Umbrella Action 1: Lethe
“The natural acoustics of the place, meshing together with these elastic energies, generates the final time-frame, linking together the local time discontinuity flows.”
- Giancarlo Toniutti, from the liner notes to #7 & 8
An Examination of the Catastrophe Point Series, #1 – 8
Umbrella Action is a series of essays, articles and interviews with artists working at the borders of sound and performance, by Seth Nehil.
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Text in regular and bold by Kiyoharu Kuwayama (K.K.)
Text in italics by SETH NEHIL
All photos by Lethe
Translations by ALAN CUMMINGS
A Catastrophe Point builds slowly, with occasional booms of cavernous metal, or small dragged objects of metal and stone in hollow sweeps across the ears. They continue in long cycles and intermittent strands. It is easy to lose one’s way among this constantly failing temporality. Dropping shards of metal clatter against a steady quiet tone. Suddenly, a series of loud tonal blasts, like a distant ship horn. Later, a burst of faraway violence and close falling pieces. Rarely, a musical tone, like a battered piano.
Did you know that the Catastrophe Point series would span across many albums when you started? Do you know how many will eventually be in the series
When I finished editing #1, I had the sense that this project would continue for a long time. And so long as there are no dramatic changes in myself or my environment, I feel that the series will continue.
Many of your works have been recorded in a Warehouse along the Nagoya waterfront. Why are you interested in these kinds of spaces? Is it something other than the acoustic signature?
In June 1999, I was asked to create some sounds for a piece by an artist who was part of a group exhibition at the warehouse. Many of the artists in the exhibition employed sound in their works, and when I walked into the space for the first time the reverberations from all of these pieces hit me as a harmonious whole. It even felt like the combined sound was a separate piece itself. Then, as I was walking around the warehouse to look at each of the pieces, I noticed that the sound and echoes varied depending on where you stood in the space. That got me really intrigued by the unique possibilities of this particular warehouse. Straight away, I got in touch with the manager and two months later the first Lethe.Voice Festival was held there. The warehouse closed down as a venue in 2003, but while it was open I was able to experiment with lots of different recording techniques. The results of these experiments can be heard on Catastrophe Point 1 and 5.
A catastrophe point is an area that expands, absorbs, encases and is self-destructing. This chain of action is a punctuated equilibrium. Everything exists within a disturbed space. We hear at the point where a vibrating surface meets a surrounding medium. Each piece looks into the crashing of waves on a distant plane, layered with the non-articulate scratching of stubborn angles. These are loosely monochrome compositions, featuring a simultaneous foreground and background, multiple frames overlaid, each existing across extreme depths.
As a consequence of my fondness for extreme echoes, it was entirely natural that I would start recording in warehouses and at construction sites. Kuwayama-Kijima’s “00/10/17″ was particularly important to me. It was recorded at the construction site for an underground highway tunnel, in front of a huge ventilation fan. We recorded it in pitch blackness, surrounded by the deafening roar of the fan, so that we could neither hear nor see each other. In other words, each of the performers and the ventilation fan were creating sounds independent of each other.
Each performer can thus neither reject the sounds from the other performer or the environment, nor allow them to pass through the body, or reflect on them with a surface level of consciousness. I consider these means of production as a way to disrupt my focus on my own actions, to avoid rejecting anything that comes in from the external world, and to avoid overly-predetermined processes. What exists in my solo performances is a kind of thought experiment – a way to alter the form of my existence and its location through the means of sound and action.
Time and distance are invisible things.
When we try to make our impulses audible, multiple impurities and filters come between the starting point of that impulse, its progress through the body, and the creation of vibrations in the air that will deliver the impulse to another person. For example, reverberations and echoes exist between the starting point and the body. While in reality it would be impossible to completely remove these obstructions, in the realm of a thought experiment it becomes possible.
Your compositional structures are quite diffuse. Long lengths, continuous sounds, and a lack of coordinating points between sonic strata lead a listener to being lost within the pieces. Do you have goal points in mind as you work (places where each composition is headed), or ideas about global development across time?
As far as humanly possible I try to start recording without a fixed image of the completed work. The only thought I keep in mind is that it is for this series.
When I was recording in the harbour warehouse, I would load up a two ton truck with the recording equipment, my instruments and a load of old junk, which I then set up around the space so that I could immediately record any sound produced. I then started creating sounds according to how I was feeling on that day, at that particular time.
Because I chose this particular way of working, I ended up with a lot of material that I wasn’t able to use. For the recording in the Swiss underground shelter (#6 & #7), I used materials that I gathered locally and a violin that I had brought with me. At the abandoned power station in Scotland, I only used rubbish that had been left behind in the building.
By my own internal clock, it feels like I can concentrate for around twenty minutes when I’m listening to someone’s performance or a recording. I apply the same time scale to my own creations. When I’m editing them, for example, I don’t have any specific goal for how long they should be, but most of the finished tracks end up being around the twenty minute mark. I do have several pieces that are shorter, but compared to the other pieces their creation was governed by a specific narrative development and to me they feel very strongly intentional in their nature.
Is Catastrophe Point purely acoustic?
On a very few occasions I do actually use electronic sounds and electronically amplified materials. The materials I used on #5, for example, were particularly memorable. For the purposes of another project, I had rigged up a mic and a hundred metres of cable to pick up the sounds of the waves from a pier and then broadcast them inside a harbour warehouse. Perhaps the cable acted as an antenna because it also picked up radio traffic between ships. The raw material I used for #5 was a recording of these sounds and the echo in the warehouse space. In addition, on #7 and #8 there are parts that have been extremely simply digitally manipulated. I don’t use many electronic sounds or digital manipulation because they seemed unnecessary for this series, but the performance of electronic sounds plays a central part in other projects.
Has there been a development of the concept or the sounds from C.P. #1 – #8? How have your ideas changed?
My own internal standards for choosing to release a work are: “is it of a higher quality than my last release?” and “does it include some element that the last work did not?” Other than those two conditions, everything else is open for destruction. Also, once I’ve finished editing, I try not to listen to it for a year. After a year, I listen to it again and if there are no problems, then I release it. If it needs further work, then I work on it some more. If I decide that even further work can’t salvage it, then I destroy it.
There have been no fundamental changes in the series itself. Each time I record I discover something new, and by bringing conceptions and methods I gained in other projects into the Catastrophe Point series, each volume becomes different from the last.
Over the five continuous years of the Lethe.Voice Festival, I was able to invest a great deal of time in researching the characteristics and vibrations of the harbour warehouse building itself and the best ways to record them. #5 was recorded there in the last year, and in that sense it represents a turning point in the series. On the volumes that have followed #5, recording ceases just as I come to understand the unique spatial features of places that I am visiting for the first time. Elements of these places have given me a new perspective.
Several months ago I finished editing #9. This volume was created by using randomly selected materials recorded between 2001 and 2006. In July I recorded sounds and some video footage at a big studio for #10, and I am currently working on editing this new material.
We are hearing a residue of activity, ordinary materials, violently strewn. Cantilevered tension, handholds of stone, the friction of disintegrating surfaces. These are layers of condensed and folded dust, underneath explosions of fragmentary steel and glass.
…..
Echoes are sounds that I myself have created and then forgotten about, until they return. But I found that by treating these sounds on the same level as other environmental sounds, they can be very useful in helping me to deviate from my own actions.
The method I use when performing with other people is to first to remove the filter called “dialogue”. Because we are performing together, it is only natural that their sounds will enter my hearing and that the sounds each of us create will influence the other, but I believe more important is to allow the body to respond before the mind.
Do you consider each Catastrophe Point to be compositionally separate and distinct?
I believe them to be a single process. It’s a mystery how long this process will continue, but when it reaches its conclusion, I hope that all of them together can be seen as a single work.
Would you encourage listeners to mix or layer volumes?
That’s an idea that I haven’t tried yet – so I think I will now. But, otherwise, I don’t encourage my listeners to do anything in particular. If a record has been released and someone has paid the necessary price for it, how they choose to listen to it should be up to them. When I buy a record and it doesn’t quite hit the spot, often I will try listening to it through a guitar amp, or equalizing it, or manipulating it in some other way.
In the studio, the residue of action is multiplied into slowly spiraling clumps. The same space is applied again and again, unifying actions at disparate distances, volumes and intensities. There are always multiple interacting planes, ignorant of each other.
When I experience a performance or action, I am far more interested in the philosophy that lies behind the actions rather than the sound or expression. If you understand that each performer possesses their own unique philosophy or thought and their own language, then dialogue becomes unnecessary. I have discovered that all around the world there are performers who possess this same sensibility. Similarly, events can occur in which performances taking place in different places and different times can have the same significance as performances which take place in the same place and same time.
Tags: Alan Cummings, Catastrophe Point, Catastrophe Point #5, Giancarlo Toniutti, Intransitive, Invisible Birds, Kuwayama Kiyoharu, Kuwayama-Kijima, Lethe, Lethe Voice Festival, Nagoya, Seth Nehil, Umbrella Action