Remai Modern had the chance to speak with The Dim Coast, a small record label, publishing entity, and curatorial and programming project operated by Saskatoon-based artists Steve Bates and jake moore. Their sound installation A Sound That Never Was: SASKATOON is currently on view in the exhibition Other Arrangements: Poetics of the Performance Score. The project can also be listened to online at asoundthatneverwas.net.
A Sound That Never Was is a digital instrument that generates a score based on real-time weather and seismic data. The score registers the vibrancy of the environment, specific to this time and this place, and, as such, this particular arrangement will never be heard in exactly this way again.
The score draws from a library of sound files authored by fourteen international artists: Félicia Atkinson, Steve Bates, Matthew Cardinal, Raven Chacon, crys cole, Isabella Forciniti, David Grubbs, Timothy Herzog, Sasha J. Langford, Mani Mazinani, Christof Migone, Marc A. Reinhardt, Anju Singh, Aho Ssan, Mark Templeton. Each provided material in response to Voice of Hearing, a book by Vivian Darroch-Lozowski originally published in 1984. The installation was also coproduced with Alexandre Burton/Artificiel, contributing instrument design and conceptualization.
The Dim Coast will lead a tour of their installation at Remai Modern on Friday, May 10, with a performance by Steve Bates and Isabella Forciniti to follow. Find all the details here!
Tell us about A Sound That Never Was.
jake moore: Where to begin? I think we have to begin with a book by Vivian Darroch-Lozowski called Voice of Hearing. Both of us have worked with sound and its absence in a variety of ways for a long time. We think a lot about vibrancy and resonance, the potential of hearing, outside of audition, and how vibrancy can be received in multiple ways.
Steve Bates: We were both really struck by the book. It’s about sound, but it’s not about sound — it’s about listening. jake and I started developing an idea on how to work with the text, with the book in an expanded way. So we thought of inviting a group of sound artists to all read the book and then respond with gestures of sounds. Not complete compositions, more like excerpts or snippets, because the idea was that multiple sounds might be playing at the same time.
Around that time, we spoke with a friend of ours, Alexandre Burton, who’s based in Montreal. He refers to himself as a digital luthier. So he’s an instrument maker working with analog and digital technologies. He designed a system with us that uses a weather station to collect data points. The software that Alexandre developed takes the incoming weather data, parses the library of shared sounds, and based on specific weather conditions, chooses certain sound files to play back at any one time.
Why use weather and seismic data?
jake moore: We were really interested in how positionality, including where one is located, starts to affect what one is able to receive. Soft powers, invisible architectures — what are the things that interfere with potentials for reception?
You will never hear what we hear here anywhere else because it’s based on the weather data of what’s happening here. We have the weather station on top of the Remai Modern, we have a seismic reader attached to the building. So what you hear is specific to this place in time. And of course that’s Saskatoon, this river, but it’s also this building. You can’t separate out any of those things when it comes to potential for reception and what either interferes or assists, what amplifies things, what doesn’t.
Steve Bates: Everywhere this project could be installed, the weather station would be present in that site. If we think of the average temperature in Saskatoon versus in Lagos, it would be very different, even the angle of the sunlight. So all of these things really affect the playback of the instrument. Nothing is random. The instrument is always making decisions based on incoming weather and seismic data.
We can see the weather station on Remai Modern’s rooftop deck, where it reacts to sun, wind and rain. But what kind of data is the seismic sensor picking up?
Steve Bates: The seismic sensor is more complex than the weather station, in that its sensitivity is extreme. If the seismic sensor was installed in this room and one of us walked across the floor, the signal would be through the roof. In audio terms, it would be in the red, it would be total distortion. So one of the challenges of installing the seismic sensor is trying to find a location in the building where it’s far enough away from talking and human footsteps, where it only receives the vibration in the building.
It’s interesting because it changes the scale of the instrument to a whole different level, to scales that are way beyond human sensitivity. It hints to the insect or the animal world, which has capabilities of sensing sound or sensorial information beyond what we can. So it’s just a way to introduce this idea of a more extreme scale of sensitivity.
jake moore: When I was doing my graduate work quite a long time ago, I became quite obsessed with the idea that elephants primarily hear through their feet, even though they have these huge ears. They receive haptic information through their feet, and particularly because of the great weight of their bodies, they’re able to feel vibrancy in the earth that allows them to communicate over great distances. And it’s understood that since huge hydroelectric dams were installed on most of the massive rivers in the continent of Africa, it actually separated communication of whole herds that used to communicate across spaces the scale of which that we can’t even begin to imagine.
I think about these incisions into the earth and what they interfere with. People think about a building as sitting on the earth, but of course in order to hold up this much of a cantilevered space, there’s a lot that goes down below us. And I’m very invested in that idea of what are the interferences, what are the amplifications, what are the potential sites of contact that allow meaning to be made? So for A Sound That Never Was, we couldn’t just have what was visible or audible or palpable to us in the air. It had to include additional information from below.
What was it like to work with so many different artists? Did you have to consider how their contributions would sound when put together?
jake moore: No, not at all. We really didn’t. I mean, later on we became aware that maybe there’s some compression issues. As people who have been lucky enough to listen to this project for a long time, we know that the sounds that are there may not appear as immediately musical or pleasurable to others, but that doesn’t really matter. The sonic world is much more complex and interesting than that for me. I was quite satisfied to realize how radically the sounds could change over time — it really did become “a sound that never was”. It would never be the same thing again.
Steve Bates: The people that we invited to participate come from a real range. Some of the music is really noisy, some of it’s really beautiful. Some of them are classically trained. There’s a death metal drummer. It was important for us to have a complex library of sounds for the instrument to draw from. In the end, the heavy metal drums don’t appear, but the approach of that person is definitely there. Truth be told, we probably wouldn’t be very excited if it was just this random non-stop flow of pretty sounds. We both come from playing in punk rock bands as younger people. When I think about learning to play an instrument and make noise, there’s a lot of negotiation and discussion and trust that you have with your bandmates. A lot of those lessons have carried forward to ways that we work now. This project is entirely rooted and designed around collaboration. So it’s the only way this thing could have come to be.
For people who are experiencing this work for the first time, what advice would you give them?
jake moore: Bring your whole body into the room. Let yourself listen in every way, but don’t forget what you’re seeing. Trust what you see. Don’t complicate it. If there’s a wire that connects something, something has been connected. If you see something, how is it sitting there? What’s holding it up? What’s the force involved? You understand that already. There’s a drawing on the wall of the river outside the building — let yourself know that. Turn around. What do you see now?
Steve Bates: Some people might feel they need to listen to A Sound That Never Was as if it’s music — and it is music to some people. But I would invite people to not bring the same judgment or criticism that they might have about, “Do I like this piece of music or not?” Try to experience it just as sound that’s connected to the environment that we’re in. Have an openness that you don’t have to listen to it as music. You also don’t have to like how it sounds to still find something interesting in the project.
jake moore: The other thing to remember is that the sound is spatialized — different things come out of different speakers. If you walk along it like you were walking along the riverbank, you’ll have a different experience. You start to establish a relationship with the work just by being with it. There’s a statistic that the average person spends eight seconds in front of a work of art. Think about spending a little bit longer. If somebody was meeting you for the first time, do you think they could know you in eight seconds? Don’t get angry if you don’t get it in eight seconds. Allow yourself to spend a little bit longer.
