Sound Threshold

SOUND THRESHOLD
musica e suono attraverso il paesaggio
a project by Daniela Cascella and Lucia Farinati
16th July + 28 September 2008
a parallel event of Manifesta 7
Trentino-South Tyrol, Italy

How does one transcend the picture postcard effect that the alpine landscape calls to mind? How does one shatter representational conventions and two-dimensional ways of thinking and seeing? How can one capture the very breath of a landscape? Sound and music are the media through which Sound Threshold has chosen to confront these questions. Through performances, sound installations and field recordings, Sound Threshold explores the visual, natural, literary and acoustic landscape of the Trentino region in conjunction with the latest research in the fields of ecology, technology and archaeology.

16 July 2008
Centro di Ecologia Alpina – Terrazza delle Stelle
Viote di Monte Bondone, Trento, Italy

4 pm
Centro di Ecologia Alpina di Monte Bondone
CHRIS WATSON [Cabaret Voltaire/The Hafler Trio/BBC] (UK)
Cima Verde CD launch

7.30 pm
Terrazza delle Stelle, Viote del Monte Bondone
FOVEA HEX (IRL / UK / USA)
BLIND CAVE SALAMANDER (I / UK / USA)
open-air live performance

free admission

28 September 2008
hours to be confirmed
Santuario di Monte San Martino, Riva del Garda
Elgaland-Vargaland
CARL MICHAEL VON HAUSSWOLFF / LEIF ELGGREN (Sweden)


Chris Watson is one of the most unique and versatile figures on the British experimental scene. In 1972 he was one of the founders of the seminal new wave group, Cabaret Voltaire, and in 1981 one member of the cult project in experimental music, The Hafler Trio. Watson’s interest in the multiple inflections of the sounds of nature has led him to work as a sound recordist in numerous documentaries for the BBC, an activity that both supports and informs his sound recordings published on CD.

Fovea Hex is the project of Irish singer Clodagh Simonds, who has chosen to work alongside such illustrious names as Brian Eno, Andrew McKenzie (The Hafler Trio), Colin Potter (Nurse With Wound) and Robert Fripp to produce a trilogy of EP’s, Neither Speak Nor Remain Silent (Die Stadt, 2005-2007). Fovea Hex have already achieved cult status, and last year they took part in the Donau Festival curated by David Tibet (Current 93) and in a series of concerts curated by David Lynch at the Cartier Foundation in Paris.

Clodagh Simonds: voice, piano, laptop
Laura Sheeran: accordion, voice
Cora Venus Lunny: violin, viola, voice
Julia Kent: cello
Michael Begg: electronics
Colin Potter: sound, electronics

Blind Cave Salamander is a project by Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo and Paul Beauchamp - an unusual mix of electronica, strings and guitars, drones and field recordings; a collection of finely wrought sounds that at times lean towards hypnotic lullabies (Julia Kent, cellist with Antony & the Johnsons and Current 93, is a fellow contributor) and at others towards abstraction.

Paul Beauchamp: electronics
Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo: electro-acoustics
Julia Kent: cello
Michael Begg: electronics

If one thinks of the geographical area between Trento to Rovereto, from Lake Garda to the Alps, a multitude of images predetermined by visual conventions inevitably come to mind: commonplace ways of seeing, flattened into a postcard effect which compress the depth of landscapes and places into visual forms that are near to clichés. Such dynamics of standardisation and rapid visual distribution pigeonhole visual and cultural conditions that are far vaster and more meaningful, calling for disengagement from the institutional conventions inherent in looking and perceiving.

How does one go beyond this picture postcard effect, pierce, scratch and dismantle it in order to reassemble the rigid images and restore – indeed reveal – a more vivid sense to them, not only allowing movements and hidden currents to re-emerge but restoring feeling and depth? How does one transcend conventional systems of representation, shatter two-dimensional ways of thinking and seeing and combine methods of ‘looking at’ with those of ‘looking through’?
How does one capture the breath of a landscape?

Sound and music are the expressive media through which Sound Threshold has chosen to address these questions. Through performances, concerts, installations, sound and field recordings, the project explores the visual, natural, literary and acoustic landscape of Trentino in conjunction with the latest research in ecology, technology and archaeology.

Borne of a reflection on the multiple forms of interaction between music, sound and landscape, and an investigation into production sites outside the usual gallery and museum contexts, Sound Threshold presents the initial results of this investigation, whilst also outlining potential routes for future interdisciplinary production within the local Trentino context.

In his 1973 essay, Line And Surface, Vilém Flusser identified in sound an element capable of destabilising the dynamics of screen / surface and standard arguments about the media. “This third dimension, which drives a wedge into the surface reading […] is a challenge to those who think in surfaces; only the future can show what will come of this.” Sound can be understood as an element that tears through images and simultaneously re-assembles and re-constitutes them, not just penetrating them but condensing them, not simply transiting but stopping and absorbing.

We will be gathering, interpreting and disseminating sounds across the region, in an attempt to move beyond a commonplace notion of landscape as a flat and opaque screen that absorbs and fragments to a new sense of landscape that is not simply something to cross but is above all a threshold. What we are proposing is not following a linear direction (the long celebrated passage from North to South, for example), but rather pausing anxiously at the threshold so as to trigger circular movements and areas of permanence; inhabiting the edge and wandering over the tenuous screen that discriminates and communicates. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: ‘We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.’

Sound is a sense of belonging and wholeness, in perpetual refraction. Objective, immobile soundscapes do not exist, only the countless fluctuations a sound wave can assume as it assimilates the stories, earthly configurations and light effects typical of a place.

Daniela Cascella and Lucia Farinati, July 2007/April 2008

[press release pdf]