Object Orientated

My fascination with raw recorded sound started before my fascination with music. It is what led me to music through an accident of sorts. When I was about 7, just after I had started primary school, my sister was given a shoebox tape player as a birthday present. I was excited and fascinated by the possibilities that sound could be recorded and replayed. At school the teacher asked the class for everyone who played the recorder to put up there hands. I found myself, a little bit confused, having recorder lessons. That led to cello lessons. Though the focus of music lessons is on pitch and rhythm for me it was important to learn how to manipulated the quality of sound the instrument made. Learning to engage physically with the instrument to understand what it could do and wanted to do. The two works in ‘Object Orientated’ were created about ten years apart and take two different approaches to the materiality of sound. ‘Encounter’ was originally commission for a movement theatre piece for Inhyungin “Migrant Overtures” directed by Seong Kyun Yoo, in about 2005. For one section the performers used 100s of off cuts of wood which they would stack into different shapes and patterns. I took recordings of the noise created with the wood by the performers as they placed them into structures and those structures accidentally crashing down. The rhythms in the first section of encounter are rhythms looped found in these recorded accidents, They are not planned nor played rhythms but ‘found’ rhythms. The latter half of encounter is constructed from sounds recorded in a rainwater storage tank for a house on an island off the west coast of Sweden. The two half of the piece can be seen as an exploration and ‘encounter’ with two elements. One directly with wood, the other indirectly with water. ‘Rotate. Shift. Repeat’ treats recordings of cello in the same way. I really love Terry Rileys ‘Untitled Organ’ in ‘Reed Streams’ and ‘Object Orientated’ is like a reaction to that. The material is treated as something ‘found’, something to be explored and the unintentional uncovered. Through repetition the sound’s materiality can be examined and explored. On each iteration I find my perception shifts and finds new things. For me its like walking around the architecture of sound. The changes are led through slow shifts of interacting asynchronous loops over large periods of time. On its surface it may seem abrasive and intense but hopefully through letting go it becomes something meditative. -Simon McCorry