Songs Of Lemuria

Song One (2004) from the mysterious Music Of Lemuria cycle by the Canadian songwriter and poet, Maureen K

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A Short Breakdown: 2008 Video Compendium

As the season of roundups, breakdowns, bookends and top tens has started to warm up, I thought I might compile the various videos that I've made of different events and performances over the past year and share them with you (even if they are of varied quality and potentially embarrassing)

I fell into the habit of making them, but now I harbour strange and grandiose visions of documentary director fame and fortune. Though how I'll manage that through YouTube I have no idea as of yet.

In Chronological Order:

Healing, Millman Street Community Centre, Bloomsbury, London, 17 February, 2008


Max Eastley's Kinetic Drawings At Metropole Galleries, Folkestone, 2 February to 30 April


Mark Fell At Sonar 2008


Pablo Valbuena At Sonar 2008


The Yellow Swans Last Gig, 20 June, Sonar 2008


Horatio Oratorio At Shunt Vaults, London Bridge, 11 July 2008


Guča Trumpet Festival, Serbia, 6 to 10 August, 2008


Tony Oursler At The Lisson Gallery, London, 3 September to 3 October, 2008


Banks Violette At Maureen Paley Gallery, London, 10 September to 19 October, 2008


André Avelãs At IBID Projects, London, 5 September - 5 October 2008


Susan Philipsz's Out Of Bounds At The ICA, London, 27 & 28 September 2008


Florian Hecker: Pentaphonic Dark Energy Sadie Coles HQ, 14 October to 22 November 2008

Florian Hecker @ Sadie Coles

Here's a short video doc of Florian Hecker's installation Pentaphonic Dark Energy at Sadie Coles HQ gallery in London from last month. Technically impressive with it's swish speakers: expensive Genelec's from Finland and two highly directional custom built ones. The recording can't do the spatial experience justice; in such a small room the sound could seem as present as if it where hovering somewhere near the centre of one's forehead, then phasing about the gallery quickly giving one a slightly off balance feel. A perverse sonic Feng Shui.

Adam Curtis & The Power Of Chalk Farm

Here's a rough recording of Adam Curtis (BBC Foreign Affairs Editor and the voice behind The Century Of The Self, The Power Of Nightmares and The Trap amongst others) in discussion with artist Mark Titchner at the 176 space in Chalk Farm, North London, 20/11/2008. A contrasted pairing as Curtis is articulate and forceful (to a fault sometimes) while Titchner remains mostly mute throughout.

One of the strangest and funny moments is when Curtis starts rambling on about Hippies (it's a way bit into the recording)

Note that 16 minutes in the recording cuts out for a bit as I'm not very good at recording. Also note that after this cut there's a minute or so of A/V confusion. I would edit it but I can't be asked right now.

CLICK HERE FOR THE POWER

Pablo Valbuena/Yellow Swans at Sonar

Further to my ongoing slog through a variety of computer based duties I have managed to splice together some more Sonar 2008 video memories including Pablo Valbuena's excellent and, I think, paranoiac installation at the Centre d'Art Santa Monica, along with a montage of the very last Yellow Swans gig. I hear that the end of the Yellow Swans is due to one of the members, Gabriel Mindel Salomon, moving to my home town of Vancouver to pursue a career in car-jacking, presumably hoping to play off of the typical Canadian's innate fear of Americans. Good luck to him although it seems to me to be a false economy with oil prices as they are. Either way, this was the first, and so I suppose last time that I've been able to see them live...

Yellow Swans 20 June 2008:



Pablo Valbuena Installation:



Again, if you wish, there are higher resolution files available here at the Wire magazine site, though this will not make the sound on either any better I'm afraid.

Mark Fell Installation At Sonar 2008

Here's a short documentary clip that I put together of Mark Fell's (from the Sheffield based duo .snd) installation in the Centre d'art Santa Monica as part of Sonar 2008. There's a better resolution Quicktime movie available at the Wire site here. I'll try to finish some other clips from Sonar for sometime next week, including excerpts from the Yellow Swan's last concert and some footage of the work of another artist called Pablo Valbuena who had an installation in the room next to Fell, which was a pleasant surprise... like stepping into Tron.

Merzbow with Satori and Sutcliffe Jügend @ ULU, 19 April 2008

A review published in Wire 293

Opening the evening, Satori’s dark Ambient rumblings fittingly provided the spooky aural equivalent of a foyer or waiting room for the mingling crowds. Accompanied by visuals of pale skinned waifs, white haired wolves and other gothic atmospherics, their low bass drones shuddering through the gathering audience were occasionally interesting and unsettling but somehow fell flat in the environs of ULU. Ideally, Satori would have benefited from a smaller and more personal space, their intimate, isolationist music more suited to a home hi-fi, headphones, or anechoic chamber than a student union. Instead, the hypnotic nuances and expansive sonic tectonics evident in their recordings was lost, leaving the sounds to drift along politely as an unresolved soundtrack.

Sutcliffe Jügend’s histrionics provided a flip side to Satori’s relative quietude and creepy stylistics. Acting out a Dionysian impulse, the ecstatic hollering of Kevin Tomkins and Paul Taylor could be more at home in the glossolalic surroundings of a cult than on campus in Bloomsbury. Driven by an idea of transcendent transgression, Sutcliffe Jügend’s unintelligible yelping hit the physical limits of the ULU sound system while also entering them into the realm of the camp. One man needing three microphones made for an hilarious sight, evoking images of bathroom mirror rock god fantasists, but, at the same time there was something genuinely exhilarating about Tomkins’s performance. His rapid alternation between falsetto squeals and baritone yelling, inflected with a mocking and aggressive tone, was also an interesting improvisational riffing between the cartoonish and the antagonistic.

Merzbow straddles the approaches of Satori and Sutcliffe Jügend, managing to jump between two laptops while remaining intensly engaged with his music. His set consisted of a prolonged toxic hiss that maintained a painful and physically intrusive level of volume punctuated by scrapings on a small, electrified contraption that resembled a home made scrap metal mandolin. The ongoing blast of grating noise blew through the crowd, creating a stunned blankness or confusion in some, while others embraced the static. A fellow nearby me sloshing about in a Sufi-like trance, translating the sounds into fits of animalistic gesticulations. I’m not too sure how long the performance lasted, but it was a genuinely harmful experience – not having remembered earplugs as many of my fellow concert-goers had caused me to spend the next day feeling as if I was 12 feet away from the world. But this invasive harm was part of the set: Merzbow’s music found a resonant frequency of the body and forced its way into the flesh, lingering there engram-like, extending the experience long after the event of performance.

Home, House, Loft & Conservatory: My Versailles, My Life Story

Taking it in turn, going down a list compiled and managed by the local council, my neighbours attach extra rooms, conservatories and lofts to their homes. Every morning of the week I wake up early to the sounds of carpentry and building. From out of my third-floor window overlooking the block of leafy back gardens encased by our homes, I can watch men with tools wandering about slowly, carefully climbing up and down ladders as the wife of the house invigilates their progress. Close to when one home comes near to it’s modification completion, we get a letter from the local council informing us of another neighbour who has decided to attach something to their home, that they have applied for permission from the council and us, their neighbours.

It is all so neatly organised, that only one home in our encasement may be modified at any one time. One gets the sense that my neighbours and I live in a slowly swirling galaxy of renovation. As soon as one rotation of the encasement has been made (which can take years depending on the type of work required) it doesn’t stop or slow down but continues onwards and around with a heavy and powerful inertia. As a season for a farmer imposes restrictions which can also induce innovation and pragmatism, the time-span of an enforced non-building is both a space for families to save enough money for another project, and time to reflect upon and plan their next step in home modification.

It’s the construction of a palace for the self and not least, building for capital. It is also a little introverted drama for oneself and intimates. In the kitchen I am Gordon Ramsay, when I decorate my house I am Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, in the garden, I am [….] in the attic, I am [….] in the bedroom, I am [….]. I am a whole person in control of my surroundings, through my home I can create the right setting for the person that I hope I actually am. So, we could say that building a loft or a conservatory isn’t only for the extra living space, a peaceful and protected hideaway studio where one can retreat and meditate, but it’s also part of a fabrication of oneself, one’s world and one’s overarching thematic concerns (or lifestyle choices) an event amongst others that helps us mark our lives and remember it, cautiously modulating the monotonous drone of the familiar and protecting home.

A Man On A Hill, In Rubber Boots, With A Microphone

Over the last few years I’ve made field recording a hobby. Not a bleating calf, roaring motor nor creaking chair is safe from my microphone and recorder when the disc starts whirling. But when it comes to setting them down into any kind of use, I’m completely at a loss as to what to do. The idea of just presenting the sound of a busy street or the wind blowing through trees as an album seems likely to be a boring experience for a listener (at least the way that I would present it) For me the pleasure is the same as when I smoked cigarettes. When you smoke, perversely you make time for breathing, or as I read in an interview with great chain-smoking art critic John Berger, the time it takes to smoke a cigarette is a parenthesis. Though a less deadly pastime, field recording is similar to smoking in that it uses a technology to mediate, make time for and enhance a bodily process and its psychological effects; one breathing, the other hearing. There is a unique, if not embarrassed, introspect satisfaction that comes with putting on headphones and hanging around somewhere recording, a feeling which doesn’t come when I simply go and stand on a street corner. This process gives the sensation of having my hearing cleaned out or tuned up. But listening back over what I’ve recorded only ever reinforces the pleasure in the act of listening for me, rather than creating an interest in me for the recorded sound. I long ago gave up on attempting to edit my recorded sounds into something interesting, but can find a vicarious joy listening to the field recordings of others. Recently I've become interested in the figure of the field recordist as artist, starting to imagine them taking on a number of different stereotypical roles of the 'artist': the rock star, the tortured composer, etc. This imaginative drift and projection onto the recordist is probably because I have no idea who I'm listening to; the field recordist always seems so purposefully hidden from sight, so reluctant to emerge from behind his microphone. This apparently passive silhouette of the artist is intriguing in that it presents them and their work to be listened to with a particular audition that is at heart, I believe, deeply related to a Romantic notion of Man and Nature.

Field recording's artistic status is alike to being a train-spotter of ‘experimental’ music, operating in a zone between radio-play soundtrack and eco-acoustic archiving, spending the last 40-odd years nervously rubbing music and the sounds of nature together. We could trace its origins to the reduced listening of musique concréte, but this wouldn’t begin to describe the breadth of influences and traditions that it’s emerged from. Beyond its myriad of origins, field recording has only started to become an artistic genre in its own right over the last few decades, having usually possessed somewhat of a side-project status within the arts (e.g. sound designer for television, cinema and theatre). It’s an occupation that is practiced at shifting about - playing the role of hapless and bullied soundman in a fuzz of multidisciplinarity - but now has something of a history to react to.

More than any other environment, the field recordist focuses upon that of the natural world, one that’s far removed from the lo-fi aural environment of the city. The pastoral subjects of birdsong, insects, wind, cracking ice, thunderstorms and rain are popular, the recordist generally being interested in soundscapes from parts of the world that are still ‘wild’ and untouched by the sounds of urbanism and industry. So travelling to remote and/or exotic places for new sounds is also quite important to the field recordist. The World Soundscape Project, it’s theorist R. Murray Schafer and ideas stemming from acoustic ecology are important touchstones also, but in general field recordists have taken an artistic route that deviates from the latter’s academic aspirations and didactic environmentalism. Instead, many recordists choose to highlight a musical sensibility within their ‘phonography’, instrumentalising the sounds of the world as compositional source material, creating narrative journeys, rather than as a tool for planning the tuning of nature and culture.

Due to an increase in affordable technology and the resultant enthusiasm of hobbyists and prosumer-age composers, field recording has grown busier in recent years. Apart from online file sharing, there’s also a good amount of commercially released recordings from independent record labels and projects, such as European labels Touch and Gruenrekorder, along with a slew of one-off releases and performances. Though popular, it’s hard to imagine that it’s a profitable venture releasing an album of field recordings. The end product of the field recordist doesn’t emote an ecstatic wave of Wagnerian transcendence or invite the listener into a carnival of hedonistic sociability: two important commercial considerations. Rather, it’s an art practice that keeps itself detached and mute, intent on avoiding any noise of the self in order to maintain a neutral and unpolluted listening.

Sometimes it seems to be an art practice that has grown used to its undefined ‘experimental’ nature, even thriving in its ephemerality and mystery. In a practice that’s so focused on the hard-to-grasp material of sound, it can be easy to forget about the recordist silently creeping about with held breath. Trying desperately to not interfere with the fidelity of the recording, the recordist avoids any sonic evidence of their bodily presence, keeping deathly silent as even the slightest sniffle or breath would ruin the verisimilitude of the recording. This silent, spectral approach to authorship can be perplexing, as if there’s something I’m not quite hearing in their work, something that I never will hear, as only the recordist could ever hear it. There’s an odd and slightly pubescent quality to it: the recordist is spying in on something, as if performing police or intelligence field work. Playing the part of surveillance expert Harry Caul in The Conversation, the recordist is an invisible and ubiquitous ear, secretly engrossed in all the moans, groans and other rumours, recording them all for some later use (or misuse). But along with this performance, the figure of the silent recordist can be understood as an avoidance, as if the recordist is trying not to be there in order to act as a conduit for the sturm und klange of the world as it is.

Listening to what might now be called ‘classic’ field recordings such as Francisco Lopez’s La Selva or Chris Watson’s Weather Report I can let the composition take me on a rich and sublime journey that traverses exotic soundscapes as well as travelling through insect swarms and then deep into a rain forest. What makes these exemplary works of field recording is both the attention to recording quality and the fine-tuned listening of the author. Armed with a variety of microphones and assorted sound gear, a good recordist is able to use their equipment as musical instrument, coaxing sounds out of the oddest of places or objects. Then there is the process of composition and mastering, both of which demand further expertise and obsessive attention. Technically proficient and aesthetically sensitive, at best the field recordist presents a composition which leads us through their breathless audition of the world compressed and edited into a seamless sequence, an art that obscures the body of its maker. This vagueness always makes me create and project an image into the missing part.

For this reason, throughout listening to a composition, I imagine the figure of the field recordist, boompole & deadcat in hand, intrepid, wind-bitten, clambering up rocky mountains, pointing shotgun mics at eagles circling high above the peaks. A tropical explorer, machete in hand and pack filled with spare batteries, treks through a mosquito infested jungle in search of ‘the sound’. A private eye tails and duly records the babbles and incomprehensible threats of their prey as evidence. It sounds so incongruous for these stereotypical characters to be projected into work that is so pensive and solitary.

With this on my mind, I came across the website of the field recordist Chris Watson, the closest thing that the genre has to a cover star. Formerly a member of the band Cabaret Voltaire, Watson made a switch from tape splicing to field recording via working for the BBC on different wildlife programs as soundman, after a while he recorded and composed several albums for the Touch label, and in his own way is quite famous for what he does. Looking through his website, one can download an album of photographs of Watson (in both low and high resolution) in which his impressive travels about the world are recorded. Watson next to the pyramids, Watson recording Crocodiles (or are they Alligators?) recording the sounds of a volcano, the crashing waves and the windy mountains. It’s all quite exciting, but contrary to the fleeting and humble image of the recordist, and closer to that of the intrepid adventurer. This is the man at work, doing what he does best whilst making a nod towards an artistic impulse that is widespread within field recording. It’s solitary Man in the elements, a Romantic notion of nature. A nature that can speak and be understood as long as one can listen well. It takes only a slight modification from the theories of acoustic ecologists proposing a tuning of the world (the composition of the world by Man) to get to the lone male in an aural commune with nature.

In this case then, the term field recording is a misnomer, or only describes part of the activity. This profound listening to nature takes on a new meaning when these sounds are recorded, edited, composed and presented in the form of a musical document. In his essay The Art-Work Of The Future, Richard Wagner, writing about Nature, Man and Art gives the cognition of Man a specific prehensile purpose, “[…] who only through discriminating between himself and Nature has attained that point where he can apprehend her, by making her his 'object.'”. Making an album of the sounds of nature is an act of architecture that both organises the world according to an individual’s particular audition, and creates a cultured distance between “Man and Nature”, which is not a passive hearing or contemplative sensorial 'meditation' upon the world. Field recording isn’t only someone’s Uncle in rubber boots standing in a field interviewing sheep and cowpat. It is an art with the potential for reiterating deeply ingrained assumptions about the world.

Pei: Envision Normality, Kwan Yin CD

The following review is also published in the June 2008 issue of The Wire magazine

Resembling a scrapbook of snippets from a newly acquired portable minidisc recorder, Taiwanese sound artist Pei’s (aka Wen Liu) album Envision Normality collects together recordings made mostly during a summer in Taipei. The tracks are rough and unprocessed recordings of a disparate array of sonic moments, edited in a harsh and uneven manner with most of the CD dedicated to the hard white noise of crickets chirping, thunderstorms, rain and other aural ephemera.
Opening with the minute-long "Changing Root", a glitchy looping electronic drone and by far the most ‘musical’ segment of the release, the track fades into the sound of a shovel digging into dirt, setting a leisurely back-garden theme that continues throughout the album. On first listen the album seems banal in the selection of recordings used. This is due to Pei’s choice of recordings sounding much like a DIY version of a sound library’s “general ambient” section. With a closer listening through headphones, one can discern layers of sounds within the recordings and behind the lo-fi hiss of the everyday soundscape. On several tracks one can just make out the ghostly noises of people speaking, dogs barking, the ribbit of frogs, running water and the artist’s breath. In fact, the sounds can be so faint it’s doubtful that some of them happened, but were the result of auditory hallucination caused by an over-concentrated listening.
There are several interesting compositional moments along the album. Where Pei splices together a quick staccato succession of what sounds like children playing in a water park which then rapidly shifts into the modulating sound of a radio playing in a car. Also notable are the sharp transitions in volume and proximity with the recorded subject that creates a shifting “point of view”. Overall, the effect can be cinematic, and is admirable for the simplicity of it's idea. Utilising a basic editing technique that seems to rely on the odd croaks and groans found submerged within the recordings, Pei creates a bare narrative structure that gives the album cohesion.
The enthusiastic idiosyncrasy of the sounds and the composition is endearing, but it is a stretch to say that what Pei produces are compositions. Rather it would be more appropriate to call the album a collection of sounds selected and arranged in a highly personal way. Which is quite a mouthful considering that what this actually means is that listening to Envision Normality ends up as the aural equivalent of experiencing a friend's summer holiday snaps.

Healing 17/02/08

Video documentation of an evening of talks and presentations surrounding the theme of healing. Organised with Phoebe Stirling, the event took place in the Bertrand Russell Room at Conway Hall in Bloomsbury (home of the South Place Ethical Society) Performances by: Phoebe Stirling, Richard Parry, Hugh Chapman, Michelle Fox, Maciej Urbanek, Simon Richards and Chris Owen. The night was third in a series of independent, self-organised events that aimed to provide a sociable, non-commercial and irrelevant forum for non-emerging artists to embarrass themselves in a critical, yet supportive environment. We're currently thinking about another event (with a different format) but are both incredibly short on money. I also have high(er) quality resolution version of this on a website, click here to experience some download magic and the clean, icy clarity of my web-design skills.

Gail Pickering at The Level Two Gallery, Tate Modern, April 2008

As a curatorial adjunct of Tate Modern, the Level 2 Gallery is the Tate’s answer to London’s promulgation of project spaces, independent artist-led venues, and other mercurial pioneer outposts of art. These spaces can have a contemporaneity, versatility and singular focus where the Tate’s main collection, in size and polyphony, can fall short. Here We Dance is third in a series of exhibitions aiming to address the theme of citizenship, this time focusing upon relationships between the body and the state. 

Gail Pickering’s three part performance and sculptural piece ZULU: Speaking In (Radical) Tongues sets out to ‘channel’ and amplify an array of voices from 60’s and 70’s radical leftist politics. Surrounded by a sculptural rendering of the word “ZULU”, with each wooden and hollow-backed box-like letter acting as both stage and prop, a lone figure wanders through the letters, pushing them about and flipping them around as she speaks. Sometimes despondently creeping inside the boxes as if to find shelter amongst ruins, sometimes proudly standing on them as if on a soapbox, her speech alternates between ecstatic, polemical and introspective. During the performance, an old Revox reel-to-reel recorder mounted on a small wooden plinth silently whirs away, storing the words onto tape.

According to the artist, the text is a collage of memoirs, manifestos and other ephemera which she has spliced together, forming a schizophonic montage of radical language from the past forty-odd years. Although none of the speech contains citation of their source, the politicised tone of the voices is immediately apparent. An arrogant voice describes the audience as “ballot beef” or going from “bus face to lunch face” and “street face to home face.” Not that the work is simply a caricature of angry radical rhetoric: at one point a voice describes “I went along to a peace-in, I noticed everyone was smoking Gauloises, so I began to smoke too.” Further along another voice describes the brutal tactics used in a terrorist operation, “Quite simply, anyone who resisted was to be killed. The same went for anyone who tried to escape or became hysterical […] That was too much for me. I explained I wasn’t a killer. But he insisted, he said it was a matter of necessity, a matter of survival.”

The overall effect is that of a lament for a time when one could think that social change through independent, street level organisation was possible; that one’s voice would be heard. Using ideas such as ‘channeling’ voices and ‘speaking in tongues’ as compositional and performative devices both imbues the text with a religious aura and shifts the tone of the voices into that of the archaic and spectral. Watching this as a process is humorous and engaging, enabling the work to poke fun at the pomposity and apparent naïvety of the language used, while also revealing the variety of interpretations that the word ‘radical’ evokes. The actress gives a new body to these voices, letting them speak into our present, but at the same time relinquishes responsibility for what is said. It’s fascinating to watch this distancing between the artwork and its content. Though I’m left wondering if the work is only a simplifying rendering of the complex polyphony inherent in the idea of the radical, more indicative of an intellectual and artistic infatuation with the sexiness of the socially transgressive than with its artistic investigation. To the ear it can be heard as a rather bleak and futile ambience: that the idea of the ‘people’s voice’, the very possibility of it being heard individually let alone as a chorus, is now so seemingly distant.

Stephen Vitiello at Museum 52, 6 March - 5 April 2008

Tromping around the pavements of East London, visiting art galleries during a gray, cold, and wet winter, it's an appreciated thing to come upon an exhibition that includes seating as a component. Usually some variety of multimedia installation set within sleep-inducing levels of light, many hours of hypnogogic relaxation can be spent meditating upon works that may have never been given a second glance. Especially during the rush of a busy day, if it weren’t for a comfortable perch to slow one down, it would be all too easy to miss work that demands more than a few minutes attention. So, the gallery traveller’s aching feet will most probably be pleased to come across two simple wooden benches that serve as spectator’s pew’s in Stephen Vitiello’s recent exhibition Finding Pictures In Search Of Sounds.
Installed in the pokey space of the Museum 52 gallery in East London, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery builds upon his work with sound and music, investigating one’s physical and psychological interpretation of space and image. Comprised of a two-room multi-channel sound work, separated by a short corridor, the show departs from the artist’s light-hearted sculptural assemblage exhibited in his 2006 exhibition Night Chatter. There, along with a smaller multi-channel work, he employed found-objects such as logs and household plants along with a Fluxus inspired improvisational aesthetic, akin to that of fellow sound artist Christian Marclay. Vitiello produced a variety of jokey object & speaker sculptures, using recordings of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, transforming them into the sounds of small tinkling bells broadcast from crawling ivy.
This time the artist has favoured a stripped down approach and soberly focused upon a sparing installation, emptying the space apart from speakers and bare wooden benches. Upon entering the gallery one steps straight into a darkened room, lit by a single fluorescent light. Painted a dull and mottled silver, the atmosphere of the room is somewhere between the austere religious gloom of a monastic cell and the confused loneliness one finds in an institutional waiting room. A dense ambient collage of field recordings emanate from small speakers mounted at head height upon two facing walls. Further along in the second room sits another wooden bench. This room, darker than the first, contains two bare dark blue pulsing light bulbs hanging from the low ceiling. Three speakers built flush into the wall and ceiling broadcast an intimate composition of domestic sounds exacerbating the distinctly claustrophobic space.
Sitting in the middle of a room, sandwiched on either side by a 5.1 channel surround-sound hi-fi, it’s undeniable that Vitiello has a great formal skill with the material of sound. At points one could feel the textures and weightiness of the sounds modulate and shift about the small space, transforming a dingy room into a dynamic psychological experience for the visitor. Then again, if the exhibition purports (amongst other things) to invite “a reconsideration of one’s physical response to sound” along with attempting to elicit a consideration of the “transitory in-between”, surely movement and listening should be integral to the work.
Any consideration of this on the part of the visitor is undermined by Vitiello’s dedication to the integrity of his surround sound stereo image. With it’s conventional seating arrangement for the listener and minimal recording studio ambience, the work risks reiterating a prescriptive and everyday type of ‘spectator’ based listening. Couple this type of listening with the quasi-religious tone in the work, and the result is a kind of sonic Feng Shui that only addresses the particularities of the space as a problem to transcend, rather than the basis of an opportunity.