ARTWORKS

Aura Satz
Dial Tone Drone, 2014. Sound work for telephone, with telephone mp3 player, chairs, table, 14 minutes.

In the first gallery of KADIST, you are invited to pick up the vintage telephone handset, or dial 833–764-1221 from your own device. You will then listen to a conversation between two old friends: the respected electronic music pioneers Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) and Laurie Spiegel (born 1945). The pair congenially discuss drones—sustained sounds, notes, or tone clusters—and their use in music composition. For both Oliveros and Spiegel, drones have been an important component of their unconventional electronic work as each marched quietly to their own drum, experimenting with electronic signals as well as audio and videotape. Their fascination with drone music aligned with Satz’s own interest in alert signals and attempts to forge a new understanding of hypervigilance and emergency through sound as a perceptual trigger of danger. In reality, this discussion between Oliveros and Spiegel never took place. The recording is a montage of excerpts from separate conversations they each had with Satz over phone and Skype, played against drone compositions by the two pioneers. The first half of the fourteen-minute composition features excerpts from Horse Sings from Cloud (1975), an accordion score with voice by Oliveros, and the second half from Expanding Universe (1974-76), a computerized composition by Spiegel. Dial Tone Drone reflects on the use of drones with all their political, conceptual, meditative, and musical implications.

Aura Satz is a London-based visual artist whose work encompasses film, performance and sculpture and emphasizes the complex relationship between humans and machines. Her entry into sound began through a series of projects that revolved around magic, born of an interest in how a ventriloquist’s falsetto voice always seems to emanate right from a puppet’s mouth. Satz’s trajectory orbits around two major topics. One involves the art and science of music, sound technology, vibration, and acoustics. The other involves social and political factors, especially issues of gender and the rediscovery of important contributions women have made to the development of technology, namely as inventors of new systems of notation, encryption, and sound-making.


Marina Rosenfeld
Music Stands, 2019. Steel, UV prints on Dibond, foam, audio components, computer, sound, dimensions variable.

The installation consists of music stand-like structures and a corresponding set of panels and acoustic devices that direct, focus, obstruct, reflect and project sound in the gallery. Together the components play on the connection between aural and social relations signified by the music stands. An episodic score emanates from the work’s sound system, momentarily interrupting the atmosphere with brief eruptions of electronic sounds and vocality. At the same time, the microphones and loudspeakers subtly amplify the sounds of visitors and mix them with the sound score, heightening their acoustic presence. The installation addresses the possibilities of “staging” sound and speaks to the privileged access of hearing and sounding bodies and the political economy of music-making.

Marina Rosenfeld is a New York-based composer and artist working across disciplines. Since the 1990s, when she mounted her first all-female electric-guitar ensemble under the name Sheer Frost Orchestra, her works have probed the intersections of experimental practices in sound with performance, installation, and sculpture. Rosenfeld has also performed as an experimental turntablist since the late 1990s, creating improvised music with a distinctive palette of hand-crafted dub plates.

Samson Young
Muted Situation #2: Muted Lion Dance, 2014. Actions, instructions, single-channel video with sound, 7:21 minutes.

In the video, Chinese lion dancers perform the auspicious procession traditionally presented at special occasions such as weddings or during the Lunar New Year. Yet, the customary percussive sound of drums and cymbals are absent. Instead, it is the sound of the performers’ physical exertion that comes to the forefront, revealing the beautiful, exhaustive rhythm of their craft—their feet hitting the ground, deep inhales and exhales, and the rustling of their clothes. This video is one of the early works in Muted Situations, a series that Young started in 2014 as text-based instructions for staging situations in which sonic foregrounds are muted. Young’s interventions consciously suppress dominant sounds and voices as a way to uncover the unheard and the marginalized. This process of muting also disrupts viewers’ expectations about familiar situations and make apparent certain assumptions about hearing and sounding. This approach to muting speaks to another form of artists’ experimental engagements with sound as a medium. 

Samson Young is a Hong Kong-based artist whose practice interlays multiple narratives and references with sound and cultural politics at its heart. His compositions, drawings, installations, radio broadcasts, and performances engage with topics as varied as military conflict, identity, migration, and political frontiers past and present. On the process of muting, Young notes: “muting is not the same as doing nothing. Rather, the act of muting is an intensely focused re-imagination and re-construction of the auditory.”