Sunday 26 February 14:08
Mini Sound Series by Supreme Connections, performance at Stedelijk Museum, Sonic Acts 2017. Photo by Pieter Kers
by
Annabel McSpadden
As I descend to the resounding lower level of the Stedelijk Museum, I let a work of art pass through the membranes of my body. Here, Supreme Connections – a group of composers reviving Maryanne Amacher’s work – will stage four episodes of
Mini Sound Series over three days. The artists use volume and frequency to elicit resonant responses from each material present: walls, floors, humans. In their collaboration with visual artist
Keiko Prince, the team creates a dynamic relationship between light and sound.
Episode One of the series begins with guttural hums. At random intervals, loud slamming and screeching noises explode together; the audience members jump, then steel themselves. On the wall, watery light laps against a luminous disk suggestive of a planet in eclipse. Keiko’s metallic sheet and overhead projector throw lustrous cosmic suggestions; we sit, stand, pace around her tools as they glow from their unceremonious places on the floor. The music swells and recedes, though the sound has so possessed us, so deafened us that we cannot distinguish volume from vibrations within ourselves. Decibels stray, disorienting, into the realm of the percussive, the occupational.
Since 2012, Supreme Connections has preserved Amacher’s musical philosophies, uniting place and body through sound. Their spatially, anatomically aware approach celebrates architectural structures and our human structure while we exist in those architectures. They play bodies and brains, approaching our subliminal responses as malleable entities to be sculpted. In one psychophysiological technique, the composers trigger oto-acoustic emissions (OAEs) in the inner ear: the bones in the ear itself make these detectable sounds when prompted by specific hertz combinations. Supreme Connection’s music shakes the walls, resounds inside the head, and wholly manipulates the listener. Each audience member becomes a host to the sounds projected from deliberately angled speakers; we vibrate as corporeal tuning forks. We adopt delusional notions that the sound exists as part of our own experiences, rather than the other way around. Regardless of the ownership’s direction, we understand that it is all temporary. The music we hear will end, and we will never hear it again.
Mini Sound Series haunts me as I listen, because the music occupies unreachable spaces within me, and also because I cannot control it. Supreme Connections’ work will not let me add it to a queue or share it with my friends; to experience the series, you must be present in a deliberately selected resonating space, and subject to the vibrations induced within your own body. I cannot incorporate these songs into my own social brand, my broadcasted consumption and output; I can’t shape my self-presentation by publically identifying with them, because they cannot be shared with anyone absent. Even trying to film the experience leaves me with a distorted recording of screeching, high-pitched tones, nearly unrecognizable from the cacophonic hypnosis unfurling – the induced chaos around and within.
Perhaps there’s something special about sound we cannot possess, that we can’t send or download or access. My desire’s irrelevance frustrates me as I huddle against a quaking wall. In this way, the sound ultimately owns me. I come to understand the true direction of power here: though I thought the sound was part of me, I am actually one resonating part of this sound transmission. I cannot pin down the memory, and each note is transient: when it passes it is gone forever. I can only string words together and say, 'I was there, it meant something'.
