UNTRAINING THE EAR:
Listening session n°8

Nach sieben Listening Session haben wir eine besondere Perspektive für Eure Ohren vorbereitet: Die renommierte Komponistin, Experimentalistin, Klang- und Medienkünstlerin Pamela Z wird sich mit Untraining the Ear in einer Klangausstellung und einer Solo-Performance rund um ihre Arbeit Sonic Gestures beschäftigen. Diese Medieninstallation, die für eine 360°–Umgebung geschaffen wurde, besteht aus mehreren Video- und Audiokanälen, die aus fragmentierten Gestenbildern bestehen. Die Arbeit umgibt das Publikum mit einem virtuellen Chor aus Klappern, Flüstern, Singen und immer stetig verändernden Klanginstanzen.

Auf die Ausstellung und Performance von Pamela Z folgen im Juni die Untraining the Ear Days mit den Künstler*innen Memory Biwa und Robert Machiri, Rehab Hazgui, Edyta Jarzab, Ain Bailey, Alessandra Eramo und vielen anderen. Bald mehr! 

Within the body of the SONIC GESTURES exhibition in the framework of UNTRAINING THE EAR series, the composer Pamela Z will unfold the space performing OTHER ROOMS – a suite of works for voice, electronics, and video. Following the performance, a discussion between Pamela Z and the scholar Zeynep Bulut will trace the idea of sonic gestures and cross-sensory evocations of voicing in the contexts of immersive, site-specific, interactive and multimedia experiences.

In anticipation of Pamela Z’s performance, project your ears and imagination towards unique instances where sounds mix and melt, where the gestures controller triggers typewriter sounds, triggers poems, syllables repeat in silhouettes of rhythms, birdsongs stretched in low and slow, memory and locus are travelled with closed eyes and opened.

The performance comprises a repertoire of various segments of Pamela Z's works through the years including: Quatre Couches (2015), Flare Stains (2010), Typewriter / Declaratives (1995/2005), Syrinx (2003), Badagada (1988), Breathing ( 2013), Unknown Person (2010), Sixteen Actions (2013), Pool (2015), Other Rooms (2018). Quatre Couches is a sonic mille-feuille – juxtaposing four contrasting layers and manually toying with them – mixing them and moving them around on the plate until they all melt away. Flare Stains is a sonic poem on the residue left by emergency flares in which a typewriter uses voice, processing, and typewriter samples (triggered with a gesture controller). Syrinx is named for the avian vocal organ. In this little extract from her longer 2004 sound work, a birdsong is pitch-shifted and consequently stretched until its individual notes are slow enough and low enough to be accurately produced by a human voice. In Badagada, one of my early digital delay pieces, the syllables "ba-da-ga-da-ga-da-ga-da-ga" are layered in multiple delay lines to form a harmonic, rhythmic accompaniment to a melody sung in English. Breathing is a solo version of a movement from a 2013 multimedia chamber work called Carbon Song Cycle. Unknown Person is an excerpt from Baggage Allowance, an intermedia work that scans and inventories the belongings (and memories) we all cart around. Sixteen Actions is a work involving live video capture and gesture controlled audio and video samples. Pool is a short episode from Memory Trace, a full evening solo performance work exploring various aspects of memory. Other Rooms is constructed from samples of the speaking voice of Paul David Young taken from an interview Pamela Z recorded as part of the process of making her performance work, Memory Trace.

The eighth listening session is a part of a new cycle of Untraining the Ear – a month long program of performances, installations, workshops, symposia, talks, and more magic.

With the Listening Sessions, SAVVY Contemporary, Deutschlandfunk Kultur and CTM Festival suggest an alternative way to listen to music and sound. In order to contextualise how we listen to the world today we also need to replay the past of abounding sonic references. We (the audience, the performers, the space, the radio, the moderators and the technicians) will rhetorically navigate through archives of maverick composers in the attempt to reindex their contributions, to create other possible genealogies and narratives. By involving sound practitioners coming from diverse genres to perform, and scholars to discuss works of the composers, we listen back to the influence and ingeniosity of musicians and sound artists who defy the linearity of 20th century avant-garde music history. We would like to shed light on and unbox works of pioneers such as Halim El-Dabh, Eliane Radigue, Jose Maceda to mention a few. We will also commission new works to echo and reflect (with a contemporary take) rare archival body of works that have been marginalised by history of avant-garde music and sound art.