DVD Project

The starting point for a DVD based project was the idea to create a collection of short video pieces that would represent my current practice. I wanted to go back through my various practical experiments and research into ideas about noise and the “para-musical” to produce something part documentation and part a work in its own right. The intention of this being almost like a promotional tool, something I could send off to arts organisations, venues etc.

It has drifted from that purpose and become much more a new work that is concerned with the interesting things that happen when you film sounds. I took some inspiration from watching the DVD extras on a horror film that had footage of some of the Foley work for the movie. It occurred to me that what I do could be seen in a similar vein, except there is no narrative purpose. Because of the nature of the sounds I produce being outside conventions of musicality they lend themselves to a vocabulary of Sound Design. Possibly noises that have an illusionary, casual quality, describing an “event” different to that which is actually generating the sound. Seeing how the sound is produced changes its context. The celery film is a good illustration of this, snapping it produces great fibrous, moist bone breaking, crunching sounds. To simply hear that noise, you can imagine this sickening organic carnage, but to see it, for me, that becomes absurd. There is a tension between that experience of sound and what you are actually seeing. However this causal interpretation is not my real intention, I also see the celery as a musical instrument/material, the film is a performance. There is also another layer to the performance in the inappropriate use or abuse of materials. People I've shown the videos to seem to ascribe anthropomorphic values to the objects. I believe this has something to do with the way it is filmed and the pallet of sounds I am interested in, that infer something animate. Thus the often destructive acts I engage in acquire sadist intent.

My idea was just to make noise and stick a camera in front of it, that all the these layers of meaning have emerged, I find fascinating and it has generated new parameters for investigation.