Sound Reasons Festival VI | FINISSAGE | Live Performances | Walk-Through |

TUE, 20 November 2018 | FINISSAGE |
Live Performances | Walk-Through | Talks | 6 pm Onwards

Exhibit Open till Wed, 21 November 2018

MON, 19 Nov – 21 Nov 2018
WALKTHROUGHS | 6 pm onwards

CURATORS NOTE | ReINSTALL

For the second and the third ReINSTALL sessions of the Sound Reasons Festival VI, we have engaged with the possibilities of Sound and its capabilities to make unseen connections, to hold un-assumed narratives and produce curative and creative tensions. While expanding upon the spectrum of the potentiality in Sound, we want to initiate a listening experience using artistic explorations and inter-media intersections.

In these works there is an interplay of text, video, synthesis, sampling, narratives with other creative practices and musique concrete processes. We conduct a curative dialogue with other mediums in which a listener is invited to explore its generative phenomenological possibilities rather than preserve/observe the actuality of the sonic event(s). It is therefore listening into a world, in order to hear what all it could be – to reconsider the frame of current actuality and explore the complexity of its sonic perceptions. This curative iteration is a thin slice of the sonic spectrum that reveals not just itself, but also opens up to newer resonating worlds for a listener, where the aim is to illuminate and generate the dynamically plural possibilities and not to just categorise and preserve it as a soundscape.

Ish S | Oct – Nov 2018

Please check the Sound Reasons website at http://soundreasons.in for more information and updates.

FRI, 16 – 21 November | 6 pm onwards
Walk Throughs | Immersive Listening Sessions | Talks |
Korean Cultural Center | New Delhi

Ish S | SITTING STILL | Spatial Sound Installation | 6 – 8 Channel Diffused Audio | from Sound Reasons on Vimeo.

Sound Installation Documentation and  Video | Ish S |

Ish S
Sitting Still – II / Faulty Scales
6 Channel Spatial Sound Installation

These are a set of two sound installations based on spatial listening processes. Here, the sound develops spatially and its discovery unfolds itself in the present, bringing with it the experiences of sound and listening as an immersive spatial sculpture. The audience is encouraged to navigate the sonic space in order to get a heterogeneous perception of sound, time and space created within the installation. This work also juxtaposes a subjective rhythmic layer which spatially evokes the loose and almost organic rhythm of ‘folk music’ from india. When paying close attention the listener can pick up on two, and sometimes three rhythms, these can be heard slightly flowing in and out of synchronicity within the installation space.

These installations are about listening and its subjective nature. They are a sonic heterotopia in  which various experiences are created which are both imagination and reality. Sound, here, is  created in the listening of it while its invention is in the imagination of the listener. The sound  outlines the creative interplay between the objectivity of the sonic phenomenon created and the  subjectivity of the perceptions filtered through individual experience. Imaginary spaces and  narratives can be drawn to trace individual experiences of listening to the sonic works installed  from various points in within the installations. These non-locational perspectives, in turn, initiate deeper  immersive listening experiences while drawing attention to the finer points of sound, its  movements, its progress through spacial form.

A View of Taichishengshui by Ish S as a part of Sonic Horizons at Vadehra Art Gallery, 2018

ISh S – Sound Installation | Multi-Channel Sound installation | Moth and a Room | Faulty scales | from Sound Reasons on Vimeo.

Sound Reasons | Live Session | Alchemy | SESSION 2 – Black Ice Melting | AUDIO | DOWNLOAD |

An article Ish S (edGeCut | diFfuSed beats)  wrote in Andy Guhl’s book ‘Ear Lights, Eye Sounds. Expanded Cracked Everyday Electronics’ is available online. This book just recently won the Swiss Design award and will be a very interesting read for anyone interested in electronic music and live visuals, as it is compiled and edited by one of the pioneers of electronic music. Andy Guhl was a part of Sound Reasons Festival II in 2013 here in India and he made an installation and some live performances. | http://www.earlightseyesounds.ch/

| More about the Sound Reasons Festival and the artist line up for this year coming up soon |

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The Performances are open to all

Sound reasons t0 Compilation

Sound reasons ‘t0′

4th world Orchestra cosmicomics
sonic objects hydrosonic (4th world orchestra rmx)
diFfuSed beats 49 percent
da-saz RL 137
Back To Frank – Freeze
diFfuSed beats blue hour
soundSkill peshkar
edGeCut last train to Sarai
heterogeneouz + electrophonicAnalog shift dub (diFfuSed beats rmx)
monoton mini beat (edGeCut rmx)
audio pervert audio date
dj Spooky + Qasim Virjee maya Saguna

Review by  Tobias Fisher

The sound worlds of modern metropolises are by default confusing multidirectional systems. In the words of Swedish artist BJ Nilsen, they always appear to be „both dangerous and beautiful“: Cars and machines have buried the cultural identity of most cities underneath their endless drone, while the simultaneity of confrontational and conflicting noises is creating a complex space which can no longer be fully decoded by the human mind. Artists have responded to the transformation and the creative challenge it implies by integrating this altered reality into their work. Canadian composer Henry Brant came to the conclusion that „single-style music, no matter how experimental or full of variety, could no longer evoke the new stresses, layered insanities and multi-directional assaults of contemporary life on the spirit.“ His massive collages would consequently pit up to six different instrumental groups against each other, contrasting, for example, the frenzied eruptions of a Jazz band with the guided emanations of a Symphony orchestra. Confusion and sensory overload weren’t considered unpleasant side-effects here, but a gauge of a composition’s truthfulness. In the emerging genre of field recordings, meanwhile, the city was even considered a work of art in its own right, a constantly changing body of sounds, continually re-inventing itself through the autonomous actions of its inhabitants and automated processes.

The latter aspect became prominently apparent in Francisco López’s Sound Matter-series and in a way, Sound Reasons, an extensive compilation conceived and organised by his Indian colleague Ish Shehrawat, now congenially ties in with and extends this concept. For „Sound Matter“, López  considered the city a well of acoustic phenomena. Recruiting a team of local artists, the group scoured the streets, side-alleys, parks and outskirts in search of inspiring materials in a bid of amassing sources for their compositions. The results, currently documented on two CDs for Pogus (Montréal) and Audiobulb (Birmingham), poignantly counterpointed traditional aural city portraits based on supposedly „representative“ spots, and seemed to suggest that there was no such thing as an urban sound world independent of its spectator. Sound Reasons, too, questions the existence of universal acoustic spaces. But it focuses less on the city as a pool of information and replaces it with the idea of it constituting a feedback mechanism, capable of helping us find out more about ourselves as human beings. Field recordings and music are neither each other’s opposites, nor are they, strictly speaking, compositional tools and choices. More accurately, they represent different categories of influences, which, as Shehrawat points out, can both „suggest and lead the other“.

Put more easily, this simply means that even straight-forward beats and melodies are capable of expressing the polystylistic reality and spatial aspects of our environment, if they are the result of a direct expression of the artist’s inner world. Those expecting this to be yet another collection of academic Sound Art will certainly be surprised about the stunning diversity on display here. From long, meditative soundscapes, unprocessed sounds of nature and drifting Electronica to minimal Techno, futuristic Dub and moments of Pop-like immediacy, the album not only spans a wide arch of styles and scenes, but actually succeeds in convincingly relating them to each other. Part of this is undeniably down to the fact that Shehrawat, under his Ish S-alias as well as a part of various projects and bands, is co-responsible for almost half of the material. His affinity to warm, richly resounding bass lines, intricate echo chamber manipulations and melancholic progressions shines through regardless of whether he’s exploring nocturnal ambient territory with the members of the 4th world orchestra („cosmiconomics“) or revelling in bittersweet songs without words under the edGeCut banner, a collaboration with Namrata Pamnani („last train to Sarai“), which also features his skills as a classically trained guitarist. More importantly, however, all acts represented here treat their sources with both playfulness and respect, manifesting their personality without loosing sight of the sampler’s overall goals.

The introduction to the album claims that „the omnipresent nature of sound involves us in a continuous engagement with the objective world; ‘in music’ we connect to the subjective self and the sonic universe that surrounds us.“ What this implies is that we can neither exclude ourselves from the equation by trying to objectively represent the world around us; nor can we pretend as though the external environment weren’t – consciously or unconsciously – influencing our own course of actions and artistic decisions. For Sound Reasons, it was therefore a prerogative to lay these connections bare and render the relations between the outside and inside transparent. An extremely obvious example for this notion is the cross-over of soundSkill’s „peshkar“, which juxtaposes a slow r’n'b groove with Indian Folk. There are more subtle shadings, too, however. On dif’s delicate and barely two minute short „blue hour“, a harmonic loop and a stoic drum beat run through the entire piece, placing all attention on what is happening on top: Honking car horns coalescing into sensitive melodies and the din of the city attaining thematic character.

It is in tracks like this that the record makes true on its promise of demonstrating the two-sided nature of our involvement with the spaces we inhabit: The music doesn’t even try to capture the complexity of what surrounds us but instead reduces it to its essentials and then blends it with the emotional response inside the musician. The result is a far more vivid and „truthful“ depiction of the both calm and agitated mood of an early evening scene on a busy thoroughfare than any field recording could ever be. Ideas like these are not restricted to any particular corner of the world and accordingly, the line-up of the album is truly international. Of course, this globalism also questions how much there is still such a thing as a real space at all and whether creative decisions have long become part of a system of references spread out across the entire globe. On anthemic closer „Maya Saguna“, for example, it might seem obvious that Washington, DC’s DJ Spooky is responsible for the grinding Hip Hop beats and his sonic partner Quasim Virjee for the Indian orchestrals. But it could just as well be the other way round.

Like vacuum pumps, the big metropoles are sucking global scenes into their spheres of influence, constructing micro-cosmoses of global villages. That, however, doesn’t disprove Sound Reasons‘s main thesis: That it is never merely the sum of external influences that determines a sonic space but the relationship these sounds build with the observer.