EPISODO : Sound Reasons
Yokohama Triennale |  JAPAN | September 2020 |

2 Sound Installation and live performances (online)
Presentation/ talks along with directed listening sessions.

Indian sound artist Ish SHEHRAWAT (Ish S) and Indonesian artist Venzha CHRIST present their sound installations as a part of the EPISODO - Sound Reasons, at the Lecture Hall of the Yokohama Museum of Art. This is the first in the Sound Reasons series to be held in Japan.

Online Walkthrough : Saturday , September 19  |  YouTUBE LINK |
15: 30 Delhi time |19:00 Japan time | 14:00 Berlin time |

Dates: September 16 – 27, 2020 *Closed: September 17 and 24.
Venue: Lecture Hall, Yokohama Museum of Art

We will be doing various other events with and before the installation dates like live performances, radio shows, talks etc. Please refer to the website and this space for updates.

Curatorial Introduction
An invisible immateriality, traveling, dissipating rapidly, embedding in somatic ways: Sound constitutes memories of encounters and moods, fears and limits, encompasses both unknowable and prohibited. It envelops, asks for discernment of intensity or withdrawal of its presence. The journey through mimicry, translucence, solitude, and togetherness is enlisted through the transversal qualities experienced in and with sound, asking us to become agile, move across senses, across membranes, across thresholds, beyond our finitude, towards an infinity of scales of becoming. To concentrate and attenuate our attention to this porous, boundary-crossing through mediums and cultures of listening and producing sound, we offer this Epis?do, inviting sound artists to awaken our sensing of extensive and expansive worlds. - Raqs Media Collective

Artist’s statement

By Ish S

The world is heard; its sonic space and time is generated through the complex unity of listening and perception. At Sound Reasons this listening and the phenomenological become the foci for innovative and generative practices as strategies of engagement to explore different creative and curatorial landscapes. The center point here is Techne, which in ancient Greek philosophy signifies ‘a mode of knowing’, being able to see, hear, inhabit and experience in the widest sense, and essentially, apprehend what is present as a continuum and the phenomenal. At Sound Reasons the ‘essence of knowing’ as Alethia, which brings into the present the processes and activities of creative reflections and abstractions, is the focus.

Sound as a medium is very dynamic and its activities and forms can be experienced and appreciated through a continuous engagement over time. The characteristics of continuity and redefinitions are complex, yet vital, to positioning Sound Art and contemporary electro acoustic music as truly post-modern forms. Sound Reasons, apart from its origins in sound and music, has at its core the processes of amalgamation of evolving phenomena, research and Praxis. It is a space for creative and sonic entanglements, and it has taken on a lot of different shapes and forms. Interestingly, in ‘Logical semantics’, or in language so to speak, ‘Sound Reasons’ stands for (or means) something reliable and sensible. Therefore, in praxis, Sound Reasons, just like Techne, brings forward knowledge-based experiences into the world, into the present, out of concealment and into their ‘multiplicity of appearances’. This aspect is closest to the philosophical concept of Rhizome as developed by Deleuze and Guattari, which apprehends this multiplicity as a study of Phenomenology (Husserl & Merleau-Ponty), and in Sound Reasons we engage with it via experiences, creations, preservations, explorations, abstractions and perceptions.

Having this multi-faceted research and praxis-based approach as a festival, music label, studio and production space, Sound Reasons is engaged with numerous curatorial as well as creative platforms. Over the last decade we have managed to represent around 90 artists. The experience of the works and activities we have engaged outline a unique spectrum of the many possibilities of sound art, electronic and contemporary music practices. At Sound Reasons we always want to initiate such varied approaches and processes. This is possible only through creative and curatorial explorations along with inter-media intersections as we sonically engage with the world and our lived experiences of the same.

Venzha CHRIST
EVOLUTION OF THE UNKNOWN VII
8 DIY Antennas, 8 DIY Signal Receivers, 4 speakers, 2 Frequency Visualisations

The first installation for the Episodo SOUND REASONS is by Venzha Christ, named ‘Evolution of the Unknown VII’. It is a graceful sound sculpture that uses DIY receivers to convert, synthesise and articulate astronomical radio waves from space into an audible spectrum. As a work of playful poetry, its structural complexity opens like a sonic bloom to reveal the phenomenological and intricate series of relationships of astronomical radio waves, with its artistic abstractions as an ongoing interplay between the radio waves, spatiality, sonifications, synthesis and the essence of the universe as intersections of being and listening.

Ish S
AN OCTAGON AND A SQUARE II
12 Channel Spatialised Sound Installation

The second installation, called ‘An Octagon and a Square,’ by me (Ish S) is a sonic horizon, which constitutes heterogeneous sound fields that can be inhabited and experienced from both the inside and outside of the installation. There are various layered sounds composed and synthesised for the installation, therefore the movement of the listeners within the installation space and their respective positioning as sonic observer plays an important part in the perception and the listening(s) of the work. I have coined this spatial phenomenon as “Sonic Sculpting in Space”. Here, the sound fields are always in motion as they reflect, oppose each other and at times exchange positions, flip and juxtapose overtones and movements. There is a folding and unfolding of the phenomenal, the opening up of multi layered listening fields that are brought into ‘various clearings’ both within the space and outside of it. This spatially illustrates some of the very intricate melodic intervals ⁽¹⁾ of Indian classical music within the contemporary format of a 12 channel sound art installation.

More importantly this installation is directed towards the phenomenological, and it brings the visitor/ observer into the complex fields of dynamic listening processes and closer to the finer points of ‘Indian classical music’ ⁽²⁾, like that of the ‘Rasa. ⁽³⁾ Based on minimalism and sound spatalisation, all the locations within the installation provide for infinite listening experiences as these perspectives and the layered sonic phenomena of inhabiting a space are sculpted as a sound installation.

As an artist I really like the idea of observing this sound field from the both from the inside and the outside. This leads to an interesting scope of inhabiting it, as well as observing it as a sonic horizon from a distance. The visitor is encouraged to move in and around the work in order to gather multiple perspectives of the installation. These movements of the observer/ listener create multiple layers of sonic experiences, and more importantly engage the body as a medium. The idea is to elaborate these engagements and multiplicities of experiences within the phenomenology of listening, thereby preventing any single sense from imposing itself at the very outset of the phenomenological processes. ⁽⁴⁾ Just like the blank space surrounding a word permits typographical adjustments, spatial compositions here are structural modifications of Indian classical music intervals, bringing forth the poetics of a newer form of listening and being.

At Sound Reasons we believe that ‘art’ through ‘sound and music’ can be the origin and the beginning, and therefore have a spring forward into a clearing, into a newer form of listening and being rather than just remaining a routine appendix to be carried out as a cultural and social phenomenon.

Sound Reasons therefore becomes a place where the layering of the so called concepts, boundaries, processes and elements can change and overlap and influence each other in a non-linear and non-historical set up – so that other creative and curatorial realms can be brought forward into the clearing and into the present. These can be a clearing to other ‘access points’ for the works, space and time and therefore reinterpretation of the poesy.

In the Heideggerian sense of interpretation, within these installations and live performances there is an interplay of imagination and poetry as a projection, a clearing, a creation of a region to be experienced. There unfolds an unconcealment, so to speak. It is a ‘creation of an open region’ that poetry allows and in this ‘nowness’ the perceptions and experiences intersect.

Music before everything else.
and, to that end.
Prefer the uneven
more vague and more soluble in air with
nothing in it that is heavy or still.
- Verlaine  Art Poitique

To name an object is to suppress three-fourths of the enjoyment of the poem, which is composed of the pleasure of guessing little by little: to suggest . . . there is the dream
- Mallarme

BIOs

Ish SHEHRAWAT (Ish S)
Born in 1978 in New Delhi, India. Lives and works in New Delhi. Shehrawat is a composer, sound artist, curator and musician, and his primary fields of interest are sound art and installations, along with electro-acoustic and improvised music. Trained as a classical guitar player, he has produced various sound art installations, albums and composed music for independent short films, plays, performances and contemporary dance recitals worldwide. He also curates the Sound Reasons Festival for sound art and experimental electronic music, which has taken place in India and the South Asia region since 2012. In 2018 he received a grant from India Foundation for the Arts under its Arts Practice Programme, with support from the Sir Ratan Tata Trust (SRTT).

Venzha CHRIST
Born in 1973 in Banyuwangi, Indonesia. Lives and works in Yogyakarta. Christ is a founder of House of Natural Fiber (HONF), a new media art laboratory in Yogyakarta that has been active since 1999, where he explores a number of art projects that work towards the development of art, science, and technology for society. He has also been a director of the Indonesia Space Science Society (ISSS) since 2015. Christ has focused on space science and space exploration research since the beginning of his career and has actively created collaborative projects with more than forty institutions and universities in this field worldwide. His latest projects including NASA are MARS Desert Research Station – MDRS (2018) and Simulation of Human Isolation Research for Antarctica-based Space Engineering – SHIRASE (2019).

Footnotes and Citations

⁽¹⁾ An interval is the distance (in scale steps) between two pitches. A melodic interval occurs when two notes are played in sequence, one after the other. Intervals can also be harmonic, meaning that the two notes are played together at the same time. For example, taking C as the tonic the “1″ (Sa in Indian classical music or the first degree/note of the scale), then the third degree of the C major scale is E (Ga in Indian classical), so the interval between C and E is called a major third. If the second tone in a major interval is lowered by one half step, the interval becomes minor.

⁽²⁾ I have used the scale from the Marwah Thaat (catergorisation or grouping of Indian classical scales) to compose and synthesise sounds for the installation. These ragas are performed from late night-time till early morning, like Marwah, Puriya and Sohini. These are special 6 note-hexatonic ragas which have the 4th note sharp – Ma Sharp – and omit the 5th note Pa completely as 5th denotes the sun. This leads this system to a very special set of notes that usually do not exist in the western performance tradition. This installation interprets the soundings of these notes and creates a unique space-time and with these intervals (and others) as en-harmonic musical and experiential relationships. These are put forward as artistic representations to bring into the realm a newer phenomenological listening of Indian classical music.

⁽³⁾ In Indian aesthetics, a rasa (Sanskrit: ??) literally means “juice, essence or taste”. It connotes a concept in Indian arts about the aesthetic flavour of any visual, literary or musical work that evokes an emotion or feeling in the reader or audience but cannot be described. [Encyclopedia Britannica (2013)] It refers to the emotional flavors/essence crafted into the work by the writer and relished by a ‘sensitive spectator’ or sah?daya, literally one who “has heart”, and can connect to the work with emotion, without dryness. Rasas are created by bhavas: the state of mind. [ Wikipedia ]

⁽⁴⁾ I want to create listening experiences which are heterogeneous within the installations, so that the attention can be drawn to the intricacies of Indian classical music like Shrutis, Raas, and the unique melodic intervals within the notes along with the compound and polymetric rhythms. These above-mentioned parameters along with others are often very important aspects of the classical form, and I feel that interpreting them in the contemporary format of ‘sound installations’ becomes an immersive and powerful medium to bring about heterogeneous interpretations and listener experiences that bring forward newer experiences of classical music into the clearing.

Now, there is a ‘learning curve to the listening (here)’ and one has to hear these installations over 3 to 4 times if possible to sense the complexities of the phenomenological engagements herein. The practice of listening will get sharper with each listening session, that is, conscious application to the sonic phenomenon and its intricacies are experienced. One will be able to track the movements of sounds within these examples, which are not too linear and will be able to follow the shapes of these movement, tracing them as diagonal, circles and parabolas (around you)

This very Phenomenology, in the great philosopher Husserl’s sense, is not a science in the sense that physics or mathematics is a science. Phenomenology is not a matter of forming inductive theories to explain phenomena, and is not a matter of drawing deductive conclusions from them. Any such going beyond the directly given is risky and subject to error.

Phenomenology, then, does not argue; it describes. Husserl makes this point again and again. Phenomenology, for Husserl, is not a matter of learning to think clearly or to reason properly. It is a matter of learning to see all over again. This “describing” of the phenomena is not a simple task. It involves discipline and training. Training in phenomenology is rather like the training a painter gets. The painter must learn to be sensitive to nuances that all of us in a sense see, although most of us don’t notice them. The ‘phenomenological heterogeneous experiences’ afforded spatially within the installation will be of these deeply immersive listening(s) which will eventually over a period of time lead to a training in sonic phenomena.

The installation ‘An Octagon and a Square – II‘ is made possible with a grant from India Foundation for the Arts under its Arts Practice Programme, with support from the Sir Ratan Tata Trust (SRTT)

LISTENING SESSIONS/ Engagement/ Registerations

Collaboration | Sound Installation | Raqs Media Collective | ISh S | diFfuSed beats | Frith Street Gallery |

6 Channel Sound Installation by  Ish S for an immersive Installation called Spinal by Raqs Media Collective
Additional Composition by diFfuSed beats
Sound Spatalisation and Post Production at Sound Reasons

Exhibit Open from
31 January 2019 – 16 March 2019
Frith Street Gallery
17-18 Golden Square
London  W1F 9JJ

Spinal follows on from Raqs’ immersive installation Not Yet At Ease, co-commissioned by Firstsite and 14-18 NOW, the UK’s arts programme for the First World War centenary.

Invoking transcripts of letters and diaries, close readings of medical records and official dispatches, extracts from novels and poetry, accounts of dreams and nightmares, fragments of archival film & photography and spectral snatches of voices captured in hundred-year-old sound recordings, Raqs foreground the experiences and testimonies of the soldiers and followers from the Indian Subcontinent who saw action in the First World War.

Spinal invents a dreamscape to build a lyrical and imaginative layer of reflection. It discovers and highlights the official discomfiture with what was taken to be an ‘excess of poetry’ (read as a sign of ‘mental disquietude’) in the soldier’s accounts. Raqs consider this early admission and evasion of the psychological distress produced by war to assert that the ‘unease’ generated by the First World War has not yet ceased.

Book Launch |The Political Possibility of Sound | Salomé Voegelin |

Book Launch
Thursday 24th January 2019
Doors 6.30pm pm Start 7.00 pm
FREE EVENT

 Review By ISh S |  Jan 2019 |
This is the third book by Salomé Voegelin who is one of the most important voices in the field of Sound Art and she has been an essential part of Sound Reasons over the years. Her writings are both original and challenging and they have to perceived with a continuous engagement over a period of time just like the medium of Sound itself. She has handled the immensely complicated sphere of Sound Art in its contemporary format in a very poetic manner, and along the way has devised an original language and a strong discourse that truly reflects the medium. The ‘Political Possibility of Sound’ like both of her previous works is a multi-layered read and it (re) builds on the sonic perception and engagement as a practice of reading and in-turn listening

Text on the Event
The essay is the perfect format for a crisis. Its porous and contingent nature forgives a lack of formality, while its neglect of perfection and virtuosity releases the potential for the incomplete and the unrealizable. These seven essays on The Political Possibility of Sound present a perfectly incomplete form for a discussion on the possibility of the political that includes creativity and invention, and articulates a politics that imagines transformation and the desire to embrace a connected and collaborative world.

Seven artists, authors, theorists and practitioners will respond and engage each with one of the seven essays that form the book, expanding and challenging the writing beyond its pages into the imagination of the listener.  Nina Power teaches Philosophy at the University of Roehampton and is the author of many articles on politics, philosophy and culture.  Angus Carlyle’s research responds to inhabited environments through film, soundworks and textual practices, shifting between collaborative and solitary endeavours, the documentary and the poetic.

Thomas Gardner is a cellist, musician and sound artist. His current work considers the ways in which the post-war ruptures of art-music, as exemplified by the Darmstadt school, are met by an increasingly political understanding of sound art.  Aura Satz’s practice encompasses film, sound, performance and sculpture. She has performed, exhibited and screened her work nationally and internationally. She is Reader and Tutor at the RCA (Royal College of Art).

Mikhail Karikis’ work embraces moving image, sound and other media to create immersive audiovisual installations that emerge from his long-standing interest in the voice as a material and a socio-political agent.  Kevin Logan is a cross-disciplinary artist/researcher/teacher based in London. His work foregrounds sonic practice using a speculative blending of writing, performance, moving-image, and installation.

BUY : https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-political-possibility-of-sound-9781501312175/

Music Composition and Sound Design for ‘Provisions for Everybody’ | Raqs Media Collective |
Project 88 | Bombay | India |

Music Composition and Sound Design by diFfuSed beats & Ish s for a powerful single channel video art work by Raqs Media Collective called Provisions for Everybody

Exhibit Open from 16 Jan – 09 March 2019
Project 88
BMP Building, Ground Floor N.A. Sawant Marg Colaba,
Mumbai – 400 005

“Everything is burning”

Raqs Media Collective returns to Project 88, Mumbai with Provisions, an exhibition that brings together the premiere in India of an ambitious recent video travelogue, Provisions for Everybody (2018), as well as a new body of work — photo/text/objects that embody an agile and playful skepticism towards the civilisational burden of the unequal distributions of toxicity.

“How not to write slow poisoning love letters to life?”, Raqs ask, as they straddle a planet rotating without permission, create a road map for the centuries from stone, coal, oil and windmills, while following an itinerary between epochs and continents, on and off the trail of George Orwell.

Raqs burrow under the earth, find a memorial to doubt next to sugarcane fields, survey an open cast coal mine, study line-dancing in a pit village, and find everything ablaze from the neolithic age to now. This provokes reflection on the relationship between time and energy, between burning and becoming fuel.

The task Raqs give themselves is one of ambition and simplicity: how to re-imagine the relation between the toxic and the true, between potential and plenitude.

 Solo Improvised Guitar performance at a location in South Delhi Sat 05 Jan | 7.30 pm | South Delhi |

Live solo guitar improvisations in 2 parts based on compositions by Ish and interpretations of works by Coltrane, Satie and Azzola.  Pls msg me ish(at)soundreasons.in

http://soundreasons.in/ish-s

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

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

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

Sound Reasons Festival VI | ReINSTALL – 3^nd Session | SYMPOSIUM | Workshops | Live Performances |

THU, 15 November 2018 | SYMPOSIUM
ReINSTALL | 3rd Session | New Works
Workshops | Presentations | Talks | 3.00 pm Onwards

LIVE PERFORMANCES | 7.00 pm Onwards

Korean Cultural Center | New Delhi

More Details in the Following

Exhibit Open till Wed, 21 November, 2018

The 3^rd – ReINSTALL of the Sound Reasons Festival VI will be taking place on Thu, 15 Nov 2018 at the Korean Cultural center marked with new installations of Sound Art works, a Symposium featuring – a workshop by Lisa Hall and talks/ presentations by Cathy Lane, Ish S and Salomé Voegelin. We will also conduct directed listening sessions along other creative engagements to build on various listening perspectives in order to engage with sound art installed at the festival and this will be followed up by live performances and Artistic interventions. The time line for the day is in the following

Thu, 15 Nov 2018 | ReINSTALL – 3^rd Session | Symposium | Talks | Workshops | Live Performances |

3.00 pm Listening for instruction by Lisa Hall | Workshop |
4.00 pm  Talk and Presentation | Lisa Hall  |
4.30 pm Salomé Voegelin | Talk & Presentation |
5.15 pm Cathy Lane | Presentation & Talk |
6.00 pm Multi channel directed Listening sessions | Sound Reasons Presentation |
7.00 pm Live Performances | Shun Owada, da Saz, Cathy Lane & diFfuSed beats |

Prior registration for the workshop is required. Pls email ish(at)soundreasons.in or lisa_hall_(at)hotmail.co.uk

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

Sound Reasons Festival VI | ReINSTALL – 2^nd Session | New Works | Live Performances | Talks |

Fri, 26 October | 6.30 pm onwards
ReINSTALL | Second Session | New Works
Live performances | Installations | Talks | Presentations |
Korean Cultural Center | New Delhi

Mon, 22 – 24 Oct | 6.30 pm onwards
Walk Throughs | Immersive Listening Sessions | Talks |
Korean Cultural Center | New Delhi

The Second Session – ReINSTALL of the Sound Reasons Festival VI will be taking place on the Fri, 26 Oct at the Korean Cultural center marked with new installations of Sound Art works, along with live performances and Installations. We will also conduct some immersive and directed listening sessions along with walk throughs and talks from Mon, 21 Oct – 24 Oct. More dates to be announced soon.

Sound Reasons Festival VI | ReINSTALL – 2nd Session | New Works | Live Performances | from Sound Reasons on Vimeo.

Over the next few weeks more sound works will be added as installations and we will making some presentations, live performances and directed listening sessions at the Korean Cultural Center.

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

Sound Reasons Festival VI | Sound Art | Electronic Music

Friday, 14 September 2018 | 6 pm onwards
Sound Reasons Festival VI | OPENING
Sound Installations | Live Performances
Walkthrough | Presentations

Exhibition is open till 22 November 2018

Korean Cultural Center
24 A Ring Road
Lajpat Nagar IV
New Delhi

Sound Reasons Festival VI for Sound Art and contemporary electronic music will take place here in India and the main part of the Sound Installations and live performances will take place at the Korean Cultural Center in New Delhi. This will be the first part for the festival and it will take place form the 14^th of September to the 22^nd of November 2018. Our curative focus this time is on the Indian and the Asian Sound Art scene. Creative activities will include live performances, workshops and Sound Installations that will happen across various venues in Delhi, Goa and Banglaore. Additionally, we will be extending some of our activities right well into the month of February in 2019. Here in the following is the first list of artist curated at the festival and more names will be added in the future

Venzha Christ
Marcus Maeder
Shun Owada
Arnont Nongyao
Salomé Voegelin
Ish S
Cathy Lane
da Saz
Suvani Suri
Paul Purgas
diFfuSed beats
Lisa Hall
Hannah Kemp-Welch
Wicked Mannequins
Bidisha Das
Kaushal Sapre
Dipali Gupta

Please check http://soundreasons.in for updates on the events, live performances and installations as some of them are still under process and will be finalised over the next few weeks. The opening is at the Korean Cultural Center, New Delhi with Sound Art Installations and Walkthroughs.

More importantly, in the next couple of months we will be announcing additional artists for the our creative activities which will include live performances, recording and collaborative sessions as a part of the Sound Reasons Festival. These activities will extend well into the months of February and March in 2019. Please do keep checking out the website http://soundreasons.in for further updates. Other Important date in New Delhi is

Friday, 26 October 2018 | 5 pm onwards
ReINSTALL | Second Session
Live performances | Installations | Workshops |
Korean Cultural Center | New Delhi

So again here we would like to remind all the artists who have applied through the ‘Artist Call’ that their entries/ works are still relevant for this along with the future editions of the festival. These will also include other creative activates at Sound Reasons that happen all year round. More information on these will be updated here in the last half of October 2018 on the Sound Reasons Website.

CURATORS NOTE

The world is heard; its sonic space and time is generated through the complex unity of listening and perception. At Sound Reasons this listening becomes the centrepoint of an innovative and generative practice, and as a strategy of engagement to explore different curatorial landscapes each time. The experience of the works presented at the festival shows a unique spectrum of the many possibilities of Sound. At the Sound Reasons Festival we want to initiate such listening(s) through explorations and inter-media intersections as we engage the world and our lived experience through sound.

Sound as a medium is very dynamic and its activities and forms can be experienced and appreciated through a continuous engagement over time. The characteristics of continuity and redefinition are complex, yet vital, to positioning Sound Art as a truly post-modern form. At Sound Reasons I have used an open-ended approach to curation in order to navigate the complex waters of Sound Art to extend and enhance the individual or collective experience. Therefore, at the Sound Reasons Festival the medium and its processes are always the foci and need to be engaged with and explored.

‘The sonic frame’ in the form of experiences curated and generated here is as intangible as sound itself, and is redrawn countless times. The installation by Venzha Christ uses DIY receivers to convert radio waves from space into an audible spectrum, that can be experienced along with a visualisation of the same. In the second installation called ‘Circle’, I have sonically interpreted the opposite side of an astronomical Event Horizon, which forms a listening field where the body and sound can meet (on the horizon). These two become objective and subjective interpretations of the universe that surrounds us. Therefore, while extending these listening experiences, the curatorial direction is not located in history or in sociopolitical discourse, but is rooted deeply in the experiential realm – in the now, in the immediate submission to it. And in this becoming, the imagination is almost more important than reality, the virtual more significant than the real. The fleeting experience of the sounds and the noise is the unique construct of the individual and not of her/his history or cognitive development.

Finally, for the sixth edition of the Sound Reasons Festival we have a great opportunity to represent the Asian scene with a focus on South East Asian Sound Art. By uniting the artists with similar creative processes and with a lens on the phenomenological and on listening, newer patterns have emerged. Over the next few months various live performances and sound installations will be presented tracing these hybrid patterns, with the momentum not settling on broad themes as offered by the visual arts, but on developing the immersive experience and newer languages and strategies for its interpretation

Ish S | Sep 2018

ART WORKS

Venzha Christ
EVOLUTION OF THE UNKNOWN #07
8 DIY Antennas, 8 DIY Signal Receivers, 4 speakers, 2 Frequency Visualisations

The art installation here results from the science of radio astronomy. The installation presents radio waves from space, sent and collected through self-made radio antennas gathering precise data from astronomical objects in space. The transmitted signals received from the planets and stars are then visually displayed and decoded into audible sounds which constitute the soundscape present in this gallery. Radio waves, together with light waves, have changed the way we view the Universe and dramatically increased our knowledge of it.

The Indonesia Space Science Society, shows us that that space is a continuous source of inspiration that compels practitioners from all fields to understand the universe we are within, using both tools and ideas of science, and those of art. This collaboration project between ISSS and Sound Reasons, will continuing to International SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Conference in Yogyakarta Indonesia November 2018.

About Venzha Christ
Working with artists, scientists, astronomers and engineers in Indonesia, Venzha Christ established ISSS – Indonesia Space Science Society as a framework for the exploration of space from a different perspective. Whilst lacking the means that large space agencies such as NASA have, the Indonesia Space Science Society provides us with a compelling encounter with space nonetheless.With an interest in the external world, space signals, parallel universes, and ancient science and technology, he visits diverse research laboratories around the world and produces research-based artworks. With ISSS – Indonesia Space Science Society, Venzha Christ in fact launched Indonesia’s very first Space Science Society and this art work is developed by Venzha Christ and v.u.f.o.c lab in 2018.

The 8 Channel Audio Room | 4 Sound works installed in One multi-channel Room as an installation |

Cathy Lane
PREPARATION OF AN IMAGINARY CONFLICT

“We are concerned here not so much with the almost natural phenomenon of identifying an enemy who is threatening us, but with the process of creating and demonizing the enemy” – Umberto Eco

Sound and language are powerful tools in the construction of imagined conflict scenarios and their aftermaths. ‘Preparations for an Imaginary Conflict’ was commissioned for Staging Disorder, an exhibition addressing the relationship between photography, sound art and modern conflict. The work uses UK public information media recordings, oral history, archival news, texts and specific geographical areas to examine the warlike rhetoric used by several generations of politicians to prepare the population to a possible attack or to construct the idea of a hostile “other” in a large number of real or imaginary situations.

Lisa Hall & Hannah Kemp-Welch
VIRTUAL VOICES

Listening for Instruction is a survey of how sounds are used as signifiers in public spaces in the UK, focusing on London as the case study. Collecting beeps, hisses, tones and automated voices, this work looks at how human workers are replaced by recorded sound, how sound is used to direct our behaviour, and how the voice is positioned within that. Probing current debates around the potential changes automation brings to working lives this study advocates for an automated future, supporting the anti-work movement’s call for ‘the right to the idle’ – the artists commit their own voices into a hybrid synthetic persona in support of this.

Virtual Voices is one third of the survey to date, made in conjunction with audio work Journey and zine Dictionary of Beeps.

Marcus Maeder
LASTA/ NIGALANA

Lasta/Nigalana was originally composed for a 20-channel, ambisonic loudspeaker array in a dodecahedron. The piece, which had its premiere in 2008 in Dubrovnik/Croatia, has now been reworked for the 2018 SoundReasons Festival and adapted to a conventional ambisonics system. Lasta/Nigalana is based on the observation of countless numbers of swallows, which in summer fly over the city of Dubrovnik in large flocks, providing a special spatial-acoustic spectacle.

The Lasta/Nigalana piece selects as its model the cries made by the swallows as they move extremely dynamically in the air, and sets them into a sound image intended to musically reproduce the impression of shady and cool alleys within the thick, medieval walls of the city and the light reflections of the sea.

diFfuSed beats
FAR AWAY

There is always a stepping into our works and exploring spatial perception by opening up the listening perspectives by moving the sonic material generated into space. Most of the source material for this work was generated live though improvised processes, these include both synthesis and other live sampling techniques. In reflection one must plunge into this sonic world instead of surveying it and in the words of Merleau-Ponty “ it (the reflection) must descend towards it as it is – instead of working its way back up towards a prior possibility of thinking it ….”

Suvani Suri
PRELUDE TO A PUNCTURE IN LISTENING II
2 Mics / 2 speakers / 1 mixer /

The project is one of a series of sonic experiments that probe into the nesting of the uncanny, within the everyday. A round of acoustic interpenetrations home in on the ambiguous zones between the inside and outside, the familiar and the unfamiliar in a bid to tease apart occurrences of the uncanny leak(s) in-between. Floating between the listening zones, one is looped into an endless feedback, a continuously mutating reflection borne of peculiar sounds intruding into spaces that have been held separate so far suggesting that at the very point of closure, there is an opening.

The flight of stairs that only goes up and down evokes the seduction of the strange and becomes the site of the uncanny encounter with that which is familiar and yet not. The useless staircase alludes to the Muy? kaidan, also know as a pure staircase, a Thomasson relics discovered by the Japanese artist Genpei.

The intervention serendipitously takes on the form of a conversation with the instrumentarium generated by the radiowaves in Venzha’s work ‘Evolution of the Unknown’. As the sonic realms of the works criss-cross into each other, speculations of the acousmatic uncanny that dwell in each of the inquiries, abound.

Dipali Gupta
A LITTLE DEATH
1 Channel Video / 2 Channel Audio

The video works of Dipali Gupta attempt to denaturalize the social construct of topics such as immorality, indulgence, domesticity, and the male gaze. They expand upon sounds, movements and imagery of pleasure objects. The still life videos challenge the conventional perception of still life paintings through sonification and moving imagery. The Bedroom video is a representation of everyday spaces stereotypically occupied by women that become private domains of female subjectivity.

Ish S
CIRCLE
8 Channel Spatailised Audio

Here I have interpreted the Sonic Horizon as a circle, where the subjective and the objective can meet. It is a process of observing and listening to the horizon up close and being on /in it. So it is a way of looking out (listening to) from the perspective of the horizon while inhabiting it. You will hear analog and digital synthesis and Juxtaposition of pure brown noise, which in this case forms the sonic perceptual horizon. Again here the point is to draw the attention and the listening to the movement of sounds in order to have deeper sonic engagement. The circle, in this case the the abstract representation of the opposite side of an astronomical Event Horizon, forms a listening field where the body and sound can meet, and this time-space can be inhabited from various angles and from both inside and outside.

There is a lot more to hear here in the quietening. The similarities of the sounding of the natural elements like that of the sea and the wind form the perceptual horizon, a line where the two meet or emerge from, the sonic horizon takes shape that can be heard and inhabited. (Object horizon) Sonically, the horizon here engages a listening of some geometric shapes, like circles, lines, hyperbolas, angles and rotation along with some sonic/ audio processes. These are interpreted on a plane which itself is subject to change of angels There is an outside and an inside of this horizon which is drawn by the circle in the middle of the room Various locations, both inside and outside the circle evoke unique listening experiences. Phantom listening perceptions will sometimes complete one spatial hearing perspectives, where the shapes are left out incomplete intentionally. There is outer limit of the horizon that can be heard form the corners of the room, where from far away the perception of the sounds in the center of the circle will become linear. Moving around therefore will give heterogenous perceptions of the installation and the sounds.

Sound Reasons Festival VI | ReINSTALL – 2^nd Session | New Works | Live Performances | Talks |

Fri, 26 October | 6.30 pm onwards
ReINSTALL | Second Session | New Works
Live performances | Installations | Talks | Presentations |
Korean Cultural Center | New Delhi

Mon, 22 – 24 Oct | 6.30 pm onwards
Walk Throughs | Immersive Listening Sessions | Talks |
Korean Cultural Center | New Delhi

The Second Session – ReINSTALL of the Sound Reasons Festival VI will be taking place on the Fri, 26 Oct at the Korean Cultural center marked with new installations of Sound Art works, along with live performances and Installations. We will also conduct some immersive and directed listening sessions along with walk throughs and talks from Mon, 21 Oct – 24 Oct. More dates to be announced soon.

Sound Reasons Festival VI | ReINSTALL – 2nd Session | New Works | Live Performances | from Sound Reasons on Vimeo.

Over the next few weeks more sound works will be added as installations and we will making some presentations, live performances and directed listening sessions at the Korean Cultural Center.

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

Sound Reasons Festival VI | Sound Art | Electronic Music

Friday, 14 September 2018 | 6 pm onwards
Sound Reasons Festival VI | OPENING
Sound Installations | Live Performances
Walkthrough | Presentations

Exhibition is open till 22 November 2018

Korean Cultural Center
24 A Ring Road
Lajpat Nagar IV
New Delhi

Sound Reasons Festival VI for Sound Art and contemporary electronic music will take place here in India and the main part of the Sound Installations and live performances will take place at the Korean Cultural Center in New Delhi. This will be the first part for the festival and it will take place form the 14^th of September to the 22^nd of November 2018. Our curative focus this time is on the Indian and the Asian Sound Art scene. Creative activities will include live performances, workshops and Sound Installations that will happen across various venues in Delhi, Goa and Banglaore. Additionally, we will be extending some of our activities right well into the month of February in 2019. Here in the following is the first list of artist curated at the festival and more names will be added in the future

Venzha Christ
Marcus Maeder
Shun Owada
Arnont Nongyao
Salomé Voegelin
Ish S
Cathy Lane
da Saz
Suvani Suri
Paul Purgas
diFfuSed beats
Lisa Hall
Hannah Kemp-Welch
Wicked Mannequins
Bidisha Das
Kaushal Sapre
Dipali Gupta

Please check http://soundreasons.in for updates on the events, live performances and installations as some of them are still under process and will be finalised over the next few weeks. The opening is at the Korean Cultural Center, New Delhi with Sound Art Installations and Walkthroughs.

More importantly, in the next couple of months we will be announcing additional artists for the our creative activities which will include live performances, recording and collaborative sessions as a part of the Sound Reasons Festival. These activities will extend well into the months of February and March in 2019. Please do keep checking out the website http://soundreasons.in for further updates. Other Important date in New Delhi is

Friday, 26 October 2018 | 5 pm onwards
ReINSTALL | Second Session
Live performances | Installations | Workshops |
Korean Cultural Center | New Delhi

So again here we would like to remind all the artists who have applied through the ‘Artist Call’ that their entries/ works are still relevant for this along with the future editions of the festival. These will also include other creative activates at Sound Reasons that happen all year round. More information on these will be updated here in the last half of October 2018 on the Sound Reasons Website.

CURATORS NOTE

The world is heard; its sonic space and time is generated through the complex unity of listening and perception. At Sound Reasons this listening becomes the centrepoint of an innovative and generative practice, and as a strategy of engagement to explore different curatorial landscapes each time. The experience of the works presented at the festival shows a unique spectrum of the many possibilities of Sound. At the Sound Reasons Festival we want to initiate such listening(s) through explorations and inter-media intersections as we engage the world and our lived experience through sound.

Sound as a medium is very dynamic and its activities and forms can be experienced and appreciated through a continuous engagement over time. The characteristics of continuity and redefinition are complex, yet vital, to positioning Sound Art as a truly post-modern form. At Sound Reasons I have used an open-ended approach to curation in order to navigate the complex waters of Sound Art to extend and enhance the individual or collective experience. Therefore, at the Sound Reasons Festival the medium and its processes are always the foci and need to be engaged with and explored.

‘The sonic frame’ in the form of experiences curated and generated here is as intangible as sound itself, and is redrawn countless times. The installation by Venzha Christ uses DIY receivers to convert radio waves from space into an audible spectrum, that can be experienced along with a visualisation of the same. In the second installation called ‘Circle’, I have sonically interpreted the opposite side of an astronomical Event Horizon, which forms a listening field where the body and sound can meet (on the horizon). These two become objective and subjective interpretations of the universe that surrounds us. Therefore, while extending these listening experiences, the curatorial direction is not located in history or in sociopolitical discourse, but is rooted deeply in the experiential realm – in the now, in the immediate submission to it. And in this becoming, the imagination is almost more important than reality, the virtual more significant than the real. The fleeting experience of the sounds and the noise is the unique construct of the individual and not of her/his history or cognitive development.

Finally, for the sixth edition of the Sound Reasons Festival we have a great opportunity to represent the Asian scene with a focus on South East Asian Sound Art. By uniting the artists with similar creative processes and with a lens on the phenomenological and on listening, newer patterns have emerged. Over the next few months various live performances and sound installations will be presented tracing these hybrid patterns, with the momentum not settling on broad themes as offered by the visual arts, but on developing the immersive experience and newer languages and strategies for its interpretation

Ish S | Sep 2018

ART WORKS

Venzha Christ
EVOLUTION OF THE UNKNOWN #07
8 DIY Antennas, 8 DIY Signal Receivers, 4 speakers, 2 Frequency Visualisations

The art installation here results from the science of radio astronomy. The installation presents radio waves from space, sent and collected through self-made radio antennas gathering precise data from astronomical objects in space. The transmitted signals received from the planets and stars are then visually displayed and decoded into audible sounds which constitute the soundscape present in this gallery. Radio waves, together with light waves, have changed the way we view the Universe and dramatically increased our knowledge of it.

The Indonesia Space Science Society, shows us that that space is a continuous source of inspiration that compels practitioners from all fields to understand the universe we are within, using both tools and ideas of science, and those of art. This collaboration project between ISSS and Sound Reasons, will continuing to International SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Conference in Yogyakarta Indonesia November 2018.

About Venzha Christ
Working with artists, scientists, astronomers and engineers in Indonesia, Venzha Christ established ISSS – Indonesia Space Science Society as a framework for the exploration of space from a different perspective. Whilst lacking the means that large space agencies such as NASA have, the Indonesia Space Science Society provides us with a compelling encounter with space nonetheless.With an interest in the external world, space signals, parallel universes, and ancient science and technology, he visits diverse research laboratories around the world and produces research-based artworks. With ISSS – Indonesia Space Science Society, Venzha Christ in fact launched Indonesia’s very first Space Science Society and this art work is developed by Venzha Christ and v.u.f.o.c lab in 2018.

The 8 Channel Audio Room | 4 Sound works installed in One multi-channel Room as an installation |

Cathy Lane
PREPARATION OF AN IMAGINARY CONFLICT

“We are concerned here not so much with the almost natural phenomenon of identifying an enemy who is threatening us, but with the process of creating and demonizing the enemy” – Umberto Eco

Sound and language are powerful tools in the construction of imagined conflict scenarios and their aftermaths. ‘Preparations for an Imaginary Conflict’ was commissioned for Staging Disorder, an exhibition addressing the relationship between photography, sound art and modern conflict. The work uses UK public information media recordings, oral history, archival news, texts and specific geographical areas to examine the warlike rhetoric used by several generations of politicians to prepare the population to a possible attack or to construct the idea of a hostile “other” in a large number of real or imaginary situations.

Lisa Hall & Hannah Kemp-Welch
VIRTUAL VOICES

Listening for Instruction is a survey of how sounds are used as signifiers in public spaces in the UK, focusing on London as the case study. Collecting beeps, hisses, tones and automated voices, this work looks at how human workers are replaced by recorded sound, how sound is used to direct our behaviour, and how the voice is positioned within that. Probing current debates around the potential changes automation brings to working lives this study advocates for an automated future, supporting the anti-work movement’s call for ‘the right to the idle’ – the artists commit their own voices into a hybrid synthetic persona in support of this.

Virtual Voices is one third of the survey to date, made in conjunction with audio work Journey and zine Dictionary of Beeps.

Marcus Maeder
LASTA/ NIGALANA

Lasta/Nigalana was originally composed for a 20-channel, ambisonic loudspeaker array in a dodecahedron. The piece, which had its premiere in 2008 in Dubrovnik/Croatia, has now been reworked for the 2018 SoundReasons Festival and adapted to a conventional ambisonics system. Lasta/Nigalana is based on the observation of countless numbers of swallows, which in summer fly over the city of Dubrovnik in large flocks, providing a special spatial-acoustic spectacle.

The Lasta/Nigalana piece selects as its model the cries made by the swallows as they move extremely dynamically in the air, and sets them into a sound image intended to musically reproduce the impression of shady and cool alleys within the thick, medieval walls of the city and the light reflections of the sea.

diFfuSed beats
FAR AWAY

There is always a stepping into our works and exploring spatial perception by opening up the listening perspectives by moving the sonic material generated into space. Most of the source material for this work was generated live though improvised processes, these include both synthesis and other live sampling techniques. In reflection one must plunge into this sonic world instead of surveying it and in the words of Merleau-Ponty “ it (the reflection) must descend towards it as it is – instead of working its way back up towards a prior possibility of thinking it ….”

Suvani Suri
PRELUDE TO A PUNCTURE IN LISTENING II
2 Mics / 2 speakers / 1 mixer /

The project is one of a series of sonic experiments that probe into the nesting of the uncanny, within the everyday. A round of acoustic interpenetrations home in on the ambiguous zones between the inside and outside, the familiar and the unfamiliar in a bid to tease apart occurrences of the uncanny leak(s) in-between. Floating between the listening zones, one is looped into an endless feedback, a continuously mutating reflection borne of peculiar sounds intruding into spaces that have been held separate so far suggesting that at the very point of closure, there is an opening.

The flight of stairs that only goes up and down evokes the seduction of the strange and becomes the site of the uncanny encounter with that which is familiar and yet not. The useless staircase alludes to the Muy? kaidan, also know as a pure staircase, a Thomasson relics discovered by the Japanese artist Genpei.

The intervention serendipitously takes on the form of a conversation with the instrumentarium generated by the radiowaves in Venzha’s work ‘Evolution of the Unknown’. As the sonic realms of the works criss-cross into each other, speculations of the acousmatic uncanny that dwell in each of the inquiries, abound.

Dipali Gupta
A LITTLE DEATH
1 Channel Video / 2 Channel Audio

The video works of Dipali Gupta attempt to denaturalize the social construct of topics such as immorality, indulgence, domesticity, and the male gaze. They expand upon sounds, movements and imagery of pleasure objects. The still life videos challenge the conventional perception of still life paintings through sonification and moving imagery. The Bedroom video is a representation of everyday spaces stereotypically occupied by women that become private domains of female subjectivity.

Ish S
CIRCLE
8 Channel Spatailised Audio

Here I have interpreted the Sonic Horizon as a circle, where the subjective and the objective can meet. It is a process of observing and listening to the horizon up close and being on /in it. So it is a way of looking out (listening to) from the perspective of the horizon while inhabiting it. You will hear analog and digital synthesis and Juxtaposition of pure brown noise, which in this case forms the sonic perceptual horizon. Again here the point is to draw the attention and the listening to the movement of sounds in order to have deeper sonic engagement. The circle, in this case the the abstract representation of the opposite side of an astronomical Event Horizon, forms a listening field where the body and sound can meet, and this time-space can be inhabited from various angles and from both inside and outside.

There is a lot more to hear here in the quietening. The similarities of the sounding of the natural elements like that of the sea and the wind form the perceptual horizon, a line where the two meet or emerge from, the sonic horizon takes shape that can be heard and inhabited. (Object horizon) Sonically, the horizon here engages a listening of some geometric shapes, like circles, lines, hyperbolas, angles and rotation along with some sonic/ audio processes. These are interpreted on a plane which itself is subject to change of angels There is an outside and an inside of this horizon which is drawn by the circle in the middle of the room Various locations, both inside and outside the circle evoke unique listening experiences. Phantom listening perceptions will sometimes complete one spatial hearing perspectives, where the shapes are left out incomplete intentionally. There is outer limit of the horizon that can be heard form the corners of the room, where from far away the perception of the sounds in the center of the circle will become linear. Moving around therefore will give heterogenous perceptions of the installation and the sounds.

Ish S   will give a presentation on Sound Reasons along with a directed listening session of  his 6 Channel Sound Installation called Sitting Still II . He will also talk about his works and future curative directions at Sound Reasons as a creative space, record Label and especially the Sound Reasons Festival

Presentation On
Wed 03 October 2018 | 6 – 9pm
CRiSAP
London College of Communication 
Elephant and Castle,
London SE1 6SB, UK

Some Images of the Audience engaging with the installation | Listening session |

Ish S has created a 12 channel Sound installation based on Ambisonic in Collaboration with Raqs Media Collective for their works based on South Asian Soldiers fighting for the British Empire during the WW1

Exibhit Open from :
Fri 28 Sept 2018 – Sun 20 Jan 2019
Opening celebration Thu, 27 Sept | 6 – 9pm

Not Yet At Ease explores the history of psychological disorders resulting from conflict and the stigmas attached to them. Using poetry and performance, this immersive artwork is inspired by letters written by soldiers during wartime. The internationally renowned, Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective have based this new work on their theory that the symptoms of ‘shell shock’ were first observed by military censors, who noticed a tendency among some Indian soldiers to break out spontaneously into ‘poetry’ in the letters they wrote from battlefields, barracks and hospitals. Not Yet At Ease gives voice to these words. This major commission reworks letters, photographs and documents dating back to the First World War. Innovative video and sound installations tell the story of the condition known at the time as ‘shell shock’ and considers how attitudes have changed towards those who carry the psychological burdens of war. In doing so, Not Yet At Ease invites visitors to explore interlinked histories of war, poetry and mental health. More info