Swan Song R&D 9 – Editing and post-production

This blogpost will focus on the editing process of Swan Song (I still couldn’t think of the title) and reflect on the further research and thinking documented on the previous blogpost. At the end of this blogpost I hope to be able to outline a clear statement for the project, such as aims and manifesto-like text.

After the further researches and reading, there are lots of great reflection on how I have done and how I wan to contextualise my work among other artists and theories. However, it is always easier for me to identify things that I don’t like and directions that I want to consciously avoid than to realise the path I should take. So for the second part of the project as I am calling it, I would like to focus it on finishing the project and expanding it into a functioning artistic expression that communicates with its audience. With this I mean first of all, edit the materials into a second version, then think of ways I would like to share the work and lastly other materials that I might produce along the sound work.

On the editing, I have now identified that I enjoy the textures of the recordings I have done, but not satisfied by the way I used my voice and language and the structure of the recordings. So the first thing I do is that I deleted all the voice recordings that I find too ‘easy’ and ‘surface level’, or that I have taken them as materials to heavily modulate to create sound objects with. This way I am extending my voice as a less immediate expression by further working on them to insert a layer of abstraction before the voice is being heard by the audience. This process constitutes two ideas, one being my changing of direction in thinking of the piece as a theatre sound piece to a more solely sound art direction.

By this I mean I want to focus on creating work that deconstruct previous established structures, no longer musical or theatrical (in terms of composition, structures and style), but only on creating a sonic fictional space where ideas are shared through the work itself and not rely on common understanding on how sound works are presented. I don’t really know what I mean, or how to put it in a nicer way, but in short I wanna really mess it up, to find a new way of imparting expressions through sound-making and other art expression; to form new structures that tells my perspective of the story.

In this case the story is about me connecting with a past, with history through imagination and sound. How do I imagine through sound? How do I fabricate a world, an ideal and a narrative through sound? How do I find my voice as an artist to not just represent who I am but reflect the world that I am seeing and the one want to show other people? This is as I say almost a reverse process of Acoustemology, and is certainly a big question that I intent to answer throughout this year, my final year at LCC.

For this project alone, I think I want an imaginary future of Hong Kong, based on who we were and how we were as a city. That is why I tried so hard to research and search for a simple answer for our identity and our essence, almost our nationalism. That did not came easy but I also accept that it is already buried deep inside me in a way, and through an almost subliminal process of sonifying in the residency I hoped to bring answers to my question of ‘what is nationalism for Hong Kong’? In this process I tried to use my voice and Cantonese to subsidise the lack of solidity in my sound work, which proven too easy not not entirely accurate to the texture I am trying to achieve. Which other more abstract sound did. I cannot explain to you at all in words, but they do, in the most atomic sense.

So after all the reading and thinking and researching, I decide to take out the things I don’t entirely enjoy and mess with them. Pitching, stretching, cutting and all sort of effects, cutting them into tiny pieces and collaging them into a different image, a more elaborate but abstract one. Somehow in this process I find more clarity, even though the recordings are obscured, less able to identify the sound source. Starting with my voice (the most apparent) to other things like drums, violin and piano (musical, non-verbal and secondary), and lastly ambiences and room tones (non-semiotic). I kept actually most things, but I rearranged lots of sections to have a different flow, layered different things together to widen perspectives or juxtapose ideas to form a more dynamic space. It would be impossible for me to evidence these changes now and give solid examples on what I did as they are all done now and they are all too tiny and complex, but beneath is two version of the same section in the piece:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1H7GnAOakzHPK9Z81eWPW2pGC0OFpxsaE?usp=sharing This link includes two file, one from the original residency and the second from the edited version. You can hear the chopping up of audio and rearrangement and the repetition and teasing and reoccurring bits in the second version. This is because of the consideration on a non-linear structure and a test on composing sound with a more deconstructive approach.

I have now created a full version of the edited Swan Song, with things being switched around and less recognisable. This is feeling like a completely new piece of work and I will need time to think and reflect if this is a progression on achieving my goal in imagining future.

On the other aim, which is to explore sound art as an art medium, I am thinking the possibility in performing, exhibiting, and publishing the piece.

On live performance, I am thinking of bringing the piece to perform in iklectik and cafe oto. It would be an exploration on how to perform a piece of work that is pre-recorded and add on to it. What do I play from the computer? What do I perform live? Do I do choreography? Do I sing? Do I talk? How would I stage it, will develop the script for it? If I were to perform it, it would become an entirely different experience hence a different piece altogether, so there is a lot to work on until it is ready and a lot to write and research and rehearse. One quick thought is I could do movements and leave the sound entirely to be played back and that I make little to no sound. But that sounds like cheating to me as a musician, I am not super keen with just playing things from computer. This is will be further discussed in a future blogpost.

On exhibiting, I think I could develop this next term and create a whole exhibition with this. A bigger version of Elephant Song. Honestly if I can, I would like to have multiple rooms of a gallery to really dig deep into the project and create multiple pieces of work to form the whole narrative, a solo show. I feel like with the story now, I can definitely do some films and create installation works with objects and the sound piece diffused into rooms. For this piece, I can really see an exhibition with several rooms combined into a whole experience, of sound installations, multi-media screen projections and found objects interweaved into a space where my imagination gain physicality, to imprint embodied feelings on visitors. This is something I find most interesting within sound art, exhibiting. Yet I did so little of expanding my work this way in my time here on the course which is a shame. I always feel sound art exhibitions are the way sound artist should investigate more in order to reach people and expand into the art world. The consideration of how you want your work to be seen, to create that environment where your work could live in, to communicate your thoughts in a controlled setting. It is like designing the layout of a book you wrote, to make sure the font and the design is constituting a unified experience. I don’t only believe in performing live in experimental music venue and publishing articles and books. I want to do sound ‘art’ ultimately and exhibitions are the place my work on the course belongs, not online or in a small club. But having the resources to do a full on exhibition is difficult and out of reach, so I will leave it now.

On publishing the piece, I am thinking of maybe releasing it on tape on top of digital releases. This is the rawest thought and furthest I feel. One being why do I need to print physical copies of the piece, is it good enough? Who is going to want a copy? Who am I catering for? I feel there are questions I need to answer before doing this, but I would admit that having my work printed on physical copies is a dream and a step into the professional world I feel, but artistically problematic. So I will leave the thought for now and return when the project is done.

Ok here I go, I’ve been circulating this for too long: “A key question out of your reflections and two aims that the project hopes to achieve.” And “whose story, what story, different for whom etc?”

The question that came out most apparently is: What is the future I want myself to be in? And this question means awareness of past and present. This is why I’ve picked this theme I think.

Two aims: one, experiment with sound composition, find a way to structure the story differently; two, through the work return to who I think I am. And this relates to the second inquiry, whose story, what story and different from whom, and who am I? This is my story, a story of Hong Kong people, not necessarily me, and different from the last generation of people has told it, and of course different from how British people tell or think of it.

I want to imagine Hong Kong in the lens of my generation, have my own opinion on how history affected us now, and imagine my own future through it. It is not a denial of the past, but a realisation that I am a product of the past, and yet I have the power to change the future from my own decisions. This sounds like a teenager thing now.