Swan Song R&D 2 – Sonic Forming

First an unimportant detail, the piece is not going to be called Swan Song. First of all, I didn’t want it to sound like a continuum from Elephant Song, where I explored completely different themes and sonic elements. Secondly, it has grown into something bigger than the swan in the story; while it is still the main character/pov from the narrative, it is important to rename it appropriately to reflect on the development of the project. But for now Swan Song would be the working title. The final title will be given when the project is finished and fully realised.

In terms of logistics, I have confirmed with Resonance that my residency will happen in the first two week of November, hopefully renders me enough time to finish recording the piece during and enough time after to edit and finish it before the hand in.

So we now have 2 weeks before the residency, and it is the time to really dive in to the core of the piece. For researching, I have been looking at sound recordings of performances where the quality is compromised and not the most important element, mostly of the sounds in archive footage of experimental theatre. In theatre we usually just set up one camera on top of the audience around the mixing desk to just record the whole stage without any filters or camera angles or considerations.

In this case, we are looking at a piece created by the theatre company Zuni from 1986. It is one of their most well-known pieces from their catalogue, namely because of the famous theme song of the same name.

Zuni is well known for their peculiar style and almost mundane scripts and movements. They are very obsessed with deconstructing theatre to its very core, most of the time without catching the audience up to speed and resulting them falling to sleep. Watching this archive video, I took away the visuals and actually found it extremely interesting, in terms of movements, theatre compositions, and the sound quality. I have always been mildly fascinated with bad recording qualities, because if the compromise and the brilliance of the sound engineer behind trying to save as much as they can.

In my own live performances, I have always tried to record and document my own work, but most of the time because I am focused on performing, I will leave the responsibilities for someone else, and just trust it will turn out ok. Which it never really is good enough and can only be a reference point for myself. In this particular one it is especially unusable yet I really wanted to post it online.

The video quality is down to 360p when I was editing it, and the person who were supposed to film the whole thing only did for 15 seconds. So I added in some extra footage of jellyfishes to make up. The sound is also ridiculously bad, recording the mixing desk into a zoom H5 which keeps clipping. But on the other hand, this video is one of my favourite of myself. So what constitute a good video is completely different from its quality, but the content. And it is the challenge of making it work pushes me to edit the video with so much details that the quality becomes part of the work.

I have been working as the sound engineer in Resonance Extra when there are live broadcasts.

Yesterday, unfortunately, my boss who were supposed to do the broadcast got covid. So a random person came in to take the signals of the live performance from me to the streaming. And somehow their computer completely messed up the quality of the sound.

Now the question is, what does that mean really? What does it mean to have the sound quality downscaled so much that it changed the piece itself, especially when I have done work to make it sound good from my desk? One hand I understand the ‘flavour’ (if you’ll allow it) to certain mixing desks or microphones when they are a bit old, but what does it mean in the mostly digital world we live in, to have something so clipped and distorted released into the world where a clean recording and 1080p video is pretty much bare minimum? Does it add to the piece or does it take away its original intentions?

I played a gig around a month ago where my sound is completely distorted by the DIY sound system of the organisers. Some people came up to me and say it adds to the set and they really love it. But (pardon my french) that’s gonna be bullshit right? How could it be adding to it when it is taking so much away from what I am trying to achieve?

Intentions and compromises, and the reiteration of the motif.

Having to work on a mixing desk, completely analog in a radio station makes me very interested in everything I mentioned. It is yet still vague in my head on how do I locate my work within this context, but it is clear that these will all be too relevant to this piece as I am using the same space to record it.

I hope this blogpost laid down some references and my questioning of them and documented some further thinking. The next post will be continued by hopefully some practical research or I don’t know whatever I feel up to in week 4.