The Cellarful of Noise
NICK JEFFREY AND BYRON JACKSON
By tracing ‘noise’ to its etymological roots within ‘nausea’ one creates an extremely personal definition of the subject. Sickness is a state that is usually endured in private, or if communally, while segregated from the rest of society. Furthermore the concept of ‘taste’ is intrinsically linked to ‘nausea’. By leaving your ears at the door I ask not that you ignore the sonic dimensions of the Cellar, but approach them with unsullied ears, free from standard notions of preference, removed from any preconceived ideas of taste. In doing this one is enabled to appreciate sound for its own sake, devoid of structure or melody.
The Cellar has been set up to explore cultural perceptions of sound. Noise and music are very much a part of the everyday. On a simple level we choose to use music to block out noise, often paradoxically created through other people’s choice in music. This desperate attempt to control our personal environment is endemic of the sonic saturation in which we are immersed. Music is given away with newspapers, sold in coffee shops and used to sell cars. In this climate it is almost impossible to find the space to listen rather than merely treating music as background noise.
It has been beneficial within the context of this exhibition to define ‘Sound’ as both noise and music, as it is with the tension between these two dimensions in mind that we open the Cellar door. This conflict also raises questions concerning exactly when music becomes noise or vice versa.
Beyond the inundation of unsolicited music, noise is also approached from an aesthetic point of view by artists who challenge accepted ideas of instrumentation and composition. One such artist is La Monte Young whose work Poem, a piece written to be performed with tables, chairs, benches, and other items of furniture, was criticised by Roger Smalley in The Musical Timesin 1967:
“Does one want to go to an art gallery to see what can be seen by merely looking at one’s own breakfast table – or to a concert to hear what is generally heard only before and after concerts (the moving of the hall furniture)?”
Composers are equally vindicated in choosing the instrumentation that best suits their artistic intentions as artists are in re-appropriating whatever objects they desire. Therefore, if one eats an exquisite breakfast worthy of inclusion in an art gallery for aesthetic reasons, why should it not be exhibited? The moving of furniture as a musical device lay dormant for almost three decades following Young’s Poem, until 1966 when The Velvet Underground included the sound of a chair scraping along the floor accompanied by breaking glass in the cacophonous mid-section of European Son. This helped place the ideas of avant-garde music before a mainstream rock audience. This dissemination of ideas manifested itself in Britain’s Art Schools, which began to spawn numerous cutting edge rock and pop groups from the late 1960s onwards.
Brian Eno’s 1970’s musical explorations utilized multiple tape loops of varied lengths to create the illusion that the music being played is eternally different, at least until the tapes fall back into synch. This is a similar system to that which I have employed in the production of sound for the Cellar. However, rather than striving to achieve the illusion of autonomous sound production our aim was to create an endless cycle of sound within the limitations of CD audio. Eno has stated that he was inspired to experiment in this area by Steve Reich’s primitive sampling techniques used on It’s Gonna Rainwhere two almost identical loops are played simultaneously, drifting in and out of synch. This technique allowed a sample of a few seconds length to achieve a vast amount of harmonic variation during its 17minute duration.
The tri-phonic sculptures which make up this installation have been constructed with the aim of mystifying the origin of the Cellar Noise while their dispersal throughout the Cellar aims to highlight the transience of sound.
