Over the past ten years sound artist and composer Ethan Rose has released recordings, scored films, performed internationally, created sound installations and worked with a variety of collaborators. Through methods of reduction and repositioning his work utilizes methods of interactive composition to explore qualities of materiality, transformation, and perception. His work was included in the film Paranoid Park (2007), directed by Gus Van Sant, and has been reviewed by national publications including The New York Times, Pitchfork and XLR8R. He has exhibited and performed at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Time-Based Art Festival, the Museum of Contemporary Craft, and the SXSW Music Festival as well as many other venues and gallery spaces throughout the world. Between Rooms and Voices
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Dec 4 - Portland, OR at City Hall Funded in part by the RACC A Spatial/Vocal performance featuring 30-40 vocalists with Ipods. In an effort to reveal moments of sonic transformation, this performance pursues a heightened sense of physical immediacy by positioning voices within the acoustic possibilities of architectural space. Drawing from my past studio work with electroacoustic composition, I am interested in rendering the sonic opportunities that are made available through digital recording into a physically realized articulation. By specifically referencing the tools of transformation made possible by studio technology, this performance will allow the audience to aurally and visually engage the work while calling attention to and exposing these processes in a direct and tangible manner. Many of the studio effects used in the history of sound recording have worked to create the illusion of space in the ear of the listener. Reverberations, echos, volume fades, filters, pans and other studio techniques are all virtualizations of real and imagined architectures, landscapes, and locations. By composing a piece that purposefully places performers in and around a unique interior space I am interested in returning these processes to their inherent physicality by recreating and highlighting these spatial effects through interactions with an existing architectural structure. Alongside these spatial concerns I am also interested in utilizing the imitative capacity of the voice to recreate other technological expressions that have become possible with the advent of recorded sound. In this case it is time rather than space that is manipulated - reversed sounds, edits, loops, and phasing will all be referenced by using the non-linguistic possibilities of vocalization. In order to create the content for this work I will invite each individual performer into my studio and ask them to make a series of sounds. This interaction will give me a sense of the limits and abilities of each performer, allowing me to create a composition that recognizes the idiosyncrasies of their individual voices. For the performance, each choir member will be equipped with an MP3 player that will instruct them in the timing of their movements and vocalizations. The MP3 players of all the performers will be synched, but each player will carry messages that are specific to each performer. "Placing": Multichannel Sound / Image Installation Over the past semester I have been working at Washington State University as an artist in residence. During my time there I have been investigating the intersection of voice, spatial acoustics, and technology with the students in the Creative Media and Digital Culture program. Based on this period of research and exploration the students are working with me to create and mount a sound/photo installation. This installation will be mounted in a large reverberant space that offers some interesting acoustic possibilities. This location is important because a large part of the composition of the piece is a response to the inherent qualities of this space. I am intent on engaging the gallery's acoustics in order to reveal the spatial possibilities of sonic transformation. To build the raw material for this installation each student will receive instructions from an Ipod, and record the sounds of their voice in response to what they hear. While they are enacting these vocalizations photographs will be taken that document this activity. These sounds and photos will be joined together in a series of flat panel speakers that broadcast the associated vocal recordings into the gallery space. While the locations of each photo/sound will remain acoustically and visually separated within the gallery space, the voices will be unified by a non-signifying vocabulary of reduced syllables, hums, whistles, and clicks. Allowing the gallery visitor to both see and hear how these combined vocalizations activate the space will create a transparency that draws attention to the employed methods of spatial/vocal transformation. This revealed and layered transformation will create an environment that invites the visitor to chart their own course through the installation while amplifying a sense of physical immediacy. |
