Hadaka: K series - Day 1

I bought a 3-day pass to experience this sonic art programme held at Esplanade. It features up to 9 Asian sound artists exploring and collaborating in an interlayed experimential production of sounds.
Well, I took an interest partly because 1 of my acquaintances, George Chua, was performing and I thought, why not hear out what his being a sound artist is like. Another reason was this year, I'm exploring new sounds and genres of music...although I don't really consider this music, rather a sonic form of expression.

So, what's my impression of Day 1? Hmm...I admit I'm really new to this and honestly, I'm quite clueless as to what to make of tonight's session. But I'm curious. It's really my 1st exposure to such a performance of sound mixing involving so many artists (9 tonight) and each having their own performing methods and styles. Wonder if anyone can do some explanation about this kind of performance to me?

1 thing that really made me wonder was how the light-sound display came into play in the whole picture. Maybe there were too many different sounds so I couldn't really make out how/when it came in. Let me try to describe the light-sound display by 1 of the artists. He's Atsuhiro Ito who uses fluorescent lighting in the creation of an original musical device called the optron. How it plays? You've got to watch him use it to understand fully...he uses a fluorescent light tube hooked up to some sound board and he uses some foot pedals too. He uses his hands to control the lighting and movement of the tube to produce sound and flashes of light. Hard to describe & I really don't know how it works, but then you can see the partial light-ups, which reminds me of a science demo during a visit in my school days where the instructor showed how one could control the lighting up of a flourescent tube even just part of the tube (something to do with ions?), even when it's not connected to electricity.

The sounds altogether were really loud (ear plugs were provided just in case). I tried to close my eyes to get a more focused sound reception, but it was simply too intense when all 9 artists were working it at the same time. It was a whole hour of this display.

I realised too that I'm so familiar with picking out sounds (of instruments) in a classical setting that I'm not used to trying to pick out sounds like 'who's playing now' in tonight's performance.

Well, let's see what tomorrow holds.