Hadaka: K series - Day 3

Day 3 - compared with the past 2 days, tonight's performance was a milder-toned session.
In a way, it sounded to me like ripples & waves (the flow of it), like the sea...maybe it's because of the recent tremors, but somehow, the peak of the sounds made me think of tsunamis/tidal waves while in between it was the quiet nature of the sea. Some parts also sounded to me to be darkness personified.

So what has come out of this 3-day experience? Well, all 3 days were so different in the way the sounds were played and personally, I think I liked yesterday's performance best.
Let me attempt to link the 3 days for me: the 1st day was like "chaos", while yesterday's was more interplay and something like exploration of new life? Tonight's was more like a rounding up of life's ups & downs and maturity. Probably have more thoughts with more reflection. Hmm...well, I guess it was a whole new experience...One must try new things.

Hadaka: K series - Day 2

Today's performance was quite different from yesterday's. I'll just give my own impression of it. Others might have differing views about it. The performance had 3 parts.

Part 1
You hear a myriad of sounds where I recognised some to be mundane/everyday sounds we hear like water running. Anyway, 5 artists for this part. Also, amidst these, I felt some suspense or maybe some sense of possible culmination at some point, but not in a strong way. In a way, I could close my eyes & "feel" the sounds.
I realised that this sound art thing is really about how one interprets or feels the sound. Maybe there's no explanation, just blending and improvising as it's not really a definite form at that point of time; like how it's written in the programme, "uncurated". Hmm...maybe I'm getting it?

Part 2
In part 2, a different set of 4 artists took the stage in a rather different aspect. Each produced 4 distinct sounds - one "sang" some ghostly murmurs...not really chanting, but it gave you that Asian traditional feel. Then, another artist (Chee Wai) used the crisp, clear sound of the piano, which gave you a western, classical perspective. Then we have Atsuhiro with his optron which gave "electric" sounds. One other produced sounds that were sort of pan-background (some parts involved the static sound), but seemed like a buffer among the rest...I don't know how to describe the effect it gave in relation to the other 3 sounds.

Part 3
Finally, in part 3, all came together, i.e. part 1 & 2 combined, which is the culmination of all the sounds.

It's really interesting how they coordinated the timing to be exactly 1 hour for both nights. Tomorrow's the last night. See how it goes.

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.