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‘Untamed Choir’    2013

a multi channel audio-installation
duration: 15 minutes

Commissioned by ‘Resonance’ European Sound Art Network

‘Untamed Choir’ alternates the cultivated enchanting beauty of multi-layered chant with unpolished screaming and crying based on human instincts of survival and fear. The work deals with the idea that every human individual caries two different sharply separated identities. A highly cultivated being next to its origin, the animal with it’s still existing strong and unavoidable instincts.  It seems that the first one is the result of denial of the second. Garden opposed to wild nature, clothes opposed to nakedness and stylized vocals opposed to the roaring scream.
This audio installation consists of 40 small speakers hanging from the ceiling, playing 30 separate audio channels. Twenty of these speakers are positioned into a circle, cones pointing inwards. The rest of them are divided over the exhibition room. The human voice is used as the 'sound basis'. We hear continual, gradual changes ranging between 'scream' and 'song' in various tonal pitches, using samples of existing vocal recordings as well as well as purpose-made voice recordings.
Three different vocal parts in three different octaves are alternated and connected to each other by a screaming voice. This screaming voice is performed by the circle of 20 speakers. It moves around into this circle which is located in the middle of the exhibition room.
During the vocal parts the 'soundscape' gradually changes as one moves through the room. With every move the listener makes, a slight and subtle change in the audio spectrum will present itself.
On one of the walls a running time-code is projected. During the multi-channel chant , the background is black and the figures are white. During shouting this image will transform into a negative picture, resulting in black figures on a white background. This white background lightens up the exhibition room.

·                      Watch the video  recorded at 'The National Botanic Garden Of Latvia'

·                      Watch the video recorded at ‘Bunkier Sztuki’, Krakow  Poland

·                      Watch the video recorded at ‘Østre/Lydgalleriet’, Bergen  Norway

·                      Watch the video (some excerpts of the composition)

 

Presentation
in Bergen
Norway

Presentation
in Krakow
Poland

Presentation
in Riga
Latvia