As part of Brighter Sound‘s Young Composers Commission, I was recently given the opportunity to attend the amazing CTM Festival in Berlin. It’s an annual festival for adventurous music and art, which couples first-hand experience with critical reflection, exchange and learning. Fellow composer Carmel Smickersgill and I spotted its future-leaning line-up late last year. We also spotted that the theme of this year’s festival – ‘Turmoil’ – bore a striking resemblance to our own theme of ‘Disruption’. We thus agreed that CTM would make a great research trip! Over the course of the weekend, we saw some brilliant performances. In this post I’ll detail those that I found particularly inspiring.
MusicMakers Hacklab
Bookending our trip to Berlin was the MusicMakers Hacklab. Led by Peter Kirn of ‘Create Digital Music’, this is an annual project wherein artists and researchers from a range of disciplines come together to invent new collaborative performances. The participants have one week to devise performances that respond to a theme. Going deeper into the festival’s theme of ‘Turmoil’, the participants were asked to focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning, and to reflect on the simultaneous promise and danger of these things.
On our first day in Berlin we were invited behind the scenes at HAU2 – home of this years’ hacklab – to a session wherein the participants were presenting their works-in-progress. With poets collaborating with technologists, musicians with psychologists, it was a fascinating collision of cross-disciplinary ideas. We also listened to the group talk through the pragmatics of their projects. It was particularly interesting to see the interactive elements of the performances being tested out – some of which worked and some of which, in these early stages of the project, didn’t!
On our final day in Berlin we returned to HAU2 to watch the performances. One of my favourites was a musical performance that utilised recycled motors from CD players. By controlling the speed of the motors the performer was able to control their pitch, creating a chorus of components. Another performance I enjoyed featured a dancer wearing sensors. Through movement she generated data that was then converted into sound. Another centred on a live percussionist whose gestures and sounds were being live-sampled and the data regenerated, turning the performance into a duet for human and AI.
In terms of sparking further ideas for the commission, there was one performance of particular note. It was one for which we’d seen the interactive elements tested out a couple of days earlier. At the start of the performance, the audience were invited to take out their mobile phones and access a specific website. Here we found a piece of audio. One by one, via our phones we became part of the performance. I really enjoyed the sense of investment that this gave me as an audience member, and decided that I would like to include elements of interactivity in my own performance. It would be interesting, I think, to give the audience control over live music that was happening on stage, and subvert the usual power balance of a concert.
MONOM 4D Sound
I’d been excited about the next event for some time. It was Max Cooper who first introduced me to 4D Sound. I’m a big fan of his work and had read a lot about his experimentation with spatiality and particularly his 4D Sound shows. For a long time I’d been eager to experience these sound environments for myself. MONOM, Berlin’s new centre for 4D Sound, was definitely somewhere I needed to visit on this trip!
For the uninitiated, 4D Sound is a fully omnidirectional sound environment in which the audience experiences sound in an unlimited spatial continuum. In other words, this is a space in which sound can be positioned almost anywhere in the room. MONOM had commissioned three artists to perform on the night that we attended. We arrived just as the first – Pan Daijing – started. The room was cast in pitch blackness, so that all we could focus on was the crystal-like synths, which were spatialised in ways that emphasised communication between voices. It brought to mind being in a jungle at night and hearing animals calling out to each other in the darkness. Sometimes I could hear diagonal pairs of speakers bouncing messages back and forth, and at other times they spiralled around us like Chinese whispers.
The next performance was by FIS. This was a viscerally powerful piece, reminiscent of the work of Ben Frost. Standing in the centre of the room, we were engulfed in a torrent of noise which emanated from every angle. It felt like being in the eye of the storm. To me, this seemed less like a piece and more like an invitation into a headspace or scenario – one characterised by turmoil. Closing my eyes, an army of helicopters clapped overhead, and lightning shattered intermittently and unpredictably around me. It was an intense experience!
In the final piece by IOANN, the performer’s live voice bounced playfully from speaker to speaker and space to space. In this manner, she invited us to move around the room – something I was hoping we’d get the chance to do. One by one the audience started to navigate the blackness, and we became counterparts to her travelling voice. Later, IOANN’s voice was interwoven with rich orchestral and choral sounds, and finally, synthesised ones. It felt like the most well-rounded piece, and took us on an impressive journey.
With no separation between music and audience, I found 4D Sound to be a truly immersive experience. At times this experience was overwhelming and at other times it was very cathartic. Though the logistics behind creating this sound environment might preclude its implementation in many places, I would love for this to be an experience more readily accessible to people, as it felt like a radically new way of experiencing sound.
Holly Herndon
Carmel introduced me to Holly Herndon a couple of months prior to the festival. I was immediately drawn in by the American musician/composer’s wild and esoteric music. Utilising MAX/MSP to create custom instruments and vocal processes, she makes vocal-led electronic music that circumvents categorisation. Holly happened to be playing just around the corner from our Air BnB, at Festaal Kreuzberg. She’s known for changing up her sets quite dramatically, and as we approached the venue we anticipated with intrigue what would follow.
The show featured Holly and a vocal ensemble, with Mat Dryhurst at the controls. With their voices sent through complex synthesis and processing, the ensemble gave a carnal, theatrical performance. Unlike other performances we’d seen, which had painted quite a naked picture of ‘Turmoil’, this performance conjured a sense of togetherness with which to battle turmoil. Holly’s future-pop tunes were emotively blasted by the tight-knit ensemble in a raw celebration of community.
For me, the most sonically interesting moments came when Holly took the limelight. The live vocal processing on her voice totally blew me away. I particularly enjoyed when she sang softly into the mic, and yet out of the speakers came this gut-trembling roar. Something I’m looking at in my own piece is the juxtaposition between the unprocessed and the processed. I’m interested in dislocating sounds from their sources, and how the visual aspect of performance comes into play here. The boldness of this in Holly’s performance was very inspiring.
SKALER
CTM was proving to be about new experiences. Skalar, a huge art installation/performance at Tresor night club, did not buck this trend. From the photos that I had seen of the piece, I anticipated a laser show. More than this, however, Skaler proved to be a nuanced piece that used a combination of light and sound to explore fundamental emotions. During the course of the hour-long performance, artist Christopher Bauder and composer Kangding Ray created an audio-visual journey wherein light was sculpted and shaped in ways that conjured strong emotional associations.
Utilising 90 perfectly synchronised moving lights and 65 kinetic mirrors, they produced ever-changing tonalities in light, sound and motion. It was hypnotic to watch, intensified by the vastness of the space. Bauder’s command of colour gave the piece a powerful sense of journey, reinforced by the multi-dimensional sound by Kangding Ray, whose lifts and falls interweaved perfectly with those of Bauder’s lights. Like MONOM, this was another immersive experience, and like Holly Herndon’s, it conjured feelings of hope, suggesting that out of turmoil, something beautiful can emerge.
I’ve been thinking more about the interaction of beauty and turmoil since I’ve been back in the UK. I like the idea of writing something that is compositionally beautiful, but sonically tumultuous. I’m currently exploring ways that the audience might be able to control the tumultuous side of the piece, whilst I control the more measured side. I think it would be interesting to run a grand piano through chaotic effects and give the control of those effects to the audience. Depending how you look at it, the audience would then become either co-creators of the performance or a disruptive influence in my performance.
Last Thoughts on CTM
I feel privileged to have been able to go on this research trip. From the audience interactivity in the MusicMakers Hacklab to the dislocation between sound and source in Holly Herndon’s performance, CTM Festival was a hugely inspiring experience for me. I’m really looking forward to channeling that inspiration into my own work, and seeing where it leads.
