It’s Friday afternoon, the second day of the Museum of Old and New Art’s Mona Foma festival, and Brendan Walls is more than a little disgruntled that his sound art piece Elements of Refusal has, ironically, been shut down because of noise complaints.
Situated in Kelly’s Garden, a courtyard hidden within the laneways of Hobart’s Salamanca arts centre, Walls has been working on his installation for several years and he’s not happy that the office workers whose windows look out on to the courtyard can’t handle it for two days of their working lives.
When I return on Saturday, Elements of Refusal has transformed into a living, breathing system of electronic and natural elements emitting all sorts of sounds through the space – there’s metal grinding on metal, tapping and clicking, and something akin to a high-pitched whistling wind.
A series of perspex boxes that look like fish tanks line one side of the courtyard, filled with brown soil and dirty water and strung together with cables, which link up to other containers housing mechanics, motors and electronics. There’s an explainer on the wall that sensors measuring motion, moisture and temperature are creating the signals that drive the elements that create the noise.
Early in the morning when I arrive, only one light sensor is in the sunlight, meaning just one of the motors (which creates the metal-on-metal grinding noise) is running. However, it’s windy too, which is triggering a a noise Walls hasn’t heard before.
Relying so heavily on natural elements makes chance an essential part of Walls’ process. It’s part of his aim to create something he can’t fully control, relying more on the idea of cause and effect between how the physical elements interact, which also means the work will inevitably destroy itself.
Many festivals claim to be music and art festivals, but the two forms do not often come together with ease. At Tasmania’s Mona Foma (Mofo) however, stage and gallery are almost interchangeable: performance artworks take place on and around the main music stages, and sound fills the gallery spaces.
Curated by Brian Ritchie, the festival’s program emphasises these crossovers. Li Binyuan’s performance art piece Deathless Love, which saw him physically smash up 250 hammers for an hour and a half, had the audience intrigued. One viewer commented “it’s not about him at all, it’s actually all about us” before crossing the 50 metre space between stages to dance her thoughts away to Paul Kelly’s Merri Soul Sessions.
A similar juxtaposition took place on the opening night of the festival, with Speak Percussion performing their electro-acoustic work both before and after the set of Iceland-based, Australian-born musician Ben Frost. Speak Percussion’s first set, Transducer, involved a series of suspended microphones, each hanging above a speaker.
Four performers took to the stage all in black, manipulating the sound by swinging the mics – sometimes in time, sometimes in jumbled chaos – creating a cacophony of noise that varied from balanced beats to static and noise. By manipulating its kinetic, electronic and acoustic potential, the microphone became a musical instrument in its own right.
At the beginning of Speak Percussion’s next set, artistic director Eugene Ughetti explained the second performance, a recreation of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 1964 composition Mikrophonie I, was what inspired Transducer. This time the performers read from sheet music and worked with a collection of household items – tupperware, tuna cans, water bottles, wine glasses and a mason jar – to produce sound from the vibrations these objects created against a giant tam-tam.
This exploration continued into gallery spaces. In Salamanca arts centre’s Long Gallery, German sound artist Johannes S Sistermanns used clingwrap to transform the space into one huge speaker for his installation Intuition Room 2015. The labyrinth of plastic wrapped around pillars of the building, emitting abstract, prerecorded sound through the transition of sound on plastic (listen to it here). The real attraction of the work is its material and visual quality, which evokes the invisible nature of sound as well how it materialises through amplification.
Constance ARI, a small artist-run space that focuses on showcasing emerging artists, presented three exhibitions for Mofo that all work with sound and old media. On Friday afternoon, the gallery was remarkably busy, with one viewer exclaiming: “This is the best thing we’ve seen yet.”
Dunedin-based artist Sally Ann McIntyre’s work explores noise in the forests of Tasmania and New Zealand, and how nature sounds have been collected throughout history. McIntyre’s first work creates a conversation by broadcasting collected field recordings of New Zealand’s tallest tree into a partially hollow, 400-year-old Tasmanian eucalyptus regnans. The original audio, as well as a recording of McIntyre’s radio transmission, has been brought into the gallery as a mini FM radio program, which she broadcasts again at short range to a collection of old handheld radios.
Her second work looks at the huia, an extinct New Zealand bird, and the 19th-century musical notations that are the only existing traces of its song. Noting the shortcomings of reproducing birdsong, the work becomes an exploration of sound recording media.
A phonograph, invented in 1877, sits like a relic in the gallery – although it was as common back then as an iPod is now. There’s also a recording of the musical notation on a phonographic wax cylinder, but it’s so fragile it will be destroyed by its own playback, so McIntyre has provided a digital version of the recording.
Sidestepping the interactive and performative elements of the other sound pieces at Mofo, McIntyre draws on the mortality of old media to explore how sound gets lost, abstracted and reinvented by new technology.
From clingwrap to conversational trees, a recurring theme throughout the sound art works at Mofo was the repurposing of media and everyday objects to turn sound into a spatial experience. On Friday and Saturday nights, Melbourne sound artist Atticus J Bastow’s work Swarm/Murmuration crystallised this idea. To experience this work, the audience was asked to open the Mofo app on their mobile phone to access a screen with six buttons on it – each triggering a different pitched sound, their own personal gateway into the work.
Standing in the centre of the audience wearing a black cloak lined in gold, Bastow slowly moved his own device as though conducting the audience. As people caught on, the audience realised they were doing more than simply listening to music or looking at art. Collectively, they were creating the work themselves as the swarm grew in sound and momentum into an orchestra of beautiful electronic noise.
More from Mofo
• Brian Ritchie on Violent Femmes and curating Mofo
• Jim Moginie on Mofo and life after Midnight Oil
• Michael Gira: Swans, religion and the hubris of Matthew Barney
• Ben Frost on Aurora and his Australian homecoming
• Mofo 2015: the hits and the misses