The first Liquid Architecture concert in Sydney promised to traverse the full frequency spectrum. Its performers did this quite literally, however there was also a fullness in the spectrum of traditions and ideas that grounded the performances by Alex White, Cat Hope, Garry Bradbury and Thomas Köner. From laptop noise to an analogue electric bass and effect pedal performance, to filmic soundscapes and samplings, the pieces managed to complement each other while still providing a degree of breadth in surveying elements of current sound practice.
Cat Hope's performance was particularly loaded, taking 19th century composer Alphonse Allais's Marche funèbre composée pour les funéraille d'un grand homme sourd (Funeral march for the burial of a tall deaf man) as her point of departure. Allais's composition was published in 1897 and consists solely of empty bar lines, a piece similar in gesture (as noted in an essay accompanying Hope's performance by Dr Jonathan W. Marshall of the University of Otago) to John Cage's 4'33”. The gesture of implied silence. Where Cage made famous the impossibility of a true physical silence, a void where no sound exists, Cat Hope deconstructs the very nature of this void. Marshall notes that rather than creating a void of pure emptiness, Hope creates a void of pure presence; in this case through an intensely thick swamp of gut-wrenching sub tones. As Cat Hope's tremendous and forceful fog of bass shook the performance space and everyone in it, the audience became unable to distinguish between something and nothing, positive and negative space; every perceived inch of physical emptiness was now noticeably full, and as such listeners were caught in a void not of nothingness, but of feeling completely inseparable from their physical surroundings; more extreme than a claustrophobia, this seemed to be a sensation of one's physicality becoming insignificant. The artist herself was (apparently) not present. A video projection of grainy, ambiguous lights in her place. Slowly however, distinguishable forms began to appear on screen: guitar effects pedals, an obscured electric bass; the slight traces of Hope performing. It was recognised that this was a live video feed and that the artist was physically present somewhere. In such, the artist became divisible from her artificial sonic 'void'. Her devices began to reveal themselves, one could start to hear Hope cluttering with her amps and gear as the haze of bass began to dissipate towards the end of the performance. Soon the illusion of void began to dissolve. Through the sounds of her flicking switches and effects pedals it became observable that Hope was beneath the seating stands, and as the last slight hum of a guitar amplifier faded out the audience could breathe relief; but now released from this sonic stronghold, thoughts on how it truly affected us are were able to surface.
Image above: Cat Hope
Images below: Cat Hope, Alex White, Garry Bradbury, Thomas Köner; Liquid Architecture, Performance Space at CarriageWorks, Friday 26 June 2009. Photography: Toby Grime.
