The Old Fire Station in Bendigo hosted the second Central Victorian concert of Liquid Architecture 10. Of particular interest were two film works. Firstly, a screening of Germaine Dulac’s Surrealist film La Coquille et le Clergyman, with Thomas Köner performing live his contemporary sound design for the work. Secondly, David Shea presented a tribute to Canadian filmmaker Arthur Lipsett. Lipsett’s film collage works featured found sound and visual segments that were scrambled and rearranged in order that the semiotics of each informed each other to create new meanings. Shea performed what he described as “Lipsett on Lipsett” and showed re-collaged Arthur Lipsett films, with a live soundtrack by the artist featuring rearranged soundtrack samples from the original works.
Köner’s composed sonic environments gave his chosen 1928 film a certain drive and trajectory, however remained true to the unconscious non-linearity of Surrealism. The artist’s fragmentary sound matched well with the textures and grey palette of La Coquille et le Clergyman, adding a mood that was unnerving in its disturbance of consciously perceived normality, without being particularly malevolent. His work contained thick sonic atmospheres with rumbling tones that at once felt neither organic nor industrial, coupled with occasional illustrative textures which articulated the film’s diegetic materials, albeit in a merely suggestive manner. A shimmer of sound at the sight of glass or a change in atmosphere with a new scene provided enough logic for an audience member’s mind to draw the events together, however the rupture in the individual’s predetermined assumptions of a naturalistic sound event, or the fact that Köner’s sound design presented suggestive rather that didactic foley, allowed for psychologically subjective readings that toyed with the individual’s subconscious as well as conceived perceptions of reality.
Image above: Thomas Köner
