aryan kaganof: tell me more about how you worked on this one
mandelbrut: most of the compositions focus on natural sounds, such as scraping, crunching, breaking, tearing, etc, in conjunction with resonating sounds from various makeshift instruments (junk-metal chimes, or spring boxes using found cookware and springs taken from lamps, box matresses, washing machines, etc). for some of the tracks I also use samples from SFX records and junk records. miscellaneous rock music, for example. these samples are often heavily processed to the point of blurry unintelligibility. I wanted to make something that could have been made 50 years ago with the available technology, but wasn’t .
In my work, I attempt to develop a dialogue between the human body and the material world, being spaces and their objects.
Since I find the relationship between those two entities very powerful, I would like to define it as a ‘confrontation’. To stage this confrontation I use my own body that I put in a certain setting and then I observe how it reacts to it by means of recording myself on video.
The reaction of the body can be movements or no movement, sounds or no sound. In any case, the making of sounds is intimately related to movements. One cannot go without the other.
I try to use my body as a pure instrument. To do so, I place myself into a certain place, so it means that I have decided on certain rules that will form the frame in which I can then let go of all rational control, escape my own consciousness. Freed from rational control and patterns, i enter into a space which does not follow the societal choreography any longer. The body then goes back to the primitive, to the uncensored, to the real.
‘Being’ fully present in a spacial and time related context demands most of your senses : touching or not, looking, listening, feeling on your body and in your body. I try to translate all these perceptions through the sound performance. Through sounds, I let myself get absorbed in the moment and in the space in which I am.
John Cage already established a link between the making of sounds and the visual. I follow his approach but I attempt to associate it also with the physical experience of the body towards what surrounds it.
Sometimes it seems, it is more confronting to remain silent. There is no such a thing as total silence. If I remain silent in a piece, then the surrounding sounds overwhelm the video and act as animators.
It is fascinating to see the constant dynamic between the living body and its surroundings. The space or objects can have an effect on you but through sounds it seems that you can have an effect on your surroundings, you can almost animate your material environment, like the aboriginals who sing the landscape to keep it alive. Body and space become an indissociable couple in constant dialogue.
I view my recorded performances as sculptures since it is a translation of the experience of space, of the physical world.
Chance is also an important element in my performances. Since I make those performances in a real-life setting, I am subjected to be influenced by unexpected occurrences. So each piece is really unique. It depends on the capacity of perception of the body and of the space itself which has its own life. I believe in the purity of improvisation.
I am influenced by a large range of artists who use their voices or their bodies in their work : Marina Abramovic, Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker, Pina Bausch, Meredith Monk, Maja Ratkje, Mike Patton, Tagaq, Bjork, Guido Van der Werve, John Wood and Paul Harrison, and many more.
Its quite easy to make density without meaning, especially with most modern multi-track recorders. Record something to each channel of an 8, or 16 track tape recorder, and play it back. it will be needlessly dense, and usually wont contain any ideas. I feel most “noise music” is like this, which is why I don’t listen to most noise music. If you can sync or gate what is playing from each channel, then you might start getting more interesting sounds. 8 people talking to you at once cannot teach you anything. Alternatively, turn on your television, radio, ipod, vcr, dvd player, computer, and cellphone at the same time … its just blaring sound; and particularly ugly sound, at that. All of those devices will usually have a poor frequency reproduction (small cheap speakers, often manufactured in china) with a response of roughly 200hz to 5000hz. There are no high or lows, just mud in the middle.
However, if you can parse out your information on different frequency bands, and different channels, you can communicate more information effectively.
