Megaphone Ensemble

… the murmur rises, increasing its volume to become a reverberating noise; energies that collect in a movement of sudden physicality, fragmenting, after melting again. What lies behind the door, below the surface or inside the wall? The infrastructures of the streets, canals, and buildings are swallowed and become the site for so many potential uprisings…

The urge to play, to shout ‘we are here!’ to squat and take over a space only for the length of the performance, to use the format of a demonstration to demonstrate the format of a demonstration. To demonstrate what it is to perform, to demonstrate the space where the performance takes place. To hack into a buildings’ hidden layers without any physical force. 

The space has a voice of its own in all the echoes, resonance, feedback, undertones and overtones. Sometimes it is whining, sometimes it seems to crack under the weight of the noise, everything is vibrating. The sound that expands according to the acoustical dynamics of a given space, it disorients its origin, supplanting the source with an array of projections and propagations, splintering the vector in multiple events. You start to hear the space inside and in between of the ever changing sound, the small glimpse of harmony which is suddenly broken by another stream, there is no way back. 

How does architecture influence sound? What happens when everything is moving and the noise seems to swallow you, takes you to the inner world of a body which is not yours…  Who is the director? When the sound stops you hear the silence and the sonic body floats away, you wake up.

Maybe this is the Megaphone Ensemble, a possession of a power which has no direction, nor a specific subject to command. A sound sculpture in the most literary sense possible. A parallel world in which the space and the sound suddenly start to combine their energy by creating a fictive landscape.

Jo Caimo is a visual artist, musician, radio maker, and inventor of superfluous objects and instruments. His work situates itself in the margin between performance, music, installation and the digital world. In many works he tries to define a border of a medium (or object) or a border of our senses. This can go from a website with the recordings of the sound of every position of a metronome (to create your own metronome symphony online) towards the ‘unstable’ live performance of swallowing a bluetooth-microphone (to record the audio of his whole digestive system, to which you are invited to call), or by putting the sun live on the internet (for rainy days, some placebo Vitamin D). 

The Megaphone Ensemble is a collaborative project of about five visual artists as well as musicians and performers. Its compound is variable and often supplemented with people who are at the specific location of the event. Potentially the ensemble is open for artists as well as non-artists; most of the time some members never have played together before and therefore improvisation is its main tool. Every member has amegaphone, some of them have an already prepared loop of a specific saved sound, so that the variable lies in the way this person moves through the space and the volume that is used, this in combination with a walkie talkie by which another megaphone of another member can be controlled. Other members also move through the space, mostly following an already built up script or score. Because of the abstraction which lies in the interpretation of the score every performer has its own freedom to experiment and use the space in an optimal sense. The sound is ever changing due to the movement and change of loop by the performers. In this way they betray themselves and give away the source of the sound, but at the same time this changes so quickly that you will never have an overview, nor grasp the whole event. Like no one will ever have, for in every corner of the space the sound will be completely different, in this way creating an individual soundperformance for an audience which is also invited to move through the space, to become part of the performance or even to disappear.

The effect of the loose connection and emerging chaos is as a daze, and to behave as a proper audience within this wall of sound is obviously impossible.

Text: Katinka de Jonge

http://jocaimo.blogspot.be/2013/12/megaphone-ensemble.html

Kalender

© 2004-2024 ChampdAction