This edition of Boundary Condition features 6 artists in a hybrid of audiovisual live sets & immersive projections; oblique ceremonial forms, xenofeminism, olfactory imagery, sonic resistance, counter hegemony, machinic desire, shamanic practices, uncertain futures, queer politics, ancestral memory, distorted textures, folk remnants, cassette collages, subtractive synthesis, climate grief, and a replica fox-hunting horn in a historic 12th century church.
Haedong Lee & Yidan Kim present Ecology of Death and Annihilation: A Ceremony for Things that Wither 죽음과 소멸의 생태계 : 사라지는 것들을 위한 세레모니
Rooted in diverse ritual cultures from across the world, Haedong Lee and Yidan Kim’s latest work is presented as a contemporary ceremony, a multi-disciplinary performance that pulls together various elements from the duo’s rigorous study of various ceremonial practices across East Asia and the wider Asian continent, and shamanic cultures found in West Africa and throughout Europe. Ringing various bells Lee has collected or created, playing wooden and metal percussive instruments used in rituals that span different cultures, chanting and overlaying hallucinatory synthesized and processed sounds, the two artists create a uniquely contemporary interpretation of ritual soundscapes, braiding remnants of folk songs with oblique ceremonial forms. They complement their meticulously engineered sonic ecosystem with physical actions and olfactory expressions that are harder to perceive on record, such as the gestures involved in the offering of incense and the materials that have historically been used in rituals and ceremonies. Scouring history, Kim creates a layered smell-scape from plant resins, leaves and bark like frankincense, agarwood and sage that diffuses as the performance unfolds.
Dirar Kalash, Cerpintxt & Ruben
Dirar Kalash is a Palestinian musician and sound artist whose work spans a wide range of musical and sonic practices within a variety of instrumental, compositional and improvisational contexts. He is mostly known for his politically driven soundscape / electro-acoustic project “The Sonic Front”, and the compositions “we can’t breathe (for eric garner, george floyd, and frantz fanon)” and “by any means necessary (for Malcolm X)”
Cerpintxt is a queer Egyptian electroacoustic sound artist and neuroscientist. Her work is concerned with generating an invented language of a particular strain of softness through phonetic entropy and augmented instrumentation. Working with cut-ups and dialectics to decimate language and linear constructs of temporality, in an entropic process of lingual erosion into protoconversation. The textural counterparts of her sound include wind instruments, broken turntablism, augmented cello, reel-to-reels, tape recorders, granular and modular synthesis.
Beachers presents Horns of Death
Is it possible for an instrument to be cursed? Every sound on ‘Horns of Death’ comes from a replica fox-hunting horn bought online. The album is an open-ended investigation of this replica, exploring how a copy of a tool designed for a specific function could act as an instrument when misused and removed from its intended role. Recorded in a bedroom in a small flat in south-east London then squeezed into a computer, for some tracks the horn is (literally) pulled apart to find what other sound sources it contains, the squeak of parts being unscrewed, flicks of the reed, the jangle of its chain. On others, the horn’s intended sounds are extended and disrupted using a DAW and a sampler. The replica contains sounds that felt inherently loaded. Adjust the way it’s blown, and it starts to evoke mammalian cries. Play with proximity, and the sounds of the horn begin to have an eerie beauty when heard from afar, an effect which sits in bizarre relation to their intended function. Up close, the banal movements of metal and air that make the horn blast become more pronounced.
Arna Beth
Arna Beth (b. 1997) is an Icelandic / American multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker based in London. Working with the assemblage of digital media, speculative futures, and cultural critique of the postmodern. Her practice spans 3D fabrication such as immersive installation, sculpture and animation, performance, sound, and recombinant material processes. Through frameworks of xenofeminism, machinic desire, she constructs immersive, non-linear narratives thatattempt to destabilize the dromocratic present.
Boundary Condition is a series of site-responsive, durational events investigating parallels between dark-jazz, hauntology, and music concrete as nostalgia-centric practices, trickling from the persistence and antagonistic fragmentation of certain memories. The project deploys a practice-as-research model of discoursing phenomenology of the various archetypes of atrophy through psychoacoustic, audible interdependence, and sombre studies on degradation, memory, and the politics of time.