[I'm required to write a series of informal response papers on events that we attend in Berlin. I will cross post these on my blog. This is the first one, about our attendance on March 15, 2013 at a performance by Tarek Atoui on his "Metastable Circuit". If you've never heard of him or his instrument, here's a YouTube clip for you to check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niH7NcY1rz8]
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When I first grabbed a pamphlet for Berlin’s Märzmusik
Festival at Das Haus Der Berliner Festspiele, I was on my way out of the
Berlinale screening of Skins that we
went to in February. I saw “Musik” and just grabbed it, not really thinking
much of it. When I got home later that night and flipped through its pages,
though, I realized that the booklet that I’d arbitrarily grabbed may well have
been the gateway to one of my favorite things that I’d see and hear in Berlin.
Contemporary
and experimental music is something that I was never really interested in until
about 2010, and since then I’ve been trying to cultivate my understanding and
analysis of it in any way possible. This has included not only listening and
experiencing it, but also trying to create it in different ways. For the past
few years at Hampshire, this has meant spending hours upon hours in the
Lemelson Center for Design, soldering endlessly until either that piece of
electronics works or I get so frustrated with the whole thing that I give up
altogether for the time being. I’ve built things such as a made-from-scratch
guitar amplifier that is housed in an old tin Batman lunchbox, a 4-foot tall realistic
Crayola crayon box containing giant light-up crayons that react to different
frequencies in the music that enters the circuit through an attached iPod, and
a made-from-scratch ribbon microphone using dangerously strong (and also
miniscule) magnets, a (rather frustrating) piece of aluminum tape that was
0.02mm thick, a transformer, and a salvaged XLR cable. Other projects have
included using the cameras from computer mice for different purposes, hacking
old children’s toys for their parts, using computer programming to create
interactive sound-scapes, and other such nonsense.
With
all of this in mind, my finding Tarek Atoui’s “Metastable Circuit” within the
schedule of events was something that immediately excited me, particularly
after I was able to look up his former YouTube performances with the instrument
that he invented. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, as it was difficult to
tell exactly what he was doing physically with the instrument to create sound
in the online videos, but was happy that the other students in the group were
also interested enough to go to the performance and find out. He seemed to have
an equal mix of musical sound sets and noise sound sets, and I was very curious
as to which he would select for the festival, especially since the theme of the
entire thing for the year was percussion.
When
we showed up to Das Hausa Der Berliner Festspiele only a month or so after we’d
been there for Berlinale, I was eagerly awaiting Atoui’s performance. Being
unsure of what to expect is sometimes one of my favorite feelings with anything
art-related. When we exchanged our tickets for sets of little blue earplugs,
though, I began to get really excited, curious, and I’ll admit a little bit
nervous. What had I gotten us into?
The
performance was loud and bass-y in a way that made me (and I’m assuming
everyone else) physically uncomfortable. It felt like the music was rattling
your bones and rearranging your heartbeat. This aspect of live music has always
frightened me. For my entire life, when I would be at a concert and feel this
way, I would leave. This could mostly be due to the fact that in past
experiences, this effect is caused by music that has no intention of conveying
any artful purpose through this acoustical phenomenon, but rather just wanted the
music to be loud. This was the first time I’ve had with it where I didn’t get
up. I thought to myself, Okay Kelley,
you’ve got to sit through this and just take it. This discomfort is all part of
the performance and of the experience, which in the end, I think, was a
stellar decision. It's actually kind of neat to think about the fact that sound waves are using your body as a medium to travel through...
Atoui’s
performance started off with big, deep, booming bass that rattled my ribcage
and made me happy that I had been given that pair of earplugs. He seemed to
have a sense, though, of exactly how far he could stretch his audience with
this effect before he would retire that vibrating bass and bring in some much
higher pitches of a different timbre. Even though much of the audience didn’t
like it and left, I was a bit amazed at how on-point this aspect of his
performance was. He would test how uncomfortable he could make his audience and
then, at the exact moment when you thought you couldn’t take it anymore, he
would back off. It’s difficult when one is only working with sounds and not
music to arrange a piece in a way that is interesting to listen to, and this
goes particularly with live performances. Atoui’s was definitely not the most
beautiful, or even the most interesting-sounding piece I’ve ever heard, by far,
but that’s also not what I think his performance was about.
Another
reason why I really enjoyed it was simply due to the concept behind the
instrument; his “Metastable Circuit”.
The more I thought about the name, the more it began to make sense to
me. Here is my interpretation of the name of his instrument and performance: “Metastable: (adj)
Physics, Chemistry. Pertaining to a body or system existing at an energy
level above that of a more stable state and requiring the addition of a small
amount of energy to induce a transition to the more stable state.” Having done
things with musical electronics, Atoui’s actual electronic circuit had to have
been stable, there’s no way that it could have been built to carry enough
energy to be considered unstable and still function with all of the other
factory manufactured electronics that he also used. This alludes, then, to the
fact that he himself is the metastable part of this circuit. His body is the
final “wire” or “connection” that completes the “electrical” circuit and allows
energy to pass through the system.
The
physicality of his body during the performance was unique, but not necessarily
creating a pleasant aesthetic. Most
of the time, I even found it a bit awkward, uncomfortable, and gruesome. His
movements were rigid and unnatural, and his face looked intensely concentrated,
in an almost painful way, on the sounds booming out into the room. Atoui’s
performance was possibly more of a conceptual movement performance than a sound
performance, and it gains a lot more depth when viewed as such. For instance, I
began to think about how each different person who used the instrument would
yield completely different results. Every human body moves differently, has
different proportions, and has a different concept of coordination, which could
potentially greatly affect the different aspects of the sound being created by
the instrument.
When
the last note faded out and Atoui stepped back and bowed his head, I
immediately wanted to jump up onto the little stage and analyze the electrical
components of his instrument. He never touched anything with his hands
throughout the entire performance, which meant that my initial guess at his use
of track pads was incorrect. (He also had homemade pedals all over the floor
underneath the table, which he impressively controlled with his feet for the
entire performance.) When the crowd got up and some people started to gather
around his “Metastable Circuit”, I decided to do the same. Upon quick
inspection, I figured out that Atoui was using small cameras to trace his hand
movements and running those traces through his computer to make sound. I’m not
sure what kind of program he was using, but I can guess that it maybe involved
a homemade patch on Max/MSP/Jitter. This was pretty neat for me to think about
because I spent last semester at Hampshire creating a program with
Max/MSP/Jitter that also took movement and color from live video and turned it
into musical sounds.
Overall,
I really liked this performance and thought that it was interesting on so many
levels. I would love to go to more musical performances (perhaps actual musical
performances instead of just sound, though those ones are good too!) and will
keep my eye out for events happening in Berlin over the coming months. I think
that seeing Tarek Atoui’s performance was important in that his instrument is
unique, and that it is played how he truly imagined it to be played with his
body at the helm. This kind of technology is getting more and more popular and
it will be interesting to see if there are more metastable circuits around in the
coming years. I’m happy that I picked up that Märzmusik pamphlet and that we
got the opportunity to go to this performance.
