Launch at the café-bar of the Cinémathèque québécoise (335 Boul. de Maisonneuve E, Montréal), May 21, 5-7pm (remarks 6pm).
Thanks to Martin Arnold, MH, Marie-Douce St-Jacques, Tibor Szemző’s Tractatus, Justin Evans and all at the CD Esoterik podcast.
oo is music that uses electronic hard/software as a prosthetic rather than as a technology with which to sculpt soundscapes from a god’s-eye view. There is nothing of the orchestral about this music; it is chamber music, music in essence produced in the chambers of the mouth, the lungs, the gut. It is a combination of utterances, or, with its chopped, staggering repetitions, its stutterances. Each song sets up strange grooves. Each is a kind of dance music but not a kind that would have a place in most clubs; rather, the grooves resonate from, then in, the mouth, the lungs, the gut, before engaging anything from the hips down.
In an email Christof wrote: “oo is probably my most song-like project, it’s probably also my least conceptually-driven.” But he also discussed oo as a continuation of a project that started with the text installation Stéréophonie written in collaboration with Simon Brown and Julie Doucet; and the book project Stéréoophonie (the double ‘o’ is intentional). Christof writes: “Stéréoophonie is plural. A polyphonic project with its three authors, its doubled ‘o’s, its nonsensical meanings. It calls for a slow reading, but in rapid bursts. It all takes place in the stereo field. It’s a playful game with layers that spread into the corners of a state of mind that oscillates endlessly from left to right, from right to left.” The stereo field that oo happens in is physical, doubled-down on by the extensive panning. But the linking of oo to the Stéréo(o)phonies also suggests a conceptually-driven background. I guess his message speculates that perhaps it’s not crucial a listener know these concepts to fully engage oo.
Like any conceptual art able to be called art, Christof’s work is always made stranger by the texts it mediates; they never explain the work, they never constitute its full content, they are never what the piece is about.
In Aesthetics of Appearing Martin Seel discusses the emergence of aesthetic experience manifested as a perpetual appearing. The experience is always immanent to phenomenal perceptions, but if art happens the representable aspects of the empirically apprehended materials are joined by an unrepresentable singularity as the aesthetic takes hold. To illustrate, Seel proposes a scene where a red ball sits on a green lawn. He discusses many of the discursive potentials that might arise attending to this scene: the physical attributes of the ball/the lawn or the logistics that might surround its occurrence. But then he discusses the potential for the non-discursive, the figural, the aesthetic to activate this scene, incommensurate with any representation/discourse.
Despite the common application of terms like non-retinal or non-cochlear to conceptual art, there is always a phenomenal/perceptual component to such work (even if it’s the presence of absence), as there are always cultural texts that interpenetrate traditional artworks disguised within praxis. Concepts are part of the material scene. Perhaps in oo they’re the green lawn that backgrounds a pair of balls, then two pairs of balls, then three pairs of balls, then four pairs of balls, then five pairs of balls.
