thanks: all the participants,all the original funders and presenters, Joel Stern, Frederic Van de Velde.
Scroll down for REVIEWS.
I have been listening to Christof Migone’s collection Wet Water (Let’s Dance) on loop for several days straight, the tracks playing alternatingly from my laptop, a bluetooth speaker in the bedroom, and the hi-fi in the lounge, following me around the house. I’m enjoying living with these sounds, and the feeling of ingesting them day-by-day in small gulps and sips, a constant drip-feed. This collection suits a domestic, everyday listening environment, poised in the liminal space of not-quite, or not-yet, music, but with an unhurried and strange intentionality that separates it from noise. Each time Éternuité (Forever Sneeze) begins I startle. It may be muscle memory; the sneeze as vector of contagion in pandemic-times. Twelve seconds; three sniffs, a sneeze, a vague exhaled sigh. Like many of the body-noises assembled here, these ones feel more semiotic than physical. An indexical grammar of sneezing. Then we’re in an Empty (Bucket); the distinctive tone of turbulent water in hollow metal, interrupted by high-frequency microphone feedback and interference—two recurring motifs of these pieces, electronic-noise and watery flows. The repetitive slosh of heads dunking again and again, disoriented and dissociated, in the electronic squelch of the bucket, water flowing in and out of eyes, mouths, ears. Migone says ‘we are bodies of water and therefore performative and relational orality is slippery.’
Like much of the artist’s work, across diverse media, these pieces reflexively thematise, compose, and perform rituals of inarticulation, impedediment, incapacity to speak and communicate. What is a text trapped in a mouth full of water, with the words choked and half-swallowed, spat and dribbling out? Language steaming-up, glitching, almost-comprehensible, like morse code in static at sea. In Vegass a single word is elongated and streched over minutes, becoming a syntactic drone, interrupted by the occasional resonant clattering of what I imagine as teeth falling from a gaping visage. The stretched-word feels like monument to ‘dumb’ materiality, words as always noise before signification. This piece, like many, is laced with feedback; fluctuating and often gentle, sounds recording and re-recording themselves, accumulating layers, and self-amplifying at the threshold of control. In Langue Distance a phone dials and rings, and sounds of licking flow down the line, wet signals with the charge of fetish. Telephones connect that which they dislocate: bodies, voices, breath, mouths, ears. The medium of the telephone is both distance and proximity. Dialtones and code-buttons punching out a secret message, distorted by the tele—distance—between sender and receiver. Later, when Éternuité (Forever Sneeze) returns for an extended redux, a voice says ‘I’m not feeling it, you need to get a bag of dust’. Another says, ‘like a torture chamber’, and giggles.
The four pieces constituting The Release (Into Motion), which take up the entirety of disc two, are different, more conventionally ‘musical’ in structure and style, but still sharing, as with all of Migone’s work, a conceptual sensibility and feeling of underlying logics at work. In each piece, layers of roughly pitched electronics tones flow into and around each other, as if mirroring the dynamic surfaces, continuous motion, interference patterns, and interacting currents of ocean waves. These sounds derive from a performance work in which Migone held a tomato frozen in a block of ice in his mouth while it slowly melted over more than thirty minutes—a painful looking exercise, based on the documentation images. How such an endurance ritual produced these sounds is mysterious and oblique, but at the same time highly suggestive. Like so much of the work captured and documented in this collection, the relation between elements is abstract, entangled, puzzle-like in its weirdness, and all the more rewarding for that.
First published on the La Chute compilation DVD. Commissioned by Avatar. Recorded at the Banff Centre for the Arts by Don Pyle in 2007. Participants: Sally Baydala, Erica Brisson, Eryn Foster, Stephanie Khoury, Angus Leech, Wm Leler, Demian Petryshyn, Naomi Potter, Don Pyle, Duncan Speakman, Barbara Sutherland, Pandora Syperek, Janice Wu.
02. Empty (Bucket) 1 12:31 (1997) link to project here I drown myself in a shallow bucket as opposed to an endless ocean. I am inundated by a few drops. Asphyxiated, I learn not to breathe. Suffocated, I learn to answer the question: is a wound with no trace really a wound or is it simply thirsty?
Soundtrack to a video shot at the Western Front, Vancouver, 1997. Images included in this publication are from a performance of the piece at Studio 303, Montréal, 1996. Photos by Peter Conlin.
03. Vegass 6:16 (2003) link to project here
Commissioned by Fortner Anderson to accompany his poem titled “Vegas”. First published on his Six Silk Purses CD in 2005.
04. Fado 04:35 link to project here
Recording of a domestic dispute on rue St. Dominique in Montréal, 2001. My Portuguese neighbours often fought, it seemed that their relati- onship was on a permanent state of breakdown, with episodic flares announcing and confirming it to the neighbourhood. As this particular fight got louder, I got my camera out in the kitchen, the best aural vantage point, the video focused on an aloe vera plant on the table, the microphone eavesdropping on the commotion downstairs. The visuals are stilled, peaceful, and oblivious to the sound. This incident ended with the police taking him away.
First published on the Syntax Error CD that accompanied the Failure Issue (No.7) of Cabinet, Brooklyn, Summer 2002.
05. anse acabre 02:52 link to project here
Commissioned by Allen S. Weiss for Danse Macabre II, an installation featuring dolls by Michel Nedjar. Part of In Transit 09 – Resistance of the Object festival at HKW (Haus der Kulturen der Welt), Berlin.
06. Langue Distance 01:36 link to project here He calls her long distance with his tongue.
Recorded simultaneously in Montréal and Toronto. First published on the Mercersound 09 compilation CD, Mercer Union, Toronto. For MJH.
07. Malebouche 06:00
Transatlantic telephone performance featuring unrehearsed live (mis)translations of F. Malebouche’s Précis sur les causes du bégaiement, et sur les moyens de le guérir (1841), and a Morse Code Instructograph. For Stucco Echoes Mouth, event organized by Chris Timms, PEER Gallery, London.
08. un jeudi téléphonique 01:06 link to project here
First published on compilation CD DO(K)S no.3, Ajaccio, 1999 as part of La semaine avatarienne. Voice: Katie Bethune-Leamen.
09. Fill (Bottle) 03:19 link to project here Here, saliva becomes active, becomes spit. It comes out of one body in order to fill an other. The bottle archives the secretions. The secretions remain inaudible, almost.
Soundtrack to a video shot at the Western Front, Vancouver, 1997.
01. The Release (Into Motion) 1 20:54 link to project here A mouth holding a tomato frozen in a block of ice until both ice and tomato thaw and fall down.
One component of Lake of Coherence, performance presented at Mutek, Montréal, 2003.
REVIEWS
• Review in Neural of the Wet Water (Let’s Dance) 2xcd publication.
Accompanied by a stylish 16-page green booklet comes the latest effort from Christof Migone, a sound artist, professor, curator and writer of Swiss origin who now resides in Toronto. Wet Water (Let’s Dance) immediately grabs the listener’s attention with a series of unusual sounds – electroacoustic, hisses, strange interferences, and field recordings that are often difficult to distinguish from digitally manipulated sounds. Are they flocks of birds or just well-calibrated buzzes? Or modified recordings of natural events? Do we really care what the nature of these sounds are? Isn’t it perhaps more interesting that a certain amount of mystery prevails in this regard? The reality is that throughout the project lines are always blurred and the relationships between the different elements are complex and unpredictable, aimed at an almost improvisational relational occurrence that is slippery in its performativity. Slippery and numb like a tomato frozen in a block of ice held in the performer’s mouth until both melt and fall. This sounds like a surrealist sketch but is the story of The Release (Into Motion), a piece released in four different versions whose video was used as one of the three sources for the piece Lake of Coherence, a composition not on this release and which dates back to 2003. Migone is accustomed to using different media, moving between the suggestions of language and voice, of the body and intimacy, between sound and silence, play and pathos, reiterating a series of obsessions that include destroying microphones, handling books and pages, hybridizing multiple languages and releasing records, to name just a few of the recurring motifs of his artistic practice. The works presented are modulated in the manner of atypical canons for which the impediment, the disconnection, and the inability to communicate are prevalent, with a certain degree of uncertainty and jumps in registers, accumulating audio layers and repeating to the point of exhaustion. This musician is then a kind of medium, a catalyst of alien energies for all of us to appreciate.
• Review in Vital Weekly, issue 1411, by Frans de Waard, of the Wet Water (Let’s Dance) 2xcd publication.
Work by Canada’s Christof Migone isn’t easily described in a few words. Joel Stern wrote the ‘press text’, which took on a more poetic, descriptive personal stance but did not necessarily write an informative text about the release. Much of Migone’s work is very conceptual, and some of this is ‘explained’ in the booklet, from which I took that many of the works deal with water and sounds generated with the human mouth. It’s more something that I read than what I heard, as these pieces are rather abstract and out there on an electronic level. There are more field recording-like works, with splashes of water (still including the body), such as ‘Empty (Bucket) 1’, drone-based voice pieces (‘Vegass’) and Portuguese neighbours fighting in ‘Fado’, along with feedback created during the recording. Disc one is quite diverse, with eleven pieces, ranging from a sneeze that is twelve seconds long and the aforementioned ‘Empty (Bucket) 1’, which is over twelve minutes.
The second disc contains four parts of ‘The Release (Into Motion)’, described as “a mouth holding a tomato frozen in a block of ice until both ice and tomato thaw and fall down”. If you know that, you may recognize some ‘mouth’ sounds, and I can’t unhear those now, but on the surface, the first part is a pleasant computer-based drone piece, full of lively action, and the second is a minimalist piece of bouncing computer sounds. The fourth part is the meaner version of the first, more chaotic and strange, lighter drones but disruptive. The third one is the darkest of the four, with an ongoing, more rhythmic approach.
As always with work by Christof Migone, I don’t always get what it is about, and I am unsure if a complete understanding is necessary to enjoy the music. I do a lot, most of the time, and wonder with some amazement. The music by Christof Migone is better off with an art critic, I suppose.
