CD + booklet – The Dim Coast

The first elaborations of this work by Canadian sound artist Christof Migone, date back to 2002, the year in which the Auditorium project began. There are five tracks – all recorded at different periods. The first, the conceptual foundation of this body of work, is a rather remote and distant score, a ‘failed’ piece according to Mignone, yet still powerful, engaging with drones, metallic resonances, vibrations, noises, along with more airy fragments. This material would later be offered for collective listening, allowing the composer to record the audience’s reception to the work which is then added to the original sources as a new piece. Places and behaviors can give rise to new sound patterns, the artist seems to be telling us, creating a sound portrait of the listening, conceived as both a collective and dialogical act. In one recording session, sixteen people were invited, and without any guidance on how to behave, were all provided with headphones to engage with the work individually, yet together. In another subsequent session, the participants were reduced to five, with the instruction to remain as silent as possible. However, the prescribed quietness turned out to be relative – the silence which, as Cage taught us, does not exist, allowed both the sounds of the traffic outside and those of the photographer documenting the event to emerge. For both sessions, Christof Migone recorded four different sequences. In the first, the audience only listened to the recording of the original piece. In the second, they heard a mix with the addition of the audio of the noises and reactions during the performance. In the third, they listened to the original piece plus the audio from takes one and two. In the fourth, they heard a mix of their reactions to the three takes, plus themselves live. An installation version – equally imaginative in its structure – was also developed in 2008 for Manif d’Art 4 (the Québec City Biennial). This release for The Dim Coast now condenses the key passages of the entire project, and the result is highly evocative and ghostly – silent in some passages but more forceful in others while also musical, meticulous, and intriguing. Indeed, listening to them will never reveal the complex processes that were put in place to create them.

 

Christof Migone – Auditorium (Chaos, Quiet, Fail)