Social Music II # 3
Radical Sympathy by Luis Guerra, Brandon LaBelle, Gentian Rhosa Meiklehman
and James Webb
with Vicente Colomar, Fátima Cué, María Escobar, Antonio Gómez, Annie Pui Ling Lok,
Catalina Mahecha, África Clúa Nieto
|
Sound is often embraced as a force for making connections. From resonant bonding to rhythmic synchronization, vibrational linking to sonic attunement, sound leads to a range of relational intensities. Working collaboratively amongst friends, the series of three audio pieces considers sound as a relational force by focusing on the experience of sonic intimacy, and the ways in which sound draws us into proximity (with things, with others, with the missing and the not-yet). Intimacy and the sympathetic nurturance sound provides become reference points, leading to experiments in knowing by way of sound. For intimacy is not only to come close to things, but to know of others in ways that profoundly shape one’s disposition and sensibility. As such, the work considers a radicalization of sympathy by giving expression to an aesthetics of contact through performing gestures of care and recollection, attunement and speech, and composing situations of coming-close. From a focus on the home as an environment of intimacy and love, as well as the material things that lend support and that enable remembrance, to the passing of spoken words between two triggered by unconscious associations, and to the rhythmic acts that punctuate being in a certain time and place, and that aid in resituating the orientation of things, the work figures sonic intimacy in emotional and physical ways. The three audio pieces can be heard as love poems composed by way of currents of sympathy. As part of Social Music II series. Social Music is concerned with sound as a social material, and the ways in which listening may enable a dynamic sense of relationality. From voice and speech to the consonant and dissonant flows that punctuate being together, Social Music explores how sound contributes to the shaping of community in diverse ways. In particular, contributing artists focus on elaborating sociality beyond the human world, to develop ways of approaching the more-than-human, ecologies of matter, and symbiotic assemblages or entanglements. |
