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Electric Whispers from Kathleen Fox.
Kathleen Fox invited me to make music for the film Electric Whispers (formerly Shards of Memory) that she displays in the exhibitions mentioned below. Here you can see it in low resolution. Also, take a look at another similar collaboration we did here.
How the piece is made:
1. I recorded 6 recordings, improvising while watching the film:
a) twice Platforms (amplified objects on two wodden doors with contact microphones on them, stereo, i.e. 4 channels) (it might be impossible to hear now, but some sound from the speakers in the studio actually goes in through the boards as well, so they also record the sound of the other platform a bit through the air vibrations, i.e. they work a bit as ordinary mikes too)
b) twice Micro Moog (mono, so 2 ch.)
c) twice voice
2. Improvising with the volume on each channel
3. Improvising with the pan l-r on each channel
4. Improvising with adding hall reverb on-off on each channel
5. Improvising with the mute button on each channel
That results in making the impression more fragmented, alien, suggesting and disembodied at the same time as all the sounds remain in the same temporal connection with the film as they were recorded (nothing is moved in time). I had more or less this idea in my head immediately after I saw the film for the first time, because as the theme of the first exhibition was about the unconscious, I wanted to make something which seems to be on multiple and possibly conflicting consciousness levels at the same time.
Recorded and edited at Electronic Music Studio, Stockholm.
Music for the installation film Shards Of Memory by Kathleen Fox, uk.
for the following exhibition:
Facebook-event.
The exhibition is centred in a collection of mounted boxes that use light, sound and texture to introduce themes of eroticism and death that underpin the realm of the unconscious. The work aims to model and explore Freud's spatial concept of the conscious and unconscious mind - for which he used the metaphor of a house and its component rooms.
Set in a space that was previously Freud's bedroom, the exhibition is divided into two areas; the conscious and the unconscious, with a sensor standing between the two. The positioning evident in Freud's hypothesis will be reversed: the first area to be entered will be the room of consciousness, furnished to give the impression of a domestic space. The viewer is then invited to pass through a membrane into a second darkened 'unconscious' room, which houses the mounted boxes whose contents are only revealed on close inspection through small apertures.
The installation questions the way in which the thresholds between the conscious and the unconscious are negotiated and how the viewer is impelled into spaces that are simultaneously real and imaginary. It invites re-assessment of how Freud's theory has been utilised and developed within surrealism, something which will be a central theme of the accompanying one day conference, to be held on Saturday 09 October.
The artist has exhibited and published her work internationally, often within the context of surrealist group activities, notably the exhibition 'As far As My Legs Can Carry Me' at the Terezin Memorial Museum in the Czech Republic (2008).
The exhibition has been made possible by the generous support of the Henry Moore Foundation and Norwich University College of the Arts.
For further information please contact info@freud.org.uk or +44 (0)20 7435 2002
The Freud Museum London website.
Johannes Bergmark - Kathleen Fox video installation Sound of Stockholm 2010 at Fylkingen from Johannes Bergmark on Vimeo.
Video installation at the festival Sound of Stockholm, Fylkingen, music by Johannes Bergmark for the installation films Fish Soup and Electric Whispers (formerly Shards of Memory) by Kathleen Fox.
I also contribute with a (two) double-mono piece(s) for the compilation cd accompanying the catalog: I was lost in the cave 8'48, left ch / Somebody took my teaspoon 7'14, right ch, both recorded live 2014-03-11 at Electronic Music Studio, Stockholm.
Improvised compositions performed by Johannes Bergmark. No editing.
Instrument: Platform for amplified objects