Christof Migone - Auditorium
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CD (6-panel digipak + 12-page booklet) / Download
Available June 7, 2024 via The Dim Coast Bandcamp page.
The Dim Coast is pleased to present Christof Migone's publication based on Auditorium, a project based on a failed audio piece done in 2002, that was then used as part of collective listening to listening experiments recorded in 2005 and 2006, followed by an installation presented in 2008.
More info (including text and images) on the original Auditorium project here.
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Track Listing:
1. Auditorium (Q) 14:53
2. Auditorium (C) 14:34
3. Auditorium (Chaos) 14:10
4. Auditorium (Quiet) 15:09
5. Auditorium (Fail) 15:05
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audīre “to hear” + -tōrium, suffix of places
Unlike ‘theatre’ which names the assemblage of the stage, the lights, the proscenium and more, ‘auditorium’ describes only the place where the people are gathered in sensorial preparation to receive. It is a defined volume, intended for a prescribed number of bodies to fill. Migone’s project brings into audition several such places whose connection is forged through the reiteration of a sound work that he considers to be a failure, shared with us here as the fifth track. In each auditorium, instead of the pre-existing public space one might imagine from the term here untangled, he has established the conditions to refigure the intention of space just as an architect or particularly generous host might do. These conditions are amplified through the actions of the bodies present, making for increasing quietude or escalating and raucous vocality. Such reformation of spatial utility is a kind of orchestration carefully conducted. In the first and second tracks Migone pushes the results of this orchestration to the point of abstraction.
In the third and fourth, the failed sound work, our original point of connection is not audibly present, instead we are now listening to listeners listening. Our informed attention to something not seemingly available to us (or being actively withheld) holds a spectral connection to other notable performance scores. Migone does assert a connection to Cage in this work, but not to 4’33’,’ Instead, it is to the mixed mutism and verbal excess of his (Cage’s) famous quip, “I have nothing to say and I am saying it”. In this assertion, Migone threads the work through the structural production of conditions, contexts, and composition into the arena of communion. Much of Migone’s work has centred on the disquieting processes of communication often through the excess and inadequacies of speech and their lineage in psychic space. Here, as we are listening to listeners listen we come to know the environs these bodies inhabit through their breath, subtle shifts in posture resulting in rustling of garments and creaking of floors, laughter, and chatter; all sonic releases in simultaneity with the intended audition. As the audience thrice removed (first the audience assembled, second Migone as recorder), we are able to ascertain the gathering: their presence, number, and level of attention to the assigned task of listening, and to each other. In this way, listening is a kind of measure or metric. I am aware that this active (act of) listening to listeners listen, mediated then through recording, is itself a form of contact. Each increment of choice, from where we were gathered to what we were told, what we listened to how, the pressing of record and stop, established contact and altered the object of sound. In this way not only is listening a form of touch as this contact between the sound and ourselves has altered both, but the collected events held now in your hands are also vocalic. The reciprocity of ongoing exchange becomes what Migone is saying without himself making a sound. Controlled release, contraction, forced air through membranes brought into sensorial reception through space and the elements that fill it, all the factors required to draw sound-labelled-as-speech from these leaky bodies is what has built this auditorium you sit in now. Instead of a performance, or passive reception, it is now a listening to the one who assembled the conditions, a potential for dialogue, a form of connection through a gesture defined by indeterminacy. This potential for failure is the necessary risk of connection, knowing that the method of measure will determine the form of what transpires, or at least what is understood to have happened.
I am touched.
— jake moore (The Dim Coast)
Recording, editing, mixing: Christof Migone (2002-2023)
Recording (Hotel2Tango): Howard Bilerman (2005-2006)
Mastering: Giuseppe Ielasi
Graphic design: Joe Gilmore
Images: Paul Litherland, Christof Migone
Text: jake moore
Thanks:
To all the participants.
To Steve Bates and jake moore at The Dim Coast.
To the Canada Council for the Arts for supporting the original project.
The Dim Coast / #22
Reviews:
Neural - Aurelio Cianciotta
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.