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