Talbot
Rice Gallery until October 5
Four
stars
Listen
hard to this first UK show by Hong Kong-based composer and polymath Samson
Young, and you might just hear something you’ve never heard before. This is possibly
because it doesn’t exist, just as the giant monumental His Master’s Voice style
horn that dominates the Georgian Gallery seems to have been washed up like some
retro-futurist steampunk dinosaur.
The
siren’s call that intermittently emanates from the circle of state-of-art
speakers beneath mood-enhancing lights that reflect the wordless fanfares form
the remainder of Possible Music #2
(2019), a fusion of sound and vision that offers up worlds of possibilities.
Co-created
with the University of Edinburgh’s Next Generation Sound Synthesis (NESS)
research group, this is as much a leap into the void as Muted Situations #22: Muted Tchaikovsky’s 5th (2018). Samson’s
forty-five-minute film fills the entire wall of the White Gallery with images
of an orchestra in full flight. With their instruments silenced, this leaves
only the creaks, squeaks, grunts and gasps that signify the sheer physical
graft of such exertions.
It’s
a routine free-jazzers and noise artists such as local heroes Usurper have been
playing with for years by way of ‘disabled’ instruments. Hearing such a pure
gut-level release on a grand scale like this, however, strips away the
orchestra’s formalism. With fancifully titled visual scores lining the
corridors upstairs, another film, The world falls apart into facts (2019) sees
the show out with a bang.
The List, August 2019
ends
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