Audible Descriptions by Carlie Norma Germs
The stage lighting fills Victoria Hall with a warm glow, making cozy the cool autumn light streaming in from the high windows. There is a faint haze of machine fog.
Ira Hadžić begins her performance with a set of drums. The drums and then the drone of the gong fills the entire space like water in a big fish bowl. The floor sitting listeners wilt beneath the weight of the sounds, with the exception of a central figure; upright, swaying with the tone as it oscillates gently
Ira’s mallet skates around the surface of the large brass gong. The longer I watch and listen I begin to feel I can connect her movement with the gradually changing tone of the sound, hearing more variation in the drone of the gong. I am new to the music of the gong. When I saw the gong on the stage, I was not expecting it to sound like this or to be played in this way. Ira is drawing and redrawing figure eights over the gong, gradually moving around its surface. The mallet seems stubborn, as if the gong is covered in cold honey, resisting the movement. Ira’s drawings echo the shapes and lines splattered around the room by visual artist Jess Tan. I wonder to myself what other shapes sound like? I am vaguely aware of gongs being an ancient type of instrument popular around eastern Asia for a pretty long time - is this how it has always been played? (2 weeks later and I still have more questions than answers about the music of gongs.)
Next is hear her breathe, a contemporary dance performance by alicec, who is dancing in silence with the company of a piece of brown paper slightly larger than alicec herself. There is an extremely serious atmosphere in the room - everyone appears to be paying her their fullest, most respectful attention. Alicec’s abstract movement is strange and novel without music to compliment or justify it. Watching feels indulgent: not like eating a whole Viennetta with a teaspoon; more like going to the beach when you need to do some household chores.
Watching her collect the paper between her feet, scrunching it, then getting onto the ground with the paper, rolling it, smoothing it as if she is packing up a sleeping bag after a restless night’s sleep on the hard ground… I have an intrusive thought – it doesn’t really matter what you're doing; everything feels like a comment on housing or inequity. Renting is great, until you’ve moved house 3 times in 4 years. You can forget for a time that the place you lay your head is temporary, but that uncertainty follows you around.
Alice begins cocooning herself in the crinkling folds of the brown paper. I notice the person in front of me is wearing pristine Balenciaga shoes and an ACNE studio hoodie. I am trying to imagine if the person walking around in a $3000 outfit is living differently to me while alicec is trying to roll over in the paper without using her hands. Alicec’s performance is over before I can return my attention back to her. I feel a bit embarrassed that I recognise those clothing brands, and a little bit guilty for passing judgement on a person for the cost of their clothing. Perhaps that person is actually homeless and they were gifted these items by a very wealthy person who was struck by their vulnerable presence out on Walyalup Kort. Maybe that wealthy person has divested themself of all their riches and is now learning to play the gong in a monastery somewhere.
The final performance of the afternoon is by Lia T and R Glacken, benefactors of AE’s seed fund. They bring a spaghetti mess of computers and synthesizers onto the stage. When they begin playing I am immediately rehydrated - the absence of music during the dance performance had left me feeling dried out. Discussing Lia and R’s music is much more complicated than anything else I have written here – digital music production excludes my curious scrutiny, and I am left to my imagination:
There is a thick liquid rhythm filling the bottom of an old submarine. It recedes and returns like an ephemeral pond in a timelapse – rising up quickly from nowhere, dropping off a little, then decaying down into nothing. Its dramatic geometric movements are controlled in the base of the vessel. I can hear a complex network of pressurised airpipes of various sizes above me filled with high pressure gas. The valves have a complex and evolving schedule for releasing the excess gas. Controlled and strictly regulated emissions hiss out in what I assume is an important pattern for sustaining the submarine’s healthy operation. Above the pipes there is an old computerised navigation system slowly booting up and its smooth bleeps are reverberating around the top of the vessel. The saturating rhythm is evolving quickly as the periscope ascends to the ocean’s surface. The navigational alerts become effervescent as the periscope signal registers ~ the coast is clear. We surface. the light of the setting sun sparkles on the surface of the sea.
Drawings by Tim Gates (top) and Danyon Saxon (middle and last).