Sonic ruins.

Contemplations on fragmentation in experimental music.

artistic research by Liza Kuzyakova

Listening to electro-acoustic music entails a particular experience and engagement of the mind, forming and provoking further dreaming. Acousmatic situation evokes imagination and brings tension in the interplay of sound origins, constantly causing re-interpretation.

Noise appeals with its capacity for imagination and as a space of power, an intense sonic mass carrying everything away, or, submerging into other, surreal realities. Distortion is a tool smearing the perfectly present sound object - hiding it under the layer of incomprehensible sonic mass. A distorted sound acquires a mythical aura, marking the beginning of a maze into repercussions of the source. Erasing the confines of a familiar sound object, distortion and the processes like it cause a mind to search for the previous narratives, but what it finds are the new forms in the noisier audible - the distorted presence of the original source, resonating through its traces. I propose to look at this newly acquired sound shape through the lens of a ruin.

A widespread term in the field of contemporary art and architecture, it doesn't come with the clarity of an object being one. Instead, it facilitates discussion on its origins and perspective. When we talk about ruin, we talk about the past. The past, however, is a construct of a mind, what does it make a ruin?

A ruin is an intriguing concept in the context of musical form - thinking about how it assimilates in relation to time structures, what it suggests about the presence and materiality of sounds. My research delves into the ruinous thought as a speculative approach to composition, an investigation into the musical aesthetic of fragmented space, disruptive processes, noise, and the role of technical artefacts its forming.

What does it mean to compose ruins?

How can an architectural ruin become the metaphor for a sonic material?

Erecting architectural ruin into the main metaphor and the starting point of this research, several related concepts are investigated through the critical perspectives of contemporary art and further the sound field:

decay and destruction, a trace, and memory.

Reviewing these terms in the context of noise performance, industrial and power electronics music, as 'styles' that extensively employ noise aesthetics and processes, and as styles I came into the closest relationship within my practice, I am searching for lingering traces of the ruin. Investigating along the way how memory and the 'past' of sound can be practically addressed in composition.

My research attempts to analyse a sonic ruin from a variety of perspectives: a melt of philosophical, technical, cultural, and poetic contributions, it finds ground in the middle, placing music at its core. The image of ruin is employed to become a guide, a parallel line to the music's ideas, a metaphor for a compositional strategy.

The practical aim lies in the application of the formulated methodology. Deconstructing audio recordings from a medical ultrasonic machine and working with amplified and processed cello, the research of sound fragments will eventually result in the 8ch composition.

Shaped by critical inquiries from the selected literature:

Dillon, Brian, ed. Ruins. WHITECHAPPEL edition. Documents of Contemporary Art. The MIT Press, 2011.

Spieker, Sven, ed. Destruction. WHITECHAPPEL edition. Documents of Contemporary Art. The MIT Press, 2017.

Bonnet, François J. 2016. THE ORDER OF SOUNDS: A Sonorous Archipelago. FALMOUTH: Urbanomic Media Ltd.

Simmel, George. “Die Ruine.” Philosophische Kultur. Gesammelte Essays 2nd ed.; Leipzig: Alfred kroner, 1919, 1911.

Stead, Naomi. “The Value of Ruins: Allegories of Destruction in Benjamin and Speer.” University of Technology Sydney, 2003.