To coincide with the Cycling74 Expo at NYU Poly in Brooklyn, Harvestworks will present a new multiple channel sound and video work by WvS and Richard Garet in our gallery. Featuring a 10’ sound cube in dialogue with an external room system, the work explores the concept of sound spacialization in an innovative way.
“blue cube++” Sound/Video Installation
8+5 audio channel audio by WvS 2 channel video by Richard Garet
8 channels of sound are coming from speakers mounted in the eight top & bottom corners of the cube. 5 channels of sound surround the cube at ear-level.Blue light calls to mind feelings of calmness or serenity. It is often described as peaceful, tranquil, secure, and orderly. The same one could say about the ethereal chords from over 1000-year old “gagaku” music, which are one core element of this self-modifying sound structure. Organ-like, synthetic sho-drones hover in the room, seemingly coming from nowhere and endless in their harmonic sequence, raising tension and relaxing it, never to arrive at any harmonic center, played at changing beat tempos, to counter a driving, subtle but persistent, constantly auto-modulated FM-synthesized bass line. As a motet-like counter-point layer, reverberated glass-like sounds surprisingly pierce the calm, serene atmosphere of the drone sounds that seem to rest on a fluctuating, de-tuned beating around 430 Hz. Circulating in & out and traveling around the cube are intense high frequency sounds and noise sources creating irritable sounds, random noises that come from nowhere, sound bursts that have no explanation, no reason, just exist – seemingly coming from everywhere in the room, almost ethereal, neither-here high-piercing frequencies that leave a mark in one’s ears, never to forget.
ABOUT WvS
The current audio work of New York City based sound organizer WvS is comprised of highly abstract and dense sound-layers, noise-oriented organic sonic textures, as well as pitch and modulation glissando driven soundscapes.WvS studied computer music, classical composition and music theory in Europe with Wolfgang Rihm and in the US with John Cage. He attended the ‘Darmstadt Ferienkurse fuer Neue Musik’ and many European Computer Music conferences, lectured at IDEA, performed twice at the Belluard Festival (Fribourg, CH), exhibited at the Museum for Modern Art Barcelona (Spain), was Artist in Residence at Harvestworks/PASS (NYC) and performs somewhat frequently in New York City mostly in collaboration with A/V artists Richard Garet, Jeremy Slater, Lady Firefly and others at venues like Roulette, Diapason, SHARE, the Knitting Factory, MonkeyTown ({R}AKE + FLOW), Generator Sound Gallery amongst other places, and managed Knitting Factory Records for many years.Having previously composed music for orchestras, chamber ensembles & solo instruments and conceptualized/realized computer controlled interactive performances, WvS currently focuses on entirely
computer-generated sound structures without the use of electro-acoustical samples or ‘field- recordings’.
http://iwvs.am
http://www.myspace.com/thesoundofwvs
Richard Garet works interweaving multiple media including moving image, sound, live performances, and photography. He completed his MFA at Bard College, and was awarded the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, Jerome Foundation Residency Grant through Issue Project Room, and the New York State Council on the Arts Grant through Lehman College. He recently completed a three months artist residency at Issue Project Room, NY in 2010, and previously completed a residency at Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, Scottsdale, Arizona in 2006. Recent exhibitions and performances
include: EAC- Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo, Montevideo, Uruguay; Fine Arts Museum of Montreal, Montreal, Canada; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona, Spain; Art Museum of Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico; and El Museo del Barrio, NYC. Additional exhibitions include Never Can Say Goodbye at the former Tower Records store; Sonochrome: at the Public Trust Gallery, Dallas, Texas; Leervoll, Diapason Gallery, and more. His sound compositions have been published through sound art labels such as And-Oar, Non Visual Objects, Winds Measure Recordings, Unframed Recordings, Con-V, Leerraum, White_Line Editions, Sourdine,
and Contour Editions. www.richardgaret.com