Sound Matters, issue 08 — p 5. Sound & Radio / p 8. Sound & Film / p 12. Sound & Art / p 14. Sound & Design / p 18. looking at Sound & Storytelling
Sound Matters Issue 08
Our world is made of stories. Historic, romantic, comedic, tragic, as well as everything in between, and beyond.
Editor’s letter
We understand our surroundings and ourselves in terms of narrative. Politicians tell us epic stories about our countries and communities. Scientists develop detailed theories to convince us about our respective realities. Philosophers, teachers, doctors, marketing gurus, and many others all try to harness that magical storytelling algorithm, with varying levels of success. One sure fact floating among this sea of fables is that the human race has unwavering confidence in the organising power of narrative. Stories help us make sense of things, and then make decisions. But – in a very human twist to the story – those narratives often have more than a little drop of the imagination to them. Flourishes that imbue our continuous telling and retelling with a spark that makes the story pop, and feel real in that moment. Not untruths, but crafty emphases and exaggerations. So, is our world as indebted to artistry and aesthetics as it is beholden to cold, hard matters-of-fact? That dynamic is what we’re looking at in this eighth issue of Bang & Olufsen’s Sound Matters journal: the ever-animated line between our stories and our realities. And how hearing and sound sits at the centre of our experience.
Head of B&O PLAY — John Mollanger / Editor-in-chief — Nathaniel Budzinski, NRB@bang-olufsen.dk / Design and art direction — Studio C, studioc.dk / Contributors —Jennifer Lucy Allan, Jordan Crane, Jeff Emtman, June Canedo, Luke Turner. Special thanks to — Marianne Christensen, René Christoffer, Jens Jermiin and everyone at Bang & Olufsen.
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Issue Real sounds: CPH:DOX and celebrating reality. / p 8
Sound design: Peter Albrechtsen. / p 14
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Singing for buildings. / p 4
Samba in New Orleans. / p 24
Contents
Find out more about us at bangolufsen.com Listen to our Sound Matters podcast at beoplay.com/ podcast Watch our Design Matters videos at beoplay.com/designmatters Subscribe at beoplay.com/culture
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Vindelev appears in the first episode of the new series of Sound Matters – subscribe via your favourite podcast app. We Like We have released two albums: A New Age Of Sensibility (2014) and Next To The Entire All (2017). katinkafoghvindelev.dk
You work between music and art. How do you see the two fields working together? On a practical level, I like to try and separate the two artistic fields, but then that’s impossible. So I’m more about switching between different mindsets – intuition versus knowledge, concepts versus improvisation, and so on. I’m very inspired by the Dada art movement, Surrealism, and the philosopher Mladen Dolar, who describes the voice as being both an interior and exterior sound at the same time – calling it a creature of the edge. I just love that image and agree that there’s something quite inexplicable about all our voices. I make performances that play with how sound travels and interacts within a space. To be honest, I've never been interested in performing on a stage – it’s so fixed, especially when amplified. I like to be able to move around freely. Recently you worked with Sound Matters podcast producer Tim Hinman on an impromptu vocal piece in Copenhagen’s Rundetårn (Round Tower) with visitors being caught off guard by your singing. Do you generally surprise people with unplanned public recitals? I mostly perform prepared work but always include small time slots and pockets for impulsive moves and ideas. Improvisation is definitely a starting point for all my work, then I go back and process it, shape it and refine it. So what I did with Tim was kind of sneak peak into the first step of creating a new piece – it was my first encounter with Rundetårn. It seems that people enjoy the lack of distance between the actual sound source and them. It gets very physical. And Rundetårn’s spiral-like construction makes the sound even more diffuse. It’s a mystical place, a well kept jewel from the past, and instead of forcing my compositions all over the place, I like to work my way into a space.
Photography — Laura Sgherri (mask by Francesca Lombardi)
Sound matters
Katinka Fogh Vindelev / From children’s choirs to sound art and impromp tu public recitals, the vocalist who sings songs for buildings.
How did you first get into music? I grew up singing in a children’s choir with my two sisters and brother – conducted by our parents, who both taught music. We always sang at home, and even recorded an album together. I was drawn to classical music from a young age, and studied singing at a conservatory in my early twenties. In the beginning I was into romantic music like Schubert, Schuman and Chopin. But I soon discovered contemporary music – I identified more naturally with the complexity of the music, ideas and poetry. Since 2012 I’ve worked with Josefine Opsahl, Sara Nigard Rosendal, and Katrine Grarup Elbo in a group called We Like We – we describe it as a sound collective. Our classical training is the backbone of our sound, but from there we explore, adding electronic elements and improvisation, and trying to interact with the spaces that we perform in.
Sound Matters Issue 08
Photography — courtesy Here Be Monsters
What made you start Here Be Monsters? I've only recently figured out where this show truly came from. Through most of my childhood, I was afraid of normal things: physical danger, emotional rejections, the future, etc. I figured that as I got older, my fears would go away – some did. But the ones that didn’t got worse. By the time I was 22, graduating college, and supposedly “ready for the real world", I felt a paralysing fear of it. In hindsight, this seems to be the result of a good, nurturing upbringing – I never had to struggle that hard. But at the time, it gave me insomnia. And so my course of action was to start Here Be Monsters, named for the monsters drawn on old nautical maps to denote dangerous, unexplored regions. I've been making the show for six years now. In 2015 we joined forces with National Public Radio station KCRW in Los Angeles, which is when I brought on my co-producer Bethany Denton. Her style is wonderful and different from mine. She has been the secret force behind many of our most successful episodes, including our episode on the (now defunct) Satanic Prayer Hotline. We're far from running out of material. It's a sign that we and the rest of society still have a lot of fears. It's overwhelming, but good for business, right?
Here Be Monsters / Cult podcast Here Be Monsters probes the deepest, mysterious parts of our world. Its creator, Jeff Emtman talks truth, avoiding over-narration, and plunging into the unknown.
Are all HBM stories from ‘real life’? Where do you draw that line between fact and dramatisation? Everything we publish is as true as we can make it. Of course, defining ‘truth’ depends on a lot of factors, and our measuring stick for it changes based on what topic we’re looking at. Storytelling is an important tool for communi cating ideas, but it's not a Swiss Army Knife. It often requires obscuring facts that are relevant, but contradictory. Story assumes plot, which is not a feature of reality (unless you believe in fate, and I don't). So, the tighter a narrative, the more doubts a listener should have. There are moments across HBM episodes featu ring pauses in the narrative – small breaks for simply listening to the world. Why? Generally, Beth and I see a lot of danger in over-narration. Over-narration is often a symptom of insecurity, or ego, or the instinct for sign-posting that's been burned into the minds of producers who came of age in the public radio world. It's not to say that narration never happens on HBM, we just examine whether it's necessary, or it falls into one of those categories. If Beth and I feel the urge to add narration, we first try it with a gap of found sound, silence, or music – we think of those gaps as narration, we're just not the narrators. Listeners will imagine their own narration into those gaps, and narration that is imagined will always be better than what we'd write. Silence can make a piece land harder.
Listen to HBM at hbmpodcast.com. Jeff unearths sonic New York in a forthcoming episode of Sound Matters series three podcast: beoplay.com/soundmatters
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Design matters
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Gail Bichler / The New York Times Magazine Design Director on the tactility of print, creating a record of history, and taking risks at a quick pace.
Watch our full interview with Gail Bichler – and check out the other instalments of our Design Matters: The Elements video series made in collaboration with Frieze magazine – at frieze.com/designmatters.
“I love print” insists New York Times magazine's design director Gail Bichler. In a disposable, digital age she has a refreshing attitude for the potential of print journalism to endure long after the reader has digested the words. “I want to make something that is collectable,” she says, “Something that people will want to keep and have. What we're aiming for is a beautiful object that is almost a record of history.” This desire to create objects that are not just destined for tomorrow's recycling bin stems from Bichler's education and early career. She grew up in a small town in the American Midwest, then went to Michigan to study fine art before switching to graphic design. Her first job was as a freelance book designer but, keen on a change, and despite having no experience working in magazines, she sent the New York Times Magazine her portfolio. A three week trial turned into a decade of work, and Bichler took over as design director in 2014. Bichler says that with world-class photographers at her disposal, she often takes an image-led approach to designing a page: “one of the things I like best about the job is coming up with images for things that are very hard to visualise,” she says. However, there are limits – with strong journalistic standards, the New York Times is unable to manipulate images as other publications do. Sometimes, reflecting her obsession with typo graphy, her design team will take an entirely text-based approach, such as the fold out poster of the US constitution, annotated with instances of President Trump’s impact on the founding document, featured in the 2 July 2017 issue. All of this is achieved under the intense pressures of the modern news room, trying to maintain the ethics, aesthetics and standards of the New York Times brand, while competing with the churn of online media. Yet, Bichler says, this pace is what encourages her to take risks, to think fast, innovate and, to an extent, rely on luck. “There are so many things that are left to chance,” she says; “It's what makes life interesting.”
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Sound Matters Issue 08
Sounds Real / CPH:DOX (or Copenhagen InterÂnational Documentary Film Festival, if you prefer) has been part of an international shift towards non-fiction films that push the boundaries of how we depict our world. The DOX team discusses celebrating reality, paradigm shifts in audiovisual culture, and how sound is changing the whole game. Adam Thorsmark
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Tine Fischer
Niklas Engstrøm
Mads Mikkelsen
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Photography — Emil Hartvig
Bang & Olufsen is audio partner of CPH:DOX 2018, which takes place 15–25 March. Read full interviews with the DOX team as well as other sound-focused artists at beoplay.com/cphdox
Sound Matters Issue 08 You started CPH:DOX 15 years ago. In a way the festival has tracked some profound developments in documentary film making. What are the most important changes you’ve seen? Tine Fischer, director and founder: “The very first edition of CPH:DOX was in 2003 – documentaries were really not on any cultural radar then. Around the time we decided to start the festival, other events started happening. It was not long after 9/11 and the “War on Terror” was declared, and you could feel a public interest in dealing with the real. Michael Moore won the Palme D’Or in 2004 for Best Picture in Cannes with his film Fahrenheit 9/11 (the first time a doc won that prize). The film created enormous controversy and became the highest grossing documentary ever. It might not go into the history of cinema as a masterpiece but one should not underestimate the huge impact that film had – in terms of building a much stronger industry interest in documentaries, creating a heightened self-esteem among filmmakers, and placing documentaries on a very high impact agenda.” “Back in Denmark, a few years earlier, the Danish National Film School had started their very first non-fiction department. So, suddenly we had young non-fiction filmmakers graduating who had been trained in the language of art and cinema just as their fiction colleagues were. It totally changed the scene. The contemporary art scene also had a growing interest in documentary – Douglas Gordon & Philippe Parreno’s Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait premiered in Cannes and suddenly the art and documentary worlds met.” “It was so evident that there was a new approach to non-fiction, a new generation and possibly a new audience waiting. Back then it also seemed like something was on its way, almost as a paradigmatic turn away from the observational prison of direct cinema, into a more heterogenous, free, and fun space.” Commentators have claimed that we’re living in a golden age of documentary film. Do you agree with this? “It’s important to say that this ‘golden age’ can be talked about in several different ways. They are all valid. In my opinion the most important one has to do with what we just talked about. The documentary scene has changed so much during the last decade. The doc scene today is a mix of really interesting profiles coming from visual anthropology, contemporary art, cinema, digital and interactive, political activism, science and research. What was highly experimental and difficult to finance and get broadcasters interested in ten years ago, is now Oscar-nominated. The Act Of Killing was unthinkable ten years back, but it recently almost won an Oscar. So the golden age of documentary film making for me is the fact that the scene has turned into being one of the most interesting places in the cultural sector. It’s aesthetically pushing boundaries, it’s politically ambitious – and it’s such an important answer to fake news and digital entertainment trash.” “There’s now also so much non-fiction content out there. Netflix, of course, but also Amazon, YouTube and all the other streaming platforms. Netflix is playing a very important role at the moment because they produce and buy, and bring finance into the scene – not only directed towards mainstream but also artistically ambitious films like this year’s Strong Island. But Netflix is also a tech company driven by data, so I hope that they are willing to go into a dialogue with the European film industry and all the institutions that support a free, artistic and hopefully collective cinema of the future.” How has the audience changed in the past decade? Are they more open to new ideas and approaches now? “It’s a whole different world! People in general, the press, the film industry – it has all changed, and for the better. Our festival was founded on a very
open-minded approach to how we define non-fiction. During the first years we had juries leaving screenings because they refused to accept our definition of documentary, I had broadcasters and partners call and ask us to reconsider our profile and journalists refusing to classify us as a documentary film festival. All this has changed. There’s an openness and curiosity towards the genre today that was absent ten years ago.” How do you understand sound as a storytelling power in film, especially in documentary where the notion of realism is so important? Mads Mikkelsen, programme editor and head of selection committee: “Sound is literally the overlooked dimension of cinema. But sound in documentary is actually changing the whole game as we speak. For example, Welcome To Sodom [premiering during CPH:DOX 2018] is as much a sound experience as a visual one – at least when you see it in ideal conditions in a cinema, which is part of the raison d'être of film festivals in the first place. After a period when sparse minimalism was dominant in cutting edge cinema, the sensory and immersive is now where it's at. A previous CPH:DOX award winner, Leviathan (2012) is a film that deserves endless credit for paving the way for the new sound film (or the New Sound Film – film programmers are always competing to claim discoveries like that!) This change most likely has a lot to do with technological inventions that I would never be able to understand a thing of anyway, but technology is nothing without creativity.”
The cliche about documentary films goes something like: they’re worthy but excruciating to watch. Working at a film festival, how can you prevent this ‘empathy-burnout’? Mads Mikkelsen: “Here's a confession: Going through countless films to find the best 10 percent or so can be really hard work, as you're confronted with the state of the world we live in from all angles – the good, the bad, the unexpected. Numbness is a very real threat in our line of work, I think, especially since all your decisions count equally in the end. But you just need to be aware of it to fight it off before it gets the best of you. Another confession: To prevent this from happening, I found that music really has the potential to ‘reset’ me. Strangely, I also found that a lot of my close colleagues and festival friends from around the world tend to share a taste for horror films. You can make of it what you want!” What do you want the average viewer to take away from their experience of your festival? Niklas Engstrøm: “I want people to appreciate the complexity of reality – which is also why we follow up so many of the festival screenings with debates, talks and more. What we hope to create by that is some context. The films are seen in the company of other people and presented in a way that will help them stay with you a bit longer than whatever film you happen to find on your VOD network. A documentary festival should not just be a bunch of films screening, but rather a big massive celebration of reality – and that is what we’re trying to create.
DOX has a vibrant sound and music strand. Are there any gems inside this year’s programme that stand out for you? Adam Thorsmark, head of music and regional activities: “One favourite this year is The Strange Sound Of Happiness, directed by Diego Pascal Panarello. It’s also one that’s not likely to immediately catch people’s eyes in a music doc programme with big names like Grace Jones and M.I.A. But I hope people give this a shot. After travelling around restlessly for years in search of some meaning to his life, the filmmaker Diego returns to his native Sicily, only to be reminded of everything he didn't become or do. But then he discovers the jaw harp! This centuries-old, seemingly unimpressive and second-rate musical instrument shows him the way, and soon he sets off on a poetic and humorous road trip to the frozen mainland of Yakutia in Siberia. He learns about the instrument's rich mythology – that it is actually an amulet that brings happiness, also that the best jaw harp is said to be in outer space with a Russian astronaut! The film zooms in on the physical and auditive qualities of a small instrument, and does it in such a kaleidoscopic way with some great sound and camera work – it’s a really original music documentary.” In terms of viewer experience, it’s claimed to be all about online streaming now. But what about film makers and artists? How important are ‘real world’ festivals like yours for them? Niklas Engstrøm, head of programme department: “With the diversion of the film market towards online, festivals are actually getting more important. Only a few films will end up on the global streaming sites – and while the ordinary distribution of art and niche films is struggling, festivals are a very important vehicle for a film to reach an audience around the world. We have a huge active audience asking great questions. So we try to create an atmosphere where the artists can meet each other – and possible distributors, buyers, financiers – in a nice way that doesn’t lose the personal touch despite the growth of the festival. And then I hope they will take the time to watch some of all the amazing films that all their colleagues present in the festival.”
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RoseLee Goldberg / The New York art scene legend on radical urbanism, uncovering hidden futures, and how sound drives a connective narrative across her culture-defining ÂPerforma biennial of performance art. By Jennifer Lucy Allan
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Sound Matters Issue 08 Performa is deeply connected to New York City, and for three weeks once every two years, New York becomes Performa. The performance art biennial happens across the city, in public spaces, iconic buildings and rediscovered gems, from Times Square to a skatepark in the Lower East side, painters in warehouses and musicians in former churches, Performa knows New York. Its links to the city are something founding director and curator RoseLee Goldberg is deeply invested in. “It's really about a radical urbanism,” she explains over the phone in New York, a few days after the 2017 edition has wrapped. She tells the story of an Australian couple who came to this year’s festival and were astounded by how many places it took them to: Harlem, The Bronx, Central Park, Dumbo and Crown Heights in Brooklyn. “I’ve always felt Performa is very much about exploring the city,” she says, “and we as a festival also explore it, finding new spaces every year.” New spaces discovered include an old bank in Williamsburg, which Goldberg says looked like a Renaissance palace inside, and this year, Harlem parish, a vast former church used for a durational collaboration where painter Julie Mehretu collaborated with musician Jason Moran, the latter using Mehretu’s vast painting like a live score. Goldberg founded Performa in 2004, and she is its beating heart. A crucial figure in the New York art scene since the 70s, when she was a curator at The Kitchen venue, She has worked with a who’s who of the last 40 years of contemporary art and experimental music. She is also an accomplished art historian and educator. In the 80s she wrote the defini tive text Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, which is credited with naming and defining performance art, and is still in print 30 years later. Performance art is able to incorporate a vast array of media and artistic styles, and historically, has always been in bed with avant-garde music, if not cheek by jowl in individual works then sharing the same stages and loft venues. This year sound figured strongly in a number of Performa pieces, from the opening gala, which was a tribute to Yoko Ono, with a performance by Laurie Anderson, through to the closing night, where South African jazz vocalist, Kemang Wa Leluhere was awarded the Malcolm McLaren award. Goldberg is passionate when talking about the importance of sound in the biennial’s commissions. “Sound is in the connective tissue of a lot of these works,” she says, describing how, while Performa commissions pieces from across disciplines, sound is a consideration that often comes up early on in discussions with the artists they work with: “We ask: what is the sound going to be? How can we connect all these parts?”
Designed by Barbara Kruger in collaboration with Project Projects. Courtesy of Performa
Goldberg says she is interested in where sound is going in the next decade, and one of the questions she’s interested in is how technology and design is considering sound. “So much of our work is about uncovering what these different histories and futures are,” Goldberg explains. Her attention to broader social context and history is a defining trait of Performa’s philosophy: Art does not happen in a vacuum. It is something Goldberg is hyper-conscious of too, through both her work as an educator, and from a childhood spent in South Africa. She describes Performa in one sense as being a museum without walls, but it also has no edges. Just days after the closing event, she is, while works are still being taken down, thinking forward to 2019. Her energy is palpable, the excitement feeding into the way Performa operates, which she quite rightly describes as a very nimble institution. “People ask me during the biennial: aren't you exhausted?! and to me it's the most exhilarating time... To see these ideas realised brings such a great sense of excitement.” She sees everything once, sometimes more than once. She says she likes to see the first and the last performance to follow how things change, but quickly adds that she wants to see the middle one too. “It’s not like people have three weeks of rehearsal,” she explains. “They are really feeling it out as they go through the piece, so it grows in time and you're seeing a very fresh work.” Goldberg identifies the big question that drives Performa, from the artists commissioned to curation and direction, as being about how to capture the present and bring important ideas to the fore; and to simultaneously create unforgettable work. “It’s very inspiring going forward,” she says. “We always say ‘this was such a great edition, how do we do this again?”
Bang & Olufsen was an official sponsor of the recent 2017 edition of Performa. performa-arts.org
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By Nate Budzinski Photography — Emil Hartvig
Sound matters
Peter Albrechtsen / The Sound designer on being the ears of the director, creating stories in sound, and staying musical in everything.
Sound Matters Issue 08
“For example, I want the sound of the door to be like ‘squeak’, like funny. And if I do a horror film then it needs to be like really shriek-y and evil… If I do a thriller then I want it to be almost like a vacuum, like you're closing the door and then ‘woosh’… There's a lot of personality even in small sounds.” I’m with Peter Albrechtsen in his Copenhagen sound studio discussing his preferred door sounds. Or, more specifically, the door sounds he prefers to use when working as a sound designer on films. For close to two decades Albrechtsen has worked in varying sonic capacities on numerous films, from blockbusters like The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and
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Sound Matters Issue 08 Dunkirk – which just won two Oscars for its sound editing and mixing – through to Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, art films like Bill Morrison’s The Miners’ Hymns (with the late composer, Jóhann Jóhannsson), and documentaries such as Bill Nye: The Science Guy, and The Queen of Versailles. Take this broad range of capabilities and add in Albrechtsen’s regular sound art projects and radio work, and you’ll probably get that he’s very busy as well as restlessly curious about the storytelling potential of sound and music. “You can do amazing things with sound… in a way that sometimes can be difficult with images because you're so aware of the images.” Albrechtsen paraphrases legendary editor and ‘sound guru’ Walter Murch, who worked on Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and The Conversation (indeed, Murch coined the term sound design), “the visuals knock on the front door and the sound creeps in through the back door.” Part composer, sound recordist, and mixer, the role of a sound designer is a varied and dynamic one. Albrechtsen describes his craft as being “kind of like the ears of the director and the ears of the movie, trying to create the sonic world and the sonic vocabulary of the film.” In practical terms, it means Albrechtsen getting involved in the creative process as soon as he can, “when the script is being written. When I'm doing a documentary then already when the first shooting begins or when the idea maybe even comes up. And I'm trying to be involved that early to be able to make the sound a part of the story and the way that the director approaches the film… how do you set up a scene, will this be in a noisy place, will this be in a quiet place, do the actors need to shout or do they need to whisper?” Growing up, Albrechtsen was exposed to an eclectic mix of music. “We were listening to music all the time, classical music and the Beatles. And [my father] also enjoyed more experimental modern music, like we listened to Morton Feldman or John Cage… I think it woke up my ears from an early age.” He recalls the moment when music opened a door to cinema for him. “I remember my parents watching [Alfred Hitchcock’s] Psycho… I guess I was five or six years old, lying next door trying to sleep but then hearing Bernard Herrmann's score playing through the door…. That's the first big soundtrack moment of my life.” From a young age Albrechtsen learned classical piano and then played in a metal band as a teenager. That playful, improvisatory musical mindset has stuck. “I really like that musical approach to sound. And the more the sound feels like music and the more the music feels like sound, the better it is for me.” In his late teens he attended the European Film College, where he had an epiphany. “I was really, really into movies. And I was really into music… the eight months that I was there I spent most of them in the sound studio, especially at night.” After, he attended the Danish Film School, then he worked as a sound recordist and designer on a growing number of productions. Throughout he’s stayed focused on the storytelling power of sound. “Great directors like Paul Thomas Anderson or Terrence Malick or Andrei Tarkovsky, they are all characterised as amazing visual directors. But these directors are really amazing sonically.” Our visual culture focuses on images and clear delineations, but sound is just as widespread and compelling, though working in subtler, more chaotic ways. “A lot of storytelling speaks to the brain, to the logic of things,” Albrechtsen claims. “Sometimes you really need to bring the sound to a very subjective, abstract, personal place like David Lynch does… it's so subjective, so abstract in a way. But it feels very real. Sound has this amazing ability of crossing the line between what is real and what is unreal, and what is authentic and what is fake.” I wonder why sound is so often used to create a sense of reality, and music regularly used to sign-post emotional mood in films, when sounds are supposedly so unstable and confusing? “You put on a sound and it's totally manipulated, edited, cut into, fitting with the sync of something and then it makes something seem more real. I love doing both fiction films and documentaries. In documentaries there has been so
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Sound Matters Issue 08 much discussion about authenticity… every one of us has our own personal opinion on what objectivity is… I've started talking about emotional authenticity which I find much more interesting.” Albrechtsen regularly collaborates on international projects with musicians and artists outside the movie world – Chris Watson, Jacob Kirkegaard, Jana Winderen, among others – something that has been helped by both advancing sound recording technology, as well as changing creative mindsets. “I feel that the sound world is getting more and more limitless in a way… this idea that you're collaborating across borders, both borders of countries but also borders of categories.” It’s something, Albrechtsen says that feeds into his film sound work. “In the movie world there's all these rules about how to do things and there's all these clichés about how things should sound… Now when the sound world is more open you can also explore things in a different way.” Technology has made film and music more available than ever before, but does that accessibility come at the cost of the viewer’s experience, I ask? “I think good sound will survive, even in the most crazy kind of medium… It was the same way 30 years ago when people were listening with a small, crappy mono speaker... For me it’s made the world more open. I am really all for making the world as open as possible.”
Albrechtsen's dual Bodil and Robert awards for his sound work on the 2015 movie Idealisten.
False Confessions, a doc that Albrechtsen worked on as sound designer, is nominated for the 2018 CPH:DOX F:ACT award. Three more films he worked on are also out this year and screening: Generation Wealth, Bad Circumstances, and The Distant Barking of Dogs. Albrechtsen is featured in the Sound Matters podcast #03 Zombie Movie Piano Music.
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She shouts across a vast mountain valley / Her voice echoes back over and over again / The sounds of the forest surround them / Listen to your world in this present moment. A graphic journey into sound, written and illustrated by Jordan Crane for Sound Matters.
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Comic
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Jordan Crane is a comics creator and artist based in Los Angeles. Crane has created images for book covers, festival posters, podcasts, and much more. His ongoing quarterly comic, Uptight, published by Fantagraphics Books, has won numerous awards. A new book, We Are All Me will be published by TOON Books later in 2018, accompanied by an exhibition. whatthingsdo.com
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Curtis Pierre is a percussionist, and a master of the Brazilian arts of samba and capoeira. He leads Casa Samba in New Orleans, a legendary centre for Brazilian culture that has been running workshops with artists and students for over 30 years, alongside performing at carnivals, parties and other public events. Pierre tells the story of how he discovered Brazilian music and dance, and then devoted his life to it. Photography and interviews by June Canedo.
Photography and interviews — June Canedo
Samba Takes You
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Percussion, Samba, capoeira, and master of more: Casa Samba's Curtis Pierre
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Sound Matters Issue 08
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Sound Matters Issue 08 Curtis Pierre: “It started about 40 years ago. I wanted to get out of the south, I was raised in a country town called St. Charles Parish. There wasn’t much for kids there. I had an infatuation with the outside, I wanted to leave and go somewhere else. The navy gave me that opportunity. I was also a percussionist and later that led me to travel around. Right after the navy I wanted to get back to the music thing. I started collecting vinyl and a friend gave me an album of a Brazilian percussionist called Airto Moreira. That’s when I got interested in Brazilian music. He became my mentor and teacher. I moved to Detroit and this is when I fell in love with the music. […] I found out Airto was going to be playing. I showed up with all my things and he asked me to sit in with him, that was crazy. That’s when things clicked, that’s when my whole life started to make sense. I couldn’t see it at the time but I can when I look back at it. That is the moment I devoted my life to it, to being a percussionist, to music.” “I went where Airto was going. He was in California and so I started asking myself if I had any cousins out there and turns out I had one and I just packed up and left for California. That’s when I met Munyungo Jackson – he turned me on to everything Brazilian. He and a few other people took me in as a samba brother and so I got really into everything – samba, capoeira. After a few years, once I started doing some of these things well, one of my mentors told me that I should consider going back to New Orleans to do my thing there, introduce it to my community and that’s when it clicked. I had never thought about carnival and Mardi Gras being related until that moment. So I went home and started up sam ba and capoeira here […] I don’t know everything but I do know a lot. And I give back a lot, I give back the knowledge I have. I know a lot about Brazil, a lot about the culture. I am a master in samba and capoeira so I’m always just trying to pass on the knowledge.” “I don’t think you can go around looking for one teacher in particular but just get that first person who is available to you. The master teacher isn’t going to accept you at a low level anyway because they aren’t ready to teach you, and sometimes this feels like a bad thing but it’s hard to send an elementary student to college. This is laid out by everyday law, you can’t go into the professional world as a kindergartener. Find someone who is doing that thing that inspires you and learn from them […] The one thing that really grabbed me was when I saw my first parade in 1988. It was marking 500 years of slavery in Brazil. I saw all of these orishas and I’m here in New Orleans looking at Marilyn Monroe, King Kong, Louis Armstrong, there was no black represen tation of nothing. The world is not white, there is more than white people in the world. I want things to be fair. I want it to be an everyday thing, not just a black thing. Samba transcends all of that. Samba drives the passion and the passion drives the samba.”
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Sound Matters Issue 08
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Sound Matters Issue 08
A larger feature on Curtis and Casa Samba will run on journal.beoplay.com in early 2018. Find out more about Claude Pierre and the Casa Samba at casasamba.com. See more of June Canedo's work at junecanedo.com.
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BANG & OLUFSEN Sound design Portable Bluetooth Speakers 1. 2. 3. 4.
This is just a small exhibit of the constellation of products BANG & OLUFSEN designs and produces. To see the full collection, go to bang-olufsen.com
Beoplay A2 Active Beolit 17 Beoplay P2 Beoplay A1
Televisions 5. 6. 7. 8.
Beovision Beovision Beovision Beovision
Horizon Avant Eclipse 14
Speakers 9. Beolab 10. Beolab 11. Beolab 12. Beolab 13. Beolab
50 18 90 19 20
Headphones 14. Beoplay 15. Beoplay 16. Beoplay 17. Beoplay 18. Beoplay 19. Beoplay
H4 H5 H9i E8 H8i E4 ANC
Wireless Speaker Systems 20. Beoplay M3 21. Beoplay M5 22. Beoplay A6 23. Beoplay A9 24. Beosound 1 25. Beosound 2 26. Beosound Shape
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SS 18 Colle ction , In sp ire d by th e oce an be oplay.com/colle ction
