Andreas Eduardo Frank

Staying with the trouble

 

Andreas Eduardo Frank–on his multimedia project »Hear it coming«

 

Text: Alexey Munipov

What is this project about? How is it built?

 

I’ll start with the title. The title is Hear It Coming, and it originates from a quote from David Bowie: »The future belongs to those who hear it coming.« This quote can be read from many different angles. For me, it was inspiring in the sense that a lot of urgent topics that are currently bothering our society–making us feel anxious and afraid of the future–were already announcing themselves for some time. And I think the calls and voices are getting louder and louder.

 

We are living in a reality where many people are dull and ignore discourse–they are hearing these things but don’t bother to respond. A response that goes outside of their bodies, outside of their heads. And for us, in art, it is very important to ask: how can I be part of society with my art? How can I make a statement? How can I say something with what I’m doing?

 

Basically, Hear It Coming is an attempt to contextualize this within a musical performance–to bring it into the realm of contemporary music and to meet different genres and disciplines within this context. It combines the idea of listening to the room, listening to the future, listening to the past–and positioning yourself within this.

For this project, we worked together with the SWR Experimentalstudio in Freiburg, and we developed a grid of speakers hanging from the ceiling in order to create a room that moves sounds. You, as the audience, can join this room–you can walk through it and change your perspective on what is happening as the music changes its own perspective throughout the whole performance.

 

There are five musicians: Marcus Weiss, Uli Fussenegger, Sarah Maria Sun, Jeanne Larrouturou and me, Andreas Eduardo Frank. There is a scenographer and light designer too. Together we set up this room. I developed the initial idea, and we are collaborating and putting the piece together–so it’s not a defined composition in the traditional sense.

It’s more that I give a structure, a skeleton, and then they bring life to it. We write six songs together. Between those songs, there are interludes. Each song has a different position in the room, so each one has a different spatial setting. And within these songs, the sound also moves differently through the room.

 

So the term »hear it coming« is also physically present–in the movement of sound through the room, through the people performing it, through the speakers amplifying it. But also through the audience, who have the chance to change their position and perspective during the performance–to rotate around the ensemble as the ensemble rotates around itself and through the room.

 

And maybe the core of this project is that it’s a text-based project. It’s a project with a singer, with a voice. I wrote the text over the course of a year, and it’s basically six songs–six fragments–about being present in the world and about inner trouble.

 

It’s an odyssey–a trip about the inner trouble that urges us to be awake, to be listening to what is happening around us. It speaks to the inner urge of impatience that troubles us, but at the same time it drives us to be attentive to what’s happening around us, and to not stop listening–to listen carefully and deeply while going through struggles and troubles, even when it is difficult. It is about resilience and persistence. And I think it is my–and our–way of dealing with what is happening around us in the world at this very moment.

 

What kind of audience movement matters most for how the piece reveals itself? Is it better to stand, walk, change position, stay still?

 

I think it’s very important that everyone makes this decision for themselves. For me, it’s also a study on group dynamics as a listening and performing collective. Everyone has to choose what’s most interesting for them.

 

And it’s very important to me that there is no rule–you can move freely. Through your active participation and changing your perspective on the piece, you’re also sculpting the room. That’s an important experience and part of the piece, because the piece sounds different in every inch of the space. Sounds move through the space, and it can be really interesting to move with the sound–or against it.

 

Imagine you go into a river and it’s streaming, and you feel the stream of the river. It’s a very different experience than, for example, taking a bath. If you lie down in a bathtub, it can be really pleasant. I would compare that more to a concert where you sit and you have a »sweet spot«–let’s say you’re in the middle of the concert hall. This is the best sound you can buy for money.

 

But this room has no sweet spot. That’s the basic idea of the piece–that if you want to have a great sonic experience, you are forced to move, and you are forced to discover your own way through the piece.

 

What does removing that sweet spot change for you aesthetically, but also socially, in the way you imagine people listening together?

 

I think it’s interesting, because on one side–well, I wouldn’t call it the democratization of listening–but it’s a different approach. Most of the time, music is conceptualized for an optimized listening perspective. And as a listener, you become very comfortable: okay, I am the listener, I am the perfect spectator from my perspective. But the moment you have to be active–to do something–it’s a totally different experience. And I think it’s part of the statement: sometimes you also have to do something to get to the top of the mountain–to experience the view.

 

I also find it very exciting to discover things, to never stop. And this is something I’ve never encountered–so I want to do it.

 

Let’s say it’s an exploration: for us as musicians, but at the same time also for the audience.

 

This loudspeaker setup was developed in collaboration with Experimentalstudio. What makes it special, and what does it give you musically that a more standard setup wouldn’t?

 

Basically I approached them with this speaker system idea, and I think they found it really exciting because it’s not something you hear every day. It’s a different way to approach the concert situation because it changes the medium through which the music is transported to the audience.

 

There is a reason why we normally listen in the conventional way–it’s the most effective. But this is not only about passive listening. As I said, it’s a very refreshing, different, activating experience.

 

It also has to do with the idea of being able to move sound through space–so that you can experience a sound that moves. If I am present in the room and the sound comes from one direction, I perceive it from that direction. If it comes from multiple directions, I perceive it from multiple directions. I can hear the reflections, and I can hear what it does with the room.

 

And putting the sound from above, organizing it within a grid–it creates a very interesting, diffuse realm, something you cannot really grasp.

 

This reminds me of being exposed to time. You know it’s there, and you can move forward or backward. But afterwards, you can only observe it. And this system brings me closer to the idea of being able to take a step back and experience a continuum from another dimension.

 

It might sound a bit trippy, but that’s how I see it. I can observe the sound moving through space in a different manner, more objectively, through this system. And it’s really funny, because you have a sound source–like a musician, or sounds created in the room–and then amplify it through the system. You really feel how it spreads in three dimensions.

We also play with the size of the room. If you have a room of 20 meters and you snap your fingers, the sound travels to the other side. With the system, we can manipulate that–we can work against natural phenomena.

 

That’s where it gets really interesting, because it plays with what you already know–with your consciousness, with how you know how to perceive sounds. We’ve developed effects where you amplify a sound, but the natural phenomenon of how sound travels through time and space is slightly off. Sometimes everything comes out of all the speakers at the same time–then you don’t have the feeling of distance anymore.

 

But sometimes we manipulate distance through delays, so the sound travels longer than usual from one point to another. Or it gets repeated, and then it shrinks together–in a way you might know from a Doppler effect or something like that. This is a very interesting aspect of the piece. On one hand, it has a philosophical and aesthetic approach, but on the other, it incorporates a lot of phenomena in music. It’s like a lab to experiment with time and sound.

 

The program describes the result as »acoustic beings« and »sound sculptures.« When did you first begin thinking of sound in these creature-like terms, rather than in more technical language like diffusion or spatialization?

I don’t want to see it as a technical fetish. That kind of thinking erases the human part of it. It objectifies what we are doing. And that’s not how I feel. I thought: I need to do something that I can feel, because I perceive art this way–I feel, and it does something to me.

 

It’s not an exercise. It’s a reality. It is being.

 

And that’s a big difference in thinking about art, about relationships, about the people who are with you on stage or who share the same room and moment with you. Everything else would just be a technical exercise.

 

In a setup like this, how do you think about authorship? Do you still feel like a composer in the classical sense, or more like someone designing conditions in which something else can emerge?

 

That’s an interesting question. When does authorship begin and when does it end? I think this is an experience you can’t easily replicate, because it’s a very special combination of people. The musicians involved have partly shaped the contemporary music scene for many years. They’ve played countless premieres and are very experienced in what they do.

When it comes to authorship, it’s a funny thing. We write songs together. We met and jammed–I jammed on the modular synthesizer, Uli on the contrabass, Markus was on saxophone, Marius as well, Sarah with her voice, and Jeanne on percussion. I had first sessions with each musician in order to connect with them.

 

I compose a lot of music–hours of music–for other people, and that can still be very interesting. But that was not the aim for this piece. The aim was to develop something that is like a breathing organism. An organism of a room, an organism of an entity–a sonic entity.

 

To become this sonic entity, it was important to go through certain steps. Even before starting, I was talking to musicians, and we were asking: what do we want? Do we want a score, or should we just play? First, we improvised together. Then we talked about what we were going to do. Playing with them was so intense that I didn’t think I could compose something that would have better results if I wrote it all out.

 

So I took information from the improvisations and created a skeleton–shaped a form, gave certain harmonies, allowed certain freedoms, fixed certain structures as a composer would, and wrote them down. At the same time, I left other structures open for improvisation moments. Writing the text already provides structure to the whole piece–because once you have the text, you have to deal with it. Do you use repetition? Do you phrase it in a line? Through this, there’s already a kind of composition. But in the end, I also take a lot of information that the musicians give me–sounds that come out of their hands, or even reflexes, things they’ve internalized over many years.

 

So, in this case, it contains a lot of elements from performance practices that I learned through performance art, which I then translated back into music.

 

The result is really interesting. It will never be the same performance. Every time we do it, it will be slightly different, but the form and structure remain the same. For instance, now I have a sound that will travel in this direction, and here I’ll have a sound projected above me while the others are traveling around somewhere else. It’s more like creating an ecosystem that you then move through.

 

And there is also a different light setting for each song and each transition. I wanted to create something that is kind of simple, but at the same time very complex. It’s a bit like life.

 

Since the focus here is this intense collective listening situation–what does »collective« mean for you in this context? Is it more about shared responsibility? Shared vulnerability? Or just shared attention?

 

I think what you all share, as an audience, is the moment of being exposed to a situation that is very different. What you share is a new experience. The idea is to create this new experience and then see what comes out of it.

 

It’s also an experiment. I’m not expecting the audience to react in a specific way. What each person will individually experience or share–that’s not something I want to define.

I want to define a space where everyone can move freely and listen freely. What you experience, as an audience, is another form of collective listening. And it’s not just that–it’s also collective observing of others. You have a very different connection to another audience member in a performance where you have to change your perspective, compared to when you’re sitting in a room where all the seats face one direction. You can see your fellow audience members and observe how they are reacting in a very different way.

 

I recently watched a concert from behind the stage and could see the audience’s faces during the performance. It was a really intense piano piece–extremely virtuosic, beautifully executed–and I could see the audience completely absorbed. Every accent in the music would slightly change their expressions. That was a »wow« moment for me.

And I think that kind of bonding experience can be really powerful–though of course it could also be a bad experience. That’s why in this piece, we’re also offering some spaces a little outside the performance area where people can go to chill–to zone out a bit, and then come back. We’ll see what comes out of it.

 

I’ve heard that Donna Haraway is an important reference point for you. Haraway writes that knowledge is always situated–there’s no »view from nowhere«. Do you think of each listening position in this room as someone’s perspective or view? Could we speak of the piece as a composition for a multiplicity of listening truths?

 

Yeah, I like this idea. I was really intrigued by Haraway’s writing at first, and then I moved away from it a bit. But I still really like the core ideas–they remain very strong for me. From Haraway I took the idea of the connection between human and sound–and human and room.

 

She often talks about interspecies connections, and I wanted to apply that term to another kind of experience: how I can change my sensitivity toward other listeners, toward the players, toward the rooms that are vibrating with us, toward time–time in front of us and behind us–in relation to the idea of Hear It Coming.

 

One really important concept is the idea of staying with the trouble [see »Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene« (2016) by Donna Haraway–AM]. Staying with the trouble in order to stay awake–to stay listening to our surroundings, and to position yourself–politically, but also physically and bodily–in this world. That is a core message for me, and a big reference point I’ve taken from her.

 

I wasn’t influenced by stuff like pigeons with Arduinos on their backs, tracking and mapping ecosystems or things like that. I couldn’t really connect to that. But the core idea was very important to me.

 

I also experienced some land art exhibitions that really rooted me deeply in nature. I found it interesting–for example, the idea of taking the movements of animals, like bees, and applying them to spatialization. How can a sound move through the room like a butterfly, or like a bee, or a dragonfly? Or how can I make music that has something in it that sounds more like an insect, or something similar? In that kind of thinking, Haraway definitely influenced me and the outcome of this work.

 

So–why songs? Why do you need songs in this post-human narrative? What can the song form do that other forms could not?

 

I’m getting back more and more to the song form. On the one hand, we have voice. And I have a strong background in band music–before I started doing contemporary music or studying classical music professionally, I was playing in bands. For me, that’s the most natural way of making music together–with people who’ve played an infinite amount of composed, complex music.

 

If I don’t write out every note, how can we still create something together? We need to rehearse together. And thinking in songs, band processes helped me a lot. It also gives a very clear structure.

 

The program note also mentioned »recalibration of the senses«. What, in your view, most needs recalibrating?

 

Ha! There are so many things that, in my opinion, need recalibration.

 

For me it recalibrates how I make a statement. How I make art that thinks differently. Maybe it recalibrates the view of what contemporary music can be–hopefully.

 

I’ve been thinking, feeling, and experiencing a lot of recalibration within myself–especially in retrospect. And I think that’s very important. It also connects to this idea of staying with the trouble. Not ignoring it or giving myself up to fear, but finding solutions, better ways of doing things, living, creating.

 

Recalibration also applies to relationships–especially listening relationships.

 

There’s so much art out there. So many people doing music and creating things all the time. Through my work, I get to hear a lot of different things. And sometimes I’m missing the feeling of people really enjoying what they’re doing.

 

The idea of working with songs helped me rediscover the joy that I had been missing for a while.

 

Do you think the piece could be recorded? Because works like this often resist documentation…

 

Some of the songs are already done, and I think they work quite well in a recorded format. But we’ll end up with very different versions of the piece. The setting we’re working with now will force us to change the music.

 

And of course, if we wanted to perform this project in another setting–a more frontal setup, without the choreography, lights, and the poetic, theatrical, performative aspects–I think that’s possible too. But we would need to adapt it. It’s not impossible. But it’s not the same piece.

 

I can enjoy a piano rendition if it’s well done and well executed–but it’s still not the same as going to an opera and experiencing the full staging.

 

We will repeat the piece in Basel, and in London in November. It’s also a very different room, but we’ll have the same speaker setup. It will be a bit more intimate because the room is smaller, but maybe also more condensed and concentrated because of that.

 

Of course, thinking of other venues or possibilities to repeat the piece would mean adapting it. But I’d be very happy to adapt things. Otherwise the piece doesn’t get played again.

Imagine you create a great piece–best case, you do something really strong–and then it never gets played again. That would be very sad.

 

That’s the reality of contemporary music. A lot of works are performed once… and that’s it.

 

I’ve heard so many pieces that were super great and never got played again. And then you hear pieces that, from a subjective perspective, you think, »Yeah, it’s good music, but maybe not my thing«–and those get played all the time.

 

It doesn’t always have to do with quality. The world of contemporary music, of theater, of performing arts works in a different way. It relies much more on human interaction, on decisions being made. It’s a complex system that begins with education–with people writing books about music, turning every thought into theory, and constructing this big brain around it.

 

And in some way, we are all part of that brain.

 

How would you describe this piece to someone who doesn’t know anything about contemporary music? Why is it worth listening to?

 

I hope it’s a fun experience.

 

For someone who has never listened to contemporary music, it’s not a piece with a high entry barrier in terms of listening or knowledge. And it’s also a piece where you can meet musicians who have a lot of experience performing highly complex music–but who make it sound very easy.

 

So I think it can be a very pleasant thing. It will definitely be freaky and trippy–that’s for sure. But it’s not a piece that’s completely outside of our world. It’s something many people can connect to.