“When I make my work, I am making what I hope to be something functional—a space for individual contemplation and reflection. I want my art to be useful…when you come into my pieces, it's not an intellectual experience, it's a physical experience. It's coming at your body.”
—Bill Viola, installation artist
“My hope is that the music creates a strange, beautiful, overwhelming—sometimes even frightening—landscape, and invites you to get lost in it.”
—John Luther Adams, composer
With Siavash Amini at Kunstraum Walcheturm, Zürich, September 2018.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve approached sound from a utilitarian perspective. When I first began to compose and record, it was for an audience of one, and for a solitary purpose: to help me sleep. It was about engineering a rhythmic progression of sounds that produced this very specific physical response in me. It was about learning to listen so deeply that I couldn’t help but lose consciousness. And while I no longer have trouble with insomnia, my interest still lies in the power of sound to evoke a physical response.
These days, when I reach for my cello, it’s usually not because I want to play it. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the physical act of playing; but I’m more interested in using it to generate a tone, a color, a sound that moves me.
I remember the first time music moved me. I was eleven years old and just returned from the public library with records in hand. Surrounded by 1970s panelling and shag carpet, leaning back in my father’s beat-up naugahyde recliner, the first notes of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition washed over me. By the end of the double LP—the brass, the tympani exploding from our cheap home speakers—I was in tears. At that moment in time, The Great Gate of Kiev had transported me to another place, or to no place, or to every place.
So when I make music, I’m exploring. Searching for that state of being, enveloped in the expanse, within both aural saturation and silence. Empowering a simple sound to evoke another time and place, to elicit an emotional physicality, to embody memories and imagination.