The world of radio constitutes an easily accessible cultural medium in which popular music, theme shows, advertising and public information, to name a few, can be found around the clock. Inspired by the low-tech and intimate sound of radio broadcasting, Zone radio explores this medium by offering a unique auditory experience. The range modulations, ruptures and storyline shifts created by Marjolaine Bourdua give the soundtrack a ghostly, eerie dimension that brings to mind the medium's slow fade from the western world. This willful jumble evokes cryptic messages that make the sounds' status evolve from simple distraction to enigmatic abstraction. The self-referential quality of some of the tones makes an easy toss towards concrete music and brings the ensemble under the larger conceptual frame of sound art. The live recordings of nightclub surroundings and certain common elements of foley brings forth a recognition game based on the tension between the banality of our relationship to the broadcast ambiance and our sometimes less accessible relation to sound exploration. This continuous movement between invented or detoured motifs, to which are added temporally distancing maneuvers (silences, long fade-outs, out-of-context sound clips, irruptions), brings forth a turnabout on the medium and a pondering of its predominantly pop culture.
|
Besides the work in sound construction and montage, the project comprises a performance approach in which Marjolaine Bourdua makes use of one of the topmost devices in radio transmission: voice. As the artist's path is anchored in the study of sounds and their various listening situations, the use of speech and song becomes in a way inherent to the whole process. In Zone radio, short vocal periods contribute to pull the auditor into an interrupted journey by addressing him directly and starting up narratives that are continuously forestalled. Sensory perception is called upon by the associative power of popular music rhythms, of which the artist promotes its redundant, hypnotic features, summoning festive resonances of events past. The musical sequences are brief, the exploratory process steps in to pursue the dialogue between the conceptual and the perceptual. By attempting to bypass the stereotypes of pop culture, Marjolaine Bourdua provokes measured oscillations between mass culture and learned culture, thus feeding the question of eclecticism in sound art.
Aseman Sabet
|
