XXI Subtropics Experimental Biennial of Music & Sound Arts will continue during Wynwood’s Second Saturday Art Walk, outdoors, at Dorsch Gallery (151 NW 24 Street) from 6-10PM on March 12, 2011, with another mesmerizing performative sound environment entitled WALK by Frozen Music, featuring the participation of Subtropics special guest artist, pioneering electronic music composer David Behrman.
THE SOUND PRACTICE OF FROZEN MUSIC
by David Dunn
Frozen Music is less an ensemble than a confluence of strategies for sonically activating space. We simply trust each other to approach this task in our own individual manner and with our own choice of tools. These can vary with every event. Rene and Gustavo tend to use prerecorded audio samples and extracted resonances from each new performance site. They may also amplify small sounds made from an assortment of objects, either brought to the location or borrowed from the site. I often use custom designed analog circuits along with amplified live signals from a variety of transducers placed at the location.
We do not interact with each other in the traditional sense of a free improvisation but create a collective fabric that is infinitely variable and to which we all remain attentive. Shifting our actions in response to this dense cloud of sound, we often cannot recognize our individual actions or audio streams within the emergent texture and simply make incremental changes so as to keep the torrent of sound alive.
Our preference is to engage within a specific place for extended time periods, several hours if possible. This gives us a sufficient duration to really explore the unique properties of a site; the otherwise hidden sound sources, resonances, and auditory history. Sometimes this has been a purely human dynamic where architecture is interrogated with sound to yield its unconscious potential but at other times the non-human world has chosen to respond with extended dialogues between our electronic world and a variety of insects, birds, and amphibians; all becoming a foreground feature.
Always we are less concerned with satisfying the expectations of a human audience than with a pure exploration of the world through sound. Whoever or whatever passes through our web, or stops to listen, is welcome to make use of the sounds in whatever manner may please or excite them.