BRENDON BUSSY & OTHERS
The Listening Chamber – Aural Hygiene
Audio Performance and Recording (Tape 31)
July 8, 1994

 

This audio‑visual performance, Aural Hygiene , was conceived by Brendon Bussy, a viola player and graduate of Pietermaritzburg University. Bussy approached the FLAT to present some experiments with sound in the gallery.[1] He and I planned the sound evening with the idea of working together to create a complex layering of sound. In a sense, we were revisiting techniques from the influential “early work” of Steve Reich. Nina/Paul/Paul/Nina was in many ways my preparation for this collaborative performance.
Bussy played his viola and I played the ‘The Miracle Filter’ (my tape‑deck), ‘jamming’ with our two respective ‘instruments’. He first played a repetitive ‘tune’ live, which I sampled and then re-played on another tape-deck, while he still played live in the room. We then recorded those together and replayed that. This process continued until an excessive amount of layers had nullified the original sound into a cacophonic drone.
Although the evening began with the audience passively watching, at some point in the performance, the noise evoked a remarkable outburst that arose from the viewers - most notably Marytn, who launched into expressive free form verbal jargon. Whereas at the Internotional, we had self-consciously ‘asked’ viewers to perform, here they seemed to respond spontaneously to the barrage of chaotic energized ‘noise’.
After Bussy and I finished, others joined in to experiment with the process. Horsburgh repetitively recorded the phrase “Silver Chameleons” and played it back on a loop into the room as he then dueled with his own recorded voice saying “Duel Squids”.[2] Tione Scholtz, Matoti and Paterson also appear on this recording and this process was used in the creation of work for our performance at Jam& Co: Quasi-Stellar Objects. This was also the first time I played Especially the fact that I don’t have a car to an audience.