SIEMON ALLEN

Songs for Nella

June 10, 1994

I advertised the event with a poster featuring the famous photo of Luigi Russolo and his Noise Machines, and indeed my interest at that time included study of the Futurists’ Art of Noises.

Nella refers to me. My alter ego, my animas, it is essentially my name in reverse. In 1988, when I was 17, I wrote an article for the school newspaper at Durban High School. The subject of my ‘review’ was a band called Nella Nomeis (after myself). I had subversively made up the band and convinced the then editor of the paper that they had released a new album with the hit single Bang the Toboggan with the Fiddle. I claimed that they had an album that was “much admired” which also included the hits, Bathroom Melodies and Song of Silence.[1]
Songs For Nella, was both a homage to my earlier subversive action, as well as a return to a project that I had originally wanted to launch in SWANS. The idea was a simple one: to create an exhibition solely around a loud noise. As the FLAT at that time was a very chaotic environment, the insane excess of this work was perhaps a sub-conscious reflection of own my sense of sometimes living in a tempest.

For the installation/audio event, I set up two rooms of the FLAT and used a total of nine stereos that I had borrowed from friends. Positioned on the wall, they looked like minimal art objects before they were ‘activated’ in the performance. Before viewers arrived, I turned all of the stereos on, so that they played simultaneously to produce a cacophony of sound. Unlike my original proposal for SWANS, this installation dealt with sensory overload through the collage of sounds rather than one single sound.
For each of the nine I used the following recordings from the last few weeks:

ROOM A

·       CD Player on repeat playing endlessly, the final track Endless from the Kraftwerk album Trans Europe Express.
·       A cassette that I had improvised the previous night of short intermittent burst of 1, 3 or 7 seconds of recordings from various CDs arranged around varying lengths of silence.
·       A similar cassette to the one mentioned above.
·       A double looped segment of my performance with Elmin from the Internotional, which would play continuously.

ROOM B

·       The recording I had made with Horsburgh which included the track Superman.
·       The recording parody of Spanish Train that I had made with Barry.
·       A raw version of Zulu for Medics without my guitar accompaniment.The installation drew varied, but extreme opinions. Frost and Gainer were skeptical, calling it “pure masturbation”. DJ and playwright, Helge Jansen, on the other hand, declared that he was “very impressed”. Martyn, Mansfield and Steven Matthews were also positive, and said that it was “the best sound experience they’d ever had”. Horsburgh remained quiet the whole evening, and when I later spoke to him he said that he had reservations about the piece. In later conversation with Frost we spoke about her reactions and thoughts about the performance:

Allen:               Both you and Carol came to an exhibition of mine called Songs for Nella. And both your responses were the same – that is, it was “pure masturbation.” Why did you think that?
Frost:               Well, wasn’t it a cacophony?
Allen:               It was and it wasn’t.
Frost:               Well, how wasn’t it? It sounded like a cacophony to me.
Allen:               You know, the funny thing is, when we were talking about the vide-tape pieces earlier today, and their sense of sublimity… That is exactly what this ‘noise’ piece was for me. It was sublime insofar as it was a woven web of different sounds. They made a massive fabric that was so overpowering that rendered the work unreadable. The sum of them did not make any particular recognizable sound. And the sum of the total was so overpowering that one went down a path of complete exhilaration.
Frost:               Well that is very interesting. What that says to me is that I can access the sublime through silence, and maybe we are constructed into that, but logically speaking it is also possible to consider the sublime as excess. And I was too horrified by the excess here. Hence I called it masturbation. But look, it may well be that it was masturbation. As an aside, my refusal of the idea of excess, may well have something to do with my own position, because I find that I am actually working with excess at the moment. It may have something to do with the fact that I can work with excess away from South Africa. South Africa was too excessive and I was very aware that I was in a space that I didn’t want to be in. And now I look for it, and that might be an interesting aspect of your and my ‘exile’ from South Africa.
Allen:               In terms of my work, I think that the woven video-tape piece was just as excessive as the audio piece. For me, it was an intense journey into ‘noise’.
Frost:               Ja, I was very excited by your sound works, although at the end, I know they degenerated or they got a bit lost. I was excited, even maybe by the masturbatory one. I mean discursively excited by it.
Allen:               The FLAT, at that time was total chaos. Using Bakhtin’s term, it was a “carnival”. It was crazy, maddening – that’s how I felt at that time. It was very frustrating. Many people were living there, five or six at a time. It was chaos and the work that was produced out of that was chaotic. It would therefor be appropriate for me to make a cacophonous work like Songs for Nella – because that is how I felt at the time.
Frost:               Totally.
Allen:               It was total chaos within our living environment. It was a carnival.
Frost:               In the apartheid era, you could not have enacted that carnival. And I think in the post-apartheid era, you can not enact it either.[1]

For me, it was a euphoric experience - a complete assault on the senses. It drove one right out of ones skin, almost to madness. My intellectual interest lay in exploring the chance possibilities of running many tapes, with erratically recorded content, simultaneously. But the work was emphatically experienced through the senses, an exhilarating example of cultural overload through sensory overload.