Sound Art Performance by Andrea Lange at Goethe Institut

Andrea Lange at the show.

On January 11, while a fairly large crowd waited patiently for the show to begin, Andrea Lange prepared the last minute details for the sound installation or “circuit bending” as it's often called in the auditorium at the Goethe-Institut Bangladesh. The event was arranged by Goethe-Institut Bangladesh, in collaboration with Britto Arts Trust.
The Berlin-based young sound artiste gave the audience a pulsating gift of sounds that penetrated deep and created visceral effects. The audience listened and gaped at this one song being transformed step by step by Lange's hands busily tapping on glass water bottle, by connecting or disconnecting into tiny self-made electronic devices she brought over from Germany. And this particular song or the raw material for the circuit bending came from a battery-operated toy she had received as a present from a kid in Dhaka.
Sitting in the audience one could see that the hands of the artiste were very busy at work… and all this you could watch on a close up-view projected on the big screen. She sat on one side of the stage with all the sound-transformers and wires laid out in front of her on a table. This close proximity of being able to witness the hands at work added intrigue for the viewer, but also an intimacy formed with the strange sounds that spilled into the physical space…perhaps also with the artiste herself, who sat in semi darkness. It is as if you are witnessing a secret act of doing something unknown, something surprising, and waiting to hear what's next.
At some point, especially at the beginning of the performance, the sound was a bit irritating. As if it was saying, “Hello I am here! I am here to test your patience!” Living in Dhaka, we are particularly aware of gazillion sounds and noises surrounding us, practically all the time -- soothing and polluting our world. Do we need more sound or noise? Our noise tolerance capability threshold is rather high. However, I don't think it was that ability that kept the audience particularly attentive and engaged. Rather it were the abstract sounds that became sometimes quite familiar and then again thumping away into an empty darkness: continually resembling sounds such as a radar, to a mundane humming, to a machine gun firing, to a windy weather outside, to getting lost in a violent traffic jam. Because of the sounds' mysterious and abstract qualities one could only keep the mind as alert as possible during the performance -- the intensity and the occasional release demanded quite a bit from the audience. Perhaps there lies its success; it's some kind of an invasion and something that is not meant to be sweet to the ear.
Playing with sound can be traced back to the Italian futurists, the Dada in World War I era, later the Fluxus activities in Europe and the Happenings in the States. In the 1950s, the American avant garde composer John Cage experimented with sound, silence and instruments; in the1960s Korean-American artiste Nam June Paik was experimenting with new audio-video equipments; my longtime favourite musician and performance artiste Laurie Anderson continues to surprise her audience with innovative sounds, voice and music. Contemporary artiste Ann Hamilton's huge installations are never complete without the collaborations of the sound engineers. Many of the contemporary sound artistes dealing purely with sound bending have a natural concentration in Germany and the Scandinavian countries.
Lange studied Fine Art at the University of the Arts in Berlin, Germany. She does installation art and it was through creating sounds for her installations that she got more and more interested in sound art. Rhythm has been a thing she liked even as a child but communicating emotions with machines is difficult, says the artiste, and as if looking for a new 'hobby' she taught herself the 'circuit bending' process! She likes to present workshops on experimental electronics to youngsters and others. In the coming months she plans to collaborate with an artiste friend from Mexico who explores sound and technology like her, but in very different ways.
Similar to some of her other performances in Europe, in the piece, “Self Resolution” at the Goethe-Institut Bangladesh, she introduced the various individual sounds from the different devices in the beginning and thereafter she began to mix the sounds. How people talk, movements of their heads, or the deep black hair of our people -- these impressions and more of what she's gathered from the few weeks' stay in Dhaka and an electronic language of these impressions were indeed imbedded in the sound collage which she expressed through her machines. She explained, based on the magnetic field and other sound ambience of a particular space, her interactions with the devices do differ and the same exact sound is quite impossible to recreate. A realisation that strikes very interesting to Andrea Lange is that more and more, the machines are really controlling what we do and can do.

The writer is an art historian and a lecturer in Contemporary Art at University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh.