| { Christopher Gladwin :Press Gubbins } |
Last Chance To See: Paramusical Sound Studies For Videoby ROB HAYNES - Sunday, September 21, 2008 Sound artist Christopher Gladwin devotes a serious amount of mental energy to generating unusual sounds from everyday objects. Ten television sets show him engaged in such unlikely pursuits as spinning a rusted butter churn in a stairwell, attaching an electronic feedback loop to a plate of mashed potato and repeatedly opening and closing a badly oiled door. Watching the artist's finger prodding a raw sausage against the innards of a radio to produce a series of harsh electronic squawks, it can be concluded that the work straddles the line between inspiration and eccentricity. Though not exactly the kind of thing you would normally listen to, the exhibition has a strong streak of humour and continues in the subversive art tradition epitomised by Marcel Duchamp. Well worth a prod. |
Five questions for Christopher Gladwinby ROB HAYNES - Sunday, September 14, 2008 Christopher Gladwin is a sound artist and experimental musician, whose work explores our perception of noise by generating amplified sound from everyday or unusual objects. His latest exhibition, Paramusical Sound Studies With Video, will be embellished by a live performance at Islington Mill on Saturday. How would you describe your work? Primarily I'm a sound artist, although in the exhibition there's some video work as well. I'm interested in the aesthetics of noise, and exploring a palette of sounds you wouldn't normally want to listen to because they're quite unpleasant. Can you give an example? In the exhibition, there's the innards of a transistor radio connected to a sausage. It produces a kind of squealing, wailing noise, and then something that sounds like sausages being fried. It's a strategy of dysfunction, really, and there's absurdist, surreal humour in there as well. How important is humour in your work? Well, you can't play a door or an amplified bowl of couscous and be very serious. I'm not trying to create something dark. I'm trying to invert that. It's not an ironic thing, I have a genuine interest in these sounds. What happens at your live performances? I did the sausage-radio thing in front of a small audience recently. It degenerated into anarchy. People laughed a lot. The sausage wouldn't work, so I started squeezing sausage meat over the circuit board and putting it on people, and I also managed to electrocute myself off a nine-volt battery. What do you want to communicate to your audience? I'd like people to go away and become aware of this world of sound, of how sounds that you initially thought were annoying are actually really interesting. Once you open that door, you can't really close it. You start listening to your fridge, or the rattle of your boiler. I find those sorts of things really beautiful. |
Santiago 's Dead Wasp, Blog Review Tonight santiago was with friends Helen and Gary at Islington Mill in Salford for “…the body without organs whose ears are filled with noise…” , part of Christopher Gladwin's MA show. Also featured were Helmut Lemke , Ben Gwilliam , Skeksi , North Mancs Beds and Espen Jensen (can't bring up his page http://www.espenjensen.com/ so the other link will have to do. As friends were tired and had to get up early, and since santiago is both very shy and not feeling too good we left after only seeing Christopher Gladwin, Helmut Lemke and Ben Gwilliam. Christopher Gladwin made a combination of electronic and acoustic noises. He started out by using one of his 'squealers' to start the audience participating in making a piercing, 3-dimensional noise rubbing polystyrene on damp glass. Like all superficially penetrating or abrasive sounds, when it's at high volume, and/or everywhere around you, it stops being so difficult and becomes an environment instead. When the squealer signalled the end of that part of the performance he moved on to generation of electronic sounds. Unfortunately my electronics is very poor, and even after checking out his website I'm not entirely certain how the effects were achieved. It appeared to be a version of the circuit bending on his website, only using a potato instead of a sausage. But it wasn't so simple as using a potato to make a circuit across the innards of a radio, the set up also appeared to be reactive to light, and built up some punishing noise to match the strobing. Finally some metal tone generators were set going. These can be seen and heard on the website and myspace, but a hollow metal base has a vertical bar affixed, with a wire stretched between the top of the bar and the middle of the base. Fixed to the wires are electric razors which oscillate and make the apparatus generate noise. Clips can be fixed to the wires to alter the tones. Overall it was closer perhaps to performance art than what you might call a music performance, and all the better for it... |