On Hearing and Seeing Randall Smith’s Music
by Gary Popovich
|imed_9416-0002|
In Randall Smith’s music I hear mini-histories of
sound, personal histories which resonate with the force of an archetype and
the subtlety of a sound pun for an ear tuned to the thick and seemingly
chaotic sonic environment around him… I hear music unfolding in a soundscape
of dynamic dialectics of power and sensitivity, the delicate and the
explosive, often building strong rhythms, mixing polyrhythmically, erupting
them into the tinkle of tiny sound particles… I’m plunged into a seductive
sound meditation, like a chant, only to be electronically zapped or cut into
a new reality, a disjuncture that puts my senses on edge, makes me question
what I’ve just experienced and makes me question notions of predictability,
even while I know I’m in a tightly constructed world of sound… I’m moved
through a constantly changing soundscape, never returning to the same place,
but through recontextualizations and transformations of the sounds my
imagination guides me through a place it’s been before… the place of the
chant… the chant of voices, mainly the voices of things, like the chant of
curled metal springs, lightbulbs and other objects… as if chanting a song
about their own existence, put to work in a new way, to be enjoyed for
attributes not put into the service of our needs but of our pleasures, and to
draw attention to a new critical listening of their beauty and power… for
instance, in The Face of the Waters sound metaphors
trace trajectories from metaphysical to physical as a light bulb revolves
circularly creating for me an image of an orb of light swirling wavelengths
of energy, a spiritual ecstatic chant that then transforms to the step of a
human rhythm… or the closing door symphony of metal clangs of the latch and
frame vibrations near the end of The Black Museum
which is both metaphor for leading in/out and opening/closing (in this case
leading out of the piece and into the world of our own sound), but also an
opening of my aural and visual senses to a sound image of a door, or
doorness, that I don’t experience in visual representations… in fact I see a
lot when I hear Randall’s music… he creates a space for my imagination where
sound relations inspire visual relations, where humor derives from both sound
and image… the rush of a train flushing into the toilet of sound oblivion…
the roar of jets and war across a landscape… the bells of hope and history…
the elements — fire, water, earth and air — twisting, flanging, bending in
fantastic shapes and rhythms like dancing bodies in a hall of mirrors… or the
more meditative feeling one gets when staring into a fire where the
imagination takes over the senses and finds patterns, codes and messages… I
also see juxtapositions that rattle my senses… like roaring rockets and
singing birds, like a barefoot walker moving over the crackling bare ends of
electronic glass, then zapped into space to hear from far away the history of
all music… I take off with this walker, drawing my ear to see the aura around
sounds and their relations… in fact to see a set of relations that become
social in a meeting of technology and natural environment created
metaphorically through the sound of imagination… where my body is implicated,
his music affecting me viscerally, striking the body, sculpting it with sound
waves, sculpting the store house of images and sounds I already carry, into a
temporary ordered choreography set beside the chaotic and fascinating sound
environment that exists all around us… as if in discourse… I also feel the
curious mind of this choreographer, Randall Smith, a
sound spirit wandering through the sound possibilities he’s constructed…
someone in love with sound, showing and sharing with me a way to love
sound.
Gary Popovich, Toronto [x-93]
|