On Hearing and Seeing Randall Smith’s
Music
by Gary Popovich
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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]
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