Resonance

I. the quality in a sound of being deep, full, and reverberating.

II. the power to evoke enduring images, memories, and emotions.

III. the reinforcement or prolongation of sound by reflection from a surface or by the synchronous vibration of a neighbouring object

Resonance is an all sound-art exhibition that explores the ways sound influences that which surrounds it as well as its ability to evoke mental and emotional reaction. With work from Sunn O))), Holly Herndon, TJ Hertz (AKA Objekt), and Phurpa accumulating in a cyclical exhibition displaying one sound piece at a time.

Sunn O)))

Conceptualised and formed in March 1998 Sunn O))) have been challenging the ways we think about music in the twenty years since. A synthesis of diverse: drone, metal, minimalism/maximalism verging on the edge of pure sonic ecstasy, meditation and trance through the power, beauty and colour of sound pressure emanating from their legendary Sunn O))) backline and their earth shaking tectonic compositions of existence, dedicated to the mysteries of life and the cosmos.

Co-founders Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson have forged paths and connections between the worlds of Metal, contemporary art, drone, new music, jazz and minimalism with startling results while remaining true to the eternal principles of volume, density, elasticity of time, blossoming of saturation viable only to the disciples and fetishists of electric guitar, synthesis, multiple gain stages and some of history's greatest pure valve amplification.

Holly Herndon

Born in the mountains of East Tennessee, she went from singing in church to enrolling in a German exchange program. Adopting Berlin as a second home, she cut her teeth performing in the city’s clubs prior to attending Mills College. She utilized the laptop as “the most intimate instrument,”cultivating live voice processing systems and developing custom vocal patches to construct experimental pieces performed in real-time.

Researching platform politics for her PhD at Stanford, she assembled her 2015 sophomore offering Platform. Telematic performance at Stanford fueled 'DAO' and integrated custom sampling of daily activities online into the songcraft of 'Chorus' and 'Home'. As it sparked commentary on “platform politics”, Platform closed out 2015 by gracing year-end lists from Pitchfork, The Guardian, NME, and The Wire. Primarily composed alongside collaborators online, it was “the first commercially released album to include a track intended to trigger autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR).”

TJ Hertz (AKA Objekt)

TJ was born in Tokyo but raised in Belgium and the U.K. Growing up in Oxford, Hertz’s interest in music started at an early age, and with the usual stints in bands, a love of '90s IDM drew him to electronic music. Studying electronic and information engineering at Oxford University, Hertz would eventually move to Berlin, where a job developing software for Native Instruments would also inform his music production.

His recent work represents an aesthetic departure from previous work’s largely synthetic tonality, drawing from organic source material and natural textures to illustrate perplexing and unfamiliar sceneries in photorealistic detail. In his recent album, Cocoon Crush, Objekt diverges further still from his musical influences to craft the purest manifestation of his own musical personality to date: an intriguing and enigmatic album whose reference points are hard to pin down, in which ghostly synth passages weave through mind-bending, weighty drums, and ASMR-triggering foley collages scrape and sparkle. Through meticulous sculpting, Objekt traces a rich and impressionistic journey through claustrophobia, hope, guilt, anxiety and joy, nested in layers of sonic detail which reward with every listen.

Phurpa

Phurpa began in the middle of the 1990's in Moscow, when a group of artists and musicians led by Alexei Tegin and based at the legendary Fabrique of Cardinal Art commenced their studies of traditional ritual music, drifting away from the field of contemporary electroacoustic and industrial music with the intent to delve deeper into the ancient musical cultures of the ancient Egypt, Iran and Tibet.

The original 2003 lineup of the project that emerged as a result was dubbed Phurpa (one of the five tutelary deities of the Father Tantra in Bon tradition), and all the members have carried on with their research in the field of Bon and Buddhist liturgies up to the present day. Lead by Alexey Tegin since 2003, Phurpa has gained wide recognition and praise for their truly unique performances and eerie rendering of the ritual chants of the pre-Buddhist BON tradition of Tibet. Their musical ensemble is solely based around ritual Tibetan instruments. The main traditional feature of such an ensemble is the mantra chanting, a unique overtone chanting called "rgyud-skad", or the Tantric voice, which is based on the principle of the singer's transmogrification during the so-called "chanting meditation". Phurpa’s rendering of this special use of the most primordial of instruments, the voice.

Curated by Liam McCartan