last post (wind wound)

Images from Susan Philipsz' poignant and exquisitely realised sound work War Damaged Musical Instruments, installed at Tate Britain, London, 2015. The installation's extraordinary sonic material and its affective spatialisation of course wholly resist photographic documentation of this kind ...

The three photographs of damaged instruments included above (from the Berlin Museum), two bugles and a silvered brass alto saxophone salvaged from the Alte Munz bunker in Berlin in 1945, are all used in the work. Other instruments include a bugle from the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, found beside the body of a 14-year-old drummer boy; the 'Balaclava Bugle', used to sound the Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854; a coronet played in the Boer War, 1880; a cavalry trumpet salvaged from the wreck of the SS Pomeranian, torpedoed off Portland Bill in 1918; and a tuba recovered from German trenches in 1915.

The Tate's web page about Philipsz' work offers the following contexts:

"War Damaged Musical Instruments features fourteen recordings of British and German brass and wind instruments damaged in conflicts over the last 200 years.

The notes recorded are based on the tones of the military bugle call ‘The Last Post’, but the tune is fragmented to such an extent that it is almost unrecognisable. The tune signaled to lost and wounded soldiers that it was safe to return to base and is used today as a final farewell in military funerals and Remembrance ceremonies.

The artist has worked with the architecture of the space devising a sequence of sounds that travel the length of the Duveen galleries. Philipsz explains:

I am less interested in creating music than to see what sounds these instruments are still capable of, even if that sound is just the breath of the player as he or she exhales through the battered instrument. All the recordings have a strong human presence."

For a review by Adrian Searle in the Guardian, see here 

For a pdf that maps the location of the megaphone-like speakers (in part structurally similar to wind instruments), see here

vocal portraits

Juha Valkeapää (Finland), Äänimuotokuvia
 

Inside the Pirkko hair salon, everyday life and work proceed as usual. A chirpy conversation between a hairdresser and a customer, interspersed with quiet laughter, bursts of hairdryer, the muffled clinks and snips of the tools of the trade. A couple of other customers wait their turn, flicking through magazines. On the walls, glossy posters of models advertising products and ‘looks’. This space is also shared with a group of festival-goers silently queuing for another kind of attention to and re-writing of identity. We watch and listen as Finnish voice and performance artist Juha Valkeapää elaborates ‘vocal portraits’ for one person at a time, in a return to the same space he first occupied eight years earlier as part of ANTI 2003.

As each person is invited to sit in a barber’s chair in front of a mirror in one corner of the room, Juha hands them a comfortable black blindfold that temporarily suspends sight and amplifies hearing and internal response. Three pulses of the foot pump at the base of the chair raise the person’s feet slightly off the ground, and then Juha begins to voice a sonic representation, an improvised auditory landscape triggered by … what? The clothing, hair and energetic field of each person? An intuited auratic flavour or feel? As each portrait unfolds, Juha continually changes his spatial relations to the ‘subject’, moving into intimate proximity, then slowly retreating to a greater distance, then close again to the other ear. Throughout this pedestrian choreography – a translated echo of the hairdresser’s own small ‘dance’ - his voice and breath morph dynamically and inventively. Over time they assume a tactile quality, sculpting space, sound and the contours of a self-in-play. The quality of Juha’s conviction and attention to each person remains generous and intricate throughout, his engagement immersive and physically implicated. 

From the perspective of a spectator witnessing these performances from the edge of the room, Juha seems consumed and transformed in the voicing - and yet he remains porous to the sounds and rhythms of these everyday surroundings. He is able, with great fluidity and humour, to dip in to and out of a kind of open dialogue with other voices, the ambient sounds of hairdryer, water, scissors, kettle, cameras, without ever seeming caught by them. As the blindfolded subject of the portrait, suspended in the eye of this singularly unthreatening and virtuosic soundscape, one reads the associative complexity and playfulness of Juha’s vocal composition as the gift of a ‘song of oneself’: the sounding of a personal topography of what one perhaps gives off, contains, or could be. Then, after a final pause and a hydraulic release of the foot pump that frames the performance’s ending like a sigh, one returns gently to the ground - and to sight, the mirror, one’s own reflected image, Juha’s smiling acknowledgement, the audience, the salon, and an everyday that is somehow slightly lighter and brighter.

* Children’s Choice Awards: ‘Most Interesting’, ‘Most Confusing’