Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) is a pioneering abstract painter. She requested her work not be publicly showcased until twenty years after her death. This gulf in exposure combined with a bias toward male artists, had left her utterly overshadowed until an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1986.
On "The Swan":
"The Swan is a group of 24 oil on canvases made between 1914 and 1915. Detailed and programmatic in their sequencing, these paintings rely on both widely recognized symbolism and Hilma af Klint’s own idiosyncratic forms and symbols. In alchemy, the swan represents the union of opposites necessary for the creation of what is known as the philosopher’s stone, a substance believed to be capable of turning base metals into gold. Here, af Klint’s black-and-white palette underscores the dualities of light and dark, male and female, life and death." - The Guggenheim/Tracey Bashkoff
My interpretation:
Abstract artwork is necessarily unrepresentative of the physical world. Maybe ironically (?) my approach was to create sonic representations of the disparate elements of this painting. The tiny triangle is represented by the three pure tones you hear in the beginning. This is followed by a pulsating high frequency smattering representing the first circle around the triangle. That goes on for a moment, increases in complexity, fades, and is overlapped with a new lower frequency pulsating texture representing the second circle. Next the largest circle is expressed through a very slow and low frequency sound which has a breathy and lumbering quality. Lastly, I finish with a dramatic transition to a white noise wash representing the red backdrop. Each circle has a frequency band and rhythm matching its size, so the larger the circle is, the lower it sounds and slower it moves. During the composition and recording process I was also thinking about the idea of creation coming from something simple and centrally located. The philosopher's stone, yes, but also the creation of the universe and how it likely started with high frenetic energy at a single point (fast moving high frequency sound) which then dispersed and cooled down over billions of years (slow moving, low frequency sound).
Recording and Editing techniques:
Most of these sounds were recorded with my Zoom H6 recorder. I wanted to give a concentric feeling to the sounds, so I either circumnavigated the microphones with objects or I spun my body in place while holding the microphones in various indoor and outdoor environments (awkward in public, but funny). I didn't overthink the harmonic content of the soundscape and just chose harmonies which felt "round". I also wanted to capture the equality of the three sides of the triangle, so I kept those three notes close to each other. I used the warp function in ableton live to stretch out sounds and/or re-pitch them, adding a granular quality. I also used multiband dynamic processing to laser focus on certain frequencies and bring them out. I used the soothe2 plugin by okesound to carve out harsh resonances where necessary. I also used s1 by waves to increase the stereo image of the overall track. X noise by waves was useful after OTT to turn my finger going across a metal railing into a noiseless, piercing metallic sound for the transition into the last white noise section of the soundscape. I also used ableton live's resonators plugin heavily to add pitches to sounds which were originally without identifiable tones. Lots of automation throughout.
15 окт 2024
