Californian artist Steve Roden uses art and design objects to make music under the moniker of "in between noise". In his recent series of three-inch CDs he evokes an abstract, Miles-ish mood from a Charles Eames leg splint, or rubs a George Nelson lamp to produce a genie that is closer to Boulez than Robin Williams. Roden's latest mini-CD squeezes 20 minutes of electronica from a Knoll "Diamond" chair, the 50s design classic by Harry Bertoia.
Friday evening's event, the last in a series for the Hayward's Sonic Boom exhibition, focused on Bertoia's "sound sculpture" and closed with an eccentric talk and slide show by Val, the sculptor's son. Bertoia Jr noted that all metal sculptures have sound, but that what his father found interesting was "the development of harmonious sound". Many of Bertoia's works can be played as percussion instruments, though they also make pleasing noises when the wind blows, or when a studio cat picks its way across their coral-like mass.
For the first half Roden "performed" with the sounds of a small Bertoia sculpture, a metal maquette with rods and knobs like a 50s hat rack. Two television monitors displayed continuous video loops of the metal object: one showed his hands striking the sculpture's prongs while the other showed him bowing the rods with horsehair. He processed and mixed the sounds of these loops through a slowly evolving soundscape in which echo and pitch shift pedals changed the speed, density and timbre of the quiet metallic noises.
The unspoken thesis, unproved by either event or show, is that an aesthetically pleasing visual object should produce a correspondingly beautiful sound. "What's it like?" asked a gallery attendee outside the door. "Electronic pigeon noises," replied his departing friend. In the context of Sonic Boom, where you can flit from sound to sound like scanning pictures at an exhibition, the polite conventions of avant-garde performance were difficult to observe. Roden's sound levels were sometimes outgunned by the refrigeration unit in the cafe chill counter. The constant coming and going, doors swinging open to admit a blast of MOR balladry from Philip Jeck's distressed Dansette installation, made the event seem more like a pub gig than a cool soirée. Despite the Knoll connection, this wasn't furniture music, but Roden's modest half-hour piece, with its coherent sound palette and structure, survived.
