UVA’s Matt Clark on their “monument to nature past set in the not too remote future”.
Polyphony, proving now at 180 Studios as part of the Synchronicity exhibit, is United Visual Artists’ 2nd cooperation with bioacoustician Bernie Krause after The Great Animal Orchestra (2016), a work that set recordings of animals in their natural environments to to visuals of vibrant spectrogram landscapes portraying the environments in which they live.
Polyphony, like The Great Animal Orchestra, highlights the value of preserving biodiversity, immersing the listener in a spatialised soundscape that takes field recordings from the Dzanga-Sangha Special Reserve in the Central African Republic, taped by Krause and ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno.
These field recordings are consistedof of animal sounds alongwith conventional instruments and balanced patterns native to the regional Baka people, which engage in a call-and-response inbetween natural and cultural sounds – all of which are interrupted and silenced by the noise of other human activity.
In this video, Clark speaks to us about the immediate styles behind Polyphony. Synchronicity is open upuntil 30 December, 2023 at London’s 180 Studios and includes brand-new works consistingof Ensemble, Chromatic and Edge of Chaos.
UVA: Synchronicity
180 Studios
180 The Strand, London, WC2R 1EA
12 Oct