The Yuha Archive :: “SONICFOLIO SCORES” Episode 2:: Inner Ongoing — FIELD NOTES
SONICFOLIO SCORES was a collection of graphic scores jointly produced by The Yuha Archive (Toronto), and The Operating System Liminal Lab (New York). From August 2021- August 2022, eleven graphic scores were produced. Each graphic score endeavored to introduce new perspectives in musical notation and interpretation. The full archive can be found HERE
“Inner Ongoing” is the second installment of the SONICFOLIO SCORES Project supported by the Operating System & Liminal Lab. To stay up to date with the Yuha Archive SONICFOLIO Series, follow the project on Soundcloud or the Archive’s website. For the introduction to this series here on the OS’ Medium platform, click here.
A city is a dream. The Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama describes the “city” being a stadium of people’s desires — — the idea that a thousand different lives from myriad experiences and upbringings converge towards a moment of sheltered singularity. Within this shelter does the safety of one’s surroundings fabricate communal performance, providing teleology for a mass anonymity of everyone’s belonging. A “city” is a fascinating medium. Like an art installation, a “city” is an imagined aesthetic fabricated by its people, environment and architecture to underscore a collective reality of the created structure. Every “city” is built with its own temperament, its own narrative and its own signs of life. The stadium becomes a conditional rhetorical mirroring the growing factors of a collaborative dream, yet an individual, and shared phenomena.
I composed the graphic score Inner Ongoing to document the collective desires of an imaginary city, to notate these desires into sonic data, and to converge these desires into a body of sound. The concept draws its inspirations from the idea of treating the city as a collaboratively musical and performing instrument. How does one navigate an instrument that is a cumulative speculation of oneself, the people around the self, and against the self’s “unified surroundings?” Should the performance of any instrument be a completely authentic practice contingent on the planned “self,” or should performance be a practice that embeds a shared spontaneity among a the “self” being anonymous to the public stadium?
The graphic score also features an optional “voice over” component, which suggests creators to utilize a poem of their choice, of any length, to elevate the desires of the imaginary city.
On creating the soundscape to Inner Ongoing — — my collaborator Alinovsky and I ventured with zoom recorders into the depths of our cities to fish for sounds (Toronto, Montreal & Brussels). Eventually, we collaged the sounds together, molded them into new palettes and colors, and set the soundscape on fire. Featured inside the soundscape is a reading by the multimedia poet Vidhu Aggarwal who recites excerpts from her book Daughter Isotope (The Operating System, 2021).
“With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse…” — Italo Calvino
INSTRUCTIONS ON BUILDING INNER ONGOING
Comprising of 16 measures, the sounds within the graphic score are notated in the form of oblong rectangles and displaced throughout the “city’s” geography. The score can be read either side up. Notice that one’s experience of a city’s geography varies between person to person should the piece be done anonymously, and communally.
The duration of each note on the graphic score is relative to one another and at the liberty of the creator(s)
Creators after building the piece can attend to the “Optional” inscription located on the graphic score.
1.
Take the city by your lap and draw a map. Venture towards a city (preferably crowded)
2.
Place yourself into the city and begin exploring the city. Realize that you have now become part of the city. Notice any sounds? This is the sonic scent of the city. Where does the smell take you? Do you smell anything interesting?
Listen. Listen again. Do you desire the city? If so, capture its scent. Repeat this process again until you feel full
CODA
Are you done hunting for sounds? Bring the sounds home and begin making hotpot out of it. Dream of the city. Repeat from the beginning
FIN
Stanford Cheung engages across a variety of creative hubs as a classical pianist, sonic artist, improvisor, and multi-disciplinary poet. From concerto performances with orchestras, poetry recitals, to electronic free-form improvisation for art installations, Cheung has collaborated internationally with a variety of artists and scholars, including Morgan Fisher, Steven J Fowler, Shahzad Ismaily and Nobuo Kubota. Cheung’s commissioned projects have been exhibited or forthcoming at the 43rd Rhubarb Festival (Buddies in Bad Times), Osaka University OCCA, Edinburgh University, Christchurch University, Banff Centre for the Arts, Orpheus Institute, Kitakyushu Centre for Contemporary Arts, Tokyo Poetry Journal, among others. Presently, Cheung is pursuing his Doctoral degree in music at McGill University where his research is dedicated to the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. He runs a multimodal soundscape project called The Yuha Archive.
You can find him here: https://stanfordcheung.com/
The Yuha Archive: archiveyuha.com
Vidhu Aggarwal’s poetry and multimedia practices engage with world-building, video, and graphic media, drawing mythic schemas from popular culture, science, and ancient texts. Her most recent book, Daughter Isotope, is forthcoming from The Operating System: a book of “hybrid” poems that speaks to multiple iterations of “daughter” tropes across generations, national borders, and timescales. Her previous poetry collection, The Trouble with Humpadori (2016), imagined a cosmic mythological space for marginalized transnational subjects. Avatara, a chapbook from Portable @Yo-Yo Labs Press, is situated in a post-apocalyptic gaming world where A.I.’s play at being gods. She has published in the Boston Review, Black Warrior Review, Aster(ix) Journal, Poemelon, and Leonardo, among other journals. She is currently engaging in a “cloud poetics,” as a way of thinking about personal, collective, and digital archives as a collaborate process with comic artists, dancers, and video artists. A Djerassi resident and Kundiman fellow, she teaches at Rollins College.
Alain Lefebvre aka Alinovsky is a sound artist, record producer, and multi-instrumentalist from Belgium. Since 1976, Lefebvre has recorded and performed with American bands Tuxedomoon, Anna Domino, Winstong Tong, Blaine L. Reininger, the English musicians Vini Reilly (The Durutti Column), Anne Clark, Alan Rankine, the French band Antena and the Belgian musician Benjamin Lew among others. In 2007, Lefebvre founded his label Off which up to 2021 has released more than 400 avant-garde recording projects from all over the world.
The Label: www.off-recordlabel.blogspot.com
