By Radar Works
Mechanical Air ~
In Search of awe
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Mechanical Air – A Note on a Hyper ~ Graphic Score:
Michael Mayhew
Mechanical Air came about because of a concern we share about what we are doing to the planet and so to ourselves.
This starting point for Mechanical Air was simple, the singular moment of photographing the earth from space whilst Apollo 8 went to explore the moon in 1968 for the later moon landing in 1969 seemed to open up a moment where we were enabled to see ourselves and our location afresh. This moment came with a singular image that seemingly captivated and galvanized political and social consciousness. We had seen ourselves in real time and had a record of it.
We were fragile, beautiful, and isolated within a “vastness of space”.
The moment was awe-inspiring: we had left the surface of the planet, gone beyond the atmosphere, and altered our perception of our existence.
Mechanical Air aims to do just that – to understand the world we live in and our position as a species on a planet that is suffering directly from the human species’ impact upon it.
Although we know this we still march on regardless of ‘known facts’ and it is as if we have arrived into what in physics is called a “landscape problem’.
Although I in no way prescribe that I know anything about physics or the ‘landscape problem’ within string theory I was attracted to the term ‘landscape problem’.
It opened up another way of seeing where I was standing metaphorically.
Has everything been discovered?
Is everything known?
Are we simply now re-playing old formats or is there something other to discover?
Are we consumed with future and clogged down with past?
What are we attempting to perceive and how are we translating our perceptions?
Has art got a place in a moment of transformation?
The Apollo missions were an act of freedom to defy the shackles of gravity.
To implement this act ‘air’ production had to be mechanically produced / industrialized.
We witnessed the planet but had to produce ‘mechanical air’ - a contradiction in terms.
I found this cruelly amusing and contemplated Gavin Osborn dressed as an astronaut.
Gavin lives with his breath, punctuating, manipulating, shaping air through the use of a mechanical instrument, the flute.
In 2012 I went in search of awe believing that my fields of perception had become cluttered with the rectangular mass of buildings, screens, doors, windows – my ears reverberated to mechanical anthems.
Had I become brutally industrialized?
‘People act as if the earth is flat, when in reality it is a spherical and extremely finite and until we learn to treat it as a finite thing we will never get civilization right.’
Buckminster Fuller
This collaborative commission from Gavin Osborn set out to discover new languages for musical notation and composition, to challenge the flute and flautist with a combination of ideas taking both into a landscape of multiple forms, to un-restrict ourselves from the apparent gravity of the mechanical industrial mindset – to re - M A P destinies.
The Hyper ~ Graphic Score is a multidimensional working document, a directional ‘flight programme’ of ideas, a multi-lingual notational & compositional system that encourages negotiation, dialogue and creative discourse – in the making of Music Art Performance – M A P
It asks you to ask questions and not conform, to ask questions and not to fall into habitual patterns of complacency.
It is collaborative in its ideal.
The Apollo 8 astronauts knew were they were going but did not know what they would find.
They knew of a direction but did not know if they would get there or even if they would return.
It was a landscape of knowns riddled with unknowns.
We have taken this sense of adventure into the process of Mechanical Air – knowing that not knowing is not a form of ignorance but a key capacity to discover afresh.
The electronic composition for this work has been extensively gathered from field recordings, from a lecture by Robert Wilson, a flight path outside Luton Airport at dawn, a ferry journey over the Irish Sea, escalators, pedestrian crossings, car horns, air conditioning, computer fans, 16 mm and slide projectors, high speed trains, a drone circling the city of Manchester, the distant recorded voices of the Apollo 8 astronauts and the human breath. These heart beats of human rhythm collaged, twisted, stretched, filtered and manipulated to make a compositional framework of sound that we have been able to live within, a backdrop of the industrialised anthem of humanity.
This sound track is placed within an 8-speaker system modeled on the Apollo 8 lunar orbital plan. The map provided a perfect model for us to spatialise the sound of this orbital electronic mass, live flute and human voice.
I was drawn to various forms of technology, from the flute being an extraordinary industrial and mechanical instrument, to the empowering use of digital software, the analogue of tape, film and slide, to the digital manipulation of sound and image. The work seemed to enable us to delve into technology that has been disposed of, yet is part of the time of the late 60s. It seemed fitting to engage with these noisy and, at times, irrational mechanical objects – we made them part of the band; they ruffle the seeming perfection of the concert hall practice.
The singularity of Mechanical Air is its willingness to play with multiple forms in order to express an idea – it is a music composition first and foremost – but it openly disrupts and challenges the language of musical notation to expand and widen what Music, Art and Performance could be.
The Hyper ~ Graphic Score is a product of its time. It unifies and collaborates with ideas and lives. It refuses to segregate forms but welcomes all in to inform, communicate and inspire a development in art making.
Michael Mayhew
2014
Gavin Osborn
entering Mechanical Air situates the flautist within a series of interconnected, interdependent fluid relationships:
digital sound
mechanical sound
animation
film
text
40 pages of graphic score
…& not only these elements of sensation –
but the concepts & ideas which are both the framework & the essence of the piece
how does a classical instrument inhabit this environment? reacting & interacting with stimuli
that ask for a more extended response than simply matching a sound to a shape or colour?
simply searching for new sounds isn’t enough – there are no new
sounds for the flute – one of the most extensively explored & tested instruments in contemporary music & improvisation –
nor is combining existing extended flute sonorities, although this was a useful starting point:
the question turns out to be not what can the flute do, but what should the flautist do?
not what sounds are novel or diverting or even suitable, but what sounds are necessary?
necessary to both the mix of elements happening at any moment,
but faithful & responsible to the piece & the questions it asks
& to the people it asks them of.
so Mechanical Air becomes not only a technical or aesthetic challenge to the musician, but a challenge of engagement, a requirement to be a thinking, doing, responsible human to the fullest
degree possible…
….can the flute fill this role?
….can the flautist?
Gavin Osborn
2014
Michael Mayhew
Mechanical Air came about because of a concern we share about what we are doing to the planet and so to ourselves.
This starting point for Mechanical Air was simple, the singular moment of photographing the earth from space whilst Apollo 8 went to explore the moon in 1968 for the later moon landing in 1969 seemed to open up a moment where we were enabled to see ourselves and our location afresh. This moment came with a singular image that seemingly captivated and galvanized political and social consciousness. We had seen ourselves in real time and had a record of it.
We were fragile, beautiful, and isolated within a “vastness of space”.
The moment was awe-inspiring: we had left the surface of the planet, gone beyond the atmosphere, and altered our perception of our existence.
Mechanical Air aims to do just that – to understand the world we live in and our position as a species on a planet that is suffering directly from the human species’ impact upon it.
Although we know this we still march on regardless of ‘known facts’ and it is as if we have arrived into what in physics is called a “landscape problem’.
Although I in no way prescribe that I know anything about physics or the ‘landscape problem’ within string theory I was attracted to the term ‘landscape problem’.
It opened up another way of seeing where I was standing metaphorically.
Has everything been discovered?
Is everything known?
Are we simply now re-playing old formats or is there something other to discover?
Are we consumed with future and clogged down with past?
What are we attempting to perceive and how are we translating our perceptions?
Has art got a place in a moment of transformation?
The Apollo missions were an act of freedom to defy the shackles of gravity.
To implement this act ‘air’ production had to be mechanically produced / industrialized.
We witnessed the planet but had to produce ‘mechanical air’ - a contradiction in terms.
I found this cruelly amusing and contemplated Gavin Osborn dressed as an astronaut.
Gavin lives with his breath, punctuating, manipulating, shaping air through the use of a mechanical instrument, the flute.
In 2012 I went in search of awe believing that my fields of perception had become cluttered with the rectangular mass of buildings, screens, doors, windows – my ears reverberated to mechanical anthems.
Had I become brutally industrialized?
‘People act as if the earth is flat, when in reality it is a spherical and extremely finite and until we learn to treat it as a finite thing we will never get civilization right.’
Buckminster Fuller
This collaborative commission from Gavin Osborn set out to discover new languages for musical notation and composition, to challenge the flute and flautist with a combination of ideas taking both into a landscape of multiple forms, to un-restrict ourselves from the apparent gravity of the mechanical industrial mindset – to re - M A P destinies.
The Hyper ~ Graphic Score is a multidimensional working document, a directional ‘flight programme’ of ideas, a multi-lingual notational & compositional system that encourages negotiation, dialogue and creative discourse – in the making of Music Art Performance – M A P
It asks you to ask questions and not conform, to ask questions and not to fall into habitual patterns of complacency.
It is collaborative in its ideal.
The Apollo 8 astronauts knew were they were going but did not know what they would find.
They knew of a direction but did not know if they would get there or even if they would return.
It was a landscape of knowns riddled with unknowns.
We have taken this sense of adventure into the process of Mechanical Air – knowing that not knowing is not a form of ignorance but a key capacity to discover afresh.
The electronic composition for this work has been extensively gathered from field recordings, from a lecture by Robert Wilson, a flight path outside Luton Airport at dawn, a ferry journey over the Irish Sea, escalators, pedestrian crossings, car horns, air conditioning, computer fans, 16 mm and slide projectors, high speed trains, a drone circling the city of Manchester, the distant recorded voices of the Apollo 8 astronauts and the human breath. These heart beats of human rhythm collaged, twisted, stretched, filtered and manipulated to make a compositional framework of sound that we have been able to live within, a backdrop of the industrialised anthem of humanity.
This sound track is placed within an 8-speaker system modeled on the Apollo 8 lunar orbital plan. The map provided a perfect model for us to spatialise the sound of this orbital electronic mass, live flute and human voice.
I was drawn to various forms of technology, from the flute being an extraordinary industrial and mechanical instrument, to the empowering use of digital software, the analogue of tape, film and slide, to the digital manipulation of sound and image. The work seemed to enable us to delve into technology that has been disposed of, yet is part of the time of the late 60s. It seemed fitting to engage with these noisy and, at times, irrational mechanical objects – we made them part of the band; they ruffle the seeming perfection of the concert hall practice.
The singularity of Mechanical Air is its willingness to play with multiple forms in order to express an idea – it is a music composition first and foremost – but it openly disrupts and challenges the language of musical notation to expand and widen what Music, Art and Performance could be.
The Hyper ~ Graphic Score is a product of its time. It unifies and collaborates with ideas and lives. It refuses to segregate forms but welcomes all in to inform, communicate and inspire a development in art making.
Michael Mayhew
2014
Gavin Osborn
entering Mechanical Air situates the flautist within a series of interconnected, interdependent fluid relationships:
digital sound
mechanical sound
animation
film
text
40 pages of graphic score
…& not only these elements of sensation –
but the concepts & ideas which are both the framework & the essence of the piece
how does a classical instrument inhabit this environment? reacting & interacting with stimuli
that ask for a more extended response than simply matching a sound to a shape or colour?
simply searching for new sounds isn’t enough – there are no new
sounds for the flute – one of the most extensively explored & tested instruments in contemporary music & improvisation –
nor is combining existing extended flute sonorities, although this was a useful starting point:
the question turns out to be not what can the flute do, but what should the flautist do?
not what sounds are novel or diverting or even suitable, but what sounds are necessary?
necessary to both the mix of elements happening at any moment,
but faithful & responsible to the piece & the questions it asks
& to the people it asks them of.
so Mechanical Air becomes not only a technical or aesthetic challenge to the musician, but a challenge of engagement, a requirement to be a thinking, doing, responsible human to the fullest
degree possible…
….can the flute fill this role?
….can the flautist?
Gavin Osborn
2014
made in art
2013
2013