(August 2009) In the late 60s a group of artists moved to expunge the figurative image from their art. Hung up on chromatic abstraction – a reduction of elements to intense fields or bands of colour, the Color Field movement, with Rothko its best known exponent, purveyed a parade of images of pure colour; devoid of obvious signifiers, these became powerful emotion-fields. Its proto-Minimalism bespeaks a sparse elementalism whose aesthetic is spiritual kin of 12k and its more questing cousin, Line, the source of this recording documenting an installation curated by microsound maven, Richard Chartier, featuring a roll-call of artists in microsound and experimental electronics, each contributing their own accompanying video or working with visual artists in the Color Field tradition.
Highlights come from a trio of usual post-digital suspects: Steve Roden, Frank Bretschneider, and Stephan Mathieu. Roden’s “Dark over light earth” sets the tone, modelling a morphing Rothko, further fuelled by a part of Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel.” A electro-acoustic setting frames and edits the pluck and bow of violin and cello, with a harmonium foregrounded, making for an elegant languorous soundfield. Visuals come in shifting multi-colours, and monochrome fields of varying saturation and light intensities, becoming bespeckled like magnified dust motes. Raster Noton’s Dr Rhythm, Frank Bretschneider, re-presents part of an older piece, his “Looping i-vi (excerpt)” a trademark trip of ear-drum buzz clicks and flicks of dark horizontals undulating against a blue screen. Stephan Mathieu’s beguiling “Orange was the color of her dress” features an early sampling of part of his Radioland (“Michael”), a peerless work of processed shortwave radio signals setting silken drones against flickering colour fields. Further worthwhile inclusions follow. Ryoichi Kurokawa’s “Scorch” is an ornate mixed media outing, abstractly representing images of the eponymous act with a granular synthesis of violent tearing and a warm smearage of field recordings in the digital-organic hybrid style of and/OAR and Spekk. “Flirting 07121602” features video and audio by Sawako, choreographing mutating pastel forms with steely high frequency sonorities in a more challenging than customary lowercase microsonic mode.
Interspersing proceedings are others: Alan Callander’s “CF01,” a more ambiguous, ambient piece exploring audio-analogues of the basic shapes and colour palettes in Rothko’s fields; Tez’s “CF #1 – 2n” uses software developed by the artist to create protean video-paintings that blend two strata of algorithmic colour gradients with photo maps that respond in real-time to dual-channel audio-constructions. Bas Van Koolwuk ‘s “FDBCK/AV – Silver” conjoins a modulating signal squall with monochromatic screen interference, also produced with specially developed software. There are less immediately engaging outings from a few long-time lurkers on the edges of experimental electronics. Like Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti’s “Chronomanic Redux,” which has an ill flute wind blowing queasy prog-isms over its fields of red, blue and green. And one-time Mego maniacs, General Magic, who soundtrack Tina Frank’s visual frenesy of rotating cubes and scintillae of vertical colour bars with unforgiving caustic blasts of digital detritus. More intriguing is Beequeen’s “AMP_SWELL,” accompanied with a handmade video by Sue Costabile, all a-swim with evanescent monochrome photograms of fabrics, textured papers, and watercolours on tracing paper, audio-framed with a soup of guitar shards and chewy electronics. Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfland’s “Ten Thousand Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid” deploys laser light to scan the surfaces of nucleating and dissipating soap bubble clusters to form eeriely green tendrils and shapes on a suppurating surface, complemented by a sub-atomic soundtrack of ripples, tears, and tones. Finally, Ernest Edmonds + Mark Fell (of SND) get down and nano-sonic while discharging the elemental colour-sculpting brief; their “Broadway One (excerpt)” examines pure colour, tone, and the harmonic relationships between these elements within their generative systems.
Overall, Colorfield Variations is inhabited by symbiotic meldings of sound and vision, designed in line with Line’s fine pedigree.
Colorfield Variations is out now on Line. [Purchase]
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