Going Underground is a collaborative project between the Berlin-based wind trio Trigger and the French phonography-photography collective Ouïe/Dire involving site-specific performances in show-caves and their surroundings. The project aims to create a space for a fuller aesthetic involvement with the audience by re-thinking notions of musical space and place using the caves as both a site of artistic experience and as an aesthetic source from which it springs.
Caves are the cradles of culture for humanity – the sites of the oldest known musical instruments and evidence of them as early centers of musical social culture abound. They also hold a special position in people’s lives as surreal spaces for aesthetic appreciation and speculation. Caves are places where people not normally discursive about artistic space feel comfortable with abstraction – thinking about the scale of time and appreciating concrete and abstract form and color. With Going Underground, we are interested in creating music for people visiting these caves who may have come to be awed or touched by the sublime nature of these spaces and through recordings of these performances, create a new audio-visual installation.
The music of Trigger (Chris Heenan, Matthias Müller, Nils Ostendorf) calls for immersive close listening – where the acoustic instruments eerily often take on the characteristics of electronic sound. Going Underground situates Trigger in a context where the acoustic music, the site-specific resonances of the performance spaces and the spectacular environment fuse together as the work itself, producing a situation balanced between the sublime and the uncanny.
Marc Pichelin and Kristof Guez of Ouïe/Dire are not merely documenting the sounds and images of the caves live, but creatively capturing the sounds of Trigger and the social surroundings of the locations themselves. The audio and video recordings that they create provides the material and framework for the second phase of Going Underground to be fed back into a new work for multi-channel audio-visual installation in which Trigger will also perform.
More info : project-going-underground.com
