Exhibition:
11 March 2022 Friday 3-7pm. Artist will be at the gallery 4:30-6:30pm on 11 March.
12 & 13 March 2022 Saturday & Sunday 2-6pm
Free Entry
A sound-film by Caroline Kraabel
‘This 40-minute Ivor Award-winning film (Sound Art category), my first, started with shots of London during the first UK Covid 19 Lockdown (the strict phase of which began on 23 March 2020), taken on my phone during “permitted exercise” (cycling), so my children would have a record of the unfamiliar stillness of their city at a time we now have ingrained in our memories for its sudden difference, and for the surfacing of fear, grief, and love it brought about.
I kept coming back to these shots of quiet streets: who was missing, who was still there, what was revealed when the tide of sound and activity went out?
I undertook to make sense of these images by playing their sounds, and their absence of sounds:
The shots from 26 March are “imitated”. On the alto saxophone I have recreated as many as possible of the original sounds from the audio on my phone-shots, and thus replaced the original audio.
For the shots from 28 March I replaced the original audio, too, “inverting” it.
I aimed to make music that was in a definable way the OPPOSITE of the actual sounds recorded on my phone.
First I divided the original audio into six “strips”, covering six separate frequency ranges, from low to high. Then I recorded six “strips” of sax and bass chords, again from low to high, and matched the highest sax/bass strip with the lowest original strip, the second highest with the second lowest, the third highest with the third lowest.
I used the dynamics of the original “strips” to control the sound on the corresponding sax and bass strips, ducking out the chords where there was a sound on the original, and leaving the chords present when there was no sound on the original. Then I muted the original audio tracks for all but a few dramatic seconds of the “inversion” section.
