Parking features two works recorded 14 years apart, registering the behaviour and characteristics of environmental and instrumental sound resounding within multiple parking garages.
The architectural form and function underpinning the parking garage demands a highly adaptive response to negotiate indeterminate conditions and hidden tensions generated by compressed space, reflective materiality, multipurpose infrastructure, and active thoroughfares. Rather than consider these as undesirable, situational practice offers an opportunity to be in the world, to observe and contest dominant narratives, and through improvised responses incorporate aleatory forces and spatial effects.
Parking La Villette comprises an improvisation recorded in a parking garage located at the edge of Parc de la Villette, beneath the Cité de la Musique, in Paris. The basic premise was to repurpose the building as a site of activation and play, free of the formal and commercial constraints of the institution under which it is posited. Parking La Villette features two instrumentalists, and two sound recordists investigating the acoustic, spatial, and material character of the compact multilevel location. As the team probed the space with their assorted instruments and equipment, different impressions gradually form through an entanglement of direct and reflected sound, musical and non-musical articulation, and environmental presences and ruptures.
Parking 2 was recorded in Melbourne and Paris during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than working together in situ, two sets of recordings were produced at different times in separate locations. The constraints imposed by the global pandemic response led to a different type of interrogation in which the parking garage became for the most part an inactive space. Due to the absence of human activity, electrical and mechanical appliances including fluorescent lights, air vents, refrigeration units, and pay stations were of comparable interest to that of instrumental expression. The acoustic incoherence caused by the convergence of discretely realised site recordings is ameliorated by the highly textured and modular concrete environment comprising the two geographically distinct locations.
Parking is derived from a four-channel master produced by synchronising two sets of independent stereo recordings. While it does not convey the full spatial complexity of the original multichannel version, the recordings reveal a range of sono-musical possibilities generated within each location. Ones that freely circulate among the stale air, fluttering vents, dim lighting, and exhaust fumes which hang heavily within grimed recursive space. Familiar and unremarkable, yet the parking garage affords complex encounters of concrete and spectral realities, and contrasts in atmosphere, tone, and texture.
Philip Samartzis, 2023
Born 1966 in Lyon, Jean-Luc Guionnet is a French saxophonist and organist, a visual artist, a performer, and an electroacoustic composer. Jean-Luc Guionnet studied visual arts and electroacoustic music with Christine Groult, Michel Zbar and Iannis Xénakis. A multi-instrumentalist (alto & soprano saxophone, organ, piano), he has improvised and experimented in the field of electroacoustic music with
Eric La Casa, Eric Cordier,
Pascal Battus, Edward Perraud, Frédéric Blondy,
Sophie Agnel, André Almuro,
Olivier Benoit, with the groups Schams, Synapses, Calx, Phéromones and Hubbub. Passing from a very physical approach of the play, of the breath, to a work of sound spatialization, through complex sound devices.
For more than 20 years, while listening to the environment, Éric La Casa (born 1968, Tours, lives and works in Paris) has been questioning the perception of reality and has expanded the notion of what's musical today. Through his aesthetic of capturing sound, his work fits equally into the fields of sound art and music. As a result of his in situ listening processes, he creates forms (of attention) that creep into the venues, slowly infuse there, and become other possible spaces. In the same way that the letter stimulates a country's reading, the in situ aesthetic object renews our relationship to space and landscape.
Philip Samartzis (born 1963 in Melbourne) is a sound artist, composer and associate professor in Sculpture, Sound and Spatial Practice and teaches Sound Cultures in the Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) program at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology).
Philip Samartzis uses field recordings of natural and constructed environments as his primary material to render densities of space and discrete zones of aural experience, which are arranged and mixed to reflect the acoustic and spatial complexities of everyday sound fields. He draws on a range of practices ranging from acoustic ecology and bioacoustics to musique concrète and sound art to arrive at compositions that highlight the pervasive nature of sound and the myriad ways in which it informs and influences our daily experiences. To emphasize this Philip Samartzis designs his compositions for multi-channel surround sound systems that afford immersive and tactile listening experiences to demonstrate the transformational qualities inherent in sounds familiar and strange.
Born 1963 in Rochdale, Dan Warburton is a British violinist and composer.
