Fred Small Studio

Projects

The other side - 2024

The other side, 13 Minutes 54 Seconds, 2024

Ambisonic soundwork presented at the Audio Foundation in Tāmakai Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand.

In the text The Poetics of Listening, Brandon LaBelle describes “sound as an energetic figuring of worldly matters which is never quite graspable, reliable, or fixed…”.

Departing from theorists such as LaBelle, Eleni Ikoniadou, and Seth Kim-Cohen, Fred Small’s new composition, The other side, examines the production of sound and its connections to foster a more poetic understanding of the worlds we inhabit. The piece is made from an array of digitally produced sounds which maintain an air of surreality appearing to mimic the lived sounds they reference. Drawing from these experiences, Small reiterates the inherently shared nature of sound by playing back on a large sound system; the sounds pervade all animate and inanimate things.

We find sound understood as both vehicle and destination – looped sounds on a dance floor entice the mind and propel us forward, emotionally and temporally. We can hear birds, water, and sirens calling, rhythms which build and then slip. We can hear a parallel space.

Frankensonics: new soundworks for many speakers

Where this motion goes - 2024

Digital video, 14 Minutes 20 Seconds

Sound, 18 Minutes 2 Seconds

Aluminium print

Sound is a reminder of life itself and the substance of the world, in all its movements, displacements, and vibrations. Where this motion goes is an investigation into the physical presence of sound and its ability to change and create new worlds. From dance floors shared with hundreds of people to the individualised experience of music in headphones, sound is a tool we return to endlessly.

In ‘Where this motion goes’ a dance track, recently released under my moniker raptAGOG, has been reworked; rhythms extracted, expanded upon, slowed down—human-esque voices emerge and resound from the digital space. Inspired by the moments of tension and euphoria of trance and techno, this piece offers a deconstructed and reimagined picture of the dance floor.

I find myself drawn to using and creating sounds that have an air of surreality in their mimicry of a real sound. Fantasy is built on reality and lived experience—so here is an opportunity to imagine something more.

Occurring over time, sound becomes an animator. In this exhibition the sound is continually animating a ‘new’ scene as the film and sound are not in sync.

While sound generally remains an unseeable phenomena, the spectrograms in this show offer a way of visualising sound as colour and light. The human tones we hear are now flickering bars of colour. In a spectrogram different colours correspond to different frequencies on the human auditory spectrum, while the brightness denotes their volume. The sounds playing in the room are captured in the metal print.

The sense of community in sound or music is what Brandon LaBelle describes as being core to the sonic landscape, in that sound is energised and fed by those listening and responding to it. (LaBelle, 18) It becomes varied and mutable as voices, singing, sounds of dancing, and ambient noise make contributions. The cold reverb of play_station carries these sounds and accentuates their size.

Photography by Sage Rossie