The Brightest Form of Absence

“In the desert, though, I don’t have to seek solitude – I am a part of it. I am not alone with myself there either, since that would be the romantic, Western form of solitude. No, the desert is for me the clearest, brightest, most beautiful, strongest form of absence.” Jean Baudrillard

The desert is a place of physical extremes – the brightness of the sun, the vast horizon and the open silence all contribute to a space where we can perceive the objects around us with a sharpened clarity. In “The Brightest Form of Absence” we approached the landscape with the intention of letting it work on us, listening and observing the elements within it rather than directly trying to shape and compose them. Where a narrative created by us is absent, and all sonorous as well as visual form is shaped by the objects and the sounds we find and by the forces of nature that keeps them in motion.

The beginning of this collaborative journey was a trip to the Mojave Desert and Death Valley in September 2010, where we recorded sounds and images. The score composed for the final work is based upon these multichannel sound-recordings. The unspectacular acoustic surroundings become material for a music based on small nature-sounds: soft wind-noises, quiet crickets, loud train-brakes, the ticking of a cooling down car, the sounds made by William Lamson’s objects. In the final work parts of the sound files are played back, but the major compositional part will lie in a traditionally written out score for the instrumentalists, the singer, and live-electronic transformations. The live music develops multiple relations to the recorded sounds: from almost literal imitation – “photorealistic” acoustic landscape-paintings – to a total counterpoint between the recorded sounds and the music of the written score, projecting its own inner acoustic landscape onto the desert recordings, and following its own musical narrative through found objects of music tradition, deserted fragments of musical expression. Three songs for voice and piano mark the furthest departure from the realism the nature-recordings suggest – intimate moments of almost entire withdrawal into an inner landscape.

In contrast, the videos use the desert landscape as a stage for a series of minimal interventions that seek to animate objects abandoned by humans and nature alike.  In each video, the wind becomes an unseen force that activates these objects either through the mediation of a kite or by working directly on the object itself. The wind gives these objects form, direction, and purpose.  In one video, Lamson follows a bottle as it is slowly dragged across white sand dunes leaving a continuous line, which in turn creates a constantly shifting composition as the artist runs to keep it in the frame. Thus, the movement of the artist and the object become like a dance, where the object leads and the artist follows. This sense of purpose is presented in stark contrast to other videos where the animated object moves in a fashion that seems entirely random. A rock is pulled into the air, falls and is then pulled up again, all the product of unseen force commanded by unknown cause.

The Videos and composed music are not connected through a common narrative, form or syntax. A subdivision in 11 movements – relating to eight different locations and installations, different “takes”, recorded during the 2010 journey, supplemented by the three songs – provide a framework for a multiplicity of relations between both media: for periods they can be “in sync”, representing for a moment the same acoustic and visual image; at other times both follow their own path, connecting for a while and parting again; or both can be entirely separated, setting their own structure for a period, where only the desert landscape defines a shared canvas.

 “The Brightest form of Absence” is a commission by SWR Radio for the Donaueschinger Musiktage, with additional funding by Northwestern University’s “CIRA Grant” and the Heinrich Strobel Foundation.

William Lamson and Hans Thomalla, August 2011