‘Sound’, noun: (a) Oscillation in pressure, stress, particle displacement, particle velocity, etc., propagated in a medium with internal forces (e.g., elastic or viscous), or the superposition of such propagated oscillation. (b) Auditory sensation evoked by the oscillation described in (a).
— American National Standard on Acoustical Terminology

The major operative principle seems to be that the human biocomputer operates in such a way as to make signals out of noise and thus to create information out of random energies where there was no signal. This is the projection principle. Noise is creatively used in non-noise models. The information ‘created’ from the noise can be shown by careful analysis to have been in the storage system of the biocomputer. That is, the projection moves information out of storage into the perception apparatus so that it appears to originate in the chosen “outside” noisily excited system.
— Dr John Lilly (neuroscientist, inventor of the Isolation Tank and inspiration for the lead character in Ken Russell’s film, Altered States 1980).

‘Paracusia: Of Sounds & Visions’ is a selective survey of the ongoing discussion between artists and sound, musicians and art, revealing itself through works from Helen Chadwick, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Kimsooja, Haroon Mirza, Chris Newman, Camille Norment, Sean Scully, Jeremy Shaw, Liliane Tomasko, Naama Tsabar, Don Van Vliet, and Marcelo Viquez. As ‘Paracusia’ allows you to see and hear there are as many approaches to this much contested debate as there are colours and tones within it.

How should we explain Paul McCartney waking to the strains of a song he heard in a dream? None of his friends or fellow Beatles could identify this ‘Ohrwurm’ that had emerged as a fully formed composition from his reverie. He said it was called ‘Yesterday’ and played it to the bemusement of the band: Today it is the most covered song of all time.

Did ‘Yesterday’ – all 2:03 minutes of the song – already exist in some plane that intersected with McCartney’s unconscious self? If not the case, where did Yesterday emerge from? The past or the future of music? A Beatle’s ‘dream’¹? The ‘noosphere’²?

Keith Richards claimed similar origins for another hit in 1965, the Rolling Stones’ ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’: as did many of the greats of classical music – from Bach to Robert Schumann (who heard entire symphonies in his head which he then claimed to transcribe, though as he aged, he was ultimately left with just the one repeating note ringing in his ears).

Do fully formed songs float in the ether? Chris Newman’s films – ‘Live Songs’ as he calls them, are an attempt to ‘catch’ one of these illusive creatures, carried on the currents of our inner self, drifting across our mind’s eye as we daydream: and disappearing in a flash, that great lyric/song is gone in an instant – we are left with nothing but what could have been; a future ‘Yesterday’ that slipped off the hook1.

One thing we all appear to hear as paracusia are our own thoughts – the voice inside that speaks to us, sounds in our ‘inner ear’ but which no other person can hear (if, for arguments sake, we discount telepathy and recent developments in brain scanning): What if this fourth wall were broken? What if we could hear the cacophony of thought that bounces around the domes of our skulls? Helen Chadwick’s work, ‘Train of Thought’ achieves just this. The impact is astounding. We are witness to the inner monologue of a young woman, alone at night on the London Tube, who is joined by a lone male who invades her space – these are the literal and metaphorical rails that this train of thought (of the work’s title) runs on. The performance, enacted on a ‘set’ resembling a slice of a London Tube carriage, deploys hidden speakers to spill this anonymous – yet intimately understood – stream of consciousness/internal turmoil into our laps; our own thoughts jostled as the Tube rocks and rolls though the imaginary night.

Camille Norment’s ‘Trip Light’ rocks and rolls too, though as a song of silence; a bright halogen light, buried in the grill of a Shure microphone, casts a shadow on the wall, redolent of the human rib cage or perhaps, simply, a cage; a stuttering light that shines on the greats but also holds the silenced voices, the souls that never made a record in a recording studio, who perished in the occulted depths of history, far from the big cities’ neon glare and those that tripped the light fantastic there.

In Sean Scully’s monumental ‘Blue Note’ a different perspective is encountered. Here, whether implied or not (and in colossal scale) is the shadow cast across the face of America, and the world beyond, by Jazz. Blue notes are those played at a slightly different pitch from standard, they are expressive and gave us the Blues and birthed Jazz, along with the eponymous (and seminal) Blue Note label that in turn supplied the world with John Coltrane’s ‘Blue Train’, alongside gems from Horace Silver, Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, Art Blakey and many more musical titans. Jazz itself seems inextricably linked, in its desire to be free, with the minds of many great artists of the twentieth century – from Kandinsky to Mondrian all who became entranced by this music for ‘psychonauts’. Here, Scully’s work spans more than eight meters, on six industrial sized aluminium panels that stand tall as New York hoardings. Each panel plays off each other – a sextet of stripes racing across your line of sight: the whole recalling Marsden Hartley’s German works, broad stroke heraldry, a Royal Coat of Arms for these great jazz warriors.

The outer quiet of ‘songs unsung‘ is a ribbon that connects Liliane Tomasko’s works ‘Hymn (January)’ (2019) and ‘Hymn (February)’ (2019), Ian Hamilton Finlay’s ‘Julie Inscription’ (1988) and Jeremy Shaw’s works from his ongoing ‘Aesthetic Capacity’ series, each of which takes a titular lead from the ‘track’ that Shaw was listening to while he took photographs of his electric body’s ‘output’ using Kirlian techniques: all of these works carry their sonic influence on their sleeves and all three open a window on music’s ability to imprint itself on our beings in multiple ways. The ghost of a song that is carried on inside the observer, is triggered by Ian Hamilton Finlay’s notches in wood, punning ‘staves’ and references to flutes; techno as prod to Jeremy Shaw’s own subtle electromagnetic system, his electrical coronas revealed through the eye of the Kirlian ‘camera’ (a technique David Bowie used to monitor the effects of cocaine use while he recorded the song ‘Sound and Vision’ in Berlin); Liliane Tomasko’s painting’s emerge from dream states, music here acting as the breeze in the sails of her painting or emotional current pushing her palette onward, unheard songs incorporated into the field of her canvases through kinetic activity. It could be said that music belongs to an almost magical dimension, and it is thought that music (as with art) may find earliest expression in shamanistic practices. No surprise then that magic and music, both, aspire to similar functions, namely to manipulate particular forces to produce desired effects. Plato noted music’s hypnotic nature and its power over people. Confucius believed it defined societies and influenced their well-being (for better or worse) and that harmonious music mirrored a harmonious society.

Haroon Mirza’s three-screen, altarpiece-like film work, ‘Year Zero’, addresses music’s alchemical and transcendental societal functions; a lone male singer, Alessandro Ravasio, stands on his balcony duetting across space and time with a shaman, played by opera singer Sarah-Jane Lewis. At times they are joined (and connected) on screen by, variously, fly-agaric mushrooms in a forest, yellow parking prohibition lines on a pot-holed road, the unison of their voices and pulsing electronic soundscapes music from Jack Jelfs.

Conceived and filmed during the 2020 lockdowns in London and Bergamo, where Ravasio, like so many isolated individuals, sung like a caged bird during the brutal restrictions put in place to stem the pandemic’s rising tide; these un-conducted strands of song forming an ethereal choir, voices unknown to other voices bring together a community devastated by death.

Like death the realm of sound could be considered a ‘hyperobject’, a term developed by Timothy Morton. Hyperobjects are entities that, in their vast scale and temporal and spatial dimensions, defeat traditional ideas of what the essence of a thing can be: and clearly this is one way of considering this audible/inaudible entity. As such – and although we are granted glimpses of this sonic Empire – it must remain unknowable within the bounds of our present thinking and beyond our scant charting of the thing itself. As such all responses to the world of sound (noise) and music (the two are knotted together in ways no mortal could untie), all attempts at mapping their infinite topography can never be more than feeble incursions into this interior/exterior. Our charting of this terra incognito as fated as Kurtz’s attempts at discovery in Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ – and only when we too are awed by its immensity and on our knees in supplication to it can we escape ‘The Horror! The Horror!’ of it all.

Yet this also acts as a spur for further explorations, attempts to commune with this entity – as alien in its scale as and as potential as H.P.Lovecraft’s terrifying ‘Great Old Ones’ or the ever shape-shifting, possibly sentient dimension, central to Jeff VanderMeer’s ‘Southern Reach’ trilogy, Naama Tsabar’s ongoing series, ‘Work On Felt’, unfold their hidden dimensions in the same way as VanderMeer’s ‘zone’ expands endlessly in time and space, bringing the inanimate (the ‘felt’ of the possibly sensorially punning title?) to life via amplification and human participation; creating an art that bridges sculpture and musicality with performance and weaves together colour, sound and play through improvisation and ritual, making the ‘player’ the partial sculptor of the work.

Whereas ‘Cats Got His Tail’ (1985) by Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart) reverses the polarity and brings a musical mind to play in art, Van Vliet’s musical incarnation, Captain Beefheart, was more shaman (his band was called ‘the Magic Band’) than Mick Jagger rockstar, his lyrics and music taking surrealism to the touring circuit. His decision to quit music for art is in some respects a failure for the simple reason that he brought the same strokes that marked his playing and composition to his decidedly abstract figures, each canvas as much a Beefheart song as a Van Vliet painting.

Marcelo Viquez’s ‘Untitled (Downtempo)’ is a multi-media installation embracing printing, performance, the audio-visual and sculpture – the monotonous sound of a kick and snare, repetitive beats marking a funereal time pattern, scores proceedings (the ‘boom-tish’ of a dark comedy echoing through the work). The drum as metaphor for the (near) persistent beat of the heart and also that final drum roll of the soon-to-be-executed hear before the guillotine drops on life – sound measures off life, heartbeat by heartbeat, from inception to grave.

As with the beat of the heart we are – while in life – noisily or quietly breathing, sucking in and pushing air out from our lungs: it is the basis, along with our heartbeat, for the rhythm of our lives. Kimsooja’s ‘To Breath: Mandala’ (2010) spins the circularity of this process – that we for the most part ignore - into a metaphor for life on repeat; the artist’s breathing and occasional humming, imbuing a slowly rotating roulette-wheel-jukebox-mandala with chimeric life, wove through with the wise (in their infinite wisdom) understaningd as the of the life cycle.

To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.
— Chuang Tzu

Music has been described as the “evolution of sound evolving over time” but are we only ever seeing the peaks of this invisible landscape, a secret that we can never understand but hear within us, without us and even when it is apparently not there.

John Cage described music as “purposeless play ... an affirmation of life not to bring order out of chaos or to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we"re living”. The same, of course, is true of art: it is this desire to wake and re-enchant that makes the medium’s investigations so compelling.

Today, art has absorbed, probed, rejected and accepted sound as an integral part of its world of creativity and reviews its relationship to music in myriad ways; unceasing in its attempts to capture music"s essence for its own use, to incorporate music"s perfect nature into its own mission to embrace the sublime.

Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.
— Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Über das Geistige in der Kunst’, 1912

¹ Should we even be surprised that the word ‘dream’ has its roots in Middle English drem, from Old English drēam (“music, joy”)? Or that pop songs have ‘hooks’?

² The noosphere is a philosophical concept popularized by Russian-Ukrainian biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky and the philosopher and Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Vernadsky conceived the noosphere as akin to the atmosphere or biosphere but as a ‘sphere of reason’ circling the Earth where creative thought is laid down as if a geological layer.