Composition For Temple Speakers
2014
15:00 mins
CD-based performance
With Sindhu Thirumalaisamy and Banana Apparatus
15:00 mins
CD-based performance
With Sindhu Thirumalaisamy and Banana Apparatus
Kere Munishwara Sai Baba temple is on Rhenius Street, opposite Richmond Park. Richmond Park is at the corner of Rhenius Street, opposite Kere Munishwara Sai Baba temple. Overlooking the park and the temple, is Bailey Apartments, where Sindhu Thirumalaisamy and I shared a studio and listened to this geography.
Composition for temple speakers is an exercise in thinking about sound and territory. As Bangalore’s acoustic space becomes more and more populated, the relationship between loudness and visibility gets stronger and stronger. But sound is unbound and always moves away from its source. It leaks and evades regulation in more ways than one. What this means for densely populated neighbourhoods is that there is a sense of being in everyone’s world all at once, with some sources being “more present” than others. Composition for... playfully attempts to highlight this experience. Working with musicians Banana Aparatus, we developed a piece to be transmitted from the temple sound system that emphasized, distorted and collapsed sonic territories in the area. Blessed by the Temple Board and masked as a “scratched CD”, shrieks of birds, horns of traffic, rumbles of generators and hisses of pressure cookers all became part of a “devotional song” that played for 15 minutes.
Composition for temple speakers is an exercise in thinking about sound and territory. As Bangalore’s acoustic space becomes more and more populated, the relationship between loudness and visibility gets stronger and stronger. But sound is unbound and always moves away from its source. It leaks and evades regulation in more ways than one. What this means for densely populated neighbourhoods is that there is a sense of being in everyone’s world all at once, with some sources being “more present” than others. Composition for... playfully attempts to highlight this experience. Working with musicians Banana Aparatus, we developed a piece to be transmitted from the temple sound system that emphasized, distorted and collapsed sonic territories in the area. Blessed by the Temple Board and masked as a “scratched CD”, shrieks of birds, horns of traffic, rumbles of generators and hisses of pressure cookers all became part of a “devotional song” that played for 15 minutes.