Sound Objects and Me
Johannes Bergmark
Sound Objects and Me
In 2006, I wrote “The Corn Grinder From The Venus Temple—About Found Sound Objects” (Bergmark 2006) [1]. Re-reading it now, I am struck by the long list of objects that I used at the time, as parts of the Whalefish, which was my main instrument then. There were 141 described objects (if I counted right). I have since forgotten many of the details I wrote about them, and when I go through the list, I can recognize 31 that I still use today, with the instruments that I call Platforms. To them, hundreds of new objects have been added. Most of them also disappeared from use in one way or another (having been abandoned, lost, broken, forgotten, or stolen).
The shift of instrument from the Whalefish to the Platforms represents a shift of my interest in sound objects. Since I began to improvise freely in 1985, I did it with the mindset that anything could be used as an instrument by anyone, inspired by the meeting with surrealist musicians and inventors Hal Rammel in Chicago (since then moved to Wisconsin) and Davey Williams and LaDonna Smith in Birmingham, Alabama. Especially the latter have cultivated this attitude and have always welcomed “non-musicians” to play with them, a play not limited to be called music, or anything else.
Inspired by Hal, I began to make my own instruments (and even began my education as a piano technician), and I eventually discovered the possibilities of the contact microphone, which opens the field of microscopic (microphonic?) discoveries: any object could now bring out a rich and full sound, even for an audience, regardless of how little it sounded acoustically. The contact microphone in the center of the one-man-band-kind-of instrument that I intended the Whalefish to be became a central focus for a number of objects that I began to use on it, and after many years, when the Whalefish was very worn out, I constructed a set of instruments that were simply amplified cupboard doors and called them Platforms. Their use and design are much more flexible than the Whalefish, and they are intended specifically for amplifying small objects.
To choose to describe just one or two objects is the most difficult thing, since they are very much a collective of individuals, like a large family gathering in every concert. One by one they could hardly be described as instruments, and they often work in teams or combinations, where one is a tool, one is a conductor for sound vibrations, one is a resonance, a damper, etc. One typical combination is a type of stick (that can be a piece from a big firework, having fallen down on Berlin at New Year’s Eve, an unused welding rod, a grill stick, etc.) with a type of surface (a broken piece of glass, enamel, sand paper, rusty metal...).
What is the reason for me to pick up a new instrument, or object, and when and why do I decide to leave it?
I lose interest when there doesn’t seem to be any mystery left to discover for me. I want to still be able to wonder what these objects want to tell me. And what do I want to tell them?
I “listen” to new and found objects first with my hands, and eyes, and the ears usually come last. The circumstance of the object, the meeting with another one, with a situation, environment, perhaps a story, never leaves it alone as a single entity. That meeting I apprehend as very similar to the spark of poetic beauty, the meeting of two realities (including the former use and the new) that Pierre Reverdy described and which André Breton adopted as the description of poetic beauty in surrealism: “The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be—the greater its emotional power and poetic reality” (Breton 1969, n.p.). It has been expressed many times with the quote from Lautréamont: “beautiful as the chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table” (1988, n.p.).
Johannes Bergmark is a sound artist and composer based in Sweden.
[1] This text has appeared in parts in: Johannes Bergmark’s masters thesis “The Hell Harp of Hieronymus Bosch. The building of an experimental musical instrument, and a critical account of an experience of a community of musicians” (Bergmark 2019).