BIBLIOGRAPHY
2009
Globe and Mail, November 7, 2009, R12,"Many Ways to Become Airborne", on Fall Out and Fall In, by Leah Sandals.<text>
Musicworks #105 Winter 2009, p.58, "awash in meaning" on awashawave, by Laura Paolini.
Globe and Mail, June 27, 2009, R4,"Dance to this: A bump. a squeak, a voice", on Escape Songs, by Carl Wilson. <text>
Curatorial essay for the Fixation exhibition, "Revealing the everyday" by Mireille Bourgeois. <text>
2008
Mercer Union brochure, essay "A Portrait: Christof Migone’s Disco Sec" by Martin Arnold. <text>
Voir (Montreal), 31 janvier 2008, "Stop ou encore?", by Nicolas Mavrikakis. <text>
CCP (cahiers critiques de poésie), review of Tue, book, by Vincent Barras. <text>
Inter, no. 101 hiver 2008-2009, review of Tue, book, by André Marceau. <text>
2007
Esse No. 60, feature article "Trou : une esthétique du corps ?" by André-Louis Paré. <link>
Esse No. 59, Bruit issue, cover and portfolio. <link>
Vital Weekly No. 564 Week 7, review of Trou book/DVD by Frans de Waard. <text>
The WIRE March 2007 p. 69, review of Trou book/DVD by Brian Marley. <text>
2006
C Magazine no. 88 (p.41), review of Disquiet by Risa
Horowitz.
2005
Artforum December 2005 Sound Voice Perform in Best
of 2005 by Christoph Cox. <text>
Ubuweb, full feature (with mp3s, essays, texts). <link>
Musicworks Fall 2005 #93 review of Sound Voice Perform book/CD by Deanna Radford. <text>
The Wire June 2005 Issue 256 review of Sound Voice Perform book/CD by Will Montgomery. <text>
Vital Weekly no. 472 week 17, review of Sound Voice
Perform book/CD by Frans de Waard. <text>
Queen's University The Journal Tuesday, Sept. 20, Issue 7,
Vol. 133 review of Disquiet at Modern Fuel Gallery. <link>
2004
Le Devoir 19 septembre 2004-F4, review of La première
phrase et le dernier mot book by David Cantin. <text>
Globe & Mail July 29 2004 R5, review of Escape Songs CD by Carl Wilson. <text>
Discorder CITR magazine June 2004, review of Escape
Songs CD by Chris Walters. <text>
Sands-zine 13-12-2004, review of Escape Songs CD
by Sergio Eletto (in italian). <text>
rep.no.sapo.pt, review of South Winds CD by Rui
Eduardo Paes (in portuguese). <text>
Le Navire Night, Chaîne Culturelle Radio Canada,
feature. <link>
2003
Artforum December 2003 South Winds in Best of
2003 by Christian Marclay.
Vital Weekly no. 389 week 38, review of South Winds CD by Frans de Waard. <text>
Monthly Art Magazine Bijutsu Techno (BT) magazine Vol.55
No.831, Tokyo, Japan, feature by Atsushi Sasaki.<link>
CBC Brave New Waves Feature.<page
+ real audio>
Ubu Web, Radio Radio series, interview by Martin Spinelli. <mp3>
After Hours No. 18, Tokyo, article on squint fucker press. <homepage>
2002
The Wire March Issue 217, feature by Dave Mandl. <text>
2001
Parachute No. 107, review of Writing Aloud: The
Sonics of Language eds. Brandon LaBelle and Christof Migone,
by Jim Drobnick. <text>
The Tentacle Summer 2001 pp. 30-31, review of Writing
Aloud: The Sonics of Language, review by Christopher DeLaurenti. <text>
Art Action 1958 - 1998, ed. Richard Martel, Quebec: Édition Intervention, 2001, 302-304. Review of Separate by kim dawn and Christof Migone in "Three Modes of Canadian Performance in the Nineties" by Bruce Barber. <text>
La Voce del Popolo Winter2001-2002 #2, interview by crys cole. <text>
Lola Fall 2001 #10, review of Disclosure.
All-Music-Guide (www.allmusic.com), review of Crackers CD by François Couture. <text>
Vital Weekly Week 40 No. 293, review of Crackers CD by Frans de Waard. <text>
The Wire Issue 209 July 2001, review of Quieting CD
by Edwin Pouncey. <text>
Musicworks No. 83, review of Quieting CD by Darren
Copeland. <text>
2000
New York Press March 1-7, review of Crackers installation
by Kenneth Goldsmith. <text>
The Wire September Issue 199, review of The Death of
Analogies CD and undo CD. <text>
1999
New Arts Examiner November 1999, review of Crackers in Site of Sound: Of Architecture and the Ear by Mark Schwartz. <text>
The Wire March Issue 181, review of vex. <text>
le stéréophile #13, review of vex. <text>
All-Music-Guide (www.allmusic.com), review of vex. <text>
1998
Vital Weekly 14 Dec 1998, review of vex by Frans de
Waard. <text>
P-Form No.46.2 Fall 1998, review of Separate by Aaron
Pollard.
Parachute No. 92, review of Separate by Johanne Lamoureux. <text>
Mix Magazine vol.24.2 Fall 1998, review of Separate by Valérie Lamontagne. <text>
Fuse vol. 21 no.4, review of Separate by Stephen Horne. <text>
Lola No.3 Winter 1998, review of Separate by Jack Stanley. <text>
Radio Feature on Radio Suisse Romande, producer Jean Nicole.
Radio Feature on Danmarks Radio, producer Peter Kristiansen.
The Wire February 1998, review of participation in Recycling
the Future. <text>
The Wire January 1998, reviews of Hole in the Head, Rappel, Radio Folie Culture.
1997
Revue et Corrigée, June 1998, France, reviews of Hole
in the Head, Rappel, Radio Folie Culture.
fader vol.001 1997, Japan, review of Hole in the Head.
CMJ, New York, review of Hole in the Head. <text>
Montréal Mirror, review of Hole in the Head. <text>
Rubberneck No.26 December 1997, review of Hole in the Head by Chris Atton. <text>
ND Magazine No. 20 Summer 1997, review of Hole in the
Head. <text>
Exclaim!, Toronto, reviews of Hole in the Head, Rappel, Radio Folie Culture. <text>
1994
Radio Feature on Radio Dos, Madrid, producer José Iges.
1993
Inter 55/56, Québec, review of Transpiring Transistor. <text>
1992
High Performance, Winter 1992, Los Angeles, review of Squeaky
Clean. <text>
1991
Site Sound, June 1991, London, Ontario, review of Horror
Radia Vacui by Sandra MacPherson. <text>
"Many ways to become airborne", on Fall Out and Fall In, Saturday Globe and Mail, November 7, 2009, R12, by Leah Sandals
With trees putting on their yearly show of vibrant golds, scarlets and oranges, one might think the ideal point of departure for a seasonally themed exhibition would be colour and hue. Not so at the Blackwood Gallery, a rigorous academic space housed on the leafy campus of the University of Toronto at Mississauga. Its two-part autumn show, Fall Out and Fall In, was sparked not by fall colour but by the tumbling, mulch-ward destiny of that foliage, bringing together works that riff on gravity and downward motion. "I like themes that are somewhat redundant, like falling in the fall," explains Christof Migone, director and curator of the Blackwood. "Everyone has an image of falling. But how to amplify that and make it more complex, that was the challenge." The strongest works from the first half of the show, Fall Out , which opened earlier this fall, well exploit those tensions between simple and complex. Torontonian Simone Jones's film, Perfect Vehicle, shows a futuristic, speedy-looking machine advancing at a funereal pace across desolate salt flats. With observation, it's revealed that the machine is moved forward by the rise and fall of the passenger's chest as she breathes. It's an absurd, yet humane, gesture - sci-fi light-speed fantasy on a slo-mo bio-dynamic timetable. Zilvinas Kempinas's O Between Fans, like similar works by this Lithuanian-born New York-based artist, is a desligh, with two fans keeping a plastic loop perpetually dancing in the air, seemingly freed from gravity. Kempinas's installations are as direct and naked as a science-museum set-up, but are also oddly spiritual and poetic. Montrealer Paul Litherland is represented by two remarkable skydiving videos, Force of Attraction and Freefall Fighters - films that marry macho adrenalin with sobering intimations of mortality and fear. Force of Attraction in particular yields this uncanny mix, as the camera focuses on Litherland's face as it morphs during a few minutes of the free fall. Seeing the artist's skin and cartilage turn to mere putty in the atmosphere's hands is by turns amusing and anxiety-provoking - Cindy Sherman-esque self-portraiture meets extreme-sports risk. Interestingly, the second half of the exhibition, Fall In, which opened in late October, courts risk in a different, rather self-reflexive way. For it, nine new artists were matched to respond to the nine original Fall In artists. "A recurring thing in stuff I do is this element of failure," explains Migone, "not failure in a derogatory way, but more in being vulnerable. I was also thinking of dominoes, of cause and effect, of one thing or fall triggering another." Indeed, some of the Fall in artists undermine the works they were ostensibly inspired by - albeit in a witty, open-ended fashion. Roula Partheniou brings a slapstick to Kempinas's science with a well-placed replica of a banana peel, suggesting there's more than one way to become airborne. More pointedly, Josh Thorpe adds a viewer-activated on-off switch to Don Simmon's Bachelor Forever, a fascinating verticle-line-tracing robot that Simmons initially argued was completed self-contained. With the flick of a finger, Thorpe's addition converts Bachelor's proclaimed solitude into something intrinsically relational. Unfortunately, experiments in failure sometimes turn out to be just that. Some viewers may have been put off, for instance, by the exhibition's installation procedure, which continued a couple of weeks into each half of the show. The result: ladders and power-drill noise that interrupted and obscured viewer experience. Migone explains that what some might see as poor planning was actually intended as pedagogy, "I wanted to focus on the installation as a process," he says. "We're a university, so I also saw it as a way for students who come by the gallery regularly to see how an exhibition goes up, to demystify it." Migone admits that in the future he might make that choice more clear. Installation quibbles aside, the Blackwood's current project delivers a stand-up effort - even if it is about falling down. With eclectic program events like astronomy lectures and breakdancing sessions, Fall In and Fall Out rejects autumnal cravings for conceptual comfort food. The result is uncertain yet enjoyable: a walk through a different kind of changing autumn woodland.
<top>
"Dance to this: A bump. a squeak, a voice", on Escape Songs, Saturday Globe and Mail, June 27, 2009, R4, by Carl Wilson
The record is called Escape Songs, and for five years it nearly got clean away. In 2004, Vancouver's Veda Hille and Christof Migone, then a Montrealer, released an album of bumps and squeaks that for a minute here and there coalesce into pop tunes, then break down again into sputters and mumbles. It's a stubbornly mysterious record: Listening to it is like peering through a keyhole into a locked 17th-century curiosity cabinet. And so few people heard it that you could ask, like the proverbial tree falling in the proverbial forest, whether it even made a sound.
But this week, for the first time, it's generating a verifiable public din. At the initiative of the month-long Suoni Per Il Popolo music festival in Montreal and the Music Gallery in Toronto, Hille and Migone are giving Escape Songs its live-performance debut. The original project was a departure for both its creators, but particularly for Hille, who for 16 years has been playing and recording songs that, however they meander, never quite break the shackles of music, for a modestly sized but devoted following. Her latest album, This Riot Life, made the long list for last year's Polaris Music Prize.
After overcoming her intimidation upon meeting Migone at Vancouver's Western Front artists' centre in 1998, where he was "the coolest person I'd ever seen - seriously," she invited him to make tape loops that added some atmospheric accents to her next album. For Escape Songs, she wanted to return the favour by reaching out into Migone's more habitual sound-art territory. Not that anyone has ever accused Hille of being a conventional songwriter, with her piano- and guitar-based songs that proceed by leaps of faith from philosophical reflection to ecstatic exclamation, from folkie lilt to car-crash violence. In subject matter, they range from cellular regeneration and poisonous plants to lunatic asylums and the life of Emily Carr, not to mention birds, Bertolt Brecht and, as she has put it, "the constant threat of tragedy." But unlike Migone, Hille has never done a piece that involved pounding a microphone against a wall over and over until it caves in, then playing back the sound from a speaker nestled inside the hole. Neither has she made music by editing together recordings of people cracking their knuckles, knees and toes, or expelling gas, or other semi-voluntary processes on the barely-there bodily plane.
After years of creating one of the world's only weekly experimental-sound radio shows on a campus-community radio station in Montreal, Migone got his PhD at New York University and is now a lecturer at the University of Toronto and director of the Blackwood Gallery in Mississauga.
Yet the gap between their two aesthetic worlds is not as wide as it might seem. After a performance years ago, someone told Migone he could call his approach "tinycore." "I like that," he says. "A hardcore of the infinitesimal."
And Hille's songs too have always been marked by an attraction to smallness rather than grandeur, a scale of reality underneath the one where everyday things are seen or stated. A Junior Scientist microscope played a prominent role in Hille's intellectual formation, not to mention a stint in art school. So, in a sense, here were two tinycore artists coming together. The record was created slowly, with each writing on their own at their opposite ends of the country and then arranging yearly get-togethers between 2000 and 2003. "While one might guess that the roles were very distinct given our respective track records, it was quite the opposite," says Migone. "I played some instruments and contributed some lyrics, Veda provided some sound textures. We recorded raw material together and apart; we manipulated and mixed together and apart. We tried to keep it tenuous and sparse." "I really don't consider it to be a music album," says Hille, "and I wondered whether I would still know what was 'good.' I found that I did know what was working and what wasn't, and Christof and I almost always agreed. Which is kind of amazing, in retrospect." "It was great for me to break out of my usual form," she adds, "but we kept a little tiny song element in there so it was a change for him too."
Migone, for his part, says he's "always been interested in melody, (dis)harmony, and specifically as they manifest themselves in song. Actually, more 'singsong' than song - the strands of musicality that escape the formal realm of songmaking/crafting/writing and permeate everyday speech." Some artists, such as Montreal's René Lussier or, more recently, Toronto's Charles Spearin (of Broken Social Scene) with his "Happiness Project," have explored that realm by composing music based on the cadences of ordinary conversations, which Migone says he likes. But "for me it was more about getting into a tiny place inside me, a place pre-language, a small nothing below the tongue. ... In exploring the sonorities of my voice, I find that a singsong often arises, little moments that could add up to a song if I had such skill or propensity ... but then I realized that capturing that pre-song state could be a fruitful avenue."
Thus, on Escape Songs, there are passages that sound like someone talking to him- or herself, which through repetition begin to free-fall into a hummable tune until they disperse into another set of sighs and smacks, as if stumbling from an exterior social world into some antechamber of disease or dream. While they briefly considered playing the results live at the time, Migone says, "I wasn't too keen on being on stage with a laptop - I'm still not - plus being in different cities and both of us busy with other projects made this a bit of a 'sleeper' release." That elusiveness was exaggerated by the CD's distribution (in a beige sleeve dotted with a few drops of varnish) on Migone's own sound-art record label with a name not even printable in this newspaper.
But since the Montreal festival and the Toronto art-music space made the invitation this year, Hille "twisted Christof's arm" and they invited some musical guests to help flesh out the ghostly originals. "I think the structure we've devised will help mitigate my discomfort," Migone says, joking that the live show could be titled "Escape Escape Songs." "The challenge and inevitable awkwardness of trying to translate such an intimate record on stage appeals to me."
<top>
"Revealing the everyday", curatorial essay to accompany the Fixation exhibition, by Mireille Bourgeois
The quotidian can seem to encapsulate everything that is experienced in a day, when in fact it is the particular redundancies
of life, which make up the every day. Things like sweating, salivating, identical words that exist in multiple books in our
library, sticking out a tongue, telling our age out loud, and so on and so forth. The everyday in art is not so because it has
touched on a subject that is regularly mediated in our day to day. It is more precisely art that has taken a very pointed
consideration of the occurrences of life, which happen on such a small scale as to not even attract attention. Why bring
awareness to the small gestures of our everyday? This can be seen as non-art, not only turning away from the aesthetics of
art objects, but to “indicate”, “intervene”, “document” what is closest to the artist, in hopes of understanding the most basic
foundations of life.
Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist Christof Migone has been making artwork since the late 80’s, originally focusing on
poetry and radio. He gradually crossed the boundaries of various mediums using electronics, video, audio, performance and
text as tools of investigation. Migone’s practice can be difficult to navigate; he is an artist, a curator (at the Blackwood
Gallery in Mississauga, Ontario), and an academic (holds a PhD in performance art). What is specific in his work is the
concentration on the banal habits of a daily routine — only experienced in the somewhat undocumentable of the individual.
The artist’s practice can be broken down into potential concerns with the body, language, and the mundane. However these
sensibilities are not mutually exclusive. Each repeats its overarching examination of the obsessive, trying to achieve an
understanding of how each artwork gesture endures physically or mentally, translates from one sense to the other, or is reordered through circling in place. Migone challenges the process of translation, and how it can be applied to other forms
of communication such as bodily senses or linguistics (for example). He uses microphones and video cameras to document
the workings of the body, reformulates language through dissecting text and reordering the words in new configurations,
and spends days, weeks, and sometimes months on a single obsession.
A disco ball has lost all its mirrors. It revolves fixed in the CCS Bard gallery space as a marker for the obsession of circling
ideas. Piece by piece Migone picked the mirrors from what he calls a “death star” — a Star Wars reference that does make
you wonder whether its suspicious silent motion will eventually devastate everything in the space — and after 12 hours
(spread over 3 days) of picking at the mirrors the ball was bare. It still has all the parts accessible to register it as a disco
ball; its information has simply been reordered.
Here fixation is also connected to the slight shifts between ideas; disco ball turns into Disco Fall (2008). The object is in
motion and constant transformation as it turns, building a slow momentum. Is the exhibition revolving around this Disco Fall or is it the other way around? A similar process of deconstruction is used in Migone’s 2008 Single text piece, where he’s
gathered the lyrics of 45 “classic” songs in alphabetical order. Repeated words are not allowed and the lyrics are then
printed seamlessly on 7”x7” white record sleeves and hung in a row on the gallery wall. The resulting text is more like a
collection than a serenade: gathering words that may constitute the essence of each song.
In Foursome, a 2007 audio piece originally conceived for a Tate Modern Resonance FM radio broadcast, Migone engaged
four dance choreographers to view Samuel Beckett’s Quad teleplay. In the teleplay, four hooded individuals enter a mat
shape on the ground resembling a boxing ring without its ropes. Each character engaged in a kind of wordless, private
dialogue, is assigned a metronome-like tempo, and the choreography advances with the build-up of a drum-circle type beat.
The Foursome participants were to recall the teleplay from memory and describe it in their own way, whether it was through
the vocal description of emotions, imagery or interpretations of the piece. Will the individuals revert to a descriptive analysis
of the video? Will they point out colors or sounds as the foregrounding element? Or will they resort to a complete emotional
reading of what they see? Perhaps it is the viewer who will describe Quad through their reading of Foursome.
The 840 razorblades in vex jut out of the gallery wall in a single row and are the remains of a 14-hour (840 minutes) long performance
the artist undertook in 1995. The piece was based on Erik Satie’s “Vexations” in which the composer added a note to the score stating
“To play this motif 840 times in succession, one would do well to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, with serious
immobilities.” During his version of the performance, Migone made 840 edits with 840 razor blades of a prior recording of him counting to 840 while a vinyl record with a closed end groove repeated the last note of Satie’s composition 840 times. Two copies of the
recordings were put on reel-to-reel tape and the edits were done by taking from one into the other. The resulting 27-minute audio —
heard throughout the gallery space emanating from a single bare speaker sitting on the floor aside to the razor blades — combines
both tapes and records a meditative passing of time, even the body’s exhaustion over the 14-hour period, and irritation engraved on
tape.
Migone abstracts the final stages of his artwork sometimes making it impossible to identify the source material. The work
can be read as a kind of trompe l’oreille disguising itself as white noise or a sensical narrative. For example in Migone’s 1998 Crackers the artist placed an ad in the newspaper asking volunteers to participate in a series of tapings where their cracking
joints would be recorded. Most of the 7 tracks on Crackers record the in-between space using its own materials as the
medium of documentation (sound, muscle, fluid, flesh). The final tracks are manipulated, pulled, cut, and only subtly recall
documentation of such a personal space, creating a disturbing voyeuristic closeness.
Migone’s interest in the body often leans towards or results in shame or embarrassment. The body presents many
opportunities for this: flatulence, secretion, contortion, aggression, immodesty are among a few scenarios that Christof plays
with in the exhibition space. He also uses the body as a vehicle to bring the ordinary outside of its comfortable
surroundings. Experiencing and marking the progressive effect of this discomfort is part of Migone’s use of endurance in his
performances. In Evasion or how to perform a tongue escape in public (2000) the artist has video-taped a close shot of his
mouth where he sticks out his tongue “as far as he can, for as long as he can”.
The tongue in Evasion is a visual allegory representing language, communication, sensuality, and is simultaneously a limb of
aggression, of necessity, and repulsion. The tongue is also in the process of attempting a kind of impossible rupture –
dividing the fleshy muscle from the idea of language – all the while knowing it cannot succeed. At 9:02 minutes, the artist is
fixated on enduring the physical exhaustion from forcing a cluster of body parts to pull together and produce a simple
action. Migone’s originally strong and straight tongue in Evasion eventually quivers, drips saliva and loses (face) control
trying to fight the need to recoil.
It is evident that the artist contributes time and energy that is consuming and at times physically demanding, often using his
own body as the measuring tool for the duration of his performances. Microhole are examples of this. Microhole has been
reproduced on-site and for the first time in stereo for this exhibition. Holding a microphone and recording the sounds
Migone has repetitively hit a wall until a hole broke the surface in two locations at stereo distance. The recording is then
attached to two speakers affixed behind the holes and the microphones left impotently on the ground. The repeated gesture
of hitting until the wall and microphone both are damaged challenges the endurance of the materials he uses, but also
measures the impact between the mic and wall through sound. The duplication of the “performance” extends the damage to
the artist’s body, the audio recording the artist’s exhaustion into the track.
As part of an ongoing project titled Pastime that will eventually involve fifty participants, Migone enlisted the help of 14
volunteers between the ages of 10 and 60 to repeat their age out loud in front of a video camera. The participants are then
paired in two-channel video projections; Pastime: 27-57 (2008) and Pastime: 20-50 (2008) are shown together in this
exhibition.
In the visual component of the videos the youngest participants are slowed-down to the length of the older participants’ age
(i.e. twenty seven years old to 57 minutes), and the reverse for the other participant (i.e. fifty-seven years old to 27
minutes), while the audio is played back in real-time causing the two to be off-synched.
In the same room is P (2006) a white animated letter jumping and bobbing on a black background. This study lasted 149
days as the artist recorded his voice at various pitches and tones stating “p” every time he urinated, which we hear to the
appearance of the letter “p” in the video. The passing p’s seems like memories passing as quickly in our minds as the actual
occurrences of the action. The pairing of Pastime and P observes the mundane within the everyday, and also steps back to
look at the banality of passing years made up of such accumulated banalities: from microscopic events meaning nothing in
the grand scheme, to the redundancy of life itself.
The two line-drawings printed in this catalogue are logs made for the participants of Pastime; 27-57 each line representing
every year of their life as they repeated it in the recording. Migone often creates secondary documentation of his artwork
that reappears in other projects, like in Pastime with these drawings, in Microhole where the microphones that have caused
the holes in the wall stand as documentation of the action, or with the band wrapping this brochure extracted from his P log
adapted for this exhibition text. This secondary material also exists as a kind of specimen, gathered after a study.
How do we come to terms with knowing what these banal representations of our everyday mean to us, if anything? Perhaps
there is an unknown, a new, or a different to be found in our quotidian rituals. But how many studies will it take to bring
resolution (revolution?) to the everyday? We might not understand what makes every day gestures in art so radical, but we
know that it somehow involves all of us, which can be a little unsettling when encountered in the gallery space. The
slightest piece of hope is left behind that by looking at the quotidian in art, some artists may have recoiled so deeply into
the everyday, so as to be on the verge of some kind of great reveal.
<top>
Mercer Union brochure, "A Portrait: Christof Migone’s Disco Sec" by Martin Arnold
Christof Migone told me that he thinks of Disco Sec as a kind of portrait; or, as he’s written: “a structural portrait of a personal history of listening to recordings compacted onto one CD.” Being a portrait, Disco Sec is not a discrete soundwork that happens to use some of Christof’s collection of recordings as its source material; and it’s also not some kind of commentary on or cultural critique gleaned from his listening habits. No, it’s a portrait; and like any portrait it represents just an aspect, just selected parts of the whole of what is being portrayed. Disco Sec “drags forth” (an English translation of the Latin protrahere, the etymological source of “portrait”) particular features, facets (or facets of facets) of his record collection, presenting something that, while new (depicting characteristics profoundly changed by being drawn out and re-experienced through their repositionings), never-the-less remains intrinsic to its source, a re-presented part of it; Christof has created no new material for Disco Sec. It’s a portrait of a “personal history of listening to recordings”; but be careful how you take the word “personal”: Disco Sec is not a self-portrait. Rather, it seems to me that to declare this collection as personal is to celebrate its systematic arbitrariness. In his subtly ambiguous, shady illumination of collecting, “Unpacking My Library”, Walter Benjamin speaks of the radically contingent make-up of any collection: “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?” But even if this disorder as a whole is Christof’s, many other listeners will encounter their own personal “chaos of memories” engaging Disco Sec, activated by glimmers of recognition or near-recognition. Christof’s collection embodies the kind of wild, uncalculated eclecticism one would hope for from one pursuing the question “I wonder what that sounds like?” as it presents itself in its myriad of contexts. But a music collection doesn’t embody answering that question just once; one collects music—keeps it near—because how something sounds never stays the same from listening to listening.
I collect recordings, lots and lots of recordings; so, not surprisingly, it’s significant to me that Christof has chosen a record collection to run his processes on. Music is a peculiar thing to think of as a thing; it’s more a complex event than an entity. And I have never been convinced by the pervasive inclination in this culture to talk about music as if it were a kind of language; I’ve always experienced music more as going on a trip than receiving a message. For me, music unfolds (and folds and unfolds) an uncanny psychogeography for my imagination to drift through; and as Merleau-Ponty says: “Music is not in visible space, but it besieges, undermines, and displaces that space.” But the aural space that enacts this displacement is radically ephemeral; as Eric Dolphy says: “When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone—in the air; you can never capture it again.” This inability to capture music gives recordings a kind of, well, magic: I know that I’m listening to the same performance, but my experience of it is never the same. I look around my apartment at my shelves of c.d.s, l.p.s and cassettes and I’m not looking at objects that I possess, that I contain within my little room; I’m looking at portals to other spaces that will besiege and blow this little room wide open. I think a book collection can give off a similar sense of unbridled potential; but there’s a speed to music that allows the close spatial proximity of recordings to be transformed into the close temporal proximity of listening at a velocity that reading can never match: I can experience what can happen if I listen to Betty Davis after Alice Coltrane after Judith Weir in a quick sitting—efficiently concise in clock time, immeasurably expansive in lived time. It’s the wonder of these disorderly proximities that Christof drags forth, portrays in Disco Sec.
Disco Sec is the name of a series of projects as well as an audio work. I think there’s something about their relationship to the delirious, transient polyvalency of musical experience that distinguishes the physical, visible accoutrements of recordings: album covers are never just packaging and the imaginary dimensions of discs of various sizes always exceed their actual, physical constitution as the hand moves them to the playback machine; the visible elements of recordings are keys and doors and launching pads inextricably linked to their portals, to the invisible—they’re a part of it. These are the kinds of links that bind the visible parts of the Disco Sec project to the audio work. They are portraits as well as they draw out and transform aspects of these keys/doors/launching pads. Again no new materials have been added. Christof calls them “structural portraits” and I find there’s a weird science at work in the formation of these structures: a record rim becomes a new whole (can it really be played? can it really be the visible gate to some other audible space?); and then there’s the quasi-Kabbalistic invention of new texts from song lyrics in Single—an application of a kind of near-gematria/notarikon/temurah as words are rearranged to create new esoteric meanings, as if the lyrics alone could be as unstable in their potentials as the music that embraces them. Even the denuded disco-ball evinces a kind of alchemy: I can’t see it as a stripping away; rather it exists as a strange transmutation—diamonds into lead.
Christof might be getting uncomfortable with this essay as this point. It was in the context of me blurting out my Kabbalistic associations to his work that he demurely stated something along the lines of: “I’m not really into the mystical. I think of Disco Sec as a portrait.” I’m not really into the mystical either; but the idea of a portrait becomes increasingly mysterious the more I think about it. I think this mystery has something to do with these comments Theodor Adorno made about the earliest representational artworks extant: “It is perhaps not irrelevant that the oldest cave paintings, whose naturalism is always so readily affirmed, demonstrated the greatest fidelity to the portrayal of movement, as if they already aspired to what Valéry ultimately demanded: the painstaking imitation of the indeterminate, of what has not been nailed down. If so, the impulse of these paintings was not naturalistic imitation but, rather, from the beginning a protest against reification.”
<top>
"Stop ou encore?", Voir (Montreal), 31 janvier 2008, by Nicolas Mavrikakis
Christof Migone est artiste, mais aussi commissaire. Dans l'exposition STOP, il réunit des oeuvres où absence, disparition, vide et mort sont des présences.
Le commissaire d'exposition est-il devenu un mauvais metteur en scène? De nos jours, il ne faut pas seulement rassembler des oeuvres de qualité (condition tout de même importante, même si elle n'est pas toujours respectée), il faut savoir créer une ambiance. Ce désir de spectacle peut avoir ses effets pervers, mais n'est pas par essence une mauvaise chose. Il y a différentes façons de faire du théâtre...
Dans cette expo montée par Christof Migone, cette mise en scène est très réussie. Elle est digne d'un film d'horreur ou à suspens. La sonnerie de téléphone (dans la vidéo d'Helen Tak) répond à une scène de meurtre (dans l'installation vidéo de Jones & Winn), qui fait écho à la salle de bois étouffante (de Samuel Roy-Bois) transpercée de trous, comme criblée de balles, qui amplifie l'effet déjà inquiétant de la voie d'un homme répétant les mots "il faut que je sorte d'ici!" (dans un film de Charlemagne Palestine)...
Mais un commissaire est plus qu'un metteur en scène. En France, on parle souvent d'"auteur d'exposition", même si des artistes, comme Buren, ont dénoncé cela. Disons que le commissaire doit être un interprète qui explique le sens ou (soyons plus réaliste) une partie du sens de l'oeuvre. Il doit élaborer une lecture de l'art et prendre parti dans les débats (artistiques, intellectuels, politiques...) de son époque. Et là encore Migone remplit bien sa mission. Dans une époque où l'art est pimpant et clinquant comme une pub Versace, il montre des oeuvres plus arides, dignes héritières de l'art conceptuel (l'intervention de Mastroiacovo sur la fin de l'art est superbe).
Ces pièces nous parlent d'un paradoxe que nous connaissons tous (en particulier en amour): l'absence est une présence plus présente que la présence. Migone souligne en fait un aspect de l'art conceptuel où ce n'est pas la dévalorisation du savoir-faire qui est si signifiante, mais la dépréciation et la disparition de l'objet. Quant au concept de rythmicité (énoncé dans le texte de présentation), il mérite des explications qui viendront certainement dans le catalogue (à paraître le 1er mars).
<top>
Tue, book, Montréal, Le Quartanier, 2007, ISBN 978-2-923400-14-3. Review in CCP (cahiers critiques de poésie) by Vincent Barras
Le point de départ de Migone est chez Brisset : « Le mot tu désigna le sexe. Tu sais que c’est bien. Tu sexe est bien. C’est un terme enfantin : cache ton tu, ton tutu… » : progression par calembours, associations sonores, mouvements réflexes (plutôt que réflexions) hors sujet, mais surtout en dehors du sujet. Migone avance pareil : écriture déterminée par des procédés fondés sur sa pure matérialité, tenant ferme à sa propre condition objective, à distance franche de l’intention subjective. Parmi ceux que l’on voit à l’œuvre dans les neuf textes qui composent Tue, un premier procédé consiste à choisir, dans les œuvres d’écrivains tirés de la bibliothèque de Migone, tous les mots contenant les lettres « t » et « u », puis à en composer un récit : celui qui provient de Homme-Bombe de Michaux va ainsi : « Outils. Autres, peut tuer, tuer, tuer, tuer toujours culbutais tue. Tout tube. » ; un autre, à opposer à une composition constituée de mots, semblablement sélectionnés, dans la traduction anglaise d’Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État d’Althusser une version française composée sur un mode identique ; un autre encore, à dresser une liste alphabétique de noms tirés de la liste d’adresses de Migone et déformés par le remplacement systématique de la voyelle par « non » ou « tutu » ou « nonnon », etc. Bref, opérations arbitraires et directes dans la chair textuelle, qui font dériver le texte d’origine (plus précisément : le pré-texte) vers une chose autonome, abstraite, au sens pour ainsi dire chimique : abstraite de son point d’origine, mais qui garde quelque chose de la chair initiale, une déformation violente qui, comme un portrait de Bacon, conserve dans la trace même du geste qui la fait surgir un lien organique avec la figure d’origine (ici, le plus souvent, un texte de « grand » auteur, poète, philosophe ou autre référence culturelle majeure de notre temps). Les stratégies textuelles de Migone sont passionnantes, leur rigueur implacable (dérouler toute une œuvre-source, jusqu’à son épuisement) s’allie à une sorte de nonchalance, un humour finalement très personnel. Retour du sujet ? La réponse est dans le dernier texte : « mig non » : collecte de messages trouvés sur la toile où le mot « mignone » s’est trouvé mal orthographié, amputé de son « n » central).
<top>
Tue, book, Montréal, Le Quartanier, 2007. Review in Inter, no. 101 hiver 2008-2009, p. 86, by André Marceau
Connu surtout pour son travail en art audio et en installation, Christof Migone ne s'affaire pas moins à la pratique d'autres disciplines, notamment l'écriture, comme en fait foi cette parution chez les éditions Le Quartanier.
Un recueil de poésie, dans son sens le pus radical (racine grecque du mot poésie : poiein, qui signifie « faire »), de la pure expérimentation. La plupart des propositions reposent sure deux mots : tue et tu, à partir desquels il décline divers jeux à caractère conceptuel, qui ne sont pas sans rapport avec son travail en art audio : appliquer des systèmes à des sources (ready-made, cut-up) qu'il a préalablement sélectionnées pour des raisons subordonnées au projet en cours. Nombre de ces jeux, en outre, entrent en dialogue avec l'œuvre de divers auteurs et poètes puisée à différentes époques et origines. Par exemple, chacun des textes dans « L'entretue », l'une des parties du recueil, repose sur une œuvre précise (de Marguerite Duras, d'Antonin Artaud, de Maurice Blanchot, de Georges Bataille, d'Henri Michaux ou de Jean-Luc Nancy) où l'auteur relève les mots possédant les ettres t et u. Rapporté dans le monde de l'écriture, tout le côté ludique de ce type d'application systématique apparaît avec plus d'évidence encore (que dans le monde de l'art audio). Mais nous pouvons croire qu'il l'a réalisé ici sans l'assistance d'une machine et que les textes et les auteurs « cités », il les a lus. Dans la mesure où le lecteur connaît ces mêmes textes (et qu'il s'en souvient), ce dernier peut partager une complicité avec l'auteur.
Le plaisir de lire peut se trouver au rendez-vous ici, à condition de ne pas considérer la poésie uniquement comme discipline éminemment personnelle, lyrique, « qui éveille des émotions esthétiques », mais bien dans son sens radical... Admettons que ce type de positionnement éditorial, dans le monde officiel des « éditeurs reconnus », on n'y était guère habitué, au Québec, jusqu'à maintenant. Les éditions Le Quartanier sont parvenues en quelques années à s'imposer dans le milieu officiel de l'édition et à pourvoir le lecteur avec cette veine de la poésie.
<top>
TROU: une esthétique du corps? feature article on TROU exhibition, Esse No. 60, pp. 50-53, by André-Louis Paré
Une bonne partie de notre vie se passe
à boucher les trous, à remplir les vides,
à réaliser et à fonder symboliquement le plein.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1)
Artiste pluridisciplinaire, s’intéressant autant à la performance, à la vidéo, à l’installation, à l’écriture qu’à l’enregistrement d’œuvres sonores, Christof Migone rejoint, par sa production, plusieurs publics fréquentant diverses scènes artistiques. Mais le fait de rassembler dans un même lieu plus d’une vingtaine de ces œuvres, dont les plus anciennes remontent à 1995, est aussi une excellente occasion d’apprécier la cohésion qui se dégage de l’ensemble de son travail. Intitulée Trou, cette exposition, proposée par la commissaire Nicole Gingras, voulait en effet montrer l’importance de certaines préoccupations de l’artiste qui se situent, principalement, au niveau du corps. Mais quel corps?
Parmi les œuvres, deux installations sonores furent le résultat de performances réalisées dans la galerie en vue de cette exposition. Microfall est composée d’une plaque de carton-mousse de polyuréthane sur laquelle sont déposés les restes d’un micro, conséquence de sa chute répétée, causée par l’artiste juché sur une échelle de quatre mètres. Un haut-parleur suspendu au-dessus des fragments du micro transmet l’enregistrement sonore lors de cette action. Une autre installation intitulée cette fois Microhole laisse voir un trou dans un mur. Ce trou est le résultat de plusieurs coups donnés par l’artiste avec un micro sur une des cimaises de la galerie. Désormais inutile, le micro est étalé sur le sol devant le trou bien visible. Un enregistrement sonore de l’impact du micro sur le mur est diffusé par un haut-parleur installé derrière le mur. Dans la monographie qui accompagne cette exposition, des photographies témoignent, pour chacune de ces actions, des gestes répétés de Migone en vue de parvenir à ces expériences sonores issues de la destruction de ces deux micros.(2)
Certes, toute œuvre requiert de la part de l’artiste une action quelconque, mais chez Migone, grâce aux enregistrements sonores, cette présence au niveau du geste n’est jamais totalement en retrait de l’œuvre. En effet, bien que parfois absent au niveau de la présentation, son corps avec toutes ses ressources est souvent à la base de son travail. Par contre, il arrive aussi qu’il s’agisse de celui de certains collaborateurs. En somme, souvent mis en scène, le corps humain est toujours considéré comme quelque chose d’impersonnel. Il est avant tout une matière vivante à explorer en vue de mettre à profit ses capacités sonores. C’est pourquoi il y a, chez Migone, une fascination pour les instruments d’amplification, notamment le microphone et le haut-parleur, qui sont techniquement des extensions du corps comme source sonore. Or, s’il émet des sons, ce n’est pas uniquement parce qu’il est, comme tout objet, une surface à partir de laquelle on produit des sons, mais plutôt, comme le titre de l’exposition l’indique, parce qu’il est un organisme vivant traversé par les multiples orifices que sont la bouche, les narines, les yeux, les oreilles, l’urètre, le vagin et l’anus.
Ces orifices sont des lieux de passage, des lieux d’absorption et d’excrétion, nécessaires à la survie ou au plaisir, et c’est justement parce qu’ils fonctionnent comme des lieux d’échange entre le corps et le monde ambiant que ces trous sont aussi les points les plus sensibles de notre être corporel. Par contre, soyons clairs, le travail de Migone ne fantasme pas sur le corps libidinal. Dans l’exposition Trou, ces ouvertures sont présentées comme des cavités, certes intimes, mais qui d’un point de vue artistique sont considérées uniquement comme des espaces de création. Autrement dit, comme orifices corporels, les trous anticipent surtout le potentiel créateur du corps. Par exemple, une autre installation sonore intitulée South Winds présente un haut-parleur déposé sur le sol et que l’on a saupoudré de talc. La vibration obtenue par les sons qui y sont diffusés produisait parfois un léger souffle capable de propulser le talc autour du haut-parleur. Mais ce qui peut faire sourire le spectateur, c’est de savoir que les sons entendus sont extraits d’un disque produit en 2003 intitulé également South Winds. Il s'agit en fait d'un hommage au célèbre pétomane, Joseph Pujol (1857-1945) qui s'est rendu célèbre avec ses numéros sonores provenant de ses flatlences. Ainsi, cet enregistrement fait du corps humain un instrument qui émet des sons. Mais on peut dire également que ces gaz expulsés hors du tube digestif par l’anus sont en étroite parenté avec la bouche, cette machine à broyer les aliments. D’ailleurs, parmi tous les trous, la bouche est une ouverture privilégiée. Elle est l’orifice par excellence.
Dans L’être et le néant, Jean-Paul Sartre analyse d’un point de vue phénoménologique notre rapport au trou. Pour lui, tous les trous sont des bouches que l’on peut obstruer, colmater, bloquer. Les trous sont en quelque sorte des néants à combler. Fondamentalement, comme être-au-monde, l’existence humaine a «tendance à remplir».(3) On a eu beau dans la tradition métaphysique occidentale, privilégier la bouche comme organe de l’expression orale et de la pensée, il n’en demeure pas moins, selon Sartre, que c’est avant tout un trou qui, en désirant se remplir de l’autre, nous unit au reste du monde. L’enfant, par exemple, porte tout à sa bouche dès les premiers moments de sa vie. Alors qu’il est, comme être troué, existentiellement ouvert au monde, il tente de devenir un bloc hermétique. Or, même si les trous sont aussi parfois chez Migone des espaces à combler, ce n’est pas pour nier notre ouverture au monde, bien au contraire; c’est surtout pour explorer dans un contexte souvent ludique les diverses ressources du corps.
Dans la courte vidéo Blockers (2004-2006) on voit justement deux visages – celui d’un homme et celui d’une femme – dont les narines sont obstruées par les orteils de l’autre. Autre vidéo, mais cette fois-ci accompagnée d’un enregistrement sonore, Poker (2001) présente un diptyque où apparaissent divers visages de collaborateurs qui se sont prêtés au jeu des effets sonores de différents micros sur leur épiderme, mais aussi sur les yeux, les narines, les sourcils et les lèvres. Toujours sous forme de diptyque, la vidéo Snow Storm (2002) montre sur une première image les mains de Migone frottant vigoureusement sa chevelure, ce qui a pour effet de produire des pellicules que l’on voit dans une deuxième image en train de tomber sur son pantalon, mais aussi sur le sol. Mais bien avant ces vidéos, la bouche comme orifice a eu aussi droit à quelques performances. Dans The Tenor & the Vehicle, une vidéo de 1995, l’artiste se filme en gros plan avec un micro dans la bouche qu’il va mâcher, sucer et mastiquer durant près de cinq minutes. Ce sera encore plus spectaculaire dans The Release into Motion (2000) où Migone garde en bouche une tomate prise dans un bloc de glace durant plus de 39 minutes. Au fur et à mesure que le temps passe, la glace se liquéfie libérant ainsi la tomate qui se mélange et se transforme peu à peu, grâce à la chaleur émise par la bouche, en une masse molle et informe.
Ces performances sont des sortes de rituels bizarres qui à chaque fois impliquent des considérations sur le plan de la durée, mais aussi de l’endurance. Par exemple, la vidéo Evasion or how to perform a tongue escape in public (2001) montre un gros plan d’une langue sortie de sa cavité buccale. Mais en la maintenant à l’extérieur de la bouche pendant plus de neuf minutes, la langue oscille, vibre et déglutine de la salive. Lorsqu’elle est dans la bouche et qu’elle mastique les aliments, la langue est un organe essentiel pour le goût. Dans cette vidéo, elle devient objet d’un pur exercice qui à force d’être regardé peut aussi déranger. C’est que l’aspect grotesque de cette action est loin de ce que l’on entend depuis Kant par goût esthétique. L’esthétique classique n’a pas de goût pour ce genre de langue, ni pour toutes matières liquides ou visqueuses provenant du corps. Autre exemple : P (2006), une vidéo où un fond noir est ponctué de la lettre P qui apparaît de diverses manières. Ces apparitions orchestrées coïncident au son P que l’artiste a prononcé à chaque fois qu’il urinait, et ce pendant 149 jours, ce qui totalise pour la vidéo 1 000 P. Enfin, Spit (1997-2003) est la collection de multiples crachats que Migone a déposés dans une bouteille de verre transparent, laquelle trônait joliment sur le sol au centre de la galerie.
Comme on le voit avec Spit, certaines œuvres sont aussi de l’ordre des objets abjects résultant d’interventions faites au quotidien par l’artiste. Mais, il y a mieux. Par exemple, In Sink (2003) présente une série de boîtiers de disques compacts vides laissés dans un lavabo pour des périodes de temps variables, ce qui leur donne divers degrés d’opacité. Il y a aussi Mille-feuilles (2006), qui correspond à un empilement de 1 000 pages de différents formats extraites de livres appartenant à l’artiste. Sur chacune de ces pages, Migone a inscrit le titre de l’ouvrage et le nom de l’auteur du livre mutilé. Ces mises en scène d’objets s’inspirent du monde de l’artiste, elles symbolisent l’importance des mots quand ils se font littérature et des sons lorsqu’ils deviennent musique. Mais les objets qui occupent une place anodine dans nos vies sont incommensurables. C’est ce monde qui nous entoure que la vidéo Surround (360 objects) (2006) nous fait voir en partie. Elle consiste en la présentation de 360 objets présentés sur un écran divisé en 36 sections. Pendant qu’il les tient dans l’une de ses mains, l’artiste filme ces divers objets en exécutant 360 révolutions sur lui-même. Ces objets ne sont pas détachés de l’univers corporel de l’artiste, ils sont en quelque sorte son monde, celui à partir duquel l’art devient une forme de vie.
Pendant longtemps, dans le geste de la création, le corps réel fut mis entre parenthèses. Constamment représenté en peinture ou en sculpture, le corps vivant devait se soumettre à des critères esthétiques. Nietzsche est sans doute le premier à avoir décrié les contempteurs du corps, ceux qui traditionnellement ont nié son potentiel créateur.(4) Or, ce potentiel s’inscrit dans la chair, dans le corps incarné à partir duquel il est permis de repenser une esthétique du corps. Bien sûr, cette esthétique est à mille lieux de celle que promeut aujourd’hui l’industrie cosmétique. L’esthétique dont il est question rejoue les catégories qui structurent la forme. En ce sens, elle réfère à ce que Nicole Gingras dans son essai appelle, à la suite de Georges Bataille, l’informe.(5) Qu’il s’agisse, en effet, de la salive, des pellicules, des pets, de l’urine ou des diverses cavités du corps capables de produire des sons, tout cela appartient à une mise en œuvre du corps réel, qui dégrade, déforme et transgresse la forme.
Il reste que la forme par excellence est la figure humaine. Celle qui tente de nous distinguer du monde animal. C’est de cette figure humaine dont il s’agit dans la vidéo Agir (25-250) (2006). Mais justement celle-ci nous sera montrée que défigurée grâce à un procédé technique. À partir d’un enregistrement vidéo d’une durée de 25 minutes, Migone en a isolé un extrait de 25 secondes qu’il a par la suite ralenti sur une durée de 250 secondes. Dans le cadre de Trou, c’est cette vidéo d’un peu plus de quatre minutes qui sera présentée. L’effet produit un portrait flou d’une jeune fille de vingt-cinq ans. Un portrait qui bouge constamment, dans lequel ce qui se forme est toujours sous le signe de l’informe, de ce qui excède la forme. L’esthétique du corps chez Migone passe par cette mise en mouvement des formes, et qui dit mouvement des formes, dit aussi passage. Dans la vidéo Agir, celui-ci est visible grâce à des prouesses techniques; mais, par ailleurs, les passages de la forme au difforme, de la forme à l’informe nécessitent souvent la présence d’ouvertures, d’orifices, bref de trous.
1. Jean-Paul Sartre, L'être et le néant, Paris, Gallimard, 1943, p. 705.
2. Trou, catalogue d'exposition, Éd. Galerie de l'Uqam, 2006.
3. Jean-Paul Sartre, op. cit. p. 705.
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra, Paris, Gallimard, 1947, p. 51.
5. Trou, op. cit. p. 47.
<top>
Trou book/DVD Vital Weekly No. 564 Week 7 review by Frans de Waard
The work of Christof Migone has been reviewed before in Vital Weekly, but it dealt always with one aspect of that work: the music, released on the compact disc that was reviewed. Migone however is also a visual artist, and much of his work is shown in his home town Montreal, so its likely that you or me didn't see that work. Until now that is. With 'Trou' we don't get the real thing, but it gives the idea. 'Trou' is compiled by Nicole Gringas and is an exhibition of various Migone multimedia works, such as films, installations and sound work. I could try to explain what his work is about, but it would mean I would have to retype Gringas book. In short, many of the works by Migone deal with body, with sound and with language. The body farts, makes the sound of cracking bones (both of these were used to make music), but also produced the installation 'Spit', which is a bottle of collected spit. Conceptual work, but it has a great visual and audio power. To make things more complete this hardcover book has DVD of various works. Of these all of them, except 'P' and 'Surround (360 objects)' deal with the human body. In 'Poker' we see two faces at the time and they are being 'touched' ('poked') for sound, which is kinda poetic. In 'Snow Storm' dandruff produces the title and in 'Evasion' we are confronted with the human tongue, but no doubt the small screen at home works less effective than the full screen in the gallery space. The films are quite short (ranging from less than a minute to twelve minutes), and open up the fascinating world of Christof Migone. Still not the real thing, as the exhibition is the real thing, but it's a fine substitute.
<top>
Trou book/DVD The WIRE March 2007 p. 69 review by Brian Marley
As Nicole Gigras, writes, in her introduction to the work of Montréal based installation and sound artist Christof Migone, the body is "a text... the raw material that the artist works with, that he cuts into fragments, transforms, manipulates." In this he bears at least some comparison to Anontin Artaud, though Artaud's performative expressiveness (a philosophically validated howl of existential pain) has little to do with the invasive procedures to which Migone subject himslef and others. His subjects' acquiescence does little to ally this troubling aspect, yet there's nothing in his writings, nor Gingras's exegesis, that acknowledges it. Trou comprises an overview of this work from 1995-2006. Much of the book - a substantial and elegantly produced catalogue of 22 key works - consists of photographic stills of his installations. In themselves they convey little of what it must feel like to experience his installations in situ, but Gingra's essay and Migone's explanatory texts (both presented in English and French) add a uselul layer, and the 30 mintue DVD of five of the installations presents them to better advantage. One of the pieces on the DVD, Poker (2001) - a reference, I assume, to maintaining a 'poker face', ie to remain inexpressive - uses a split screen technique. Microphones of various kinds are stroked over and tapped over the faces of volunteers. The faces in each of the dual frames changes at irregular intervals, and the sounds vary according to whether a cheekbone is being tapped or an eyebrow stroked. About halfway through the piece there's a snatch of field recording of adults and children, low volume, lo-fi and vague, the significance of which is obscure. For P (2006), Migone recorded the sound of himself saying "pee" everytime he urinated. There are 1000 tightly packed, chronologically sequenced utterances in the piece, which took 149 days to record. As well as the 60 second DVD version, there is, apparently, also a 60 minute version. While Migone repeatedly says "pee", the letter dances around the screen. It's an amusing piece, but of little consequence. What's of greater importance, but acknowledged by the artist only in Poker, is how aspects of his work reduces people to the status of things to which things may be done. It hadly matters whether his subjects have agreed to be treated in this way: the result is dehumanising, which I suspect is not what Migone wishes to convey.
<top>
Sound
Voice Perform book/CD Artforum December 2005
Issue 256 (p.77) in Best of 2005 by Christoph Cox
A splendid survey of audio work by this Canadian artist. In
the spirit of Antonin Artaud, Dada, Fluxus, and sound poetry,
Migone playfully and insightfully explores the sonics of bodily
orifices and surfaces.
<top>
Sound
Voice Perform book/CD Musicworks Fall 2005
#93 review by Deanna Radford
This combination of commentary, artist interview, and catalogue
appropriately collects acclamation for the work of audio and
performance artist Christof Migone, dating back to the 1980s.
Sound Voice Perform chronicles this important Canadian artist,
whose works is always provocative, alive, physical, and occasionally
grotesque. The pieces writing Sound Voice Perform, written
by Migone and Brandon LaBelle, Martin Spinelli, and Allen
S. Weiss, artfully paint the impetus emerging from Migone’s
body of work. Some of Migone’s artistic experiments
have involved the collection of saliva, the ongoing protrusion
of this tongue, and the cracking sounds of warm human bodies.
It pretty well goes without saying that the physicality of
Migone’s work can make observers uncomfortable. At the
same time, Migone is intent of making the level of access
to this art—and to the means of sonic production in
general—transparent and immediate. Migone’s long
tenure at CKUT campus and community radio must contribute
to this perspective. Migone’s artwork is truly playful
and critical. In an interview with Spinelli, Migone explains
his passion for what he calls “the act of transmission
itself”: “Alongside playing around with different
relationships with the listener I would also play with the
equipment circuitry, I would place my hands on the microphone,
touch it, scratch it, play with it and the mic-stand…
so that people heard spatially and materially the room that
I was in. All of these kinds of situations to make apparent
and obvious the mechanism, the machinery, the technology that
is being used.” In a beautifully written contribution
to the compendium S:ON: Sound in Contemporary Art (edited
by Nicole Gingras, Editions Artexte), Migone writes: “…
sound epitomizes leakage, sound confirms the porosity of space…
Every space… has its own soundtrack, its room tone.
Every space is sonorous, every space has a breath.”
Yes, these things are intertwined and with this summation
Migone adroitly spells out how the sounds he imagines in his
mind become real. With this in mind, Migone’s practice
as an artist becomes the ultimate praxis. With written, photographic,
and audio documentation, Sound Voice Perform is an excellent
package.
<top>
Sound
Voice Perform book/CDThe Wire June 2005 Issue
256 review by Will Montgomery
Artist Christof Migone often works with the human body —making
audio pieces from the sounds of eyes, the tongue, joints cracking.
In an interview in this book, the second in Errant Bodies’
Critical Ear Series, and co-edited by Brandon LaBelle and
Achim Wollscheid, he describes his in the body’s ‘mistakes
— “saliva sounds, stuttering, mumbling”
— glitches abstracted from the digital realm and made
corporeal. This model applies across the range of his audio
work, which tends to home in on what lies outside or in the
way of communicative clarity. He foregrounds incidental matter,
sonic by-products and supposedly inconsequential ‘cutting
room floor’ audio. It’s a project that, in common
with much avant garde artistic practice, wants to tip the
balance from signal to noise. Nearly 50 examples of his audio
work can be heard on the CD accompanying the book, which compiles
material dating back to 1990. Radio is a strong component
in Migone’s work — he ran a Montréal phone-in
from 1987 to 1994. Some of the most suggestive material presented
on the CD are ‘blink and you miss it’ radio miniatures.
One of Migone’s projects was to produce little piece
of audio punctuation, abstract ‘in-betweens’ of
a similar duration to a radio station ident. Another strand
of the work is conceptual. In one audio collage, for example,
Migone rings his own telephone number but appends different
international prefixes in order to stitch together a virtual
community of people who definitely don’t want to speak
to Christof Migone. Other of the pieces exhibit an ear for
the small-scale sound — pops, rustles and clicks that
aligns his work with the microsound universe. The book includes
photographs of numerous performances, discographical and biographical
information, as well as brief texts by Migone and performance
theorist Allen S. Weiss. The longest contribution is an essay
by co-editor Brandon LaBelle. Sadly, it’s not particular
helpful, written in a shopworn, button-pushing theoretical
idiom that doesn’t do justice to Migone’s work.
With this package, the surprises lie in the audio.|
<top>
Sound Voice Perform book/CD VITAL WEEKLY no. 472 week 17, review by Frans de Waard
The work of Christof Migone extends beyond 'just' audio
and into the world of art, and art with a capital A. Many
of his works are conceptual, such as a CD with the sound of
farts or people cracking their fingers. Despite the fact that
some of the CDs have text dealing with the concept behind
it, this book 'Sound Voice Perform' is the compendium that
explains, shows and lets you hear it all. First of all there
is a CD with excerpts of the various previous releases by
Migone. It was nice to hear such a selection from his works,
but for me, well-acquainted with his work, it didn't add that
much new to what I knew already. Migone's audio pieces work
better when heard in their entirety I guess. The nice thing
about the book are the texts and pictures. Especially Brandon
Labelle's text on the use of the body in the work of Migone
is especially interesting and tells us a lot more on Migone.
If ever you wondered what a conceptual composer and artist
is all about, I'd recommend this book to study a good example.
<top>
La première phrase
et le dernier mot book LE DEVOIR 19 septembre 2004 -page
F4, review by David Cantin
[...] Le quartanier désigne un sanglier de quatre
ans. à vrai dire, ce n'est pas une bête d'âge
adulte, mais il y a un certain temps que ce n'est plus un
marcassin. C'est aussi le nom d'une jeune maison d'édition
québécoise (www.lequartanier.com) qui impressionne
par son dynamisme, de même que pour son goût face
à une littérature davantage exploratoire. Avec
huit parutions à son actif en moins d'un an (dont deux
prix Grafika), cet espace se distingue du lot grâce
à ses livres atypiques. Dans La première
phrase et le dernier mot, Christof Migone (artiste multidisciplinaire)
s'invente un monde où la déroute littéraire
provoque un jeu ludique et paradoxal qui sert de miroir à
l'écrivain. Aussi savant que curieux, l'objet exige
une forme d'abandon de la part du lecteur. On assiste donc
à une traversée mentale qui questionne le moi
tout comme la finalité du texte dans un désordre
prosaïque inclassable.
<top>
Escape Songs CD GLOBE & MAILThursday, July 29, 2004-Page R5, review
by Carl Wilson
[...] Escape Songs -- a cluster of miniatures
made by Hille (of Vancouver, though an honorary Torontonian,
known for her innovative-pop-poem song-objects) and Migone
(from Montreal and New York and a maker of collages of, for
instance, the sounds of cracking knuckles and knees) over
the past four years. "I am in danger (shut up), I am (shut
up) inanimate," Hille sigh-sings in Narrow into and above
Migone's shuddering computer, each doing its part to destabilize
the region. The suite eludes me even as I am immersed (shut
up) in it, but I elude its grip too -- permitted to enter,
leave, breathe between its assemblages, not seduced or sedated
into following the same path over again from so-called beginning
to so-called end.
<top>
Escape Songs CD Discorder CITR magazine June 2004, review by Chris
Walters
Imagine escaping from everything. What do you think
you would hear? In Migone and Hille's case, they find music
in a natural, organic form, without all of the re-recording.
Escape Songs is a progression of sonic experiments. Find the
beauty in the mistakes.
<top>
Escape Songs CD Sands-zine 13-12-2004 (in italian), review by Sergio Eletto
La
semplicità, lo scorrere fluido e rilassato degli eventi,
i tratti somatici fuggenti rendono Escape Songs un
disco importante e capace di mettere d'accordo un po' tutti.
Cristof Migone e Veda Hille battezzano un lavoro, fin dalla
confezione, scarno nelle informazioni e astratto nei contenuti.
L'astrazione deve essere intesa come il lato positivo dell'opera,
per intero sospesa e contesa tra sensazioni, esteticamente
opposte, ma complementari per la piena riuscita finale. Tutto
si spiega nella contrapposizione del background dei rispettivi
musicisti. Migone, (s)manipolatore elettronico attirato dalle
microwave di Steve Roden e Bernhard Günter, con la Hille,
differente in un passato accademico maturato, nel corso del
tempo, con linguaggi di ricerca. Il titolo, canzoni che fuggono,
mostra una spina dorsale fugace e spensierata e, se ciò
può indurre ad una certa noncuranza dei due nell'assemblare
i vari materiali, il complesso risultato finale mostra l'opposto. Escape Songs è un disco articolato come non
pochi, un lavoro tinto allo stesso tempo da tradizioni folk
ed elettro-acustica, da disturbi(ni) glitch e da sprazzi di
musica contemporanea, dalla ripetizione minimalista dei suoni
e dall'uso intimista della voce, dai pacthworks concreti e
dall'uso di melodie velatamente pop(peggianti). Un alone domestico
racchiude tutto un operato che ha visto i due registrare i
vari materiali nelle rispettive camere (l'intimità
e la solitudine lasciano una loro personale scia durante tutto
il tragitto) e, anche se il termine lo-fi non calza a pennello,
mi piace immaginare il mood dei due legato a quella estetica
del DIY, dal piglio semplice e artigianale. La voce (in fondo
"Escape Songs" è un disco di canzoni,
anche quando a mancare è la diretta interessata) della
Hille a tratti cammina, ansima: più che cantare, preferisce
procedere con andamento recitato (Sympathectomy, una
stupenda ballata, si adatta al caso). Quando spetta, più
raramente, a Migone fare sfoggio di ciò, lo vediamo
cimentarsi nel creare intricati giochi ultra-minimali: loop
vocali scarni e sussurrati sorretti dalla ripetizione lenta
di uno stesso termine o parola; facile preda durante l'ascolto
di Lick. Per quanto riguarda la musica: da sotto si odono
echi di pianoforte (la prima traccia senza titolo fa tuffare
nelle melodie sognanti dell'universo di Luciano Cilio), suoni
grattugiati e granulari, pulsazioni acute fuoriuscite dal
basso, voci trattate, alchimie strumentali e strumenti inconsueti
e inventati, echi e risonanze di (probabili) corde, tirate
e percosse, andamenti tratteggiati, suoni smussati e levigati
sezionati in micro particelle, lirismi pianistici surreali,
suoni striduli e sghembi, cut up(paggi) radiofonici, scampoli
di ambient, paesaggi notturni e riflessivi... La dimestichezza
nell'edificare un complesso emozionale, così vasto
e compatto nell'intersecazione delle varie forme musicali,
nasconde una buona dose d'improvvisazione, almeno questo è
il sentore che si percepisce in più di un frangente.
Se, di recente, avete apprezzato le minuziose diavolerie di
Sawako, le ballate nordiche dei The Iditarod, gli inconsueti
assemblaggi percussivi di Un Caddie Reversé Dans L'Herbe,
il primo glitch di Oval e Mouse On Mars, i riscoperti stati
di coscienza di Luciano Cilio (ancora lui) e le varie textures
di Roden e compagnia, Escape Songs, come accennato
in partenza, riuscirà a cullarvi con l'ascolto in un
unico blocco di tutte queste cose, in meno di un'ora.
<top>
South Winds CD http://rep.no.sapo.pt/criticas_C.htm (in portuguese),
by Rui Eduardo Paes
Migone é um dos mais curiosos
conceptualistas da nova electroacústica/electrónica,
graças a álbuns como Crackers, baseado
nos sons provocados pelo estalar de dedos, maxilares, tornozelos,
omoplatas, etc., ou Quieting, que tem como matéria-prima
um "sample" de 26 segundos com o disparo de um canhão,
sempre manipulado a um volume muito baixo e com cada pequena
peça secundada por outra, absolutamente silenciosa,
da mesma duração. Bem diferente é este South Winds, gravado com o recurso ao que o artista
sonoro canadiano chama Le Pétomane e que nunca chegamos
a saber muito bem do que se trata. O título do disco
fala-nos dos ventos do Sul e é inevitável que
tracemos paralelos entre o seu interesse pelo sopro do ar
e suas anteriores experièncias com a voz humana e a
fala como fontes sonoras dos seus processamentos, tal como
se ouviu em Hole in the Head e Vex, mas a verdade
é que não encontramos quaisquer traços
desse procedimento nas nove faixas do presente título.
Inserido, mais do que nunca no percurso de Christof Migone,
dentro da linha "lower case", dada a delicadeza
e o preciosismo destas composições, o que aqui
encontramos é muito menos "mental" do que
este criador de "puzzles" sonoros nos habituou,
ganhando mesmo uma desconcertante sensualidade. Do melhor
que tenho ouvido nesta área.
<top>
South Winds CD VITAL WEEKLY no. 389 week 38, review by Frans de Waard
Christof Migone hails from Montreal and has released a great
deal of work on various labels, including his own label, Squint
Fucker Press. Many of his CDs have a strong conceptual edge
to it. For his CD Crackers he recorded the sound of
cracking knuckles, knees, wrists etc and made music out of
this sound. On his new CD he works with the sounds of farts,
a work Migone undertook by using Le Petomane, a creation by
Joseph Pujol (1857-1945) - how they meet up is on of this
CD's mysteries. The title of the CD refers to Marseille, birthplace
of both Pujol and Antonin Artaud, which is the path of the
mistral, the wind coming from the Alpes going to sea, and
which is said to be a terrible wind. Terrible wind? Catch
my drift? The sound of farts was regarded as something funny,
and maybe still is, even when it's imitated by instruments.
Let's say that Migone recorded a whole bunch of farts and
created this CD out of it. Like usually with this sort of
things, if you don't know this, you wouldn't probably notice
it. Maybe it sounds like another bunch of synthesizers. Migone
however knows how to create an intelligent set of compositions
with such limited sound material. For the better part of this
CD are compositions that would appeal to a click and cut crowd
(if anyone remembers what clicks and cuts are), but this material
takes the whole idea just a few steps further. It works with
clicks but Migone is not interested in dance music at all.
His rhythms move along lines that are not really symmetrical.
That makes this CD into a captivating one, with or without
the concept of farts.
<top>
THE WIRE March Issue
217, feature by Dave Mandl
The Wire Issue 217 March 2002 Dave Mandl "I enjoy erasing
myself--though I retain a kind of presence," says Swiss-born
sound artist Christof Migone, now based in New York. Soft-spoken
almost to the point of inaudibility in person, on record he
gives the impression of being just barely there even when
he's singing. On Escape Songs, a collaboration-in-progress
with Canadian singer Veda Hille that features rare vocal performances
by Migone, the duo's voices hang by less than a thread--hesitant,
fragile, afraid or unwilling to make a commitment. With reverbless
close micing bringing every lip-smack into relief, the recordings
are strikingly pure and almost uncomfortably intimate. Yet
Migone and Hille frequently drift out of the frame, innocently
unaware that their private voice-games and uncalculated electronic
noodlings were even being observed. Fragility is a state that
particular interests Migone –specifically the fragility
of the human mind, body, and language capability. His recent
performance piece Evasion involved him attempting to
stick his tongue out for nine minutes. Like going for extended
periods without sleep such an act pushes the body into an
unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and somewhat precarious state.
"Evasion lets the muscles of the tongue and jaw
take over," Migone explains, "or at least come onto
the surface, interacting with the message that my conscious
is sending me throughout: 'Get this tongue back inside!'"
A video recording of the piece, showing only his tongue, with
Migone himself retaining only a shadowy presence, documents
his physical struggle to resist his brain's warnings, saliva
dripping involuntarily from his mouth. Much of Migone's work
revolves around issues of control and lack thereof, and the
struggle between the two. "In our constant attempts to
rein ourselves in, things invariably slip," he says.
"But the slippage is perhaps more an excess than a lack,
or paradoxically both, as in a leak." Among the 'leaks'
that have long interested Migone are speech disorders and
vocal accidents, normally unacknowledged or prettified for
public presentations. His 1996 CD Hole in the Head,
which contains cut-up and processed voices culled from his
long-running phone-in radio show on Montréal's CKUT,
was inspired by écrits bruts (writings of the insane)
as well as psycholinguist Roman Jakobson's studies of aphasia.
Replete with all manner of gasps, groans, sputters, and cries
of anguish, the disc's 61 short collages approximate a kind
of aural schizophrenia, offering a disquieting reminder of
how thin the dividing line between "normality" and
"madness" is. The recently released CD Crackers , which collects recordings of people cracking various parts
of their bodies (knuckles, back, knees, etc.), is another
study of the control/lack of control dichotomy. To Migone,
the tension and release inherent in the decision to crack
or not reflects in microcosm the tension between order and
chaos in the larger world. Sometimes a joint insists on being
cracked, and if ignored it may crack itself anyway; an uncracked
joint can also make it painful for you to stand up, thereby
forcing you to crack it. Though Crackers seems like
a much simpler sound project than the incredibly dense and
obsessively cut-and-layered recordings that comprise Hole
in the Head, Migone says it's "just obsessive in a different
way." It took him three years to complete the CD's basicrecordings.
"Paradoxically, the [initial] recordings were too successful,"
Migone recalls. "They instantly sounded like digital
glitches. Yet retaining the somatic reference was the crucial
element." Without any prior knowledge, it's still difficult
to identify exactly what the flurries of apparently electronic
clicks actually are, and finding out can be a shock: "One
of the things that interest me in the work," Migone says,
"is that moment where one realizes that these are sounds
of joints cracking; sometimes the resulting cringe produces
a cognitive dissonance, and that movement against the grain
of one's enjoyment and preconception enriches the work."
Produced during his years living in Montreal, where he collaborated
with radio-art luminaries Dan Lander and Gregory Whitehead,
Migone's radio work also went against the grain. Well, the
way he heard it, he was attempting to resuscitate what he
perceived to be a virtually lifeless medium. "Radio voices
are dead on arrival...well-combed and articulated...air-dried
and dehydrated.," he wrote in an article for the recently
published collection, Experimental Sound and Radio (edited by Allen S. Weiss for MIT Press). In his own work,
Migone sought to banish the antiseptic, hyper-articulate speech
that dominates radio. In its place, he positively embraced
the imperfections and unpleasantnesses that make up communication
in everyday life. He also tried to break down the standard
host/caller relationship: "I was really trying to have
a total contrast from talk radio and say, 'I'm not going to
play the role of radio host, not going to present a topic
of the day, not going to monitor how long you talk as a listener'."
He provided open phone lines, sometimes leaving the studio
and letting callers talk among themselves, or calling in from
public phones to join the discussion like any other listener.
The unmediated and often intensely personal tone of his show
even attracted a stalker: "I was so much trying to bypass
this mass-communication thing by being very intimate on the
radio, and that probably didn't help matters. Also in some
ways my voice, not only its tone but also the bareness in
which I presented it, somehow triggered something in her."
Migone may really be flirting with yet more danger with his
planned Crackers video, in which he plans to put himself
in the frame filming himself recording people cracking their
joints–a very close and intimate process. More than the
audio version, he concludes, "it's much more about the
relationship. I mean, have you ever seen a chiropractor crack
someone's back? It's actually very sensual."
<top>
Writing Aloud:
The Sonics of Language book/CD eds. Brandon LaBelle
and Christof Migone, PARACHUTE No.107, review by Jim Drobnick
Conventionally, the body and language are terms mired in opposition.
At one extreme, theorists such as Parveen Adams declare that
the body does not exist outside of discourse. At the other,
theorists like Elaine Scarry point to how the body, especially
when experiencing ecstasy or suffering, obliterates language.
Poised between these polarities is the anthology and CD of Writing Aloud. Its engaging series of essays, manifestoes,
poetry and audioworks demonstrate that in regard to the absolute
belief in the ability of language to define and contain, the
corporeal is a radical and continual disruption. Yet, even
with its chaotic energies and unpredictable excesses, the
body can manifest its own form of communication, forcing a
reconsideration of its meaning-bearing potential. It is at
this fertile intersection between the semantic, the sonic
and the somatic that Writing Aloud stakes out creative and
intellectual possibilities. The essays, by media artists,
radiomakers, poets, composers, cultural critics and literary
theorists alike, analyze aural phenomena typically at the
edge of language, especially when it abuts, melds into or
erupts from the body. The editors, for instance, investigate
microphonic invasions and the sonicity of the body (Brandon
LaBelle), and ectoplasm and ventriloquy (Christof Migone).
Other chapters feature subjects such as glossolalia (Vincent
Barras), death rattles (Lionel Marchetti), and yodeling (Bart
Plantenga). Vanguard poetry emerges as a volatile site of
activity in Nicholas Zurbrugg's discussion of concrete poetry,
Fred Moten's inquiry into the avant-garde and difference,
and Sean Cubitt's tracing of the co-evolution between voice
and technology. Michel de Certeau once postulated that all
experience that is not a cry of pain or pleasure can be institutionally
appropriated. The CD accompanying Writing Aloud might
have taken this statement as its motto as cries, screams,
groans, stuttering, babble and other phatic utterances pervade
thirteen experimental audio works by Marina Abramovic, Michael
Chion and others. Also featured are works based on ambient
drones, microscopic tonalities, overlapping voices and synthesized
effects by Gregory Whitehead, John Duncan, and Yasunao Tone,
to name just a few. Writing is usually considered a silent
activity, but writing requires a body, and the cumulative
result of this anthology/CD is a shift not only in the understanding
of embodiment as an instrument, but also corporeality as an
entire listening device.
<top>
Separate performance by kim dawn
and Christof Migone, by Bruce Barber
[...] During the late nineties East Coast artists Christof MIGONE and Kim DAWN collaborated to produce a number of complex, technically sophisticated, and frequently abject and/or haptic performances. Working mostly in Montreal, Halifax and now New York MIGONE has produced audio work for CD's, live audio performances for radio transmission, as well as published theoretical essays and printed matter works. Kim DAWN has singly performed a number of simple but extraordinary works in Halifax and London (Ontario) and collaborated with MIGONE for a period of three years. In one performance in 1996 DAWN walked for several hours around the city of Halifax, dressed to kill in a tight fitting green skirt, high heels, flaming red hair, dragging and spanking her garden rake behind her on the pavement, enacting a kind of latter day Rake's Progress.
In My Dirty Tongue, a work performed in November 1996 at The Palace at 4:00 a.m. an alternative space in London Ontario, DAWN engaged in several activities wearing a pink see-through nightie/house coat from the sixties. With eyes closed she crawled around a rectangular space filled with white sugar crystals (6 x 40 kg bags) outlining the space with pink crayon. And then sitting in the sugar she clipped the tops off plastic chocolate and honey bear containers releasing their contents on to the floor and several beige nylons stuffed with teabags. (endnote 16) DAWN writes stream of consciousness prose and considers her writing to be performative and (loosely) therapeutic: "through writing I attempt to unleash the knots in m traumatized body." Echoing ARTAUD's all writing is shit, she writes that for her "writing is a process of pleasurable defecation on the page." (endnote 17)
One of MIGONE and DAWN's most ambitious collaborations was staged as part of the CounterPoses performance programme curated by Jim DROBNIK and Jennifer FISHER for Oboro Gallery in Montreal. In this work titled Separate the artist used their bodies, buckets, pots of honey and stewed plums to engage the topics of sexuality and desire and the continuous relationships between purity and danger, pollution and taboo. A small self-published text documenting the event contains twelve photographs of the artists dressed in disposable white suites wearing panda eye-blacking, seated on a floor area covered with aluminum foil and lit by two casually hanging naked light bulbs. DAWN alternately gorged on and spit up stewed plums, while MIGONE doused himself with honey, immersing his head in a bucket of it and occasionally inflating a balloon/condom. The slow motion performance evoked the erotically charged atmosphere of David LYNCH's Eraserhead or Guy MADDIN's extraordinary film Tales of Gimli Hospital. The artists' accompanying bookwork contains a stream of consciousness text that underlines some of their abject intentions.
lights bare, ready to electrocute, lights
fadein, fadeout,
blackout. they breathe, she
lost consciousness
from time to time. she started to hate
people watching her
disease. she counted in her head, se-
conds, minutes. she watched
the honey pour down his face, sticken
thick, gooey,
shimmery. she worried about his eyes,
offered her shit
napkins to wipe his honey eyes.
honeymilk. honeyman.
honeymitts. lights flickered
unpredictably. rose. fell. like
them. fell. fell. fell. swimming in their
shit. their sticky.
motor for the light dimmer hums slightly
in the background.
The rear cover of the book contains a quote, and abject reverie from the book Inner Experience by the renegade surrealist George BATAILLE."I stick my tongue in the hole...there's a piece of meat there, a blood clot getting larger, starting to protrude. I spit it out another follows. The clots have the consistency of snot, taste like food gone bad. They're glugging up my mouth. I decide that by falling asleep I'll get over my disgust, won't be tempted to fuss with them or spit them out. I drift off and wake up at the end of an hour." (endnote 18)
ENDNOTES:
16. Described to the author in a conversation.
17. Artist's statement, 1998.
18. Georges Batailles, Inner Experience, New York: SUNY Press, 1994.
<top>
Writing Aloud:
The Sonics of Language book/CD eds. Brandon LaBelle
and Christof Migone, THE TENTACLE Summer 2001, pp.
30-31, review by Christopher DeLaurenti
(includes a review of Music, Electronic Media and Culture Edited by Simon Emmerson Ashgate, 2000).
Topical anthologies tend to take one of three paths: encyclopedically
encapsulating the subject, or summarizing the state of the
art, or curating a complex combination of historical and current
work. Writing Aloud ambitiously strives for the latter and
veers from the brilliant to the inexplicably pedestrian. The
book's essays, interviews, scores, and photographs sprawl
gloriously from Bart Plantenga's arresting cross-cultural
overview of yodeling to David Dunn's score for Madrigal to
Nicholas Zurbrugg's knotty but ultimately rewarding ruminations
on connections between sound poetry and the avant-garde. Apart
from some dubious poetry and unremarkable photos, there are
many other fine essays as well as intriguing interviews with
Robert Ashley and Alvin Lucier. I was thrilled by the CD's
archival tracks (Arthur Petronio: Tellurgie from 1965, Vito
Acconci's Body Building in the Great Northwest, and Marina
Abramovic's Freeing the Voice, both from 1975) and can easily
recommend most of the remaining pieces such as the extract
of Chion's Gloria and Whitehead's Market Share. A few of the
tracks, seeming to have nothing to do with language or writing,
mystified me, though. For those interested in the long-form
intersection of text and music, Randy Hostetler's Once Upon
a Time, Glenn Gould's Solitude Trilogy, and J.K. Randall's
unnerving intimacy (a polemic) merit investigation. Quibbles
aside, this bold anthology is a bargain. By contrast Music,
Electronic Media and Culture is more consistent, but takes
fewer risks. I was mildly annoyed at the bibliography blithely
listing CD release dates instead of those all-important dates
of creation. While it's unlikely that most adventurous musicians
will think Stockhausen's Kontakte and Wishart's Red Bird were
composed in the early 1990s, others might be misled. Nonetheless,
despite the occasional ungainly terms such as "problematise"
and "paradigmatic", the essays are well written and teem with
marvelous insights, such as "The modern tendency to regard
tradition as a series of historical objects and as the antithesis
of innovation... fails to acknowledge that traditions, to
have continuing social currency, tend to change constantly.
A contrasting Japanese attitude towards history and tradition
is best exemplified by the case of a national shrine –
a fourteenth century Buddhist temple – which is completely
rebuilt from new materials every two years, and in which the
tradition is regarded as not residing in the object itself
but in the continuing knowledge of appropriate materials and
building techniques." (Simon Waters, "Beyond the Acousmatic").
And this jolt from editor Simon Emmerson: "We should not forget
that the phrase avant-garde was first used by Henri de Saint-Simon
in France (1825) at almost exactly the same time as Mendelssohn's
inauguration of the museum culture in Western concert music
with the revival of Bach's St. Matthew's Passion (1829) –
the past and the future at once..." Robert Worby's "Cacophony
" offers eminently readable pillar-to-post explanations of
Fourier analysis, harmonic partials, and guitar pickups as
well as good summaries of the Futurists, early Minimalism,
and Industrial music, though I wish he had devoted a few more
sentences to Japanese Noise. Also included is Chris Cutler's
indispensable "Plunderphonics," which outlines historical
antecedents (Hindemith and Respighi, yikes!) and masterfully
explores the swirl of contentious copyright issues. Unlike
the recent Arcana essays edited by John Zorn, I suspect neither
of these fine anthologies will get much press, but they are
both well worth owning.
<top>
Crackers CD ALL-MUSIC GUIDE, review by François Couture
Some readers will recoil only at the idea underpinning Christof
Migone's CD Crackers. Through newspaper and radio ads,
he recruited people who could make parts of their body crack
and pop. He recorded them and created a handful of pieces
using only those sounds. So what you hear is a construction
(a symphony, if you like) of cracking fingers, jaws, elbows,
ankles, backs, etc. This album marks the completion of a project
started in 1997. Migone participated in exhibitions and released
a few tracks on compilation albums and audio exhibition catalogs,
but Crackers represents the complete, definitive work.
One must understand the limitations of such a narrow sound
palette; the repetitiveness and relative softness of the sounds
make for Spartan textures very similar to glitch electronica
(paradoxical, isn't it?), especially in the first track. In
track five, it seems the artist tried to mimic the crackling
sound of a fire. Track six is the most puzzling piece: The
pops are lined so closely one to another that they form a
delicate drone. Track four presents an excerpt from one of
the recording sessions; a "cracker" casually explains
to Migone where to put his microphone to best capture his
body music – an example of the composer's deadpan humor.
As music, Crackers doesn't cut it: it's limited, linear, eventless,
extremely "lower case." On the other hand, as a
listening experience and wacky conceptual art idea, it is
genuine Migone.
<top>
Crackers CD VITAL WEEKLY Week 40 No. 293, review by Frans de Waard
Christof Migone might not be unknown to the readers of Vital
Weekly and here he presents a truly interesting work. Crackers doesn't deal with crunchy bread or cracks from the laptop,
but it deals with the sound of cracking knuckles, knees, wrists,
jaws, toes, ankles, backs, necks, elbows and hips. I usually
crack my fingers, but don't see that listed here. I know many
people that don't like that. Christof executed this project
partly to record the sound, but also as an art-science project.
The resultant sounds act here as the music. Of course these
sounds have been electronically treated to a wide extent,
so it's a repeating field of crackling sound. Sometimes high
pitched sounds are added, sometimes they are left by themselves.
Microsound for sure, and this release wouldn't have looked
bad on Mille Plateaux. An interesting idea to produce from
these bodily activities and maybe the future of clicks & cuts?
<top>
Quieting CD THE WIRE Issue 209 July 2001, review by Edwin Pouncey
As
its title implies, the fourth solo recording from this Canadian
conceptual sound artist is minimal in the extreme. Yet, separated
by slabs of stony silence, its isolated sound events acquire
a quite unnerving dramatic aspect. Turning on the noise of
a cannon being fired, its single shot causes one unprepared
bystander to shriek with surprise. It is no less shocking
when it unexpectedly goes of again like a bomb in your living
room, causing a ripple of panic and a rush of adrenalin before
it is once again swallowed up in silence. Except now that
it is charged with fearful anticipation, that silence no longer
feels so comforting.
<top>
Quieting CD MUSICWORKS No. 83, review by Darren Copeland
Christof Migone's Quieting is really quiet. So quiet
that the CD becomes entirely dependent on the listener's active
participation in the sounds that not only ooze out of the
CD literally every few minutes, but the sounds inhabiting
one's environment at the time. There may in fact exist many
more sounds that simply are not audible on this CD with a
typical consumer stereo system. Is this a thumbing in the
nose to the lack of aural attention in our culture? Or, is
it a challenge to our hunger for constant noise, constant
amusement whether we are consciously participating or not?
I challenge the reader to purchase the CD, listen to it and
keep count of the number of times you forget the CD is still
playing. You will find that your acceptance of silence and
inactivity may not be what you think it is! The notes to the
CD indicate that the sounds used throughout the single work
on it are derived from a recording of the cannon fired daily
at noon hour at the Citadel in Halifax, Nova Scotia. One of
the remarkable features of time signals like cannons and guns
is the shocking threshold shift that occurs once they are
sounded. Although Migone is creating a largely artificial
soundscape around the cannon firing, benefiting no doubt from
the increased dynamic range offered by digital audio techniques,
he is still preserving the possibility of that shock by making
excessive use of silence. In fact he is inviting the listener
to contribute to the preparation of this shock experience
by seducing him or her to turn up the stereo, to sink quietly
into reflection, and then.... Bang!
<top>
Crackers solo installation, Studio 5 Beekman, New York and performance
at Apex Art, New York Press March 1-7 2000 Vol. 13 Number
9, review by Kenneth Goldsmith
The press release for Christof Migone's recent sound installation
at Studio 5 Beekman was irresistible: "Crackers: A continuous
multi-media installation featuring bodies cracking their joints.
Do you crack your fingers? Your neck? Your back? Your knees?
Your elbows? Your ankles? Your hips? Your jaws? Your toes?
Your...?" Naturally, I assumed that it'd be just about
the creepiest thing I'd ever heard–perhaps something
akin to fingernails scraping down a chalkboard–and hoped
it would make my skin crawl. Upon walking into the gallery,
I was confronted with a small video projection documenting
how Migone captured the sounds: strapped to a naked ankle
was a contact mic; every time the ankle moved, it cracked.
Over and over. The source material was collected from people
Migone found by placing radio and newspaper ads that simply
asked: "Do you crack?" After an interview and cracking
demonstration, eight people were selected and the sounds of
their best joints were used. (It turns out that cracking joints
have varying acoustical properties: larger ones tend to be
heavier on the bass, while smaller ones have more treble.)
In a separate darkened room, 10 speakers of various sizes
hung from the ceiling, all cracking away simultaneously. Somehow
I expected the cracks to have a warm, human quality, but they
were icy cold. But not cold like bones rattling; instead,
they had a delicate digital, almost glass-like sound. I was
perplexed so I cracked my own knuckles. To my surprise, when
I disassociated the sound from my warm body, it did indeed
have an unexpected coolness to it. I realized that, while
the installation was not the sort of knockout I anticipated,
Migone's agenda was something other than what the sensational
press release seemed to hint at: he's a guy who's primarily
concerned with creating digital sounds from analog sources.
This was confirmed by Migone's short performance at Apex Art
a few nights later. There, he sat in a chair and stuck a contact
mic into his mouth, while on his lap he manipulated an ancient
reel-to-reel tape recorder stripped of its tape. Throughout
the performance, Migone attached things like paper clips to
the tape recorder, which went whirring around, hitting against
other small metal objects. The Rube Goldberg-style setup made
a small racket: each time Migone swallowed or otherwise moved
his mouth, the mic would pick up big, booming bass-like sounds;
at the same time, the variety of objects placed on the reel-to-reel
acted as a sort of primitive percussion device. As in "Crackers,"
the sound emanating both from his body and the analog equipment
was unexpectedly cool, digital and abstract. I think Migone's
on to something here. While there have been countless experimental
works made using the body as a sound source–Lauren Lesko's
contact-miked vagina and Donald Knaack's "Body Music"
come to mind–historically, the sounds remained true to
the source. You always knew that what you were hearing were
indeed body sounds. Migone instead is part of a splinter group
of glitchwerks and electronica artists (including Steve Roden,
who plays midcentury modernist furniture) who use dirty analog
sources to create clean digital-sounding works. This is in
contrast to most of today's artists who exclusively employ
the crispness of computerderived sounds to make their music
(this echoes a split that goes back to the 195Os when the
dirty French musique-concrete guys battled the squeaky-clean
German electronic musicians over what the future of music
should be). Call it process art: the way it was made counts
as much as what it sounds like. And while the result may not
be as lush as you might imagine, Migone's rich and intriguing
processes through which his music is created more than make
up for it.
<top>
The Death of Analogies CD and CD by undo The WIRE Issue 199 September 2000, review
by Phil England
On his third solo album The Death Of Analogies, Christof Migone
updates the fast edit, low tech musique concrete he developed
in his works for campus radio CKUT-FM in Montreal. Migone
delights in audio detritus–the kind of details others
leave on the cutting room floor In its intimacy, his debut
Hole In The Head was reminiscent of Adam Bohman's home dictaphone
recordings in the way it featured his own voice or body sounds,
the voices of callers to his radio show, and sounds from domestic
life. Death uses much the same sources as Hole but strips
them of any character that might identify them, somewhat blunting
his idiosyncratic edge and pushing him towards the overpopulated
area of electroacoustic music. If he has subjected his latest
sonic miniatures to greater computer intervention, they nevertheless
retain the dirty, visceral quality of his earlier album: glitch
done ugly. The slightly longer explorations of a new suite
called "Post Mortems" nudge his work closer towards musical
forms, despite its patina of vinyl surface noise. Less engaging
is Undo, Christof's duo with Alexandre St Onge. Like St-Onge's
last solo record, un sperme features recordings made entirely
from inside the mouth. Though this information is not given
on the sleeve, it is crucial in understanding these highly
minimal explorations. The duo's variations on the 'microphone
in the mouth' theme (tape hiss on max, mumbled voices, sub
vocal sounds, etc) are like so many shades of grey. Appropriately
enough, the track titles are taken from Samuel Beckett's The
Unnameable. And the grey cover is something Beckett himself
might have warmed to.
<top>
Crackers in Site of Sound: Of Architecture and the Ear NEW ARTS EXAMINER
November 1999, review by Mark Schwartz
[...] Of all the sonic projects offered [in Site of Sound:
Of Architecture and the Ear], none echoes Artaud's sentiments
about snake charming more than Christof Migone's Crackers
#4. Via radio ads and newspaper classified, Migone invited
the citizens of Ottawa, Canada, to a sound studio where he
recorded them cracking their knuckles, necks, jaws, etc. The
resulting "portrait of a city" makes for fascinating
if gruesome listening. You definitely hear this recording
with more than just your ears.
<top>
vex CD
THE WIRE March 1999 Issue 181 review by Andy Hamilton
"If
you enjoy being vexated, you will not want to miss the grindings
and gratings ot Vex," promises this electroacoustic disc Christof
Migone is assisted by Michel F. Côté, Louis Ouellet
and Gregory Whitehead. The disc is divided into three zones,
designated Satie, Antonin Artaud and Gilles Deleuze respectively,
with 2O minutes of short tracks in each. Satie was known for
Vexations of his own, of course, and his zone is the most
colourful, concluding with a splintering one minute "Satie
Hardcore". Artaud inspires more melancholic reflections with
mournful sax prominent on some tracks. But there's a minute
attention to detail throughout this quirky release.
<top>
vex CD
LE STEREOPHILE #13, review by Fred Landier
VEX est un disque qui se compose de trois zones. Des zones
de remixes concrets autour de trois héros contemporains:
Satie, Artaud et Deleuze. Humour et musique concrète,
électronicité et jeux de mots rogilos, ce sont
Christof Migone qui s'occupe avec Michel F. Côté
du cas Satie, avec Gregory Whitehead qui calme Artaud et avec
louis Ouellet qui ressuscite Deleuze. Les titres sont assez
éloquents pour ne pas se perdre à essayer de
raconter la musique : comme un rossignol qui autrait mal aux
dents, satie hardcore, les amateurs professionnels, channel
surf morpion, pour en finir avec la fin, défenestrer,
parler sale, je fuis ce que je suis É excellent sur toute
la ligne.
<top>
vex CD
ALL-MUSIC GUIDE, review by François Couture
Vex, Christof Migone's second CD, is a cycle of three works,
three 20-minute suites each inspired by a "shadow"
(the composer's word) and created with the help of a friend.
"Marche Arrière" ("Reverse") is
inhabited by the ghost of French composer Erik Satie and features
percussionist Michel F. Côté. "Cris-Cris"
was inspired by French writer Antonin Artaud and created with
the help of Gregory Whitehead. "Corps dans le Vide"
("Bodies in Emptiness"), a collaboration with Louis
Ouellet, is impregnated with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.
Each suite is divided into short interlocking segments (nothing
over four minutes), a technique Migone displayed on his previous
album Hole in the Head. The sound collages mostly use voices,
as well as electro-acoustic and electronic sounds, alternating
in the form of a cut-and-paste. The composer's fascination
with speech puts a new dress on: instead of accidental speech,
he now uses excerpts from the featured ghost's body of works
to weave enigmatic strings of meaning into his piece. "Marche
Arrière" is the more lighthearted of the three,
while "Corps dans le Vide" gets very close to aural
claustrophobia. All three have a more abstract construction,
a less visceral delivery than Hole in the Head, but they feature
a wider palette of sounds and techniques. It should be noted
that the collaborators' input did not leave a remarkable stamp:
Migone's touch remains the strongest one everywhere on this
album.
<top>
vex CD
VITAL WEEKLY 14 Dec 1998, review by Frans de Waard
From the active new music sources from Canada, a new CD by
composer Christof Migone, who is helped by the voices of Gregory
Whitehead, Michel F. Côté and Louis Ouellet.
There are three zones, or themes if you want: Erik Satie,
Gilles Deleuze and Antonin Artaud. "Vex is a series of accidents,
problematic strategie, absurd tactics and misunderstood languages".
Like with schizophrenia, the music limps on many ideas. Some
strong, and some weak. Much sampling of sounds, instruments,
voices, short and witty at times, even rhythmic at times,
but sometimes boring. A strange CD, not easy to capture in
it's intent. Closed like an asylum. If you are into improvisation,
sampling and a strong concept: this is it.
<top>
Separate
with Kim Dawn PARACHUTE octobre-novembre-décembre 1998,
review by Johanne Lamoureux
[...] Au terme de l'exposition, sont inscrit deux projects
plus près des préoccupations inter-esthétiques
des conservateurs. Womens' Rites: Sifting de tarin
chaplin et Separate de Kim Dawn et Christof Migone
délaissent la problématique du regard et de
l'interaction au profit de mises en situation du corps dans
sa plus troublante organicité: le corps consommable
(le corps enfariné chez chaplin, corps-pâte,
corps-pain) et le corps consommant dans la prestation de Dawn
et Migone annoncée, dès le haut de l'escalier,
par un odorama de miel, de fruits germentés et de lait
suri. Les performers y transgressent, dans une espèce
d'autisme jubilatoire et oppressant, un des grands interdits
de l'enfance : jouer avec la nourriture. [...]
<top>
Separate
with Kim Dawn MIX Vol. 24 No.2 Fall 1998, review by Valérie
Lamontagne
[...] Visitors returning from a final back room are warning
me, " Don't go in there, it's disgusting." I determinedly
move on towards the room's gleaming lights and enter a psychedelic
picnic where my olfactory senses are immediately assaulted.
Two raccoon-eyed humans are crouched on the floor in a debauched
display of consumption. They are breaking every table manner
and rule of etiquette - playing with their food, eating with
their mouths open and spitting it out again. Their menu consists
of chocolate bars, fruit, milk, and a large bucket of honey
that one of the performers occasionally dunks his head in.
Kim Dawn and Christof Migone's Separate embraces the fissure
between animal and human, food and feces, where the body's
exterior and interior boundaries spiral into one.[...]
<top>
Separate
with Kim Dawn FUSE Vol. 21 No. 4 Fall 1998, review by Stephen
Horne
[...] Last in my trajectory, but by no means least, was the
fabulously viscous performance of Kim Dawn and Christof Migone.
Those feelings of revulsion that so mark our fears of becoming
fluid are given a very precise embodiment in this provocative
and rigorous work. Presented in a small dark room into which
electric light intermittently flickered from an almost dysfunctional
single overhead bulb, Separate could disturb Kristeva
herself with its evocation of dangerous fluidity, of flows,
pollution and loss of stability. while one participant immersed
himself headfirst into a bucket of slime which could only
have been honey, the hooded co-performer sat mutely, slowly
carving round and round a book-shaped piece of material with
a large knife. equally obsessive, this same performer peeled
fruit, perhaps plums, sucking and drooling the viscous body
of the fruits. In slow time, this performance entirely permeated
the space and the bodies of anyone watching. Separation was
impossible; the persistence with which it oozed through pores,
under my/our skin was an entirely captivating argument for
'intersubjectivity' as a way of understanding the reciprocity
of relations between maker and made, of self and other. In
fact, McFarlane's and Dawn/Migone's works manifested what
I take to be the primary relevance of the 'Counterposes' event,
that is, to open a reconsideration of the banishment of performance
because of its emphasis on artistic presence, on the body
as subjectivity. [...]
<top>
Separate
with Kim Dawn LOLA No.3 Winter 1998, review by Jack Stanley
[...] One of the more enigmatic works came from Kim Dawn and
Christof Migone. Separate was a surreal ritual-like
performance where the artists engaged in infantile activities,
like sucking, chewing, spitting, and smearing food all over
their bodies. They sat on a blanket in the center of a darkened
room with honey, molasses, milk, and fruit spread out around
them. Both wore white hooded costumes and black makeup around
their eyes, which gave them a toy animal appearance. Even
though they didn't interact with the audience or with one
another, there was an acute sense of intimacy between the
two –an embodied sense of companionship. There was also
something extremely sensuous about their gentle and deliberate
action, which appeared both repulsive and comforting all at
once. Adding to this sensory experience was the smell of rotting
food that permeated the room, making me palpably aware of
the inevitability of impermanence and change. [...]
<top>
Recipes for Disaster THE WIRE Issue 168 February 1998, review by Phil England
[...] it was down to the artists to deliver the more interesting
presentations. These included Quebecois radio interventionist
Christof Migone, whose intelligent musings on wireless issues
were conducted from a table illuminated by a single lamp and
covered with a small number of props, which set the late night
radio mood. [...] 1997
<top>
Hole in the Head CD CMJ September 28 1997, review by Robin Edgerton
A 1991-1996 retrospective of Migone's sporadic but enticing
sound/language pieces, Hole In The Head is made up of familiar
sounds far out of their context. In these 61 fragments, mostly
arranged into longer suites, buzzes, clicks and static nervously
dart around voices of various kinds. The vocal components
are texts and noises, mostly, but a lot of frightened, filtered
snatches of conversation, like the kind Scanner picks up,
or quick inhalations and sleep-sounds. Drier than sound-poetry
contemporaries like Paul Dutton and Anna Homler, Migone works
with (and tries to approximate) the language of the insane–
repetition, dissociation, non-verbal words. verbal non-words
– arranged in a purposeful, composed, arty way (many
of these pieces were made for art contexts).
<top>
Hole in the Head CD MONTREAL MIRROR November 13 1997, review by Chris Yurkiw
Students of psycholinguistics and sympathizers with Bertol
Brecht's ideas on interactive radio should recall Christof
Migone's sound breaking show on CKUT-FM, Danger In Paradise,
whence a goodly chunk of this "schizophonic art' is culled.
Mics are misused, CD players skip, syllables are snipped and
recognized languages lapse into what Allen S. Weiss calls
in the liner notes "Migone's oral and aural contortions,
ruins, lacerations, abrasions and ruptures." Great fodder
for your answering machine.
<top>
Hole in the Head CD RUBBERNECK No.26 December 1997 Chris Atton
Christof Migone presents 61 tracks of close-miked vocal explorations
in as many minutes, The shortest clocks in at four seconds,
recalling Zorn's hardcore excesses applied to the voice, though
Migone offers much greater subtlety, variety and humour. An
obvious comparison would be Henri Chopin, but whereas he prefers
large-scale structures for his compositions, Migone's strength
is clearly as a miniaturist, focusing briefly but intently
on particular vocal phenomena and semantics. It appears he
does this on Canadian radio, too. Precisely why, he doesn't
say. You don't need to be there, either.
<top>
Hole in the Head CD ND No. 20 Summer 1997, review by J.F.
Migone exploits the technological possibilities of sound poetry
with much emphasis on simple, linear editing over sound processing..
This, and the almost strictly verbal character of Migone's
sound poetry (word meanings are often unimportant) make me
think of him as the polar opposite of Henry Chopin, another
tech-dependent sound poet. Like Chopin's work, Migone's exhibits
a kind of restraint that keeps the primary focus from being
obscured by indulgent effects and clutter. In feeling. 'Hole
in the Head' seems akin to sound artists like IOS Smolders
and Ryoji Ikeda, whose work expresses a technological attitude
that is post-heroic and which belongs to the blasé
mood of the communication age. Quite intriguing and recommended.
<top>
Hole in the Head CD EXCLAIM! September 1997 Richard Moule [also includes reviews
of Radio Folie Culture, Rappel and Jocelyn Robert's La Théorie
des Nerfs Creux]
That Quebec has always had a strong tradition in electronic
and electro-acoustic music is a given; what continues to surprise
is the wealth, depth and scope of the work being created.
The Quebec label OHM/Avatar seems interested in exploring
sound sources and found sounds. At its core, OHM/Avatar seems
to be following the esteemed traditions of people like John
Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, Brion Gysin, and more recently Robin
Rimbaud's project, Scanner and Panasonic, in creating musique
concrete and sound collages. Radio Folie/Culture uses
samples from field recordings of nature, radio or random conversations
and matches them with industrial noises that are carefully
constructed to form sound pieces. If Radio Folie Culture's
pieces serve as aural snapshots of fleeting real world moments,
making the ordinary seem extraordinary, Rappel is about the
art of voyeurism. Produced in collaboration with Radio Canada's
'Chants Magnetiques,' Rappel is a collection of recordings
from a little Bell branch office, and from answering machines.
Sound experimenters have dropped in on people's phone conversations,
capturing their innocent exchanges with one another. The effect
is at once banal and disturbing, catching these transmissions
and monitoring them much the same way someone would from security
services. In a world of instant communications and yet unprecedented
surveillance, Rappel tackles issues of privacy and
appropriation, and the lines that are drawn between the private
and public self when you try to reach out and touch someone.
Jocelyn Robert's La Theorie Des Nerfs Creux is no less
manipulative, but its intentions are more in creating waves
and frequency-based glitches, similar in style to the German
duo, Oval. Robert's sound collages appear to come more from
the electro-acoustic side of musical experimentation. Christof
Migone's Hole In The Head is a little more ambitious.
Migone's audio inventions are centered around the human voice,
in particular the inner voice and how it haunts our thought
and speech. Through piercing acoustics, Migone exposes the
vocal accidents of speech: moans, screams, sighs, cries, chokes,
slurps, wheezes, stutters and other imperfections. This is
abrasive and at the same time humbling stuff. We often like
to think of ourselves as sophisticated and enlightening conversationalists.
But at base have we progressed as far as we think? Are we
not, in the end just apes with haircuts? The mind reels.
<top>
Rappel CD ND No. 20 Summer 1997, review by J.F.
Compilation of telephone related sound works by Christof Migone,
Daniel Leduc, Sylvia Wang, Algojo)(Algojo, Pierre-André
Arcand, Chantal Dumas, Kathy Kennedy, Jean Routhier, Gregory
Whitehead and Doyon/Demers. There's a lot of French speak
here, making me ill equipped to understand or judge these
pieces, but I'll mention that they tend to remind me of the
works by some of these same artists on Nonsequitur's Radius compilations. Here they dwell on the sounds and mysteries
of the telephone world rather than the possibilities of radio
art (lots of beeps, busy signals, answering machine messages,
etc.) to pretty interesting effect.
<top>
Solar Plexus on Radius #3 CD GAJOOB March 1997, review by Mike Bowman
In the words of Monty Python, "And now for something
completely different." The Radius #3 CD compilation
features the work of audio artists, and when I say artists
I mean the fine arts Andy Warhol type, not the recording artist
Michael Jackson type. Kathy Kennedy constructs an audio essay
on gang culture and the pursuit of victims using a sonic collage
of footsteps in the subway, victim's verbal recollections
and other associated sounds. Christof Migone's "Solar
Plexus" focusses on the minute, insignificant sounds
of the world: people humming to themselves, clanking dishes
in the kitchen, etc... According to the liner notes, the goal
of these artists is to have their works broadcast. If you
like the work of hometapers like Scott Davies and the band
Inca, you'll enjoy this departure from the world of rock.
<top>
Live radio, CKUT-FM
Montréal 1987-1994 PHANTASMIC RADIO Duke University
Press, 1995 by Allen S. Weiss
[...] Villier's antitheater, Artaud's theater of cruelty,
Cage's imaginary landscapes, Novarina's theater for the ears,
Wolfson's radio solipsism, Whitehead's forensic theater, Migone's
radio contortionism: can the heterotopia of radically experimental
radiophony lead to a linguistic utopia, or are its results
necessarily dystopic? I wish to end this study with one further
selection from [Migone's] Describe Yourself, which
might serve as a coda, perhaps even an allegory, and certainly
a warning: CALLER 7: The wires. Hello Host: Yes, What is your
shape? C7: The wires. The wires for the electricity. It's
the power. The wires. You know what I mean? H: Yeah. C7: When
I stand near the wires and the tower of the powers. H: What
does that have to do with you? C7: Interesting things. Short
circuit feedback. Here, loss of self paradoxically entails
the most weighty presence of selfhood and self-consciousness.
Indeed the precondition of the "wireless" apparatus
is precisely the wires, the dynamo, the power, the institution
-reason enough to be paranoid. Is this an expression of anxiety
or fear? Or is rather the case, as Migone suggests that radiophony
"is a pleasure grounded in the insecurity of its grounds,
a certain danger in the paradise of unbalanced inputs and
dizzy spells."
<top>
Le transistor
transpirant Galerie Articule, November 4 1992 INTER
No. 55/56, review by Sonia Pelletier
Dans Le transistor transpirant, Christof MIGONE ressuscite
les correspondants d'écrivains célèbres
et impose une traduction signalétique par un micro-montage
de leurs lettres (littéralement l-e-t-t-r-e-s) sur
bande magnétique. La présentation de chaque
t-r-a-d-u-c-t-i-o-n revêt celle d'une conférence
classique dans un salon somptueux où certains invités
iront apostropher les passant, rue Mont-Royal, puis dans l'obscurité
du bureau nouvellement aménagé, interpréter
des circonférences de grincements envirevoltant sur
une chaise.
<top>
Open Your Mouth
and Let the Air Out for Radio Rethink INTER No.
54, review by Jocelyn Robert
Un travail questionnant les relations qui s'établissent
entre l'auditoire et l'animateur radio, cet étranger
admis partout mais dont on ne connaît pourtant que la
voix.
<top>
Open Your Mouth and Let the Air Out
for Radio Rethink ART RESEARCH CENTER IN BUDAPEST, review
by çgnes Ivacs
[...] In his work écrit bruts, Christof Migone
translated writings by the insane into a subjective aural
reading. Speech fallen apart, sounds cut off from the words,
stammers, silences and cries evoked the fragmented and disembodied
sounds of Radio Thanatos. The utopia of identity either personal
or that of the community broke off in this Artaudian schizophrenic
theatre - where the voice strives against the body to get
free - and radio manifested itself as technological presence.
An installation by Migone presented as a part of Radio
Rethink project was centered around the same topic. "The
radio booth resembles an inanimate brain rather than a great
communicator", he says. "And radio stripped off
its hardware, without a transmitter is like a confessional."
He installed a "confessional" feigning a radio booth
in which a computer was talking to the audience. The sequence
of questions and answers did not make up a conversation and
the words spoken did not reach anybody but immediately disseminated
as there was no transmitter. The person interviewed did not
understand his position: he did not know where he was - in
the ether or at an exhibition - and to whom he was talking.
These fragments of "conversation" that lacked a
context belong to the theatre of the absurd and join in the
parody of communication.
<top>
Squeaky Clean HIGH PERFORMANCE Winter 1992, review by Josh Hartley
Migone
and Toy have created a playful and hilarious experimental
soap opera that they describe as a "romp through the
apparatus of the popular culture product". The concept
for this collaborative CD originated from a series broadcast
on Canadian Radio. Sampling from the dialogue in soap operas,
it sticks to no one narrative, mixing voices and plots into
a complexly layered, wonderfully ridiculous and ironic package
of entertainment.
<top>
Horror Radia Vacui SITE SOUND May/June 1991, review by Sandra MacPherson
Gregory
Whitehead and Christof Migone explored the disembodiment of
the radio voice. Whitehead attempted to re-enter his "dead"
or pre-recorded voice. Christof Migone, who delivered the
second annual report of the CRTC (Center for Radio Telecommunication
Contortions), managed to get all the voices in the gallery
to enter the same body - a body which believed that "learning
to speak well is an important and fruitful task."
<top>
|