French artist Thierry Bernard-Gotteland is fascinated by sounds. His performances are entirely new and sometimes destabilising experiences for HCM City. I attended his latest performance and speak with him about sound ecology, drone music and... guitar fetish.
“Saigonese street noises are for me typical of a booming city. Noise is not yet a concern. Priority is given to development, construction and profit.”
The show begins with the thump of a heartbeat that resonates in the night. A red electric guitar perched on its stand faces a Marshall speaker bathed in an eerie green light. Thierry Bernard-Gotteland (TBG) begins his performance.
TBG grabs the guitar and rubs it with dark, shiny latex tape. The guitar screams, squeals and cries, as if it’s being tortured. The beat changes with a high frequency note, and the smoke machine kicks into action.
There’s just one thing missing. The location is secret. There is no one else around.
The performance—Rhetorical Devices of Surfaces—is, however, being broadcast live on Non Stop Music Planet, a 24-hour online venue featuring artists from around the globe. The macabre scene is recorded by a camera and two mics, recalling the set of a horror film. But here, the victim of this ritual is the electric guitar, the icon of rock music, the symbol of unleashed passion and energy.
« It’s an allusion to the bondage ritual so to speak, the fetishism of the rock guitar icon and its destruction, » TBG explains.
TBG is not a musician in the strictest sense. He’s a multimedia artist who often works in the tradition of soundscape ecology, a movement which appeared in the 1960s and aims to explore the relationship, through sound, between living beings and their environment. For the past two years, that environment has been Vietnam.
Sounds of the City
TBG started exploring the depths of sound in France at the Fine Art School of Grenoble and later at Le Fresnoy National Studio. During his studies, he developed a video installation called Archigames, a 5.1 surround sound system that revealed the “tunes” of the city: noises echoing and reverberating on concrete buildings and glass walls.
After moving to HCM City to teach in the design department at Raffles, TBG found that the city provided ample fodder for his work.
“Saigonese street noises, coming from trucks and motorbikes, honks, construction sites, are for me typical of a booming city,” says TBG. “Noise is not yet a concern. Priority is given to development, construction and profit.”
TBG staged his first HCM City sound performance at Cafe 44 in 2007, where he stunned the audience with sharp high frequencies that approached ultrasound.
“For me, that was like the tones of Saigon, a growling vibrant city with myriads of trucks, construction sites, motorcycle sounds. I wanted to remaster and transform them into an art piece. »
But for the audience, it was something totally alien.
« It was quite a shock for the audience, they didn’t know how to react” he recalls. “Even taxis on the streets were stopping and asking what was going on, if everything was OK. »
TBG isn’t without a sense of humour about how his work is received in Vietnam. He had asked his students to film the performance for a documentary, but when he was done, they approached him and asked when the performance would begin.
“They thought I was just having a problem tuning the machine the whole time!” laughs TBG.
Buddha Drones
TBG now teaches a Computer Sound Production class at RMIT. To illustrate that sounds are composite—that sounds we hear on the street are made of many aggregate sounds—he gives his students drone music, a minimalist musical style characterised by lengthy audio programmes with slight harmonic variations and sustained, repeated notes in a specific frequency, like the blowing wind.
The music may be unfamiliar to the students, but it’s rooted in Buddhism. Drone appeared in modern Western music during the 1960s, but its origins date to ancient Southwest Asia. During a sound and light piece TBG performed with local heavy metal band Black Infinity last year, he tapped that shared tradition.
“It sounded like a Buddhist mantra, like a long sustained Om chant,” recalls TBG. “The Om is the pure, first, unpolluted, one-and-only sound that could be heard at the birth of the universe, according to the Buddhist philosophy.”
Though these performances are new to HCM City, they are not without precedent. Rhetorical Device of Surfaces recalls Fluxus, an international network of artists of the 1960s that was active in Neo-Dada noise music, or Christian Marclay and his piece entitled Guitar Drag, in which an electric guitar was attached to car and dragged down the road while still connected to a speaker.
« It was an allusion to a black man who had been lynched the same way, somewhere in the South of the U.S. at the time,» explains TBG.
That potential for representation made sound installation the right choice for Rhetorical Devices of Surfaces. As the performance reaches it’s climax, TBG wraps the guitar one last time and cuts the vinyl tape with his teeth. The guitar becomes mute. Its sobbing is looped through a distortion device before eventually fading away. Silence returns as the smoke dissipates. The guitar is now totally wrapped in its black binding.
The fetish is complete. The icon is silenced.
TBG checks on the camera and then chats with Non Stop Music Planet’s organisers in France: « All is good, » they proclaim. « Great show! We are now switching to a live performance in Moscow, bye! »
Truly alone now, TBG is free to contemplate his next artistic endeavour, whatever it may be.
