Artists from France and HK come together to mount a multimedia show, drawing attention to the city's richly textured soundscapes that we often take for granted. A report by Chitralekha Basu.

What do Edwin Lo's fragmented horizontal lines against a white base and set in pairs on adjacent walls, after the fashion of framed family portraits, have in common with the glittery black volcano series, by Pascal Broccolichi, where music erupts from speakers implanted in some of the craters?

Both artistic works are inspired by the harbors of Hong Kong.

Broccolichi teaches sound art at Villa Arson, Nice. Lo was raised in a fishing family in Aberdeen. Both have plumbed the depths of the watery environs of Hong Kong in search of material to build their sound art installations on. The results, expectedly, are as different from each other as chalk and cheese. Broccolichi's creation comprises 62 mounds of music-spewing black dust on which strategically-placed lights dim and brighten alternatively, signifying the passage of the day. Lo's work indeed is on a different register -- spare black lines drawn on white paper.

"The horizontal lines indicate my sonic experiences afterward," says Lo, referring to the recordings he made of water sounds at Aberdeen, including impressions of underwater music created by boat paddles and motors. A video recording of these are played on a loop beside the graphics. It was while re-listening to his recordings, Lo had decided "to use simple lines to notate the sound, movement, corresponding to my on-location experiences and memories of the sounds".

Broccolichi's and Lo's works are on show at Comix Home Base, alongside those by several other bright minds, with original ideas from Hong Kong and France. The exhibition, Beyond the Sound, runs until June 8, as part of Le French May Arts Festival. It is curated by Anne-Laure Chamboissier, who was pleasantly surprised to discover a vibrating, pulsating sound art scene in Hong Kong, during her frequent trips to the city over the last two years. The sound expo she put together is a great way to draw attention to the rich and multifarious world of sensory perceptions that we often take for granted.

"In Hong Kong we're always exposed to noise," says Chamboissier. "At the same time we're not very conscious of what we're hearing. We're bombarded by sounds without necessarily trying to discern what those sounds are about."

A case in point could be Eddie Ladoire's audio composition, Intimity. It's a soundscape featuring street sounds - the clanging of metal being struck, resounding through air, people talking, the whirr of machinery, perhaps a giant fan. The sound grows in intensity, culminating in a crescendo, ultimately abating with merely a tinkle. It's an impromptu orchestra of everyday sounds, either amplified through spaces, brickwork and metallic features of the building from where the sounds were recorded or filtered through them.

Pierre Bastien's piece, Paper Orchestra, which combines music, sound sculptures and shadow theatre, might be interpreted as a call to join the frontline of a battle - completely bloodless, needless to add. The music is indeed rousing. As the ascending notes are struck one by one, hidden fans blow on sheets of paper which rise like crackling flames. Metal clips attached to strips of paper strike up the mini drums. A slow-rotating disk on which paper flutes are stuck, bringing to mind pipes in a church organ, make barely-audible, somber music, contrapuntal to the restless flutter of the thin strips of paper beating against a board, causing the sound to multiply.

"I like to work with sounds, images, shadows, music, rhythms, harmony," says Bastien. "I like to use all components of what makes music."

One of the most rewarding aspects of mounting the show, as Chamboissier never tires of pointing out, was the Hong Kong whiz kids of sound art she came to discover and collaborate with. Besides Lo there is Samson Young, whose work Liquid Borders - a sonic archive built on sounds collected from either side of the Hong Kong-Shenzhen frontier - is a highly ambitious project.

"Through the ritual of collecting sounds (including the vibrations in the fence, recorded from both sides) while walking along the border, I work through and digest this notion of a border as lines of control, as administrative barriers, as firewalls, and as physical structure separating people," says Young.

His exhibits at Beyond the Sound include Nocturne, for which he dubbed studio-generated sounds to video footage showing bombing of the Gaza strip among other images of terror strikes with original soundtrack erased. The sounds of violence - explosions, gunshots and crumbling debris - are recreated with everyday household objects using live-Foley techniques.

Hong Kong-born Phoebe Hui chanced upon Erik Satie's capricious musical composition, Vexation, at The Julliard Store in New York where she was doing an artist's residency. Her acoustic sculpture - also called Vexation - is "played" by pencil strokes on a cylindrical soundboard on which the keys are painted. "Score and performance are collapsed in Vexation," says Hui, noting the visual "enactment" of the musical movement by tools programmed and set in motion.

Music is indeed a key element in this show of sounds, even when it is missing. Bertrand Lamarche's installation, Sans Titre, is a rotating turntable with a silent, unrecorded disc attached by a thick string, several meters long, to an amplifier. The sound of the string whipping against the loudspeaker's surface creates a dull, repetitive sound every second or so.

Asked if this was a reference to people buying into the nostalgic charm of vinyl all over again, Lamarche said, unlike many new fans of the long-play record, his intention was never to fetishize it. "I have created a toy, more as a nod to childhood memories of listening to 78 rpm records. I am being totally respectful," he says. "If you turn the volume up, it sounds like the murmur of thunderclouds before a storm," he suggested helpfully.

Or it could, just as well, be the sound of a popcorn-vending machine.

Contact the writer at basu@chinadailyhk.com

In Edwin Lo's imagination the sounds heard on Aberdeen harbor take the form of fragmented horizontal lines. Provided To China Daily

Cecile Le Talec's art installation (detail in the blue background) recreates the experience of walking into a bird cage.

Samson Young muted the audio in a video footage showing images of terror attacks and spliced on simulated sounds created in the studio.

(HK Edition 05/15/2015 page8)