Noise: symbolic of the unknown, the sublime, the ineffable. It can only be defined by what it is not. In music; its software generators can be a defacto score, but in so-called classical notation, it can seldom be notated, making of noise a kind of ineffable. The researchers who discovered Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation were trying to erase the noise they heard while mapping the Universe, only to later discover that the noise keeping them from their wanted signal was the very map they were looking for.
On the other hand, noise comes to us with the idea of the pleasant and magical surprise. Hildegard Westerkamp says of working on Beneath the Forest Floor “Because of experience I could imagine what it [the setup in the music studio] would do, but I wasn’t sure…You always have surprises, if you use the same piece of technology for years, still with new sounds and new materials, you never quite know…I love these surprises.” [Westerkamp, Hildegard. Interview by Andra McCartney, in Toronto, Ontario; April 20 1993. Tape #6, York Univercity Graduate Programme in Music.]
Our relationship to ourselves and our bodies shifts while creating Noise music, losing body, gaining body, becoming virtual, extending our mind and sensations into that externalization of mind that is the computer. Attali states in Noise: The Political Economy of Music; that noise is violence. A noise interferes with music, bringing forth chaos. It is painful when loud.
Attali believes that by “ritually sacrificing” noise, we enact a ritual of control over an otherwise chaotic, and violent world. He believe that this ability to make us forget the violence of the world through composed music makes composed music a weapon. And that therefore noise is a synecdoche of freedom. “Those in power will always wish to control noise, especially if it makes us forget that we can be free.” [—https://listentobettermusic.wordpress.com/2014/03/28/noise-by-jacques-attali/]
Remembering that very famous poster of the Electromagnetic Spectrum that depiction of nature and simultaneously the locus of technology. The poster below shows how vibrations and frequencies in the electromagnetic sphere become colonized and privatized by corporations and nationalized by countries and their defense systems. This poster is a map of going left and right, but also going deep, folded in the waves and vibrations within entire worlds flourish, like the Ham radio frequencies, from which so much radio communication innovation stems, which occupy such a tiny part of the spectrum because governments and commercial radio interests left only the tiniest sliver on the dial for amateurs and hobbyist experimenters.
https://external-preview.redd.it/bXIKpolMBOyjlMXVCy3Lc9LHr7UYmxKdQxt8R9uovmY.jpg?auto=webp&s=4f0fa750ac83ea9db6335e07a114559f148b09ba
Noise in this case is only the uncharted part of the electromagnetic spectrum, the part we have yet to measure or define. Once again situating Noise in the realm of that which can only be described by what it is not.
Sultana…..yeah I mean I’m not saying “let’s connect with the universe” then it becomes too funny or vague but if I say like let’s connect with mycelium it’s like—oh “it’s cool”.
Sofy: It reminds me of that book we were reading The Tone of our Times. Francis Dyson talks about noise and the Big Bang in the same sentence. Thinking about the Big Bang is very spiritual but at the same time it’s getting rid of the noise, cleaning house if you will, in incoming radio signals that lead people there.
Sofy: Can you speak to how your performances tie into causes and ideas that are important to you personally, and what those ideas and causes may be?
Sultana: There is some translation that happens which is sonic and artistic and aesthetic in the sense that the subject matter of the creation of the work for me is the things that are important to me personally like non-human life because—we’re going through the sixth mass extinction [on Earth]. Hence I might not see this butterfly ever again—it’s the sort of ephemerality of all of these things which also brought me to sound actually and vibration. And what I mean with the visuality. With us being visual beings and 60 of our frontal cortex processing just visual imagery and thinking visually and so on.
I think we’re doing what we did to our tail we’re losing all of the senses in some way. So that’s important to me and also how we are unable to connect to the world because we only see it visually. A picture of a tree is as good as a tree you know? Yet a picture of a tree doesn’t make any sound. An actual tree has a bunch of nests in it and a whole ecosystem. It makes a lot of sound. It makes a lot of different sound at different times of the day and at night. and so I guess this is uh things I think about and this is stuff which also translates to my sound performances. yeah and interestingly… and what I’m doing in the coming future is a little bit more directly to do with politics because politics has become so fascist in this country it’s unlivable almost at this point really…
Last December (2018) we were doing this performance with Cynk collective in which we were going to wear PPE kits. We should have done it but it got cancelled. We cancelled it. We cancelled it because of the political environment. There were protests going on in the city and we didn’t want to take away from their progress. We thought that we should also go to the protest and people who would be at our concert should also be at the protest. We thought it was temporary, but since that time the government shot some students inside a university campus. A government university which is primarily muslim. A government university in New Delhi. So it felt too intense.
At that time we were doing this noise concert which felt extremely relevant so we thought we should do the concert at the protest site. Somehow it didn’t happen but we thought it was temporary and that we will get together again and we’ll do it again but since that time there has not been a single day when this in this country there’s not a country-wide protest going on. It doesn’t seem to move the government. So all of this is going to come into the work as well because it became central very recently.
Sofy: Can you talk more about noise being super relevant at the protest?
Sultana: Yes. Our noise music concert is choreographed. It is not all noise—but it starts and ends with noise.
There is a lot of noise in our lives yet we find those moments where we are able to—everyday hopefully—find these moments and tune in to a certain frequency to a certain thing and go deep inside that.
This is something that I’ve been saying every day to myself: that deep is a direction. You know like left, right, front, back, North, South, East, West, is how we navigate the world. It’s a very Euclidean and a very colonial way. Like conquering the West, and conquering the East and so on. You just touch the surface but you’re not conquering people’s hearts and minds and all of that. It’s superficial—is it satisfying to the ego? maybe, [and] that’s okay—but deep is the real direction because you don’t go anywhere if you don’t go deep inside your mind. So in that way [in] noise and our concert the idea is actually to start somewhere but then we tune in and then all of us kind of synchronize to that singular meditative even streak. It is within the noise concert and it is within noise itself and within the spectrum of what is known. In that way very directly as well as abstractly it is related to how the protest is and was in Bangalore
Sofy: You mentioned a bit about how you make the sound. Can you tell me more specifically about your techniques or your hardware/software flow however you see it?
Sultana: I’ll talk a little bit about my practice and also about Cynk Collective because I feel that that really helped to grow my practice and my imagination of working with sound and music
So I started with Pure Data
now I use Max because I can afford the fee when I need to use it. So I use Max and Pure Data and now I’m also beginning to use Reaper for ambisonics. I’m doing some spatial stuff or at least moving towards it which is quite interesting. I use my voice, but never in pure form, always transformed, always as a sort of a seed to enter into the flow of the code and then the code transforms it.
So I started exploring sound with Pure Data about four years ago. I did it after I saw Miller Puckett’s work at Kochi Biennale. He did two performances which were very simple and yet quite powerful and I thought that was very interesting. So I went back home and I downloaded Pure Data and that’s when it all started four years ago (2016).
I also had a mantis who used to live with me. Totally at random it just came inside the house and started living with me for three months. It didn’t leave. It would eat with me. I have a video of it eating with me, but the most interesting thing was that whenever I was doing sound this mantis would find its way to wherever I was. Whichever room I was in. The mantis really liked sound or something. That really made me want to do more sound. I was like “hey baby you like sound? I’ll do it!” [smiles] So it felt like there was someone listening and so I started playing more.
So that’s what my process is–was/is. I start with a frequency and then a single thing you know, a single thread like just something really tiny or sometimes I’m in a really noisy place like right now I live in this garage room that’s right on the street. It’s very noisy so one can’t really start with nothing because there’s always something. So I start with a lot of stuff. Basically some kind of noise—and then filter it. So the starting point is just to kind of begin to make sound in whatever form and then build on it. But building on it could also just be removing—just trying to find that “something”.
I think it’s something to do with finding your own center perhaps because each time it’s different. It is actually the desire to kind of come to this [present] moment because we’re always either speculating —I mean at least for me, I’ve realized this pattern— that either it’s speculating about the future, or living in a past moment of a memory and the question is—how do we come to this present moment?
When we were in lockdown this happened a lot more because everything that grounded me like say going out to a park or going to a forest and staying there or something, all of that was kind of lost and I just had this thing where I was kind of making mental notes of where my mind is at every moment of time and it was either speculating so if there is a thought and the next thought is to speculate and it’s like this thought tree is pointless it’s so pointless I don’t want to think but how to not think? Just by listening I guess, you know? Just by listening. So that’s my intention with my own practice when I’m just here in my room alone. I make sound just to find a moment of being centered and listen to something.
Then there’s this question of music. Because the moment someone enters my room I tell them “oh I don’t do music” because there’s all this music equipment and they ask. And I’m like “no I don’t make music, I know nothing about music— and then I find myself trying to explain that what I do is not musical and in fact I went through this whole process of trying to understand what music is and I realized that it’s great but it’s just this pattern forming at every scale. At every scale, like even at a micro scale of time, to create a tone there has to be that frequency which continues for a certain time and then you call it a tone and so on. And that there are steps—I mean the piano keys even look like steps.
And then I looked at Western music. I was like “okay everybody is doing this step scene like—one has to go from 441 to the next thing which ‘sounds good’.” We already know to the human mind or all over the world in places to go from 441 to say whatever next and or whatever it is and that’s kind of not true.
I’m not just trying to say that it’s not true for me, it’s also not true in an absolute sense. Pleasure is a lot more variable than has been stated and written down that— “oh! oh! 441 is pleasurable to the human ear, that’s it 440 is off, it’s off yo.” It’s also this euclidean sense of thinking and even in this sonic land also there’s this superficial navigation which is that from one thing to the other, like one step to the other, forward and backward and so on, it’s like the same way we navigate the surface of the Earth. South, North, East, West, all that. But then the question is: “what happens when you try to go deep as in deep as a direction so what happens when you say don’t do that and you just stay?
Mr Mantis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2FXxUPKbco
And Then https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UZLqQcACME
Sofy: What are you playing with right now, what are you going deep into?
Sultana: I’m presently playing with field recordings and spatial sound and less with synthesis— because somehow—I don’t know how, but somehow a lot less I’m doing a lot less synthesis through Max. I’m doing a lot of somewhat specialized field recordings and trying to see how is it that I could just create. I’m trying to create something in which I’m talking but in the headphones or in spatial audio space or whatever like it’s some voice that comes from really far away close by. It’s pretty basic—I’m just exploring spatiality in sonic land. This is the present moment for me right now.
Sofy: Can you tell me about your local place that you go to play and the scene?
Sultana: So I’m here in Bangalore and interestingly—I’m connected to many people who are making some kind of sound and noise music or just kind of playing exploring sound basically. I mean not in the musical space but outside of that as well across India. And it’s interesting that Bangalore has become a center for many, many of these people. We have a collective. There are about five people: there’s Amit who’s our troublemaker, then Vivek who runs the space Walk-In. We all collectively work out of Walk-In Studios as Cynk collective. Then there’s Naveen and Vishal does visuals, he does touch-designer and so on. His work is also similarly algorithmic in a way so it works in the space.
https://www.walkinstudios.com/
We have a space; Walk-In Studios where we all kind of meet and kind of make sound. We started Cynk about three years ago because we were all interested in sound and we were all doing it informally without any kind of guided exploration or talking through the direction we wanted to take. And we were all like in the same space we were meeting every day and every night we would just end up making a lot of noise. We didn’t even know it was a thing, it was just that we made a lot of noise and I felt free in the presence of these people to make as much noise as I wanted. This happened at Walk-In because it’s a space which allows for that. I’m very glad for that company and for the freedom it affords to make as much noise as you want. I think that’s really something. I don’t think I’ve found that space again in the pandemic. We have all kind of separated and we’re not doing this at the moment anymore but we really are going to pretty soon I guess after some things get better. That’s how Cynk works.
Amith created some physical instruments which use different contact microphones on metal objects which were there because Vivek is a metal sculptor so Walk-In Studios has a bunch of different kinds of metal things and also plants, lots of plants which we have to make music with. That’s an idea that we think we’re going to do at some point. So there’s metal contact microphone things then there’s analog instruments that Amith built which then route into my Max patch. Everything routes to me and then I spatialize it and control the levels and all.
I think Vivek is a little bit more of the conductor because he is more into pointing like that in the concert time. He’s the one we all look at for cues and he’s able to keep time and all. I can’t keep time so hence he remains the conductor and I’m the mixer and producer and also specializer and I do all the technical stuff. I set up the speakers, I basically set up the whole system and then everybody comes in with their things to plug into it. We also have one more thing that we do—a leap motion theremin.
https://www.instagram.com/cynk_collective
In the last performance which I coded is an interesting example because it has so much to do with physicality and sound changing with touch. With just touching nothing, and with movement which was very interesting. So there’s multiple instruments, there’s also just mics with things—like we were playing with these plastic bottle caps and the bottle caps sound like the ocean. When they are amplified and lots of them together are played in a way that sounds like the ocean which is a cool ironic metaphor. So we went with that. So we do lots of different kinds of explorations, and then we find some things and put them together and that’s Cynk collective.
There are other people in the vicinity who are experts in this very niche sound field. There’s one friend called Nikhil who also went to this Goethe Germany residency
and he’s like the ambisonics guy. He’s working for lots of theater plays and also he’s a friend of mine. He helps me figure this out. And then there are other people—recently I met this interesting guy who was building speakers and he’s a geek. Like a proper sound nerd who—a very interesting story for another time maybe, but yeah Stefan and there’s Ishan…there’s few people who are really getting into this sound space even though there is no support in a way. I mean financially there’s no way that this stuff is going to make you money, at least right now in this country. Even the speaker guy is struggling. But I guess everybody’s doing it anyway.
Sofy: Maybe having the space to meet and make makes that easier.
Sultana: It makes it possible. Otherwise it wouldn’t be possible at all without Walk-In. It brings us together and makes it possible for any of us to be having this conversation—it’s important that that kind of space exists, and it’s a beautiful space.
Sofy: It’s really cool how we get to have this conversation from different sides of the planet. Because of meeting there, part of what I’m writing about is that we have this community that exists all over the world and we talk to each other pretty often—like there’s these links that go from one place to another in a sense—this the culture of noise and like experimental electronics and this kind of music. That’s also very political, everyone is involved in the protest scenes all over the world, people are rooting for feminism and queer rights everywhere, and it’s very interesting to me that we have similar sounds, we have similar thoughts, but we’re in completely different places.
Sultana: Definitely. Spaces center us. Growing, nurturing our own community is the only way to go forward because right now we have nobody else nurturing us, not the country, not the institutions, nobody just each other, we only have each other.
Sofy: Exactly that’s also why I’m writing these interviews—you hit the nail on the head. Somehow we all talk to each other because maybe DIY people recognize each other.
Sultana: Yeah definitely. I think the other people recognize each other across all borders.
Sofy: Can you describe on the spiritual side of things how that works its way into your work —even if it doesn’t.
Sultana: That brings us to the question of what is spiritual and what is understood as spirituality.
Sofy: In your definition of it, how does it relate to making sounds or like using technology to make sounds? I think that our ideas of ourselves which we can call spirit, we encode them into the logic of our machines or the logic of our music or sounds or whatever. When we give interviews we always talk about how we wrote the software but we never talk about the spirit of the performance or the spirit of the sound.
Sultana: “The spirit of the sound” that sounds nice. The spirit of the sound…so I did a series of three of the performances called “flower”. I wanted to reach a place where I could do a final performance for my thesis which was called “And then” and the idea was: “And then anything can happen” it was about a night in the forest or a night in a forest, and it involved the idea of having an encounter with the unknown. I think that’s the most if I can use the word spiritual or if I can just say that is the meaning of life. I find there is no other thing like that. It’s unlike anything else, to have an encounter with the unknown. There are two reasons I’m interested in it:
one) is that by itself it is a transformative experience. It could be fear, it could be beautiful, it could be sexual. Even with a spider or a komodo dragon or the rock lizards which are all brightly colored. It involves I mean there’s something which is interesting and transformative in that experience because there’s fear but there’s also that moment where you are encountered with yourself as well as the other. That is the thing that I’m trying with my work. This is everything, all the sound everything. It’s that moment of an encounter with an unknown being is something I’m looking for and also something I feel is what is spiritual for me. Because this universe is spiritual, right? Like the world is spiritual, knowing that there is a single bug in the world—I am there and then there’s this bug and we’re the same essentially. I mean we’re the same—that’s spiritual and that’s just uh it’s just beautiful. That’s one thing which I look for but also
the second) reason why I’m interested in talking about it or or being more explicit about it in my work in my writing or performance, or before the performance when I talk to people, is that all of everything—the whole human enterprise is geared at this moment, for I don’t know how many years now, to remove all kinds of encounters from the experience of life.
Like “I don’t want to have any unknown encounters, remove the unknowns, kill the animal, remove the insect, have nothing, spray the pesticide. Just have nothing which is not known. If you’re growing rice in a field you don’t want the bug, you don’t want anything you don’t want whatever even nurtures their eyes because you don’t know” and so this whole idea even now, we’re even removing other human beings like—I don’t I want to go to a mcdonald’s and have an ice cream without having to face another person so we’ll try to remove the human interface from there as well because there’s a possibility of an unknown, you know? There’s a possibility of someone showing something real like a real emotion or something like that and that’s unacceptable so this entire human enterprise of removing unknowns. And all I want to do is bring back the unknown—just throw it in people’s faces! Just tell them that everything is unknown.
So I guess that’s spiritual and that’s how I think that I connect with this and if I speak more specifically—well I found a metaphor in mycelium for talking about this body and time. In the sense that we’re individuals we’re like the visual individual. And hence we’re like some sort of a singular entity which exists, which is “me” and my relationship with the world. It is already different. Everybody thinks of their relationship to the world differently and so on, but with a mycelial form for a body, a body of mycelium never really dies. It retains all the memory of the previous whatever till it does die. It can continue to live if the conditions are right, that’s the metaphor which I found very interesting. Which I also find somehow tangentially connected to sound.
It’s a very spiritual thing for me; that if you’re a network then there is no “right now”. If you think of your little toe and then you think of your ear and then you think of your vagina you think of each thing each time I say these words. You become aware of a part of your body which you were not aware of previously because we live in our minds and so on. But when you’re mycelium you can’t see, you experience many many different points of space through your body. You just grow, you don’t move, you grow. And also when you want to look out you sprout a mushroom and you’re able to look out and sense all kinds of things—temperature, night, day, sun, moon, all of that, wind, people, beings, all kinds of things. You’re able to sense all of these things through this network but the other thing is the relationship with time. This is something which is mind-blowingly spiritual in the sense that at one moment of time we can only hold in our mind the sense of being able to think of one thing to experience— so if I’m experiencing the cold on my feet I cannot experience the pain in my shoulder. It’s like one thing at a time, we’re able to perceive you know, singularly we move across in time.
We move, but how does a network think of time? I mean what is the relationship between network and time? This is something I find very interesting because I think we’re lost in time. We’re lost in time somewhere like some kind of fast-paced whatever it is—so I find there’s some relationship between this and sound because sound and how we experience sound in relation to time is also very different to how we experience time in relation to our visual sense in our mental selves. There’s a certain physicality to sound. I feel that this is related to networks and networks being a network and time and sound and body and the relationship between all of these things. This is something which I find has something which I’m looking for which is what spirituality I suppose would mean.
Sofy: How does your experience in your body affect your work? From the perspective of the feminine body versus other bodies but also your body whichever way you think of it, however you define yourself.
Sultana: I think it cannot be put into words but body is what I am. I can’t separate me and myself. Making noise is a non-gendered space for me because I feel like I’m lost in in making it and I’m not seen as myself, just a being, and as not a gendered one.
Sofy: That’s really great. That question always comes up like in discussions you know so I so I figured I would ask it directly and it’s tricky because I also don’t think—I mean I have a female body like and I wanted to change it also at some point like I really wanted to change it and then at some point I was just have been living in it for so long that I just kind I’m like: “whatever”. And I don’t think about it but then it’s always somebody else who comes from the outside and they say oh but how do you feel being a woman you know in in this world
I don’t feel like I’m a woman? and I’m like “I don’t feel like—yeah/and/but/also I don’t feel like it matters, you’re making it matter”.
Sultana: And also it’s political saying that I’m not a woman exactly. I am everything that I am and have lived through. Whatever that means to live, to be a woman, and live in this world and live in this country and live with all of that. All of that stuff you know, it’s crazy so I don’t want to say in any kind of on the record thing that I don’t think that I’m a woman because I feel like—I am yes. I don’t want to be in this space and I’m not even a woman so there’s no woman in this space. Then it’s a woman-less space!
Sofy: Maybe that’s that’s the right thing to write because I feel like a lot of media presents that you have to know.Here in the states like there’s this big trans movement which is really great because everybody knows about it and they start to understand more about it but in a sense the rhetoric behind it is very strange because it’s like “I know who I am and therefore I must become another gender” instead of like “I am who I am and I’m in between or whatever” it’s always this very strong statement and so it’s nice to make statements that are accepting of everyone’s in-betweeness and the more we say we are in between then maybe the less we have to ask this question of “who are you?”.
Sultana: Yeah for sure, for sure. What is the gender of mycelium? Does the mycelium care?
Sofy: Yeah yeah now that’s a great answer!
Sultana: The only thing that helps with making this possible I mean what I’m doing with sound and noise and everything it’s–I mean it’s a non-sexualized space Walk-In and my friends and people who don’t see this kind in this way and we see each other as people. And I know that and for sure because I have lived with them for very long and so this question and the discourse that we don’t know I mean what gender I am or they are or all of that, so there is a ambiguity to it I think there is very much an ambiguity to it in the space where we all come together and do this. So yeah, I would say that helps in the making; keeping it ambiguous and keeping it that way where it does not matter. It just–it is what it is and it is about what it is about—which is about making sound and music and love, and feeling, feeling something mostly.
Bio:
Sultana Zana is a low tech, high craft, open source, network-systems enthusiast working with physics, biology and emergence, Sultana is interested in mycelial perception, insect perception, tree intelligence and non human world views. Through her research-led art practice using multi-channel sound, video, code, vibration and sometimes non-human collaborators like bees and mantises, they attempt to explore their position as a being in this world. They have created multi-media installations, experiential performances and videos. Their work has been exhibited at various shows in Delhi, Mumbai, Kochi, Bangalore, Chennai and Bir, Himachal. Sultana initially trained as an electronics engineer, their interests led then to a masters in Contemporary Art Practice from Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology (2018). They presently live and work in Delhi and Bangalore. Sultana is a part of Cynk collective.
