Decibel

DECIBEL: PERTH’S NEWEST NEW MUSIC ENSEMBLE, Aug 2011

Decibel is poised to become one of Perth’s most innovative new music ensembles. Formed only in 2009, it has already given numerous concerts, released a CD of original music and a book commenting on its activity to date. Directed by WAAPA’s Cat Hope, Decibel is armed with an understated yet audacious manifesto. Its aim is clear: to change the way Australians see music. Will it succeed?

There’s a hint of the ideologue in her and a whiff of the visionary. She is an amalgam of pioneerism and populism, ever on the hunt for new sound possibilities, yet attuned to the sensibilities of the common man. From her radiate intellectual sine waves that embrace the resolute avant-gardism of John Cage, Alvin Lucier and Iancu Dimetrescu, but also the decidedly mellower sound worlds of Ennio Morricone and Brian Eno. Such is the seemingly irreconcilable eclecticism of one of Perth’s most energetic and ground-breaking artists: Cat Hope.

‘Artist’, rather than ‘musician’, is indeed the operative epithet here. She may use sound as her principal source material, but the scope of her work is all-encompassing. Her goal, which she pursues with militant zeal, is an artwork that transcends barriers of genre and style. She rides forth in pursuit of her goal, supported by a phalanx of horsemen equally committed to the cause, the fellow members of her Perth-based new music ensemble, Decibel.

These cavaliers of contemporary Art are: Lindsay Vickery (reeds and programming), Stuart James (piano, percussion, programming and electronics), Malcolm Riddoch (guitar, networking and electronics), Tristan Parr (Cello) and Aaron Wyatt (Violin, Viola).

Together they form a unit, both artistic and ideological, practical and intellectual, whose purpose is not only to share sound experiences, but to challenge perceptions on art and music. What is music? Need it remain separate from the other arts and, most crucially, need it languish in a state of fragmentation, splintered as it is in a multitude of redundant subgenres?  

Decibel works out of the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), where Cat, formerly head of composition, now occupies a research position in which Decibel plays a decisive role.

As the CREATEC Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at WAAPA, Cat Hope’s research projects include her own compositions, low frequency sound, West Australian music archiving and new scoring technologies. Her academic work and her activities as a performance artist with Decibel feed into each other in mutually validating and reinforcing ways. Hypotheses elaborated in the academic laboratory are tested in the concert space for their concrete applicability. Conversely, discoveries made in rehearsals and performances are used to further refine and develop an underlying theoretical framework.

A Decibel concert typically involves the following elements: an integration of electronic and acoustic sounds, a juxtaposition of established repertoire by key twentieth century composers with new music by contemporary West Australian artists, and arrangements of existing works for electro-acoustic ensemble.

Most intriguing is their pioneering use of new, experimental scoring techniques, such as the scrolling score. The scrolling score involves a computer-generated image of graphically notated musical parts, which moves horizontally as a performance unfolds, providing musicians with the visual clues required to play a piece. It has featured in several of Cat Hope’s pieces, including In the Cut (2009) and Longing (2011), both composed for performance by Decibel.  

This scoring format is fascinating above all for its inclusive aspect. It remains visible not only to performers, but at times to the audience, allowing spectators to monitor a piece’s progress and predict its developmental curve on a moment-by-moment basis. This amounts to a kind of musical ‘voyeurism’, setting this scoring format apart from traditional instrumental parts, which are jealously guarded by a performer and kept from the listener’s view.

Their exploration of ground-breaking scoring techniques is but a single manifestation of Decibel’s broader experimental spirit. The drive toward the new, which, in Decibel’s case, goes hand in hand with a challenge of the old, pervades all aspects of Decibel’s creative process – conceptive, constructive and performative.

A piece’s realisation is fundamentally the fruit of collaborative labour, calling upon the varied talents of each of the group’s members. “We try steer clear of the notion of the composer as the ultimate authority in musical matters”, maintains Cat. “An idea for a piece may initially be mine or Lindsay’s, but it is thoroughly workshopped in rehearsal and all have the chance to provide their own input as to how it could be made more effective or more playable.”

Decibel’s concert works experiment with new sound sources and often exhibit a strong conceptual component.  In their second concert at PICA (the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art), carving knives and an animal carcass (!) shared the performance space with more traditional acoustic instruments. In their 2009 Tape it! concert, Lindsay Vickery’s Transit of Venus utilised a non-linear score and live sound processing to recreate the direct passage of the planet Venus in front of the Sun, while Cat Hope’s In the Cut  studied musical decline, tracing an instrument’s slow journey from its high register downward, until the instrument had no tuning left.

Decibel’s most concerted visionary energies are arguably focused on their treatment of electronic sounds. Their goal is to elevate the status of electronic instruments to that of their acoustic cousins, putting them on the same level both musically and intellectually. “We want electronic sound sources to be seen as perfectly valid instruments in their own right”, Cat declares. This means placing them in performance spaces alongside acoustic instruments so that electronic and acoustic sounds are treated equally and come to occupy the same semantic space in people’s minds.

As driven as they may be by their hunger for innovation, Decibel take care not to neglect less adventurous listeners. Programs are carefully pieced together so that a counterbalance is provided to some of their less accessible offerings. So alongside pieces from the 1960s American avant-garde by John Cage and Alvin Lucier, it is not uncommon to hear electronic arrangements of songs by rock artists like The Velvet Underground and Scott Walker, or the film composer Ennio Morricone.

All in all, though, labels leave Cat Hope indifferent at best. Inaccessible. Populist. Avant-garde. Conservative. Experimental. Revisionary. These are all terms which, in the eyes of Cat Hope, are commonly given more importance that than deserve. While they may hold academic relevance, and their utterance may conjure up a kaleidoscope of diverse and rarefied nuances, the one thing they refer to is disarmingly simple: Art.

Art is the game Cat Hope plays with her fellow Decibel teammates. And, in Decibel’s hands, this game has the same aim it has had throughout the course of millennia-long existence: to illuminate, to stir, to shock, to ennoble, to sadden, to exhilarate and, most importantly, to galvanise. When Art is good – when it’s really, really good – it grabs us by the heels and shakes us from the intellectual complacency that can so often cast its tenebrous shadow over our minds.

Art is indeed the game Decibel play, and they play with bold indifference to petty quibbles over genres and subgenres, over factional membership to such-a-such a movement and such-and-such a style. If there is indeed an explicit call in the Western World for greater integration among the Arts or, at the very least, an implicit call to halt the quibbling over which art is more art than the next, then Decibel represents a crucial point of reference, both on a national and international scale.

Decibel’s CD, Disintegration: Mutation, was released early this year on the HellosQuare label, and features music by Cat Hope and Lindsay Vickery including In the Cut and Transit of Venus. Their book, Audible Designs, a 130-page commentary on Decibel’s concerts containing images, score excerpts, photos and reviews, was also published early this year by PICA press. Both may be ordered on Decibel’s webpage at www.decibel.waapamusic.com.

Posted by Ilario Colli at 12:00am, 25 August 2011

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