Junk set to make music for Atau

Feb 27 2008 by David Whetstone, The Journal

After a trawl of second hand shops, Atau Tanaka is ready for two big performances. He tells David Whetstone about Variations VII.

MORE than two decades ago, a student in California, who was doing a PhD in computer music, was listening avidly to cassette tapes that had been lent by a friend.

They were by an underground group called :zoviet*france: who specialise in electronic music and were based thousands of miles away in Newcastle.

Atau Tanaka says: “And now, some 20 years later, here I am in Newcastle.

“You have The Sage and Baltic and all this cultural regeneration but it was really to find out about the :zoviet*france: guys that I was attracted to the city. They are great artists.”

Since last October the one-time student fan of a musical outfit which is hardly a household name on Tyneside has occupied the new chair of digital media at Newcastle University, based in Culture Lab.

Prof Tanaka says Culture Lab, which used to be a gymnasium, represents “a significant investment by the university in digital culture”.

It is a place where artists and scientists can join forces to explore the infinite possibilities of new media.

Atau Tanaka, a leader in his field, was clearly an inspired appointment. Born in Tokyo and brought up in the United States, he studied biochemistry for his first degree but also played guitar and piano.

Newer sound sources intrigued him, however.

“I was always interested in the musical potential of technology,” he says. “In my day, it was a rare thing but at Culture Lab we promote this idea of interdisciplinary study and research.”

As he speaks, Prof Tanaka is surrounded by gadgets of pensionable age. There is a sewing machine from an era when pale blue was a cool domestic hue. A teasmaid rubs up against a food blender and a tumble dryer. There’s a saggy old orange vacuum cleaner which, I imagine, roars like a geriatric lion.

All this stuff has been collected by Prof Tanaka and the three colleagues with whom he will be recreating an historic sound performance – John Cage’s Variations VII – at Baltic on Friday night.

“We travelled around Tyneside visiting junk shops and charity shops.

“I am new to the area and it was a great way of getting to know it,” says the professor.

“In each shop we had to explain that the pieces didn’t have to work but they did have to run. We had to switch them on so we could listen to the sound.

“We said it was for a concert and people were very interested. Sometimes they would pull things out for us that were particularly noisy.”

Among all these old fashioned mod cons are some unfamiliar gadgets. I point to one.

“It’s a function generator, a piece of scientific equipment,” says Prof Tanaka helpfully.

“There’s a project here at Culture Lab called Redundant Technology. It’s linked to a really important new topic in art, the question of sustainability, and it looks at how these objects that are all being thrown away can be used in an artistic way. We get video monitors and other things from departments across the university.”

Much of this stuff will be laid out at Baltic on Friday when Prof Tanaka will perform Variations VII with some of his heroes – the :zoviet*france: pair (who prefer anonymity) and Matt Wand, from Manchester, who used to perform with a group called Stockhausen & Walkman.

The first UK recreation of Variations VII forms part of the opening gala of the AV Festival of electronic arts. It attracted such great interest that a second performance was scheduled to follow the first.

John Cage was a pioneer of what he termed “chance music”.

For Variations VII he gathered various sound sources in a room in New York, supplemented by phone leads to other sound sources outside (including the New York Times, a ballet company and a dog pound), and then welcomed in a strolling audience whose movement determined the sequence of sounds heard. Cage didn’t write a conventional score but did leave instructions and a map resembling a circuit board.

The performers’ role is unusual.

One instruction, unearthed in what Prof Tanaka describes as “an archaeological pursuit of documentation”, describes it as “making audible what is otherwise silent, therefore no interposition of intention – just facilitating reception”.

John Cage died in 1992. Prof Tanaka met him twice, first in 1986 when he attended a famous lecture series he was delivering at Harvard University. They had dinner together.

He recalls “a very gentle, soft spoken person but one with a very clear intent”.

They shared, he recalls, an interest in Zen Buddhism.

It inspired Cage’s most famous work, a composition consisting of four minutes, 33 seconds of silence when the musicians were instructed not to play.

Inevitably no two performances of Variations VII will ever be the same. Sound sources on Friday will include the press room at The Journal, the Fujiyama restaurant on Pink Lane, North Shields Fish Quay, the Tyneside Metro and the Sita waste processing plant at Byker.

Attending the Baltic performance will be some of those who attended Cage’s 1966 premiere, including Julie Martin, widow of Billy Klüver, an engineer on the project. She will also be present at a conference, Music & Machines, taking place at Culture Lab on Friday and Saturday.

Prof Tanaka describes each 45-minute performance as a modern interpretation rather than a museum representation of the Cage work.

They should get the AV Festival off to a rousing start. Prof Tanaka says the increasingly influential festival was another reason he was attracted to Newcastle.

“It is a very dynamic city. There are things happening at the international level, at Sage, at Baltic, in the AV Festival, but there is also a very lively grassroots art scene and plenty of underground, experimental things. Newcastle has the whole spectrum.”

Prof Tanaka has already had applications from across the world for the new masters degree in digital media he is establishing at Culture Lab. Where he led, others will follow.

The AV Festival runs from Friday until March 8. It features more than 100 events and exhibitions in Newcastle, Gateshead, Sunderland and Middlesbrough. For details visit www.avfestival.co.uk. Box office: (0191) 232- 8289.