Spaces for Audio Practices
A case study of Audiolab Arteleku with its director, Xabier Erkizia
- Audio: Bidasoa, Presak from the recording Elektra Bidasoa. A collaboration between Xabier Erkizia and Francisco López published by Ferns Recordings in 2011
I think, generally speaking, that we always err in the same way; we’re always trying to get the same thing right. First, we want to get something to work, to accomplish something, to meet our goals and maybe the results will be a lot tidier and cleaner – not so dirty – but something that works. What’s nice is that it doesn’t happen mechanically but keeps getting botched. And that’s the ephemeral nature we want to stamp on things. Are we botching it? Well, you should have been here on Day 1. Over time, works disappear, but these values like generosity and honesty stay on. We could spend more time getting more grants, more money, making it prettier, putting up 5-metre posters and banners all over town and bringing in the most cutting edge artists in the world. But we almost prefer to work with less cutting-edge artists, without banners, making our own dinner, as long as the minimum requirements are met. But human contact is given priority.
Arteleku has been going for 23 years now. It started in the mid ‘80s as a project with its own history. It came out of some conversations and plans that Oteiza had. The Museo de Oteiza near Pamplona has the manuscripts of his ideas about creating centres dedicated to contemporary art. I remember when we set up Audiolab, he had already proposed some plans to do audio studios.
At first, the centre was planned as a production centre for artists, but its shape has changed according to different production models and changes in artistic activity over the last 25 years. In our specific case, there’s an anecdote that illustrates the philosophy of the director for the first 20 years, Santi Eraso, who did fantastic work. Arteleku is and was what it is because of him. He paid close attention to what was happening around him, without the slightest bias. This anecdote, which illustrates our case, is worth telling. In 2002, they hired me to do production work at the festival for new musicians in San Sebastian, which doesn’t exist anymore, and they put me in charge of several installations, three here at Arteleku. One day, some friends of mine – Mattin, Enrique Hurtado from Easy Software – and I were in the centre of Donosti, bored, and I suggested coming here, unplugging the installations and do an improv. So we were doing the improv and this man came out shouting: “What’s going on?” and Enrique said, “I told you we couldn’t do this and that the director would come.” I started talking with him, saying, “Calm down, we’re finishing up” and he asked us, “But who hired you?” I said, “No one”. He said, “Who’s paying you?” “No one, but calm down, we’re finished now” and he responded, “No, no, this is great!”
Two or three days later, I got a phone call: “Now I know who you are. You’re doing the Ertz festival in Bera and we’d like to start doing something long-term with sound” – and that’s basically where Audiolab came from. It was born the moment that Santi Eraso proposed doing a series, working with people outside the institution on what I call ‘associated projects’. It turned Arteleku into a kind of breeding ground for projects that were given a sort of home for a few years, where they could develop a system that would enable them to become independent. Although Audiolab was born as an in-house service. Now Audiolab has its own programming that can basically be divided into three groups: workshops throughout the year, especially in summer; one-off events which present projects; and digital projects like Soinumapa and Hots! Radio.
- Audio: Igneo 2. A podcast by Kim Cascone for Hots! Radio . A field recording reconstructed from an underwater test carried out in the first steam-powered submarine in the world in Barcelona, 1867. Produced as part of the event, Hidrofonía.
Improvisation has had an especially important place in our programming over the last 9 years, but that wasn’t always a clear-cut decision. It was based on the interest in the community of musical and audio artists. Really for me, improvisation is not a precise or defined field, but it interests me as a working method. It can lead you to new places where you can reach other elements of sound creation beyond the aesthetic and formal. It speaks about social relations, political values and many other aspects that can be brought together in the phenomenology of not only improvisation, but of music in general, with respect to the stage, the relationship with the public, with the industry. But it’s not a dogma here; we didn’t set out to work on improvisation.
- Audio: Concert with Jean-Luc Guionnet and the duo Bizarra for the Ertz festival, 2008
Of the four or five workshops we do a year, there’s always one on improvisation, another on field recordings and then others that depend a little on what’s needed or what we think should be in the programme. Then obviously there’s another type of inside interest for more advanced audiences, where we try to develop lines of research, like the publication of the book Noise & Capitalism and some other books we’re working on, and the workshops on listening. So we could say that on the one hand, Audiolab performs almost a kind of service for other artists in the community and on the other, there are some more specific, minority lines that have a different kind of international reach, but that’s hard for the other people in the building here to see.
Our goal was to do just make them see it. When we went to South America – before we started on the (Un)Common Sounds project and I was getting to know the South American scene – we realized that there were a lot of musicians doing quality work, but who were unknown. We were surprised to see the difference between the work done in Peru and the work done in Germany. They could be related aesthetically and be quite alike, but the social, political and economic realities of each one meant that they were completely different. So the idea of the project was also to investigate all these political, social and economic implications for these practices by comparing them to see if they could generate new meanings, and to see how far that could go in places in the western world (where these practices were established and even institutionalised or part of the academy in some cases) and contrast that with the same or similar practices in a totally underground context without any link to any academic institution or any type of official body. It was also a small lesson in learning that often, there aren’t any short-term results – or the results are hard to see. But they generate something, some desire to learn new things both from within institutions and outside them. Somehow there is a lot of prejudice about working with public institutions, because losing this underground status means making a huge sacrifice and contradicting your own philosophy and ideas.
From that point, the projects that have evolved haven’t been under pressure to achieve results. It’s been more like: “there will be results in time.” If we believe in this project, then it’ll work out. You don’t have to make a big stink or put posters up all over town; things will work out. One example of that is Noise & Capitalism.
This is a little book with all its failings -- as the critics regularly remind us – because we thought that it was a completely coherent book from beginning to end, but in the end it was an accumulation of different opinions about a rather delicate topic where there’s no certainty or science. But look, there’s been a lot of interest and the English edition has almost run out. We translated it into Spanish and distributed it exclusively through exchanges. The book’s reach has been incredible. We’ve got orders for it from all over and we’ve received a ton of materials in exchange: records, CDs, tapes, texts, photos, paintings, sculptures from all types of people we didn’t know and who were doing things with sound. And there’s been some interest in the implications between music and the capitalist system and economics and politics.
- Audio: Noise & Capitalism by Oscar Martin , published using free software in 2010. A transposition of the book in pdf to sound, manipulated using analog processes.
So then, I could say the same about Soinumapa and Hots! They are projects that might seem to be just out there, functioning, but they’re really much more far-reaching. At Soinumapa right now we are finishing up a teaching tool for children that we’re going to distribute to schools, not only here but also in part of France, and a lot more projects have come out of that. Most importantly, there’s a kind of sensitivity with respect to sound and audio cultures that is becoming more and more visible, both in the media and in society in general.
- Audio: Kilkerrak Makroan soundscape from Donosti, uploaded to Soinumapa.net on 10 August 2010 by Xabier Erkizia
We never start with the idea that something has to end up as a book. In fact, in 2004 we did some workshops for the first time called MRB AMM, which is also a blog today, and we put out a call for experimental music from the Basque Country. For three days we were here sleeping and debating. That led to us to push for projects like Larraskito, a netlabel.
In these workshops, there’s a lot of debate about the situation we’re living in and how far an institution like Arteleku can support these types of proposals. (Un)Common Sounds was the same, but on an international level. So MRB AMM and these workshops can result in projects like Noise & Capitalism.
This is something that I learned from Arteleku’s own philosophy. When Santi Eraso was the director, every year we proposed new lines of research, some of which were strongly criticised because they made a very specific nod to different elements of society that weren’t very artistic. This changing paradigm at Arteleku was criticised by several people in the art community because they thought that an art centre shouldn’t pay so much attention to those things. Instead, a different type of structure should exist for them, while a centre like Arteleku should pay attention to things like aesthetics and art techniques.
I think there’s something intrinsic in sound. Sound itself has something implicit in it. This is obviously true of all the art disciplines; it’s impossible to separate any of them from the political and social moments that frame them. But with sound, it’s more obvious, because it has the facility to adapt or not adapt, and to make a difference, to reinforce identities and our physical reality when it comes to listening or choosing not to listen. I’ve always thought that if there’s a hole in the history of music, it’s this: these elements were not really being investigated until ethnomusicology appeared, and the investigations were always looking out, not in. The societal elements have always been somewhat shunted aside.
I always feel a sense of responsibility, to give something back to society, through the structures of the media, putting our publications online, making it easy to share everything and working with different audiences, not just with artists. Working with children, with the disabled and the elderly.
- Audio: Uxane and Ertz, the product of the workshop run by Alex Mendizabal and Juan José Aranguren since 2007.
Last year we did a workshop for autistic children and it was a really nice experience for us, but also a hard one, because we weren’t really prepared. So then we did a bunch of installations here that they could come and break, but they also made sounds, breaking sounds. It was incredible. At Ertz exactly the same thing happens, every time we do something. This year we did a popular operetta – we asked them if they want to join and they didn’t hesitate. We proposed the idea to an Italian composer named Gianmarco Serra. He was able to use all the people in the town who wanted to join in and the result was a kind of improvised operetta with 100 people in it. Until we started, nobody even knew what the script would be. So it had this popular part in the sense that a ton of people participated in it who had never been interested in the festival, and maybe the operetta piqued their interest and made them curious about it. And then it seemed like an opportunity for us to experiment with a standard format like opera, because there was a very high level of improvisation.
- Audio: La Astronave, an operetta from the One Lesson Symphony Orchestra vs. the Uxane Alien Orchestra at the Ertz Festival in 2011.
When Jean-Luc Guionnet was available to do a concert for organ in 2008, the parish priest changed his mind and the Ertz organisation was only able to offer the musician a kind of Hammond organ that didn’t sound right. Xabier Erkizia left Guionnet alone for a few minutes to decide what he wanted to do. What follows is the result of that process.
- Audio: Gezurrezko JoeraI, Jean-Luc Guionnet, published by Ertz in 2008.
