Ben Owen

An Encircled Reflection:
Resounding Nodar

For “An Encircled Reflection”, the medium, the material used to make this installation, was sound and physical space. I used my ears and a recorder to collect different sounds and make them into something else by combining them back into an environmental walk. “An Encircled Reflection” maps a territory through installation where an open frame work is interpretive, where sound made by the artist is discoverable on the same level as the soundscape it self. The work features unprocessed and composed musical pieces that comprise both natural and electronic sounds that are shaped into subtle compositions on a path around Nodar.

My first approach to Nodar consisted in making “first impression” recordings. I recorded for three days. I recorded ordinary sounds; like birds, flies or crickets and patched them together into the landscape.I didn’t have an exact plan to do something within this path in the village.That came out of these three days of recording and exploring Nodar.The sound in Nodar is really vivid, really loud and very encompassing from the minute you wake up to the moment you are sleeping at night. And it’s not industrial or man-made noise; it is pretty much the nature, the river and the way it is situated in this valley.

Initially I was interested in making a square landscape composition. I was very interested in both seeing the landscape from an aerial perspective before coming here and in trying to see what this landscape was about and in considering how each person would incorporate some kind of sound into the landscape. I began to capture different degrees of the landscape and thought: Why won’t the speakers be the players? I had the idea of reintroducing sound back into an area: the birds hearing the birds, my composition being reintroduced into space and how I would respond to that.

This “music” played from non-visible speakers inside the landscape blurred the attention between what was created and placed by the artist and the soundscape that existed already. I was not interested in expressing ideas in the form of music, but rather in interacting with something that was already there.

In exploring the fusion of our senses I was inviting the audience to stop fora moment, to listen to the sounds and to think about where they were coming from and their place in this environment.

The speakers I built had no aesthetic quality in them, so it was very much about just hearing the landscape and trying to convey that to the audience. By placing the sounds in the landscape with people walking through them I wanted people to experience the place and just listen, questioning what was it they were hearing. In this piece I imagined people would try to find things and would go to look for them and forget why they were looking for them and just keep walking.

There is one place on the walk where I played an improvisation from this abandoned building, which is my interaction with the space and that has very much to do with something that happened here and couldn’t happen anywhere else. It’s very specific to find this room with these materials and playing with them, finding different qualities, resonances in them, in this brick and cement room. If I begin to interact more than just putting the microphone down I’m very conscious that this is a human interaction with the environment. But it is only when I begin to make decisions that it becomes improvisation. That is where I draw the line between field recording and improvisation.

Another thing I was interested in was to create a minimal duration-based score. What I was interested in is how to get away from the process of making decisions about when and what to play, and just decide on how long to play. And for each time frame that I was perceiving, I placed a single sinetone or a frequency that drew from the corners, that brought out the qualities of the room.

Also, on the backside of the hill I composed something with a harmonium organ that represents much more an idea, an intent that had to do with the feeling I had of this part of the village.

Ben Owen is an American sound artist. He graduated in Art History and BFA Studio Art (sculpture and print making) Virginia Common wealth University. Ben Owen is an investigator, explorer and illustrator of the physical properties of the world we inhabit. His work across multiple media, including sound, video and, importantly, stone litho printmaking, is motivated by a desire to more deeply understand the inner life and character of the materials he Works with, rather than animpulse to control or implement them. Ben’s current work includes improvised and graphic score based performance, audio and video collaborations. He has been involved in a considerable number of performances in museums, festivals and galleries incities like New York, California, Tokyo and Berlin.