In the Buffer Zone
af Juliana Hodkinson
Contemporary music and sound art are often concerned with the transgression of borders - social, perceptual, aesthetic, conventional, historical, instrumental, registral, etc. But rarely
so explicitly as in Yannis Kyriakides‘ chamber opera The Buffer Zone. Here, the border is the UN Buffer Zone in Cyprus, in place since 1964.
Scored for baritone/speaker, cello, piano and electronics, the work is a collaboration with video artist HC Gilje and director/choreographer Andre Gingras. I’ve only heard this opera on CD, but even in that format, the mix of sound-sources - from the randomly-recorded but carefully-selected, to the electronically-manipulated and on to the classically-formed - is surprising and compelling. Birds tweeting on a deserted buffer-zone meadow create a kind of faux-pastoral aura; the slow speech of an actor narrating from transcripts of interviews with UN soldiers posted on the buffer zone is both personal and distanced; radio transmissions chart the rise of tension in a situation where the soldier issues warnings to a man entering unauthorised into the buffer zone (the key moment in the dramatic development of the opera) …
In the opera, two instrumentalists sit on each their side of the performance space, which is divided by hanging video screens. The main protagonist (a baritone-narrator, acting a young UN soldier on watch) crosses between the two areas, but the audience can only see half the performance, since they have to choose to sit on one side or the other.
On the CD, there are 66 tracks, some of them extremely short, but all leading seamlessly through a set of themes grouped around the narrative of one soldier’s 24-hour watch duty.
At the beginning, a field-recording texture of birds, insects and wind-noise fades in. It seems at once both under-filtered and over-edited – maybe it is the opposite of hyperreality, if there could be such a thing. Rough, noisy, full of confusing redundant fuzzes and bumps, but at the same time totally artificial. The promise of constancy in this unnaturally natural environmental provides the sonic pretext for a music full of drones. The drones are placid at first - sustained cello notes, supported at times by a quiet baritone growl that is somewhere between a sigh and a snore - but they become increasingly disturbed, multi-layered, and complex, with the accumulation of acoustic material feeding into electronic filters. High drones evolve from mutations of insect sounds, later transformed into short-wave radio glissandi, as the soldier desperately tries to retune into his situation after falling asleep on duty. Similarly, the irregular chirp of a cicada informs the insistent beep of a high-pitched radio-alarm calling the soldier to attention.
Many composers go to great length to increase the level of abstraction of the concrete sounds that they record and use. In the Buffer Zone, it seems to be a major point that the authenticity of the site is preserved, even in the face of electronic processing. As much as the composition creates an obviously musically controlled situation, there’s also a real feeling of proximity to this soldier standing surrounded by weeds and birds and not much else, and Kyriadkides’ heavily biographical programme notes support the sense that his piece is committed to drawing attention to the reality of the buffer zone’s existence today.
7. oktober 2007 kl. 23:07
So, Yannis, how did you get hold of these field recordings - did you go into the buffer zone yourself, or what? Or is it a simulation of the sounds one can hear in the zone?
10. oktober 2007 kl. 22:31
hi Julia -thanks for opening this discussion - I’m looking forward to discussing the nature of field recordings with you !
short answer:
a bit of both.
long answer:
I tried to go into the Buffer Zone at roughly the point were my mother’s village once used to be (it’s now totally razed). I had no idea what kind of sounds I would record there or even what I would do with them. I suppose the first thing on my mind was a curiousity about what kind of feel the buffer zone would have.
Walking around with a microphone made me very nervous if I would encounter a soldier or not.
I was stopped in a few places by UN soldiers (hiding my mike) and had to turn back, but I finally found a place overlooking a dry-river bed that had a beautifully wide acoustic space, where I was hidden by a tree. I suppose I was intersted in capturing the feeling of the space without knowing what sonic content I would find.
The strange thing about doing these kind of field recordings is that you are constantly asking yourself: “How long more shall I continue recording ? Am I getting interesting material ? Is there a better spot ? Is the mike pointing in the optimum direction ?”
I ended up recording a landscape of birds, insects, occasional airplanes, trucks in the distance, wind on the mike (which at first one tries to avoid, but then later realised that it had such a dramatic effect in disturbing the sonic quietitude on the recording that I kept all the clips and distortions it produced). Other inardvertent sounds I captured where my own footsteps (recording my own inability to sit still for long periods of time !), which I also kept in the piece, because it somehow represented that impatience of the soldier, and gave the recording a clear subjective stamp, which in the piece you project into the steps of the soldier , the sole character in the piece.
The problem in field recordings I always find is how to capture the ‘nothingness’ of how we experience ambient sound. Because I don;t necessarily think that the foreground of sounds that happen in a recording are necessarily what is interesting about them. It’s seems to be a question of duration and context.
Capturing that sense of time – the slow circadian cycles that affect an enviroment’s sound. How does one translate that into the format of a musical structure.
The day I spent in the Buffer Zone, I did discover a lot of things about the piece I wanted to compose. Simply because I had to sit next to the microphone, which I had just placed in the long grass, and just wait and listen for long periods of time. My piece had to do with a soldier on guard duty in the buffer zone, and just simply experiencing that act of waiting there, I could potentialy have an insight into the world that the UN soldier experiences, while sitting on his watch tower.
In the end I used parts of this recording in the piece, as long sections in the beginning, middle and end without treatment. Keepin it more or less intact as I recorded it. All the other more isolated use of bird and insect material were actually from samples, simply because I wanted a clean recording which I can digitally manipulate. So in that aspect I cheated !
12. oktober 2007 kl. 22:29
That’s quite refreshing, to hear you’re not a purist about found sounds! Being unconditionally accepting of field recordings warts’n'all, with wind noise, footsteps, and so on, can sometimes seem a bit relentlessly nerdy, and as a listener one can miss the element of artistic selection. But equally, on the other hand, polishing things to sound-library quality can get too clinical and over-produced. I find the mix you describe - of ‘muddy’ environmental sound, and clear samples - very effective in your opera.
Now on the CD, the 66 tracks have time-labels spanning 24 hours. Did you hang out behind that tree for 24 hours (i.e. are these the actual times of your recordings?), or are these fictive times structuring the narrative of a soldier’s duty?
And, while we’re on the specifics (before we get going on the “nothingness of how we experience ambient sound”!), can you say what recording equipment you used and what software you edited/processed it with?