A Constructivist Gesture of Deconstruction. Sound as a Cognitive Medium
Agostino Di Scipio · Contemporary Music Review · 2014
This author outlines the approach taken in a series of live-electronics works whose title is Modes of Interference, and describes more particularly the third work in the series, a sound installation using three or more electric guitars, amplifiers and computer. This installation implements a feedback network of sonic interactions structurally coupled with the surrounding environment, developing a kind of autonomous (i.e. self-regulating) and dynamical sound-generating system. However, it also bears on the electric guitar as a cultural object of strong iconic status, and more particularly on the electric guitar sonorities and their role in the rhetorics of rock music. The work is thus described as bending a ‘constructivist’ perspective to a more conceptual task of ‘deconstruction’. The author elaborates on the idea that, as a medium of situated embodied cognition, sound allows us to experience the power relationships that lie behind its coming into existence and its articulation in time.