Company of Trees
Matthew Lovett · 2015
Matthew Lovett’s practice explores the relationship between musical composition processes and environmental stimuli, with a particular focus on the way in which rhythmic patterns and cycles and extra-musical data provoke particular responses. As a composer and sound designer, his work integrates improvisation, composition and environmental sound, frequently in combination, in order to create sonic composites. In this body of enquiry Lovett draws on posthuman theory, particularly Robert Pepperell’s notion of ‘Fuzzy Humans’ (2002), wherein thresholds between the environment and the human are problematised, along with the notion of the distributed brain, that explores the locatedness of consciousness throughout the human body. In addition, Lovett’s interest in Francois Laruelle’s notion of ‘Music Fictions’ (2012), wherein creative acts of musical composition and improvisation can be likened to creating ‘parallel worlds’ is explored. In Company of Trees, Lovett’s composition builds on previous practice in both composition for film, along with a series of site-specific improvisations. His practice has focused on creating music and sonic gestures that respond to and enhance emergent rhythms in speech, which featured in his score for the BAFTA award-winning feature film Playing Burton, as well as environmental sounds, which he explored in a series of outdoor performances that were presented at contemporary art and music festivals. For Company of Trees, the artist Helen Sear used a high frame rate to create a zoetropic and highly rhythmical visual effect; cutting extremely rapidly between a sequence of ‘revolving’ and strobing moving images. The soundwork for the project, which combines field recordings and audio treatments, therefore both extends Lovett’s own long-running research interests, and at the same time responds to aspects of Sear’s own artistic enquiry into digital processing and composite image-making. The finished, 12-minute artwork is the result of a sustained creative exchange between artist and composer which centres on the relationship between visual and sonic rhythms.