Rene Barge
Above: drops, installation view, 2005.
Quietmatter n. Amplified contacts, granular textures, and acoustic colorants. The moniker for sources and materials used in the sound works of Rene Barge. Rene Barge's approach to working with sound is interrogative, informed by science, and yields results that can be communicated to audiences as a spatial experience.
Fostering a questioning frame of mind is the very essence of his creative practice. Barge dissects and explores sites, reaching sustained peak experiences and achieving a dynamic awareness, not from an approach working towards a predetermined form, but rather from actively participating with the acoustical properties present in a place. His approach results in perceiving complicated and surprisingly rich, site-specific, acoustical phenomena that emerge from interacting with a collection of existing sonorous agents. Through Barge's processes of inquiry, insight, and feedback, auditory results merge with the environment into unpredictable sequences of aesthetic experiences.
Currently, Rene Barge is collaborating with Gustavo Matamoros and David Dunn as FM, an artist research collective and experimental music ensemble that designs and realizes interdisciplinary music in response to the acoustical characteristics of a given site. It focuses upon the making of otherwise inaudible phenomena audible in science, nature and architecture. Each performance is a kind of acoustical "tuning" or redrawing of the existing aural landscape through direct sound generation and amplification.
FM is a unique vehicle for the development and implementation of a novel kind of extended electro acoustic music presentation, at times lasting up to 16 hours. Its members use new and custom-designed audio technology to engage audiences in activations of indoor and outdoor spaces that promote an aural perception of the world. Rather than a traditional ensemble, where each musician contributes a single voice to a collective, FM arises from a confluence of sonic activation strategies where each performer engages with their own autonomous audio gestalt and unique instrumentation to simultaneously occupy and stimulate the same acoustic environment.
FM germinated from ideas explored in the Subtropics 20 exhibition SOUND at The Bass Museum of Art in March 2009. Similar to current discourse in the art world concerning the concept of art as a research activity, FM takes this notion seriously and attempts to transcend mere theoreticism by focused efforts to combine both aesthetic and scientific insights, thereby creating experiential understandings and descriptions of reality based in aural perception.
For more information and to listen to present work, please visit MySpace/Quietmatter and MySpace/FM Ensemble.