Archive: Issue No. 84, August 2004

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James Sey & James Webb

James Sey & James Webb
"A Compendium of Imaginary Wavelengths", 2004
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James Sey & James Webb
"A Compendium of Imaginary Wavelengths", 2004
Radio Artwork 02:20 minute extract


The Impossible Ventures of a Fictional Author: A Compendium of Imaginary Wavelengths
by Carine Zaayman

In Experiment IV (1986, The Whole Story), Kate Bush sings of a sinister government project intended to create a vastly powerful machine to be used for the purposes of torture and killing. To do this, the story goes, the scientists involved in the project recorded sounds of various intimate human moments. One such source is purported to be the 'painful cries of mothers'.

The machine, we hear, could make you feel 'like falling in love' - the ultimate collusion of torment and ecstasy. Even though there is no direct reference to this song in A Compendium of Imaginary Wavelengths, the power sound possesses to conjure up our deep senses of Eros and Thanatos, not only describes the method of the machine in the story, but also the effect of this remarkable piece of sound art.

A Compendium of Imaginary Wavelengths is the result of an inspired collaboration between the techno-philosophical mind, James Sey, and the consummate sound artist James Webb. Originally conceived as a parody of radio dramas, it was first launched on Bush Radio as a half hour radio broadcast.

The Compendium has since been performed live at the Independent Armchair Theatre (Observatory, Cape Town), University of the Witwatersrand, and most recently, the Grahamstown National Arts Festival. It has appeared in various forms throughout the year: as a radio broadcast, the context in which one heard the work was obviously dependent on the environment in which one's radio was situated.

The live performances, however, experimented with different modes of visualisations, including using Sey's 10 minute video work Sex Times Technology Equals the Future. It is significant that for the final performance, they returned to the primacy of sound, extending the piece to 38 minutes, and performing it simply in a darkened auditorium, the only light emanating from their laptops. In all performances Webb mixes the non-vocal sounds live, while they both recite the text.

At the start, we are told that what we are about to hear are the works of a highly influential scientific and literary figure - whose name, incidentally, we never learn. These works have apparently been unearthed recently in 'a private vault in Barabas in North-East Africa'. By claiming such mysterious and mystical origins for the text, the authors of the compendium call on us to use our archaeological imaginations. That is, we are invited to project all manner of associations onto the somewhat obscure texts that we hear read out by Sey and Webb, as well as the strangely familiar, yet unrecognisable sounds of which the soundtrack consists.

Importantly, the contents of this great author's texts are always described, whether through the voice-overs, or by sounds intended as correlatives to the subject matter of the books, but it is never directly read. Ultimately, an insistent distance between the audience and the 'source' texts shadows the entire work, and enforces the need for our imaginations to fill in the space left by their absence. Consequently, much of the content is borne from ourselves, things we might have forgotten, and events we could never lay to rest, and is different for everyone who hears it.

The compendium contains 15 books, with no apparent pattern. There is a book of illuminations (book 2), that tells of the worldwide drone of electric devices and the shadowy presence of half-forgotten communications. Book 6, the book of 'Empty Seats in Moving Objects' is a kind of travel documentary. Instead of descriptions of destinations, however, we hear of the experience of travel, of the intimacy we feel with the strangers next to us on airplanes: a kind of passenger sex. The last book, 'A Study of Insect Sex', was written close to the author's 'mysterious' death, features a bizarre series of sounds that conjure up images of cockroaches rubbing their hard exoskeletons together, or a grasshopper's leg caught and tearing in its partner's jaws.

Webb created the sounds in his unique manner, by recording gasps, tears of bandages, sometimes microscopic domestic clatterings, and similarly undervalued elements of our daily soundtracks. These are then amplified and manipulated, woven into a structure in which we are forced to acknowledge their power.

In this respect, my favourite book (book 10) 'A History of Rain' is a prime example. The book is said to contain the history of every raindrop, all over the globe, throughout the history of time. An impossible task, surely, but one that is given substance through recordings of thunderstorms, as well as the light skipping of CDs, crackle from old vinyl records and excerpts from an older work of chance composition, Webb's Phonosynthesizer 100603 (2003). The life of every raindrop thus does not end with its plummet to earth, but is forever sustained as echoes in the present, all around us.

Another remarkable example of the way in which the compendium draws on the everyday to signify notions of cosmological proportions can be found in book 8 'Evil's ever changing appetite'. The book starts with the sound of someone biting into an apple, referencing the origin of sin in Eden. It finishes with a series of burps, which are slowed down again and again, until the final one sounds like the gulp of an emptying drain.

The book documents the consumption and expulsion of material into our primary instrument, namely the body. This process becomes a spiritual one, documenting our intimate brushes with the demonic and the divine: "As the devil's master chef puts it 'I charge more for anything black. By eating something black you are saying: Ha! Death! I eat you!'"

Perhaps the compendium holds together not because of a systematic development of motifs, but by a method similar to that of the scientists in Bush's Experiment IV. It is a fiction constructed through collection, amplification of the mundane, and a desire to reveal to us the architecture of our consciousness.


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