Brett Sroka @pasaj.istanbul
Spectral Variations (Spektral Çeşitlemeler)
15 May- 8 June 2025
@barin_han
When Isamu Noguchi spoke of ‘listening to stone’, he was not just rhapsodizing metaphorically, but in fact describing an ancient sculptors’ technique of tapping a block of stone around all sides to divine its inherent structure. Out of the omnipresent phenomenon of sound there are also inherent forms and transcendent beauty which mathematics and music attempt to carve out of the air, like the sculptor’s stone. Though works of music, sound, video and sculpture, Spectral Variations traces the chaotic world of sound all around us, to the ‘invisible architecture’ of musical sound in the harmonic series, to the human intervention of tuning which attempts to bend these phenomena to our own cultural will.
Isamu Noguchi “taşı dinlemek”ten bahsettiğinde, yalnızca şiirsel bir metafor kullanmıyordu; aslında
heykeltıraşların çalıştıkları taş bloğuna çeşitli yönlerinden hafifçe vurularak sahip olduğu içkin yapıyı anlamaya çalıştıkları eski bir tekniği tarif ediyordu.Heykeltraşın taşla kurduğu ilişki gibi, matematik ve müzik de hava aracılığıyla her an her yerde var olan sesin içkin biçimsel özelliklerini ve aşkın güzelliğini ortaya çıkarmaya çalışan iki bilgi alanıdır. Spectral Variations adlı sergi, müzik, ses, video ve heykel aracılığıyla,
etrafımızdaki kaotik ses dünyasını, harmonik serilerdeki müziğin “görünmez mimarisi”nden, bu olguyu
kültürel irademize göre şekillendirmeye çalışan akort sistemlerine doğru izini sürer.
an excerpt from
Endless Song
2023
audio/video
51:40 looped
Commissioned by @interfaceinagh as part of The Woodland Symposium, an an artistic response to the ongoing restoration of a Sitka Spruce forest back to native woodland. Presented in progress at @immaireland and premiered at @galwayartscentr in December 2023.
an updated reel of music/sound work I’ve done with visual artists, choreographers and film makers. I worked very closely with these collaborators to integrate a unique and compelling sonic world into their vision. If you’re looking for an audacious, unconventional score for your project please get in touch, and please spread the word.
works in this reel include:
We Hold These Truths (2021) - Shani Jamila @shanijamila
premiered at the Park Avenue Armory, NYC @parkavearmory
Shirin Neshat Retrospective at The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2014) - Sujin Lee @sujinlee_art
Carrying Wood (2023) - Linda Schirmer @lindaschirmer_dance
premiered at Galway Art Centre / Galway Dance @galwaydance@galwayartscentr
Altar (2016) - Shani Jamila @shanijamila
premiered at the New Museum, NYC @newmuseum
The Jerusalem Syndrome (2014) - Sohrab Pirayesh @spirayesh
Exciting news, in a few days I’ll go back to Finland after 12 years to work with my friend Rauno Nieminen again, and I’ve also just learned that the project received additional grant funding from @finlandiafoundationnational to return this summer to document Rauno at the Kaustinen Folk Festival, which he first performed at in 1983, and last year was honored as a master musician.
These pictures are from our last performance together at the Galway Jazz Festival in Galway, Ireland in 2017. Thanks to @alannahrobins and @interfaceinagh for arranging that gig and taking these photos.
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Rauno Nieminen is a renowned scholar, luthier and performer of Nordic medieval instruments. Through Sroka’s live computer processing of Nieminen’s music, the duo create rich tapestries of electro-acoustic sound out of the ancient roots of Nordic music, finding commonalities in centuries of culture, history and technology, imagining a boundless new music.
more at: brettsroka.com/rauno.html
I’m looking forward to working with my friend Rauno Nieminen again in a few weeks, Rauno is a Finnish instrument maker and scholar of medieval Nordic instruments. I’ve been reading a lot of his books and articles and thinking about what we will do, these are some pictures of him through the years, from the 70’s to 90’s. I have a lot of love and respect for Rauno for many reasons: his dedication to the history of a nearly forgotten music, his intellectual rigor in the technique and science of instrument making, and not the least his perfectly dry sense of humor. I’m not sure if it’s a Finnish thing or a Rauno thing, probably both, but here are a few favorite quotes (some from his publications and some from memory):
“You only learn to carve by carving. By reading literature about carving, you learn to read literature about carving.”
“Sharpening a knife is an easy task, but it has taken years of work to figure out just how easy it can be.”
“The target audience for shepherd music consisted of cows, sheep, horses, bears and wolves,”
“In mid-1990, Landola guitar factory, based in Pietarsaari, manufactured an ecologically friendly guitar made from 100% domestic renewable wood. However, the guitar did not generate interest, so production ended significantly earlier than planned. Apparently musicians only care about protecting nature when they absolutely have to.”
“the kantele is the national instrument of Finland, so it will be very important for us to destroy it”
“this is a Finnish children’s folk song about a boy who kills his grandmother with an axe”
March 8: International Women’s Day celebrates the social, economic, cultural & political achievements of women, and marks a call-to-action for gender equality, women’s rights and social justice.
‘Her Doubt Heard Out’ is from an ongoing series of text works called Orthographic Poems, asking what is the relationship of sound to the written word, proposing multivalent meanings- a protest, a question, a call to action. After studying Turkish for the past few years I’ve realized how baffling and nonsensical English language is in written form. The Turkish alphabet was remade into the latin alphabet after the 1923 revolution and with few exceptions all the letters in a word are pronounced and directly correlate to an exact phonetic. English on the other hand is a hodgepodge of words and spellings collaged from Greek, Latin, French, German and other languages. Almost any letter or grouping of letters might conjure almost any sound.
In her book ‘Of Sound Mind’ the neuroscientist Nina Kraus writes, there’s an “old joke that fish should be spelled “ghoti”: gh as in laugh, o as in women, and ti as in nation. - Human beings were never born to read - we have only been reading for a few thousand years - evolution does not work quite that fast. - We accomplish it by coopting other parts of the brain - the visual brain is involved, too, of course. But auditory areas, including those that govern both spelling and understanding spoken language, play an outsize role.”
Resonance no. 1-7 (seven variations on seven ratios of the harmonic series)
I made this clip for a recent grant application, reflecting on the years long process of making this work (on 3 different continents)- 7 jigs in harmonic series ratios to create half of a symmetrical form curving in three directions, to make 392 halves welded together in 784 places (not including mistakes and redos), I lost count of how many wire connections between the 196 parts, filing/sanding/acid cleaning all of them, ending up with seven modular sculptures…
exhibited in my 2025 solo show ‘Spectral Variations’ with @pasaj.istanbul
Remembering the time my brother took me to the anechoic chamber at his work. Yesterday was my two older, twin brothers birthdays :) they’re both really brilliant. Love you guys
Dreaming, planning, scheming…
going back to Finland to work with Rauno Nieminen again in a few months. This was our score for our last performance at the Galway Jazz Festival in 2017, in Galway City, Ireland.
