When artists and filmmakers Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard contacted me whether I was interested in compiling and editing a conversation between them and Raj Patel, a sound specialist they’d been working with on a range of their projects for about a decade, I didn’t have to think long. First, because they’re great friends and I have always admired and been curious about their collaborative practice; second, because I’ve always been intrigued by sound and how it can so profoundly affect our experiences and emotions. The context for this conversation was Raj having been invited to contribute to a Routledge book on sound and space. Rather than writing a single-author text, Raj suggested a conversation with Iain & Jane, as he felt it was their collaboration that had enriched both their respective practices and also because he’d produced a book about architectural acoustics not long before.
Between an initial zoom meeting and a day spent talking and listening, and listening and talking at Arup’s SoundLab in London, we ended up with a rich meandering set of fragments in which Iain & Jane and Raj reflected on very different but also some related projects. A recurring topic was the development of new technologies and the testing of their limits, or as Iain puts it ‘there is a kind of natural impulse to want to break things, to creatively tear things down to make something new. That is what makes making art exciting for me. If I smash it to pieces, what canI turn it into? Not that I’m suggesting smashing up the SoundLab, but metaphorically.’ The final text, titled ‘Beyond the sweet spot: Sound, space and emotion’ – derived from an anecdote about working with Scott Walker on Bish Bosh: Ambisymphonic – has ended up among a raft of other contributions to this hefty hardback, though luckily there is a – much more affordable – e-book version, and the book is also partial open access.
Gerrie van Noord 