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If music be the food of love
If music be the food of love
'ohrenhoch - the Noise Shop' presents on Sunday 31 May and 7 June 2015, 2pm - 9pm:
If music be the food of love
(2015, Premiere)
by Maximilian Marcoll
Video installation
with exhibition of the score and sketches
Maximilian Marcoll on 'If music be the food of love':
In the secret prisons of Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, the U.S. forces applied music as a means of torture. The selection of songs used, which is known as the “Torture Playlist” or “GTMO-Playlist”, consists of Pop, Rock and Metal Songs which are well known, accessible and very popular in the western world.
Having been used as torture instruments, the songs are imprinted with ambivalency in three ways:?The victims do not have access to a way of hearing the songs as popsongs. For them they can only mean pain, suffering, the inability to hear their own thoughts.
For us, the popsongs are still popsongs. Our perception might be changed because of our knowledge of their use as weapons, which, then again, lies far beyond our imagination.
The torturing soldiers themselves actively changed their own relation to the songs in a very drastic way. I find it quite hard to imagine that they could later listen to the songs without also hearing the torture instruments.
One is forced to choose between two opposed ways of perception, that can never be accessed simultaneously. On the contrary, they obscure one another. While listening to them, the songs as weapons and as songs, are always present and absent at the same time, yet always in the directly invers relation.
"If music be the food of love" is a piece that makes this ambivalency audible.?The exhibition will present a video installation and contextual material, including the score and sketches.
On the ohrenhoch Sundays with the video installation "If music be the food of love" by Maximilian Marcoll, in addition a simulated version of his piece “Adhan – Tripartite Appropriation”, that should have been performed on Whitsun, but that was cancelled by the organizer/interpreter, will be accessible.
Audio Field Report no. 31 / Soundaktivismus 10: Interview with Maximilian Marcoll by Knut Remond. Limited Edition Audio cassette, 8 copies numbered. Available at 'ohrenhoch - the Noise Shop' (and can be heard there on headphone no.1).
Maximilian Marcoll (*1981) studied percussion, instrumental and electronic composition in Lübeck and Essen, Germany. He lives in Berlin. In his series "Compounds" (since 2008) he focusses on the transcription of concrete sounds, mostly recorded in everyday life situations, and the creation of a material network, on which the pieces of the series are based. The development of software also is a part of his compositional activities. In 2010, the software quince was released. M.Marcoll is a member of the artist group stock11. He lives and teaches in Berlin.
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