KVT – Soundscaping Hanoi

When I lived in a far off country soundscapes used to feature on a non commercial radio station every Sunday night. Musical compositions that electronically recombined and recontextualized sound, that used the whole world as a composition. Sometimes wonderfully invigorating stuff.

Last Saturday night at the National Museum of Vietnamese History we were treated to a formal concert of soundscapes composed in and of Hanoi by German composer Robert Henke and local composers Tri Minh and Vu Nhat Tan. Henke and Tan concentrated on incorporating keynote sounds of traffic in Hanoi and Minh on Ga Ha Noi (Hanoi train station) before collaborating in an impromptu jam session using the same themes.

Soundscapes are immersive environments and on Saturday we were really immersed as we sat, in formal rows surrounded by banks of loudspeakers.

Vu Nhat Tan’s music, which I usually, and not disparagingly, refer to as noise, always seems to exist in a low, growling register which builds to just below the decibel pain thresh-hold and incorporates an amazing variety of environmental sounds. One soundscape pioneer invented the word ‘schizophonia’ for electronically manipulated environmental sounds/music and Tan’s noise fits that term delightfully. I’d love to see a contemporary dance piece constructed and performed to this traffic composition. One of my favorite of his noise works remains the powerful piece that accompanied Brian Ring’s ice block melt at the British Council a couple of years ago. At twenty minutes duration Tan’s piece was too long for me… I hate it when a really good piece of work strays into that grey area of a self indulgence and begins to grate.

Tri Minh’s Ga Ha Noi composition was a welcome foil to follow Tan’s traffic overture. Minh’s pieces are easier on the ear and more readily acoustically readable/translated. His incorporation of a discernable beat makes your body start to move and you close your eyes and are transported to one of those early avant garde rave events from a couple of decades ago, before they were hijacked by techno and boom boom monotony. Gorgeously evocative music with a comfortable range. At 15 minutes it just fitted into my concentration time-span. Ten would have been perfection.

Henke’s composition was really effective and cinematographical (if I can coin a word!). I kept on imagining it as a soundtrack to a movie, sometimes grounded in reality and sometimes disappearing into the surreal realm of daydream. Easy to decipher but at 25 minutes long my personal daydreams about being stuck at a busy intersection in Hanoi almost submersed it at the 20 minute mark.

As a concert performance it was a success with the final jam session great listening but, for me, not as moving as the individual performances.

One question… why is that the pieces followed the same basic structural format… slow fade in and slow fade out? Is there a soundscape ethos that precludes finishing with a crescendo or a big bang?

Thanks Goethe and its director Mr. Bumke for having the foresight, and courage, to raise new music forms to sophisticated, concert status. It was a memorable night.

I could imagine commissioning Tri Minh to compose a concentrated 24 hour soundscape of my little corner of Hanoi. Let him play around with the 4am crowing of fighting cocks and bantam roosters… 6 am songs of uncaged song birds warbling through a tiny, tangled remnant of trees and shrubs… a whining puppy… Clanking. clanging gates… motor bikes revving… television echoing through cavernous, concrete houses… women chop chop chopping vegetables… cantankerous men yelling… occasional deep throated boom-boom box thumping… distant rumbling of reverberating jack hammers, a punctuation of honking of horns… cries of itinerant peddlers… ex-pat neighbours chattering loudly and invasively into the wee hours below my bedroom window… the crowing of fighting cocks… all bound together in Minh’s distinctive electronic poetry.