Swiss-born experimenter Christof Migone hasn’t quite “landed” with us on his recent releases – Swan Song (drone produced from old brewing equipment) was quite good, Wet Water was just too process-heavy and generally unrewarding. Today’s Auditorium (Chaos, Quiet, Fail) (THE DIM COAST #22) is more intriguing, though. It’s some kind of installation piece – the lengthy description here is abstruse, verbose, and self-referential, but from what I can make out it consisted of people sitting in an art gallery or other such exhibition space listening to sounds through headphones.
He’s been experimenting with the plan since about 2002, and there have been numerous manifestations of it across the world – one of them might have involved a video component too. The bit that intrigues me is that Migone is admitting the entire experiment has pretty much been a failure, but he’s owning up to the errors and ploughing on regardless anyway. What we hear accumulated here on today’s release might be a pile-up of these errors – along with the successful bits – thrown together without many clues, apart from some sketchy information about the set-up, a few unhelpful photographs, and lists of participants in the whole macaroni – many of whom appear to have been personal friends of his. There’s a chunk of verbiage and conceptual hoo-hah to digest, and buried somewhere in this cranial bran and mulch resides the notion of realising a sound-art piece that isn’t even intended to be heard by anyone – some kind of update on Fluxus or Cage, supposedly. Or perhaps planting the suggestion that we’re simply listening to the reprocessed sound of other people listening, and the highly reflexive nature of this proposition is meant to tell us something.
As to what the piece actually comprises in terms of audio, or what the focus of our attention ought to be, I’m still not really sure – leakage from headphones, or the sound of relaxed participants getting mellow on free wine (which was provided). It’s confusing and unsatisfying, and the process isn’t as significant as its creator thinks it is, but on another level I sort-of enjoy the open-ended nature of Auditorium, and it’s worth waiting for the “payoff” of the final chaotic track, 15 minutes where everything supposedly went wrong. Finally we get some juicy noise – why did he hold it back for so long? As to piling errors on top of errors, apparently this is exactly how most computer programmers and software developers work; rather than fix code or repair a mistake, they just add more code to the file. Maybe Christof Migone has a comparable attitude to his own work. (22/04/2024)