Hélène Prévost rencontre

STEVE HEIMBECKER

STEVE HEIMBECKER en conversation avec Hélène Prévost, mercredi 24 janvier 2001.

H.P. : Steve Heimbecker. Where are you now, as we are talking?

S.H. : Where am I located? I am west of Saskatoon in a small prairie village in Saskatchewan called Springwater. The population here is 20 people. So most of the work that I've been doing in the last couple of years since I've moved here, has involved environmental sounds of the Prairies recorded in surround sound and then manipulated in my studio here. One of the sounds that I've become very fascinated with is the sound of the wind.

H.P. : The wind, which I imagine, must be very strong where you are, at one point.

S.H. : Yes, and it's kind of one of the situations when I first started working here, when I was trying to record a complex sound environment such as birds singing or other complex sound environments in trees and just on the prairies, crickets and that kind of stuff, I kept running into this problem of having wind blow in my microphones. And after being frustrated for some time, I realised that actually maybe the wind was something that I could use. And now my work is specifically directed at wind sound in combining wind with the other prairie sounds.

H.P. : And have you found a solution to record wind face on? It's always complex to record wind…

S.H. : Yes, it is. What I have ended up doing is recording from inside tree groves or inside abandoned buildings that have open windows or doorways so that the microphones aren't affected necessarily by the wind going into the microphone, but that I can hear the movement of the wind around the building or through the grove of trees. I also have a specially designed building I guess that is kind of a small garage that is up on blocks and so that there is a space at the bottom of the building that the wind can travel through underneath the building, and I have been recording multidirectional wind from this vantage point, keeping the microphone in the center of the building, but allowing the wind to blow underneath the building.

H.P. : It's moving the way you describe that. You are like a birdwatcher, like being a complice of the event but trying to hide away so the wind will be fooled because he doesn't see you, so he can let go.

S.H. : Yes.

H.P. : Is that your approach also with the Silophone? Is the wind one of the elements with which you want to work?

S.H. : When I visited the Silophone, the wind was quite strong, of course, because the building, the architecture is so large and vast. So there was quite a lot of resonance from wind occurences blowing through the windows. Just the emptiness of the space because it's been abandoned for so long, really resonated with me and what I have been doing here on the Prairies. Of course, the combination of growing up on the Prairies and being on the Prairies with all the grain production and then being at the Silo and knowing that the grain, that important export of that grain, occured through that building. So I'm trying to create a connection, almost a travelogue of the growth and the sound of the Prairies related to the growing of the grain, as it would flow through the silos and be rediffused or distributed to the world. So I'm very excited about taking these sounds and transporting them through the silos and having them diffused in an outdoor setting to a large audience and to an outdoor setting. Not to be restricted by the architecture but to be enhanced or mediated by the architecture.

H.P. : Is it the first time that you work with such a space?

S.H. : Yes, although I've worked with diffusion systems in the past and I've worked on farely large projects in the past. A piece I did in 1993, involved recording the sound of a mile of environment from equidistant sites. And once I had that recording done, I synchronized (they were recorded individually) so I synchronized the recordings to a playback machine that played the acoustic environment, that encapsulated that mile of sound in an environment that was 64 feet long, and the result of that was that when you listen to the environment in the acoustic model, if you travel from one end of the model to the other faster than 5.5 seconds, which is the speed of sound, you conceptually would be travelling faster than the speed of sound in the listening environment.

H.P. : And what have you been working on lately before this Silophone project?

S.H. : Well, I do a lot of visual art installations that do sound or use sound as a primary element. In 1999, I released a CD anthology with Avatar/OHM editions called The Enormousness of Cloud Machines which is a double CD of my sound works over the last 8 years or so, since 1992. But my primary focus of the last few years really has been about the environmental sounds and creating a new technology and methodology to diffuse complex sound environments and actually I've been developing a system where I can use the voltage dynamics of a surround sound recording and the movement, 'cause I'm very interested in the sculptural effect of sound, but the movement of sound as a mechanical device through the dynamics of the amplitudes as it moves over a multichannel recording system or a surround sound recording system, and take that as a template and use it to control other sounds so that the other sounds have the movement of the first set of sounds.

H.P. : You will be using this technique with the Silophone?

S.H. : Yes.

H.P. : Could you give us an example of how it could work or what you are looking for?

S.H. : Well, for example, I can make a recording of the wind and all of the movement of the wind as it blows and surrounds you and swirls around you and use that as a template to put over top of, let's say, a thunderstorm so that not only are the dynamics of the thunderstorm which is kind of an omnipresent sound, not only is that there, but the motion of that through the diffusion system, the movement through the diffusion system, will be like the wind, but the wind would not be necessarily heard. It would only cause the movement of the thunderstorm through the diffusion system.

H.P. : In the case of the Silophone, of course, everything will be amplified and heard through speakers that will be on the ground floor where people will be. Will you be high up in the Silophone or will you be down with us?

S.H. : I will be down with you. The idea, the way I see it right now, hopefully, is to have a small stage in the center of the architecture of the Silophone at the bottom so that the upper four-channel sound diffusion system is to my back and above me and the other four-channel diffusion system will be built in a square in front of me. The size of the square that is in front of me will be based on the same proportion of me at the distance from the stage level to the height of the upper diffusion system. So it creates kind of a cubical form that comes outward from the Silophone or from the architecture.

H.P. : So you will be hearing what we will be hearing, in a way?

S.H. : Yes, absolutely. I've always done that with my diffusions.

H.P. : Essentially, you inject sounds in the Silo?

S.H. : Yes.

H.P. : There's no direct acoustic. You don't manipulate anything directly in the Silophone. You shoot sounds.

S.H. : Yes, I will be shooting sounds. The major manipulation would be to disperse the sounds through the silos. The reason why I want four silos is because all of my samples and my recordings are all four-channel sound sources. So I want to be able to keep intact the sound diffusion, the natural space of the environment or have that affected by all four silos discretely. So that it comes to the diffusion system as discrete events. I'm very interested in moving scale, of recording small environments and playing them back in a large position and vice versa.

H.P. : A last question. What does the Silophone… what is this instrument for you now? Is your perception evoluting as you work with it? With what kind of sound memory do you work because you've been doing a "residence" this summer, but you have not been back in the Silophone? So are you working with the memory of the Silophone? With what aspect, physical, metaphorical, perceptual aspect are you working with now?

S.H. : I have a very strong sense of just the space of it. It is a memory thing, but then memory to me is about space as well. It's kind of like Einstein's time-space thing : memory is a piece of time and time is a piece of space. So, in that sense, it all connects for me. The reverberations are very ghost-like to me, but they're kind of like strings of time and sound… One of the things that I've really explored, being on the prairies here, is observing the sound over great and vast distance. There is a location here that I can hear a train at an elevator station, 30 miles away. So the sound of that is very much, to me anyway, analogous to the Silophone. It's a mapping of all of that distance from where it's produced to where it arrives to me to be able to listen to it. So the reverberation of that sound is the space between us, and Silophone is that space. That's my approach to it.

H.P. : Thank you very much Steve.

transcription : Sophie Laurent

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