UNTRAINING THE EAR WITH ILYICH

The seed of all conflicts is in separation of me and mine
The seed of all suffering is in expectations and resistances
Put these two seeds together and they will root a tree
So high as the sky...

...In the shadow of this place, countless lives pass...
...In the shadow of this place, countless lives pass...

Branching off, in fear and greed, and great attachment
In desire, haterade, anger and jealousy 
The tree of separation, bears fruits of liberation

Don't go to the root. Go beyond the seed.
Don't go to the root. Go beyond the seed.

Seeds...Roots...Fruits…

Seeds...Roots...Fruits

Seeds...Roots...Fruits...

PIECE #1 Seeds Roots Fruits

In our upcoming session, UNTRAINING THE EAR is hosting an encounter with the space traveller ILYICH, who in sonic ritual, travels through sound to explore the many possibilities of listening. With ILYICH it is inevitable to think of space, time, sound, body nexus, and how sound will inform our futures and pasts. 

“… listen to how sounds arrive from all directions: from the front, or back, from above and below, from the left and right… from the inside and from the outside… some of the sounds are near and some are far… listen whether you can sense the moments of their arrival, their amplitude, their pitch and timbre: how long they stay and how they slowly fade away… arrive, decay, sustain, release…it takes everything to make a sound...” – ILYICH

In imagining future sounds, ILYICH expands our possibility of listening to all sounds around us, starting with those that we carry, transmit and embody within us. It is rather a proposal at humbling the position of our ears closer to those sounds that might be often unnoticed, maybe even misunderstood. If listening to all sounds could suggest a reorganization of which sounds make sense, then this session is a proposal on listening to silence, and to those sounds that are slowly existing from our present memory. ILYICH is invested with silence, and how it has been associated with the non-existence, in silence there is a possibility of listening as Salome Voegelin writes in Noise and Silence: “Towards a philosophy of sound art”, there is a possibility through which “silence is about listening, listening to small sounds, tiny sounds,  quiet and loud sounds out of any context, musical, visual or otherwise. Silent sounds can be loud, as much as noisy sounds can be quiet, but they do not deafen my body to anything but themselves, and instead include me in their production.” 

This session is also a different from the ones we listened to before a unique encounter for UNTRAINING THE EAR, one that can neither take place in the physical space of SAVVY Contemporary nor one which takes place in the ether alone. In this encounter, ILYICH has visited SAVVY Contemporary in person to perform two of his pieces titled Seeds Roots Fruits and Meditation on Sound and Thoughts to a space in absence of a physical audience. Captured on film by Bona Bell, this performance is also an attempt to resituate where listening happens, and on what stages it unfolds, shifting the notion of a physical stage to other possibilities. Disregarding the boundaries between sound art and music ILYICH invites you to board a space vessel exploring a beginningless inner-space: a unified field from which all concrete planetary processes and presences occur. This unique situation is also a spectacle of the senses, that which asks to reconsider the relationships we find ourselves having between the sonic and the visual. One might ask, which comes first? Is it the sound or is it the image? And how can we read an image by listening to it before reading it through seeing? 

During the performance ILYICH is activating a sound crystal, an interactive sonic sculpture developed to encourage spontaneous emergence of sonic and performative rituals and music concerts, collectively exploring the de-colonial potential of listening. The sculpture synthesises pragmatic concerns of a sound system while exploring the basic geometrical forms and auditory hallucinations like Doppler Effect. The work is a semi-autonomous, futuristic vessel suggesting sound and listening as an aesthetic, technological, and collaborative project for outer and inner-space explorations. The vehicle open-ended enquiry projecting itself from the future as an infrastructural connection between transmission and reception. 

ILYICH is a space traveller of an ambiguous origin. Musician and storyteller ILYICH occasionally re-appears at the core of music performances, sonic rituals and project activations. Mysteriously entangled with this world, yet clearly not from here, ILYICH’s stories are identity slippages and anecdotes of struggle told from the multiple first-person narratives. Oscillating between recognisable electronic music and abstract sonic improvisations ILYICH can be often found at the core of an intimate listening session, a sound ritual, gallery or museum gathering, or on a larger club and festival stages around the world. Currently in residency on Earth ILYICH is known for his surprise appearances at the Lot Radio and I.S.C.P. in New York, House of the World Cultures and Festsaal Kreuzberg, Berlin or Bergen Kunsthall, Norway among others.

Whether you are sitting, standing, walking, lying, falling, flying, drifting, driving, floating, spinning through the vast cosmos as a little planet, join in gently by simply bringing your attention back into the interior of your mind and body

 …spend a few moments allowing your head, neck, and shoulders to relax… relax your face, your jaw, your hands and legs, relax your belly… let go of any tensions… for a while… focus your attention on the movement of your breath in the body, can you sense it?... are you sure your body is really here?...

…exercise your listening… use this opportunity to go within…broaden your awareness to include all sounds that surround you… there is no need to seek them out… as best as you can… stay open… be receptive to sounds as they arrive… you hear the sound of this audio… stereo… this voice… you might also notice the sound of the space around you, the city, nature, a sound system, humans, animals, spirits, inner voices, outer voices… voices… notice the enormous depth and the variety of sound…

… become aware of whatever is actually here…

… listen to how sounds arrive from all directions: from the front, or back, from above and below, from the left and right… from the inside and from the outside… some of the sounds are near and some are far… listen whether you can sense the moments of their arrival, their amplitude, their pitch and timbre: how long they stay and how they slowly fade away… arrive, decay, sustain, release…

… it takes everything to make a sound… every sound is as complex as the world it appears in… it is the sum total of the ecosystem, of politics, and social relationships, of remembering… forgetting… presence… silence… notice how independent and untraceable every sound is… it is not yours, or theirs, it is beyond control and always in between…

…notice whether you can hear your own voice among the sounds… can you hear your tendency to describe, define, to judge, attach, to grab a sound?... can you hear your voice as just another sound?... listen – if you are feeling lost – refocus your attention on the sounds as the raw sensations and on you experiencing it… who is listening now?...

Sound is not a wave… it is a sphere… listen to how louder, more obvious sounds tend to force out the quieter ones… notice how easily you can be carried away under the influence of their sphere… sounds are events, not facts…

Do you hear the gaps between the sounds? Can you gain a sense of the silence? Somewhere on the edge of hearing?

Sound and Thoughts...and Silence...

Gently shift the focus of your attention to your thoughts...

Can you sense how thoughts are rising in your mind? How long they linger and when they pass? Their amplitude, duration, pitch? What are they pitching?

As with sounds, there is no need to make thoughts come or go… they do it anyway, they arrive from all directions, all by themselves… arrive, decay, sustain, release… as with sounds, you cannot control the type or intensity of thoughts flowing across your mind… all you can do is listen and be attentive to them…

… just as with sounds, it takes everything to make a thought… mind, body, planet, spirit, technology, nature, cosmos, chaos, politics, remembering, forgetting, presence, silence… the sum of it all… every thought is as complex as the world it appears in… ever escaping, impossible to represent, thoughts are events, not facts… listen… thoughts and sounds are all and the same...

Just as with sounds, thoughts flow, vibrate, and resonate, yet they are spheres, not waves… how easily are you abducted and carried away under the influence of their sphere? Carrier waves… Carrier thoughts… Can you trace any thought back to its origin?...

Thoughts are sounds… some of them are loud, scary, sudden, and some are barely audible, queer, marginal, quiet, fresh… quite fresh… Sometimes they stick around and fill the entire space and sometimes they dissolve quickly and disappear immediately and only space remains…

When powerfully charged thoughts, emotions, resistances arise… pay kind attention to them… allow them to be just as they are, without judgement, expectation or blame… sounds and thoughts are events… at least inside of you, it is up to you which events you will attend and nurture… just as with sounds, all of this will eventually change or disappear completely… whatever is closest to source lasts the longest...

Can you hear the gaps between the sounds? Can you hear the gaps between thoughts? Can you gain a sense of the silence? The background space from which it all appears ?... Listening is all it takes and silence is ever speaking… silence — the only eternal flow of language — interrupted by sounds and thoughts… like electricity flowing in a wire… only with resistance to its passage it illuminates a lamp, revolves a fan, lets a sound emerge, another thought perhaps, a life… for a very brief moment only… for now… yet, it always remains silence, the heart of all… whatever lasts longest is the core of it all… silence… beginningless… listen… sounds, thoughts...silence… 

Whether you are sitting, standing, walking, lying, falling, flying, drifting, driving, floating, spinning through the vast cosmos as a little planet, join in gently by simply bringing your attention back into the interior of your mind and body… Who is listening?...