VOLT-AA (03) Appropriation documents three musicians confronting the same basic question from sharply different directions: when does borrowed sound stop belonging to its source and begin living another life? Helen of Troy, Tim Hecker, and Martin Tétreault each work with material that has already happened. A violin phrase is captured and returned through delay. A recognizable piece of popular culture is degraded until celebrity narrative becomes emotional debris. A vinyl record is removed from its intended sequence and treated as a physical surface. The resulting CDr is not simply a compilation of three electronic performances. It is a small public laboratory devoted to memory, ownership, reproduction, and the strange authority acquired by sound once it has been separated from the event that created it.
The word “appropriation” can suggest theft, quotation, tribute, exploitation, recycling, transformation, or the practical fact that no artist begins with completely untouched material. Musical instruments arrive with histories. Recording software contains assumptions built by other people. Genres carry inherited gestures, and even the most private emotional expression depends upon a language learned from elsewhere. This VOLT-AA event does not attempt to solve the moral and philosophical complications of borrowing. It makes them audible. Each participant takes something that exists already and changes the conditions under which it can be recognized. The listener is repeatedly placed between familiarity and estrangement, hearing traces of sources without always being able to reconstruct their original identities.
Léon Lo’s Helen of Troy project provides the most intimate form of appropriation because the material being borrowed can be his own immediate past. A violin note is played, captured, delayed, and returned to the performer as something newly external. Lo can then respond to a previous version of himself, building sustained layers in which live action and recorded residue become difficult to distinguish. This is appropriation without historical distance. The borrowed material may be only seconds old, yet reproduction has already changed its status. The performer who produced the sound is no longer completely in control of it. The loop continues, occupies space, and begins influencing whatever is played next.
That method creates a beautiful confusion between memory and presence. A sustained violin tone may seem to continue naturally, although the hand that produced it has moved elsewhere. Another layer enters, and the recording becomes populated by several versions of one performer existing at different points in time. The electronics do not merely decorate the acoustic instrument. They expose a hidden condition within all recorded music: sound can survive its original gesture and confront its maker as an independent object. Helen of Troy turns that survival into harmony, friction, sleepiness, weakness, and gradually accumulating emotional weight.
The project name adds an appropriate ambiguity. Helen of Troy is one of Western culture’s most repeatedly appropriated figures, reconstructed through poetry, theatre, painting, opera, cinema, and political metaphor until the historical or mythic person has almost disappeared beneath representations. Lo’s music operates similarly on a smaller scale. The original violin gesture remains somewhere inside the layered sound, but each repetition places another image over it. Eventually we hear not one pure source but a mythology produced through copying. The beauty lies precisely in the distance between the first action and the atmosphere it generates.
Tim Hecker’s section approaches appropriation through cultural wreckage. Around this period he was moving away from the cleaner rhythmic language of his Jetone work and deeper into the damaged ambience introduced on Haunt Me, Haunt Me, Do It Again. He had begun treating digital sound less as immaculate information than as material capable of being worn down, overloaded, blurred, and passed through effects until melody appeared to have survived an accident. In the context of an event devoted to appropriation, this method turns sampling into something closer to erosion.
Hecker’s contemporaneous My Love Is Rotten to the Core grew from an Éric Mattson commission based on sampling aesthetics, using material connected with Van Halen, David Lee Roth, radio talk, celebrity conflict, and the collapsing mythology of arena rock. The brilliance of that approach lies in how far it moves from parody or recognizable remix. The borrowed voices and cultural fragments do not remain stable enough to provide nostalgic pleasure. They are submerged in haze, distortion, repetition, and emotional ambiguity until the ridiculous public drama surrounding a rock band begins producing an unexpected sadness.
Popular culture is filled with abandoned emotional energy. Interviews, advertisements, radio chatter, promotional language, and celebrity feuds are created for immediate consumption, then discarded when the news cycle moves elsewhere. Hecker recognizes that these fragments can retain feeling after their original informational purpose has expired. A boast can become loneliness. Masculine spectacle can reveal vulnerability. A cheap media voice can acquire ghostly dignity when removed from the commercial machinery that once explained how it should be heard. Appropriation becomes a form of excavation, not because it restores the source faithfully, but because it releases emotions trapped beneath its public meaning.
Hecker’s presence on this tiny 2002 document is especially fascinating in retrospect. The enormous, organ-like environments of his later work are not yet the only lens through which the sound must be interpreted. He is still close to Montréal’s experimental electronic community, sampling culture, minimal techno, CDr production, local commissions, and performances where the boundaries among sound art, ambient music, noise, and club electronics remained fluid. The music captures a route being chosen rather than a famous style being displayed fully formed. Digital material is becoming less clean, rhythm is losing its authority, and damaged harmonic atmosphere is beginning to occupy the center.
Martin Tétreault makes appropriation physical. A turntable is designed to reproduce a record, but Tétreault treats reproduction as only one of its possible behaviors. Vinyl can be interrupted, scratched, blocked, touched, layered, cut, or combined with objects that alter the relationship among motor, platter, needle, and groove. The record ceases to be a transparent carrier delivering someone else’s completed music. It becomes matter: plastic, printed label, rotating disc, damaged surface, resistance beneath a stylus, and a source of sounds its original producers never intended.
This method exposes the hidden labor normally suppressed by playback technology. Conventional listening encourages us to forget the turntable and imagine direct access to the recorded performance. Tétreault returns attention to the apparatus. The needle is dragging through a groove. The motor is regulating rotation. Dust, scratches, pressure, and hand movement affect what reaches the speakers. Mechanical noises normally classified as defects become primary events. Reproduction is revealed as another performance rather than a neutral delivery system.
Tétreault’s work also complicates the idea of ownership. A commercially manufactured record may be purchased as property, but the music encoded within it remains associated with composers, performers, publishers, and copyright systems. By cutting into playback, Tétreault does not simply claim the original music as his own composition. He turns the object into a participant whose physical behavior exceeds the intentions of everyone involved. The record answers back through skips, fragments, friction, and damaged repetitions. Appropriation becomes less a matter of taking a song than of discovering that every cultural object contains possibilities excluded by its approved use.
The three approaches form an elegant progression. Helen of Troy appropriates the performer’s own newly created sound, folding the immediate past into the present. Hecker draws upon circulating popular media and transforms cultural memory into unstable emotional weather. Tétreault attacks the physical carrier through which recorded history is reproduced. Together, they move from gesture to culture to object. Each artist demonstrates that sound changes identity whenever it is repeated under different conditions.
The live setting is essential because appropriation is often imagined as private studio work: selecting, editing, layering, and arranging borrowed material in isolation. At O Patro Vys, these transformations occurred before witnesses. Decisions had duration and risk. A loop could accumulate unexpectedly, a sample could enter with the wrong weight, and a turntable gesture could produce consequences that could not simply be erased and attempted again. The audience heard not only finished results but the act of material becoming available for another use.
Éric Mattson’s VOLT-AA series created a valuable space for this kind of concentrated listening. The phrase “deep listening” can sometimes suggest calm immersion, but depth does not require gentleness. It means allowing enough attention for the apparent surface of a sound to divide into histories, technologies, accidents, and relationships. A distorted sample contains a source, a method of capture, a chain of processing, a playback system, and the listener’s uncertain recognition. These performances reward ears willing to follow that entire chain.
The CDr format extends the concept beyond the event. Fifty numbered copies converted one evening into objects capable of leaving the venue and entering private collections. The performance was appropriated by microphones, recording equipment, editing, duplication, and eventually digital ripping. Every stage changed what survived. The room’s physical pressure became recorded information; the rare disc became files; the files entered another archive and could now reach vastly more listeners than the original edition ever permitted.
This does not make the CDr or rip equivalent to being present in Montréal on January 16, 2002. The recording cannot restore the room, volume, audience concentration, equipment arrangement, or small visual actions that explained how certain sounds were created. What it preserves is a transformed remainder. That incompleteness is entirely appropriate. VOLT-AA (03) Appropriation is about the productive distance between an event and its reuse. The surviving document does not return us to the original night. It takes possession of a portion of that night and allows it to become something else.
More than two decades later, the release also preserves a particular Montréal ecology. Leon Lo’s largely obscure Helen of Troy project, Hecker at a transitional stage of his development, Tétreault’s mature turntable practice, Mattson’s curatorial work, Oral’s tiny editions, and a venue willing to host deep electronic listening all meet inside one object. None of these elements needs to be declared the center. The record’s value lies in their temporary intersection.
Appropriation ends up sounding less like theft than a law of recorded existence. Once a sound enters the world, it may be remembered incorrectly, sampled, delayed, damaged, quoted, replayed, archived, misunderstood, or discovered by someone for whom its original context no longer exists. The artists gathered here do not resist that instability. They compose with it. A violin meets its own echo, rock mythology becomes vapor, and a record reveals the noise hidden beneath its assigned music. Fifty CDrs carried the transformation outward, and this surviving rip continues the process. The material has changed hands again.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi.