Circa 115: Article

PeterMonaghan: Fandango, 2005, acrylic and ping pong balls on card; courtesy the artist

While music (of several varieties) isimportant to me personally, it’s use-value as a kind of subcultural bindingagent has never concerned me much.Call me old-fashioned, but my work as a critic and occasional curator has tended to be more informed by literature, history and philosophy. I just hope the contemporary art worldwill continue to tolerate my attempt to combine the roles of critic-curatorand non-DJ
Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith

Working with video, I have always added sound or music on as an after-thought but recently Melissa wrote a piece of music for a show I am makingwork on for April. It is a piece for a piano and banjo; we thought that this would be an interesting mix and would complement the work I am doing which mixes the vernacular with Modernism’s high ideals. This is the first time I have started with music as the primary source for my work; after all, Goethe, when looking for a comparison with music, claimed architecture was frozen music.
Brendan Earley

I listen to music on and off while I work, usually when the conceptual part of my work is done and I am at the rendering stage where I can more or less chill. Yes, I feel music influences what I do; it takes me into a mood and keeps me there while I work. I can’t say for sure how it actually influences the particular piece, but it helps me to get it out. When I look back on work, however, I don’t remember the exact music I was listening to but the mood remains in the piece. I sometimes listen to the same CD over and over to keep me in a grove. My musical taste can run the gambit from Johnny Cash, Classical, Jazz, to Cuban big-bandmusic from the ‘40s and ‘50s. My CD of choice this week is Carlos Molina hits from 1932 –1946 on the Harlequin label.
Brian Cronin

Other than a time, years ago as a student, when I made some attempts at sound art, music hasn’t featured in my work at all. But recently this has changed and I find myself considering ways in which the construction of temporal, sound-based work relates to the development of images. This began a short while ago when pondering on how to depict transparency, which coincided with my discovery of a link on the Museum of Modern Art’s website which plays John Cage’s 4’33”, with the problem of visual equivalent to silence solved by accompanying it witha clean white screen. Since recently embarking on painting for the first time, I’ve been wondering about how one can develop a dialectical approach to image-making, and an important part of the thinking came from hearing the changeover from BBC Radio 4 to the World Service on Sunday nights.This is always marked by playing a recording of church bells – from a different church or cathedral each week. Bell ringing is an inaccurate method, never quite the same twice.The structure of the short musical phrase, repeated continually throughout the refrain, is understood only through mentally identifying an ‘average’, finding the pattern which lies under the cacophony. This brought to mind the percussion music of Xenakis and reminded me of The otherwise very beautiful Blue Danube Waltz, a piece made in 1976 by a then little-known Michael Nyman, which consisted of five pianists playing the first bar of the waltz, going back to the beginning, playing the first two bars, going backto the beginning, playing the first threebars etc, etc. Despite Andy Warhol, the applicationof these kinds of process to the construction of images, through repetition and not-quite-rightness, can provoke a dialectical process in both the making and reception of painting.
Colin Darke

Loud music has always attracted meand certainly at times encouraged or influenced my decision to do stuff.Within various genres I enjoy the relationship of loud music to physicaldance/ action. When I was younger I held a peer record for the number of stage dives during a gig. It was during a Nuclear Assault (sociallyaware, hardcore thrash) gig (c. 1988)and I dove off the stage eleven times. Some years later I used the action, if not the music, in a simple video workcalled Leaps into the abyss(1996).
Dan Shipsides

Dan Shipsides Leaps into the Abyss, 1996; courtesy the Artist

Everyone wants to be a DJ… The parallels between the practice of curating and musical practice are enticing. Do the curator and conductor/ DJ/ record producer share the same function: to manipulate, interpret and master the presentation of a given cultural artefact (a song, a score, an artist’s work…)? Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of artist as DJ, remixing pre-existing cultural elements into a new form, is eminently as applicable to curatorial practice as it is to artistic practice. Musicians and audiences seek out the work of a specific producer or conductor: specific ‘name’ curators increasingly have the same cachet in the realm of visual arts. For myself, curating the project Rhythm-A-Ning in 2005, in Waltons New School of Music in Dublin, dealt with some of this head on: the three selected artists (Ciara Finnegan, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Fintan Friel) explored elements of musical interpretation and influence, cultural choice, and the cut & paste/ remix musical aesthetic. The site and its function – a location where people learnt music, which, with much consideration, seemed increasingly the most mystifying of procedures – were an initial motivation for the project. This was developed later through a fascination with a track by Theolonius Monk, Rhythm-A-Ning. The title of the track itself seemed to function as an acting out of the mystifying procedures of musical learning: the word itself being an act of reinvention, by grammatically making a noun a verb, and by, in effect, designating a wholly new activity – ”we’re rhythm-a-ning…” And beyond that, there was of course an appreciation of the track itself, which features an interior conversation between instruments as its major element, foregrounding mimicry, repetition, variation and communication between different instruments and musicians. It was an ideal reference point, not just for this project, but perhaps for all acts of curating. It’s about being in a band. Maybe everyone wants to be in a band…
Declan Sheehan

Music and art: I’ve always thought of both as ways of dealing with structures, surfaces, processes and flows, with ideas about how things move and change, fit together and break apart. But maybe that’s just because of my training as an engineer. Growing up in the suburbs, music was very, very important to me: a lifeline to a wider world. A few years ago, I made the mistake of opening my ears to the world, as John Cage suggested, and now everything is music: I can’t switch it off. I’m not too worried about naming what I do, although I frequently have to. Naming and categorisation facilitate ownership and administration. In the end, what I do gets categorised as a result of the context it is positioned in, the listener and their attitude, institutions, etc., and a lot of this stuff is outside my control. Is it music or art? Is that the important question?
Dennis McNulty

Any influence is, I think, filtered through an early intoduction to John Cage’s compositions and ideas; particularily the complexity of Roaratorio (1979) with its arbitary rules and layers of sound either spoken, sung, whispered or played. A revelation then and the memory of which still provides me with the courage to relinquish restrictive concerns.
Frances Hegarty

Sometimes, sometimes not… I made Black Brain Radio listening to a Neil Young, digitally remastered greatesthits album and Madonna’s latest which was very upbeat and dancy. I broke into sporadic dancing in my kitchen after every recording of Black Brain because it was weighty to make and I needed to inject myself with energy. It was great fun. I could never listen to music concrete or experimental sounds to influence me… Garrett Phelan

Yes, music and art are baked in the same oven for me. Music is art to me and art is music, siamese twins and lovers. I don’t see a separation between my own music and my own art. Other people’s music sends me to a creative place sometimes and also sparks a fire or enthusiasm in me to create and release something of myself. The music that influences me or my creativity does not come from any specific genre/ time period/ musical piece. It is constantly changing and the atmospheric sounds of everyday all around me are as much of an influence as music that sends me away in to the creative space. When I hear something that sounds unique or new, it tends to awaken my senses and urge to create something for every new mood, every new feeling or experience that I or someone may be likely to encounter. I have not come close to achieving this yet, which is a positive thing as it keeps me motivated. PS Films, visuals, books, sounds and people are as much, if not more, of an influence than music on my art.
Nina Hynes

‘The first time I used a piece of music in my practice was as part of a work commissioned by Jacob Fabricius in Denmark for retur, a project ongoing since 2002, where I used the meter from Catch a falling star as the basis for a text piece. More recently I’ve used snatches of lyrics in the Four notebooks. I haven’t used music so far in video work as I’ve wanted to avoid its directive properties; however, earlier last year I swapped a painting for a piece of music yet to be written and I’m excited about where that might lead as a project.
Jeanette Doyle

I wouldn’t say that music influences my work; I feel that it is inseparable from it. It’s taken me a while to make this clear to the art world, but in recent times it must have become very obvious. Just to give a few examples: our Huts exhibition was partly based on a musical analogy, and in recent months we’ve had performances in the gallery by Laura Veirs, Sufjan Stevens, and Cat Power. This is an area of activity we’re going to pursue. Why? Because I find that many musicians get closer to the heart of things – to real feeling – than most visual artists are able to do. And it’s important to me, as a curator, to draw attention to what I consider to be the real purpose of art – the expression and articulation of what it’s like to be alive, sensitive, and aware in this overwhelmingly complex world.
John Hutchinson

Music plays a subtle role within my practice, functioning as a layer in which it may or may not be seen; however, it is an active part within the process of making. It has three forms, the first being as a way of creating a pace for the work. If I am developing the work I like jazz; it reflects my train of thought and complements that process. At the point of making, it is about flowing, so I prefer Hip Hop or something like Devo. The second is to generate a mood for the work. If the work is of a darker, passionate content I listen to Malcolm McLaren. The final form music holds is part of the work itself. This has mainly been in conjunction with video and could be seen as Sound Art. I am currently expanding this with installation by manipulating sound/ music to further heighten the experience for the viewer.
Lee Welch

Music does influence what I do – perhaps most of all hip-hop. Upon discovering rap music around 1987 I was blown away by how innovative the medium was, especially in comparison to what the radio played (this being a time when Bruce Willis had a successful recording career). More than anything, I was impressed by just how much one could fit into a rap song. Just looking at the lengthy lyric notes it was obvious that a band like Public Enemy squeezed in four times the amount of other artists. The more I listened the more it became evident that not only were the lyrics expansive, witty, and intelligent but also each track was richly layered with lots of bits of other songs. Since then I’ve been interested in what can be accomplished by recycling old material and perverting its intended significance – from DJ Shadow’s sublime masterpiece Entroducing… to the endless number of anonymous mash-ups available from mix-CDs and as downloads. In a way I think this method of working helped to tackle those difficult questions of what to paint and where to begin. When it’s good (and it frequently isn’t, of course), hip-hop offers ways to be inventive with acquired material. It taught me to steal.
Paul McDevitt

I use music as a mnemonic device, an effective means of access to the listeners’ (viewers’) personal archive. To slightly modify a sentence from the Talmud, “We hear things not as they are but as we are.” In this context, music, sound and sound art function in similar ways. The form, place and frequency of a sound can evoke the same constituents of a memory. In recent work, I find it necessary to compose these pieces rather than sample any particular genre or time period. This process often persuades the visual or tactile elements of a work. Ah sure, ya can’t beat a good sing-along.
Paul Murnaghan

Obviously, I love music. Music and art are reciprocal and both feed off each other, in a way a parenthesis, an exchange, collaboration. Recently I was interviewing Michael Craig-Martin who told me he was more inspired by John Cage’s lecture on silence than anything else, and that he felt it is far more influential to visual artists than musicians. Personally music for me is part of everything in our daily lives and loops into the artists’ lives. I was last listening to ‘80s trash cocktail music, so not sure what that says about my practice and I have currently been exchanging music compilations with Philippe Parreno and Doug Aitken as I’m working on a group show with them at IMMA and we hope to record and commission a CD as an integral part of this – we are trying to experience the physicality of sound. I was also interested in gallerists Alan Vega and Martin Rev who formed the nasty punk band called Suicide. There has always been a affinity between music and art; prime examples are with Velvet Underground/ Warhol, Rammelzee 12 inch vs. K-Rob/ Basquiat. Some of my friends are musicians – Katell Keineg and Cherrystones, the latter of whom has turned record collecting into an art form; he’s got a museum construction of vinyl. At the moment I’m going through a NICO and Scott Walker phase… Rachael Thomas Listening to music suggested a rationale to build the kind of painting I make which is not narrative. As music exists as sequences of sounds which do not necessarily illustrate a specific idea or verbal narrative, so the application of areas of colour can exist in its own right. I have been touched by many kinds of music, but specially by the Baroque, when the music seems to circle and repeat in such a selfcontained way, and be at the same time oddly contemporary. Richard Gorman the sound and any other media_art are in perpetual inter_shift as appropriate in any given moment within time_like _ space and according to perception. the idea of ‘influence’ seems irrelevant.
Slavek Kwi

Time spent in the studio is filled with music and silence. For practical work, the usual popular melodies are good company. For creative and academic work, there is Johann Sebastian Bach – an entire universe.
Michael Dempsey

While music is biggish for me, I can’t say that I have directly referenced or used a piece of music as a source of ideas for a project or in work I have done. That said, I have had the chance to work with composers and musicians over the years and hopefully will continue to do so. One project that I am working on at the moment involves composer Stephen Gardner collaborating with artist Gary Coyle on a film piece of the Wexford sea – a percent-for-art commission. I suppose, then, this kind of thing might count as music influencing my practice.
Cliodhna Shaffrey

I suppose I’ve been fascinated enough by the idea that people believe music has the power, subliminally or otherwise, to influence people. These are the people who believe art can fundamentally change the way people think about their lives and the world around them but it’s a shame they only ever think it’s a change for the worse. Do I think music has influenced my art? I know it’s been one of my greatest pleasures in life, but I’m unaware of any one record that has directly or consciously affected any thinking or decision making in my work. Then again, maybe i shouldn’t have played some of them backwards…
Allan Hughes

As a student artist I was as influenced by musicians as performers, as much as by their music. I knew almost no female visual artists in the ‘70s, so found my influence from Annie Lennox, Chrissie Hynde and Debbie Harry. I wanted to have as much control, energy, precision of movement and individuality as them. From the beginning I constructed my performances like song lyrics, with verses and choruses that repeat in sequence. (I was also lead singer and songwriter with a short-lived band in the ‘80s called Houseparty, sort of Bow Wow Wow-style for clubs). Since 1990 I have devised all my own soundscores, essentially to provide structure, rhythm, tension and atmosphere to the finished presentations. During this process I like to think especially of a quote from Brian Eno, about how his compositions are about “creating other worlds for people to lose themselves within.” Without a doubt music is an essential and integral part of my art.
Anne Seagrave

I am certainly interested in the thinking process used by certain composers and how they link with visual art. At present I am working on an installation involving islands and a boat. I have looked at Arnold Böcklin’s Island of the dead and listened to Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the dead, which he composed after seeing Böcklin’s painting. I have also looked at the grays used by Philip Guston in his almost abstract period as a possible colour for the islands. There is a sense that his gray shapes hover between presence and absence. He was friends with the composers Cage and Morton Feldman, who also dealt with this issue. In fact Feldman talked about that “delicate space between sound and music.” In my own work I tend to return to the original sounds that influenced the composers while retaining an interest in the abstract way they thought about them.
Brian Kennedy

It almost happens the other way around in that I almost ‘see’ the music before I hear it. My music-making and art-making are, at this point, indivisible and site-responsive. The music that interests me is texturally motile and inconstant. My next project (Daniel Figgis’ THE BANQUET) takes place 22 July 2006 in the National Basketball Arena, and is concerned with issues of scale and information dissemination, and not labouring under the yoke of any specific exterior influence.
Daniel Figgis

Daiel Figgis: Tamper, 2004; Performance shot courtesy the artist

This a complicated question for me to answer as l will outline, but in short: no, not at all.

As a teenager l spent virtually all my time in my bedroom listening to records. l took this business extremely seriously, as teenagers are often wont to do. Having no interest in making music of my own, l was content to closely scrutinise that of others. This in some way influenced my decision to go to art college, and central to my practice still is a focused scrutiny, which l’m sure was developed, in part, by endlessly listening to some 12” or other in my parents’ house. The band which really kicked off my musical interest – The Smiths, who are still a band of great importance to me now – were introduced to me by my sister, who also introduced me to art college. (I recently digressed for twenty minutes during a meeting with a curator as we compared notes about our respective Smiths passions after someone mentioned Phil Collins’ latest work.)

While at art college, after developing a keen interest in country music, l abandoned music altogether; not that the two occurrences are related. l am still unsure what the reason for this was, but l didn’t listen to any music for about six years. l slowly found myself listening to music again through an interest in American hip-hop, and a resumption of my love affair with American rock n’ roll – in particular the output of Sun Studios and one Mr Elvis Presley.

Also at this time l was sharing a studio and working closely with the artist Paul McDevitt – with whom l still co-curate. He found my taste in music – hip-hop aside – hideous, l believe he referred to it as “dad rock”|and “kitsch.” He introduced me to numerous musicians such as The Handsome Family, Gift of the Gab, Jim O’Rourke, Trans Am, who then prompted further additions of my own – usually frowned upon by my newly acquired music mentor. This was augmented further by a habit l developed of staying up through the night listening to records in Mark Garry’s studio, while he generously, and without complaint, attempted to sleep nearby. This l mention in such detail as, while not central to my practice, these dialogues about music became a focal point during my dialogues with both these artists, and by extension numerous others.

This renewed interest has other direct links with my work. Firstly the discovery of The Magnetic Fields’ 69 love songs first introduced to me by Mark Wallinger in 2000, but l only got around to getting it in 2003. An amazing and mesmerically brilliant album, it has prompted numerous dialogues with artists, two in particular being Annika Strøm and Susan Phillipsz – both of whom l believe to be among the best artists currently working in Europe. Interestingly, music features heavily in both their work.

Whether my tendency towards the appreciation of meloncoly in works – be they films, paintings or pop songs – was inspired by the Smiths or, as l believe, is something that l have always been drawn to, l can’t really say. However, all the works l have made over the past few years have maintained an air of sadness. This is something l find of great significance at present, and I find myself constantly trying to introduce the idea of sadness, or things which may be associated with it, into all my works. l somehow don’t trust that which overlooks it at present. I don’t mean sadness in a teenage “l’m unhappy” way – but as an articulation that in everything, in any instance, there must be present a sense of loss or failure of some kind.

Of late, l have been listening almost exclusively to soul music, in particular Dave Godin’s Deep soul treasures – taken from the vaults, volumes 1-4. These amazing compilations, full of passion and hurt, do not feature in any of the work l am making. Nor do they inspire any work-related ideas, but l can’t accurately say to what extent they are separate from my practice.
Declan Clarke

I would consider myself to be influenced by music but only obliquely: it is evident that there are underlying structural properties within the formation of images which are akin (or perhaps, more specifically, analogous) to those within music, eg harmony/ discord, rhythm, tempo, pitch (or, in painting terms, hue), tone, accent among others. The composition of these properties obviously governs, often in quite a primal (ie ‘pre’, or is that ‘non’- linguistic) way, the audience reaction(s) to a work. It is this ‘outside of language’ quality in music that interests me – this ‘thing-in-itselfness’. People will listen to music without seeking words, narrative or even explanation (generally not the case with looking at art). This isn’t to say that those things aren’t there, or important – it’s just that they aren’t central or even strictly necessary. Sometimes they’re even an impediment. To a degree I think this is also true of visual stimuli.

My method of working has been compared by others with that of jazz music. The comparison is reasonable in that in both cases the work is formed by a chronological, largely intuitive, improvised set of actions and responses; a range of discrete, abstract parts coalesce to form a hopefully sophisticated ‘whole’. I realise though, and welcome, that this description could also apply to the formation of a termite mound, a galaxy, an archipelago or a public-transport system. A contrivance which allows a collision of nature, fate and circumstance to take its course.

While jazz is something I certainly listen to, I take just as much pleasure or visual inspiration from a wide range of musical sources. I don’t believe music is translatable per se; however, I think one can, with effort and luck, find visual equivalents for certain moods or amalgams of feeling which music may induce. If you want to, that is! I personally wouldn’t try to find specific visual equivalents for musical forms, but sometimes I have found them and left them there! I think music and art are both essentially an organising of matter for expressive purposes.

Incidentally I can only make artwork in silence.
Ronnie Hughes

 Music is my lifeblood. I’ve been passionate about it from an early age. Punk came along and changed all the rules. In many ways postpunk was musically far more interesting and long-lasting. The whole DIY approach and spirit of experimentation had a profound effect on my visual and sound work and pretty much continues to inform how I work today. The late ‘70s/ early ‘80s was the key period, with bands like Wire, Gang of Four, Joy Division, Magazine, Pere Ubu, The Minutemen (to name a few) reflecting the immediate cultural climate and personal/ psychological zones it created with a raw, barbed, and utterly uncompromising intensity that really connected. Part of music’s power is its ability to initially bypass the intellect and connect directly to the emotions. Hence its universal appeal.

This latter part of this period dovetailed with my entry into art school and introduction to more obscure areas of sonic exploration – the ‘industrial’ scene protagonists like Einstürzende Neubauten, Test Dept., Z’ev, Bow Gamelan, Dome. This ignited my own explorations into sound and related visual experiments. Sound as sculptural element. Nonmusical sound sources. Exploratory music was creating strange new mental spaces to inhabit which really inspired me. Outer limits. Imaginary soundtracks. Nameless zones. This fed into my visual work at the time with an exploration of the suspended time zones of derelict spaces that Dublin was once so full of. All hoovered up now of course, in a squeaky-clean future of “chequebook modernism” (Iain Sinclair: Downriver [Granta 1991]) and Euro ennui.
Fergus Kelly

My first thought was to reply that I didn’t consider my work to be influenced by music much; however, after chewing over it a while, I realise that from time to time I take an impulsive cue from listening to something (no particular genre), and this has resulted in notetaking, scribblings, drawings, and occasionally revision of rhythm in the editing process. Recently, I have used Hindemith’s Neues vom Tage in a piece of work, Tesco opera; however this was chosen in response to the work and not the other way around, though considering the title there is an element of the chicken and the egg…
Fiona Larkin

It’s a really old film and I’m glued to it… looking at a woman looking at a door… that’s it… there’s nothing else to see – a woman and a door… and there’s the sound of a violin… the notes run faster and faster and higher and higher scratching backwards and forwards as they climb and the tension rises with them, even if I know it’s not a very good film and I’ve seen it before and… “Don’t open the door you fool!”… it’s the violin, just the violin, ignore the violin – it’s setting the tone, agreeing and disagreeing frantically as her hand reaches out… twists the knob… The room is empty. The violin has stopped.
Jaki Irvine

The influence of music on my art is undeniable, but to specify which particular genre would be impossible. I view the process of creating sound art as (among other things) a means of recontextualizing the presentation of sound, and before the appearance of ‘sound art’ as a unique forum for artistic expression, music was the only context within which sound was presented in an organized way. The two processes are closely aligned, even though the results might be radically different.

Music is a form of sound art, essentially. What we think of today when we talk about ‘sound art’ is really nothing more than a further abstraction of the compositional process. If you had to define ‘music’ – taking into account twentieth-century composers such as John Cage – the best we could do is to say that it is “organized sound”; albeit sounds that are organized in very specific ways and intended to be reproduced by players on particular instruments. The difference between music and sound art lies primarily in the execution and context within which the sounds resulting from either process are presented.

My sound-art works have had a strong tendency toward specifically ‘musical’ structures – borrowing rules and relationships from musical harmony and rhythm as a means of organizing the occurrence of sounds within an installation. I believe that these relationships have grounded my works, giving the observer/ listener something familiar to relate to within what might otherwise be a very abstract sonic experience.

I have always enjoyed listening to a wide variety of music from different styles and historical periods, and continue to do so. I like to seek out music that I am completely unfamiliar with, and I enjoy finding new sonic relationships that I can borrow, explore and learn from within my own work. Musical composition has allowed people to explore sonic relationships for centuries, and the results of that exploration provide a treasure trove of sonic possibilities.

When I say ‘borrow’ I’m referring not to the process of sampling and sound-file manipulation, but rather to the understanding and implementation of specific sonic relationships – every composer from J.S. Bach to Trent Reznor or anyone working today has a unique sonic ‘signature’ and anything we do as sound artists follows (one hopes) in that tradition of sonic organization.
Jody Elff

Yes, music does influence my art. Its direct influence is not something easily explained or indeed verified, but I feel music can have the same effect as a beautiful day might have on motivating the creative impulses to produce art. There are, however, a number of pieces of music that bring to mind some of my particular art practices, for instance, tempo can call to mind my particular interests in the modular.

As both a visual artist and a musician, one key interest in my work is the colliding of these two worlds. Taking the form of sound art, I am very interested in our perceptions of sound, sound as object. With this in mind, I am drawn to music that is progressive in terms of moving away from some of the strict traditional practices within music. Music that uses sound like a colour to create a particular atmosphere. It would be this genre of art practice, sound art, that would influence me the most.
Karl Burke

Yes, as much as anything else that’s going on around me. I’ve made sound pieces, radio broadcasts, worked with musicians and participated in all kinds of various sound events. When I’m working I listen to the radio (NPR); during the day it’s interviews, current affairs, music, and at night it’s only classical music. In a way music is more connected to ‘reality’ (than art is) in that the radio discusses current events while simultaneously playing music and interviewing musicians (all kinds). I think music has always seemed to me to be more in tune (ha ha) with what’s going on outside the studio as it’s always been taken for granted to be part of the mainstream consciousness. Art is a little bit removed and more specialised. Although I work within the visual arts (because that’s the term for the pigeon hole that fits my peg), i’ve always felt that music is just another medium. By the way, I’m not musical at all.
Katie Holten

I make music, graphic design, video and photographic works and various self-published projects, and these all share things in terms of process, ideas, source materials and form-giving. For instance, found elements, systems, grids, issues of context and lifespan, memory and memory-building, randomness and chance, noise and silence all recur throughout my work. I used to listen to music very loud while I was working visually and this enabled me to focus intently on what I was doing. Now it’s not so loud, but it still helps to create a mental workspace. Sometimes I might use some low-key textural electronic music as a background, while other times I might listen to Sun Ra; the outcome of the work is certainly different for this!
Peter Maybury

Music is a constant source of inspiration and relaxation. I listen to it all the time, from new, jazz, rock through to classical. When I listen to a piece of music, as well as enjoying it for its own sake I’m also translating the rhythm, timing, shape, colour and texture into a painting; I would love to convey emotion and feeling the way music can. I know I’m doomed to failure but I just keep trying anyway!
Peter Monaghan

Music has always been at the center of my work as an artist. I am a trained composer, and early on I became interested in the idea that compositional technique could be applied to any media or discipline, not just music. As a result of my interest in such composers as Richard Wagner, Arnold Schoenberg, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, etc, all of whom moved freely across the disciplines, I became interested in the idea of composing with media. Such techniques as indeterminacy, the remix, recombinatory practice, participatory and interactive forms, even more traditional musical techniques such as polyphony, counterpoint, harmony, etc, could be applied to visual and performance genres such as video, theater, dance, painting, etc.

The composers I have listed above span the mid-nineteenth century to the present. All of them are wedded to what is called the Gesamtkunstwerk or total artwork, which is concerned with the synthesis of the arts into a single hybrid medium (such as opera, music theater, happenings, etc). In today’s media art, artists have truly blurred the boundaries between art and music; they are working with digital processes that allow the two formerly disparate media to be translated and integrated with one another. Sound can be translated into imagery and visuals can be converted to music. Such software programs as Max/ MSP/ Jitter, which I use extensively in my own work, support this new paradigm and have redefined today’s artist, who is essentially a composer of media.
Randall Packer

Everything I experience has an influence on my work and the music I listen to is a big part of that. I listen to music for different reasons. The music that I feel has an important influence on what I do does so because there is a shared vision contained therein. At other times I will listen to music to conjour up specific times, places and memories – and these then become pictorial.

My music collection is very varied – there is everything from old ska to Thomas Tallis’ choral work and northern soul to Motorhead. There is, however, a disproportionate amount of stuff by The Fall – a band I savour for their humour (in both lyrics and music), their surrealism, which is particular to Northern England, and their ability after twenty-five years to still produce moments of utter genius.
Stephen Brandes

Music is an amazing thing. From something you put on in the studio to allow you space to think, to the impulse to make new work. My taste is eclectic. I will listen to anything from Sonic Youth to Rachmaninov, Nina Simone to Damien Dempsey. I get a particular kick out of making photographs with a private sound track for the viewer (if they know the songs); Mississippi goddamn, Oops, I did it again, 50 ways to lose your love handles. In exhibitions I love juxtaposing music within earshot of each other: a video playing Beethoven beside one playing Kylie or Gil Scott Heron. Seeing music played live is a totally other experience, Classical music is never loud enough and gigs hit you physically; the sheer intensity of being in a crowd of people with pulsating sounds, exhilarating. At the moment I’m working with the Benedictus from Mozart’s Requiem and loving becoming familiar with every note; the piece involves adoring a Chloe handbag, a difficult job but must be done!
Amanda Coogan

Amanda Coogan: ADORATION, 2006; courtesy the artist

Reprinted from Circa 115, Spring 2006, pp. 32 - 41