Lei Liang: Hearing Landscapes/Hearing Icescapes

The work’s second section, “Mother Tongue,” focuses on the inherent musicality embedded inside Liang’s own Beijing dialect. Using recordings of famous Chinese comedians from the 1950s, Hou Baolin and Guo Qiru, engaging in xiangsheng (“crosstalk”), Liang enhances the sonic relationships in their interaction through various production techniques, in particular, alternating between highlighting individual voices and subsuming them in a chorus that renders the words unintelligible. “Mother Tongue” does not mine the words to construct overlapping rhythmic patterns, instead it uses fragments of the voices to build an animated tapestry of sound, waves of activity that undulate and form larger structural shapes punctuated by brief spotlights on lone voices.

The guqin master Wu Jing-lüe’s rendition of Water and Mist Over Xiaoxiang is heard towards the end of “Water and Mist,” the third part of Hearing Landscapes. It serves as the culmination of the percolating material that unfolds earlier in the movement. It opens with a “sonic rain storm” created by dropping styrofoam peanuts inside the piano, a technique Liang pioneered. Electronic manipulations of Wu Jing-lüe’s guqin follow, bouncing off the sides of a spatialized stereo field. Liang’s Hearing Landscapes finds several ways of honoring Huang Binhong’s landscape paintings, through three movements that focus on practices concurrent to the era in which he worked, as well as through more systematic deconstructions and transformations of their essence into the language of sound.

Like the environment within which the source material was recorded, Hearing Icescapes is austere and spare, drawing the listener into the subtlest variations in finely etched sounds. The recordings Lei and his team garnered from deep below the surface of the arctic waters outside of Alaska reveal a complex auditory landscape, including the sounds of ice forming and cracking, survival sounds for marine animals, and increasingly, sounds that result from anthropogenic activity. Liang’s investment in this sonic world is an act of deep empathy for this threatened environment, calling our attention to what we risk losing. The opening movement “Call” proceeds in three larger sections — first we hear the fragile, disjunct creaks and crackles of ice formation, then sound masses of white noise produced by oscillations, surface wind, and pressure containing a fascinating array of acoustic variation, and finally a symphony of communication between various marine animals. Liang’s editing and compilation of the archive of recordings is elegant in its deference — it facilitates a contemplation of the intricacy of the sonic sources themselves without calling attention to the curator.

“Response” enlists the artistry of three improvising musicians to inhabit and respond to this rarefied sound environment. Interwoven with excerpts from “Call” and following its overall structural trajectory, trumpeter David Aguila, flutist Teresa Díaz de Cossio, and violinist Myra Hinrichs find analogues for the sounds from the “living score” on their instruments.

In this way, Lei Liang has flipped the narrative of humanity’s impact on the natural world, asking human musicians to adapt to the realities of a rarefied environment, instead of the other way around. Indeed, Hearing Landscapes/Hearing Icescapes lives entirely in a reverential space. Using tools available to artists and scientists, Lei Liang shines light on cultural traditions and natural phenomena that we endeavor to preserve despite a world that moves too fast to see their deep, enduring value.

– Dan Lippel