Camille Norment’s ‘Prime’ Lets KMB 2016 Visitors Touch Sound

KOCHI:
Sounds from a time before language haunt Camille Norment’s installation space at Aspinwall House, engaging visitors in an unspoken conversation with their slow murmuring, chanting, humming and moaning. Then, ‘Prime’ sends shivers up their spines.
Exciters attached to the benches – seemingly a thoughtful accommodation for those who would like to take in the Sea outside while listening to the deep, resonant voices – echo the sounds, mirror the changes in their textures and radiate them up into the seated, surprised bodies.
“The space is well suited to the installation with the low bass tones produced resonating with the sound of the boats and ships that drift past. The sound will follow you, noticeably changing the way you perceive a trip on the ferry,” Norment said. Or benches, for that matter.
But the American artist is not interested in evocation alone. She would prefer ‘Prime’ to be a neutral experience, looking instead to the connect between disembodied sound and physical objects. In turning audiences into participants, her installation at Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016 gives sound the assertive presence of other art media, fills space and claims time and attention.
The vocalisations are a cross-cultural mixture of sounds, ranging from the moaning practised in African American church worship, to the throat singing of Tibetan monks, to incantations of the Om sound. The installation connects these cultural references to the body’s experience.
“No sound can be detached from a culture. The moment a sound excites an ear, it belongs to a body that is cultured. I want people to feel sound, to feel the physicality of it,” said Norment, who added glass harmonica, electric guitar and Carnatic vocals to the soundscape during her music group ‘The Camille Norment Trio’s live performances during KMB 2016’s opening week.
Norment traces her interest in sound tonality and inclination toward experimentation to her introduction to music as a piano student at age six. “I was interested in the ‘seconds’, which are the semi-tones and combination sounds that were not prescribed in the music notes,” she said.
The genre-defining 1952 composition of silence, 4’33”, by American experimental composer John Cage – where he opened the piano and played nothing – captured Norment’s imaginatio
n, encouraged her to set aside the conventional in favour of invention.
“Cage’s concept to compose silence, by which he actually intended to find the sound of silence – a view of silence as an impossible condition – inspired me to experiment,” Norment said. It was when she got her first synthesiser in the early 1980s that Norment first experienced the joy of modulating sound waves directly.
“From then on I was excited about experimentation with sounds. The advent of new-age music like electronic dance and trance further influenced my concept about sound. Every sound has music. It all depends on how you place it, and the context on which it is placed,” Norment said.