EKATERINA BAZHENOVA-YAMASAKI: TIME STRETCHING PROPERTIES

I would like to share the thinking behind my practice which invites the audience to consider the concept of sound as it is felt, seen, and experienced. The life of the people is always a mine of the raw materials for art, materials in their natural form.

While listening, we can experience more drastic responses, neither racing to make sense of what we are hearing to decide how to respond, or, through a combined preservation and conservation process, ignoring what we are hearing. Sounds expand unfolding and changing over the time. An immaterial occurrence. It is a little more than a change in air pressure. 

An entire human body is a listening vessel. Higher-pitched sounds range are usually absorbed more by our upper body, and lower-pitched sound mainly affect our lower body – Sense and Sensibility. The music/sound I’m working with is always a study in deep listening and non-linear durational composition primarily focused on septimal intonation. On the contrary creative listening, that is, listening to music that involves the mind as well as the ears and heart, can attain a measure of understanding of what I’m,  as an artist, saying.

Like the nuanced minimalism unfolds a depth of focus and opens up contemplative spaces in the listener’s attention, where we become vulnerable receptors and where every miniature shift in sound becomes magnified through stillness. It has a perception/altering quality that encourages self-exploration free of signposts and without a predefined endpoint. Randomness is glorified as a multicolored kaleidoscope of perceptions to which we are ‘omni-attentive’. Any content, as well as the dynamism that is characteristic of ‘saying something’, is automatically lost if one aspect of the language is systematically altered. But the resulting emptiness does not antagonize the audience which is confident of its ability to cultivate a taste for virtually anything.
‘The most, the best, we can do, we believe (wanting to give evidence of love), is to get out of the way, leave space around whomever or whatever it is. But there is no space!’ (Cage, 1966)