20 Seconds, Once a Week: No. 8, with Marco Fusinato
Kalas Liebfried and Marco Fusinato explore the intricate relationship between noise, art and perception.
This interview, published on Substack, is the first in a four-part series for 20 Seconds Magazine on the visceral materiality of the medium of drone and noise music. The collection of conversations, conducted by Kalas Liebfried, will culminate in a feature story to appear in 20 Seconds Issue 7.
For this edition of 20 Seconds on Substack, artist and curator Kalas Liebfried speaks to artist and noise musician Marco Fusinato. Together, they explore the intricate relationship between noise, art and perception, delving into Fusinato's unconventional approach that challenges established norms and reshapes the context of artistic interventions. The dialogue traverses Fusinato's significant projects, the intersection of various components in his compositions, and the impact of noise within both the auditory and visual realms. In an introspective manner, they discuss the durational aspects of Fusinato's work and its connections to labour, capitalism and societal structures. Throughout, Liebfried and Fusinato unravel the layers of noise, art and societal dynamics, offering an exploration of intersectional expressions and the contexts in which they unfold. Together, the two artists explore the role of the guitar as an instrument and the notion of time and the extended set as a tool to achieve these combinatory expressions.
Location: Munich/Melbourne
Date: 3/10/23
Kalas Liebfried: Noise is not the part of the aural spectrum we listen to, but mostly part of that which we try to ignore or “cancel.” Even if it happens in the foreground, we don’t necessarily listen to noise, as it affects the whole body. How would you see the interference of the ordinary and the artistic perception regarding the context of your work? What happens when we start to carefully perceive noise instead of cancelling it?
Marco Fusinato: Context is everything and it’s very important to understand a work with it. If you enter a museum or a venue you need to know the language of it and its history. The way I use the instrument is unconventional. I’m fascinated by the guitar's history and iconography and interested in taking it somewhere that might have been unimagined, unexpected; a context automatically alters meaning. By bringing noise into the museum, people might be more open. But I found out through experience that sound, especially the particular volume, can be disturbing for a lot of people. You can put an image on the wall and no one would take any notice, no matter how difficult it is. Compared to making sound with high volume, it can create all kinds of trauma. When we talk about noise I always like to bring that John Cage quote where he talks about noise being disorganized in contrast to music being organized. The museum also provides a space where things will be considered, so to bring noise into that context automatically takes it into attention. As soon as you see someone holding a musical instrument, you imagine the person performing some kind of music. But if they are doing something that is unconventional, that can [confuse] you.
In the 1990s I did this ongoing project called FREE. I was travelling around the world for exhibitions, but without any music equipment. So I would go and find a music store with a mini-disc recorder in my pocket and ask to test a distortion pedal, so they have to give me an amplifier and a guitar. Then I would turn everything up and make the most horrendous noise until they kicked me out. I’ll capture it all with the mini-disc recorder, I’ll walk out and then take a photo of the shop. That’s a way to put yourself out in a context that’s there, an example of a context shift.
KL: With your sort of performances it’s not just the music or the instrument, it is a combination of sound, imagery, audiences, surroundings, context, so there is never a border, unless you organize it yourself or a promoter does so. How would you describe your concept of an intersectional extended composition considering all components?
MF: I play a lot of improvised noise guitar sets in clubs. With time I got frustrated with the process in the sense that I was travelling great distances, spending most of my time with transfers but not with performing. So I thought, fuck it, I’ll invent a project where I travel somewhere and perform all day. That project is called Spectral Arrows and it’s like a take on the guise of a worker. It’s 8 hours a day, following the museum's opening hours, and filling it with massive amplification and improvisation. It’s an occupation of the space.
Leading on to that I have decided to use infrastructure of the stadium and large scale performances: would it be interesting to form a band, where instead of beginning with local clubs and rehearsing, you start at the end by being the stadium band. The thing that really carries those bands nowadays is huge video walls. So I thought: let’s begin with that. The images become the singer, which I trigger with my instrument, and this becomes an interesting turn on infrastructure which creates an experience for the audience. So that’s how Desastres began. It’s about using that infrastructure and rethinking it with an experimental noise project that synchronizes sound with image.
The control unit takes my guitar signal in, then spits it out perfectly synchronized with sound and image. Then I can manipulate it, grab fragments of the sound, pan it, randomize its behaviour etc. Its first incarnation was the installation at the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2022), as a 200-day performance, 8 hours a day. At Berlin Atonal (2023) it was a 40-minute set. So it has many different forms, whether it’s installation or straight up festival performance.
KL: So the different components of a composition develop into a reflection on infrastructure or how something is carried on to and with an audience.
MF: You’re right, that’s how it's composed. It’s thought of in terms of what is the context here? and this is very much like making exhibitions, you have to think about what the experience will be and how the people negotiate and navigate the work and this becomes a major part of the composition.
KL: At Berlin Atonal you provided the images through an approximately 15-metre-high projection. This image machine felt like an amplified visual noise. It reminded me of the way that we doom scroll with our smartphones and how this behaviour became familiar to almost everyone during the pandemic. Sometimes you don’t recognize that you do it. It’s like a demon possessing you. How does your concept of noise work within the visual realm?
MF: Taking in images became such a significant part of our lives. In Desastres, the images that I select are open enough for a broad audience, so that interpretation remains vast. The crux of it is that you try to forge meaning from them, but the person next to you would have a completely different take on meaning and affection. We’re bombarded with imagery but it comes down to how we make sense of them. I want images that I’ve selected for the piece to be very broad: natural history, art history, the press, bits from all these different tensions. And when they clash against one another there is enough kind of friction there, but it’s never clear. It’s not even clear to me what one can make out of the clashing sound and imagery. I do need the force of the sound and the power of the image to sit equally in the mix to create a kind of physical encounter for the audience.
At Berlin Atonal, it was more complex than we first imagined, because images are made to be displayed horizontally and here the screen was vertical. If you cut two-thirds of a horizontal image by showing it vertically, the one-third that's left doesn't make sense because you maybe just see the grind of an image and not what’s making it up. I had to rethink the presentation in that format, which is basically the same as how we use the phone. This is where we’re at: the phone is dictating how we absorb information and images.
KL: If you take instagram as one of the most used platforms for visual content, you can’t even take it horizontal. It is vertical all the way through and leads us to produce content in a vertical way. Seeing the monstrous screen at Atonal seemed like an amplified smartphone surface, which gives me the daily dose of media noise at a macro scale.
MF: The program I use to edit the image doesn’t adapt to the format, so you get really weird edits. At the Venice Biennale we also made the machine give it a randomization where you can bring up any image zoomed right in up to 20 per cent or as a double exposure. As I’m always improvising on the guitar but the images are always randomized, I never know which image is going to come up. The machine determines the imagery which makes it weird and unexpected. Without sequential order the meaning gets mixed up. There is a quality and an aesthetic that comes from my interest in underground music, such as grindcore or hardcore anarcho punk and noise. All these kinds of subcultures have a particular aesthetic and imagery. A lot of images I gravitate to could be from those worlds of lo-fi black and white grain, texture and xerox aesthetic.
KL: What role does the surrounding architecture and its context play in your practice? Do you try to tune into a space?
MF: In galleries and museums I need to bring in the amplification because there is no infrastructure. And the surfaces are hard and I really have to think through the reverberation and set up the equipment in particular angles so that it can create some kind of spectral phenomena as you move around. I need to come up with ideas and think about how you can sculpt the air through the space and what effect it has on the audience.
At Kraftwerk [in Berlin], it’s such an immense, overwhelming space the technicians working there know the space well and set up the PA system accordingly. That's the kind of situation where you’re really relying on the crew because all I can get is the sound of my amplifiers. In this typical concert situation I’m quite remote from the audience, as I’m high on a stage and there are approximately 3,000 people spread out in the space. Whereas in Venice there were up to 5,000 people a day coming through the pavilion being on stage with me. And when you think of the three elements there (the screen, myself and amplification) the audience becomes another element on stage, coming up close, sharing an opinion or hanging around for a long time. In every situation the experience of an audience becomes site specific.
KL: At your performances you tend to extend the duration into a long process of a 9 to 5 working day. Compared to durational concepts such as La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music, your work refers more to labour and the conditions of a brutal capitalist society, rather than cosmic and transcendental topics and the concrete examination of frequencies. How do such concepts of duration come into play in your works? And do you see your work as a break out of a clocked society or rather a vast disruption in a system?
MF: There is the labour component turning up and occupying the space, it really does tie back into ideas in Marxism, the 8-hour work day and being dutiful and focussed. Central for improvised music is that there is a lot to explore, so playing in a club with a time limit is quite restrictive and you’re very conscious of what you’re doing, conscious of an audience in front of you who expect—no matter how fucked up the sound might be—to be entertained. Because of that construct, the performer on stage facing the audience and those looking at the performer creates a consent. I find that limiting in performing improvised noise guitar music. So I prefer to face the wall, so I can’t see anybody in the room. I’m removed from any form of distraction or any desire to entertain. That allows me to concentrate on the sound and what I’m hearing in the room. The first hour I’m conscious of time, but as the day goes on I lose sense of time completely and I let the sound take me somewhere. I usually try to work on 15-to 20-minute blocks because I feel like if I go that time with one idea that could possibly be the side of an LP and then I transition it to something else and try to push it further. It’s all about transitions. These intense blocks of time feel a bit like standing in the ocean all day being crushed by waves which keep coming through you. And in this condition there is plenty to explore: tune the room, listen to the resonance and all those kinds of frequencies, overtones and extended harmonics that are happening in that space.
KL: I find it interesting to define working in the arts as labour, as most societies wouldn’t consider artistic work this way. Especially in Venice it was quite clear that the artist is exposed as a part of the labour system, as a worker who wears himself out exchanging physical and mental condition. This shows the audiences the un-romanticized side of artistic labour.
MF: I occupied the Australian Pavilion for 10 months, six days a week, every day. I became friends with and conscious of all the workers that are there. The Australian Pavilion is close to where the rubbish is taken so the cleaners are walking by, so you get to know them, you get to know all the guards well, the people who work in the cafés, and the people who look after the other pavilions. There is a core group of workers who are there every day and ensure that the place functions properly, so I was part of that, saying “hi” to everybody, becoming part of a real community. Part of the exhibition concept was to allow any of the workers to come in, make a coffee and use the bathroom. It ended up being a real social hub to hang out, have a conversation, and it became a real workers' meeting place.
KL: As your work is based on improvisation and dynamics it’s also a sort of production on site, so there is not a ready-to-sell product, but a workshop where heavy amplification and noise is the material used and articulated on site.
MF: Yes, it’s also an open studio. I’m there all the time working. I treated it very much like that. You could see that the artist does exhibit in the very moment with the artist’s materials.
KL: As you don’t put yourself to the front, the labour aspect goes beyond personality. The artist is part of a labour system and not part of a celebrity system, like many people recognize or imagine artists.
MF: I was kind of denying that by positioning myself with the back to the audience. I’m just another tool, an equal element to the screen and the amplification. I’m a necessary material. It’s not about celebrity, personality, ego. I want to skip that anyway. Using guitar as a signal generator to create noise is not about the desire to be seen and to be loved.
KL: I’ve been thinking a lot about a parasitic way of behaviour within a system. Following Michel Serres, a parasite is not necessarily negative or harmful; instead, it signifies an entity that exists on the margins, thriving in the spaces between established structures. Parasites play a crucial role in the evolution and transformation of systems by introducing novelty and facilitating change. Would you describe your work as parasitic?
It’s a really interesting proposition. There are definitely certain elements of that, especially the idea of infiltrating and contaminating, something you can’t get away with. The essence of art is also to show alternatives and ask questions without the necessity of answers. The idea of a parasite is a fascinating one.
KL: In your body of work you explore the tensions and contradictions of opposing forces. There is a strong dialectic method that comes into play. Would you rather tend to achieve a resolution of those contradictions or to leave them at a state of endurance?
MF: Everyone’s searching for an answer, and there are answers so that people feel happy and things work out, it’s gonna be great and let’s all have a group hug, so we can make the world better. But in my opinion, things will always be fucked, there will always be great tensions and contradictions, there is always disagreement. The most important is to ask how we deal with this friction and noise. I’m fascinated by and involved with the tensions around the opposing forces. In fact, they coexist, so how one deals with it is the most important. I just don’t believe that there are solutions. Humanity is always constantly in struggle. And that's the beauty in it.
KL: This state of open contradictions directly activates audiences. Is your work more about changing the system it’s situated in, or rather showing the need for a change?
MF: I want people to feel something. That’s the bottom line. You need to remember that people need to have a pulse. That they’re alive at this moment in time. Agitation is a positive thing. If you look at these images and they piss you off, if you hate the sound, well that’s something. You don’t have to like it. I want the work to be polar, I don’t want to be in the middle. It’s not nice, I don’t want to be nice. I want people to display emotion and walk away with potential after their experience.