Looming

SOUND PAINTER

Instruments for measuring interior and exterior distances; scientific methods for manipulating and displacing the limits of consciousness. The vibrations of a room, amplified to create an interface between the ego and the world, between control and chaos. Low tones, barely audible, and then even lower ones, between 0 and 20 Hz - registered by the body, albeit in other circuits and with other membranes than those of normal hearing. In his perceptionally challenging installations, Viennese artist Franz Pomassl experiments with acoustic material. Surface upon surface, layers of tonal shifts and white noise becoming transformed and creating new electrical fields, new territories of sound. Interior spaces magically altered. From destabilisation and giddiness to a heightened presence. In the 1990s, Franz Pomassl studied painting under Arnulf Rainer at Vienna's arts academy, as well as electro-acoustics and experimental music at the city's school of music, under Dieter Kaufman and Tamas Ungvary. Pomassl's sound and space experiments are fuelled by this combination of experiences and by the laboratory-like precision of the sound processing, which takes on radically different dimensions when it is done in large spaces. One of Pomassl's permanent installations, for example, is found in the thirty-metre-high, cylindrical hall of a thermal power station in Theiss, belonging to EVN, an Austrian power company. The title of the work is "Volume", Permanent Sound System for the hall of the Denox Nox removal system, EVN power station Theiss, 9457,2 M3 20-20 000 Hz 90 db".

It has not been made to function in some average room, but is rather based on the specific acoustic conditions that make the power station hall a place for the listener/visitor to explore on different spatial levels. During the descent between the platforms, the frequencies gradually change, from extremely high tones down to the deepest bass sounds.

Franz Pomassl has made similar installations in the basement of Vienna's Sofiensale (during the Wiener Festwochen), and in a subterranean room in what was previously a bathhouse (in Luxembourg during Manifesta 2), in a Cargo-Hall at Amsterdam Harbour, Sonar and Avanto Festivals. In 1990, he and fellow sound artist Alois Huber set up Laton, a record and production company for various types of experimental electronic music. It has released, among other things, Pomassl's "Trial Error" (1996), a CD made after a scholarship stint at Tokyo's earthquake simulation centre. "Architectronics", from 1998 (on another label), is the result of a collaboration with British writer and musician Kodwo Eshun, who has described Pomassl's creations as "sound hallucinations". The title encapsulates Franz Pomassl's sound works, which have as much to do with architecture as they do with music.

CD: Trial Error 1996 (Laton), Architectronics, with Kodwo Eshun, 1998 (Sabotage), Retrial Error, remixed by Mira Calix, Alva Noto,Pita och Mika Vainio, 2001 (Laton)

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