The Silence of Sea Tower

Abstract

The Silence of Sea Tower is an auto fictional, site-specific sound art piece that I self-released on cassette tape in May 2023. Nine months of sound recordings, from my artist studio in Helsinki where I live, are composed into a soundscape situating itself between ambient noise music, field recording, and conceptual spatial art. It is a sonic portrait of an office building, and the sociocultural space it constitutes, with a focus on the noise that occurs in the silence.

By positioning myself as both artist, audience and material in the process, I have embodied the work, and site, for a total duration of one year. With this project, I curate my imagined experience of a place as I navigate it by ear. The project has been an ongoing conversation with myself, observing and examining my surroundings and myself within that framework, inhabiting multiple roles and perspectives in the process, and moving through different stages of listening and sounding.

The work is performed live as a concert iteration titled Narrative Noise, played on an orchestra of analogue tape players. The first presentation was the self-organised release party on May 31st, this performance being the official public presentation of the thesis project. The composition is deconstructed and reconstructed as a live collage, making each performance a new, unique version of the piece. Live, the soundscape is verbally narrated to present the tower and its inhabitants, incorporating elements of storytelling and opening anthropomorphic aspects of the work that are hiding on the tape.

The written component of the work expands on central concepts like listening and composing, silence and noise, and further examines subliminal themes of the work such as time, loneliness, perceived binary opposition, and agency.