Artist Spotlight is our regular feature introducing you to Cities and Memory artists around the world with an in-depth interview. In this edition, we introduce you to UK-based multidisciplinary artist Simon Kennedy, whose work is inspired by everything from Kurt Schwitters to De Stijl and Cubism.

My practice is multi-disciplinary, drawing on writing, poetry, music, field and found sound, design and art of all disciplines. Sometimes, but not always, it is manifest in combination with a moving image piece or graphic design, but all the work is a valuable resource for learning and experimentation.

The key for me is to value and cherish the joy in discovery, learning and exploration. Specifically related to sound, and put in a rather cerebral way: my work is mesh of practices, ideas and objects influenced by and exploring the physical and ontological properties of sound: resonance of spaces, phase shift interference, and the transmission of sound through and against physical media. Physical and emotional reverberance. (Reverberance referring to the extent to which sound persists in a space after its source has stopped, due to reflections from surfaces).

My pieces combine elements of ambient, noise, minimal, found and field recordings. I am particularly interested in audio ecologies: biophony, anthropophony, geophony, technophony and electro-acoustic experiments.

Creatively, with sound, moving image and writing, I try and shift between minimal setting and basal technique, blurring the boundary between documentary and fiction. The term “paranarrative” captures the intentional blending of fact and fiction as the work layers multiple meanings. There is a personal (queer) and political dimension to everything I make.

The interview continues below ⬇️, and this map collects together all of Simon’s contributions to Cities and Memory: 

Right now I can hear a muntjac barking, F32s taking off and the heat of mid-afternoon summer stillness.

I come from a challenging background where, from the earliest memory, violence and fear were intrinsic to one’s everyday experience. Listening acutely was a proactive defence mechanism.

Turning that ingrained negative and heightened sense perception into something positive was a useful exercise in adult life. And in parallel I discovered that many composers, such as John Cage, Pauline Oliveros and Eliane Radigue, have worked with a form of composition that combines their spiritual (often Buddhist) practice of meditation and listening with a sonic minimalism.

Many academics refer to this work as requiring a focussed, reduced, deep, layered or quantum listening. So my childhood experience of silence, then violence, and then silence transmuted into something more positive, profoundly beneficial and calming.

It is the learning, exploration and experimentation.

For my day job I work as a designer and one of the key skills is iterating ideas. I equate the process to the different compositional forms used by earlier modernists such as John Heartfield, Kurt Schwitters, El Lissitzky as well as artists of Cubist, Futurist, Constructivist and De Stijl movements.

The working process is:

• Collage – loose composition and sketching
• Montage – precise construction
• Decollage – deconstruction

A big breakthrough for me when learning and making sound pieces was learning to transfer skills I have developed in other spheres of creative work (design, writing, poetry, film, graphic design) and applying to creative techniques when making sound work.

Where I might lack technical or theoretical skills (as examples: understanding equipment, sound synthesis or music theory) I look for skills and techniques that replace, augment or subvert one discipline’s skill and replace it with that of another (think Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies). But the key is always find joy in learning, exploration and experimentation.

Anything on my website will be useful in understanding that the personal is always political. I maybe a tired, old queer but I am a passionate and committed one.

The work is called Mi- Fu- Bu- Hi- Mu- and it resonates with me particularly because the Ainu language will soon go extinct. There are currently only two fluent speakers on earth.

Mi- Fu- Bu- Hi- Mu- are Japanese prefixes for words of negation, removal, absence and obsolescence. English equivalent prefixes include Ob- De- Ab- Im- Dis-. The original sound sample is of a student receiving a Kouta Lesson in Tokyo, Japan.

Vocalisations for Japanese sounds of negation are drawn from the source sample and used in the work. This piece is a lament for the Ainu, indigenous people of the islands surrounding the Sea of Okhotsk, now identified as part of the northern Japanese archipelago. The Ainu people settled these islands several thousand years before the arrival of the Yamato Japanese.

For centuries, pseudo-scientific racial ideologies, which included the false belief of the superiority of the Yamato character, marked the indigenous Ainu as ‘sub-human primitives’, making illegal their language, culture, right to gather and hunt. Eugenicist theories justified ‘racial improvements’ to the indigenous population, with forced sterilisation and rape of Ainu women by ‘pureblood’ minzoku. Male and female Ainu populations were separated, with males exiled to southern Japan to work in debt bondage.

As recently as 2020 the Japanese prime minister celebrated Japan as the world’s oldest monoculture, negating further what limited visibility and rights the Ainu people may have in law.* As a consequence of systematic erasure by the Japanese, the Ainu language is one of the most critically endangered. There are only two fluent speakers left on earth.

** Technical notes

The piece was recorded in a single take as a live improvisation using only the source sample.

Vocalisations for the Japanese sounds of negation are drawn from the source sample and used in the performance.

The work was made using Leafcutter John’s Forester-2022, a Max for Live device

* It is worth noting that until 1981, indigenous Australians were identified on the national census as “Flora and Fauna” with no reference to their being human.

** www.endangeredlanguages.com/lang/1212

Dillon Bastan in LA, Slate + Ash in Bristol, Xiu Xiu’s Angela Seo and Jamie Stewart in Berlin. Arthur Russell in ’70s NYC, Kaouding Cissoko in Senegal, Bill Orcutt in San Francisco, Mark Wastell in London, Max Neuhaus in Maratea, Italy…

A special mention to chicoco.fm, a media project I co-created 15 years ago to train at-risk communities living in informal settlements in west Africa to develop media skills to advocate for their housing and human rights.

It is not so much an individual sound, it is the magical shift from ‘hearing’ to ‘active listening’ that accompanies slipping on a set of headphones and walking into any ‘field’ that one is about to record. It is a profound and mystical act.

Anything by Dillon Bastan and Slate + Ash. Any tool that allows for sound to be decollaged or concatenated.

I very often make work and then take that work apart in an auto-destructive act. I often wonder what a sound work by Gustav Metzger might be.

I have a sound and music project that is inspired by and explores the meanings encapsulated by my surname in direct translation from Irish (my heritage, including Irish traveller heritage) to English (the place of my birth).