The Vibrating Drum - developing a practice for the modern percussionist

Ingar Zach

Over the last 60 years, contemporary percussionists have been investigating the potential of their instruments beyond established classical techniques, making use of a variety of preparations and techniques, additional electronic amplification and manipulation, and alternative setups. In my artistic research project The Vibrating Drum, I apply my background as a percussionist working in various experimental disciplines towards a consideration of how the vibrating speaker (the transducer) can be used to produce sustained sounds. Over the course of my project, I have assembled a haptic system comprising vibrating speakers in contact with the drum skin, small amplifiers, and iPads, that allows me to create and develop new artistic works for percussion. My methodology entails giving a series of solo concerts, where I present different versions of the setup and material from my ongoing research. I have also introduced my material in collaborative projects and explored how vibrating material interacts with specific acoustic spaces. To produce my formal artistic results, I edited and structured the recorded material, which resulted in two solo albums, a video installation, and a final concert. The aim of this research is to broaden my own practice and to offer a tool for modern percussionists, composers, educators, and others for whom my research and approach would be relevant in the future.

Musica liquida

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Musica liquida is
about attuning to space
about musicking
about ⚮
about the permeable membrane
about the consequences of electromagnetic radiation
about Anton Bruckner’s Symphony no.8 in C minor, third movement
about slow melodies
about the emancipation of creative pressure
about letting go
about haptic systems
about the hesitating hand
about the smell you cannot sense
about accustoming oneself to darkness
about lack of sleep
about spasms
about time and placement
about running water through your hands
about coexistence
about flickering and beatings
about the complexity of interfolded layers
about Italy
about the eternal yearning for physical touch
about the therapeutic effect of vibration
about diffraction
about solitude

Inspired by Yaniya Mikhalina

Recorded by Stig Gunnar Ringen at Emanuel Vigeland Mausoleum in Oslo, Norway on the 25th of June 2021.
Mixed and mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi in Monza, Italy, December 2021.
Art: #133_700_36 by Eléonore Huisse.
Art Direction: Stephen O’Malley.
Supported in part by the Norwegian Academy of Music and the Norwegian jazz forum.
All rights reserved (TONO/NCB).
sofamusic.no
ingarzach.com

It is January 2021. My wife and I have just arrived in Oslo after living in Madrid for 17 years and the last six months in Calabria, in the south of Italy. We tried to arrive in Oslo in time for me to start the PhD in September 2020, but, due to the quarantine regulations of the ongoing pandemic, we could not come to Norway earlier. I was still working as a freelance musician, but many concerts had been postponed. Musicians around the world had been forced to adapt their calendars to fit in all the lost work, and were crossing their fingers about the potential for new dates.

From January to June, I had worked mostly in my studio at NMH, playing, experimenting, assembling my haptic system, and discovering new musical material. I organized the first concert of The Vibrating Drum concerts series in March. Besides that, there was not much going on. Stuck in my studio without any way to record, I had developed material almost to the point of saturation. Now I needed to find a way to record and document my new findings and musical ideas.

I was looking for a space where the material and I could come alive again. I felt the urge to have someone or something to communicate with. I knew I had valid material, but I also knew that it needed to be activated. The best way for it was to find an inspiring room, with memorable characteristics—a place where I could enter in a musicking mode. And so I chose the most radically different location from my dry studio at NMH: the Emanuel Vigeland Mausoleum in Oslo.

Here you can listen to episode 3 of the podcast SOFA STORIES where I talk about the album Musica liquida.
Hosted and edited by Jennifer Gersten
Produced by Joseph Bohigian

I had been to the Mausoleum several times before with both my groups Dans les arbres and Huntsville, recording and playing concerts. The Mausoleum is quite a place, offering a reverb of more than twenty seconds. It seems to be also very responsive and balanced in all frequency areas, which I thought would benefit the recording. The room is dark and cold, and the 800 square meter-walls and ceiling are covered with the dramatic fresco painting Vita, which conveys human life and death with naked bodies and erotic scenes. The room holds a stable temperature of around 14 degrees all year.

In charge of the recording is my favorite sound technician: Stig Gunnar Ringen. Stig Gunnar knows my music, and he is deeply interested in making my instruments and the room sound the way the I hear them from my position. He has a strong work ethic, and he never gives up before he is satisfied. We don't say much to each other when we set up, saving our communication for later, when we are outside of the reverberant space.

The entrance to the main room has a very small door. I must dismantle the skin and rim of the kettle drum to allow them to fit. I start to soundcheck and Stig Gunnar records it. I go back to the small entrance room where Stig Gunnar has his recording equipment to listen to the three sets of room microphones he had previously positioned.

Despite my previous encounters with this room, I am still blown away by the immense sound. I am filled with joy, and I can’t stop laughing. It is overwhelming to hear your instruments sound in this way—to perceive a delight in vibration, a co-expression with the materials and the space. Gone is the austere reductionist in me. I can’t wait to record for real.

Listening closely to the three different microphone pairs, I realize that I am missing close-up details of small, delicate sounds in the test recording. The presence of the reverberation overshadows the dynamic range. Small sounds are inaudible with the room mics only. It is crucial that the recording can convey my attention to detail as I hear it from where I am sitting to reach a more accurate result. I realize that we need to closely mic each drum so that I can adjust the amount of room and detail in the final mix of the music. Stig Gunnar sets up, and the sound is perfect. I am in the room for four hours, recording three long sections using sonic material developed over several months in my studio at NMH.

The recording moves forward, but halfway through I need a break. I am confused and exhausted by the impact of the massive sound in the Mausoleum. It still sounds beautiful, but there is a risk of getting saturated. Everything may sound the same—as if the layers were liquids, filtering through everything, ending up in a puddle.

I decide to record the building blocks separately in the room, trying to pay attention to each special sound in the room, and also trying to make short pieces and listening to the decay of the sound. I play more slowly, letting the room decide the pace of the music. I have already recorded enough lengthy, orchestrated, layered material, so now I can concentrate on the identity of each building block, especially the melodic material and the glissandos, which were difficult to perform with so many layers in motion at the same time.

I didn’t want to prepare anything more apart from some motifs and building blocks that could be introduced in one way or another. I wanted the composites of these building blocks to emerge in the moment I was musicking, as if they were a consequence of the compound of sounds reflecting in the room. Motifs or building blocks could be prerecorded material, melodies, glissandos, drones, or pre-programmed patterns. Here is an example of a building block in the piece “Increspature su un lago”:

The building block consists of a recording of vibrating material and percussion collaged with the same material reversed, which I then sent back through the transducer as a sonic layer. This building block is the anchor in this piece. Everything else in this piece revolves around it.

Afterwards, I understood that recording these building blocks offered me an extra tool for composing and editing the different sections for the album. I understood from the recording session that the album had to be assembled in this way in order to balance the material. I wasn’t disappointed about not being able to record everything live. On the contrary, I was intrigued by the process of discovering my limitations, which allowed me to find, and ultimately accept, a solution for continuing to work with the musical material for the album in post-production."Vapore" is the closing piece of the album, and is the only piece that is recorded without edits or cuts. The two others are layered and edited in the software Logic.

The assembled haptic system is an instrument in and of itself. Attuning it with the space of the Mausoleum is a complex process. There is no silence in the recording apart from the constructed gap between the pieces, I try to orchestrate and work over all the frequencies all the time, paying attention to a symphonic whole. Having this immersive recording at my disposal, I couldn’t resist the temptation to give in to the lushness of the space. As soon as the haptic system was at work in the Mausoleum with a selected frequency material vibrating on the membranes, I could undertake my role as an observer and a listener more than as a a performer. Moving around in the room while observing and listening, I realized I could perceive the sound's materiality as though it were part of an artistic installation, static and dynamic all at once.

I have found this discovery to be an important factor in the shaping of sound as well as duration. I notice that slowly-changing, drone-based sonic material can trigger perception of a temporal vacuum: a sensation of floating, of vertical time, of a moment stretched out. The material created in these processes suggests slowing down as a method of creation, and, in my case, produces music with an emphasis on timbre, time, and duration. These discoveries are now bleeding into all of my artistic work, and into my solo work most of all.

time is my material

lingering in the moment

stretching the moment

no intrinsic logic

sound as time

Here is a snippet from the soundcheck before the recording of Musica liquida in the Emanuel Vigeland Mausoleum.

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Ingar Zach - The Vibrating Drum - developing a practice for the modern percussionist - 2024