Owen Johnson

Drum Solo No.4

‘Drum Solo No. 4’ explores a personal narrative into relationships with sound, and its often unidentified effect on experience. Every material, surface and structure has experienced sound as physical force without resorting to our dominate experience of it as a sense. Vibrations effect may not penetrate far into solid structures, but sound and music penetrate some way into all surfaces and bodies. Chord and note structures form more finite vibration effects, each structures impact is different but as a combination, a song or rhythm, structures can tell abstract narratives.
The work consists of a drum kit with each drum connected - via microphones, amplifiers and shaker speakers - to column structures made of sand bricks. The sand is strong enough to hold the brick form yet light enough to be physically moved by sounds vibration. As the drummer evolves a drum line over the course of one or two minutes the destruction of the sand columns serves as a mapping devise for the narrative of the drummers interaction, drumming tastes and personal experience.
Another narrative of this work is it exploration of my own deafness between birth and the age of four, coupled with the slow development of hearing over the next five to seven years. As a child – after my hearing had developed - I would lay my head in the cone of the speakers on my parents large stereo system. I imagined the vibration penetrating my brain and leaving a physical vibrational memory, I also tried to remember the feeling of each beat and note while attempting to forgo the sound I was hearing. Johnson