Marc Couroux and Juliana Pivato, The Fetish Character of Music and The Regression in Listening.

Marc Couroux and Juliana Pivato, Video: Couroux and Pivato
The Fetish Character of Music and The Regression in Listening.


The sound ecology of each cityscape is littered with prerecorded and live ambient sound. The continuous presence of these frequencies is filtered out through selective attention, and often goes unnoticed. Often the visual is privileged as the sense of navigation, and the aural is disregarded as background or unnecessary excess information. However, the aural dimension of urban life has the potential to move bodies through spaces. For example, muzak, original and remixed versions of popular music, is a staple of urban centres. It bleeds from shop windows and mall entranceways. The constant spillage of ambient music harmonizes with the sounds of mall shoppers and street sounds. Muzak is slyly insinuated into corporate spaces to lubricate the movement of bodies. Pedestrians are soothed into contemplative window-shopping. The steady drone of muzak is intended to deter street loiterers from hanging out. It plays in the background and blends into the sounds of cars driving by, of people conversing.

Juliana and Marc roam around the downtown core in a “performance- van” – a nomadic studio- where they repurpose muzak for passersby. Curtains are strung up around the windows of the van to hide the process of production. The visual effect renders the van as a kind of inaccessible shelter. Marc and Juliana take 4 fragments, randomly generated by MAX (a computer program) from 40 Carpenters’ songs, and attempt to “smooth them out”. Marc works on the keyboard and Juliana sits with headphones and a mic that is amplified. The speakers blast the live remix of the fragmented music emitting a lyrical form of music-muzak out from the van window. This blends with the sounds and muzak that circulate around the outer parameters of urban centres, like The Bay Department Store, Shoppers Drug Mart and other such places.

In order to locate the nomadic van, Marc and Juliana have set up maps of locations and times accessible through their blog. People are invited to find the van and encounter the soundscape Marc and Juliana create. Sometimes they are found, other-times not. Like many other works in the festival, this piece is not intended for an invited audience.

The visual cue of the curtains in the van attracts more attention than the loud oddly repetitive muzak. I find it after wandering around for twenty minutes. I hear the loud sound of the Carpenters’ music and see the van across the street from The Shoppers Drug Mart on 102nd Street. At first glance, it appears as though someone is camping out in their car and listening to a cd that is skipping. Some people stop to see if there is anyone in the van. They might see Marc playing the keyboard through a crack in the curtain. Most people just walk by. The subtle articulation of the sound performance is barely perceptible. Like Emma Howes’ performance, Marc and Juliana also seek to de-emphasize the proscenium and the traditional staging of the performance of music, in order to amplify its trace. In the attempt to de-emphasize the staging, another staging occurs. In the context of Edmonton’s current media focus on the tent squats and growing issue of homelessness due to rising housing costs, the van becomes a display of nomadic shelter. This is further evidenced by the fact that they rent parking space for hours at a time in order to both rehearse and generate muzak for incidental audiences.


When I walk towards the van I am taken by the way the motion and speed of my walking gait is implicated in the growing amplitude of the sounds emitted from the van. My motion determines the volume of Juliana’s singing voice. As I walk past the van, the level increases. The frequencies are reverberated against the cement enclave of the City Centre façade. If I didn’t know that the van was part of the performance, then I might think that the music was coming from a speaker on the building. I look up to the cement ceiling overhangs and search for outdoor speakers, and find none. I sit on a ledge just across from the van and listen. A sentence is repeated over and over. This is not the conventional melodic repetition of chorus lines forming the structure of a popular song. This original and live remix of oddly familiar lyrics and melody is as soothing as it is irritating. I close my eyes and listen for rhythm in the glitch. I discern the sounds of the cars passing by from the flow of this madly repetitive phrasing. I try to discern the music from the ambient- as figure and ground, and realize that this muzak is embedded in the ambient environment. Rhythms that Marc and Juliana create play with the rhythms of the continuous flow of motion in the streets. These are not “dotted rhythms” as Juliana explains in one of her postings on their blog. There is difference created in this repetition. The phrase takes on another form through each re-articulation.

They are not performing for the audience, but inserting an expanding field of unexpected encounter with the frequencies we travel through everyday, perceptible and imperceptible as sound or noise. They don’t want to perform for people, or have people encounter the work as performance. Rather it is the body moving through the aural field and moving the aural field that is the performance. As each body encounters this differently, it becomes impossible to locate the “place” of this performance.

The work illuminates a substrate of time-space that we move through and create in the city, that is rarely consider as a site of performance. Often we think of site-specific work as having to take place in a space or place, at a certain time. The definition of site connotes “a location”. But in this case, I encounter an auralscape that seeps through the parameters of the the visual markers of place. When the van is no longer in my field of vision, the soundscape Marc and Juliana create becomes ubiquitous with ambient sounds of the city. I cannot locate the “place” of this aural encounter on an X/Y axis, even though they created a map to direct me to this area.