The listening posts of Technical Breakdown install sound art in the city, and mix it with everyday soundscapes. In the listening post City on the Net, the exhibition moves on to other cultures, other cities and countries. The cities are brought into private homes. The most comprehensive studies and far-reaching sound art projects are presented in City on the Net. All of them with long playing times and all of them exploring the social as a main theme. The unwanted, accidental, intrusive and violent sounds – the noises of the densely populated city became an art object in itself as early as 1913, with Luigi Russolo’s futuristic manifest L’arte dei Rumori (The Art of Noise). Since then, the effort to integrate real life sounds into sound art has developed in many different directions. The common denominator for this listening post is the collage form, the zapping and the cacophonic.
Psicklops should be heard in the dark. The work is an acoustic counterpart to the Dark Cinema of film, where themes from the shady sides of our culture, violence, perversions and life in the underworld make up the content. Through being anarchistic, fluttering and hard to navigate in, the work demands that the listeners let themselves be engulfed and hypnotised. The title is pronounced ‘cyclops’ and refers to the myth of the brutal, cannibalistic, one-eyed giants from the mythological underworld. The work is a collage of sound material, not from a concrete city space, but consisting of samplings of conversations and sounds from previously produced sound works, music and media clips. The conversations circle around themes like interrogation and surveillance. Lyon himself draws parallels to Franz Kafka’s The Process. The work is the first part of a series of sound theatre works.
Raphael Lyon is American and was born in 1975. He graduated from Brown University and makes experimental music and performance art under his alias Mudboy. He is also the man behind the record company FreeMatterfortheBlind.
Raphael Lyon is a multidisciplinary artist and activist who has been living, working and performing in Providence since his graduation from Brown. His latest works, including his sixth film, Eye of the Storm, have appeared in a variety of showcases in and beyond Rhode Island.
