Situating the Sonic with Okkoota
Liang Luscombe
Filled with field recordings, shifting and elusive soundscapes, and sonically charged performances, Okkoota centres the aural experience to interrogate histories and politics of cultural practice. These three artistic works from Okkoota draw on distinct and differing traditions: Nikhil Nagaraj, in his multi-channel soundscape strange undertones (2023), highlights the caste hypocrisies within Indian classical music; Shareeka Helaluddin blends and layers field recordings of Islamic practice to evoke her own spiritual sonic offering; and NC Qin centres glass’s sonic properties to explore Taoist belief in her performance Glass Armour (2023). By focusing on the ear, each of these works avoids rendering ancient stories and traditions as politically mute. Instead, they use sound to intervene, imbuing the works with a critical resonance that doesn’t shy away from the complex and oppressive values inherited and, at times, embalmed within these practices.
Entering the Arts House studio, which is bathed in low red lighting, we are introduced to Nagaraj’s sixteen-channel sonic work, strange undertones. Combining Carnatic music (a form of South Indian classical music) and electroacoustic music, Nagaraj centres his composition on the casteist legacy of the percussion instrument the mridangam. A barrel‐shaped drum, the mridangam is the leading percussion accompaniment for Carnatic music and South Indian classical dance forms. Vedic scriptures suggest that Lord Brahma (one of the holy trinity in Hindu religion) defeated the demon Tripura, which created the mridangam from the resulting blood-soaked earth. [1]
The drum is known for the variety of sounds and tones it can make, the result of its complex construction. The body is carved from a jackfruit trunk, and its two sides are covered with layers of cow skin, which are laced together by braided leather straps that run the length of the instrument. A centre circle is cut into the drum hide to add the saadham, made from a paste of boiled rice and iron ore powder creating an additional skin that enables the drum to produce a deep, resonating sound. [2] In strange undertones, Nagaraj focuses on the Brahminic order and caste hypocrisies, which portray classical music as a solely Brahminic tradition, valorising the Brahmin mridangam players’ artistic skill. In contrast, the sonic knowledge and craftsmanship of the Dalit who build the instruments are often equated to that of manual labour. It is considered sinful in Hinduism to butcher a cow; some Indian states have even criminalised killing cows altogether. [3] Braham musicians outsource the acquisition and handling of cowhides to Dalit instrument builders, which puts the Dalit in potential legal peril, so that the caste elite can maintain their ‘purity’ and their proximity to the cowhide they demand.
In strange undertones, Nagaraj warps and skews the rhythmic quality of the mridangam performed by instrument builder Bangalore Ramdas Ramanath. Dense in its layering of voice and rhythm, the work combines the drones of a stringed tanpura that waft around the listener in this highly spatialised work. Through centring and then manipulating the timbres of acoustic percussion recordings by those oppressed by the caste elite, we hear and feel the rich and varied emotional tenors that are drawn out by both Ramanath and Nagaraj’s intervention. strange undertones highlights the instrument makers’ creative practice and knowledge to call into question the ways caste practices within the ideologies of Indian classical music inhibit and foreclose creative evolution and possibilities of the form.
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Behind a folded-out screen is the striking silhouette of a warrior donning her armour for battle. As each plate of glass is fastened onto the armour’s internal steel armature, the delicate resonance of the glass rings out across the audience. Once the helmet is in place, the screen is slowly pulled back to reveal the artist NC Qin, weighted under eighty kilograms of a full suit of translucent cast glass armour. Elaborate in its appearance and completed by the artist over several years, the armour itself is inspired by stories of the Three Kingdoms period, a short and bloody era of warfare and political intrigue which is perhaps one of the most interesting and indeed romantic in China’s history. [4] Qin was drawn to the story of the demise of ancient warriors Guan Yu and Zhang Fei. The two brothers, both who are depicted on the armour’s chest plate, the two sworn brothers served under their eldest brother, Liu Bei, and due to their fatal personal flaws of arrogance and pride, they saw their respective ends in different but equally bloody ways.
Qin builds materially from this allegory; indeed, Glass Armour is deeply rooted in Taoist belief in duality, which we can see in the creation of weaponry from a material that could never be used in battle. As Qin states, ‘Glass has its own internal voice, so when people think about glass, there is a story about vulnerability, of fragility but also endurance.’ This is further heightened by the sound of the artist’s controlled breathing, which is audible in an otherwise still performance in which Qin stands rooted to the ground for as long as she can stand wearing the armour. We see her stomach and chest rise and fall, her bare skin pressed up against the glass as she labours under its weight. Here her breath becomes a poetic signifier as we feel her internal physical struggle aurally with the glass armour’s materiality.
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Opening the door to the Arts House Clocktower’s staircase, we hear washes of Shareeka Helaluddin’s highly layered sonic works portability of ritual ii (2023). She draws together field recordings taken from a rooftop in Coimbatore, India, alongside the voices of two vocalists matching notes in a singing lesson. These are layered with the Islamic call to prayer, the azin, wafting in and out of the mix. Helaluddin folds and encases the aural imagery of these recordings and their evocation of soundscapes within metallic tones, low hum drones and chords, hums and percussive rhythms. Slow and meditative, the works take on a spiritual quality, their ebb and flow suspending us in the clock town, a site symbolic of the standardised colonial time.
Islamic cultural practice is at the centre of portability of ritual ii; the azin is a practical and sonic way of calling believers, but it can also be understood as a spiritual metaphor for the turn and change in orientation in the believer’s soul. [5] Islamic worship and holiness can occur anywhere; there is no practice of consecrating Islam. Helaluddin evokes the portability of spiritual practice through the sonic, encouraging the listener to pause on the staircase as the woven textures wash over them.
Across Nagaraj, Qin and Helaluddin’s works in Okkoota, the sonic textures of the layered percussion of the mridangam, the resonances of the glass surface and the field recordings of spiritual practice encourage us to listen deeply, but more than this, they ask us to situate our ear in relation to the political and cultural values inherent within these sounds. It is by listening, that we find the rich audible imagery that can propel us to critique these structures as not intrinsically static and silent.
[1] Avdhesh Babaria, ‘The Casteist Legacy of Indian Classical Music’ in The Funambulist 38, November 2, 2021 https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/music-and-the-revolution/the-casteist-legacy-of-indian-classical-music-2
[2] Vishruthi Girish dir., The Making of the Mridangam (2019), YouTube, online video, 18:30, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrGgllzIgic
[3] Babaria, ‘The Casteist Legacy of Indian Classical Music’
[4] Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia, ‘Three Kingdoms’ Encyclopedia Britannica, January 31, 2023, https://www.britannica.com/event/Three-Kingdoms-ancient-kingdoms-China.
[5] Tamimi, Arab, Pooyan. Amplifying Islam in the European Soundscape : Religious Pluralism and Secularism in the Netherlands, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=4770908.