- 03.06.2021,
- 04.06.2021,
- 05.06.2021,
In this exclusive commissioned piece for Tonfunktion, Irish artist Áine O’Dwyer embarks on a journey in search of the materiality of sounds from the Main River and Offenbach’s harbour. Between industry and new housing, people strolling along the promenade and passing boats, with the help of an old string synthesiser, microphones and amplifiers, she interweaves the soundscape around her with her own composition. The result is a musical interaction based on the principle of call-and-response that makes no distinction between functional sounds, noise and musical score.
Áine O’Dwyer works on the banks of the River Main. Follow your ears.
Commissioned work
Cast & Credits
„Tonfunktion – Festival für Gebrauchsmusik“ ist ein Projekt des Künstlerhaus Mousonturm. Gefördert vom Musikfonds e. V. mit Projektmitteln der Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien und durch den Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain. In Kooperation mit MMODEMM, EOS Radio, dem Amt für Kultur- und Sportmanagement der Stadt Offenbach am Main und der OPG Offenbacher Projektentwicklungsgesellschaft mbH.
Biography
Áine O’Dwyer
Áine O’Dwyer is an artist whose work is informed by both the conceptual concerns of sound-art and traditional compositional techniques, embracing the broader aesthetics of sound and its relationship to environment, time, audience and structure. O’Dwyer’s work has been informed by her study of the individual idiosycracies found in each pipe organ and notably the realisation that each individual organ is meticulously tuned to the measurements of the building in which it is housed, allowing it to connect intimately with its surrounding architecture.
Poems for Daedalus (2018), was a series of site-specific performances that O’Dwyer developed in Athens, based on the exploration of a building, its intimacies and the surrounding neighbourhood. Her book Poems for play pays homage to the specificity of time and place, with a titular nod to the duality of meaning: ‘to enjoy oneself by interacting with one’s surroundings’, vs ‘the realisation of creative form through the choreography of social poetics, and the mechanics of body/building as instrument.” Similarly, the notion of the “holding space as extension-of-instrument” can be seen in her work such as Accompaniment for Captives (Open Ear Festival, 2019). This piece was written for Horseshoe bay, Sherkin Island, Ireland. It centred around two local fishing boats, creating an “environmental tapestry where land, sea, man and animal were woven into one symphonic whole.”