Is a composer inspired by the casinos of Las Vegas really a sound artist No, says Denis Roche, whose music for the new installation in Temple Bar's Diversions Festival is a reaction to the consumerism in contemporary Ireland, writes Michael Seaver.
As a composer you can be driven by the very act of composition. You can grapple with the symphonic form, aware of the weighty legacy of other greats, or pore over your computer and be seduced by the process of granular synthesis in creating your electronic abstract. Denis Roche, on the other hand, is driven by ideas. Not necessarily musical ideas, but issues concerning society, individuality and culture. He could express these through a novel or political activism, but he chooses music.
Currency is his latest sound installation, in Curved Street in Temple Bar, Dublin for this year's Diversions Festival. Along with visual artist Paul O'Connor and Ed Hammond from Media Lab Europe, he has created an exploration of greed and economic seduction based on Las Vegas slot machines.
"I was on holiday in Los Angeles a few years ago and decided to go across to Las Vegas," he says. "Having driven for six hours in the desert we were all a bit numb and going into one of the casinos was a complete culture shock. Everyone was milling around and the cacophony was incredible. I was immediately drawn to the sounds and their potential as a sonic landscape. There was the percussive sounds of the coins in the slots, money going down chutes, the arpeggios of the machines, people shouting, and whatever way everything blended acoustically it has this rarefied sound. It's almost like being in a church or a cathedral, it has those same acoustics."
The concept grew on him over the next few years so he applied to the Arts Council for a travel award to go back to Las Vegas ("that probably raised a few eyebrows," he jokes). The desire to work with those sounds wasn't driven by purely musical concerns, but through a need to articulate and interrogate the growing greed and economic obsessions he saw around him in contemporary Ireland.
"Things have changed so rapidly here in Ireland. There has been such a huge shift from the 1980s to now, in terms of our economy, which is not unlike a huge payout at a slot machine. Of course, there were sound economic reasons for the boom, but someone's house doubling in value over a few years, without them doing anything to create that extra wealth is a pure payout."
And then there's the well-documented change in our society and our values.
"We now think more like a wealthy first world country, with all of the arrogance that goes with that. Even in ordinary conversation, money is referenced early on, whether it's the value of your house, your latest car or the cost of child-minding. In Currency I want to point out that there are different currencies and the get-rich-quick ideals of contemporary Ireland are as vacuous as those of Las Vegas."
So how do these ideas get articulated through music? "The approach I've taken is to use the sounds that I recorded in the casinos during my second visit to Las Vegas. The material I gathered was amazing. They are almost like sirens, drawing you in. There was one machine whose sounds were so comforting that you just wanted to be with it all day. The coin sounds are obviously quite percussive but I also wanted to use the quieter arpeggios from the machines and make something quite atmospheric with them. I've manipulated the sound quite a bit to make textures and backdrops for the other sounds in the piece.
The issue as to how these sounds articulate his ideas is answered through the compositional process itself. "What I've tried to do is set the atmosphere by creating textures and backdrops and then there's a kind of transformation or morphing into these virtual instruments that I have created through the sounds. These are not real instruments but are created thought sounds such as the slot machines. They are very clearly heard in the overall piece, just like real instruments. The idea is to indicate a change in perspective, the transformation that mirrors what has happened here in Ireland. And of course my own emotional feelings about greed and society also find their way through the music."
It is ironic that Temple Bar, at times the site of the worst by-products of our economic success, is to house Currency. Much of Roche's work has been heard in Meeting House Square, including scores to his sisters' dance company, Rex Levitates, and his own recent installation, In the Absence of a Cathedral.
"I love that space and wrote In the Absence of a Cathedral specifically about that space. In it, I was looking at how you create a vessel for an intention or an artistic idea. I was in a studio overlooking the square and thought if you put a roof on this square it would be like a cathedral. There is that much enclosed space in a cathedral just like Meeting House Square and it got me thinking about how you galvanise the energy of a place.
"Sound can be so effective in this," he says. "When you make a recording of a certain place, it's incredibly evocative, I think more evocative than film, because with film you miss an awful lot of the periphery and the incidental stuff that makes up vision. Sound can totally immerse you in the place."
In spite of his concept-driven work and his claim that he thinks visually when creating music, Roche is clear that he is a composer and not a sound artist.
"The difference, I suppose is the whole issue of musicality," he says. "I think that Currency has elements of sound installation which then evolve into composition and finally into performance. Certainly, the sounds of the casino that make their way into the piece are closer to sound art and the distinctions are getting blurred all the time.
"But the ultimate arbiter for my work is musicality."
A fluent collaborator through his work in dance, film, theatre and with visual artists, he revels in the artistic give-and-take that occurs working with other artists. "For a while, I was working on my own in a vacuum, not getting any feedback and I really began wondering what the hell I was at. Working with others makes you continually question what you do and often their feedback gives you a completely different viewpoint on your own music."
He says that he has been lucky in the people he has worked with up to no, but his own open-mindedness has surely played no small part in their success.
His next project is in St James's Hospital, where he will create soundscapes for bone-marrow patients who spend weeks at a time in sterile environments. A different challenge from Meeting House Square, it will no doubt be tackled with the same intellectual rigour. His first symphony won't be around for a while yet, but his conceptual compositions will continue to crop up in all sorts of different spaces.
•Currency takes place from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Curved Street, Temple Bar, until Friday, 28th June. A performance by singer Paula Greenwood takes place as part of the official opening tomorrow night at 6 p.m. Further information on Denis Roche's projects is at www.natural5th.com
