The Middle Eight
For over 30 years Ernie Althoff has been constructing site-specific, kinetic musical instruments (or sound sculptures). A devotee of the low-budget approach, and a diviner of everyday objects, Althoff’s instruments produce subtle music of organised randomness.
Essential to all of Althoff’s instruments is the use of salvaged items, domestic objects, industrial materials, and repurposed devices. Manufactured wood and metal products, natural materials including stone, shells and bamboo, and salvaged equipment such as electric fans and old turntables, are the most prominent and recurring items that Althoff has used in recent years to assemble a mix of automated and playable instruments.
Designed and constructed in mid-2009, The Middle Eight was an automated musical instrument that combined organic materials (seashells, rocks), domestic objects (cake tins, plastic container, wooden trestles), salvaged product (plywood, metal springs), with pendulums and wooden beaters – all driven by Althoff’s much-loved turntables. All the components of the work were built in Althoff’s workshop, and then carefully assembled and calibrated in the gallery space.
The instrument, presented within a resonant, octagonal shaped room of the Geelong Gallery, was assembled on top of a large, low-lying, rectangular platform that allowed people to view and listen from all sides. The title of the work alludes to both the room shape, and also to the central ‘bridge’ of popular song structure.
Most noticeable at first were the small wooden trestle structures and accompanying turntables, mounted at different angles around the outside edges of the platform. These trestles acted as a type of suspension structure providing: ‘… a visual link to the industrial scaffolding used as a display feature for the main show.’
Suspended from all but one trestle were eight percussive pairs of opposing objects. Each pair comprised a brass ashtray (used as microtonally pitched gongs), coupled with one of the following percussive objects: two stretched springs amplified by a plastic resonator; two lower pitched gongs (one large metal tray and one cake tin with a felt ‘dot’); two metal tines made of industrial strapping and pop-riveted to tin can resonators; and two tin rectangles with wire sizzles and polystyrene cup resonators. Another structure comprised two rotating plywood rectangles of different sizes attached as tines to a mounted wooden block, with a small wooden beater and metal strapping chime dangling near the plywood pieces.
The eight ashtray-gong percussive pairs, and the single plywood construction, were struck by small wooden beaters that were positioned at the mid-point of conjoined pendulums (pendulums that employ two or more weights to develop complex swing patterns – pendulums attached to pendulums). The irregular movement of the conjoined pendulums allow a break-up of the sound, away from the uniform beats that would be otherwise produced by the turntables. Underneath the main music, small clicks could also be heard – produced by seashells tied to the bottom of the conjoined pendulums, and being struck by metal tabs fixed onto the turntables.
The instrument was driven by the 16 rpm rotation of Althoff’s faithful stripped-down record-player turntables. The detail images show how the metal tabs attached to the rotating turntables strike the seashells, setting the conjoined pendulums in motion. In describing the particular arrangement of the objects, Althoff states: ‘the positioning of the sounding devices at right-angles to the main strike-thrust direction meant that the pendulums had to develop pretty complex swing patterns before striking one or the other of the percussive pairs. This strategy, along with the use of conjoined pendulums with their erratic patterns, was used to introduce the longer and unpredictable silences from each pair into the work. The plywood rectangles operated slightly differently: here the instrument constructions rotated and applied force to the beater-beam suspended in their path.’
However the sonic characteristics of the instrument are not the only elements to be considered. As with many of Althoff’s previous site-specific instruments the selection and layout of all elements and structures have been utilised to form ‘… a visual layer of linearity.’ Even the power boards and the turntable cables are mounted onto small wooden pylons and carried away off the platform. Arrangements of round stones might suggest tracks, markings or contour, and segments of rock dispersing, of time, erosion, or change generally. Althoff describes the overall construction of The Middle Eight as referencing ‘… geology, mapmaking, aerial photography, and human intervention onto the landscape.’ For Althoff, the sonic and visual aspects of his works are locked together in a tight relationship. Although audio-visual documentation of instrument does exist, as with many instruments ‘… the real way to experience the work is to be with it in situ.’
The Middle Eight was presented as part of the exhibition ‘The Freedom of Angels: Sculpture in a Century of Upheaval’, Geelong Gallery, May-July 2009.
An audio excerpt of The Middle Eight, recorded in the Geelong Gallery, July 2009.