See If It Can Happen, an audio-visual installation

A collaboration between the Swiss musician, Hans Koch and the Indian artist Rashmi Kaleka, ‘See If It Can Happen’ will transcend sounds. [dated November 2011]

A collaborative presentation by the Swiss musician, Hans Koch and the Indian artist Rashmi Kaleka, ‘See If It Can Happen’ will transcend sounds as moments of energy will be ensnared between music and voices of real people and real situations. An electronic synthesis that arrives at a coherent sound design.

Date: Wednesday 16 November 2011 at 6:30 pm 
Venue: Lalit Kala Akademi-Garhi Artist Studios, Kalka Devi Marg, East of Kailash, New Delhi - 110065

Project brief: 
Hawkers voices are of real people whose survival roles decree their own rules, it's a form of 'surrender'. A whole life can be written around them - voices that spawn amazing ways of singing, the idea is to use the form and to play with its expectations. It's an unknown territory that has the potential to produce a 'sonic' pleasure. A social aspect of music that has the possibility of losing its own 'self' is what interests me. To use the old monument in Garhi as a backdrop for that night is to suture indigenous with the 'western', -'western' as manifested in the mainstream)

The idea is to ensnare moments of energy between music and a voice - point of departure and return, new and old, past and present. I was thinking what would come closer to creating a 'within': in regards to musical instruments, many are able to morph into a variety of sounds that echo a human voice. The closest in today's sounds that has an electronic beat that pulses around a one-note baseline, has to be Radiohead's song The Butcher. It slides and glides around shadows that rise and fall. The other seven minute song Supercollider is beautifully calm, electronic pulse, riffs of synth, unpredictable chorus, the synth crescendo merges beautifully with Yorke's, (lead singer), falsetto. I wanted very much to create a symphony of music which combine live instruments as well as electronic apparatus, weird chord sequences, strange keys which can be musically challenging. The innovation of today's time is a combination of live instruments and a sonic pleasure created with recordings, (voices) and electronic synth to arrive at a coherent sound design.

Rashmi Kaleka
New Delhi 2011