Room Tone

"Room Tone takes its name from the ambient recordings filmmakers use to provide continuous-sounding background. Silence in cinema is never completely silent – editors use the atmospheric room tone to prevent the soundtrack from ‘going dead’, which audiences would perceive as a failure of the sound system.

Here Dyment, whose practice often deals with silences and near-silences, brings together new works in a variety of media that deal with quiet drones, distortion and feedback. The exhibition continues the artist’s interest in the minute and the infinite, employing sparse and simple concepts with distinctly poetic undertones."

- gallery press release

White neon
 

A pair of headphones is altered so that one earpiece becomes a microphone, picking up its own sound from the speaker and creating a continuous feedback loop, which is disrupted by attempts to listen closer. The silence serves as a blunt metaphor for the inability to understand infinity (your head gets in the way).

Nothing (for Robert Barry) is ostensibly a tone-cluster sound work (albeit one in the ultra-sonic range) but I think of this work as primarily a gallery space empty of insects and rodents. 

DVD, etched wine glass, housed in a handmade, silkscreened pine box. Edition of 3. 

The litmus test cliché “is the glass half empty or half full?” (the western equivalent to a Zen koan?) is turned into a musical equation.

Durational sound piece

Score: 

A five-pound block of ice is placed on an electric keyboard, producing an extended amplified cluster-drone. The sound continues until the ice melts away, or the keyboard shorts out from the resulting water-damage.

Audio CD, hand-drawn cover. Edition of 3 (each unique). 

Six-hundred and sixty six Death Metal tracks, played simultaneously.