Another Sound
by Arnont Nongyao and Khvay Loeung

Part I
17 Jan – 30 Mar 2018
Live performance: 17 Jan, 6pm
Sa Sa Art Projects, Phnom Penh
leaflet | artist’s page

Part II
31 May – 29 Jun 2018
Live performance: 31 May, 7pm
Chiang Mai AIR, Chiang Mai
leaflet | artist’s page

Another Sound is a two-parts project by Chiang Mai-based sound artist Arnont Nongyao with guest collaborator Khvay Loeung, a sound inventor from Phnom Penh. The project stems from Arnont’s curiosity to connect and continue a conversation with Loeung who he first met in 2015 during his residency with Sa Sa Art Projects.

The first part of the project, which takes place at Sa Sa Art Projects, presents moving images, sound, and photographs exploring an experimental approach to communications and a concept of life passing on through sonic and visual mediations. At the centre of the exhibition space is a video of two moving images projected on top of each other. One layer of the videos interweaves two parallel worlds of Khvay Leung as an Ajar at funeral services and as a sound inventor in this bedroom/studio.

At the funerals, Loeung works as a mediator of the ceremony facilitating between monks, laypeople, and the dead. He sets up and controls his sound system, chants, and ensures the event is equipped with music and songs needed. At home in his bedroom, the audience sees where and how his sound system is made: electronic parts crowd the walls and the floor as Loeung and Arnont test their equipment and make sound together. Meanwhile, another layer of the videos is a live projection of the interior of Loeung’s homemade amplifier. It is installed on a part of the floor which is cracked, exposing the concrete underneath the tiles integrated into the work. 

The exposed amplifier proposes an opening into the interior of the body which is being examined through the interrogation of the camera. Its noise, which is produced through the interruption of various signals, is projected out through a repurposed speaker. The amplifier and its extension of sound and moving image together with the videos and photograph signposts on the walls, all perform like an interior of an amplifier-room, or, according to Arnont, act as a kind of alphabet.

The alphabet, however, in this case, cannot be deciphered, but can only be felt and sensed. Because of the communication barrier between the two artists—who do not share a common language—the presented work is not only a result of their collaboration but in fact also the very method of their collaboration. They attempt to achieve a mutual understanding through a sonic experimentation: through another sound language.

In the second part of the project, Leoung in turn comes to Chiang Mai to work and explore a new experience with Arnont. The collaboration results in a live performance and an exhibition at Chiang Mai AIR. The artists engage and activate two levels of the space, turning it into an immersive sonic chamber. Using two recycled amplifiers as sound generators and image sources, the artists communicate by exchanging audio and visual information to each other across floors, whereas the audience can experience and act as an oscillation by walking up and down between the two stations. 

The project brings to bear the honesty of material conditions as a form of an active agent. The experimentation of materiality, as well as the use of sound derived from physical matters, is mirrored in both practices of Anont and Loeung. While, for Anont, the used, the error, and the broken are sources for inspiration of new innovation, for Loeung, the very media used for mediating death-rebirth of funerals are the source for continued reinvention.