INTO AIR

The ultimate ephemeral material, apart from perhaps sound (…), is ice.  For all its fixity, it seems to be perpetually teetering on the brink of a state change, precariously waiting to vanish. Singaporean artist, Dawn Ng feels into this juxtaposition by adding vital, often flesh-like or verdant pigment to large blocks of ice, thus her works catch us with their almost conventional beauty of form, and then reel us in with the question, “but what exactly is it?”.  They verge on the trompe l’oeil: arctic tundra cascading into muscle fibres and crevices of luminescent lichen in eddies of ocean. 

Alex wrote INTO AIR, in close collaboration with Dawn, creating a musical response to a film work of hers that documents the disintegration of one of her blocks of frozen pigment from monumentality into nothingness. In the piece, five singers undergo a musical meditation where each moves through the music to the rhythm of their own breathing patterns, one bar of music for every exhale.  Musical structures slowly build and disintegrate; evolve and transform; melt and evaporate. Textures, harmonies and colours – some delicate, others more pronounced – appear, disappear and re-emerge. Combing different singers’ breathing patterns gives the piece an indeterminate quality: the piece will never be the same twice and may even be radically different from one performance to the next. As such, the piece is not a fixed musical object that can be ‘performed’. Instead, it is a transient, ephemeral and elusive moment in time to be experienced.   

The central section includes a text consisting of pairs of words taken from Ecclesiastes 3:

‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven… A time to kill and a time to heal… a time to mourn, and a time to dance… a time to scatter and a time to gather…’. 

Both meditation and music create transitional space in us: we can cross over a threshold into a mind and body space where the integration of all possibilities is experiential as opposed to conceptual, where the tyranny and self-estrangement of everyday language can be stepped out of like an old skin, and truths can be felt in our guts and our lungs. 

INTO AIR is a radical departure from the conventional notion of ‘singer as performer’.  It asks the question, what is singing for? And in answer, it doesn’t say – to impress your mum or get a good review in the Guardian; it takes us back to the fundamental architecture of being in the world.  It is a healing exercise, a form of recalibration, an inner exploration of body, mind and soul through sound.

Alex has developed an alternative ‘tuning’ method – which brings new meaning to the idea of singing ‘in tune’.  Inspired by the psychiatrist Bessel Van Der Kolk, the tuning method situates mental health at the intersection of mind, body, and breath: mental health is about being in tune with all parts of oneself. Each singer meditates and sings to the rhythm of their own breath, coming into attunement – to use to Bessel Van Der Kolk’s terminology – with their embodied minds, with the quintessence of their own sound, as individuals and as a group.   

The piece unfolds in a transitional space, where voice and breath ebbs and flows, as you come into the physical and aural sphere of certain singers, leave that of others, and at once, hear and feel the totality of sound, breath and body in space. Perhaps you will even feel your own selves, bodies and souls, wax and wane in this liquid world of flow and flux.  

-       Music & Being 2023