W. MARK SUTHERLAND
1955 - 2024
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Nobuo Kubota and W. Mark Sutherland

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Nobuo Kubota

and

W. Mark Sutherland

Two Heads Are Better Than One
by W. Mark Sutherland

My ongoing collaboration with Nobuo Kubota gives me the opportunity to probe the limits of human utterance and to challenge the boundaries of accepted disciplines. Together, we try to create a rigorous intermedia art-form predicated on an act of hybridity: is it sound poetry or music — or both?

(…….)

In a genuine spirit of collaboration, we have unintentionally produced a series of duets and solos that exhibit characteristics of both formal composition and free improvisation. If there is a single binding agent or locus governing our collaboration (beyond the self-conscious counter pointing of two voices), it can be found in our sympathetic use of space and silence as an integral component of linguistic and sonic experience. Through the subtle manipulation of the inaudible and the audible in real time, we chart the uncanny rhythms of the heart and the head.

Full Text (pdf download)

Slowpokes (2007, 5:12 minutes) W. Mark Sutherland and Nobuo Kubota. An improvised sound-poem by Nobuo Kubota & W. Mark Sutherland in slow motion.

Sonologic (4:54 minutes, 2002), W. Mark Sutherland and Nobuo Kubota. An animated videopoem based on the audio-track Sonologic from the Kubota and Sutherland CD Cross Rhythm and White Noise.