This Danish Sound Artist Makes Experimental Work With A Hip Hop Producer's Mentality

"By Default," 2013, Collaboration with Laura Silke, Sounding Carpet.

After many years of intense training as a vocalist, and a stint as frontman of an all-girl rock band covering The Smashing Pumpkins and Skunk Anansie, Lotte Rose Kjær Skau began to find music a little too structured. So the Danish artist decided change things up and to go to university to become a speech therapist. However, it was while studying the movements and science of speech that music came back into her life--this time in a very different way.

In 2009, she relocated to the tiny, car-less, island of Tunø (population: 113), where she spent three months collecting field recordings. Shortly after, Kjær Skau used the recordings gathered on the island as her application to London College of Communication’s MA in Sound Art program. She graduated in 2012 and has since been developing her various explorations into art and sound.

Kjær Skau is known for melding raw ambient sounds into collages without digitally manipulating them. Though there are other artists who use similar processes, such as William Basinski and Leyland Kirby, Kjær Skau differentiates herself by incorporating video, GIF art, and a hip hop producer's make it, hit send, and move on attitude into her sonic work.

Her first solo show, United We/I Stand Etc., premiered at IMT Gallery in London this past January. It included video clips of her dancing, sound experiments, and even user-generated web content.

The Creators Project caught up with the young artist to talk sound art, hip-hop, and her debut solo show.

Lotte Rose Kjær Skau in France

The Creators Project: So there’s Lotte the sound artist and Lotte the musician. Where do they overlap, where are they different? Or am I wrong, and they’re the same thing?
Lotte Rose Kjær Skau: There’s definitely two different parts of me there. A lot of the time I try to keep them very separate, but the more you keep them separate the more you realize they’re infiltrated in each other. There’s this thing I feel with music, because I really enjoy pop music and hip hop music. I love beats, that’s a big part of me, and I guess in a way I feel that music…there’s already a pattern to music. It’s very boxed. There’s a chorus, there’s a verse--pop music has the typical building of a pop song. So there’s already a pattern to follow. Whereas with sound art I feel more like I’m making the patterns myself. So it’s a different way of working.

You’ve said you work by starting from the sound, and that moves you in one direction or another.
Exactly. Maybe because I do music as well, my sound art is not that sounding [giggle]. It’s more that sound is the generator and the art might be totally visual, or half and half. So the sound is kind of making me do it.

But you see that as something that makes you less of a sound artist?
Yeah, I feel like sound artist is a very limiting label to put on a person. And I think most sound artists are very aware of how their pieces look, especially if they're being exhibited. I think it has a huge impact. But if it's sound that creates what I’m doing, then it makes sense for me to be called a sound artist. I mean I love noise, but I’ve never made a total noise edit or something.

Walk us through the show at IMT.
So, the starting point are these videos I started recording three years ago [United We/I Stand Etc.], which are these intimate, one, two, three minute videos of myself, projecting a feeling. When I feel empowered, I get this deep sense of movement inside of my body. So whenever I had that feeling I had a rule that I had to record myself. And it would be this very small movement--very subtle, but very energetic. They felt really sincere to me. And when these videos were recorded I would have to edit them really quickly in an editing program, whichever was available. And this was kind of the thing, that they would just be there, and that was that.

There’s a lot of inspiration from hip hop music and producers who make their beats really quickly and don’t polish them, but they are really intuitive about it--they make them and don’t think about them anymore, they just put them out there. That was the idea to make these. And I wasn’t sure what was to come of them but I wanted to create as many [videos] as possible.

Which hip hop producers specifically inspired you?
I’m very bad with names, but I think he's called Knxwledge. He was just putting stuff out. I was at one point thinking, Every time he uploads a thing on SoundCloud I will have to listen!…Because he’s so productive. I think [his beats] were really, really, really good because they were also really intuitive. You could tell that they were made from instinct and not from what was expected. He was just doing it.

So at IMT you have these projectors displaying all your videos on the walls.
Yeah. And then I wanted to create a place where these videos came from. I’m not into hiding the whole process or the electronics, the equipment. I wanted to create a sculpture from where all these [videos] came, with cables and everything. So there’s this metal stand on which all the projectors are placed on, and that’s kinda what you walk into. There’s kind of more to it, because all of these projectors are placed on knitted materials [laughs]. A lot of details, but this is a way of humanizing the electronic devices. I like them to kind of, feel like home.

How many of these are GIFs and how many are videos? What was the decision to go one way or the other?
I made different versions of all of them, just to play around with it. I think there’s like four or five GIFs and up to twenty videos? Not in the exhibition, but in my little archive. I really like the roughness of the GIF, like how you just change from one position to another. But I find them a bit harder, the expression is more tough, whereas the videos are more embracing. So it was really just a decision of my mood.

Is United We/I Stand etc. your first video project?
No, it’s not my first video project but it’s my first video project with myself in it, which is also a bit, you know…first solo show and I’m just all over the place! [Laughs.] I’m not used to being in my art like that. But it was very interesting.

I do feel like every single project is like a self portrait. I’ve done a video called How To Get Somewhere which is a video that is constructed from a training video from 1972 with an old theater in Denmark. [The footage is of] all these rejected applicants for the National Theater in Denmark. They started their own group in like a totally different part of Denmark, not in Copenhagen, in the countryside. And they did all these physical trainings that are just amazing. So I’m making a musical composition from their movements, there’s like bare feet against wooden floor, and there’s a swinging stick that goes swish swish… it’s a musical composition but it’s very visual. It’s edited for the sound.

How To Get Somewhere, 2012.

You make a funny point about you being all over the place [in United We/I Stand etc.]. Is this piece about you, or is it about us? There seems to be an ambiguity there.

I think it’s about us. And again, I was there, I was available, so I’m in the videos. It’s not about me, it’s about feelings I have, it’s about movement, and it’s in all of us. I’m kind of portraying that. I think what is important to know is that it’s this thing of being really intuitive and do it. I don’t have anything available other than me at all times. So that’s why I’m in the videos. I think I also mentioned in Morgan Quaintance's essay ["Here I Am: Telepresent Subjecthood In The Work Of Lotte Rose Kjær Skau"] thoughts about socialism versus egoism. And that’s why there’s so many [videos]. It’s also very much a comment about this, about standing together and being together in this really egocentric world.

With this piece, what I really like about it is that I feel like everytime I talk about it to someone, like I’m talking to you now, lots of new stuff comes up, like Ohh that’s why, or that’s why, and you know, this is what you get from working really intuitively, and producing something and getting it out there. You see how much there is in it, how much there’s in our intuition that’s not researched down to the bone. It keeps on opening up.

I couldn’t agree more. 

“United We/I Stand etc.” will be on display at IMT Gallery through 2 March 2014. For more of Kjær Skau’s work and updates, visit her website.

*Morgan Quaintance’s essay, entitled “Here I Am: Telepresent Subjecthood in the Work of Lotte Rose Kjær Skau,” is available through IMT Gallery. 

United We/I Stand etc. (trailer) from IMT Gallery.