Opening its humble exhibition space in Seven Sisters last month, SoundFjord is the UK’s first gallery dedicated solely to sonic art. While its studio setting seems cramped and unglamorous at first, that doesn’t matter once you are immersed in the audio-visual environment of its first exhibition, Stillness by Yann Novak.

The American artist’s atmospheric soundtrack plays on a loop and has your ear tuning in to pitches and frequencies that resonate in ever more intriguing ways. Meanwhile, a large projection of soft red and grey strips, reminiscent of a sub-tropical skyline, blends and transforms so slowly that you are unsure if it is really changing at all.

Yann put together the meditative soundtrack using field recordings of radio static from the airwaves in Los Angeles, and his projection combines colours extracted from photos of the sprawling Californian metropolis (a second part of the exhibition uses similar elements gathered from Seattle). While the piece has autobiographical significance for the artist – he has lived in both cities – it is designed to provide a space for the viewer’s (or listener’s) own reflection.

What’s amazing is how the installation seems to transport you beyond the diminutive room into an immense, epic landscape. It was a similar sense of space and enormity that inspired SoundFjord’s name when its founders, artist Helen Frosi and sound designer Andrew Riley, experienced an ‘expanse of sound’ after climbing a mountain in Norway.

While the exhibition transcends the four walls on an imaginative level, SoundFjord reaches out beyond the gallery in more tangible ways too, acting as a hub for a wide range of activities. Helen and Andrew describe how they took part in a Swedish festival set in a Bronze Age settlement last month, creating a space for curious festival goers to listen to audio art. They have also hosted a ‘soundwalk’ exploring the auditory life in nearby Tottenham Marshes, with the aim of ‘allowing people to attune to the sounds around them’.

Visiting SoundFjord certainly has me listening in a more attentive way. When a storm breaks outside, the beating of the rain on the gallery window takes on a magical quality (it’s almost as though London is trying to speak to LA) and on my walk back to the Victoria Line I am less focussed on my rapidly soaking feet than the sounds of raindrops pelting shops’ awnings, and the hiss of cars passing on the wet streets.

Beginning to hear subtle nuances of sound makes it seem as though there is a whole new universe to discover, one that has been right here the whole time. Although we have been educated to hone our appreciation of the visual arts, our capacity for listening and analysing what we hear has historically been neglected. SoundFjord aims to redress the balance. Art-lovers and seekers of new sensory experiences, listen up.
–Kate Stanworth (Sonic Journeys at Soundfjord, The London Word)

So, Shoreditch and Dalston, read and weep: the first UK gallery devoted to sound art is, astonishingly, located in Tottenham. And hardly more than a half-brick’s lobbing distance (to use a local unit of measurement) from my home. Soundfjord is a modest space, inside a vast pile that used to be a floorcloth factory, back in the days when the whole street was a thriving outpost of the rag trade. It’s the brainchild of artist Helen Frosi and sound designer Andrew Riley. The Gallery has barley been open a month, and already they’ve organized a sound walk across Tottenham Marches and a newsletter that amounts to a sound art zine-cum-noticeboard, plus the first is a series of monthly live events called Immersound. Los Angeles based Yann novak’s work is in the space for two months, shown in two parts: first Stillness.Subtropical, and during September, Stillness.Oceanic.

Subtropical is a supercalm piece that seductively suggests you bask for a while and maybe drift off into a southern California state of mind. A gentle, harmonious drone accompanies a wall projection of exotic, layered colors. Likewise, the sound has layers and a fuzzy surface like felt. The visuals shift perceptibly in and out of sunrise tones, while the sound may be changing too (though it’s hard to say). There’s a lot of ambiguity here, as to whether the material is abstract: both sound and visuals could be digitally generated, but have a warm patina.

For all its cool distancing, Subtropical is a highly personal work and its subject is Novak himself. In fact the images are derived from actual landscapes filmed near Novak’s adopted southern California home, while the sound is a filtered loop of static taken from an empty radio station in the same area. Stillness.Oceanic (which I haven’t seen) will rejig the process with material from the American North West, the Seattle area. And so the whole two-part piece deals with Novak’s relocation from one part of the US to another, and his feelings about that. Novak explored the same subject last year at Kings Place, London with another installation titled Relocation.Dislocation.

Inside Soundfjord, on a cosily domestic scale, the experience is an intimate one. Although the room is otherwise bare, it’s as though you are in someone’s home rather than a clinically neutral space. Novak’s work feels like it has comfortably moved in; a heady evocation of Californian beach relocated to North East London. In the future, Soundfjord hope to show more sound art by Song-Ming Ang, Rie Nakajima and Simon Whetham. In an area more noted for ice cream vans and night-time helicopter surveillance, some of us residents are very grateful.
– Clive Bell (On Site: Sillness.Subtropical, The Wire)