Patrick K.-H.

Sound- / video- / visual artist, Patrick K.-H. (aka Anton Iakhontov) collages within the fields of sound installations, live and tape acousmatic and animation (1,2), exercising cross fertilisation.
Author of music / video for opera / drama / contemporary dance / post-dramatic theatre plays and performances as well as his own works in Russia, Austria, Germany and USA. He has had his music, video and performances presented in more than 200 festivals and series around the world, holding several international awards. In 2009, he created sound-scape for Russian pavilion of 53rd international art exhibition la Biennale di Venezia.

Head of media research programs of Media-Studio at the New Stage of  Alexandrinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg. Founder (2008) and co-curator (since 2010) of the Floating Sound Gallery – the sole venue for spatial sound in Russia (currently in St.Petersburg), organiser and curator of festivals and educational programs, among them – Russian “ACOUSMONIUM inauguration” (since 2018).

Resides and works in Vienna / St.Petersburg and elsewhere.

‘Drawn sound performances’  / since 2010.

“Drawn Sound” is both an audiovisual performance and an open composition.

It examines new values of one century old – and then-groundbreaking – technology of drawn, also known as graphical, sound. The latter, emerged nonlocally through heuristic inventions of artists and technicians acquired with film technology, in most of the times pursued a goal of creating impossible sounds, sounds that don’t belong to any of the existing categories available through live performance or sound recording. This brilliant though highly resource-intensive task later nearly died death with the rapid evolution of synthesisers that delivered the promise of sound variety with less blood and sweat.
Patrick K.-H. and Oleg Makarov recreate this old-school yet ever-green approach – converting sound to image (that is graphical spectrum of sound), and back, image (sound spectrum) to sound – by nowdays’ means: Max/MSP/Jitter, cameras / lenses, video projection, spatialized sound. In their “Drawn Sound”, sonorities, sequences, phrases come to life through placement of a paint brush, which act somewhat like filters, extracting sounds from the solid colour of underlying white noise. The classical idea of drawn sound techniques happens to reveal much about possible contemporary approaches to music composition and its relation to unconventional instruments and performance.

“Ars Electronica afterlife”,
an untiled multichannel composition, originally performed @ Ars Electronica, Post City, Linz, Austria, 4.09.2015

“Dissimilate”, pt. 2, 16-channels /2015.

“Room Sketch: Dada Sonic Sculpture” (w/ Oleg Makarov), mechanical sound installation / 2014

“Room Sketch: Sonic Relay live” (w/ Oleg Makarov), laptop, Max/MSP, Arduino, relays / 30.05.14

“Mutanys” series / since 2016

As the title suggests, the series is largely about mutations – to confirm this intention, mutation starts with the very orthography of the title.

A pivotal period of music history and theory was the beginning and middle of the XX century with its burst of music evolution theories, followed by biology-like mutation theories. Alike pre-darwinians, music people for centuries used to think that every music entity—be it genre or instrument—could be defined by a set of necessary traits that characterised its essence—that there was a precise definition for orchestra, opera, guitar, vocal, score, etc. (and of course there are “creationists” in music in now days). According to this “music creationism” paradigm, a guitar has a guitar essence—as well as music forms it would constitute—and can no more evolve into a squeak or murmur than a dinosaur can evolve into a bird.
One of conceptual breakthroughs that comes out of sound synthesis married to sound recording was the appearance of intermediate forms that are literally neither guitar nor murmur. Moreover, the mutants of that kind can vary in their qualities, and the variety of that qualities can suggest search of new music forms, stranger than ever existed.
The evolution of “Mutanys” had a winding path—prepared electric guitar later filtered and processed by graphic sound software, mixed into stereo, quadro, octophony and Acousmonium versions.

pt.1 24:44
Patrick K.-H. edition 2016.
Patrick K.-H. / Burkhard Stangl / Thomas Gorbach, Acousmonium with prepared guitar edition 2018.

pt.3
2019
realised with the support of SKE / austro mechana

pt.4 09:52
2021
realised with the support of Stadt Wien Kultur

Concrète choirs: “Overtranslation”, movement 2, 05’09″ / 2004-2008

Concrète choirs, movement 8, 17’30“ / 2020

“Concrète choirs” series (since 2004):
Language is what makes conversations possible, and conversation is a quintessence of social activity, meaning survivorship—it is a cliché of what language meant to be and how it paved its way to nest in our brain. 

Electronic media and the new paradigm of “information explosion” that characterises our times confront us with the limitations of the brain in processing information—indeed we suffer from information overload. 

But the bigger danger of information—what causes the infamous “paradox of rational ignorance”—is not only that we might be overwhelmed by how much data is, but that we interpret that we might be poisoned by it. And even if we could acquire as much information as we think we desired, there are certain sequences, messages and narratives a rational mind may not be willing to get. That “cursed” domain of language information presented in speech, which caries its traits of timbre, tonality, rhythm, linguistic, gender and other aspects classified as redundant, was adopted as sound objects—building blocks to constitute the “Concrète choirs”.

“Dead Score”,
6-channels, 2015.

“Dead Score” simulates a situation of a stranger in a country which language (s)he doesn’t speak. For such person, it takes no time to succeed at understanding that a) what (s)he hears is language and not anything else, and b) nearly all what (s)he learnt as “language” is right now a dead-weight. Each conversation quickly comes as rejected invitation to participate in meaningful information exchange, the one becomes compelled autist. Helplessness provokes to grasp whatever possible – and the one starts picking out blocks of organised sounds, perhaps with the same lack of mastery. Within seemingly undoubtful finite number of elements, (s)he tries to form valid generalizations, but empirical constraints filter out the unknown concrete meanings towards the condition of abstract sounds.

“AorA”, 3’22“ / 2020