Richard Garet’s approach to working with sound live focuses on creating processes that interact and activate sonic material such as electromagnetic waves, treated tape and audio cassettes, cracked media, sonification of light and data, information noise, and computer processing. Over the years his work has evolved from laptop playing to a more hands on type of approach, focusing on sound and material that could encompass a more tactile malleability and less playback. Garet’s preparations to working live with sound evolve from studio practice and these developments establish the artist’s material and set of possibilities to work and interact with in front of an audience.


"It is really pointless trying to coin a term for working with sound live. I feel that adjectives and names describing audio art today apply to a certain degree but it does not represent a practice that uses broad methods and techniques. Much goes into the mix, and much goes into consideration. There are moments of improvisation but then there is a control-and-memory at play. There is much knowledge involved as well triggering things as much as the desire to run faster than the mind has time to dictate the next move. Therefore during a live set there is much space for risk and discovery. There are preselected methods and there are elements of surprise. There is electricity. There is analog and digital but most importantly there is hope and there is optimism! And overall there must be progress. Presenting sound live for me has always had a fixation to time, and it involves more than one time, more than one memory, and many approaches to craft-and-media tailoring ideologies for listening that also challenge reception and notions of listening, physicality, and awareness. I like to think that making this work embodies imagination and action that embraces sculpting in time as a dominant understanding of physical space and physicality shifting within space. It is also fascinating how material objects that create sonic energy, shred air, and change and affect a temporal situation. It is like having additional arms and legs for voicing out wordless forms that carry out powerful communication. Performing live with audio to me consists of piling efforts that sum up to a temporal temper that interconnects people within a particular environment and time capsule. It can make you as aware of sound as it can of its absence and yet be felt besides being heard. It is a directness that not only produces a faculty to touch others but also a vehicle for experiential transcendence, psychological connections and thought that leaves the room with you. Performances become alive inside a space or with the absence of one but most importantly are also collectively lived.” RG