The "human sound machine" Arthur Henry makes music from the sounds of the world
The world is made up of multitudes of sound snippets from which musician Arthur Henry artfully creates striking collages. The producer, who hails from the French-speaking part of Switzerland, is a two-time Loopstation champion as well as a beatbox star, and combines sound art components to form a powerful whole. His current goal: to travel to all the countries of the world, capturing the sounds of cities to create his distinctive music!
But first things first: in Arthur Henry's cosmos, anything can become music. For example, he covers Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" with just a bicycle! The artist masterfully converts the saddle, spokes and handlebars into drums and bass, and mixes the vocal melody from the meow of a passing cat. "I love it when things that weren't made to make sounds make music," says Arthur Henry. "It excites me to build a sound out of a teaspoon of sugar!" It was out of this love for the animate environment, that he set up the "Sounds of the Lockdown" project during the pandemic, calling on people on Facebook to send him videos of their everyday lives and crafting songs out of them. The result is a remarkable contemporary document: a galloping horse, a woman sneezing, a baby drumming on a bowl with cutlery - Arthur Henry's artistry weaves all of these into an organic whole. "Even more than the sounds themselves, I like that people sent them in. They were just moments they liked and I like it when you hear the people behind them," says Arthur Henry. True to the adage: the people are the artists, I'm just the medium.
Arthur Henry's ambitious new project "Sampling the World" demonstrates his ability not only to work with people and things, but also to use the sounds of a city, giving a voice to his environment. He straps his apparillos to his back, walks through the streets and cuts everything he comes across, from dustbins to trams, pigeons and, of course, the city-dwellers themselves. It would be no surprise if animals also started singing around him.
The series begins in Geneva on 28 May. The goal? "One song per city. And preferably I'd like to tour at least one city per country - of all 193 countries!" says the Couchsurfing fan, smiling almost sheepishly at this massive global undertaking. He is delighted that personal exchange and encounters - the source of inspiration for his music - are now possible again. In his productions, this inventive mastermind is able to connect together complete strangers, creating euphony out of disharmony, and skilfully filling the spaces in his collected material. One could also say that Arthur Henry's art is to see the light in the cracks , and to let others shine through them. "I like people's voices, even if they can't sing well, and when you can hear the person behind it. In Geneva I met this incredibly cool rapper and put his recordings together with a trombonist from another sample and built the harmonies around that," he says. But "the living drum set" doesn't need to hide his own skills under a modest bushel: Arthur Henry creates sounds with his lips, tongue, teeth and throat with such virtuosity that one might ask whether a mouth is really meant for speaking or perhaps it was always meant for making music.
Beatboxing is one of his many talents. "The pandemic threw me into a crisis of purpose and I questioned everything I was doing. I only wanted to do something that I could be absolutely sure was contributing to positivity. And when I sat in front of my loop machine in the studio and compiled the sounds of all these people's lockdown, I knew: Wow, THAT'S what I want to do!" he says, his eyes sparkling. And of his international project, he says, "I've never felt so useful." Other stops in the pipeline for "Sampling the World" are already Istanbul, Rome, Iceland and Kyiv, where he travelled to in autumn 2021 and still moves him today.
As a live show the computer scientist delivers a real experience: apart from his sound artistry, his concerts are also audio-visual spectacles. When he plays "Sampling the World", the person who made each original sound appears on a screen. All this, however, should not be misunderstood as simply gimmickry - these are songs that immediately and powerfully draw the listener in, because Henry's passion is tangible.
The old maxim that music connects and brings people together is embodied by this one musician and his work. His first single "Geneva" conveys this in its message: we are all just many small parts of an enormous whole. This philosophy could hardly be more urgent in current times, and is one on which the world could well base its recovery. The sound artist Arthur Henry is playing his part, contributing with his encompassing and inclusive original music and in this way he becomes a witness to the contemporary.
