Noise, Structure, and Transmission

During his residency, Nirantar Yakthumba’s investigates methods of oral transmission. Nirantar is not concerned with methods of oral transmission that aim to reproduce fixed compositions with some notion of ‘fidelity’—although he acknowledge that his interest is inspired by practices of oral transmission in Nepal, his home country, where such practices, themselves diverse, conserve monumental cultural archives through such means. Rather, he is interested in how the process of transmission itself contributes to the material that is transmitted.

In communications theory, transmission is approached as a source of noise, or that which introduces errors into a given ideal message. In this research, he inverts the conventional attitude towards noise-due- to-transmission—an undesirable yet necessary material artifact of transmission which compromises a message or a signal (i.e. material), damaging its intelligibility and structure—by approaching it as productive, co-articulated with the material-in-transmission. He frames his intentions in the following questions: how is information configured—i.e. produced and modulated—in speculative practices of oral transmission where the material to be transmitted is not prescribed? How do the specific characteristics of such practices qualify the specificities of such configurations?

Nirantar Yakthumba is a musician and composer from Nepal, based in the Hague, the Netherlands. He is the artistic director of the Kali Ensemble, a collective of musicians and composers based in The Hague which focuses on cultivating long-term collaborations and diverse collective practices. He holds a Bachelor of Music in Music Composition at the Royal Conservatoire the Hague, graduating with distinction, and a Master of Music at the Institute of Sonology, also awarded with distinction. For his master’s project, he was awarded the Konrad Boehmer prize for an outstanding and original final presentation, which included his artistic work and his written thesis. In his research, he investigated the production and organization of tone, questioned the material-discursive boundaries of ‘instrumentality’, and explored the implications of information theory in collective musical practice.

In his current work, Nirantar continues exploring his interests in tone, instrument building, and collective practice from an information oriented perspective. In particular, he explores how variations in informational constraints—structure, redundancy, noise, (in)determinacy—are articulated with and within a work, and how such a practice of variation can be a technology for prompting transindividual introspection, challenging preconceived notions, and making space for difference in relational configurations.