Susan Philipsz: Living in Berlin, the history is so raw and you still feel it.
I think it's that it doesn't want to hide its past.
When I first came to Berlin,
this was one of the first places I came to actually.
Train stations, they're very evocative places, places of departure and separation.
That has a melancholy feel about it, I think, the station.
I love that sound.
I'm interested in the emotive and psychological effects of sound.
Often I'm just looking for a place that has an interesting acoustic or architecture history.
Like in Kassel, for instance, it was the atmosphere of the train station that drew me.
“Study for Strings” started from standing at the platform's end
and thinking about sound coming from a distance.
I discovered that Kassel is where they made major deportations of the Jews to Theresienstadt,
which was a concentration camp where they sent all the creative people.
I started thinking about Pavel Haas who'd composed this composition,
“Study for Strings,” while he was interned in the camp.
It was to feature in this propaganda movie for the Red Cross.
They wanted to pretend that everything was great in the camp.
It was really tragic because it was straight after it was shot, they were all sent to Auschwitz.
In the original composition, it was a 24-piece orchestra.
What I decided to do was to record just two of the parts.
Silence really makes you think about the absence of the other performers who would've been killed.
Eoghan McTigue: There was never a point where we were working together as a collective.
It just seemed to develop out of our shared life together.
After we moved to Berlin, it became clear that Susan was getting very busy.
I started to manage some of Susan's productions.
Susan is much more intuitive and can determine the tone or the atmosphere of a space.
Susan has a very good understanding of space,
when a space is layered and when the meaning is just there,
just below the surface,
and then just doing something very minimal to let it reveal itself.
Susan Philipsz: I was invited to make a work that marks the 80th anniversary of the
annexation of Austria to Germany as that happened after Hitler's speech.
It's not something that they're proud of, but they want to acknowledge their part in it.
With each new project in public space, I make a sound test just
to get an idea of how the sound would be in this particular space
because sometimes it can do really unpredictable things.
You can place anything in the Heldenplatz, I mean and it will take on a political connotation because of the context.
At the beginning, I tested a work which used the sound of a viola.
And another work where I actually used my voice.
Singing has always been
part of my life, singing with my sisters.
Then I was in a band for a little while.
Then I became aware of what happens when you
project your voice into a room and how it can define space.
I think it's clear that I don't have a trained voice.
I'm singing in a way that you might sing if you were on your own.
The songs I've sung in the supermarket I originally
performed live where I sang over the PA system at hourly intervals.
It has quite a disarming effect because you feel like you're listening to something quite private.
I'm trying to create this sense of solitude in this very public place.
I thought of songs as found objects.
Singing them unaccompanied and then placing them in a particular
context could make you see the place in a new way,
or the words might take on a new meaning.
The song “Lowlands,” which was this old 16th century Scottish
ballad about a sailor who comes back to say a final farewell to his loved one,
it's a very sad lament, but the context prevents you from really being moved.
Recording for my voice, or battling with the sounds of the trains and the traffic,
you're all of a sudden aware of where you are because the
ambient sound is really loud and hostile.
When I was really young, I was more interested in
the historical part of the museum rather than the painting galleries
because I found that really boring.
“War Damaged Musical Instruments” is a work that has been going for a few years now.
I've been recording these musical instruments that have been damaged in war.
The first ones I came across were the ones here in Berlin.
That led me to different musical instrument museums here in Germany.
It was clear to see that these instruments could never play music anymore.
They were so badly damaged. But they still could produce sound.
Sometimes it would be a very fragile, delicate sound, and it was really more about the breath.
I became interested in breath being a metaphor for life.
Each of the speakers plays a tone from the “Taps” and represents a different instrument.
Originally it was used on the battlefield.
It was one of the signals that meant it was safe to come back.
It makes you wonder who was the last person to have played it and what happened to them.
As a student I wanted to make political art with a capital P, but I was never happy with the results.
Those political themes come through the work in a more subtle way.
In Vienna, the work that was the most successful was the sound of
me rubbing the rim of four crystal wine glasses.
It does have this kind of feeling of a voice.
I wanted to give voice to those forgotten voices who were persecuted during the Holocaust.
By defining the space with sound, you draw attention to and remind people what happened here.
Sound can really act as a trigger for memory, then can bring you back to a particular place and time.
I wanted to bring those voices from the past into the present.