"Sometimes sound summons the world with more certainty than my verse ...secretly, like twilight. The world seems lost in listening, trying to validate itself in each solitary sound." - Akio Suzuki
Akio Suzuki was on our wishlist for a long time. He’s known as a pioneer of sound art, but his work goes way further the normal boundaries of sound art, unworried by the rules of modern music. He’s a musician, an inventor, a nature lover, an instrument builder.
Suzuki’s journey as an artist began in 1963 with a performance at Nagoya station, in which he threw a bucket full of junk down a staircase. The inspiration behind this performance - the idea that if one were to hurl an object down a well-balanced stairway, a pleasant rhythm might be the result - took the desire to “listen” as its subject. That desire to hear, to listen has remained the one constant in Suzuki’s stance as an artist.
Akio Suzuki gives a lecture in the afternoon and in the evening there is a performance scheduled.
After we discovered the cd “Le Brame Des Cerfs, Forêts d’Automne / Rutting Red Deers” on the Frémaux & Associés imprints, we immediately fell in love with the sounds of French deers. Deers are the most innovative experimental musicians of the century, taking much from modern black metal vocalists and contemporary sound poetry. In the Walloon forests they hide as well for unholy and highly erotic rituals. This will be the bus trip of the year, heading to the heart of the Ardennes for a long walk through nature in search of nonconformist deer sounds with the local forester.
Got this some weeks ago for my birthday: a release from 2005 from Sean Meehan. He’s NY-based drummer with a unusual view on the actual drumming part, that to say the least.
It’s a double cd that’s sealed in a white sheet of watercolor paper and it reminds me of artifacts produced in the industrial art scene in the 80s. It’s actually no surprise for me that Meehan is coming up with a record like this: he’s music is barely audible sometimes. That’s a small step to the locked grooves and betonned vinyl from the Anti-record movement, no?
A relatively new album from Ernst Karel. “Heard Laboratories” consists of unprocessed, long-take recordings made in various scientific research environments at Harvard University, edited together to make five pieces.
You can download a live version of his project at http://wanderingear.com/wel001.html
The project /2009/ started on 4th of january 2009 and ended on 13th december 2009. It was a succession of sound recordings made over the course of one year by ten artists who had each four weeks to respond to the recording of an unknown predessessor. They got no other information then this recording itself. Each recording is 7 minutes long and is accompagnied by two pages in a diary. Recordings, diary and reflections are brought together in a listenbook.
The aim was to investigate how we perceive music, in a more precise way than ‘I liked it’ or ‘it spoke to me’ and whether it is in any way possible to ‘understand’ experimental music. The proposition of the research-part of the project was that mis-understanding could lead to creative interaction, presupposing that there is an active and open listening.
The involved artists are Julia Eckhardt, Chiyoko Szlavnics, Mieke Lambrigts, Manfred Werder, Annette Krebs, Tim Parkinson, Olivier Toulemonde, Manu Holterbach, Aernoudt Jacobs en Anne Wellmer. Their contributions provide in their wide diversity a reflection of the experimental music field, which seems to be very much in flux at the beginning of this century.
The book will be released by label ‘compost and height’ and presented in collaboration with STUK (Displaced Sounds) on 16th of May at q-o2, in presence of the involved artists.
This Friday (16th of April) Bram de Jong will do a presentation on Freesound.org at Dorkbot Gent.
The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, … released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License. The Freesound Project provides new and interesting ways of accessing these samples, allowing users to
browse the sounds in new ways using keywords, a “sounds-like” type of browsing and more
up and download sounds to and from the database, under the same creative commons license
interact with fellow sound-artists!
We also aim to create an open database of sounds that can also be used for scientific research. Many audio research institutions have trouble finding correctly licensed audio to test their algorithms. Many have voiced this problem, but so far there hasn’t been a solution.
Some birds species have the ability to replicate the songs of other birds, voices of other animals and - not unknown - humans. But less know is the fact that birds also imitate machines. In this video you see the Australian Lyrebird imitating hammers, a chainsaw and a power drill. All because there has been construction work in the zoo.
For the people who are interested the British library released some years ago also a great cd on the subject. You can find eg a blackbird from london that imitates a computer modem. Check the bl.com site for more info.
After we discovered the cd “Le Brame Des Cerfs, Forêts d’Automne / Rutting Red Deers” on the Frémaux & Associés imprints, we immediately fell in love with the sounds of French deers. Deers are the most innovative experimental musicians of the century, taking much from modern black metal vocalists and contemporary sound poetry. In the Walloon forests they hide as well for unholy and highly erotic rituals. This will be the bus trip of the year, heading to the heart of the Ardennes for a long walk through nature in search of nonconformist deer sounds with the local forester.
Toshiya Tsunoda