"We can say that field recording is considered to be a work which crops a part from a whole complete picture. What does that mean? An incident is continuously followed by the next incident like a domino. What is a criterion to cut a moment and distinguish it from other moments?" - Toshiya Tsunoda
While looking for some information on Max Neuhaus (who unfortunately passed away last year) I stumbled on the very good blog Audible Affinities. Matt Marble apparantly stopped blogging last summer. His latest post was on a Luke Jerram project I haven’t heard from before. Here’s the post from Audible Affinities:
A recent New York Times article made me aware of the work of Luke Jerram. Since March of 2008, this Bristol artist has been planting pianos in public spaces in major metropolitan areas, most recently throughout London. Luke collected discarded and used pianos, decorated them, and inscribed the name of the project “Play me I’m Yours” on their body and/or keys. Passersby find themselves with a private moment of musical play or a spontaneous concert. On a google search images and videos abound.
Luke’s project is similar to David Byrn’s recent Playing the Building 2008 project at the Battery Maritime Building in New York.
In both cases the artists have set up a context of possibilities, open to and encouraging public interpretation. While Byrns project relies on the novelty of his instrumental extension of the piano interface, Jerram relies on the original placed in novel contexts. Jerrams work is unique in the generation of personal performances and documentation that have followed from it (Seed Work). Where Byrns project evades more immediate stylistic interpretations to feature the playful enjoyment of the building itself as it is played, Jerrams pianos beckon for the diversity of styles that can be brought to a familiar instrument.
some performances at Artefact festival (9>14 Feb 2010):
Long String Instrument performance Ellen Fullman | Konrad Sprenger
Tuesday 9th of Feb 2010
Ellen Fullman’s work resides between the fields of sound art and music. Her primary activity has been the development of the Long String Instrument, in which her rosin-coated fingers brush across dozens of metallic strings, producing a chorus of minimal organ-like overtones which has been compared to the experience of standing inside an enormous grand piano. At STUK the strings will be more than 18 metres long. Fullman will be joined by the incredible Konrad Sprenger to perform with her. Biba Kopf, in The Wire, wrote of the Long String Instrument: “Listening to it, you feel like you are inside some cyclopean subterranean grotto… its bejewelled walls glistening with an alien lustre (and) sounding like something that shimmers, iridescent shapes bend conventional pulse-based time and impose their own paradoxical temporality, where constant movement teems within a vast stasis.”
Entanglements for Four Projectors
Luis Recoder | Sandra Gibson | Ben Owen
Wednesday the 10th of Feb 2010
“Scratched film loops on opaque black leader emulsion provide the basic and base material(ism) for a projective and introjective encounter for four 16mm film projectors, two projectionists, and one projection “noise” engineer. The footage is not what interests us per se but the effect it has in dispersing and/or scattering the projected light itself. If the rotating shutter-blade which is lodged in the projector is meant not only to produce the palpitating illusion of movement but also to obstruct our access to how this cinematographic trick is achieved, the critical tendency would then be to impair the basic apparatus, to take it apart piece by piece. But there is another way! To further obstruct the obstruction. To shadow the shadow into thinking that it is being overshadowed, overcome, overperformed. Outperform. Imagine the shutter-blade efficiently rotating in its assembly, obliterating not only the light but the film itself. For it expresses the outburst of its violence not knowing that its vicious cycles lacerate into the soft and fragile emulsion of time.” – Sandra Gibson + Luis Recoder
“As sound engineer, I follow two mono audio signals from two separate projectors. The marks and patterns being seen are as well being received into the software (ppooll) where subtle modulating filters are applied to the sound and then amplified into the space. The play between simply sending what is being received and subtle shifts through filters and/or synthesis follow in an improvisatory motion in parallel to the visual projections of light and smudge around the room. Through these systems the sound follows paths in oscillating flux, one that parallels directly the information being seen, one that contains suggested loops and one that is most important - is the degrading rhythms of the film makers marks. The hand of the sound engineer only occasionally guides the multiple layers of sound oscillating in and out of aural focus, these light holes determining the point of entry, the machines grace of precision, into some scope of mass exploration.” – Ben Owen
The Symbol of the Unconquered
William Hooker
Saturday the 13th of Feb 2010
The genre-bending free jazz drumming legend William Hooker has been exploring the adventurous borders of avant garde music with kindred spirits like David Murray, David Ware, Thurston Moore, Zeena Parkins, Elliot Sharp, Christian Marclay and many others.
In this performance he will improvise a live soundtrack to pioneering African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 silent film classic The Symbol of the Unconquered, originally advertised as a chance to come see “the annihilation of the Ku Klux Klan.” Some of Micheaux’s earliest and most significant films were responses to D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), portraying the African-American struggle against white racism and the KKK.
Some of these films were lost for decades and restored in the 1990s. In Symbol of the Unconquered, the black hero holds his ground and protects a light-skinned mulatto neighbor (who is passing as white) as a local gang of thieves and hooded, torch-carrying Klansmen plots to frighten him, steal his land and finally, to kill him. Though how they do it remains unknown due to a key missing reel, the amorous “black” couple emerges from the ordeal unscathed and thrilled to discover their shared racial identity.
From 9 till 14 February we organise the Artefact festival for art & media at STUK in Leuven. One of the works presented in the exhibtion is the confronting Public Secrets of Sharon Daniel. This website provides an interactive interface to an audio archive of hundreds of statements made by current and former prisoners, which reveal the many secret injustices perpetrated by the state against its most vulnerable citizens. Visitors navigate a multi-vocal narrative that links individual testimony, public evidence and social theory, in order to challenge the assumption that imprisonment provides a solution to social problems.
There are secrets that are kept from the public and there are ‘public secrets,’ — secrets that the public chooses to keep safe from itself. The trick to the public secret is knowing what not to know. This is the most powerful form of social knowledge.
In the United States the injustices of the war on drugs, the criminal justice system, and the Prison Industrial Complex are ‘public secrets’. The public perception of justice relies on not acknowledging that which is generally known. When faced with massive social problems such as racism, poverty, addiction, and abuse, it is easy to slip into denial. This is the ideological work that the prison does. It allows us to avoid the ethical by relying on the juridical.
Till the 23rd of January you can see some of Henri Chopin’s very beautiful works on paper in Berlin at Supportico Lopez in Kreuzberg.
Henri Chopin was born in Paris in 1922 and died in England in 2008. During the 1950s Chopin started to work with sound on his first portable tape recorder, soon loosing interest in the simple human voice and replacing it with more primitive human sounds, working on their manipulation by experimenting with current technologies. Chopin’s interest focused on all possible variations of the human voice, seen as an action and “language” of the body. He discovered that the inside of a human being carries with it a form of primordial poetry that he decided to express in the form of ‘concrete poetry’. Chopin was also a painter, graphic artist and designer, typographer, independent publisher, film-maker, broadcaster and arts promoter.
Chopin spent a lot of time in Naples from the beginning of the 1980s due to his collaborative projects with Peppe Morra, founder of Fondazione Morra, one of the most renowned spaces for contemporary art active within the city. Morra and Chopin worked closely together up until the final years of the French artist’s life. During this time they produced numerous publications, a large number of which were based on his stunning production of “typewriter poems”. Chopin found a new possibility for poetry both within sound and the written form; with a formal approach he constructed a new alphabetical narration that actually had no responsibility for communication.
In 1957 Chopin founded “Cinquième Saison” a sound poetry magazine that for many years would be a point of reference for artists worldwide. In 1964 “Cinquième Saison” becomes “Ou cinquième Saison” and with this name he published an amazing series of vinyls dedicated to international sound poetry and worked together with international contemporary artists and writers such as Jiri Kolar, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Tom Phillips, Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs.
Some months ago Aernoudt Jacobs did a residency here at STUK working on his latest installation Permafrost, he also did a talk on the work at a previous Displaced Sounds evening. Last October he presented it for the first time at Vooruit’s Almost Cinema exhibition (where you could also experience the amazing ‘It’s in the Air‘ by Felix Hess). The final result was extremely beautiful. If you missed it in Ghent, you have another chance to see this quiet and mesmerizing work at Kaaitheater in Brussels from 24 till 27 november at their Burning Ice program.
Permafrost is an environmental sound sculpture about the freezing process of water. An installation has been developed in which we can observe the constantly repeated cycle of freezing and melting. By means of a custom-made sound apparatus the process is made audible. Permafrost deals with the sometimes paradoxical relation between nature and technique.
Permafrost is an installation addressing in the first place the freezing process of water. At the core of Permafrost is a silent machine producing sounds according to her specific condition: the crystallization process becomes the sound source, the matter outgrowing its container becomes visible and tangible (the expansion of ice compared to the water volume is more than 9%). Due to this visual aspect Permafrost is much more a sound sculpture than a mere installation. Different contemporary media are combined in the installation: sound art, kinetic art, sculpture and new technologies. The physic laws of our environment and my fascination for the human perception are an endless source of reflection and creativity.
The formation of ice (as a process) is a fascinating (sonic) experience. It allows the approach of matter transformation - liquid into solid - as a sonic process and to experience how in the end this inaudible process becomes perceivable to the audience. From a scientific point of view I want to research sound conductivity in changing matter - how the same sounds will change along with the consistency change of water. Ice, water and the different stages in between are an ideal platform for this research. Because of their physical qualities water and ice each have a different effect upon sound. This has to do with the speed of sound. The speed at which sound propagates itself through air is about 340m/s (i.e. If sound is produced 340m away it will be heard 1 second later). The speed of sound under water is of 1500m/s; 3 times faster than air. In ice this becomes about 3300m/s. This means that in ice sound reaches its destination 10 times faster than in air. Practically this also means that as matter changes the pitch of the sound will also change. The freezing process will thus produce sounds relating directly to the growth process of crystals.
Permafrost focuses on a central question in my work: how can the complexity, richness and stratification of our direct, daily environment be translated into something that can really be experienced? How can an environmental installation reach a beholder in the most efficient manner? What perceptual conditions can I design to yield specific experiences? What does this tell us about our perception in general? Our experience is always biased by our own structure (our body of experience). Francisco J. Varela writes in his book “The Tree of Knowledge”: We do not see the ’space’ in the outside world, but we experience it through our own representational space… We cannot just separate the biological and sociological background of our actions from the way in which the world presents itself to us. We don’t hear “frequencies”, we experience them. Sound is always coloured, not only by form but also by the different layers of meaning we extract from our own experiential background. With Permafrost I research the relation between sound and frequencies by investigating how frequencies, not perceivable by the human ear, still can yield sonic processes which will reach the perceptive scope of the listener. My fascination with reproducing the sound of this process concurs with the paradoxical relationship between technology and nature. This confronted me with ecological issues such as global warming and especially its effects on the melting process of the (former) permafrost, the ice caps that cover the Arctic and the Antarctic. Permafrost sensibilises the visitor about these issues. The technologies to produce Permafrost, is an actor of this paradox.
For the cooling installation the most advanced technological options have been evaluated and realized in cooperation with the University of Diepenbeek, Industrial Sciences and Technology department. They have the necessary international know-how concerning cooling systems. For this installation (machine) a completely new self generating cooling system was designed. A block of ice is produced in a visible way (a 3 hour proces). And it all needed to happen silently. The core concept behind the technology of the cooling unit was to design a system that was highly efficient in its use of energy. It has become a fragile system that is in a equilibrium. Almost a ‘perpetuum mobile’. The energies (warmth) that the unit uses to generate the freezing proces are reversely used to apply the melting process.
“March 9th 1987 began as a normal day for railwayman Wesley MacDonald as he made up a train of 50 cars of ore at a mine in northern Canada. But that all changed when the brakes failed to hold the load and Wesley suddenly found himself aboard a runaway train. This programme tells the story of what happened next, featuring actual audio footage of the radio communication between him and the rail traffic controller as he wrestles with the decision on whether to jump or take his chances onboard.”
BBC recently did broadcast this intriguing story from twenty years ago in Canada. The inspiring thing for us is that there is a full recording of the incincent and it has been released by Ash on a one-sided lp (sold out however). The dialogue between Wesley, and Alfie, grows tense. The train hurtles on threatening unsuspecting communities. At 95mph, with a doctor and ambulance standing by, Wesley faces disaster. Suddenly the line goes dead.
After the incicent the driver says he did not pass any signal. The signal box was being run by inexperienced supervisors. Both the supervisor’s log and tapes of communications with the train driver were removed from the signal box overnight. Senior rail staff accused Railtrack of a cover up…
very very sad news last week. Maryanne Amacher died last Thursday, after she’d suffered a stroke a couple of weeks earlier. we’ll miss her and her sounds a lot.
“Scratched film loops on opaque black leader emulsion provide the basic and base material(ism) for a projective and introjective encounter for four 16mm film projectors, two projectionists, and one projection “noise” engineer. The footage is not what interests us per se but the effect it has in dispersing and/or scattering the projected light itself. If the rotating shutter-blade which is lodged in the projector is meant not only to produce the palpitating illusion of movement but also to obstruct our access to how this cinematographic trick is achieved, the critical tendency would then be to impair the basic apparatus, to take it apart piece by piece. But there is another way! To further obstruct the obstruction. To shadow the shadow into thinking that it is being overshadowed, overcome, overperformed. Outperform. Imagine the shutter-blade efficiently rotating in its assembly, obliterating not only the light but the film itself. For it expresses the outburst of its violence not knowing that its vicious cycles lacerate into the soft and fragile emulsion of time.” – Sandra Gibson + Luis Recoder
“As sound engineer, I follow two mono audio signals from two separate projectors. The marks and patterns being seen are as well being received into the software (ppooll) where subtle modulating filters are applied to the sound and then amplified into the space. The play between simply sending what is being received and subtle shifts through filters and/or synthesis follow in an improvisatory motion in parallel to the visual projections of light and smudge around the room. Through these systems the sound follows paths in oscillating flux, one that parallels directly the information being seen, one that contains suggested loops and one that is most important - is the degrading rhythms of the film makers marks. The hand of the sound engineer only occasionally guides the multiple layers of sound oscillating in and out of aural focus, these light holes determining the point of entry, the machines grace of precision, into some scope of mass exploration.” – Ben Owen
The genre-bending free jazz drumming legend 
Some of these films were lost for decades and restored in the 1990s. In Symbol of the Unconquered, the black hero holds his ground and protects a light-skinned mulatto neighbor (who is passing as white) as a local gang of thieves and hooded, torch-carrying Klansmen plots to frighten him, steal his land and finally, to kill him. Though how they do it remains unknown due to a key missing reel, the amorous “black” couple emerges from the ordeal unscathed and thrilled to discover their shared racial identity.
From 9 till 14 February we organise the 
In the United States the injustices of the war on drugs, the criminal justice system, and the Prison Industrial Complex are ‘public secrets’. The public perception of justice relies on not acknowledging that which is generally known. When faced with massive social problems such as racism, poverty, addiction, and abuse, it is easy to slip into denial. This is the ideological work that the prison does. It allows us to avoid the ethical by relying on the juridical.
Till the 23rd of January you can see some of Henri Chopin’s very beautiful works on paper in Berlin at Supportico Lopez in Kreuzberg.
Permafrost is an installation addressing in the first place the freezing process of water. At the core of Permafrost is a silent machine producing sounds according to her specific condition: the crystallization process becomes the sound source, the matter outgrowing its container becomes visible and tangible (the expansion of ice compared to the water volume is more than 9%). Due to this visual aspect Permafrost is much more a sound sculpture than a mere installation. Different contemporary media are combined in the installation: sound art, kinetic art, sculpture and new technologies. The physic laws of our environment and my fascination for the human perception are an endless source of reflection and creativity. 
Permafrost focuses on a central question in my work: how can the complexity, richness and stratification of our direct, daily environment be translated into something that can really be experienced? How can an environmental installation reach a beholder in the most efficient manner? What perceptual conditions can I design to yield specific experiences? What does this tell us about our perception in general? Our experience is always biased by our own structure (our body of experience). Francisco J. Varela writes in his book “The Tree of Knowledge”: We do not see the ’space’ in the outside world, but we experience it through our own representational space… We cannot just separate the biological and sociological background of our actions from the way in which the world presents itself to us. We don’t hear “frequencies”, we experience them. Sound is always coloured, not only by form but also by the different layers of meaning we extract from our own experiential background. With Permafrost I research the relation between sound and frequencies by investigating how frequencies, not perceivable by the human ear, still can yield sonic processes which will reach the perceptive scope of the listener. My fascination with reproducing the sound of this process concurs with the paradoxical relationship between technology and nature. This confronted me with ecological issues such as global warming and especially its effects on the melting process of the (former) permafrost, the ice caps that cover the Arctic and the Antarctic. Permafrost sensibilises the visitor about these issues. The technologies to produce Permafrost, is an actor of this paradox. 
For the cooling installation the most advanced technological options have been evaluated and realized in cooperation with the University of Diepenbeek, Industrial Sciences and Technology department. They have the necessary international know-how concerning cooling systems. For this installation (machine) a completely new self generating cooling system was designed. A block of ice is produced in a visible way (a 3 hour proces). And it all needed to happen silently. The core concept behind the technology of the cooling unit was to design a system that was highly efficient in its use of energy. It has become a fragile system that is in a equilibrium. Almost a ‘perpetuum mobile’. The energies (warmth) that the unit uses to generate the freezing proces are reversely used to apply the melting process.
Maryanne Amacher in 1953