"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
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.
I’m sorry I’ve been off the map for a while. February has been busy with our yearly Kraak festival. If you’re interested: Yoshi Wada and Bill Orcutt where the two highlights for me, and Wada would have been perfect for Displaced Sounds as well.
A release that’s been really inspiring is the Framework250 4cd compilation. It’s a celebration for the 250th radioshow they hosted on ResonanceFM. To mark the occasion, a collection of artists who have been important to the program over the years created new works for the compilation. A lot of our favourite artists are involved. Find out more
on the 29th of March we have an amazing program at STUK in Leuven, the fifth evening in our series. with performances by Toshiya Tsunoda, Manu Holterbach & Michael Northam and Mieke Lambrigts.
Holterbach and Northam met on a crossing country skiing trip near Grenoble, France in 2001. Since this time they have continued a friendly dialogue that intertwined their mutual obsessions — collecting obscure music, researching sound-traditions from around the world, observing everyday natural phenomena and the application all of these explorations towards the creation of their own suspended music. After nearly ten years of exchange, they are meeting in the spring of 2010 to realize their first performances together. During these performances, both Holterbach and Northam take a ‘hands-on’ approach—creating a live, immediate music using only simple resonate objects, traditional instruments, pure tones, field recordings and basic processing. An approach that enables them to explore immediate surface tensions and fragile micro-tonal clusters in real time and in context of the live situation.
The performance will be an assemblage of their individual techniques—shifting easily between solos and duets. Holterbach’s delicate layering of lacework tonalities from guitar, oscillators and distant sounds one on top of the other quietly forming crystalline sonic structures. Northam’s ‘actionistic’ approach evoking animistic textures, breath and tones generated from flute and voice. A pendulum arching between two universes, bringing the listener through a kind of loom—weaving rich tapestries of sound.
Soundartist Mieke Lambrigts works with subtle manipulated recordings and sound-generators. The decoding and recycling of every day sounds form the starting-point for the manipulation and orchestration of recordings.
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.
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 
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.