/2009/

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.

compostandheight.blogspot.com

displaced sounds 5

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.

join us for the following:

* Toshiya Tsunoda live

click here for some samples of this amazing artist. we are proud to finally be able to welcome him here in Leuven.

a fan made a myspace profile here where you can listen to some tracks

* Manu Holterbach & Michael Northam live

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.

* Mieke Lambrigts

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.

some performances

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.

Pics from the Naldjorak evening

Charles Curtis (Naldjorak I)

Carol Robinson and Bruno Martinez (Naldjorak II)

Charles Curtis, Carol Robinson and Bruno Martinez (Naldjorak III)

Carol Robinson, Eliane Radigue, Charles Curtis and Bruno Martinez

Displaced Sounds IV with Naldjorlak I, II, III

Tuesday 20th of October we host a new Displaced Sounds event with a focus on Radigue. Naldjorlak is the first entirely acoustic composition by a composer who has pioneered pure electronic sound for over thirty years. The suspension of time, the dialog with eternity, the proximity to silence, an appeal to contemplation, and exceptional concentration… all that has characterized Eliane Radigue’s music is now more relevant than ever.

check here for more info & tickets

some interesting texts on first Naldjorlak here

Mixtuur (one of the best radio programs in Belgium) did a special on Radigue last Thursday. you can listen to it here (click on the mixtuur link on the left)

this is what they played:

• Birthday Mister (Antye Greie / Ryoko Kuwajima / Kaffe Matthews / Eliane Radigue) The Lappetites - cd: Before the libretto - Quecksilber 10
• Naldjorlak I (fragment) (Eliane Radigue) Charles Curtis - cd: Naldjorlak - Shiiin 3
• Etude aux Chemins de Fer (Pierre Schaeffer) Pierre Schaeffer - cd: Diversen - OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music - 1948-1980 - Ellipsis Arts CD3670
• Messe pour le temps présent: Teen Tonic (Pierre Henry) Pierre Henry - cd: Messe pour le temps present - Philips 456 293-2
• The Hollows (Laurie Spiegel) Laurie Spiegel - cd: Diversen - Female of the Species - Law & Auder la13cd
• Silver Apples of the Moon (Part A) (fragment) (Morton Subotnick) Morton Subotnick - cd: Silver Apples of the Moon - Wergo WER 2035-2
• Adnos III (fragment) (Eliane Radigue) Eliane Radigue - cd: Adnos I-III - Table Of The Elements SWC-55
• Lîle re-sonante (fragment) (Eliane Radigue) Eliane Radigue - cd: L’ile re-sonante - Shiiin 1
• Naldjorlak II (fragment) (Eliane Radigue) Carol Robinson & Bruno Martinez - cd: Naldjorlak II - niet in de handel
• Polygyne (Efterklang) Efterklang & The Danish National Chamber Orchestra - cd: Performing Parades
• Him Poe Poe (Efterklang) Efterklang & The Danish National Chamber Orchestra - cd: Performing Parades
• Horseback Tenors (Efterklang) Efterklang & The Danish National Chamber Orchestra - cd: Performing Parades