29 | 09 | 10

The Wire Salon Reading List: Environmental Agents: The Art Of Field Recording

The Spanish sound artist Francisco Lopez has talked about the potential of field recordings to produce “acousmatic broadband sound environments of thrilling complexity”. Following on from September’s edition of The Wire Salon, which looked at the rise of sound art, this month’s salon examines a parallel phenomenon of 21st century sound – the emergence of environmental field recordists as sonic artists in their own right.

A panel including the sound and field recordists Peter Cusack, Lee Patterson and Justin Bennett will discuss the philosophies and processes of contemporary phonography, its relationship to the parallel disciplines of acoustic ecology, bioacoustics, cybernetics, ethnomusicology, urban soundscaping and audio mapping, and the way these and other related investigations at the occult fringes of environmental audio science have infiltrated and influenced much experimental music practice. The discussion will be illustrated by audio examples of the modern field recordist’s art. Plus other participants to be announced. London Cafe Oto, 7 October, 8pm, £4.

Read:
• The Primer: Field Recordings by Richard Henderson (from The Wire 168)

• The Wire 300: Will Montgomery On The Changing Uses Of Field Recordings

• Sound & Music’s guide to Field Recording, by Richard Thomas

• Field Recording and Experimental Music Scene, by Toshiya Tsunoda

Browse & Listen:

• Framework Radio, regular Resonance FM radio show focused on the art of field recording with the subtitle “open your ears and listen!”

• Favourite Sounds map started as a radio program on London’s Resonance FM in 1998, asking participants to answer the question “What is your favourite sound of London?”. It has since carried on in cities around the world.

• radio ::: aporee maps began in 2006 and is based on artistic research into mapping, spatial conditions and the navigation between the real and the virtual.

• The British Library’s new UK SoundMap, with contributions of sounds from around the UK from the public at large.

• Montréal Sound Map, a growing archival database of sound recordings from all over Montréal, Canada.

• London Sound Survey, a collection of the sounds of the public life of London with compilations of past aural accounts showing how the city’s sound environment has changed.

Other Resources:

• The World Forum For Acoustic Ecology (WFAE), “founded in 1993, is an international association of affiliated organizations and individuals, who share a common concern with the state of the world’s soundscapes”

• Christopher DeLaurenti, Seattle based composer, performer, sound artist, and phonographer. Site contains recordings, writings and information on his various projects. Also, listen to his album Wallingford Food Bank, free to download from Ultra-red’s online label Public Record.

• Chris Watson’s home site, with information and links to the work of one of the best known field recordists in the UK

• The Quiet American, website of the field recordist Aaron Ximm with a large collection of compositions and recordings collected from around the world.

The Wire

Category: Events | The Wire
No comments

16 | 09 | 10

Adventures In Modern Music 16 September 2010

Adventures In Modern Music tonight features 90 minutes of brand new and unheard music as Derek Walmsley flicks through the upcoming Autumn releases, with fresh releases from Joe Colley, Mark McGuire, Ahleuchatistas, Francisco Meirona & Dave Phillips, Bjørn Fongaard and many more, all culled from the ever-bulging shelves of The Wire’s office. AIMM is broadcast every Thursday 21:00-22:30 (BST) at 104.4 FM for Londoners, streamed live at resonancefm.com for the rest of the world.

Nathan

Category: Radio | The Wire
No comments

20 | 08 | 10

The Wire Salon: We Hear A New World: Microphony, Technology & The Rise Of Sound Art

At the turn of the century sound art reached a new level of visibility with a cluster of high-profile shows and countless below-the-radar initiatives. Meanwhile, new thinking about sound has led to an extraordinary proliferation of practices, and in recent years a phalanx of sound recordists and sonic artists has emerged to stage a revolutionary coup on behalf of sound, demanding its right to exist both in and of itself, free of the competing agendas of music or the visual arts.

The emergence of this new world of audio was accelerated by the dual technologies of microphony and digital processing, and can be heard in the examples of acoustic ecology and anthropology; desktop synthesis; the form-destroying praxes of Noise makers; Reductionism’s amplification of previously occult sound events; frequency experiments with waveforms and pure tones; and more.

A cluster of recent books on this area has showcased the range of thinking behind the new sound art. For some, this work calls for a renewed focus on the perceiving body; for others, sound art offers new perspectives on the circulation of cultural meanings; for others still, sound has removed itself from the realm of the human to occupy a world where we simply don’t figure.

For this edition of The Wire Salon, artist/writer Salomé Voegelin, author of Listening To Noise And Silence (Continuum), Helen Frosi, curator of the Soundfjord gallery, and critic/sound artist Will Montgomery discuss the new philosophies and practices that have emerged in recent years to map and calibrate the new world that has been revealed by 21st century sound art.

The Wire Salon: We Hear A New World: Microphony, Technology & The Rise Of Sound Art takes place at London’s Café Oto, 2 September, 8pm, £4 Ticket on the door only.

Plus: take part in an audience-participation sound art quiz and have your perception of the audio world around you reshaped!

In anticipation of the night, we’ve put together the following reading list with links to online MP3s, videos and texts:

Listen:
• Anne Hilde Neset hosts an edition of The Wire‘s Adventures In Modern Music on Resonance FM. Anne was joined by Dont Rhine and Robert Sember, members of the international activist/art/music collective Ultra-red.

• Steven P McGreevy specialises in recording natural Very Low Frequency (VLF) Radio phenomena, “The (very beautiful) Music Of The Magnetosphere And Space Weather”

• Recordings of Futurist composer Luigi Russolo’s compositions using his noise making Intonarumori instruments (page also contains a downloadable PDF of Russolo’s The Art Of Noises manifesto from 1913)

Read:
• “Return To Form: Christoph Cox On Neo-Modernist Sound Art” from Artforum, November, 2003

•Seth Kim-Cohen’s “The Hole Truth: On Doug Aitken’s Sonic Pavilion” from Artforum November, 2009

• Francisco Lopez’s essay “Environmental Sound Matter” on La Selva, the sounds of nature and ‘profound listening’

• Read about Konstantin Raudive and Electronic Voice Phenomenon

• Mike Kelley’s essay: “An Academic Cut-Up, in Easily Digestible Paragraph-Sized Chunks or The New King Of Pop: Dr. Konstantin Raudive”

• Ubuweb’s Kenny Goldsmith on sound art

• David Toop on The Art Of Noise

Watch:
• A selection of video work by Brandon LaBelle: Concert #2: working with participants to stage the tension between sight and sound; Perspectives: writing and listening action in public space; Z: writing action utilizing motion-tracking to generate sound in real-time.

• Footage from Sound Seam, Aura Satz’s collaboration with Aleks Kolkowski, shown as part of the AV Festival 2010

• Mike Patton and Luciano Chessa test out reconstructed Futurist Intonarumori noise machines.

Also:

• Join the Soundasart mailing list

• More sound art links (via Seth Cluett)
____________________________________________________________________________

The Wire Salon is a monthly series of salon events, hosted by The Wire magazine, and dedicated to the fine art and practice of thinking and talking about music. The evenings, which take place on the first Thursday of each month, will consist of readings, talks, panel discussions, film screenings, DJ sets and even the occasional live performance.

The Wire

Category: Events | Music discussion | News | The Wire | Uncategorized
Tags: Cafe Oto | Helen Frosi | Salomé Voegelin | Sound Art | The Wire Magazine | The Wire Salon | Will Montgomery
Comments: 2

16 | 08 | 10

Volatile Frequencies: call for papers

Beirut improvisor and visual artist Mazen Kerbaj

Volatile Frequencies: Topologies of Authority, Technology and Production in Contemporary Middle Eastern Music Practices: call for papers and performances

NB: Due to request, the deadline for the submission of abstracts has been extended to 1 October 2010 and for full paper submissions to 1 November 2010

The Volatile Frequencies conference seeks to collate research that translates, mediates and frames practices specific to sonic disciplines (music, sound art, musicology) arising in relation to the Middle East and North Africa, and to critically connect with wider academic currents. It will emphasise current post-graduate research and scholarly approaches to new sonic practices, prioritising practice that favours experimental and exploratory approaches.

Volatile Frequencies will be in conjunction with the first edition of the MazaJ Festival of Experimental Middle Eastern Music and is co-produced by Zenith Foundation, Sound And Music, and The Wire to be held in London in November 2010.

Academics and artists are invited to submit proposals for the Volatile Frequencies post-graduate day, addressing the key themes outlined on the conference site.

For further information visit zenithfoundation.com/conference2010

Tony Herrington

Category: Music discussion
Tags: Volatile Frequencies
No comments

11 | 08 | 10

The Outer Church: Position Normal

The man (men?) in the marshes above is performing a very rare Position Normal live date at The Outer Church tonight: well worth checking out I’d say, their self-titled last album, originally released on tape, was one of The Wire’s Top 50 Records of 2009. Our own Joseph Stannard will be DJing, and best of all, it’s free.

And a small competition: if you can identify where the photo in the great Lila Hunnisett flyer above was taken, email myself at The Wire, and you’ll get some on-the-hoof field recordings done by myself at an appropriate location.

Derek Walmsley

Category: Uncategorized
No comments

09 | 08 | 10

John Wall on Glossolalia

Tune into to Resonance FM tonight, 9 August, at 23:00 to catch the latest edition of Glossolalia, a show which, according to presenter Oliver Fay, is “produced with the intention of exploring the outer limits of composition, searching for those still thrashing uncomfortably around the perimeters of genre, the outsiders of the experimental music/sonic art frameworks.”

Tonight’s edition features an hour long collaboration between digital composer-improvisor John Wall and poet Alex Rogers, both of whom fit Fay’s brief for the show to a tee.

John’s last CD release was 2005′s Cpohn, which contained just 20 minutes of material, and his live performances, while they have been growing more frequent in recent years, are still relatively few and far between, so this is a rare opportunity to hear one of the most unique and advanced (non-)musicians we have. As Helena Gough put it in The Wire 318: “His work is so intense and stark, and has this absolute precision to it. I don’t hear that anywhere else.”

John has just launched a blog too, complete with sound files, video clips, software demos, and so on.

Tony Herrington

Category: News | Radio
Tags: John Wall | Resonance FM
No comments

04 | 08 | 10

The Wire Salon: Electric Eden

Our monthly salon series continues with a talk by The Wire’s Editor-at-Large Rob Young based on his history of folk, folk rock, psychedelia and the British imagination, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music (published by Faber And Faber, 5 August 2010.). The talk will be illustrated with film and audio clips and will be followed by a discussion of the book’s central themes; plus DJ Jonny Trunk will be in attendance spinning the sounds of wyrd and wired Britain. London Café Oto, 5 August, 8pm, £4.

• Read: The Incredible String Band and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter. Extract from Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music by Rob Young

• Read: Into The Woods. “Across folk, classical, pop and exploratory music, the sense of exile from Eden is key to the progress of British music in the twentieth century, writes Rob Young.” Article for The Journal Of Music.

• Listen: Exotic Pylon podcast. Featuring conversation between Rob Young and host Jonny Mugwump. The show lasts 90 minutes and includes a selection of music from Talk Talk, Peter Bellamy, Steeleye Span, John Ireland, Dave Cousins, Archie Fisher, Mandy Morton & Spriguns, Robin Williamson and Alasdair Roberts.

The Wire

Category: Events | News | The Wire
Tags: Cafe Oto | Electric Eden | Faber And Faber | Rob Young | The Wire Salon
Comments: 1

19 | 07 | 10

Jeff Keen: public meeting

Jeff Ken photographed by Matt Hass

Brighton’s Lighthouse organisation is hosting an emergency public meeting to discuss how best to secure the archive of local underground film maker and artist Jeff Keen.

Keen is ill with prostate cancer, and also faces eviction along with his wife Stella from their current home in the town. This necessitates them moving into Keen’s studio, which currently houses his archive, which in turn necessitates relocating the archive to another location. Any interested parties are urged to attend the meeting at Lighthouse in Brighton on 28 July, whether to show support, or to offer practical solutions.

Keen is one of the UK’s pioneering experimental film makers. Three of his short films dating from the mid-1960s are currently on show as part of the exhibition Blow Up: Exploding Sound And Noise (London-Brighton 1959-1969) at Flat Time House in South London.

A DVD box set of his films, Gazwrx, was issued by the BFI in 2009.

Tony Herrington

Category: Events | News
Tags: Jeff Keen
No comments

Monolake goes Romanian

For all Romanian Techno and Ableton heads, you can now check out Derek Walmsley’s interview transcript with Robert Henke/Monolake in Romanian on this excellent blog: http://boingbumchakro.blogspot.com/2010/07/interviu-robert-henke-aka-monolake.html.

Derek Walmsley

Category: Uncategorized
No comments

15 | 07 | 10

How To Wreck A Nice Blog

If you haven’t already had your brain rearranged this year by Dave Tompkins’s How To Wreck A Nice Beach, an occult history of the vocoder from Cybotron back to the communication R&D labs of Second World War… well, you should. But if you want to try out your code-breaking skills before you buy (by the way, it’s one of the most beautifully produced books I’ve seen in a long time) you can visit Dave’s blog. Essential musings on Rammellzee’s death, vocoder ephemera, an astonishing and essential mix taking in Jonzun Crew, ELO and The Human League, and many other enigmatic variations on the vocoder theme. All done by the dude above in the Luke Skyywalker jacket. Essential reading and listening… as is this completely singular book.

Derek Walmsley

Category: Music discussion | News | Uncategorized
Tags: Dave Tompkins | vocoder
No comments