Flatland FrequenciesExperimental recordist alas23 presents a sonic exploration of a Soviet era bus cabin, using contact microphones and an electromagnetic field antenna. As well as making the occasional video on Vimeo, alas23 is a regular contributor on Radio Aporee, visit there if you want to hear more.
“Right now, for the preservation of life, the citizen is being asked to isolate by staying remote and staying still. Stillness and fixity after an age of speed and motion – it’s quite a shock. Later art can analyse this time; now it can only chronicle it, notice the way in which, in unprecedented times, new phenomena surprise us.
Here’s one. In a sudden and involuntary response to stillness, people are starting to travel without moving. People are voyaging in their minds to visualize places remote from the ones they inhabit. Stillness and fixity, it seems, have unleashed the volition and freedom of our imaginations. Our minds are supplying what the world cannot: waking visions, nighttime dreams, compensating for our circumscribed existence – healing us by making associations. Overnight we’ve become nomads of the imagination – our minds reaching out to others across the world.
Here is Elsewhere is an essay film about this psychological phenomenon, asking whether transformations in perception will enable us to think and live differently in the future.”
On a cold, snowy evening of the social distanced winter of 2021 we take stock and drift back not so many months to the warm summer of 2019 when this video was shot, on a mini-DV Handycam, in various locations around Felixstowe. The music is inspired by Japanese Environmental music and was composed on Nanoloop IOS. If you want more visit Penname records.
Ambient, atmospheric landscape cinematography, the kind of thing we love at Flatland Frequencies.
This book, published just a couple of months before the death of Kraftwerk co-founder Florian Scheider earlier this year, is a timely retrospective of the band that changed the shape of popular (and not so popular) music forever.
Readers of this blog will no doubt include many die-hard Kraftwerk fans, so this general introduction probably won’t feature much information that is not already known. However, there is still something of interest to be found in this book. Aside from the usual biographies and discographies, Uwe Shütte considers the aesthetic and philosophical aspects that shaped the Kraftwerk sound and ethos.
Sam Winston spent a month living in total darkness. In his blacked-out studio, he created images that were informed by sound, touch and the written word. This film documents his experiences, you can read more on the website A Delicate Sight.
Way My It Did I is a 2019 film by Maria Anastassiou commissioned for New Geographies, an arts project which highlights overlooked or unexpected places in East Anglia
Listen to linguist, anthropologist, philosopher, and author Dan Everett talking about his theory of culture. He discusses exactly what it is, how it exists on a macro and micro level, how it affects our language and our cognition, and how without it, we would die.
Everett spent many decades living with hunter-gatherers in the Amazon jungle. The language of the natives who he lived with, Piraha, is unlike all other known languages in that it has no words for numbers, colours or the future. He explains what his knowledge of the Piraha language, tells us about the intersection of language and culture.
He also talks about the practice of the science of linguistics, animal vs human communication, universal translation, and what unites and what divides us as humans.
The Emoji Movie is a story of rebellion and co-option. This video shows the parallels that this story has with the nature of the culture industry as a whole. When the profit motive completely takes over society, cultural innovation and rebellion are transformed into another commodity that is sold back to us to be passively consumed. If Adornian critiques of trashy kids’ films are your thing check this out.
In art and everyday life are we dominated by an endless quest for the new? Composer Claire van Kampen, film director Sophie Fiennes, music journalist Ammar Kalia and musician Brian Eno discuss and explain their ideas in this 40 minute debate.