Musings on art, nothingness, and the observation of the observations of others. With reference to Walter Benjamin and Niklas Luhmann.
Category: Art
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The Cabin
Experimental 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.
Since free market reforms and opening up to foreign trade in the late 1970s, China has been among the world’s fastest-growing economies. Along with pulling 800 million people out of poverty, it has also become the world’s largest economy and with it a growing cultural and arts scene.
China’s experimental music and sound art scene began to take shape in the post-Tiananmen era in the late 1990s. A few musicians from the mainland’s underground music scene started to experiment with new ways of making music while the music industry co-opted the once revolutionary and independent rock music scene.
This particular collection of pieces runs the gamut of experimental styles, from music concrete to drones, arpeggiated synth pieces to field recordings. All achieved in a pure and focused dedication to the sound. A really stunning anthology musically and excellent curation from the label.
Recommended.
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New Label: Eastern Ears
Great to see local sound experimentalists and noise enthusiasts, Eastern Ear (formally NNSAC), have started releasing recordings of music performed at their events.
Their first release by Twinkle3, consisting of Clive Bell (shakuhachi and other woodwind), David Ross (drosscillator and percussion) and Richard Scott (electronics and analogue synthesiser), was a very memorable gig. So it’s great to hear the sounds again, in clean digital form (especially that wonderfully blooping and burbling EMS Synthi).
A mesmerising blend of futuristic alien rhythms, electro-acoustic interludes and 1950’s synthesis.
Eastern Ear are based in Norwich and organise regular workshops, performances/events, along with the excellent Yarmonics sonic arts festival in Great Yarmouth.
After Benge’s quite fantastic Loop Series One reviewed last November, we didn’t expect to get sent any more music made on an original Buchla 100 system, simply because there is only a handful of them left in the world. How wrong we were!
The particular system used in this new release, sent in by Nicoletta Favari & Christopher Salvito, aka Passepartout Duo, was built by Don in 1967 for composer Ernst Krenek, who used the synth alongside piano.
Flash forward to 2021 and the (still operational) system resides in Krems an der Donau, a small town near Vienna. Lucky for local musicians Passepartout Duo (and by proxy, all of us), who have used the 100 system alongside piano in five considered pieces, inspired by the original works of Krenek, to great effect.
“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.”
Ambient, atmospheric landscape cinematography, the kind of thing we love at Flatland Frequencies.
New York gallery space The Issue Room hosted this visual and audio event featuring a montage of images from A. Qadim Haqq, author of The Book Of Drexciya, and audio soundscapes from Dopplereffekt. The theme grows on the concept originated by the late James Stinson and Gerald Donald (of Dopplereffekt), an underwater world inhabited by the water breathing descendants of slaves thrown overboard during the Atlantic slave trade.
After the presentation, techno musician and cultural theorist DeForrest Brown, Jr. talks with A Qadim Haqq about the legacy of Drexciya and techno as black futurism.
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Loula Yorke – Crowd Control Vol.1
Crowd Control Vol.1 is a more thematic and focused offering from Suffolk based sound artist Loula Yorke, in comparison to her more techno-orientated output in ‘Ldols’.
The topic of surveillance capitalism covers the use of digital products such as social media, as a means of surveillance and corporate influence. The term was coined by the work of Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff and is also regularly covered by Silicon Valley commentator Jaron Larnier.
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.