Category Archives: #34

Show 520: Spaces To Act Or Not (CFRC)

spaces to act or not

by: Nelly Matorina

I recently discovered Caroline Nevejan’s work on presence. In the piece 8 spaces to act or not, she divides presence into three parameters: now/not-now, here/not-here, you/not-you. I was taken by the option of now/here/not-you, the immediacy and intensity of being in ‘now’ and ‘here’ surrounded by not-you. This piece contains field recordings from places where I felt surrounded by “not-you” most and wanted to act (make a sound), and then versions of just those sounds without a place. It ends with a sacred moment, I witnessed a wedding in a church in a small town in Lithuania which was open to the public despite being a private ceremony. The wedding was only 8 people, and the song I walked in during was entrancing and futuristic.

The piece contains readings from 8 spaces to act or not by Caroline Nevejan (http://www.being-here.net/page/745/8-spaces-to-act-or-not), and samples from Paras’ Memon’s A Story from their Self-titled EP, and M Mucci’s Days Blur Together. how

Show 519: First 100 Days by Julia Drouhin (Campus Paris)

First 100 days in the sound environment of a new born. With a parliament of crows, bats and birds, family and friends.

Julia Drouhin has been working with sound since 2003. She has investigated the haunted air of ghost towns through phono-memory, conducts voodoo sessions with records made of chocolate or ice, has glittered the catacombs of Paris, curated mini-FM events in both France and Spain, and performed with candyfloss clouds. She completed her PhD on the art of walking and radio art at the University of Paris 8 in 2011. In 2014 she won the Giuseppe Englert Prize for which she produced a musical and environmental “Listening Passage” in the mall of Launceston, Tasmania.

www.tacticalmagick.net/juliadrouhin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKY1N0YL4Uw

Show 518: Hours after Hours by Samuel Longmore for radio one 91FM

hours_after_hours_radioone

radia season 34, show #518 (radio one 91FM. dunedin, new zealand), playing from march 2 to march 8, 2015.

Hours after Hours

by Samuel Longmore

This composition was recorded at night in six different rooms and liminal spaces within a certain building in central Auckland, New Zealand. The history, location and daily life of the building itself may or may not be relevant to the piece, but this set of conditions is as follows. This building houses the Audio Foundation, Auckland’s most recognisable locational node of sound culture and experimental music. It was, formerly, a tie factory for a local manufacturer which, in an Antipodean bid for faux-continental sophistication, called itself Parisian ties. Now no neckties, and indeed hardly any clothing, are made in New Zealand. But the building is still busy working, nurturing a resolutely self-aware locality in regards to the sonification of place, with rooms containing a sound library, a gallery space, a small performance venue, studios and workshop spaces, an office and small shop housing hens-teeth rare local runs of multi-format limited edition pressings, as well as its own low power FM radio station, AFM.

These rooms were entered by the artist at night, with a microphone and a recording device. The gain was set to high and the microphone was left “to do its work”, without guidance, the artist immediately leaving the scene, not monitoring the sound. In subsequent takes, the sounds of these room-ambiences, these (near) ‘silences’, were played back into the rooms, and re-recorded, creating an accumulative and self-referential circuit in which the resonant frequency of each room began to emerge. In editing the piece together from the resulting audio six separate rooms are sequenced together. Listening back to these, their subtle shifts, it is as though witnessing a mysterious formal experiment, the alignment of each room emphasizing the difference within the gesture’s repetition, the magnification of the room-tone and the resulting ‘presence of absence’ undulating like waves. Signaled by no intermediary save the change in resonant frequency, the shifts subtly become a sounding-out of the dimensions of walls, staircases and other architecture, an aural mapping, a blind yet acutely aware material and physical cartography of the space which Sam describes as “an overall picture” of the space.

This work joins a compositional tradition of sound works exploring the resonant frequency of discrete spaces through repetition. Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room, through Jacob Kierkegaard’s 4 Rooms. The absence of any kind of originating signal, as well as Longmore’s explicit removal of his own body from the scene of recording, extends these practices toward an accumulating analysis of something that sounds close to silence, within the after-hours existence of rooms dedicated, in their everyday life, to sound. If Longmore’s minimalism relies on an analysis of the formal aspects of recording, it is also deeply interested in the chaotic aesthetics of noise, the conflict between the non-intentionality of improvisation and the expectations of findings in compositional practice. Such a dialectic allows the emergence of traces, an uncovering of things normally inaudible. Perhaps that’s why, in the absence of any signal to be obliterated, we might not be so surprised when these ‘field recordings of the act of recording’ themselves start to speak – to sing like choirs – at certain points. Or uncover, as Sam writes, “the tension between the resonance of each space and the non-existence of silence – the former always tending toward dominance with the latter inevitably cropping up a a disruption.”

Samuel Longmore

Grounded in the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Samuel Longmore’s practice and research occurs in the spaces where his interrelated concerns for the experience of aural perception, the phenomenology of architectural space, field recording as compositional action and the para-ontologies of sound:silence / signal:noise, overlap. The work of Merleau-Ponty affirms a position regarding the importance of subjective, corporeal perceptual experience which is central to his practical investigations, fueling an ongoing interest in the ephemeral and spatiotemporally specific ontology of sound. Sam has a BVA in Sculpture from the Dunedin School of Art. He now resides in Auckland and is working towards an MFA at the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Art.

Sam would like to thank Jeff Henderson and Chris Cudby at The Audio Foundation for their support in the making of this piece.

Show 517: The Haystack by Michael Dean for CKUT 90.3 fm

“The Haystack” addresses modern practices for data gathering and surveillance, approached through the development of evolving sonic landscapes. Four chapters are compiled, each drawing from different methods of data monitoring, including tapped telephone calls, recorded conversation, the sonification of network traffic, and the internal sounds of communication technology itself. Haystack is the sound of dystopia, as told from the eyes of a machine.

For more work by Micheal Dean please go to https://soundcloud.com/m-dean-1

Show 516: Nuit Libre by Naoual Fassal for Radio Grenouille

Nuit Libre

An attempt to work on hyper-stimulation’s impact on ourselves, and on the resulting mix of void and anxiety. This is not a technophobic production but an observation of the exhaustion that comes with a certain way of being in contact with the world – or how sounds and information become intruding and break in our intimacy.

–—-

Un essai autour de l’impact de l’hyperstimulation, et de l’angoisse en découlant. Ceci n’est pas une production technophobe mais un constat d’épuisement face à un mode d’accès au monde qui le rend invasif – les informations et les sons devenant intrusifs, entrant de force dans notre intimité.

Show 515: SAVUSAUNA by LASSE-MARC RIEK for radio x

radia season 34 – show #515 (radio x) – SAVUSAUNA
– playing from february 9 to february 15, 2015 –

SAVUSAUNA
by LASSE-MARC RIEK

As a substantial part of Finnish life and culture, sauna has a considerably long tradition in Finland. Savusauna, the smoke sauna, is the eldest technique of preparing a sauna bath. In contrast to more recent sauna baths, no chimney is needed. A big fire is prepared and kept over hours under constant temperature – not to low, but also not too hot, to produce smoke. The smoke is filling and thus heating the sauna room. When the room is hot enough, small windows are opened to let the smoke escape and the sauna bath can begin.
Have you ever enjoyed a savusauna? You should. Lasse-Marc Rieks piece invites you to join a savusauna bath by listening. It’s really worth a try.

While Lasse-Marc Riek, being a specialist for field recordings, would for sure have been able to provide extra material to capture the atmosphere around the savusauna as well, we did not ask for that. His piece is complete in its on rights, celebrating the Finnish sauna culture of the everyday. At the same time, when it comes to sauna bath: how can we translate this experience into sound? Obviously, for several reasons this seems to be an almost impossible task. Or, to be more precise: what we might consider as the most natural translation would be always the most artificial part. For we’d loose track of what we are missing, what can’t be captured with the means of recording, due to the fact that the core experience is fuelled by substances that can’t be kept: smoke, heat, steam, sweat.

So we chose for our acoustic framework a good mixture of field recordings – some of which are so concrete that they might remind you of Foley sounds, the kind of sounds that are created for exactly this very kind of purpose: a substitute that may feel more real than the real one would. But is this really true? You’ll be able to find out anyway. But then we also have to be complete with our credits (see below), thus it is not really necessary to try. Yet, why not stop reading here. Listen by yourself first. And check the data later. It’s really worth a try…

LASSE-MARC RIEK
is an artist mainly working in the field of sound art, acoustic ecology and related interdisciplinary research, including cooperations with other artists as well
as scientist. He is also the co-founder of GRUENREKORDER, an outstanding label for phonography, sound art and field recordings. Over the past years he has been travelling north more but once, often returning with field recordings from the frozen world.
This winter he has spent some weeks in Finnland. And as it went to be quite cold outside he regularly enjoyed the savusauna.

Find out more about his projects at www.lasse-marc-riek.de
and about GRUENREKORDER at www.gruenrekorder.de

credits:
great many thanks to LASSE-MARC RIEK for SAVUSAUNA! Moreover, special thanks to morosopher, gutek and muf211 for generously contributing their snow recordings, uploading them to freesound.org and donating them to the public domain!

metadata:
SAVUSAUNA
by LASSE-MARC RIEK
radia production: miss.gunst [GUNST + radiator x]
production date: january 2015
station: radio x, frankfurt am main (germany)
length: 28 min.
licence: (c) Lasse-Marc Riek
www.radiox.dewww.gunst.infowww.lasse-marc-riek.de

additional info:
includes radia jingles (in/out), station and program info/intro (english)
intro credits: melting snow (2012) by muf211, snow effects (2013) by morosopher and snow removing (2013) by gutek, all donated to the public domain, on freesound.org

links:
radio x & radiator x: www.radiox.dewww.radiox.de/radiator-x
GUNSTradio & radiator x: www.gunst.infowww.gunst.info/radiator
LASSE-MARC RIEK: www.lasse-marc-riek.dewww.gruenrekorder.de

pics:
verena kuni (cc-by-nc-sa)

Show 514: La Promesse by Julien Quentel (for Jet FM)

Pour l’émission 514, Jet FM donne Carte Blanche à Julien Quentel, plasticien nantais. Voici ce qu’il m’écrit à propos de sa pièce “La Promesse” 2008-2015 réalisée pour Radia :

—Salut Anne-Laure
Tout cela restera bien énigmatique, comme l’est d’ailleurs le noir de la nuit!
je n’ai rien à revendiquer, ni la prise de son, ni la technique, ni même un lien affectif avec le lieu…
rien de tout ça, juste ce qui reste à l’écoute, que l’univers est dans la nuit.—

http://www.reseaux-artistes.fr/dossiers/julien-quentel

** English version**
For the Radia Show n°514, Jet FM gave “carte blanche” to Julien Quentel, visual artist from Nantes. This is what he wrote me to present his piece “The Promise” 2008-2015 :

—Hi Anne-Laure
All this will remain well enigmatic, as the dark of the night !
I have nothing to claim neither sound recording, nor technology, or an emotional bond with the place …
none of this, just what is left to listen, that the universe is in the night.—

http://www.reseaux-artistes.fr/dossiers/julien-quentel

www.jetfm.asso.fr

Show 513: VHS tape loop in a magnetic field by Eddie Spanier & Black Monk (Radio Papesse)

A closed circuit formed by a loop that exploits the digital technology in VHS and a magnetic field, activated by the magnets of a powered speaker for the diffusion of audio. This system ensures the maintenance of an onanistic process that leads to constant and progressive disruption of the audio and video signal supported by the magnetic tape of the VHS. The residual audio, which gradually loses quality, is channeled into a mixing system and spread through the same audio speakers that degenerate the sound source itself.

This show was produced for Radio Papesse from the recordings of a performance held at xenos arte contemporanea (Firenze) in October 2014


Bio:
Eddie Spanier
b. 50 ° 53 ‘34.66’ ‘N, 136 ° 50’ 12:38 ” E 50 ° 53 ‘34.66’ ‘N, 136 ° 50’ 12:38 ” E
He is an auto-generated intelligence swarm, a dense team of highly-trained space monkeys, skilled and ontologically devoted to artistic do-it-yourself processes, obsolete technologies and retrogaming, technological onanism and hypertrophic mechanical systems, pseudo-scientific dogma, subculture science, conspiracy theories and the former life of L. Ron Hubbard, the Day of Judgment, and popular culture. Eddie Spanier is a gray area, a gray eminence that often conspires against itself, a machine of propaganda and a parasite of free information.

Black Monk
It is a new moniker concealing the other half of the duo Alpin Folks, a musical project that blends the literary references and visual arts related to mountains.
Immersed in electronic listenings he gives space to the compositions of Steve Reich, Terrence Dixon and Helm. His records are a valuable asset for use as connective or degenerative material. Fascinated by the triptych word, sound, images, he works for the first time with Eddie Spanier, making four hands.

Show 512: Die gestohlene Figur by elffriede.aufzeichnensysteme and Jörg Piringer (for Radio Helsinki)

Drawing by elffriede.aufzeichnensysteme

die gestohlene figur (The Stolen Figure) (2015)

A voice, which becomes sexually indefinite, feeblish and apparently drained by alienation, faces up its situation in the form of an acoustic interior monologue. The shallows, which are represented by the voice, coagulate as a sound compilation of radio play clichés. Abrasively and bulky parts are combined with elegant atmospheric parts. The capitulation will win at the end. For now. To be continued…

More information about elffriede.aufzeichnensysteme and Jörg Piringer:

jörg piringer

geboren 1974. lebt in wien. ist mitglied des instituts für transakustische forschung und des gemüseorchesters. arbeitet in den lücken zwischen sprachkunst, musik, performance und poetischer software.
http://joerg.piringer.net

elffriede.aufzeichnensysteme

frei erfunden = künstlerische selbstformatierung als unabhängiges, un-diszipliniertes aufzeichnensystem; seit 2000 ausstellungen, veröffentlichungen, auftritte in literatur, bildender/medienkunst; inszeniert en masse entstehende, minimalistische tusche-feder-zeichnungen (auch als live-zeichnung) und stockend-sperrige kurz-dichtung (bruchstücke) als lesung, performance, lichtkunst, installation in kombination mit künstlerisch zweckentfremdeten, alten (büro)medien (schreibmaschinen, projektoren, diktaphonen etc.); definiert zeichnen / schreiben / aufnehmen in aufzeichnen als einheit und akt körperlicher präsenz / wahrnehmung. initiiert zusammenarbeiten im bereich performance und literatur. elffriede.aufzeichnensysteme ist v.a. nichts verpflichtet; zuletzt: schrei zum hummel. eine art buch (buch u. radiokunst), klever verlag wien 2013; kubine (ausstellung), alfred-kubin-haus zwickledt, 2014
www.elffriede.net
intermediäre zusammenarbeiten von elffriede.aufzeichnensysteme und jörg piringer seit 2002: „die sprache der ticket-pinguine“ (mira-lobe-stipendium 2003), „the notebook of e.h.“ (extrapool / nl, hörspielpreis st. pölten, ö1 kunstradio, elevate-festival graz), lesungen und performances.
http://www.elffriede.net/pinguine/
http://www.extrapool.nl/old2/audiotoop.html?start=20