Category Archives: #39

#39

Show 665: Screaming Tower by Carlos Santos & Nuno Torres (stress.fm)

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Screaming Tower is a sound project by
Carlos Santos: electronics, field recordings
Nuno Torres: alto saxophone.

Screaming Tower is a site-specific audio performance based on the flux of water delivery public system, and uses electronics, alto saxophone and field recordings diffused by a set of mobile loudspeakers. 

The performance took place in the last level of a resonant water tower, about 40 meters high, located in Barreiro city, Portugal, in June 2017, as part of a performance event commemorating 80 years of public water delivery.

The architectural space is the “motor” for the development of the piece. Each of the generating sound elements: electronics, field recordings, saxophone, contribute as all for the displacement of sound in the resonant circular dome of the water tower. The usage of low and high pitch sound material, small percussive elements found in field recordings or played by the saxophone, were distributed by realtime mixing process of carefully placed speakers, 
so that space could vibrate revealing its hidden “music”, as the last character in this broader sound spectrum process.
Music for vertical structures.

Mixed and mastered by Carlos Santos
Photos by Vera Marmelo

#39

Show 664: Avant moi / Before me (Jet fm)

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“Pourquoi le moustique, il mange le sang
de nous et pas des pâtes ? (Why mosquitos eat our blood and not pasta?)
Pourquoi quand je regarde par la fenêtre,
elle bouge la maison ? (Why, when i look out the window, the house is moving?)
Pourquoi les lapins qui courent, ils sont en poils
et ceux qu’on mange, ils sont en viande ? (Why the running rabbits are made of furs but those we eat are meat?)
Pourquoi les fleurs, elles défleurissent ? (Why flowers unflowered?)
Où j’étais avant d’être dans ton ventre ? (Where am i before growing inside you?)
Avant moi, y’avait quoi ? (What’s before me?)”

Avant moi (Before me) is a play for kids created in october 2017 by the theatre company Rachel Mademoizelle.It’s about origin of life, creation of the planets, life on earth and evolution (in the darwin way) until our birth. Inspired by a same title childbook by drawner Emmanuelle Houssais it’s a tiny tale for 3 – 6 aged. Annaïck Domergue did the script and played, Henri Landré made the sound, played live each time, with parts of improvisation and accident (as life).
This is a radiophonic version of the play without any words (except the introduction), just trying to make sense about the evolution with sounds only.
Contains samples by Pierre Henry, David Hykes, Rafael Toral & Chris Watson. Introducing Misha Landré Domergue.

#39

Show 663: a radio séance for Vera Wyse Munro, by Celeste Oram (Radio One 91FM, NZ)

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Vera Wyse Munro (1897-1966) was a pioneering New Zealand ham radio broadcaster, improviser, and sonic experimenter. Her primary media were amateur radio broadcasts, Morse poetry, and sono-topographical scores. Via her broadcasts, which were frequently received by amateur radio operators as far afield as the United States and Europe, Munro initiated some of the earliest telematic performances, in which she would perform prepared violin in structured improvisations with other musicians broadcasting from elsewhere in the world. Munro’s work was often necessarily clandestine, as a result of legislation curbing amateur radio activity in New Zealand. As a result of this, as well as the absence of extant documentation about her life and her ephemeral practice, Munro’s work is only now starting to be regarded amidst New Zealand’s cultural history.

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this improvisational radio play is part-homage, part-seance, part-instructional score for the home listener. it joins an ongoing series of broadcast re-enactments relating to Vera Wyse Munro by artist and researcher Celeste Oram. here, the radio is a medium through which we channel the lost histories of Vera Wyse Munro’s pioneering radio experiments back into audibility, utilising the opportunity provided by the global reach of the international radia network as a way of calling on radio artists and enthusiasts around the globe to collectively keep vigil on the ionosphere. the hope is to summon the spirit of Vera Wyse Munro by attempting to receive her final radio broadcasts.

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improvisation re-constructions by Keir GoGwilt & Alex Taylor
starling poems by Keir GoGwilt
written & produced by Celeste Oram

http://verawysemunro.nz/

 

#39

Show 662: Architecture & Time (Kanal 103)

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Artists interested in field recording and related musical practices are invited to a five day Audio Workshop “Architecture and time” in Stari Grad on island Hvar in Croatia headed by the musician and artist Schneider TM. The workshop took place in towns music school located in the Biankini Palace – Stari Grad Museum. Over a period of 5 days the participants explored the two parameters of architecture and time with the aim to translate them into music /soundscapes / audio pieces. Both topics were reflected in sound. One aspect is the architecture of the city itself and the other is the architecture of sound structures, whether it is a soundscape, sound art or a song. The aspect of time can be taken as history of the city, but also as linear sound produced by the use of architecture like reverb / resonance or by playing with the material structures of found architecture, formed by certain spacial specifications.The final works were presented in a live session in the museum´s garden. This is a short presentation of that presentation.

#39

Show 661: Dirar Kalash (radioart106)

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Dirar Kalash is a musician and sound artist whose work spans a wide range of musical and sonic practices within a variety of compositional and improvisational contexts. His performative and compositional approaches to instruments, techniques, and aesthetics are highly political as they challenge dichotomies, hierarchies, and binary logics of new/old and west/east as tools of cultural imperialism and hegemony. The methods he uses are based upon his research into the intersections and relationships of music and sound with other contexts such as language, architecture, mathematics, visual arts and further social and human sciences. His regular solo and collaborative performances include but are not limited to audio-visual performances, free jazz groups, string ensembles, solo piano, and live electronics.

Silence measured with blood

“… I did this piece along one other in 2009, during the assaults on Gaza, not much thought was done during / before I did it, so it’s totally improvised using short samples from different sources, some were sent by friends, some from news broadcasts.. I remember i just plugged in my equipment and started playing, the thoughts i had in my mind were of persistence against the evil and shameful forms of silence: moral silence, ethical silence, impotent silence, corrupt and innjust silence… but at the same time that persistence was also directed inside, as a form of resistance.”

“wily dancing with twenty one passing winds”

“Holding onto the will // wily dancing with twenty one passing winds” is a no-input-mixer piece, mostly improvised, but with a direction in mind, moving from ambient drone sounds to harsher sounds, not simply as an attempt to structure a certain form, but rather as a focus on content an expression which are essentially poetic, as the starting point for the work was the title as a poetic expression that gravitates close to a human gesture. However, the choice of a no-input mixer setup, as a purely machinic-electronic setup, which essentially contrasts a human gesture with a machinic one, came out of the need of a live and interactive setup that could allow a variety of sounds and noises which could be approached as raw and primal, however commonly heard as “feedback noises”, yet they allow for a particular tension that constitutes a creative framework which is able to merge experiment with experience, due to the unexpected “feedback based” nature of this setup, the choice of such musical and sonic tools also raises questions on the possibilities of sonic and poetic condensation.”

https://albayan.bandcamp.com

 

 

#39

Show 657: Method / Anna Zett (reboot.fm)

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sdr

METHOD, by Anna Zett via reboot.fm 88.4 FM Berlin for radia.

In this spontaneous audio piece Anna Zett explores the interview as a form of monologue and a form of trialogue. It is centered around the artist’s visit at a professional fortune tellers office in Beijing.

She has brought her own deck of modernist tarot cards, he is willing to share his approach to situation analysis and fate calculation according to Chinese traditions. Mediated by a third person who is serving as translator, they enter a conversation about chance.

Anna Zett has written and directed two radio plays for the public radio in Germany, both of them dealing with voice-based oracles and the challenge of communication.

#39

Show 656: AMonFM::: underground_acceleration by beepblip (Radio Student)

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beepblip

The track was recorded live on Sound Topographies Festival at Škuc Gallery, on 1 October 2017, by an invitation of the festival’s curator Nina Dragičević. The track is based on various field recordings, which in their raw form often sound quite piercing for the ear. Field recordings are most interesting for the person who finds them, in simultaneity with the sound-event, in direct contact with the sound-field source. Such encounters are marked by an element of surprise in a unique event, a non reproducible moment in time. With repetition this moment becomes an object in the archive of memory, of something known and transmittable. In my relation to sound, the element of the unexpected plays a significant role, as though I am making sounds in the tension between repetition and surprise.

The track plays with various frequencies in audio or electromagnetic spectrums, which are outside the range of a human hearing. Often, such frequencies come in extremely high and sharp form, when they are transposed to the human hearing range. These are exactly the frequencies that attract me most. I am producing such sound in an attempt to shift the flow of conscious thinking.  In this way, the production of such persistent sounds is political, because they nullify the capacity to be productive and efficient; the two imperatives imposed by capitalist mode of reproduction. At the same time, these sounds are not particularly entertaining, and they offer relaxation only to the people who refuse to be relaxed in an anesthetic way. The track ideally works as a jammer for thought pollution.

A few words about field recording. In the immediacy of listening when recording, I am using amplifiers, catchers of frequencies, different antennas, coils, transducers. I record either outside of the hearing range, either in the electromagnetic fields or on the radio frequencies outside of the advertisement-polluted FM (AM or VHF). To walk through space with headphones and an amplifier of sort is like floating in some virtual inter-space, which is not connected to online or digital virtuality, but a virtual space on the level of electromagnetic waves, for example. In my utopian thinking, I imagine that computers and the web are not optimal carriers of virtuality. If we are ever to develop interfaces, which are more comfortable for our human bodies, we would have to invent new way of virtualisation. I am not interested only in producing sound compositions, but propose sounds, which would say something about the future. As a representative of contemporary cognitariat I feel flattened in two dimensions of a computer screen. And sometimes I am in awe with the 3D world with its forms and possibilities. An ordinary view of the world is virtual reality to me. My listening of electromagnetic waves is a way of opening the virtual space into more spatial and temporal dimensions.

The track consists of modified fragments recorded with a radio receiver on AM waves. Mostly they are without narration, and sometimes a word or a melody creeps in. I listen to these tracks like they would be arias of some sort. The tracks also consists of sound layers recorded with a coil for sound detection of electromagnetic waves. These recordings were mostly taken in 2013 and 2014 in New York City, where the EM waves are omnipresent. This part of the recordings is also the reason to call this track Underground Acceleration. What interests me in this sound layer is the tension of constant acceleration with few releases. This constant electromagnetic tension works like an illustration of capitalist depletion and accelerationism.

There is also a really beautiful example or an acoustic citation of light installation by Kurt Laurenz Theinert: Gespinst, exhibited a few years ago at the Lighting Guerrilla Festival in Ljubljana. In addition to these field recordings, there are also several sound levels produced live with analogue electronic synthesisers.

For the conclusion, perhaps a short explanation of the title AMonFM. Not only are some AM transmissions now channeled on radia-FM, the FM in this case is also the Shape of a dozen of analogue patches.