22.3.10
25.3.09
Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik "The Originale"
Charlotte Moorman talks about how she met her long time artistic partner Nam June Paik. The details of the establishment and presentation of the 1964 premier performance of Stockhausen's "Originale" in New
Yok is described in very funny detail. She tells about George Maciunas (Fluxus) picketing the performance. Filmed in 1980 under a grant from the National Endowment for the arts. It is an excerpt from the work Charlotte Morman and the New York Avant Garde.
This piece by Fred Stern is dedicated to the Memory of Charlotte and Nam June.
4.10.08
titbits of sonic art
Cut and Splice
fabulous festival of sonic art working with Karlheinz Stockhausen's score Aus den Sieben Tagen (From the Seven Days) in london October, ...featuring Karlheinz Stockhausen, David Behrman, Maja Ratkje, Phil Minton, Michael Vorfeld, Frank Gratkowski, Rhodri Davies, Seth Josel, Nikos Veliotis, Twentytwentyone Laptop Quartet, Apartment House, Robin Hayward, Reinhold Friedl, Angharad Davies, Aleks Kolkowski, Anton Lukoszeieze and Marc Weiser...below is a quote from their web site of sonic artist/composers and their links..
Anton Lukoszevieze - Cello/Artistic Director
Cellist Anton Lukoszevieze is one of the most diverse performers of his generation and is notable for his performances of avant-garde, experimental and improvised music. Anton has given many performances at numerous international festivals throughout Europe and the USA (Maerzmusik, Donaueschingen, Wien Modern, GAS, Transart, Ultima, etc.etc.). He has also made frequent programmes and broadcasts for BBC Radio 3, Danish Radio, SR2, Sweden, Deutschland Rundfunk, WDR, Germany and ORT, Austria. Deutschlandfunk, Berlin produced a radio portrait of him in September, 2003. Anton has also performed concerti with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at the 2001 Aldeburgh festival and the Netherlands Radio Symphony Orchestra. He has collaborated with many composers and performers including David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, Amnon Wolman, Pierre Strauch, Rytis Mazulis, Karlheinz Essl, Helmut Oehring, Christopher Fox, Philip Corner, Alvin Curran, Phill Niblock and Laurence Crane, He is unique in the UK through his use of the curved bow (BACH-Bogen), which he is using to develop new repertoire for the cello. From 2005-7 he was New Music Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge and Kettle’s Yard Gallery. Anton is the subject of four films (FoxFire Eins) by the renowned artist-filmmaker Jayne Parker. A new film Trilogy with compositions by Sylvano Bussotti, George Aperghis and Laurence Crane premieres at The London Film Festival, October 2008. In November will premiere a new hour long work by Christopher Fox for cello and the vocal ensemble Exaudi commissioned by the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and will also present new solo works for cello and live electronics. Anton is also active as a film and sound artist, his work has been shown in Holland (Lux Nijmegen), CAC, Vilnius, Duisburg (EarPort), Austria, (Sammlung Essl), Wien Modern, The Slade School of Art, Kettle’s Yard Gallery, Cambridge Film Festival and Rational Rec. London. His work has been published in Musiktexte, Cologne, design Magazine and the book SoundVisions (Pfau-Verlag, Saarbrucken, 2005). Anton Lukoszevieze is founder and director of the ensemble Apartment House, a member of the radical noise group Zeitkratzer and recently made his contemporary dance debut with the Vincent Dance Company in Broken Chords, Dusseldorf.
www.myspace.com/antonlukoszevieze
Apartment House was created by cellist Anton Lukoszevieze in 1995. Since then its original and innovative programming has gained Apartment House the reputation as one of the most exciting contemporary music groups in Europe. While performing a wide range of new music, the seeds of the Apartment House repertoire stem from the hard-core European avant-garde, the joyful anarchy of The Scratch Orchestra and the exploratory nature of experimental music. Apartment House embrace a broad range of acoustical and theatrical situations within which volatile and stimulating performances occur. Apartment House’s performances have included world premières of music by a wide variety of composers. Notable portrait events have featured Christian Wolff, Jerry Hunt, Luc Ferrari, Dieter Schnebel, Christopher Fox, Laurence Crane, Helmut Oehring, Clarence Barlow, Philip Corner and Richard Ayres. Titled with reference to the Cage work Apartment House 1776, the group is of flexible instrumentation, allowing for a vast range of performance possibilities. Apartment House has made numerous broadcasts for BBC Radio 3 as well as Danish Radio, Swedish Radio 2, WDR Cologne and Deutschlandfunk, Berlin.
Performers for Cut & Splice:
Dave Ryan - Clarinet
Ian Mitchell - Clarinet
Andrew Sparling - Clarinet
Gordon MacKay - Violin
Mai Kawabata - Violin
Sara Hubrich - Violin/viola
Anton Lukoszeieze - Cello
Patrycja Kujawska - Violin
David Berhman - Electronics
David Behrman has been active as a composer and artist since the 1960s. Over the years he has made sound and multimedia installations for gallery spaces as well as musical compositions for performance in concerts. Most of his pieces feature flexible structures and the use of technology in personal ways; the compositions usually rely on interactive real-time relationships with imaginative performers. Behrman’s sound and multimedia installations have been exhibited at the Parochialkirche in Berlin, Stanford University’s LaSuen Gallery, the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Hudson River Museum, The New York Hall of Science, the DeCordova Museum, The Addison Gallery of American Art, Ars Electronica in Linz and La Villette Science and Technology Museum in Paris, and other spaces. Some of these installations have been collaborative projects with George Lewis, Paul Demarinis, and Robert Watts. Together with Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier and Gordon Mumma, Behrman founded the Sonic Arts Union in 1966. Sonic Arts performed extensively in North America and Europe from 1966 until 1976. Working at Columbia Records in the late 1960s, he produced the “Music of Our Time” series of new music recordings for Columbia Masterworks, which presented works by Cage, Oliveros, Lucier, Reich, Riley, Pousseur and other influential composers. Behrman toured as composer/performer with the Cunningham Dance Company in the early Seventies and again from time to time in more recent years. In the Sixties and Seventies he assisted John Cage with several projects. Merce Cunningham commissioned him to compose music for several repertory dances, including “Pictures” in 1984.
http://www.lovely.com/bios/behrman.html
Arturas Bumsteinas - Installation
Arturas Bumsteinas works as a sound and visual artist. He has completed a number of musical scores for different instrumental ensembles and orchestras, released 9 albums of electroacoustic music (in Lithuania, USA, Denmark, Ukraine, Canada, Spain, Netherlands) and directed a multi-collaborative project called Antiradical Opera with writer Jesse Glass. He founded laptop quartet 20/21, which is devoted to performances of graphical notation scores and many more activities.
Bumsteinas started as a visual artist working with artist Laura Garbstienò. In the fall of 2002, during the exhibition Parallel Progressions 3 in Vilnius‘ Contemporary Art Center they founded G-Lab duo, which was devoted to video art, audiovisual installations and performances. He is an organiser of the first-ever series of experimental music events in Lithuania based on the concept of open mixer and simultaneous participation. He lives and works in Vilnius and Warsaw and is represented by ANTJEWACHS gallery in Berlin.
Cranc
Cranc formed in 1999. They perform infrequently and rarely release any music. They began performing with an interactive, gestural and highly energised aesthetic, as documented on their only CD release, ‘All Angels’. They are now exploring calm sonic landscapes. Although they mostly use acoustic instruments, they sound shamelessly electronic. Cranc is Rhodri Davies, Angharad Davies and Nikos Veliotis.
Angharad Davies - Violin
Angharad Davies is a violinist based in London. She is an active performer in contemporary, improvisation and experimental music both as a soloist and within ensembles. Her classical background lead her to further violin study with Charles-Andre Linale in Dusseldorf, Germany and subsequently Howard Davis in London. Her studies with these two eminent violinists inspire her own teaching practice. Since making London her base in 2002 she has developed a specific approach to the violin, extending the sound possibilities of the instrument by attaching and applying objects to the strings or by sounding unexpected parts of the instrument’s body. She is dedicated to exploring and expanding sound production on the violin. 2008 has seen Angharad perform a live radio broadcast with Apartment House for WDR Koln, and in June she took part in Tony Conrad’s ‘Unprojectable: Projection and Perspective’ which was specially conceived for the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London.
Rhodri Davies - Harp
Rhodri Davies has been a significant figure in European experimental and improvised music for over ten years and is based in London. He uses a range of inventive techniques to extend the possibilities and sounds of the harp. His regular groups include Branches, duo with John Butcher, Broken Consort, Common Objects, Cranc, Portable, Apartment House, The Sealed Knot and a trio with David Toop and Lee Patterson. He has commissioned new works for the harp by: Carole Finer, Catherine Kontz, Michael Maierhof, Michael Parsons, Tim Parkinson, Ben Patterson, Mieko Shiomi and Yasunao Tone.
Reinhold Friedl – Inside Piano
Born in Baden-Baden, he lives in Berlin. He studied piano in Stuttgart with Renate Werner and Paul Schwarz, and in Berlin with Alan Marks and Alexander von Schlippenbach. Reinhold Friedl extended the playing-technologies in the interior of the piano and introduced for this instrument the term “Inside piano”. He studied mathematics and musicology and received scholarships in Paris, Rome, Marseille, Amsterdam. He has given concerts in Europe, the USA, Australia and Japan and produced numerous CD and broadcasting recordings, as well as professional articles and radio features (WDR Cologne). Reinhold Friedl is founder and leader of the ensemble Zeitkratzer.
Frank Gratkowski - Saxophone
Born in Hamburg, 1963. Alto saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet, flute, composition. Started playing the saxophone at 16 and, following a period at the Hamburg Conservatory (Hamburger Musikhochschule), moved in 1985 to study at the Cologne Conservatory of Music with Heiner Wiberny, graduating in 1990.
Since 1990 he has been giving solo performances throughout Europe, Canada and USA. Frank Gratkowski has played at nearly every German and on numerous international Jazz Festivals including Vancouver, Toronto, Chicago, New York, Seattle, Quebec, Les Mans, Muelhuus, Groeningen, Nickelsdorf, Barcelona, Lithuania, Warsaw, Zagreb, Prague, Bratislava, Sofia, Bucharest, Odessa and Roma. He has been teaching saxophone and ensembles at the Cologne, Berlin and Arnhem Conservatory of Music and is giving workshops all around the world as well.
Robin Hayward - Tuba
The tuba player Robin Hayward, born in Brighton, England in 1969, has been based in Berlin since 1998. He has revolutionized the tuba’s potential both in the areas of noise and microtonality. His compositions for other instruments reflect a similar experimental, medium-specific approach. As an interpreter his specific playing ability has been utilized by leading composers such as Alvin Lucier and Christian Wolff. He has toured extensively both solo and in collaboration. His research to date has been documented in his solo CD Valve Division and various collaborative releases. Active in many contemporary music ensembles including Phosphor and Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin, in 2005 he founded Zinc & Copperworks for continued research into brass instruments.
Seth Josel - Guitar
Originally from New York, now residing in Berlin - has become one of the leading instrumental pioneers of his generation. As ensemble player and soloist he has been involved in the first performances of more than one hundred works. From 1991 till 2000 he was a permanent member of the Ensemble Musikfabrik NRW, a State-subsidized ensemble devoted to the performance of contemporary music. Recently released on Mode is a portrait of Gavin Bryars, in collaboration with Ulrich Krieger. He is the co-founder of www.sheerpluck.de, a website database dedicated to the contemporary guitar literature, and he is a member of the artistic committee for the newly founded Triennial in Amsterdam, “OUTPUT Festival”.
Matthew Lee Knowles - Gold Dust Performer
Matthew Lee Knowles was born in Scunthorpe in 1985, studied with Richard Baker and Paul Newland at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and writes music, poetry, events and happenings whilst teaching piano in London. Happenings include: “six_events” which took place in nearly thirty countries over seven days; “The Nothing and the Nothingness” where over one hundred performers contributed to an evening of exploration into the subject of nothingness in art, music, literature and dance; “For the Birds” for seven groups of people reading texts in seven different ways in seven different locations and a happening for the London Festival of Architecture. Compositions recently completed include: “33..44…. for a Speaker”; “Lecture on Chopin” (piano+speaker); “Ten Text Pieces for Josh”; “The Story of a Magnificent Banquet” (Harpsichord+speaker); “This is Fluxus (piano+speaker)”; “I always thought I’d like his sculpture in my garden”; three theatre scores; about one hundred mesostics; over one thousand events; numerous piano pieces; thousands of lists/questions/anagrams/palindromes/poems/waxpaintings/sculptures/videos and photographs. Future projects and pieces include setting texts of Jon Clay, more collaborative work with Neil Luck, several commissions and more happenings.
www.myspace.com/composermatthewknowlespianist
Aleksander Kolkowski – Violin
Aleksander Kolkowski studied Music at London University and the Royal Academy of Music and has worked internationally as a violinist, improviser, solo performer and composer appearing in major festivals world-wide and recording on numerous labels. Over the past ten years he has explored the potential of pre-electronic sound reproduction technology, combining horned violins, gramophones and wax cylinder phonographs to make contemporary live mechanical-acoustic music. This work has been shown widely in Europe, the U.S.A. and also broadcast on the BBC, WDR & Deutschlandradio radio stations. The ‘Stroh’ string instruments used in the performance all come from Kolkowski’s extensive collection of historic horned fiddles which includes the only working original Stroh String Quartet in existence. The Stroh violin, characterised by it’s large aluminium horn, was patented by Augustus Stroh in 1899 and manufactured until the 1940s. It was the first mechanically amplified string instrument and used widely in the early sound studios before the advent of electrical recording in 1925. Stroh instruments are highly versatile, their tone blends superbly with brass and wind, while they also can produce a wide variety of unusual sounds not found on their conventional counterparts. This makes them ideal for sonic experimentation. Kolkowski’s ‘What hath God wrought?’ for Stroh String Quartet performed by Apartment House, was featured in BBC Radio 3’s ‘Hear and Now’ in June 2007.
Neil Luck - Gold Dust Performer
Neil is a composer and performer based in London. His compositional practice focuses on various approaches to non-standard notations, in particular those which implicate either the composer’s own body/movement in construction and performance, or directly engage with the physiology of performance techniques themselves. This interest has lead to several projects including the co-curation of NOTATIONS 2008 with visual artist Sam Belinfante at the Slade research centre, London, as well as a series of live-performance installations for the Louise T Blouin institute, Soundwaves festival 2008, a happening; For the Birds created in collaboration with Matthew Lee Knowles, and a large scale vocal work created with Sam Belinfante and EXAUDI for the launch of the Campaign for Drawing Festival 2008.
Neil is also the founder of ARCO - a collective of emerging composers, artists and string players from a range of musical and artistic disciplines and backgrounds, investigating experimental approaches to musical notation and live performance practice.
Phil Minton - Vocals
Phil Minton was born in Torquay UK 1940 and both his parents were singers. He learnt trumpet from age 15 and played and sung with local jazz groups, moving to London in ‘63 to play with Mike Westbrook. From the mid ’60s he worked in dance bands in the UK, Canary Islands and Sweden. Rejoining Westbrook in ‘72 he was a regular member of his Brass Band until ‘84 playing trumpet and singing extensively in Europe, USA and beyond. Over the last 30 years he’s worked mainly as an improvising singer and sung with most of the world’s leading improvising musicians as well as been a guest singer for many composer’s music. He collaborated with pianist Veryan Weston on compositions such as ”Songs from a Prison Diary” and is currently a member of improvising groups TooT, No Walls and Axon. He also has a quartet with Veryan, John Butcher, and Roger Turner. In the last 15 years has traveled to many countries with his “Feral Choir”, a workshop and concert for all people who want to sing.
Maja Ratkje – Voice / Electronics
Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje, composer and performer (born Dec. 29th 1973 in Trondheim, Norway), finished composition studies at the Norwegian State Academy of Music in Oslo in 2000. Her music has been heard all over Europe as well as in Japan, China, Canada, USA and eastern Russia. Her composed works have been performed by Klangforum Wien, Oslo and Bodø Sinfonietta, The Norwegian Radio Orchestra, Fretwork, TM+, Arve Tellefsen, Cikada and Vertavo string quartets, Quatuor Renoir, Ticom, crashEnsemble, Torben Snekkestad, Marianne Beate Kielland, SPUNK, Frode Haltli, Rolf-Erik Nystrøm and Håkon Thelin in POING among others. Ratkje is active as a singer/voice user and electronics player as well as studio engineer, mainly in connection with the contemporary improvisation ensemble SPUNK or as a solo artist. Other groups are the metal band Trinacria, duo with Jaap Blonk, the performance trio Agrare and a workers’ songs collaboration with the acoustic trio POING. Ratkje has performed her own music for films, dance and theatre performances, installations, and numerous other projects. Her music has been released by Tzadik, rune grammofon, ECM, Kontrans, Asphodel, Important Records and others.
Twentytwentyone – Laptop quartet
Twentytwentyone isn’t your average chamber quartet. Firstly, because the instruments it uses are laptop computers. Secondly, because it interprets (or, often, reinterprets) graphic and aleatoric scores by both the 20th century classics like Cardew and today’s composers (hence the quartet’s symbolic name), as well as graphic artifacts whatsoever unrelated to music. In effect, the quartet’s performances are a curious and engaging hybrid of a concert and an exhibition, with the actual scores projected on the screen as they are turned into electronic sound. Brought together by the inexhaustible idea generator Arturas Bumsteinas, the collective consists of four sound artists with diverse aesthetic inclinations, which makes the sound of Twentytwentyone complex, multi-layered and widescreen.
Lina Lapelyte - Laptop
Arturas Bumsteinas - Laptop
Antanas Dombrovskij - Laptop
Vilius Siaulys - Laptop
Nikos Veliotis - Cello
Nikos Veliotis was born in Athens, Greece. Active in the experimental field (audio & video) since late 90s. Veliotis uses floating long sustained sounds (primarily with the cello) and multilayred abstract visuals (overlays of digital trash and other digital found material) which provide the spectator with a suspended intermedia environment to sink in, dislocating him from the casual perception of time and space. He runs the Athens 2:13 club whose activities include an annual 2:13 three-day festival.
Michael Vorfeld - Percussion
Musician and visual artist, based in Berlin, plays percussion and self designed stringed instruments and realises electroacoustic sound pieces. Vorfeld works in the field of improvised, experimental music and sound art and is often involved in site-specific art projects. Besides his solo activities he is a member of various ensembles and collaborates with artists from different art forms. He realises light installations and performances with light, works with photography and film.
Mark Wastell – Tam Tam
London-based lowercase improviser and composer Mark Wastell builds enormous atmospheres on the Tam Tam with very little actual movement. Wastell’s music is dark, deep and beautiful. Slow movements build up sonic pulses that are able to take over rooms and buildings. He is creating something that is very close to pure elegance. He has played with people like Tony Conrad, Keith Rowe, Otomo Yoshihide, Tomas Korber, Toshimaru Nakamura and Joachim Nordwall.
Marc Weiser – Laptop / Voice
Born in the city of Kraftwerk and Joseph Beuys he studied Outer European music and philosophy. He is a musician (git, vox, electronics) and part time writer (Suhrkamp, Verbrecher Verlag). For 3 years he was Programme Director for the club “Maria am Ostbahnhof“ in Berlin and worked for different record labels as Product Manager (eye q / harthouse / königshaus / wea …). He was part of the curator- team of the “club transmediale – international festival for electronic music and related visual arts“ 1999 - 2007 in Berlin. Since 1997 he has been part of the audio - visual project “rechenzentrum“, giving live performances, lectures and workshops. He was commissioned by the Goethe institute for a new version of the 5th piano concert of l.v. Beethoven (opus 73 / emperor) in 2006 with Ueli Wiget from Ensemble Modern. He has produced music and sound design for dance companies, commercials, films, radioplays etc. and has been a part of the ensemble for contemporary music “Zeitkratzer“ since 2003. He has provided vox and electronics for the techno-noise live project “t.raumschmiere“ (novamute). He has given 200 instant genre generator performances as “marc marcovic “.
SONIC ARTS NETWORK
ergo phizmiz
carl stone
vicki bennett (people like us) at ubu
people like us site
INTUTE also has great links to 135 plus sonic artists click HERE
23.8.08
Ubu Web (thankyou) - Music Overheard
Music Overheard edited by Damon Krukowski
CD 2 : Curated by Kenneth Goldsmith
[ CD 1: Curated by Bhob Rainey ]
An audio response to the exhibition Super Vision at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, December 10 2006 to April 29 2007
1. "The Problem With Bodies" - Gregory Whitehead (01:19) 
Track 1: All voicings and voicalisms originated from the inside of Gregory Whitehead's own larynx. "The Problem with Bodies" originally appeared on The Pleasure of Ruins and Other Castaways (Staalplaat, 1993).
Gregory Whitehead is an internationally acclaimed audio artist, radiomakerand playwright. He is the co- editor of Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde, and the writer of numerous essays on subjects relating to media technologies and the body.2. "Marilyn Monroe" - Language Removal Services (00:55)
Language Removal Services is a pioneer in the arena of language removal for vocal applications. Our laboratory is, we believe, the only one of its kind in the world. LRS facilities include our state of the art vocal observation chamber; a special storage facility for our archives, including the world-famous Raymond Chronic Static Language library; and the laboratory, which houses the latest developments in both Static and Ecstatic language development platforms.3. "Le corps est une usine à sons (excerpt)" - Henri Chopin (05:19)
Track 3: Henri Chopin: voice, body & electronics. "The Body is a Sound Factory" was featured on an LP of previously unpublished pieces accompanying the box set, Revue OU published by Alga Marghen.
Henri Chopin (b. 1922) is one of the pioneers of sound poetry, both with his own works and with his work as a publisher. Since the 1950s, Chopin has explored the amplification of the voice and the body, the vibrations of the larynx, the labial snaps and the hiss of bodily systems. He pioneered the use of the tape recorder in sound poetry, extending the purview of Musique concrète developments in France after the Second World War. He edited the magazine Cinquième Saison from 1959 to 1963, and then the magazine-with-record series OU from 1964 to 1974. Chopin lives in England. 4. "Memento Mori" - Matmos (07:32)
Track 4: Matmos "Memento Mori" (Professor Ping Publishing). Composed entirely from samples of human skull, goat spine and connective tissue, and artificial teeth. M. C. Schmidt: Human Skull, Goat Spine, Teeth, Mix. Drew Daniel: Sampling, Sequencing, Digital Editing, EFX. Courtesy of Matador Records.
Matmos is M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel, aided and abetted by many others. In their recordings and live performances over the last nine years, Matmos have used the sounds of: amplified crayfish nerve tissue, the pages of bibles turning, a bowed five string banjo, slowed down whistles and kisses, water hitting copper plates, the runout groove of a vinyl record, a $5.00 electric guitar, liposuction surgery, cameras and VCRs, chin implant surgery, contact microphones on human hair, violins, rat cages, tanks of helium, violas, human skulls, cellos, peck horns, tubas, cards shuffling, field recordings of conversations in hot tubs, frequency response tests for defective hearing aids, a steel guitar recorded in a sewer, electrical interference generated by laser eye surgery, whoopee cushions and balloons, latex fetish clothing, rhinestones on a dinner plate, Polish trains, insects, ukelele, aspirin tablets hitting a drum kit from across the room, dogs barking, people reading aloud, life support systems and inflatable blankets, records chosen by the roll of dice, an acupuncture point detector conducting electrical current through human skin, rock salt crunching underfoot, solid gold coins spinning on bars of solid silver, the sound of a frozen stream thawing in the sun, a five gallon bucket of oatmeal.5. "Keening (excerpt)" - John Duncan (07:35)
Track 5: Excerpt from "The Keening Towers," John Duncan, Gothenburg Biennial 2003. Curated by Carl Michael von Hausswolff. San Pietro Elementary School Children's Choir conducted by John Duncan. Soloist: Timoti Toniutti. Audio system designed by Giorgio Tomasini. Towers provided by E.D. Knutsen, Gothenburg. Thanks to: Giuliana Stefani; Peo Karlsson for E.D. Knutsen; Lennart Pettersson and the tech crew at Göteborg Konstmuseet; Cecilia Borgström-Fälth, Elisabeth Rees, Åsa Nohlström and the Gothenburg Biennial staff; Luisa Tomasetig and the children of San Pietro Elementary School; Massimo Toniutti for the recording of Timoti's voice.
John Duncan was born in the United States, and currently lives and works in Italy. His events and installations have recently been held at Eco e Narciso in Turin, MUTEK in Montreal, The Compound in San Francisco, Teatro Fondamenta Nuova in Venice, Teatro Piccolo Jovinelli in Rome, the Noorlands-Operan in Umeå, Fylkingen in Stockholm, the Watari Museum of Art in Tokyo, the Gothenburg Biennial, Quarter in Florence and Galleria Enrico Fornello in Prato. His audio releases The Crackling (1996, with Max Springer), Tap Internal (2000), Palace of Mind (2001, with Giuliana Stefani), Fresh (2002, with Zeitkratzer), Phantom Broadcast (2002), Infrasound-Tidal (2003), The Keening Towers (2003) and Nine Suggestions (2005, with Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen, a.k.a. Pan Sonic) are considered by critics and composers alike to be benchmarks in the field of experimental music. His work in performance has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; the Osterreichisches Museum für Angewandte Kunst (MAK), Vienna; Museu d'Arte Contemporani, Barcelona (MACBA); and Museum of Tokyo (MOT).6. "About Face, Part 1" - Caroline Bergvall (05:00)
Track 6: Caroline Bergvall, voice. The written piece of "About Face, Part 1" is featured in full in her recent text collection FIG (Salt, 2005).
Caroline Bergvall is a poet and performance artist based in London, England. Books include: Goan Atom (Krupskaya, 2001), and Eclat (Sound&Language, 1996), rethought as an online book for ubu editions (2004). Her most recent collection of poetic and performance pieces, FIG (Goan Atom 2) was recently published (Salt Books, 2005) and her CD of readings and audiotexts, Via: poems 1994-2004 (Rockdrill 8) is available through Carcanet. As an artist, she has developed text performances as well as collaborative pieces with sound artists, both in Europe and in North America, including the installation Little Sugar for TEXT Festival (Bury, 2005) and Say: "Parsley" at the Liverpool Biennial (2004). Her critical work is largely concerned with emerging forms of writing, plurilingual poetry and mixed media writing practices. She is co-Chair of the MFA Writing Faculty, Milton Avery School of the Arts, Bard College (NY).
7. "Lips Is" - Paul Dutton (03:49)
Track 7: Paul Dutton: voice. No electronic effects or processing, no feedback, overdubs, or fades. "Lips Is" appeared on the CD Mouth Pieces: Solo Soundsinging (OHM editions, 2000). Engineered by Steve Lebrasseur, Avatar Sound Studios, Quebec City. Rights for "Lips Is" are administered by SOCAN.
Paul Dutton is a writer and soundsinger who began publishing and performing in 1967. A member of the groundbreaking poetry performance group The Four Horsemen (1970-1988) and the free improvisation band CCMC, Dutton continues to tour throughout North America and Europe, solo and in ensemble. The most recent of his six books is the novel Several Women Dancing, and the most recent of his five solo recordings is the CD Oralizations.8. "Marcel Duchamp" - Language Removal Services (00:47) 9. "Thirst (excerpt)" - Lauren Lesko (05:09)
Track 9: Excerpt from "Thirst" by Lauren Lesko. Producer: Connie Kieltyaka. Engineers: Brenda Hutchinson, Jonathan Duckett. Recorded in 1995 at Harvestworks, New York. Edition of 12.
I became friends with Lauren Lesko in New York in the early 1990s when we were both staples on the Soho art scene. At the time, Lauren was focusing on very strong feminist-oriented, body-centric works made of diverse mediums. In the mid-90s, she hit her stride as a poster-girl for the seminal Bad Girls show at the New Museum. Around the same time, Lauren also began to assume a larger role as a curator of feminist art shows around the country. In 1995, she handed me her audio work "Thirst," one of an edition of 12. I had never heard anything like it before or since. I had her give another copy to WFMU, where it received extensive airplay (and continues to do so). Over the years, the piece has become somewhat legendary, discussed in chatrooms, forums and journals. In the late 90s, Lauren headed off to India on a spiritual quest, ceasing her activities in the art and sound worlds. - Kenneth Goldsmith10. "Crackers (excerpt)" - Christof Migone (05:00)
Track 10: "Crackers" (excerpt) taken from track 3 of the CD Crackers (Locust Music, 2001). Source: cracking knuckles, knees, wrists, jaws, toes, ankles, backs, necks, elbows, hips.
Christof Migone is a multidisciplinary artist and writer. His work and research delves into language, voice, bodies, psychopathology, performance, video, intimacy, complicity, endurance. He co-edited the book and CD Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language (Errant Bodies Press, 2001) and his writings have been published in Aural Cultures, S:ON, Experimental Sound & Radio, Musicworks, Radio Rethink, Semiotext(e), Angelaki. He obtained an MFA from NSCAD in 1996 and is currently a PhD (ABD) candidate at the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University. He has released six solo audio cds on various labels (Avatar, ND, Alien 8, Locust, Oral). He has curated a number of events in the sound and radio arts: Touch that Dial (1990), Radio Contortions (1991), Rappel (1994), Double Site (1998), stuttermouthface (2002). He has performed at Beyond Music Sound Festival (Los Angeles), kaaistudios (Brussels), Resonance FM (London), Nouvelles Scènes (Dijon), On the Air (Innsbruck), Ménagerie de Verre (Paris), Experimental Intermedia (NYC), Méduse (Québec), Victoriaville Festival, and in Montreal at Radio Canada, Quinzaine de la Voix, Musiques Fragiles, Galerie Oboro, Casa del Popolo, Théâtre La Chapelle. His installations have been exhibited at the Banff Center, Rotterdam Film Festival, Gallery 101, Art Lab, eyelevelgallery, Forest City Gallery, Studio 5 Beekman. He has collaborated with Lynda Gaudreau, Martin Tétreault, Tammy Forsythe, Alexandre St-Onge, Michel F. Côté, Gregory Whitehead, Set Fire To Flames, and Fly Pan Am. A monograph on his work, Christof Migone - Sound Voice Perform, was published in 2005. He currently lives in Montréal and teaches at Concordia University.11. "Ritual with Giant Hissing Madagascar Cockroaches" (excerpt)" - Miya Masakoa (05:00)
Track 11: "Ritual with Giant Hissing Madagascar Cockroaches" was performed by artist with thirteen Madagascar Cockroaches triggering the insects' amplified hissing while crawling over performer's body. Courtesy of Miya Masaoka.
Miya Masaoka resides in New York City and is a classically trained musician, composer and sound/installation artist. She has created works for solo koto, laser interfaces, laptop and video. She has also made works for sculpture installations and written scores for ensembles, chamber orchestra and mixed choirs. In her pieces, she often works with the sonification of data, and maps the behavior of brain activity, plants and insect movement to sound.12. "Straight Razor" - Jim Roche (09:20)
Track 12: Jim Roche: voice. "Straight Edge Razor" is from the LP Learning To Count (Morgan Gallery, Kansas City, 1983). It is currently available as a double CD, Jim Roche Early Works (Mary Brogan Museum of Art, Tallahassee, 2004).
Jim Roche was born 1943, Florida. Exhibitions include: Solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1974; 37th Venice Biennial in 1976; and the 10th Biennale de Paris in 1977. Movie appearances include: Something Wild (1986), Silence Of The Lambs (1990), Philadelphia (1993), Beloved (1998), and The Manchurian Candidate (2003). Roche's audio performance "Fight It Out" was used for the movie Slacker. His work is archived on UbuWeb and WFMU. A DVD, A Jim Roche Experience, was recently issued.
13. "William S. Burroughs" - Language Removal Services (00:56)
14. "Hayfever" - People Like Us (02:36)
Track 14: Dedicated to Loretadine, without whom, this track would be much longer.
For 16 years Vicki Bennett has been making CDs, radio, and A/V multimedia under the name People Like Us. By animating and recontextualising found footage collages, Vicki gives an equally witty and dark view of popular culture with a surrealistic edge. People Like Us does an ongoing experimental arts radio show onWFMU, called "DO or DIY," and is currently Artist in Residence at the BBC Creative Archive.15. "P" - Christof Migone (01:00)
16. "Zzz... (excerpt)" - Leif Elggren and Thomas Liljenberg (09:33)
Track 16: Leif Elggren and Thomas Liljenberg: voice. Published by Firework Edition, 1996.
Firework is the name of the group that Leif Elggren and Thomas Liljenberg founded in 1978 and under which they have put on several exhibitions and performances. As a result of the philosophical discussion engendered by the underlying essence of this work, a small publishing company, Firework Edition, was started in 1982. It has since then brought out many books and other printed matter, multiples and records and put on a number of exhibitions, not only by the founders, but also as a result of collaboration with various other artists.
Track Notes
When listening to Henri Chopin's music (3), it's hard to tell that it's body-derived; instead it sounds like much of the Musique concrète of its day. It's only after reading the liner notes that you learn that the source for a composition was, say, Chopin banging a speaker against the side of his head. Chopin's direct bodily engagement has inspired younger artists: listen, for example, to Matmos' Memento Mori, (4) where an abstract composition gradually morphs into a surprisingly rich-even pleasant-piece of music. It's only after we learn that it was composed entirely from samples of human skull, goat spine and connective tissue, and artificial teeth do we listen in a different way.
Similarly, on first listening, Miya Masaoka's Ritual with Giant Hissing Madagascar Cockroaches (11) sounds like any number of contemporary electronic compositions, yet again, once we learn of its methodology-sounds triggered by the movement of cockroaches on the performer's naked body-our relationship to the work drastically changes.
On first listen to Christof Migone's Crackers (10) you might think you're listening to a garden variety of computer glitchwerks until you become aware that the source material for the piece is the cracking of human bones. In all three pieces, the procedural knowledge is not contingent on the success of the piece, for they are all gorgeous; rather, once you know, another layer of complexity is added.
While Chopin was busy exploring the sounds of his own body, composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen were seeing what could formally be done by manipulating existing voices ("Gesang der Jünglinge"). Whereas Stockhausen was a formalist-seeing how far he could push the acoustic technology in the work-the younger composer John Duncan takes a radical turn toward subjectivity and emotion for his installation The Keening Towers (5). Using audio systems mounted at the tops of enormous steel towers, the source of the piece is a 30-voice Italian children's choir. Duncan states that, "The personal motivation for this project is to make a small gesture to give something back to kids, especially infants, that I've seen in my life who were victims of abuse by adults... I don't think it really matters whether 'The Keening Towers' communicates this aspect to anyone else-I'm satisfied that it works on this level for me whenever I hear the whispers, screams, etc., all made by kids having fun with their voices, moving as if they're coming down out of the wind, at times whispering directly into my ear, at other moments morphing into sexual groans that for several seconds sound as if they're being made by an adult couple hidden behind the museum façade." It's hard to image Stockhausen making such a statement.
People Like Us's Hayfever (14) is an audio vérité piece in the tradition of R. Murray Schaefer's World Soundscape Project which attempted to theorize acoustic ecology in the 60s and 70s. But Vicki Bennett (who records under the name of People Like Us) personalizes and embodies the devastating consequences of our untheorized polluted environmental space- using an odd mix of hayfever, pollen and ambient media-giving us a something that's closer to Julianne Moore in Todd Haynes' Safe than to the lofty aspirations of Schaefer.
Lauren Lesko (9) also favors a vérité approach and by using a contact microphone, gives us access to the sounds of the insides of her vagina. It's remarkably graphic, but not in ways that one might think: calming, warm and aquatic, and not surprisingly, womblike. The sensation produced in the listener is similar to the aforementioned Viennese Actionist films: jarring yet calm, art not porn.
A more staged approach is used in Leif Elggren and Thomas Liljenberg's Zzz...(16) which is an hour-long performance of two gentlemen snoring. At the beginning of the piece, it simply sounds like two people sleeping, a snore here, a cough there. But as the piece progresses, the snoring gets more theatrical and obnoxious until, about half way through, it turns into a snoring opera, with the two protagonists taking turns belting out twisted arias of snorts, yawns and honks. It's a hysterical and self-reflexive take on the more sober documentary durational performance works of an earlier era, say, Chris Burden, as well as a response to a work like Lesko's.
Another strain of body-centric works found here is language and its constituent parts: the sounds of the mouth, spoken descriptions of bodily functions and sensations, philosophical questions of corporeality, and the power of the sheer absence of language. Gregory Whitehead's The Problem with Bodies (1) sets the philosophical tone for the linguistic aspect of the disc. In it, a disembodied voice (the voice of media) is asked to repeat a proposition first without using a tongue, next without opening the mouth, and finally without using the larynx, reducing the philosophical proposition to a series mere glottal clicks.
Language Removal Services (2, 8, 13) takes Whitehead's directive literally and removes all language from recordings of famous personalities, leaving us not with their jewels of wisdom, but rather with the peripheral detritus between the words. For this disc, I selected three tracks using figures as source material whom seemed to me particularly invested in corporeality: Marilyn Monroe, Marcel Duchamp and William S. Burroughs.
Paul Dutton moves in a similar direction of linguistic non-sense. Lips Is (7) is comprised entirely of labial sounds. In it, the lips-conventionally thought of as our primary delivery system of linguistic communication- are used to create anything but conventional language. Instead Dutton makes an astonishing array of lip sounds including babble, breath, salivation, kissing, and electronic music; think of him as Henri Chopin unplugged.
Christof Migone brings a technological sense to bear on the body's urinary function in P (15). Migone states of the piece: "I said / shouted / whispered (depending on the context) 'P' every time I went to pee until I reached 1000 times (took 149 days). The playback of the Ps is in accordance to the timestamp of the original P (it's hard to discern a variance in spacing in the 1 minute version here, there's a 60 minute version where that's more obvious)." The rhythm of the piece is determined by the clicking on and off of the recording apparatus reminiscent of the stop-click tape recording experiments of Anton Bruhin, while the self's examination through technology gives an eerie aura to the work, reminiscent of Coppola's The Conversation.
Cresting on the border between conventional language, deconstructed words, and glottal stuttering is a piece from Caroline Bergvall, About Face, Part 1 (6). Prior to a reading in 1999, Bergvall, a Norwegian / British / French poet had a tooth removed yet decided to go ahead with the reading anyway. The result was a series of unintentional linguistic gaffes-stutters and hesitancies which added another layer of complexity to Bergvall's already complex relationship to her stew of "native" languages. As Bergvall says of the piece, "The sutured pain and phantom bone made it difficult to articulate the text to the audience. Speech fluency is an articulatory feat. It presupposes the smooth functioning of speaking's motor skills. It is a choreography of the physiological mouth into language."
Moving back toward a more conventional narrative is Jim Roche's Straight Razor (12), where he gives a graphically hypnotic accounting of what feels like to be cut with a straight-edged razor. Circuitously chanted in a Steinian way, Roche articulates an almost slow-motion account of the incident. Recorded in 1972, the piece grows out of a series of improvised performance works that Roche performed in galleries. By throwing himself into a trance and adopting characters of his native South, Roche's audio works are remarkable documents which still have the power to provoke and stun some thirty-five years later.
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