sonusphere

Triptych: The Music of Eliane Radigue

2011-05-17T03:20:00.000-07:00

photo © Arnold Binas

Date: 12 - 26 June 2011

Venue: Christ Church Spitalfields, St. Stephen's Walbrook,

Cafe Oto, Rich Mix and Watermans, London
Produced by: Sound and Music

Sound and Music presents the first major UK retrospective of the work of Eliane Radigue, one of the most celebrated and influential of living composers. This London-wide festival stages a curated selection of Radigue’s work including her extraordinary compositions for acoustic instruments, her classic electronic compositions and a unique presentation of her installation works.

Since the 1960s Eliane Radigue (born Paris, 1932) has created a singular, powerful and individual body of work. Strongly influenced by her studies of Tibetan Buddhism, her works since the mid 70s have explored slowly evolving states where musical change is perceived as environmental in scale, constant in evolution and virtually imperceptible in transformation. Often monumental in duration, her music communicates a sublime spiritual power, transporting the listener on a journey into the very heart of sound. A true original, Radigue has followed an artistic path unfettered through association to any schools and trends. She is now celebrated as a true innovator, pioneer and musical visionary. The audience at Triptych will be truly immersed in sound in venues chosen in consultation with the artist for their resonant beauty and rich acoustics.

Christ Church Spitalfields – performances as part of Spitalfields Music's Summer Festival of Radigue’s celebrated collaborations with performers including the first UK performance of the monumental Naldjorlak trilogy and the world premiere of Occam 1 for solo harp, a work completed this year on her 79th birthday.

St. Stephens Walbrook – eight concerts of classic electronic works in one of London’s most beautiful acoustics. This concert series will including the epic Trilogie De Le Mort, a spiritual acoustic journey reflecting on the transcendence of death, and a special concert of Radigue's early and very rarely heard feedback works.

Triptych also features a free public presentation of Radigue’s rarely heard installation works on a series of Sonic Beds designed by sound artist and Radigue collaborator Kaffe Matthews. These instruments have been designed for the audience to lie in and feel sound move up, down and around their bodies in ever changing patterns of vibration.

Works in the Triptych season are performed by leading international musicians who have become key collaborators with Eliane Radigue, including Charles Curtis, Carol Robinson, Bruno Martinez, Kasper Toeplitz, Rhodri Davies and The Lappetites.

Aki Onda Cassette Memories Cour Carrée du Louvre 14/5/2011 Nuit des Musées

2011-05-06T07:36:00.001-07:00

Aki Onda
Cassette Memories

Birdcage sound gallery
Cour Carrée du Louvre
May 14. 8PM – 10PM.
Nuit des Musées (Museum Night).

Curated by : Daniele Balit

Visitors can come and leave anytime as they wish. The admission is free.

Aki Onda is an electronic musician, composer, and visual artist. Onda was born in Japan and currently resides in New York. He is particularly known for his Cassette Memories project – works compiled from a “sound diary” of field-recordings collected by Onda over a span of two decades. Onda’s musical instrument of choice is the cassette Walkman. Not only does he capture field recordings with the Walkman, he also physically manipulates multiple Walkmans with electronics in his performances.
Cassette Memories is a music performance, or a ritual, that Onda conjures up the general essence of memory by playing his field recordings, so to speak his personal memories, at a location which has its own memories. It’s invisible, but you would feel that live memories awake sleeping memories.

Birdcage is a sonic gallery initiated by Daniele Balit as an itinerant and temporary display to host artistic initiatives. Previous appearances include : Stockholm with Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Amsterdam with dj sniff, and Beijing with Yan Jun.

For more information and press inquiries, please contact: birdcagespace@gmail.com

Birdcage gracefully acknowledges support for the production of this project from the Dena Foundation for Contemporary Art.
And the kind collaboration of the Louvre Museum.

A special thanks goes to the Louvre Contemporary Art Program, chief curator Marie-Laure Bernadac and Pauline Guelaud.
And to : Eric Cordier, Licia Demuro, Silvia Ferro, Satoko Fujimoto, Mathias Geoffroy, Daniel Hosner, Hannah Huesberg, Marie Lelouche, Anthony Morabito. Eric Perier, Vincent Voillat.

Urls :

akionda.net
denafoundation.com
Nuit des Musées

A nod to Cage

2011-04-21T03:49:00.000-07:00

Felix’s Machines, image courtesy Atherton-Chiellino Photography

16 April - 5 June 2011
To accompany the exhibition Every Day is a Good Day, the Pavilion has curated a season of art and sound installations, with a nod to John Cage. An eclectic group of sound and visual artists were invited to respond to the artist’s work and ideas. These artists’ projects can be discovered throughout the building during April, May and the beginning of June.

There will be live performances by Mount Kimbie, Margaret Leng Tan, Keith Tippett, Brainwaves: Mira Calix, Anna Meredith, Aurora Quartet, Loop. pH, eighth blackbird and comedian Stewart Lee and contemporary pianists Tania Chen and Steve Beresford's reinterpretation of Cage's Indeterminacy readings to name but a few.

Random Fridays reaunches this season, featuring AK/DK, FOUND Collective, Jane Ormerod, Void Vector and many more genre-defying live projects from the most cutting edge contemporary acts the UK has to offer, with work inspired by the late, great John Cage.

>> Read more about Every Day is a Good Day
>> See our live programme page for ticketed events
>> Download a season calendar

EARS

2010-05-26T02:54:00.000-07:00

The ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS) project has been established to provide resources for those wishing to conduct research in the area of electroacoustic music studies. EARS will take the form of a structured Internet portal supported by extensive bibliographical tools. To aid the greater understanding of the opportunities offered by these radical forms of sound organisation, as well as their cultural impact, the project will cite (or link directly to) texts, titles, abstracts, images, audio and audio-visual files, and other relevant formats.

The Avant Garde Project and online Archive of out of print music

2010-03-12T06:25:00.000-08:00

The Avant Garde Project is a series of recordings of 20th-century classical, experimental, and electroacoustic music digitized from LPs whose music has in most cases never been released on CD, and so is effectively inaccessible to the vast majority of music listeners today.

In the Blink of an Ear

2010-02-02T02:22:00.000-08:00

In the Blink of an Ear
Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art

by Seth Kim-Cohen
Continuum

"Polemical, revisionist, prescriptive: In The Blink of an Ear argues for a reassessment of the short history of sound art, rejecting the tendency toward sound-in-itself in favour of a reading of sound’s expanded situation and its uncontainable textuality.

It has been nearly a century since Marcel Duchamp famously proposed a ‘non-retinal’ visual art, rejecting judgments of taste and beauty. In The Blink of an Ear asks why the sonic arts did not experience a parallel turn toward a non-cochlear sonic art, imagined as both a response and a complement to Duchamp’s conceptualism. Rather than treat sound art as an artistic practice unto itself, or as the unwanted child of music, In The Blink of an Ear relates the post-War sonic arts to contemporaneous movements in the gallery arts.

Key ideas from art history, poststructuralism and deconstruction are leveraged to suggest that the sonic arts have been subject to the same cultural pressures that have shaped the most important post-war movements in the gallery arts: Minimalism, conceptualism, appropriation and relational aesthetics. Sonic practice and theory have downplayed – or, in many cases, completely rejected – the de-formalization of the artwork and its simultaneous animation in the conceptual realm. John Cage and Pierre Schaeffer’s predilection for sound-in-itself fuses Greenbergian media-specificity with a phenomenological emphasis on perception, and this tendency has established itself as the dominant paradigm for the production and reception of sound art. In The Blink of an Ear dismantles this history, excavating the conceptual implications of important instances of the sonic arts of the past six decades, and establishing the principles for contemporary non-cochlear sonic practice.

Embracing the inevitable interaction of sound with the social, the linguistic, the philosophical, the political and the technological, In The Blink of an Ear announces a turning point in the theorization of the sonic arts. "

Max Neuhaus : Times Square, Time Piece Beacon. New Book

2010-01-08T10:29:00.000-08:00

A new publication on Neuhaus, by Diabooks, with texts by Christoph Cox, Branden W. Joseph and others.
Here's a review on Continuo's weblog.

Below a nice piece by Neuhaus, the Silent Alarm Clock, made in 1979, to awake the sleeper with silence...

Festival : Cut & Splice: Living Rooms

2009-05-20T02:36:00.000-07:00

Cut & Splice: Living Rooms
19-20 June 2009, Wilton's Music Hall, London
exploring the domestic soundscape
mapping the ultra-ordinary
the life of a room revealed

Cut & Splice: Living Rooms brings together some of the world’s leading sound artists and composers for a two day festival of performance, installation, video, broadcast, podcast and discussion that explores the beauty, memory and personal identity of sound in domestic environments. The event is set in one of London’s most atmospheric spaces, Wilton’s Music Hall, the last surviving and oldest grand music hall in the world.

Through a wide ranging programme using a range of unexpected spaces in Wilton’s Music Hall Cut & Splice: Living Rooms reveals the often over looked depth and meaning in the ordinary and individual sonic experience and dramatises the physical acoustic phenomena of architectural space.

go to web site

featured: BBC Radiophonic Workshop

2009-02-02T07:45:00.000-08:00

Full documentary on the famous BBC Radiophonic Workshop. On YouTube:

watch the following parts here

play the Doctor Who theme by Orbital:

Featured : William Furlong Exhibits

2009-01-29T04:55:00.000-08:00

(from The Wire)

The British sculptor and founder of the Audio Arts Magazine cassette series of interviews with artists is having an exhibition of his sound work in London. Titled Possibility & Impossibility Of Fixing Meaning and consisting of several 'sound frames' with multiple speakers mounted upon them, Furlong has taken various recordings he made of other artists voices and re-edited them into a new composition.

London Laure Gillard gallery
2 Hanway Place, W1T 1HB
23 January to 9 April
Telephone + 44 (0) 20 7323 6523

link:
audio arts

featured: "without records" - Otomo Yoshihide / ENSEMBLES

2009-01-24T02:48:00.000-08:00

without records (new version)
Otomo Yoshihide＋Aoyama Yasutomo

In this installation, there are about a hundred portable record players without records, but equipped with unusual materials such as corrugated paper or iron. In the space of the foyer, turntables scattered everywhere, high and low, right and left, produce noises by the rotating friction, resonating in multilayer. Quiet, low-fi sounds form groups and change the entire image of sounds. When visitors move the position of a player or replace the needle, an additional new world of sound appears. In the gallery on the second floor is a new installation, which disassembles turntable functions and hi-fi sound is output.
These installations provide people with an opportunity to reconsider the meaning, possibilities, and historical significance of sound art composed of records and turntables, which are being consigned to oblivion in the digital age.

(from YCAM)

audio culture: sonic drugs and sonic weapons

2008-12-29T14:44:00.000-08:00

Infrasounds as sonic drugs: such mp3s are recently available to download via p2p or rather being sold as "Binaural Brainwave Doses" by I-Doser Labs. Many doubts remain on such commercial exploitations of binaural beats, as explained by media hoax fighter Paolo Attivissimo in this article.
The following is a very good survey on the subject of acoustic weapons by artist Alex Davies.

Acoustic Trauma - Infrasound and Sonic Weapons

Intro post: L I S T E N

2008-12-29T13:48:00.000-08:00

As a percussionist I had been directly involved in the gradual insertion of everyday sounds into the concert hall, from Russolo through Edgard Varese and finally to John Cage where live street sounds were brought directly into the hall. I saw these activities as a way of giving aesthetic credence to these sounds – something I was all for. I began to question the effectiveness of the method, though. Most members of the audience seemed more impressed with the scandal of 'ordinary' sounds placed in a 'sacred' place than with the sounds themselves, and few were able to carry the experience over to a new perspective on the sounds of their daily lives.

I became interested in going a step further. Why limit listening to the concert hall? Instead of bringing these sounds into the hall, why not simply take the audience outside?

more...