Triptych: The Music of Eliane Radigue

      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.

for event information and booking, go to sound and music website

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

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

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

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

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

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. "