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. "

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

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

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