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

featured: BBC Radiophonic Workshop

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

(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

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

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

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?

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