Futurónica 160

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Episode 160 of Futurónica, a broadcast in Rádio Manobras (91.5 MHz in Porto, 18h30) and Rádio Zero (21h GMT, repeating on Tuesday at 01h) airs tomorrow, February 19th.

The playlist of Futurónica 160 is:

  1. Simon Whetham, Against Nature [1] (2016, Against Nature, Crónica)
  2. Simon Whetham, Against Nature [2] (2016, Against Nature, Crónica)
  3. Simon Whetham, Against Nature [3] (2016, Against Nature, Crónica)
  4. Simon Whetham, Against Nature [4] (2016, Against Nature, Crónica)
  5. Simon Whetham, Against Nature [5] (2016, Against Nature, Crónica)
  6. Simon Whetham, Mic.Madeira (Stereo version) (2011, Mic.Madeira, Crónica)

You can follow Rádio Zero’s broadcasts at radiozero.pt/ouvir and Rádio Manobras at radiomanobras.pt.

“Against Nature” reviewed by nitestylez.de

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Soon to come as cat.no. 103 of the Portoguese Cronica Electronica-imprint is Simon Whetham’s most recent album entitled “Against Nature” which consists of five takes of the same name, all recorded and generated throughout his residency at the Agder Kunstsenter in Kristiansand / Norway in late 2013. “Against Nature [1]” is a quiet, partly repetetive piece that might be generated from contact microphone recordings overhearing digital processors and their micro currents for lovers of Clicks’n’Cuts , “Against Nature [2]” brings in wistful electronic moaning and tense, Morricone-like atmospheres of lurking terror whilst “Against Nature [3]” caters layers of polyrhythmic sinewave tones, rumbling field recordings, clanging glasses and indifferent moving objects accompanied by vibrating tubes. Furthermore we see “Against Nature [4]” start off with scraping tones and stereophonic noise pulses later joined by muffled sounds resembling slowly boiling liquids before a harsh metallic strike leads into a total plot twist, turning the whole tune into a robotic, mechanical audio sculpture. Finally “Against Nature [5]” brings in hissing drones, electrical buzz and nice waves of low frequency bass wildly disturbed by experimental filter works to round things off nicely here, concluding a well-recommended album for lovers of experimental electronic music.

via nitestylez.de

New release: Simon Whetham’s “Against Nature”

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It’s always a good strategy to open with a salvo of tension, dynamics and volatility. The threat of another will continue to loom throughout the following, lending a disquiet to even the most minimal of passages. Such is the unveiling of these five chapters in a highly refined practice of telescoping sound from the British artist Simon Whetham. If it is not a sense of unease, then something carcinogenic, septic, or unstable is felt, heard, and / or alluded to. Against Nature makes for an apt title, though a literary reference to the decadent work by Huysmans is an implausible one. Here, we find Whetham confronting an existential question in relation to a principle working method, what Whetham qualifies as “an intervention.” The process is relatively straight-forward and somewhat commonplace, as the sound artist seeks out spaces with interesting acoustic properties and activates those sounds through physical or electrical means. The question that Whetham ponders is in regards to the mark-making, the disruption, and the destruction of that site through his action. Out of that investigation, Whetham presents a confluence of activity: white noise scabbed from physical abrasion, static and circuit amplification from electronics gone haywire, the resonance of bell tones grotesquely transformed into a chorale of noxious buzz, the complication, the confusion, the unknown. Jim Haynes

Against Nature is Simon Whetham’s third full length release in Crónica, after Mic.Madeira, in collaboration with Hugo Olim, and Never So Alone.

With Against Nature, Whetham explores errors and failures. Although this is by no means a new concept, in this work these were used as part of an organic process in the generation of source materials. Sounds emitted by badly built microphones, over-burdened amplifiers, motors driven by sound impulses, misbehaving software, objects toppling, were all arrived at through sonic investigation — and often as an unexpected result.

Rather than deleting the unexpected outcomes, Whetham found them more interesting to work with than the desired results.

With Against Nature, as with all of Whetham’s work, the material was allowed to dictate its order. The nature of the sounds collected and the way they were collected has led to a more erratic and unpredictable composition than in many of his previous works.

Against Nature is now available from Crónica, Bandcamp and all the best digital and physical goods retailers!

“Against Nature” reviewed by Le Son du Grisli

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Une façon peut-être de s’éloigner du field recording pur… Simon Whetham joue ici contre nature : cinq fois, à partir de sons attrapés en compagnie d’Agder Kunstsenter en Norvège entre octobre et novembre 2013.

La branche sur laquelle il se pose n’est donc plus réaliste : pas concrète non plus, puisque l’électronique la travaille. Souffles endurants, rumeurs électriques, signaux alternatifs, plaintes animales ou céramiques, trembleurs de toutes sortes : dans le matériau qu’il trouve et transforme, Whetham trouve toujours de quoi composer – et même, étonner (dernières minutes d’Against Nature [3]). Avec un naturel, justement, confondant. Guillaume Belhomme

via Le Son du Grisli

“Gamelan Descending a Staircase” reviewed by Neural

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Gamelan Descending a Staircase is a composition of over fifty minutes whose instrumental sound materials were recorded at the Museum Dahlem Ethnologisches in the summer of 2013, during a research visit. A wide variety of Indonesian gamelan orchestra instruments were recorded specially for the occasion and later assembled into one surround sound composition that was then performed live. The gamelan may be thought of as a percussion orchestra and its instruments are mostly met allophones struck with mallets of various sizes, shapes, and materials: more than enough for Bumšteinas to rethink structures of the tradition and build a free form sound collage. The result is really fascinating and the compl rhythmic geometry of the work completely surround listeners, immersing them in timeless dreamlike atmospheres. Aurelio Cianciotta

“Gamelan Descending a Staircase” reviewed by Bad Alchemy

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Der 33-jährige litauische Klanginstallateur und Composer-Performer nimmt hier Marcel Duchamps ‘Nu descendant un escalier’ von 1912 als Inspiration für eine klangliche Analogie. Zerlegt in Myriaden tröpfelnder Partikel lässt er eine Klanggestalt endlos eine Treppe herunter kommen. Als eine Kaskade von perkussiven Schritten, die das nackte Steigen, die Bewegung als zimmerwährenden Zustand suggeriert. Als Spielfeld nutzte Bumšteinas (zusammen mit Raminta Atnimar) Gamelans im Ethnologischen Museum Dahlem in Berlin. Mit diesem Quellmaterial formte er eine Surround-Sound-Komposition von 50 Minuten, die erstmals im April 2015 beim Jauna Musika Festival in Vilnius erklang. Wie bei Zenons Paradox, um’s Eck gedacht, wird bei Bewegtheit von allem, des Körpers in der Zeit und der Zeit im Rauschen des Blutes und im Zerfall der Zellen, als Zustand wahrnehmbar. Als muybridgesches Daumenkino. Als “das Nicht-Fließende, das fließt.” Als kontinuierliches Diskontinuum. Als permanenter Abstieg, der einem Klingklang, der das klöppelnde und glockenspielerische Werk der vier Hände regnerisch und windspielerisch erweitert und entgrenzt. “Alles formt sich durch Zahlenverbindungen zwischen diesen Klangmolekülen”, um noch einmal Roberto Calasso murmeln zu lassen.

“Everything Emanating from the Sun” recommended by Ambientblog.net

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This is the first release of a forthcoming Crónica series called Corollaries: works that were produced as part of the Active Crossover residency curated by Simon Whetham: ‘a platform to investigate further ways of capturing, creating, composing and performing in sound’.

“Igor Stravinsky talked about the pleasure of listening to the sounds of nature, however he emphasized that we would fool ourselves to call this music. Natural sounds, as he argued, suggest music, are promises of music, but cannot become music until they are put into order and organized as a “conscious human act”.”

Yiorgis Sakkelariou opens the series with a 31 minute composition called “Everything Emanating From The Sun“ (the title comes from Emanuel Swedenborg’s Life in Animals & Plants).

“Eventually the amount of manipulation and ordering of the recordings followed purely musical and compositional needs. It is about effectively placing sonic events in time and not submitting to any kind of pre-fixed rules about recorded sound. After all, I did not perceive this piece as a representation of my journey in Estonia and certainly I was not merely documenting the country’s sonic atmosphere.”

“Returning to Stravinsky’s thoughts, perhaps the conscious human act that he requires can simply be the act of listening. This activity, potentially profound and meaningful, establishes a form of communication between the listener and the environment but remains a personal experience.”

“Everything Emanating From The Sun“ starts out with a drone that may very well be the deepest/lowest you have ever heard, changes into a much louder, almost mind-numbing industrial pulse… then to suddenly transform into a soundscape incorporating many different kinds of environmental recordings. Indefinable metallic sounds, resembling rain on a roof, conclude the piece before it returns to a comforting silence.

via ambientblog.net

“Gamelan Descending a Staircase” reviewed by Blow Up

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Nonostante una discografia vasta quanto variegata, mai su queste pagine si è scritto di Arturas Bumsteinas, compositore lituano in grado di muoversi col medesimo talento e disinvoltura tra sperimentazione elettronica e neoclassica. Viene a proposito “Gamelas Desdending a Staircase”, che tra l’altro sancisce il centesimo titolo della portoghese Crónica, a sottolineare nuovamente la poliedrici di Bumsteinas che, ospite del berlinese Ethnologisches Museum Dahlem, ha potuto utilizzare vasto armamentario d’orchestra gamelan, rielaborando poi il registrato in una suite di cinquenta minuti che vuole ispirarsi, almeno nel titolo, all’opera di Duchamp “Nude Descending a Staircase Nº 2”. La specificità etnica della strumentazione naturalmente non inibisce tratti di marcata astrazione, con frangenti in cui il flusso percussivo di metallofoni, gong, campane e xilofoni si impiglia in vischiosi grumi avant, con attitudine non accademica ma, piuttosto, non distante dal primo Z’Ev. Paolo Bertoni