LMY-7-10 from Miguel Carvalhais on Vimeo.
Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais’s installation at this year Serralves em Festa, in Porto, is finally documented in a short video. If you didn’t make it there, get your headphones and enjoy the sample. More photos are available at at-c.org.
Tudela and Carvalhais are currently working on a new piece, to be premiered September 1st at Lisboa Soa!
For those interested in environmental recordings, the Corollaries series on the Crónica label is a definite must-check.
This (sixth) edition in the series is an acoustic exploration of a deserted, metal water tower about four stories high made by soundscape artist John Grzinich.
“People are pulled inward upon hearing the depth of the reverberations from within. In numerous instances time seemed to stop as we gathered around, crawling about, climbing, plucking, bowing, striking, howling, stringing and generally playing in and around the great structure.â€
Two single-take recordings were made: “the first was a dialogue of sorts between three artists carried out through sporadic sounds and the second was a solo follow-up to meditate on how the various artifacts attached in the previous months were affected by the windy conditionsâ€.
The metallic sounds – clangs, whistles, whispers and moaning – from within the tower suggest that it’s alive and breathing.
A fascinating recording of post-industrial environmental ambience, available as a Name Your Price download (as are all editions in this series). Peter van Cooten
via Ambient Blog
Episode 172 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, August 5th.
The playlist of Futurónica 172 is:
You can follow Rádio Zero’s broadcasts at radiozero.pt/ouvir and Rádio Manobras at radiomanobras.pt.
Jim Haynes produces sulphureous visions from a peculiar brand of ill-defined concreteness; any hint to humanitarianism is canceled as states of feverish awareness announce terrible things to come. Throttle And Calibration may be born from the processing of hybrid recordings by different collaborators, yet it exudes the toxicity typical of the man’s finest outings. In a difficult field like this, it takes a special talent to maintain a high level of quality over the course of a lengthy career. In that regard, Haynes rarely fails to deliver the goods.
The five tracks walk convolute paths across variously altered matters and psychological conditions dictated by a thorough annihilation of “positive vibesâ€, as they say in the trade. When the relentless power of ineluctable events overwhelms the mind in all possible ways – from an obliteration of the mere act of thinking to the suggestion of utter hopelessness – that’s an unequivocal sign of success inside and beyond the compositional mechanism. Efficaciously harsh signals carve deep scars in the systems of acoustic receptiveness. Disembodied voices act as mini-preambles to landscapes of desolation contoured by an unspeakable anguish. Violent echoes of mechanical guerrilla wake us up while attempting self-hypnosis within the sonic grain. Slowly sloping drones and deceivingly calmer textures initiate the listener to the cult of a future that’s not going to greet us with a warm smile.
Live with this music for a while and start decoding its concealed messages minute by minute, notwithstanding the lack of luminousness. Remain in search of a sense of harmony that is actually there, only dressed in putrid rags and immobilized by musty ropes. Electrical shocks to desperately revive an already dead humanity; the unique grace of decay emerging from unusually amassed frequencies. It’s classic Haynes, and we need it. Massimo Ricci
“Throttle and Calibration†is the seventh release in the series Corollaries, that compiles works resulting from Active Crossover: Mooste, a cross-cultural collaborative residency curated by Simon Whetham and hosted by MoKS, in April and May 2015. All works are composed from material compiled in a collective archive during the project.
All source material in “Throttle and Calibration†collected from the Active Crossover archives, with recordings and sounds by Tuulikki Bartosik, Richard Eigner, John Grzinich, Jim Haynes, Rostislav Rekuta, Yiorgis Sakellariou, Dawn Scarfe, Eamon Sprod, Taavi Suisal, Simon Whetham, and James Wyness, 2015.
Noise, immolation, heterodyning, and other signal manipulations conducted by Jim Haynes at Helen Scarsdale’s shipping container in 2016.
“Throttle and Calibration†is a free download from Crónica or Bandcamp.
Met ‘Gamelan Descending a Staircase’ leidt de Litouwse componist en elektronica producer Arturas Bumšteinas ons binnen in de wereld van de gamelan. Het Indonesische slagwerk orkest. Het stuk, op de gelijknamige CD is wel op een heel bijzondere manier ontstaan.
Bumšteinas maakte in 2013, samen met Raminta Atnimar opnames van de diverse onderdelen van het gamelan orkest in het etnologisch museum van Berlijn. In 2015 bewerkte Bumšteinas deze geluiden vervolgens tot de huidige compositie die in april 2015 tijdens het Jauna Muzika Festival in Vilnius, Litouwen in première ging.
De titel ontleende BumÅ¡teinas aan een schilderij van Marcel Duchamp, ‘Nude Descending a Staircase, nr.2′. BumÅ¡teinas toont in deze compositie bijzonder geïnteresseerd te zijn in de enorme klankrijkdom van het gamelan orkest. Een duidelijke structuur ontbreekt, evenals een eenduidige richting. Sommige passages kennen wel iets van een ritme, maar verreweg het grootste deel van het stuk is te omschrijven als een dwaaltocht. Maar aangelengd met de nodige noise en distorsion is het wel een spannende dwaaltocht geworden. Maar die analogie met het doek van Duchamp is dus zo zo gek nog niet. BumÅ¡teinas zegt daar zelf over: “Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 painting Nude Descending the Staircase. No.2 was an inspiration lurking not only behind the title of this composition but also regarding the deconstructed micro-forms and the study of sound structures, progressing as if in slowmotion, and without a clear point of destination… Descending into the unknown territories… The title came in a vision, as a possible sonic event of a instruments of a gamelan orchestra falling down the stairs. A beautiful, unrealistic image. A dream.â€
Ook het tweede stuk op het album, ‘Sad Young Man on a Train’ is te beschrijven als een studie naar klank. Hier ligt de basis bij het clavecimbel. Maar denk hierbij dan niet aan de heer Bach en zijn tijdgenoten. In dit stuk klinkt het geluid van dit instrument totaal anders. Dankzij een uitgebreid scala aan hulpmiddelen, tot aan een cappuccino mixer aan toe, slaagt Bumšteinas erin om ook hier een zeer interessant klankuniversum te creëren. Ben Taffijn
via Nieuwe Noten
Deux pièces, enregistrées à Rotterdam dans l’église des marins norvégiens en 2012, utilisant orgue, guitare em ampli vox. La première, “Ma.Orgâ€, comme son nom l’indique, est une pièce d’orgue, entrons segments. Tout d’abord un continuum, en un long déroulement, jusque’à la moitié. Puis dans la seconde section, des sons de soufflerie, comme des flûtes basses, et lentes, créent une respiration, qui enfle et prend son rythme de croisière, entrecoupée de sons concrets (bois, pédales). Un nouveau continuum compose la dernière section, très ambiant et mélodique, virant progressivement au répétitif, un peu à la Terry Riley, allant en s’étoffant. Le second morceau, “Pa-Gitâ€, est une pièce de guitare, qui démarre sur le son voilé et un peu distant d’une boucle de saturation grise, tournant comme un ventilateur. Une basse lancinante, qui découpe le temps, vient se poser, tandis qu’une mélodie d’orgue se joue en arrière-plan, façon Soft Machine rencontrant Ash Ra Tempel. S’y ajoutent des résonances, et la trame s’épaissit, déroulant son tapis, relayée et doublée d’une guitare très krautrock qui s’achève dans des souffles gris. Un album court, de moins de 33 minutes, qui développe deux pièces au caractère plutôt enveloppant et mélodique, distillant une présence concrète, dans les souffles résiduels de tuyaux, de très légers à très présents, et tuant sur les contrastes entes des sons très nets et d’autres plus voilés et flous. Agréable. Emmanuel Carquille
Attributing a value to forlorn locations through the assessment of their resonant qualities represents a sort of transference of power. When a sound artist – presumably gifted with deeply perceptive features – sets conditions for a given structure to vibrate, the spontaneous generation of a different type of life occurs. The resulting interaction gains or loses strength according to contingent forces at work, but – sure enough – the hugeness of a reverberation is one of the few things able to connect the most audacious experiment to the realization of being, after all, extremely limited.
John Grzinich – assisted in some of these recordings by Simon Whetham and Arlene Tucker – is one of the best “men for the job†when it comes to producing sonic elements with a purpose from materials that would appear as good as dead to the average observer. In Prevailing Wind, Tangled Under he sensibly elected to let a water tower in Mooste, Estonia express its acoustic vigor without interruptions. A modicum of variety in the timbral gamut comes from what the mastermind describes as “crawling about, climbing, plucking, bowing, striking, howling, stringing and generally playingâ€. The 46 minutes reveal a practical harmonization between the human and the (theoretically) inanimate. Occasionally, a welcome complement – the chanting of assorted species of birds – introduces further suggestions beyond the ominous roars, wavering frequencies and various clangors characterizing at large the textural mass.
The whole transmits a sense of conscious persistence, in a way symbolizing an obstinate attempt to distil juices of critical energy in places where most people’s logic would suggest a refusal of possibilities. Molecules are everywhere, though; hence, our weight in the universal ambit equals that of a rock (or a water tower, for that matter). Better learn the lesson once and for all. Massimo Ricci
Episode 171 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, July 22nd.
The playlist of Futurónica 171 is:
You can follow Rádio Zero’s broadcasts at radiozero.pt/ouvir and Rádio Manobras at radiomanobras.pt.
