Ένα έργο αποτελείται από μια ιδέα η οποία ξετυλίγεται στο χρόνο για να μας τυλίξει σε ένα δικό της χώρο εντός της. Στην πειραματική μουσική, όπως και στα εικαστικά, πολλές φορές οι νέες ιδέες που παρουσιάζονται μόνο νέες δεν είναι. Λογικό, θα έλεγε μια κυνική φωνή εφόσον έχουν παιχτεί όλα. Ο κυνισμός είναι, όμως, η απαρχή της ήττας και κάθε δημιουργία που βγαίνει από το σκοτάδι είναι σαν να πιάνει τα πάντα από την αρχή.
Ο δημιουργός Γιωργής Σακελλαρίου επισκεπτόμενος το εργοστάσιο βότκας Degtine στο Βίλνιους όπου μένει, αντιλήφθηκε ότι υπάρχει ένας ολόκληρος κόσμος ήχων ο οποίος δεν παραπέμπει απλώς σε ένα βιομηχανικό μοτίβο. Μια αόρατη αύρα συνέδεε εργάτες και μηχανές κάνοντας ένα μέρος όπου πέρα από υπεραξία και προϊόντα, παράγει μια δική του τυχαία και φαντασματική ζωή. Όντως, ακούγοντας τη σύνθεση του πειραματιστή “Degti”, μπαίνεις πραγματικά σε ένα κόσμο υπερβατικό πέρα από την κούραση των εργατών και τα ντεσιμπέλ των μηχανών. Το έτερο “Be Pavadinimo” αποτελεί ένα στρόβιλο εξωτερικών ήχων και ηλεκτρονικών κυμάτων που πατά πάνω στα άγνωστα ηχητικά βήματα μιας φύσης που όσο νομίζουμε ότι φθίνει, αυτή μας καταβροχθίζει. Κάτι μηχανικό υπάρχει στη φύση και κάτι φυσικό στις μηχανές, με τη μουσική να είναι ο σύνδεσμος τους.
On the 17th March 2020, one week before the UK national lockdown, Yan Wang Preston decided to photograph a single rhododendron tree every other day at half an hour before sunset, for a year, with sounds from the site recorded by Monty Adkins and Yan Wang Preston each month. The rhododendron was introduced to the UK by colonial botanists in the late 19th century as an ornamental plant, it is now seen as a highly invasive species by ecologists. Many of the rhododendron species currently grown here are originally from China, Yan’s motherland. Living as an immigrant in a country going through Brexit and COVID, Yan felt a strong personal connection with such invasive plants. They remind her of her homeland as well as the complex perceptions around nature, national identities, landscapes and migration.
The area, Shedden Clough at the outskirt of Burnley, was an open-cast limestone mine 400 years ago. Nearly 200 years ago the local landowners planted rhododendron and beech here, in an effort to change it to a hunting estate. Now it is an “ecological wastelandâ€, colonised by these non-native plants and by sheep-grazing farms. Hidden in the heartland of the South Pennines, the local landscape is simultaneously post-industrial and post-colonial. Yet the ecology can also be said as being cosmopolitan. This particular rhododendron tree happens to have a natural shape of a love heart. An alien species sending out love. As such it is a rich metaphor to anchor considerations of landscape and identity.
The repetitive photographic act over a year allows nature to run its own course. This has been the year of the global crisis caused by COVID-19. To date, over three million people have died from the virus. A natural disaster has also become a political issue, in which racial tensions re-surface over and over again. Yet the rhododendron carries on with its own rhythm of growing, flowering, seeding, and growing again. The art piece is therefore becoming a space: a context for us to consider such political issues within the context of nature. The fact that this nature is made of unwanted species further complicates the issues at hand.
Yan Wang Preston is a photographic artist interested in the intercultural connections between landscape imagery, ecology, identity and migration. Her work has won many international awards such as the 1st Prize, Syngenta Photography Award and the 1stPrize, Professional Landscape, 2019 Sony World Photography Awards. She has exhibited widely and internationally at venues including Fotofest Biennial 2020, USA, Gallery of Photography Ireland, the 56th Venice Biennale and Chongqing China Three Gorges Museum. Preston’s monographs are Forest and Mother River (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2018). She received a PhD in Photography at the University of Plymouth in 2018 and currently lectures at the University of Huddersfield, UK. She is originally trained in Clinical Medicine in Fudan University, China.
During the twenty-plus years of their collaboration as @c, Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais’s work has spanned composition and performance but also, and prominently, several installations, often site-specific and ephemeral works that have at most been documented with short videos. Crónica’s latest series of releases is dedicated to systematic documentation and revisitation of these installation works. Its goal is not only to record in situ registrations of the works — although in some cases that may be the selected approach — but rather to revisit recordings, the computational systems developed for the works, archival materials, and other assets, and to present new compositions that unfold from each of the installations. The first release in this series is Seis Elementos (six elements), after the installation of the same title that was shown at the Rectory of the University of Porto in 2016.
Seis Elementos was created from found materials, with physical elements recovered from the deposits of the University of Porto, and sonic elements found in databases and in the artists’ archives. These elements were the starting point for a creative process that involved the occupation of the room and the development of an open work of construction during which the piece was shaped by the context, by random events, coincidences, and articulations. The outcome of this was a physical body constructed out of valchromat, glass, LED lamps, steel cables, loudspeakers, sound and electric cables, audio DVDs, and multichannel sound that expanded through the room and from where sound radiated, resonating with space. This structure was the foundation for a network of matter, events, and rhythms that was open to the visitors’ exploration and interpretation.
David Lee Myers continues his legend with the meditative suites of “Reduced to a Geometrical Pointâ€. Noise music, at least for the aficionados, can be seen to be the other side of that ambience coin. At first grating, it eventually gives way to something far different, a trip of sorts. While David Lee Myers may not be a household name for noise heads, his work as Arcane Device certainly serves as some of the best noise music to come out of the 90s. Featuring some truly abrasive textures Arcane Device managed to land some records with RRR Records run by Ron Lessard, another legend within the US noise community. With this album David takes his lessons learned from those old projects to reconfigure them into a transcendental experience.
Uneasy buzzing opens the album up with “Laurentiaâ€. With an eerie ominous tone about it, the drone extends off into the infinite. Volume needs to be watched for he does take things further than one would expect. Over the course of the piece, it begins to shift into lighter textures, featuring rather exquisite fragments of melody. Quite mystical “Pannotia†brings the tension down to reside within a strange, looping groove. “Gondwana†mixes both the harshness and the airiness in, never neatly settling into either. Easily the loudest and most industrial churn radiates from the extended shapes of “Pangeaâ€.
“Reduced to a Geometrical Point†features an exquisite take on a unique combination of ambient and noise, in a way that only David Lee Myers, an individual well versed in both, can do.Â
I am not an advocate of “music for meditation†and in fact believe that to be a completely misguided notion. However, I have observed that some audio constructions seem to encourage a posture of staying in the moment. This has proven to be a fascination over time. As I began the present sonic explorations, a quote from metaphysics scholar Frithjof Schuon kept coming to mind: “You must detach your life from an awareness of the multiple and reduce it to a geometrical point before God.†Certainly, Schuon was not referring to any particular Judeo-Christian vision of a supreme being, but rather, whatever ultimate creative force of the universe which must exist. So becoming “reduced to a geometrical point before God†was a concept that resonated for me while working on the pieces.
That said, as the tracks developed I, as usual, gave them temporary working titles, in this case, Geo 1, etc. After a time I suddenly realized that the designation Geo implied a reference to our Earth and that this could suggest an additional meaning to the music. There is this geometrical point, but also the greater context of the world at large. Could these sounds remind one of the microcosmos and macrocosmos simultaneously? I hope not a pretentious assertion. — DLM
Tracklist:
GEO 1 Laurentia (17:24)
GEO 2 Pannotia (12:04)
GEO 3 Gondwana (14:22)
GEO 4 Pangaea (16:15)
Feedback matrices, oscillator banks, and multi-processing by David Lee Myers. Recorded at Pulsewidth NYC, 2020–2021 and mastered at Crónica. Artwork by DLM.
David Lee Myers is a sound and visual artist living in New York City. He has had over thirty recordings released under his own name and also as Arcane Device by Starkland, Crónica, Generator, ReR, Line, Silent, Pogus, RRRecords, Staalplaat, Monochrome Vision, and many other labels. Collaborations have been produced with Gen Ken Montgomery, Thomas Dimuzio, Ellen Band, guitarist Marco Oppedisano, and Dirk Serries (VidnaObmana). Two Albums were created with legendary electronic pioneer Tod Dockstader, and with Hamburg’s master sound manipulator Asmus Tietchens five projects have been released. Myers has performed his sounds and visuals at New York’s Generator, The Kitchen, Roulette, Experimental Intermedia, Knitting Factory, Clocktower, MoMA/PS1, Outpost Artists Resources, Trans Pecos and Silent Barn, as well as the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Boston Museum of Modern art, among others.
Crónica is delighted to present Lucas Alvarado’s debut in the label with La Ausencia Como Lenguaje.
La Ausencia Como Lenguaje is comprised of a series of sound reflections on the absence of people in sites built by and for humans, and about the absence of art in our reality. Abandonment and absence are sometimes thought of as being consequences of crisis, but they became essential traits of our cultural landscape in a post-pandemic time.
Myers’s Cronica CD debut is an entirely different kettle of fish compared to the kind of work he produced on his sister Arcane Device release, the yin to Nodes’ yang, psyche to drama. If anything, this lengthy, four-track recording of miasmic, buzzing drone and minimalist linear formatting resurrects the original AD motivators but recontextualizes them in the service of ‘meditative’ music in the abstract, as the artist himself concedes in the liners. At first glance, this material is hardly what one might use to achieve contemplative, low-energy/impact balance; the brillo-like textures and tart flavor of these pieces suggest Phill Niblock picking o’er the bones of early, discarded tones, or Merzbow in a unusually warm and fuzzy mood. Further investigation reveals that Myers is keen on situating the listener in the moment, as he notes, rather than shattering the silence; one’s ears become intensely dialed-in to these oscillating penumbras, surrendering to their concentrated magnetism instead of ‘using’ them for more mentally restrictive purposes. To that end, the music works on a variety of levels. The Earth signifiers of each track, prefaced “Geoâ€, do certainly suggest the tug and pull of crumbling tectonic plates, immense continental divides altering their positions, and the constant magma flow of terran topography. So “Laurentia†feels rugged, sharp, and as thoroughly enigmatic as a specimen of smoky quartz; “Pannotia†is a study of abject trills whose vibrations respirate like the warbling timbres of ancient monks; “Gondwanaâ€, with its high-altitude pitch and mysterious undertow, drills black holes through the firmament; the concluding “Pangaea†hints at the explosive aftermath when gigantic landmasses collide. Awe-inspiring stuff this, nary a dull moment, and immersive as all get-out. No matter how you slice it, Myers’s is simply one of the most original electronic musicians on the planet. – Darren Bergstein
Another strong release from Francisco López, the very prolific sound artist whose passion and headstrong ways often lead him to make grand gestures and pronouncements, along with the music. Today on DSB (CRONICA 166-2021) he is reiterating – absolutely verbatim – the claims made for a 2018 release untitled#360 for the Emitter Micro label in Berlin, and noted here. The relevant passage is “an astonishing reversal of the traditional widespread subservience of sound to story-telling†and “the open shell of an apparent narrative becoming sound workâ€.
These phrases, and the artistic intention, continue to apply to today’s release, the cassette DSB. As with the 2018 record, my take is that he’s pretty much producing a very artistic sound-effects record, but at the same time López wishes quite strongly that we don’t hear it as a story or narrative, and just concentrate on the “new form of weird experimental music†that he offers. This is extremely difficult given the generous amount of the content on the tape, and the fact that it’s very redolent of a radiophonic play; one can’t help but hear it as the story of a submarine, possibly during wartime, with a brief strafe of gunfire and bomb explosions from an air attack, followed by lots of sub-aquatic adventures and some flurries of wind and rain when the sub surfaces now and again. For the “interior†scenes, López has much fun with the submarine’s sonar pulses and humming boxes of electrical equipment, weaving it into the general fabric of DSB and supplying plenty drama.
I fully appreciate this is not the desired response, but on the other hand it’s good to hear this sometimes-austere Spanish fellow injecting a lot more maximalism into his work. Known for years as a master of silence and inaudible records, he currently seems to be enjoying a purple patch where the joys of noise and incident can be savoured. I’m all for it…we dive at dawn! Ed Pinsent
Sometimes I need to repeat myself (I don’t mind), and surely I wrote the next thing before: ever since I stumbled upon music by David Lee Myers, I am a big fan. I guess it was already with his LP, ‘Engine Of Myth, for the unlikely label Recommended Records (not always known for the most out-there sort of electronic music). That was under the guise of Arcane Device, which he continued throughout the nineties. For many years, he releases under his given name. What I found fascinating about his music was that he used feedback, but in a much different way than those who called themselves power electronics, say Whitehouse or Ramleh. There was more control and less abuse; almost like a grandson of the fifties and sixties composers of serious electronic music. On this new release, he works with the notion of “audio constructions [that] seem to encourage a posture of staying in the moment. This has proven to be a fascination over time.” You can call it music for meditation, but Myers says he doesn’t like that. He also says that “as I began the present sonic explorations, a quote from metaphysics scholar Frithjof Schuon kept coming to mind: “You must detach your life from an awareness of the multiple and reduce it to a geometrical point before God.†Certainly, Schuon was not referring to any particular Judeo-Christian vision of a supreme being, but rather, whatever ultimate creative force of the universe must exist. So becoming “reduced to a geometrical point before God†was a concept that resonated for me while working on the pieces.” The working titles he used, ‘Geo 1’ etc, became an Earth reference, maybe adding meaning to the music. Maybe not. Myers uses “feedback matrics, oscillator banks,  and multi-processing”, which is not much different from when he started, but maybe the means are a bit more sophisticated? This is not really meditative music, of course, certainly not when the volume is put to a level that has a bit more presence. I am sure some people love their meditation to be loud, but the music as played by David Lee Myers is at times too dirty and strange to do such a thing, but, yes, people are strange as mister Morrison once sang, so for all I know, people might find this an excellent soundtrack for some deep meditation. I enjoy such things differently, I guess, not being too much interested in meditation (which, despite advancing age, and peers doing so, still is not a thing for me), but I enjoy my minimal music a lot. The variation played by Myers is one of considerable force and bruitist style, but also with some finer sustaining powers, sticking into a sound for a while, before slowly morphing into something else. It may no longer have the raw power of his earliest work (which also back then quickly toned down), but it is still a most enjoyable ride for about an hour or so. Maybe not really a big surprise anymore, but yet another high-quality work by one of the best when it comes to playing imaginative electronic music and with a strong voice of his own. (FdW)
