Close Radio - Evidence of Movement

From 1976 to 1979, Los Angeles radio station KPFK hosted Close Radio, a weekly half-hour program that allowed artists to present sound and art projects via radio broadcast. Initially founded by artists John Duncan and Neil Goldstein, the program was primarily organized by Duncan and Paul McCarthy, with Nancy Buchanan and Linda Frye Burnham also participating as organizers at various points in the program’s history. Over the course of more than one hundred broadcasts by more than ninety artists, Close Radio challenged nearly every conceivable industry standard of radio broadcast, and collectively its projects present an encyclopedic array of strategies used by artists to present performative art works using only sound.

An Anthology Of Chinese Experimental Music 1992-2008

Adventures In Modern Music 06 August 2009

Hosted by Anne Hilde Neset. With special guest Clive Bell discussing Chinese experimental music

MILITANT ESTHETIX

A superb, if not slightly disorientating website, set up by Ben Watson, author of Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (Quartet, 1994). Covering almost everything under the sun that you had never even thought worth considering before.


"MILITANT ESTHETIX has advanced the quivering tip of the visual pyramid into Esemplastic Heraclitean Infinity. With our floating upright lyric (blue and sparkling) and plagiarist communism (Trotskoid and betusked) we burst through the indigo (possibly of coal-tarred synthetic origin) lampshade of the firmament, slog beyond, abandonning the petty purple (mauveine?) mortality of the merely individual to the bruised condition of a historical-non-historical life. Let spill the fire! Sizzle. Drip. Drip. Arrows, speak."

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Public Information

Frederick Charles Judd (1914-1992)

Inventor, proselytiser of early British electronic music.

Practical Electronica: A Trailer from Public Information on Vimeo.

The Alchemists of Sound

The BBC's Radiophonic Workshop was set up in 1958, born out of a desire to create 'new kinds of sounds'. Alchemists of Sound looks at this creative group from its inception, through its golden age when it was supplying music and effects for cult classics like Doctor Who, Blake's Seven and Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, and charts its fading away in 1995 when, due to budget cuts, it was no longer able to survive.



For the full documentary click here...

There are interviews with composers from the Workshop, as well as musicians and writers who have been inspired by the output. Great archive footage of the Workshop and its machinery is accompanied by excerpts of the, now cult, TV programmes that featured these sounds.

Oramics to Electronica: Revealing Histories of Electronic Music

Today I went with a friend to visit the Science musuem which has an evolving exhibition detailing the history and development of electronic music. I had previously heard of Delia Derbyshire who had worked at the BBC radiophonic workshop which was created in 1958 and enjoyed a very successful 30 years or producing stange new sounds which were most notably used in Dr. Who. However this was the first time I had heard of Daphne Oram and found the display to be quite exhilirating.


Electronic music is everywhere, from the television that we watch to the music we listen to in clubs and even the ringtones on our mobile phones. But who created these electronic sounds? And how did electronic music develop?

The Oramics Machine is a revolutionary music synthesiser that was created in the 1960s by Daphne Oram. Daphne had a strong passion for sound and electronics, and she created a visionary machine that could transform drawings into sound.

Long thought lost, the machine was recently recovered and added to the Science Museum’s collections in co-operation with Goldsmiths, University of London.

You can see rare archive footage and try out an interactive version of the Oramics Machine in the gallery.

Watch an excerpt from Oramics: Atlantis Anew, a film about the Oramics Machine from The Wire's Website:

Oramics: Atlantis Anew from The Wire Magazine on Vimeo.

SottoVoice

Sottovoce, now in its 4th year, is a London-based, multi-venue festival showcasing groundbreaking acts producing challenging, experimental music. Sottovoce aims to expose the experimental musical genre to new audiences whilst maintaining the familiar crowd interested in new forms of presentation.


This year the festival will be based at The Nave for Saturday and Sunday, where the festival will present 8 acts per day in two different spaces: a main resonant hall for loud acts and a church hall for acoustic sets.

The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope

The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope (Czech: Kyvadlo, jáma a naděje) is a 1983 Czechoslovak animated short film directed by Jan Svankmajer, adapted from Edgar Allen Poe's 'The Pit and the Pendulum'

Instal 10 Extras

Music is about more than just music.

In fact, any radical music has always been provoked by something from outside: by non-musical ideas, ideas from and about our situation. And it only stays radical if it keeps saying something back to that situation, if it tries to change it.

An experimental festival of experimental music, Instal 10 addresses itself to these and subsequent concerns.