Thursday 27 February 2014

Micropolitics Research Group

The Micropolitics Research Group investigates the forces and procedures that entangle artistic production and the flexible subjectivities of its producers into the fabric of late capitalism. Based primarily in London, the group carries out and analysis of issues ranging from the production of subjectivity in creative work, diplomacy, institutional analysis, radical pedagogy and concrete situations of free labour, ‘carrot work’, and creative industry.


The prefix micro does not indicate ‘small’ or ‘mere’. Nor does it assume a belief in the revolutionary potential of everyday life, or indicate a retreat into the inner life of the subject. Rather, it is invoked to access the registers of desire, vulnerability, affect and subjective implication that generate both artistic practices and the collective engines of cognitive capitalism. If current regimes of cultural and cognitive capitalism are predicated on subjective forces, on the collective production of knowledge and surplus creativity, how can artists begin to distinguish, let alone imagine a practice that does not merely feed and replicate the machine itself? How can art practices that in Suely Rolnik’s words bring ‘mutations of the sensible’ into the realm of the visible or speakable, refuse or exit the limited field of possibility inscribed by late capitalism? Finally, if it is the very regimes of cognitive capitalism that not only capture but also produce flexible, creative subjectivities, how could we imagine a micropolitics of subjectivation? The research of the group will evolve from these core questions and will aim to investigate them through (a) theoretical reflection and production (b) the analysis of concrete situations and existing practices (c) the organisation of encounters and events.

Tuesday 25 February 2014

Zudrangma Records


Monrakplengthai Blog

enchanting songs of thailand


a collection of great music made by the people of thailand; luk thung, luk krung, molam, regional folk styles & more. mostly recorded from tape, sound quality should be pretty good (unless stated otherwise). transliteration is done using the royal thai general system of transcription. feedback/re-upload requests/etc. always appreciated!



Monday 17 February 2014

Hamilton Mausoleum


Put simply, Hamilton Mausoleum has the longest reverberation of any building in Europe. It takes 15 seconds for a sound, once made, to die. Think about that for a second, or maybe even 15, and hopefully you’ll get an idea of how bewildering this most odd and striking of buildings sounds.

Directions: The Mausoleum is part of Low Parks Museum, 129 Muir Street, Hamilton, South Lanarkshire. Some parking is available next to the Mausoleum on Burgoyne Drive: the dome of the Mausoleum is clearly visible, about 1 minutes drive or 5 minutes walk North East of the Museum itself, which has some additional parking. There will be toilets at the Mausoleum. It is not accessible to wheelchairs.

Lost Sound (1998-2001) - John Smith



'The theme of fragmentation and decay is taken up by my favorite work here, the video Lost Sound (2001), made in collaboration with sound artist Graeme Miller. Divided into short sections titled by location, Lost Sound shows discarded audiotapes around London - strands clinging to a fence, trapped in the crevices of a tree trunk, intertwined with weeds. The sound track combines the voices and songs on the found audiotapes with ambient sounds recorded on location. Visually the audiotapes tell us almost nothing; they must be 'decoded' by the equipment that put them on the sound track. But we come to see that the signs, cars, and pedestrians in the videotape pose similar 'decoding' problems: what do they mean, where do they come from, who are they? A city that at first seems comprehensible is revealed as a layering of mysteries; we know no more about the passing humans from their images than we do about what's on the crumpled tapes... Each section charts a different relationship between tape and urban scene, taking the viewer on a little unpredictable journey. Finally, as happens so often in Smith's work, the representational structure itself seems to break down. Titles and images are flipped left to right, undermining the readability of words, and men loading boxes onto a truck are seen in a repeated loop, foregrounding the arbitrariness of cinematic time as well as commenting on the repetitiousness of manual labor. Lost in an indecipherable maze whose rules change constantly, we see the city as a network of unpredictably shifting relationships and come to doubt even the sounds encoded in the tape fragments.' Fred Camper, from 'Pushed to the Limit - Films and Videos by John Smith', "Chicago Reader" magazine, 2001. (full review on www.fredcamper.com)

...from Lux Online

Thursday 13 February 2014

Sarah Tripp - 24 Stops


24 Stops is a sequence of hourly chimes – short audio segments – comprised of percussive sound and spoken word commissioned by Camden Arts Centre and UCLH Arts. These chimes, played on hospital radio throughout the day and night, act as temporary markers, reflecting the atmosphere of the hour in which they appear. 24 Stops was developed on Camden Arts Centre’s inaugural Radio Writing residency. Radio Writing marks the start of a collaboration between Camden Arts Centre and UCLH Arts to commission artists to create new work for both hospital radio and live performance.
The residency was accompanied by a Lights Out Listening Group communal listening event in the dark and concluded with a live performance of 24 Stops. The live performance used 16mm film of percussion performed by Fritz Welch, Nichola Scrutton and Mark Vernon, recorded by Iain Donnelly and edited by Rob Kennedy. 24 Stops will be reconfigured for TENT in Rotterdam during the autumn.
Documentation of the performance of 24 Stops can be found at www.thisistomorrow.info. Further information on Lights Out Listening Group is at www.lightsoutlisteninggroup.wordpress.com
For further information on 24 Stops please visit www.camdenartscentre.org

Wednesday 12 February 2014

Rungpetch Laemsing | Fon Duen Hok


Rungphet Laemsing was born wasan chanplaeng in 1942, in the southern-central province of phetburi. he moved to phetchabun province for school, after which he joined the armed forces medical corps and from there the thai royal guard. rungphet had always enjoyed singing and had gained some notice from his many victories in local singing contests. he specialized in the new style being pioneered by khamron sambunnanon, which would eventually be called "luk thung". while he was stationed in bangkok, he would regularly sit in with the phayong mukda band, and after winning a major song contest in 1961, he joined samniang muangthong's ruam daokrachai band. eventually, his friend phraiwan lukphet introduced him to the pre-eminent songwriter of the time, phaibun butkhan, and the composer agreed to write 3 songs for rungphet. they were extremely successful, and phaibun decided to cultivate rungphet as his new star. at the height of rungphet's fame, phaibun made an arrangement for the singer to appear in an upcoming film from "mon rak luk thung" director rangsi thatsanapayak. when rungphet backed out, the maestro became very upset and gave all future singles intended for the singer to sonkhiri siprachuap, essentially ending his career. rungphet continued his government service up to his retirement in 2002. he now lives in the bangkok suburb of nonthaburi, and performs occasionally.

Monday 10 February 2014

Grey area: Chris Petit’s Content



Mark Fisher is mesmerised by Chris Petit’s essay documentary, an ‘informal coda’ to his 1979 film Radio On
At one point in Chris Petit’s haunting new film Content, we drive through Felixstowe container port. It was an uncanny moment for me, since Felixstowe is only a couple of miles from where I live – what Petit filmed could have been shot from our car window. What made it all the more uncanny was the fact that Petit never mentions that he is in Felixstowe; the hangars and looming cranes are so generic that I began to wonder if this might not be a doppelgänger container port somewhere else in the world. All of this somehow underlined the way Petit’s text describes these “blind buildings” while his camera tracks along them: “non-places”, “prosaic sheds”, “the first buildings of a new age” which render “architecture redundant”.
Content could be classified as an essay film, but it’s less essayistic than aphoristic. This isn’t to say that it’s disconnected or incoherent: Petit himself has called Content a “21st-century road movie, ambient”, and its reflections on ageing and parenthood, terrorism and new media are woven into a consistency that’s non-linear, but certainly not fragmentary.

Errant Bodies: publishing as practice



Errant Bodies has been developing publishing projects since 1995. Since this time, it has been dedicated to supporting diverse discourses and projects in the fields of sonic and spatial practices, auditory culture and performativity, experimental writing and critical thought. The project further aims to consider the specifics of location, media and modes of address, and the co-productive details generated from cultural work and its place, through site-based research, collective actions and collaborative projects.

Full catalogue here...

Facebook is like chairs

Published on Oct 4, 2012 Facebook is celebrating hitting the 1 billion monthly user mark with the company's first ad campaign. Facebook First Commercial - The Things That Connect Us

 

This Is the Ad Facebook Should Have Made

Sunday 9 February 2014

Listening: A Tension, An Intention and an Attention

Lucia Farinati and Richard Crow



In mapping out different meanings on the notion of “listening” and playing a series of audio fragments including inaugural speeches, rants, nonsense, disembodied voices, and ‘silence’ -  this session aims to bring into earshot the act of listening in itself: a tension, an intention and an attention.

The main questions that we would like to raise and discuss are:
How is listening related to a collective becoming and/or group formations? And what is the space we are creating through the “living voice”? And what is its political dimension?

A possible departure point (as a kind of provocation) will be Jean-Luc Nancy’s conclusion that:
“The subject of the listening or the subject who is listening (but also the one who is “ subject to listening” in the sense that one can be “subject to” unease, an ailment, or a crisis) is not a phenomenological subject. This means that he is not a philosophical subject, and, finally, he is perhaps no subject at all, except as the place of resonance, of its infinite tension and rebound, the amplitude of sonorous deployment and the slightness of its simultaneous redeployment-by which a voice is modulated in which the singular of a cry, a call, or a song vibrates by retreating from it (a “voice”: we have to understand what sounds from a human throat without being language, which emerges from an animal gullet or from any kind of instrument, even from the wind in the branches: the rustling toward which we strain or lend an ear).” Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, 2007. New York: Fordham University Press, pgs 21-22

Lucia Farinati (Italy/UK) is an independent curator and researcher based in London. She studied on the Curatorial Programme at Goldsmiths College (2004), London, Public Art and European Cultural Planning at De Montfort University, Leicester (2000) and History of Art and Aesthetics at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Trento (Italy) (1997). Her practice is informed by an interdisciplinary approach to working and collaborating with artists and by a production-oriented mode to framing contemporary art and curatorial practices. Her research is focused on the relationship between contemporary art and the public sphere, and listening at the intersection between sonic art and activism.



SENSATE FOCUS 'Déviation Heat-treated' (PAN 38)

Déviation Heat-treated is Mark Fell's (SND) response to Heatsick's recent Déviation EP on PAN. Somewhere between cover version, remix or deconstruction, just over 34 minutes of re-layering of patterns and sounds. The 12" is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M. It is pressed on 140g black vinyl which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
 

PIERRE HENRY - MALÉFICES


Often evading the composer ’s official discography lists Cacophonic present this outstanding, commonly undetected Pierre Henry film score providing fans of early electronics, femme vocal manipulation and horror soundtracks with an indespensable “dream record” that ticks every box and crosses out every line in the rule book. Widely recognised as one of the original sonic architects of the movement known as musique concrete, having joined Pierre Schaeffer’s forward-thinking initiative as early as 1949, Pierre Henry was arguably the first musician to entertain the notion of this defiant musical revolution coexisting with traditional and poplular music. Initially using the mediums of modern dance and spoken word as a platform to contextualise his tape-music mutations (notably in unison with Maurice Bejart) Henry’s foresight to fuse accademic with thematic ideas lead to the birth of electronic sound design for film and theatre, expemplified most prevalently in the macabre.

Musique Concrète Soundtracks To Experimental Short Films (1956-1978)

New England Electric Music Company 



An amazing collection of crucial and lost slivers of both celluloid and sound, from right along the rim of the memory hole. Tom Dissevelt's soundtrack to "Glas" (dir. Henstra, 1959) is almost like an Henri Chopin poem, with weird squeals and reverberating breaths and crackling radio voices intoning with dreadful menace among the cycling noises. Turns out to be about glass-blowing, go figure. Gershon Kingsley provides a percolating soundtrack to "Pixillation" (dir. Schwartz, 1971), which shouldn't be too much a surprise for those familiar with his duo work with Perrey on The In Sound from Way Out. Very reminiscent of a coherent Sun Ra moog fugue and the most funky and taciturn of the entire set by far.

Read more...





Le Pas, Piotr KAMLER, 1974, FR by shortanimatedworld

Saturday 8 February 2014

Trevor Cox - The World's most Reverberant Space

Scottish Oil Storage Tank


The storage tank measured used to contain 5.6 million gallons of shipping oil. You can find out more about the oil tanks and their acoustics (and why the World record is incorrectly called an echo)  in my new book.
The measurements were carried out according to ISO 3382-2 2009 “Acoustics – Measurement of room acoustic parameters Part 2: Reverberation time in ordinary rooms”. The impulse response measurement method was used using a starting pistol firing 9mm revolver blanks. Two ½” inch laboratory quality omnidirectional microphones were used (Bruel and Kjaer 4165 condenser microphone connected to Bruel and Kjaer 2669 preamp). These were connected to a Norsonics 336 Front End power supply and pre-amplifier. The outputs from the Norsonics 336s were recorded on a Roland R44 sound recorder at a sampling frequency of 44.1 kHz with a 24 bit precision uncompressed.
Six source-microphone combinations were measured. The two microphones were placed roughly a third of the way from the rear wall of the room, approximately 5 m apart, roughly 2 m and 3 m from the centre line running along the length of the room. One was approximately 1.5 m above the ground the other approximately 2 m above the ground. Three source positions were measured, starting roughly a third of the way from the entrance and ending about half way into the room. Source positions were away from the centre line of the room. In feeesound the impulses are labelled 1-6. 1&2 were measured at the same time (similar for 3&4 and 5&6).

Thursday 6 February 2014

On the Edge (Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice), 1992

Derek Bailey (1930-2005)



A series of four 55 minute films shown on Channel 4 TV in the UK in early 1992. To say this was the best and most intelligent analysis of improvisation to be screened on UK television is probably unnecessary: it has in all likelihood been the only televised programme on this form of music-making. Written and narrated by Derek Bailey, produced and directed by Jeremy Marr, it developed out of the first edition of Bailey's book on improvisation (the broadcast almost coinciding with the publication of the second edition) and attempted to provide a world-view of the subject, not being bound by country, musical genre or preconception.

Tune In (2006) - Esther Johnson


A portrait of the fascinating world of amateur radio operators, better known as HAMS. Dealing with the politics of space and social communication, Tune In blends documentary and abstract audio to reflect on the use of DIY radio equipment in an ever-changing modern world. 'The Space-age hobby where the world is your friend.'

"An unusual delight...beautifully composed study of a dying breed of enthusiasts and hobbyists...The more I think about this film the more I love it and it well deserved to be fifteen minutes long which few films do."
 – Ben BlaineShooting People Film Programmer 2006

"An astute and affectionate portrait on the unseen community of HAM radio enthusiasts." – London Film Festival 2006

Asounder - for (Un)Sound Occupation

Main Questions

Has the sonic world you inhabit ever felt oppressive or invasive? (Bearing in mind that ears are open 24/7). Were the effects of this state physical or psychological, or both? In cases where such contexts are encountered on a daily basis, what strategies can help deflect or disrupt such a sound world?
How can you avoid hearing only what you want (or are programmed) to hear? What kind of training can break the conditioning which limits hearing? How do you break out of your own sonic past and invent a future?
How might you use sound in order to stimulate a sense of collectivity? (Where both the physical and mental are intertwined.) How might collective intelligence be mobilized through sound in a capitalist system which separates and individualizes?
Have you ever been overwhelmed by an acoustic environment (over all the other senses)? Did you pick apart the experience to figure out why?
Have you ever been in a situation where the notion of frequency (pitch) seemed allied with a political position? What about volume in the context of a political protest? (Sounds of dispersal vs. magnetically attractive sounds?)
How do you create a rupture within a capitalist system which easily assimilates (tolerates) difference? (Like John Carpenter’s The Thing, capitalism seems capable of absorbing and metabolizing anything it comes into contact with, even its own glitches).  Is there still a radical outside to capitalism which can be accessed?

Control / Modulation

Spatial Intervention