To add something special, each day in February 2010 there was a blog from selected members that explored a different aspect of where sound, music and creativity meet. The end result was a series of discourse by various different artists who use and/or appreciate sound & audio in different ways.

The organiser of the series, Emlyn Firth, compiled a daily list linking to each blog so that you could catch up on what they may have missed. To say thank you again to everyone to participated, and to give anyone who missed it a chance to comment and discuss, we thought we’d give it another spin.

And so we give you, Mix-Blog [Intro]. Enjoy.

You can also see each Mix-Blog listed here.

Got a blog about sound/audio/music that you want to tell us about? Feel Free to add a note & link in the comments below.

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Like a classic film or piece of art, one viewing just isn’t enough. Encore is about revisiting much loved creative blogs that are definitely worth a second look.

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Want to see more special events we’ve had in the past? Browse through our Partner Projects.

We’ve all really enjoyed this series, it’s made for some fascinating and stimulating reading, and it’s up there now as a valuable resource.

All that remains is to thank everyone who took the time out to write a mix-blog – fantastic contributions one and all.

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28.2.10 / Mix-Blog#25: Kurtis ‘Best Supporting Role’: Movie Soundtracks Kurtis has always been into movie soundtracks, ever since he nicked his mum’s vinyl copy of the OST to Midnight Express by Giorgio Moroder…

26.2.10 / Mix-Blog#23 : C4′s Stuart Cosgrove knows a thing or two about sound and creativity, having previously worked for the NME and The Face. Here he talks about the nature of appropriation, cut & paste, and theft with reference to Chris Ofili.

26.2.10 / Mix-Blog#20 : Loudspkr – experimental sound/media explorers give us the launch of new online documentary following Sound in Context (2009) – Exploring the presentation of sound in the visual arts world.

25.2.10 / Mix-Blog#19 : Remote Location are behind some of the freshest (can I say that?) developments in music and design at the moment, collaborating with the likes of Warp and Lucky Me, and here they showcase some of their recent outputs, alongside some amazing influences and more top linkage. And yet another great example of weegie boys made good in the big smoke…

25.2.10 / Mix-Blog#22 : YuVA’s very insightful post on VJing, with a host of great links to explore.

25.2.10 / Mix-Blog#21 : Daniel Padden, film composer, musician and Wire magazine contributor, gives his personal ‘simplistic and unconnected’ stance on sound and music

22.2.10 / Mix-Blog#18: Paul Welsh:  Digicult film supremo Paul Welsh talks music imagery, mythology… and Hendrix … and asks you to add your own favourites too

21.2.10 / Mix-Blog#17: louiserossiter: Exploring the personal process behind ‘Projekt Berlin’ – acoustic ecology, sound walks. A sonic postcard might be in the pipeline too…

19.2.10 / Mix-Blog#16: Tayto et Tayto [aka Neil Mulholland] riffs on the art of the mash-up…

16.2.10 / Mix-Blog#15: Tulta Behm: Tulta Behm gives her 21st Century deconstruction of Luigi Russolo’s Futurist Manifesto ‘The Art of Noises’, with reference to Toop, Cage, Stockhausen amongst others, and a university degree’s worth of links to seminal texts.

14.2.10 / Mix-Blog#14: Kim Walker: Field Recordings – Friend or Foe? Artist Kim Walker poses some questions, in relation to her own practise, about field recordings in a gallery context.

24.2.10 / Mix-Blog#18.5 : Biotron Channels of Sonic Warfare. Not content with slipping us the largest link-sausage-blog-roll we’ve ever had, Mr Biotron has helpfully digested the new tome on Sonic Warfare book for us. Hope you don’t have plans this evening.

13.2.10 / Mix-Blog#13: Biotron – Channels of Sound. A huge, rangy, persona primer on Sound – Patronising and incomplete overview of communication history

12.2.10 / Mix-Blog#12: Jessica Ashman – More than a Music Video

11.2.10 / Mix-Blog#11: Hanna Tuuliki – Singing as a Sculptural Process, Song as Sculpture

10.2.10 / Mix-Blog#10: Colliderscope – Audio Visual Synergy

9.2.10 / Mix-Blog#9: Patricia Fleming: Curator Patricia Fleming discusses an upcoming show for GI with French Sonic Artist Damien Marchal and Glasgow based artist Katy Dove.

8.2.10 / Mix-Blog#8: Konx-Om-Pax – A Display-Copy Blog A/V Top 3

7.2.10 / Mix-Blog#7: Dougal – Spog Rock Blog – An ‘experimental art experiment’ – taking the stage in front of 100 under 5′s. Brave man.

6.2.10 / Mix-Blog#6: Matty Samuel – Design for Sound – Matty’s definitive take – or rather opening statements in a big debate on – design for sound

5.2.10 / Mix-Blog#5: James Houston – Disposable Media / Death of MTV …

4.2.10 / Mix-Blog#4: Andy Connor ‘Soundings…’ The categorisation of Sound, plus details of Soundings Festival

3.2.10 / Mix Blog#3: We Sink Ships ‘Casting Off’ We Sink ships present their podcast. Featuring us in there as well, nepotistically ; )

2.2.10 / Mix Blog#2: pennywrite I Can Hear You… personal recollections of the Manchester scene…

1.2.10 / Mix Blog#1:Brian Harvey from 2 Open Ears challenging designers to consider sound and how it shapes the everyday experience.

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> Intro:

Apparently, writing about music is like dancing about architecture. I did google to check this long-held-dear quote, that I thought had been coined by Lester Bangs, but it turns out it might have been first muttered by Elvis Costello. Or Zappa. Or it possibly might have been Laurie Anderson and she actually said “writing about art…”.

Thankfully, this thing I’m making a pigs-ear of introducing is neither specifically about music or architecture, though they both come in to it. I’m hoping there might be some dancing, but it’s probably more dominated by ‘art’. With plenty of film and design thrown in too.

The next 28 blogs – one each day in February, under the slightly dumb banner of ‘MIX-BLOG’ – are dedicated to SOUND, and where it intersects with creativity.

We’ve asked our expert, passionate, insightful members to explore a panoply of good vibrations – from Sonic Art to Synaesthesia via the complex aesthetic codes of Subcultural Style. There are projects, podcasts and plenty of personal perspectives, hopefully with less alliteration and a lot more inspiration.

Anyway, I’ll shut up now and let the main acts take the stage. Just one last thing: we want you to get involved too. Our 28 members are bravely taking the floor and putting this brand new material out there, just for you. We’d like you to comment, contribute, collaborate, corroborate. Sound-off, or show your appreciation. Just make some noise.
[thanks for listening...]

But a topic I have only recently began to appreciate is the subject of narration in music, and to a lesser degree narration with music, in film and television.

Take for example the hugely popular HBO series the Wire. Despite having quite a strong soundtrack, the only music you ever hear, with the exception of the opening theme, is that of a diegetic nature, meaning your’e hearing it only because the characters in the scene are hearing it. This is quite different, from say the majority of modern cinema, in that it does not create any illusion of a feeling, conveying a very raw atmosphere, akin the show itself.

This is in stark stark contrast to most of today’s cinema in that music is used non-diegetically to purposefully create and set moods, or even place the viewer in a specific time periods etc. The use of classical music in a scene to step up in social classing or the use of hip hop / ‘street’ sounds to express grittiness.

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Mix-Blog: A bit like a mix-tape but with blogs instead. Read more from the series here.

At its core live visuals can be seen as continuation of a tradition that has existed since the inception of cinema itself. This movement is in direct opposition to cinema and is constantly trying to free itself from its rigid format by embracing improvisation and alternative projection spaces in an effort to create a form of language that can adequately describe the increasingly unstable and fast changing world around us.

All modern technology – electricity, mobile phones and our ability to permanently illuminate the world – stem from unraveling the mystery of light. Video Mix artists are on a similar quest attempting to gain ever more control over light, creating new tools that allow them to investigate space, time and our interconnectedness to it.

These new ‘real-time’ tools are opening up completely different worlds for contemporary VJs, taking them beyond free flowing visual performances in club land; to becoming Inter-media artists working with trans-disciplinary methods towards building programmable environments.

Some of the best Video Mix Artists are also software artists in their own right. Neuromancers that believe the act of code writing itself is very important, (regardless of what this code actually does at the end) because the actual message is expressed in the abstract new mediums that they create.

Whether its about live audiovisual performances, controlling lighting systems, interactive environments, light sculptures or immersive 3D spaces –software becomes the central working media, consuming all that came before.

Software like VVVV, Isadora, Max/MSP/Jitter and Quartz Composer are some of the most popular toolkits available for real time video synthesis – they are graphical programming languages, which allow you to draw a program rather than write it. These programs are designed to facilitate the handling of physical external interfaces (Midi/Wireless/Touch controllers) in combination with real-time motion graphics output.

Noodle based graphical programming applications like VVVV (PC) and Quartz Composer (Mac) use a “visual programming” interface, wherein programs are created by connecting various functional blocks of code by “wires” or “noodles”. In this way, they provide an easy method for the prototyping and development of software that can open up real and imagined rich sensory spaces.

Here are a few examples of what people are making just now.

1024 (formerly EXYZT) experiment with real-time graphics in architectural spaces. This demo video shows really nice synergy between sound and light.

Robert Hodgin uses Processing to achieve amazing results with code based visuals.

David Dessens uses VVVV software to achieve these great generative visuals from superformula.

Apparati Effimeri are a collective who specialise in interaction and Motion design for the visual environment.

The “Polygon Playground” is a large scale interactive lounge object, where up to 40 persons at a time to walk, sit and explore its multifaceted surfaces.

A Video artist who experiments in VJ software, data visualization and writing tools is Vade. He produces some great custom plugins for Quartz Composer including the great OpenEMU project that allows the user to remix old skool 8 Bit video games.

Find out more about YuVA here.

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Mix-Blog: A bit like a mix-tape but with blogs instead. Read more from the series here.

When I was young I thought everyone listened to the same music, literally. As though it was piped in with the gas and water. I assumed that everyone had heard the same music I had heard.

My first musical memory is throwing rubber balls at the copper pans hanging on my Grandma’s walls. The basics of that experience still inform much of my music today:  an attempt to release sounds from within objects; a healthy potential for error and accident; and minimal technique.

My mum played the piano when I was young. She was an enthusiastic amateur. She liked to play Erik Satie, and often made mistakes. I spent hours hearing already-peculiar Satie with extra oddness (added by my mum). I couldn’t tell which was which.

One of the most depressing sounds I know is the sound of commercial radio coming from a car stereo.

For a long time I would only buy records that were in languages I didn’t understand. I can only speak French. And English.

Musicians don’t always make the best music. There’s plenty of examples of beautiful music made by people who don’t know a sharp from a flat. Musicians should de-tune their instruments, and play left-handed once in a while. Play something you can’t play. Sometimes technique can get in the way of creative expression.

I own 11 guitars (I got rid of one last week). They all sound just different enough for me to keep them. Only 2 of them cost more than £10. I don’t like a lot of guitar music, and I don’t consider myself a guitarist. The world of music would be a far more interesting place if guitars ceased to be. But (like pianos) they’re a very convenient tool.

I create music for theatre and (mostly short) films. Its easy to put too much music in theatre and films. Silence is one of the most powerful soundtracks you can have. It makes people listen. And there are a lot of different silences.

Musicians and engineers and producers spend hours and hours creating music that sounds as good as it possibly can. Then we place our speakers behind sofas and curtains, or listen to the music as mp3s on tiny headphones that make most of the sound spill out. Its like watching a movie through a dirty shop window at a 45˚ angle in the pouring rain.

Below is an article I wrote for The Wire magazine last year:

I got into music pretty late. That is, I started actively discovering and listening to music that I considered ‘mine’ pretty late. For a long time I assumed everyone listened to much the same as me and my family. I rarely if ever listened to Peel, and music was just kind of ‘there’. Although we had music at school and I had clarinet lessons for a year or so, music was really something that happened to me. 

It was really at university that I first started hanging around with people that made me realise that there was ‘other’ music – and I voraciously started picking up and collecting all manner of weird and experimental records. I was making up for lost time. Years later I’d get rid of half of them after realising my scattergun approach to buying music was leaving me with a load of records I didn’t actually like, even if they were heralded as seminal or ground-breaking.

By now I was living in Leicester and Volcano The Bear was happening. The other 3 members all had enough music to last many peoples’ lifetimes, and I was still buying LPs, often turned on to stuff via VTB. It was around this time that my search for the Weird pushed me towards the ‘world’ music sections, and I started buying records played on instruments I’d never heard of, and in languages I couldn’t understand.

One of the first of these was an academic-looking LP of music of the Laˇ hu_ nyiˉ of Thailand. It was mesmerizing – full of bizarre love-songs and dances. Simple, strange and beautiful. I had bought it mainly because Track 17 was listed as ‘Love-songs played on the mouth organ and on leaves’, and it opened me up to an entirely new kind of music. It started and stopped abruptly, had pieces of almost no consequence, and was utterly beautiful. No ‘experimental’ band would ever be brave enough to release this music, and yet here were a Thai tribe playing it amongst their bamboo huts to some folks from the University Of Basle.

And there began my addiction to ‘primitive’ and indigenous recordings, which would take me through the catalogues of Nonesuch Explorer, Ocora, Ethnic Folkways, Argo, Chant Du Monde, Tangent and dozens of other specialist labels, nearly always lovingly produced with extensive images and descriptions of the music held within. The records seemed heavy with musical possibility, and of profound musical substance.

With nearly every record I bought I was being surprised and challenged – the recordings rode roughshod over my conceptions of musical structure and performance. There was ritual Tibetan music consisting of a seemingly endless back and forth between deep irregular chanting and almighty cacophonous percussion. There were Inuit children’s singing games from Greenland. And then there was the Ramayana Monkey Chant – an almost overwhelming vocal onslaught from Bali. Closer to home, Europe revealed incredible musical secrets I was utterly unaware of.

These recordings were wonderfully at odds with our western notion of music, almost defiantly so, using bizarre tonalities, startling vocals and impossible rhythms that made ‘our’ music sound rigid, dull and inflexible. In doing so they almost gave me permission that certain musical ideas were possible. (For some people punk music did the same thing. But for me this stuff was genuinely new, even if some of it was recorded over 60 years ago.)

For a start it seemed that the music wasn’t driven by technique – there were no solos, and all the music played seemed to serve the piece as a whole rather than any individual’s musical ego – and although there was clearly incredible musicianship, it gave hope to someone like me who was technically pretty rough. Improvisation was inherent throughout – the music allowed for it at all times, so much so that the boundary between improvisation and composition disappeared. Similarly there wasn’t the same instrumental hierarchy – there were often no lead instruments. Everything was in there and had its place. Yet it was clear that this music was advanced, far more advanced than I could really grasp. It made me feel that every aspect of a musical piece was up for grabs, that every musical assumption could be challenged. This blew open music for me, and, in conjunction with the experimental and free music I was listening to, made me consider music-making with a fresh perspective.

I’m not kidding myself – I’m no ethnomusicologist. There’s often a lot of information with these records, that, if I’m being brutally honest, I don’t much care about. I know that many of the recordings are for social functions and ceremonies, or tell stories, or are work-songs, but I listen to them purely (and naively) as music, largely unrelated to their social context. Although the materialist in me likes to own these richly annotated documents, I rarely pay them much attention. The music is the thing.

I didn’t realise at the time how important vocals were to me in these recordings. I’ve always struggled with the use of words in my own music-making, and I’m of the opinion that you can sometimes say more with a well-placed wail than you can with a whole verse of poetry. But I’ve realised that one of the reasons I love the voices in many of these recordings (and the myriad of ways voices are used) is precisely because I don’t know what they’re saying. I hear them as another instrument. When things become too specific in music I often lose interest. I’m a bad audience member and don’t like having stories told to me. I prefer to impose my own selfish meaning or emotion on what I’m hearing. So I listen on a pretty simple level – I know that the opening track on the Ocora Burundi LP is one of the scariest songs you’ll ever hear, and that a recording from Sulawesi sounds uncannily like Gaelic Psalm Singing from Lewis. The Bulgarian song ‘Izlel je Delyo hajdutin’ could stop wars if it were played loud enough – its probably the most devastatingly beautiful song I’ve ever heard. And some of the solo khene pieces on the Ocora Laos LP are more Steve Reich than Steve Reich…

These recordings have a timeless quality, and seem largely oblivious to musical fashions, (which exist just as much in experimental music as any other). But overall, the same things that attracted me to experimental music can be found tenfold in these indigenous recordings – a sense of otherness and of mystery (especially if you ignore the liner notes), and a sense of what can music be?

Find out more about Daniel Padden here.

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Mix-Blog: A bit like a mix-tape but with blogs instead. Read more from the series here.

Hudson Mohawke – Butterstar Galactica

Play the game…

Promotional game for Hudson Mohawke‘s recent album ‘Butter‘ on Warp Records.
We produced this in collaboration with Thomas Traum, Mike Tucker, the guys at Warp, Hudson (Bespoke sounds & beats), Wednesday Nite (Voice-over).  It also uses some of the Konx-Om-Pax Dom Sum album art. Bit of a team effort really.  The music is full of hyperactive energy, pulling together a wide mix of sounds.  We took the playful smorgasbord vibes from the album art and ran with them, creating a series of worlds each sound-tracked by different songs from the album.

LAZER SWORD Presents Low Limit vs Lando Kal – The Golden Handshake EP (NMBRS1) by Remote Location & Thomas Traum

EP art for the forthcoming release on the label we co-run with others called Numbers.

We chose to create an image based on a literal interpretation of the title as this approach gave us the iconic imagery we needed for the first release in the catalogue. We commissioned a photo-shoot in New York with one of our regular photographers, Sam Robinson, then enlisted the skills of our friend and studio-mate Thomas Traum. Tommi re-modelled the hands in poser, then added flowing gold liquid using a fluid dynamics application called realflow. The collaborative process was super fun and we’re really proud of the final outcome.

And here’s some designing for music we like by other people :
North / South / East / West by Shaun Bloodworth, Give Up Art, and Bleep.com

Great collection of artist shots from Shaun Bloodworth and Give Up Art.  They photographed artists involved in the bass and beat culture in Glasgow, London, NYC and LA, designed the sleeve art, and Bleep.com sorted out compiling an accompanying CD with tracks from each artist. Really striking shots, moody stuff.  The three portraits above are of Hudson Mo, Rustie and Taz Buckfaster. Interview with Shaun and Stuart here.

Cornelius – Fit Song (Video by Koichiro Tsujikawa)

A lot of fun this video.  Koichiro Tsujikawa has worked with Cornelius on a number of projects and done some other amazing stuff but this one is a fav. There’s humour in the music and the video does the job of representing the playfulness and instantly engaging you.

Prince – Raspberry Beret

Prince in soultrain type live escapade. Love the synchronised dance at the start and the look he gives the girl who hands him the guitar :)

And here’s some bonus ball links & mixes:

‘Visual Chinatown of davidope‘
Credit Crunk
Crazy Random blog/feed of inspiration
‘A collection of well designed things that can be bought and sold‘
Chinese contemporary artist who produces amazingly detailed illustrations reminiscent of the ##KA##Studio Ghibli output.
An oldie but a goodie, still makes me laugh though. The ultimate stalker.
Generation stupid. Loads of daft pop-culture gems.
King Midas Sound mix
Jackmaster mix

Find out more about Remote Location here.

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Mix-Blog: A bit like a mix-tape but with blogs instead. Read more from the series here.

Because I am particularly interested in Acoustic Ecology and the change in a cities physical and auditory features, I wanted to attempt to incorporate this into some of Mum’s memories- especially the scarier bits such as being tailed by the Stasi’s through Checkpoint Charlie to a restaurant and even being followed into the toilets. At the same time, I thought it would be unique to have someone with a variety of memories of Berlin to go back there over 20 years later and to record what, if anything had changed, and to put the stories that she told me, into context.

The main problem I had was working out how exactly I was going to go around recording all of these memories and changes in a vast city, and making good pieces of sound art out of them.

The first stage of the project was to secure funding- in case the project didn’t materialise due to a lack of funding, I recorded my Mum’s memories in the studio at the University of Aberdeen- it would still act as a standalone sound documentary after all…

Thankfully for me, the Music Department at the University of Aberdeen has been very supportive throughout the project- from its conception right to where it is now. I had discussed my idea with Pete Stollery, and Miriama Young who specialise in electroacoustic composition at the university. They had said that it was feasible and gave me some ideas to look into. I ended up being fully supported by the University of Aberdeen through a ‘Small Grants Award’ and the Alfie Tough award, and this enabled me to travel to Berlin for a full week and carry out everything I needed to create the Project.

Before going to Berlin, I had a steep learning curve to follow. With my fascination of Acoustic Ecology, Aesthetics of Music and my readings of Walter Benjamin, I had decided that on the first day, I would do a ‘Flaneur’ Soundwalk. Where Benjamin would explore a new city by smell, rather than with a map, I would do the same, but instead of exploring the city by smell, I would do so by sound- especially as research shows that one is more susceptible to hearing new sounds due to the flight and fight mode of the human body when in a strange/ possibly unsafe place.

The other learning curve was to come from attempting to build my own website. I knew that I wanted to share my experience (and Mum’s) of where I walked, what I heard and saw. I also knew that the whole pin on a map that plays a sound idea would work best- but a lot of online sound maps already do that- Montreal sound map for instance. Google Earth seemed a good way to present the project- especially with its tour/ path feature- I knew that I should be able to map the routes I recorded sounds on- along with images – both old and new- and Mum’s spoken memories.

Mum and I travelled out to Berlin at the end of August for a whole week. I had split the week into two main tasks- The first day was spent doing my flaneur sound walk- which apart from anything else was very tiring having being up since 2am and flying in from Edinburgh- but a lot of really interesting and unique sounds where captured- a car backfiring down the Kufurstendamn, the vast public transport of the city and an African Drumming Band amongst many other unusual sounds..

The majority of the week however, was spent touring around Berlin- both the well known areas, but also the lesser known places such as Spandau and the East of the city- both are absolutely beautiful and have a very rich history. Over the course of the week, we visited areas where Mum had both lived and worked and recorded her memories from the past and also the differences that she noted all those years later- some of which where quite striking.

There will be several outcomes to this project. Just before Christmas, I completed the piece that consists of the recordings taken on my ‘sound walk’ on the first day. It’s called ‘No Man’s Land’ and is available to listen to on the project website- www.projektberlin.com. I am currently working on the sound documentary. My Mum’s memories from before the trip are already online and she’s coming up to Aberdeen soon to help me finish off the project- she’s taken a bit of time to reflect on both experiences and these too will be interesting to listen to I’m sure.

The web development is also well under way and should be completed by mid March. I had to change my idea slightly as I’m very much a novice at websites… I had planned to import Google earth into the web page so to speak, but to do this limits some of the programmes great features. Instead, I have opted to embed a .kmz file that can be downloaded by the user into Google Earth- The current version incorporates 2 pathways- one showing the route the Berlin Wall took, and the other, the route I took on my first day of the project. The user can follow both routes using the path feature on Google Earth, but as well as this, also has the ability to click on icons I have placed on the map which enable them to bring up a dialogue box with a environmental sound recording and a picture. The user- if they wanted to- could follow the path I created for my ‘Flaneur walk’ and listen to the environmental sounds which I created ‘No Man’s Land’ from.

I would hope that this project would have several outcomes- apart from it being the first major project I have undertaken as someone interested in electroacoustic music.

I think it’s a great way to potentially introduce people to sound art- to get them to listen to their own environment when they’re out and about- rather than relying on Mp3 players and iPods to block environmental sounds out.

A lot of people use the internet as a key source for information. Within this project, I have aimed to give a historical perspective to a city that is sometimes forgotten about. I felt this was especially appropriate when 2009 with the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I have also tried to aim the content at all age groups. Even with just the basic site up and running, one can follow the route of the Berlin wall and see the modern city in Google Earth.

I wonder then, if there isn’t perhaps a place for projects like this one in schools alongside the likes of Sound and Music’s ‘Sonic Postcards’ ? The new Curriculum for Excellence for instance, encourages collaboration between subjects. It is a relatively simple way for kids to learn about their own aural environments and the history of that environment as well. It needs very little in the way of equipment- a simple recording device- and a computer with internet access… It lends itself, I feel to a whole world of creativity.

Perhaps this type of project could be used as a starting point for collaborations? I worked alone on the project on the creative side of things- but surely the idea has potential for composers, artists, photographers etc to collaborate on similar projects and to perhaps map cities- or memories in more than one way?

I think that there is a huge potential for the use of Google Earth in music projects like this one. Its a great way of opening up would could be argued as a particularly academic strand of music which is rarely heard outside of University Music Departments- and even less so by the general public…

Find out more about Louise here.

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Mix-Blog: A bit like a mix-tape but with blogs instead. Read more from the series here.

For an introduction to Russolo’s concepts of noise, I have turned to musician and composer David Toop, writing in Tate etc:

“Almost 100 years ago, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo proposed the idea that urban and industrial sounds, including the noises of modern warfare, were a new and enthralling source of musical material. Their nature was unprecedented – their intensity, volume, texture and shape – and so musical history should come to an end. The slow evolution of musical language had suffered a massive stroke, to be replaced by a vigorously healthy art of noises.”

It’s a century since Russolo wrote it, and more than 50 years since John Cage questioned the fundamental difference between music and noise, but but for most, the art of noise is still “a puzzle with no satisfactory solution” [Toop, ibid].

Reading the Art of Noises manifesto by Luigi Russolo, I am aware of the fickle and contradictory nature of hindsight. Reading this letter, written shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, is like reading a palimpsest upon which the history of noise art, sound art, musique concrete, phonology, plunderphonics, electronica, acousmatica – whatever term you’d apply to your own niche interest within the radicalisation of listening habits from the mainstream to the unknown, the classical to the experimental – of a hundred years has been written.

It is an illuminating and illusory, concise and confrontational articulation of the directional shift in music making, sound accretion, instrumental innovation in the mechanised world; from harmony to dissonance, and ultimately the breakdown of music into noise, to be mirrored by the shift from instrument to mechanical tone, and it could have been written yesterday, or in the ‘eighties, the ‘sixties, the ‘thirties, even. It predates Cage, Varèse and magnetic tape, yet true to Futurist form, its radicalism is in the pronouncement that noise can dominate music, much as industrial noise has come to dominate the landscape. Man conquers nature, and the authoritarian tone of the Fascist politics of Italian Futurism is unmistakable even in the championing of noise against the rigid structures of established music.

The world post-mechanical reproduction has altered sound and how we listen as much as it has altered visual media and how we see. This document sets out the ambitions and failures of a manifesto for listening change in as insightful a way as one could hope for from a man with no formal musical training, no knowledge of instruments, an intense distrust of ‘pure sounds’ and desire to hear the noise of the battlefield usurp the harmony of the orchestra.

Ultimately, his manifesto sees the Futurist movement in noise art borne out by musicians conducting a heartfelt study of noises, committing such noises to memory – now recorded – and composing with noise as source, yet not quite in the manner Russolo predicted;

“After being conquered by Futurist eyes our multiplied sensibilities will at last hear with Futurist ears. In this way the motors and machines of our industrial cities will one day be consciously attuned, so that every factory will be transformed into an intoxicating orchestra of noises.”.

Whilst the post-industrialisation of global economic centres (the centres of art markets, and we’re to believe, art-making) has put paid to this ambition, the increased influence of noise art, coupled with urban renewal, has led to an audibility, and visibility of experimental sound in our cities. The shift from industry to culture as signifier of urban capital has brought with it the transformation of sites such as Bankside power station, the Baltic flour mill, and Liverpool’s Dockside developments into major contemporary art spaces, and the Turbine Hall, in exhibitions by the like of Bruce Nauman, can once again manifest the sound of industrial urbanism, bringing noise art home to the factory. We may not see with Futurist eyes the beauty of violence in war, but we might be beginning to hear art with Futurist ears.

Looking into Futurist Noise Art led me to trace a small trail – a jigsaw puzzle of ill-fitting parts – through sound and its heightened sensibilities, which I invite you to explore here.

Russolo proposes radically new ways of structuring sound, explored by musicians such as Varèse, Cage [2, 3], Stockhausen, and the proponents of Musique Concrete and Sound Art.

A talk by Douglas Kahn, entitled “Cage & Phonography” [below], and an article exploring the impact of phonography and its application in art.

‘Cage at Wesleyan’ Symposium, Middletown, Conn. 27 February 1988
the means of recording sound – a critique of sound,  Varèse and Cage from outwith music, outwith aesthetics.

The impact of noise and other stimuli on the inhabitants of the city is articulated in terms of anxieties and societal change by theoretician Georg Simmel, in his seminal essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’.

The autistic spectrum of auditory disorders renders 90% of those with autistic characteristics ‘hypersensitive‘ to auditory stimuli, many perceiving all sound without selection, unable to filter the important auditory signals from the irrelevant. Acute sonic perception, hearing every noise for what it is, registered without discrimination – an ideal of sorts in Futurist noise – leads to an inability to cope with the modern urban environment and its incessant stimuli.

The figure of the flaneur enters societal discourse, and his modern counterpart is the citizen sporting headphones – the ipod* user – within, and distinct from the crowd.
*already having supplanted its forebear, the Walkman, by providing digital storage for near-endless continuous play.

The city structure as source of ‘industrial’ soundscape inspires visual artists such as Dadaists, Assemblage and Pop art, Kinetic artists such as Jean Tinguely, and sound artists such as David Cunningham and Christian Marclay.

Films such as Godard‘s Nouvelle Vague, Wenders’ Alice in The Cities, Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy make use of experimental and noise music as soundtracks to visual poems on urbanity. One scene in Delicatessen (dir. Jeunet/Caro), contrived compared to these realists, nevertheless makes plain the link between urban dwelling and concrete noise art.

The literary sphere of Georges Perec’s ‘Life: A User’s Manual‘ [Time Magazine review] allows the reader a lingering view on tenement dwelling in much the same way Jeunet and Caro encourage the viewer to eavesdrop – with each chapter a room, each plotline an apartment in this great Parisian building framing the pieces of the puzzle that create the work. Urban life, as much as sound, is shown to be a jigsaw requiring sorting, the catalyst in this case is mortality – a struggle towards achieving our goals in life, and the mystery left behind in death.

Noise art, in its explosive, anti-form, hidden and recollected nature, could be seen to explore the abject in sound – the aesthetic of noise is death and memory, with rhythm bringing sex to the mix (as witnessed in Delicatessen). Here’s an essay on contemporary musicians that delve into the abject, the excreted and sublime aesthetics of noise, and a timeline of noise music.

Finally, two great experimental music blogs for those interested in hearing more, and an essay on noise as critique…

http://continuo.wordpress.com/

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Mix-Blog: A bit like a mix-tape but with blogs instead. Read more from the series here.

Here, Jack Dangers sampled Wyndham Lewis reading from The End of Enemy Interlude, available on this fine collection. Now, if you want a decent Meat Beat Manifesto track, try this tasty blend of Helter Skelter with Radio Babylon. The Future Sound of London used a similar bassline on Papua New Guinea but the notes are different – are people deaf? Yes, the Prodigy put the same beat on Charly, but chopped it further. MBM reworked the sample from Bobby Byrd’s Hot Pants (Bonus Beats) and soaked it in reverb, but The Stone Roses had already used a shorter loop on Fools Gold, no?

So, with further a(u)d(i)o, what to write about? As Emlyn noted in his self-effacing “porcine hearing appendage” of an introduction to this series, it is not easyfinding words to discuss music. More specifically, any attempt to articulate individual sounds is rife with danger – and nigh on impossible without recourse to embarrassing onomatopoeia.

Not Luke Fowler: “Have you got that rare La Monte Young record on Shandar with Jon Hassell on trumpet?”

Not DJ / head chef Michael Kilkie: “What the hell are you talking about?”

Not Luke Fowler: “You know, the one that goes: A~a~aa~aaa~aaaa~aaaaa~aaaa~aaa~aa~a~aa~aaa~aaaa~aaaaa’…”

(a further plea to stop reading and leave this playing for its duration, sadly 4 times shorter than the original recording; bonus prize of temporary enlightenment for anyone with the ‘slack’ in this day and age to do so)

We could resort to metaphor for the purpose of general description. Colliderscope notes that Goethe referred to architecture as “frozen music”. If this is the case, my current flat would be an ill-advised cover version of Foreigner’s I Wanna Know What Love Is. Before anyone goes rushing to check Google Maps’ Street View, please consider that this information is given voluntarily and not designed to encourage prospective stalkers to take up residence in my garden. I don’t need the hassle in my life. There’s been heartache and pain; the thing is, I don’t know if I can face it again. Anyway, I can’t stop now: I’ve travelled so far… to change this lonely life…

Altogether now! *raises arms and eyebrows, inhales…*

(not The Farm, Emlyn, come on: deep focus)

Those of you who aren’t singing along at this point – at least in your mind’s ear – must a) be happily too young; b) have lived in a cave in the mid-to-late 80s; or c) have exquisite taste. To those who are indeed channelling Louis Grammatico and the New Jersey Mass Choir, I offer my sincerest apologies.

This brings us to research showing that the unsurprisingly-named auditory cortex in the temporal lobe is at the core of perceiving, storing and regurgitating sonic memories. On a few occasions, I have found myself prey to a particularly stubborn and distasteful earworm, wondering why it should have emerged from the depths… only to realise that the fleeting glimpse of a word, one isolated snippet of a song lyric completely out of context on an unrelated document, has – like a positive streamer which travels upward to connect with the pre-formed trajectory of the negative stepped leader to complete the “return stroke” of lightning – set off an instant reaction; this has then run for some time before apprehension of its existence, let alone any question over its origin.

Interestingly, Kraemer et al. have demonstrated that this type of example – where a discrete linguistic unit stimulates semantic knowledge for reconstruction of a song – may well mirror how figural imagery (“visual imagery elicited when considering names of objects”) operates. Both processes are reported to bypass their respective primary cortices, with neural activity in adjacent “lower resolution” areas being sufficient for materialising representations in the mind. However, in the absence of semantic information (e.g. with instrumental music or “depictive imagery”), both primary auditory and visual cortices are required and become the focal point of neural activity, with perceptual processing operating at “high resolution”. This is still not well understood, though, with other areas of the temporal and frontal lobes also playing a part.

Are we populated by examples of “catchy” music commonly just beyond conscious reach, irrespective of aesthetic preference? What parasitical audio horrors lie dormant, only ever seconds away from reasserting themselves in the mind of their host, following the appearance of a suitable catalyst?

Long-term memory appears to rely mainly upon repetition for reinforcement, with the subsequent blessing that much of the sensory noise bombarding us on a daily basis is filtered out and consigned to history. Exceptions to this rule usually occur when sense impressions are accompanied by strong emotional responses, trauma or incongruities that stand out from the general data set. Similarly, music – even on first hearing – can help cement a combination of other sensory impressions received while listening, leading to strongly evocative recall [shameless reference to own comments regarding The Human League’s Don’t You Want Me? and The Prisoner here].

The fact that there are such exceptions leads me to speculate that we do not necessarily have to notice them at the time to determine their longevity. Is it just me, or is one prone to burp out seemingly random quotes or statements at the oddest of intervals, without the slightest inkling from whence they have come?

“Polar bear livers contain potentially lethal amounts of vitamin A.”

Ok, I admit that I did notice that one at the time and have wheeled it out on many a suitable occasion, finger held aloft. Back to sound: when we read, to what extent does our internal voice – projected onto the written word – selectively embed itself on the author’s behalf? How many phrases of speech from subliminally “overheard” conversations are permanently resident within, despite the absence of any intention to eavesdrop? What else gets racked up on the jukebox?

“Hearing” full answers to these questions might well confirm that we are possessed by and subject to all manner of competing memes, discourses and registers, many of which never reach the light of consciousness; taken together with those that do, how stable is the “narrator” at the centre of this cyclone? Before proceeding to juicier realms of high weirdness, please allow me to offer up a

Patronising and incomplete overview of communication history

[Disclaimer: it is beyond the scope of this blog (and my waking life / sanity) to examine ownership and control of technology, the threat that any new form of empowerment represents to church or state, or subsequent attempts to counter this with censorship. The primary concern here is for music as sound, sound as voice, voice given body. If anyone can be arsed, a parallel history tracing the visual component of communication along similar lines would be most welcome.]

* recommended listening material for the next 77 minutes *

For aeons our species sought to preserve information uttered vocally only through the memory of a select few. Following a phase of scribal culture, the development of theprinting press undermined hitherto sacred roles in the transmission of ideas.

With every technological advance comes an inherent understanding of its limitations and creative desire to extend the boundaries of what is deemed possible. In this respect, we find evidence for a growing sense that “printed text was not enough”, rendered explicit in literary fiction – as we shall see later – by invention of fantastic machines physically embodying the voice. This is simultaneously tantamount to nostalgia for the proximity of utterance, in the face of enforced depersonalisation. It also betrays tacit acceptance of the momentum toward recipients of communication becoming increasingly passive.

As a side note, in relation to the cumulative impact of access to the printed word and its subsequent development into electronic formats, there is a strange irony in the fact that a text regarded as “the earliest complete survival of a dated printed book” should present “the avoidance of abiding in extremes of mental attachment” as its core lesson.

The race to eliminate time and space as barriers to communication features such notable landmarks as Claude Chappe’s semaphore lines as a form of “mechanical internet”, Alexander Bain’s proto-fax machine, Baron Schilling’s use of binary in his electromagnetic telegraph, Cooke and Wheatstone’s electric telegraph and its fascinating role in criminal detection, and the 16km call made by Alexander Graham Bell on 10th August 1876, despite many claimants and contributors to the invention of the telephone. This final event marks the first proper advance in transmission of audio signals for 5,000 years or more, since drums were first used for communication across relatively small distances: a voice from a body, present as a real-time participant, is disembodied in order to achieve physical reconstitution in the vibration of the receiving “speaker”.

11 years earlier, James Clark Maxwell, building on the work of Michael Faraday, had first predicted the existence of radio waves. 11 years later, Michelson and Morley put the idea of the aether – the Aristotelian quintessence, the fifth element acting as a transmission medium for light – to rest, Heinrich Hertz generated the first experimental radio waves in his laboratory, and Nikola Tesla filed patents for his alternative method of electrical power distribution: AC vs DC. At this point, too many protagonists enter the fray to give any fair assessment of who was responsible for the invention of radio. My head tells me to side with Tesla, but my heart retains a bias for Marconi, given that I lived 7km away from Poldhu Wireless Station when less than a year old until the age of 3.

With only a passing nod to the prediction of television, earliest experiments in transmission of a televisual image [it just had to be a ventriloquist’s dummy], first long-distance television pictures [it just had to be Central Station] and pioneering video recordings using audio technology (the gramophone record), let us backtrack to consider this potted history using helpful terminology, kindly donated by Douglas Kahn in his introduction to Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-garde.

Kahn mentions 3 figures – vibration, inscription, transmission – “that begin to account for how sounds are located or dislocated, contained or released, recorded or generated”. These 3 terms correspond roughly to core stages – oral, printed, electric – in the incomplete overview of communication history given above. For now, we will ignore the evolution of electric into electronic with the rise of circuitry, returning the focus back to music, sound and voice, and attempts at meaningful articulation.

The story of the desire to preserve the voice and give it body is a frothing morass of beauty, curiosity, obsession, hoax, ennui, acrimony, madness, mysticism and the desire to cheat death, one that ends in a proliferating cacophony of voices which are mostly disembodied, many of which cascade daily into our permeable brains. In attempting to make transient intangibles manifest and attain a degree of immortality, this quest leads into dark and frankly ridiculous corners of the human psyche.

Please return for the next instalments of this article – blogs are limited to 40,000 characters per post, apparently :( – which describe various attempts to visualise, represent, capture, replicate and disseminate sound, discussed under the headings of vibration, inscription and transmission.

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Mix-Blog: A bit like a mix-tape but with blogs instead. Read more from the series here.

One music video that automatically springs to mind is Autechre’s, Gantz Graf:

This video, directed by Alex Rutterford, focuses on a random collection of abstract objects, which move and shift to the pulsating beat of the track. Which is nothing revolutionary. What makes it stands out is the level of programming skill that has gone into the piece. Apparently the director stated that there’s “no generative element to the imagery; every three-dimensional object in the agglomeration was painstakingly and manually synchronised with a specific element or frequency range within the track”.

Almost as if he’s given each individual layer of the track a personality, like a weird form of A.I. But would taking away the track make it “lifeless”? It reminds me of electronic music instruments, mainly sequencers like the Tenori-on which merge visuals and audio so seamlessly that one simply can’t function without the other.

Another video that I thought of was Radiohead’s, House of Cards:

In this video, “Geometric Informatics and Velodyne Lidar” technology (or in lamens terms, motion capture with lasers) was used to scan the movements of Thom Yorke and his surroundings. There are no cameras involved and the images we are presented with are just data. You can see a ‘Making Of’ video here.

Radiohead are no strangers when it comes to innovation in their videos, but I think this is one of their most intriguing ones, just due to the complex work processes the artists and scientists had to undergo, resulting in something quite ethereal.  And I quite like the idea of presenting raw computer processes as something tangible, before our eyes.

One last video I’ll mention, before I stop waffling is Björk’s, Wanderlust:

A departure from the obviously computer based works of art mentioned above, this video was filmed in “stereoscopic 3D” and merges quite traditional techniques like puppetry with CG, producing psychedelic imagery seamlessly. The sense of depth in this video blows my mind and shows how old school skills can mix with technologically advanced techniques to create something completely new and exciting.

Anyway, something to ponder on!

Find out more about Jessica Ashman here.

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Mix-Blog: A bit like a mix-tape but with blogs instead. Read more from the series here.