more info: https://robertmillis.net/z/the-music-room/

Music Room (Installation at House of World Culture, Berlin) excerpt

Composed in collaboration with Gilles Aubry for Documenta 14's radio series. Premiered in April 2017, on various radio stations around the world (http://www.documenta14.de/en/public-radio/). Based on historical accounts by recording pioneers such as Theobald Noble and Fred Gaisberg—who made the earliest sound recordings in India and other parts of the world c. 1902—The Gramophone Effect is a sound essay on recording and listening. Coined by Jacques Derrida and described as the tension between the desire for memory and the impossibility of preserving living voices, “the gramophone effect” refers here both to the estranging presence of recorded voices and the potential of the unheard. Further analysis of the piece, Radio Artist as Ethnographer" can be read here: http://soundimplant.com/gilles_divers/Thesis_Anna_Vermeulen_2020(new).pdf

Participants: Gitanjali Dang, Usha Deshpande, Renee Lulam, Farah Mulla, Travelling Archive (Moushumi Bhowmik and Sukanta Majumdar)

Gramophone Effect

...sound artist, producer, guitarist, composer, Climax Golden Twins, Victrola Favorites, Indian Talking Machine, Sublime Frequencies, Idol KoSi, AFCGT, 78rpm records, Fulbright researcher, Men and Music on the Desert Road, The Lonesome High…

I have a golden childhood memory of an attic in a very old house, owned by an aunt, where my family spent summers. Crawling through the dark, creaking, front part of the attic I found another room, bathed in sunlight, with a pile of forgotten books. On top of this pile, as if the books were a throne, sat an old windup gramophone. This memory has informed a lot of my work: the sense of exploration, mystery, the secrets old books and 78rpm records seem to hold in their designs, the scars of their age, their receding sounds and stories.

“Some people can sum up their lives on a business card; Robert Millis needs a whole deck, full sized, both faces of each playing card, and you’re still liable to miss something while he shuffles. Filmmaker, photographer, guerrilla ethnographer, collector and sharer of 78 RPM records, weaver of multi-layered ambiences, improviser, annotator, jokester, traveler…” Bill Meyer, Dusted

DeMillis

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