for recordings of satellites, string quartet and electronics

Paris, Centre Pompidou April 18th 2021
Quatuor Diotima

**********************

Achille Judica-Cordiglia and his brother Giovanni Battista are well-known amateur radio operators who claimed in the late fifties and early sixties to have heard radio communications taken from secret Soviet Union space missions, including SOS signals, telemetry, and the dying sounds (heartbeats and breathing) of a suffocating "lost cosmonaut.” Even though their claims have been thoroughly debunked, the stories of these sensational intercepts are part of the mythology of the Space Age and stand at the origin of a durable conspiracy theory.
In the 1960s, the idea of a “lost cosmonaut” spoke to acute fears. Despite the optimism of space exploration tales, the reality of space travel—from sending a dog into orbit to putting a man on the moon—had a striking effect on the public and raised more life-altering questions than it provided answers. A cosmonaut lost in space served as a poignant metaphor for individuals’ anxieties about the future in an era of nuclear tension and uncertainty. This helps to explain the diffusion and the longevity of a hoax that identified the stain of some kind of original sin on the shiny surface of the triumphs of the early space age. Now that the cosmos has switched in our imaginations from being the route toward a radiant future for humanity to a place of accumulation for space capitalism or a post-doomsday shelter for the extremely rich, these stories of dead astronauts are more sinister and haunting than ever.

The title "Memories of the Space Age" is borrowed from the collection of stories of the same name by J.G. Ballard (1988), a set of writings thematically linked around rotting launch gantries at Cape Canaveral, the failure of the US space program, dead astronauts eternally orbiting in space, deserted hotels lining the Florida coast, and the lonely, disturbed individuals who linger at the fringes of this lost dream of the Space Age.

The piece uses more than 100 historical radio recordings of human-made objects gravitating in Low Earth Orbit, for example, the beacon beeps of satellites, telemetries, and the voices of cosmonauts, along with the ill-famed Judica-Cordiglia tapes. This material—shifted and transposed to match the harmonic structure of the piece—is the starting point for an imitation game that involves the string quartet and that grows into a complex three-layered polyphony.

In addition to these archival materials, the electronic material features digital processing of the string instruments with the modulation techniques that were, and still are, commonly used for radio and television transmission. The fragile, inharmonic sonorities of the prepared strings are mirrored by electronic phenomena like feedbacks or physically-modeled chaotic circuits that behave in similarly erratic ways, in a laborious attempt to tame the untamable while at the same time pursuing serendipitous glitches.

"Memories of the Space Age" deals with the aesthetics of ground noise, white noise, and lost radio waves, with the misuse and malfunctions of technology, and with the misinterpretation of a chaotic signal as pareidolia. It is also, somehow, a nostalgic homage to obsolete or soon-to-be-obsolete technologies and to the visions of the future these technologies carried. That future now seems irretrievably lost, but its ghost, like Ballard’s dead astronauts, still haunts us.

Mauro Lanza - "Memories of the Space Age" (2020)

Written for and performed by pianist Ben Smith at 'MUSICON: Eternal Returns' on 9.6.2021.

Many thanks to Simone Tarsitani, Eric Egan and Musicon, Durham University for the recording.

Watch the full concert here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZX8WNkc2VM&t=1527s

This piece is in dialogue with an earlier work of mine, 'flicker': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4RQoseTp7Y

flare (2021)

Seminole Rest, Florida. A train is passing by at a distance. 

Recorded by an ORTF, 2 x Schoeps CCM4
in a Cinela suspension
on a Sound Devices MixPre6
Original recording in Wave 96kHz 24bit
Done during a residency at ACA Soundscape Fieldstation at Canaveral National Seashore in December 2021

GPS : 28.870238, -80.837478 
Sound Ref : FL-211216-009

Train passing by at a distance, during the night

Géranomachie (2021)
pour grand ensemble et électronique
Commande de l'Ensemble Intercontemporain et de l'Ircam-Centre Pompidou

3 December 2021, Cité de la Musique-Philharmonie de Paris 

Direction: Léo Margue
Rim: Carlo Laurenzi

Géranomachie (2021)

Soulévigne (29/01/2023)

Original Version:
https://soundcloud.com/h-ctor-navarro-agull-1/bachatanok-del-pantano

Clara Invisible -  Bachatanok Del Pantano (Senglar Serpiente Version)

Solidresolve Friend1

Maurizio Azzan
Wasteland_not yet (2023)
for nine amplified musicians
© Casa Ricordi srl, Milano – all rights reserved

Yalda Zamani, conductor

PHACE
Michael Krenn & Doris Nicoletti, sound objects
Walter Seebacher, bass clarinet & sound objects
Berndt Thurner, percussion
Mathilde Hoursiangou, piano
Ivana Pristasova Zaugg, violin
Leo Morello, cello
Alexandra Dienz, double bass
Samuel Toro Perez, electric guitar
Alfred Reiter, sound design

Audio: ORF / Radio Ö1

Wasteland_not yet

Wasteland_not yet (2023) [use headphones!]

Transfert
for 10 musicians & ambisonics electronics

Opening of a 32mn piece.

Live recording at IRCAM Centre Pompidou
January 17th 2023

Ensemble TM+
Laurent Cuniot, cond.
Augustin Muller & FCD, electronics
Augustin Muller, live electronics
Sylvain Cadars, live sound
Jérémie Bourgogne, live recording

Transfert - for 10 musicians & electronics - TM+ IRCAM (2022)

More on this 622nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Know the Shadow (The Assignment: Use recently discarded material to make something new), at: https://disquiet.com/0622/

About the Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0622-know-the-shadow/

Shadow ( disquiet0622)

performed by:

Elijah Spies – viola
Francesco Palmieri – guitar
Jacob Mason – piano
Mikołaj Rytowski – percussion

recorded by Santiago Villar Martín
mixed by Isaac Roth Blumfield

recorded Nov 30, Klaus Linder Saal, Musik Akademie Basel

Underglow | for viola, guitar, piano, percussion, feedback network, and electronics (2022-23)

Félix Blume is a sound artist and sound engineer. 
His work is focused on listening, it invites us to live sonic experiences that enable a different perception of the surrounding. He uses sound as a basic material in sound pieces, videos, actions and installations. His process is often collaborative, working with communities, using public space as the context within which he explores and presents his works. He is interested in myths and their contemporary interpretation, in human dialogues both with inhabited natural and urban contexts, in what voices can tell beyond words.

Train passing by at a distance, during the night

felixblume

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