as part of http://libarynth.org/parenzana_residency_notes

Mathew Thomas - Field

Mathew Thomas - Field Myth

(a short yet dense mix - track listing not in play order)

Peter Christopherson - 5 
Cyclobe - Wounded Galaxies Tap At The Window
Electric Sewer Age - Moon's Milk (Eternal Phase)
Sunn O))) & Boris - Blood Swamp (TLOC Edit)
Lull - Thoughts
Zoviet France - Daisy Gun
Jana Winderen - Heated part 2
The Bug - Skeng (Autechre Remix)
Sunn O))) and Nurse With Wound - Ra at Dawn Part Two (Numbed by Her Light)
Ben Frost - Light/Shadow
Ben Frost - Forceps


In Praise Of Shadows

The Dust & Shadow soundwalk is an experiment in attunement to an urban desert environment through diverse forms of listening. Walking in silence through the Sonoran dust in the shadow of civilisation, the walkers may begin to hear the murmur of matter, uncover desert refugia amidst urban life, and forge new connections with the unexpected.

The walk is an invitation to the walkers to viscerally engage with the urban desert, using the entire body as an antenna or listening device. The soundtrack is a reflection of our experience of the desert; our attempt to read the desert through the language of experience. It contains a multitude of voices heard in different parts of the Sonoran desert and Colorado Plateau. Many of these voices are also present in the urban environments, but are too quiet to notice. Some of these voices have been amplified and layered beneath and between the drone of the city. This soundtrack exists not to cover up or emphasize existing sounds, but to weave them into a new sonic fiction – one in which Phoenix becomes a city in the desert rather than a city despite the desert. 

Instructions for a self guided soundwalk can be found at https://fo.am/dust-and-shadow-soundwalk/

dust & shadow

The Ephemeral Garden evokes the sense of convivial gatherings under a pergola. The murmur of conversation, complemented with the sound of animate matter. Growing plants, crackling wood, expanding rocks, crawling insects and the invisible signals emanating from all-pervasive electronic devices. Human and non-human voices intermingle. An ambience that is thick and alive, filled with liminal whispers otherwise unheard. Field recordings and synthetic sounds combine to create a continuously changing atmosphere. Beings come and go, the noise rises and subsides. The garden awakens with daylight, buzzes with activity throughout the day, then quietens at dusk. Its character adapting to the changing of seasons...

Recorded and composed in Istria during May 2018 by Maja Kuzmanović and Nik Gaffney. 

This piece is part of FoAM’s sound installation presented at the Croatian pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2018. The exhibition “Cloud Pergola / The Architecture of Hospitality” was conceived as a collaborative site-specific environment, crossing the boundaries of architecture, art, engineering, robotic fabrication and computational models. In collaboration with Bruno Juričić, Alisa Andrašek, Vlatka Horvat and Branka Benčić.

Dedicated to Vera Miler. With thanks to Branka Benčić, Dorina Vlakančić, Marina Gaši, Danica and Goran Kuzmanović, as well as all the relatives, friends and passers by,  the procession of birds, snakes, bushes, rocks and technological entities who (knowingly or unknowingly) participated in our field recordings. 

Supported by the Croatian Ministry of Culture and the Panpsychic Development Fund.

https://fo.am/pergola/

Ephemeral Garden

"Mediation wishes to speak of other things. So Mediation will quote from an ancient human book. The Hamburg Manifesto says, `Thalience is an attempt to give nature a voice without that voice being ours in disguise. It is the only way for an artificial intelligence to be grounded in a self-identity that is truly independent of its creator's.' "

--Karl Schroeder in Ventus

thalience radio

Instead, the stories could become worlds inhabited by things that keep slipping beyond our grasp. Things which lurk at the back of our mind, on the tip of our tongue, just out of reach. Stories with protagonists that can only be known as gaps in being. The spaces they leave. Not here and not quite there yet. Dwelling on the peripheries of the sensible, speaking in glimmers, shimmers, suggestions.

These stories may not even have words. They might be felt rather than told. In sound, scent, touch and light. The stories might be experienced at the limits of the visible spectrum, pulsing at ultraviolet or infrared frequencies. They might inhabit the radio spectrum or create divergencies across the spectrum of acceptable behaviours. Spectral stories, stories of cosmic spectra and planetary spectres. The folk tales of unquiet matter.

"I have sought to show how the terms 'mind' and 'matter' are abstractions which in their concreteness are identical"  —Peter Sjöstedt-H

"how the terms 'mind' and 'matter' are abstractions which in their concreteness are identical"

The Last Dance? was commissioned by the BBC Proms and the Dunedin Consort as a new piece to conclude Bach's  Orchestral Suite No.1 in C major, BWV 1066, for the 2019 season of Henry Wood Promenade Concerts.

The work was premièred at the Royal Albert Hall on Wednesday 11 September, played by the Dunedin Consort.

Adding a movement to another composer’s work highlights the relationship between them and encourages comparison. Relating the new work to the old in some way means they can be performed together without a “disagreeable mixture"; but, equally, the new composer must express an individual voice.
Wishart has met these desiderata by adding a modern dance to Bach’s Bourrées, Passepieds, etc.: a tango — or rather two tangos – No.I preceding and following No. II, as Bach does with his. The scheme also matches that of Argentine tangueros of the last century, enhanced by Wishart’s distinctive voice and contrapuntal language. At the same time, Wishart – in line with her long-held ideas — makes use of the Baroque orchestra both to say new things in old sounds, and trusts the players to make their own contributions within the blueprint of the Baroque; there are opportunities for cadenze, and part of the piece uses the improvisatory short-hand of figured bass (the sort of idea Wishart transports into contemporary idioms) to allow the harpsichordist — within limits- to invent his/her own part.
Wishart sees concern for the environment as a natural extension of her creativity and shortly before starting this Tango, she was commissions such as those for Ex Cathedra have given her the chance to study with song-birds as a way to learn music and train her ears in unwritten forms of complex sound. 
On watching the videos of Paula Webster (who kindly gave me permission to use her recordings) and discovering that the Argentinian Hooded Grebe performs a tangoesque mating ritual, I wondered if its call might work in the music and made musical sketches notating its call variants which revealed fourthing and fifthing trilling figurations which are even quite Baroque and in the same tonality as the Bach. It seemed only natural therefore, to use its raw and impelling calls as my theme, and now on the “critically endangered” list of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and of BirdLife International my work's title draws attention to its plight. 
The piece has an optional sound-track supplied for the performance and cued from their transcription in the top line of the score. The bird-calls are heard around the same time as they are introduced by various instruments in the orchestra, indicating affekt rather than direct imitation and should sound joyously timbral rather than overly precise: they should be listened to as part of learning the piece even if not used in performance.
Instructions in the score include “Try a short flashy cadenza to end: harpsichord playing the brief grebe-call melodies in the RH, I hear a ruffle of continuous trills interfering with the sky-line pitches in the C/Bb region above and below, crossing the hands and overflapping the second manual if there is one”
Paul de Lusignan  © Stevie Wishart

Last Dance? A Baroque Tango

Recorded LIVE at Post-Animale event in Vooruit // 5th & 6th of March 2020.

"how the terms 'mind' and 'matter' are abstractions which in their concreteness are identical"

foam

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