Kunstkammer

Inventare Nr. 1

NoxinpatchRec - 221008 - 2

Unfold AG

Abby Lee Tee/Philip Sulidae, Troca Iônica

Dialog between two layers of Benjolin. First track of an album project.

J'ai Tellement De Choses À Te Dire

Mattin - Seize the Means of Complexity
LP on Xing (XONG collection XX09) out December 2023, order at https://www.soundohm.com/product/seize-the-means-of-comple
Collector's edition available at https://www.soundohm.com/product/seize-the-means-of-comple-1 and at https://shop.flash---art.it/products/mattin-seize-the-means-of-complexity

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Xing presents the LP Seize the Means of Complexity by Mattin, ninth release of XONG collection - artist records. The release is on white vinyl in a limited numbered edition of 150 copies. The collector's edition consists of 20 copies, each accompanied by a different polaroid portraying fragments from the social media universe.

Seize the Means of Complexity is a call for all social media users of the world to unite: "We are in the asshole of history. Broken individuals struggling with mental health, media obsession, need for attention and legitimation. Burning souls searching for validation, suffering from imposter syndrome in a post-Netflix wasteland. From the ruins of our subjectivity, something can be built; something must be built. To seize the means of complexity, we must comprehend the tools of algorithmic subsumption, and leverage that knowledge to steer their development towards an open-source conception of subjectivity. We should all have access to the codes, technologies, models, and complexities that shape our lives. By embracing noise rather than shying away from it, this adaptive open-source subject could pave the way for a future transcending capitalist realism and its end of history, forging a new form of communism fit for the 21st century."
Seize the Means of Complexity is the recomposition of some materials Mattin used in his interactive performances over the last year: a mass of musical fragments that crystallise as a call for mobilisation. As the title of the album advises, or rather states: to not be crushed by the symptoms that social media produces on us, we must seize the opportunity opened up by the internet in its widest complexity. How can we collectivize the psychosomatic consequences produced by the Meganets? How can we reverse-engineer social media? This new record by Mattin commissioned for Xong collection contains recordings from TikTok and Instagram (hits, pop songs, advertising and voice) that can be heard as a a chorus of fragments from the multitude addressing psychic destabilization and the horizon of paranoia and alienation. This plunderphonia of sounds transmitted by the global media opens the possibility of addressing what it means to be human beyond the liberal individual. Seize the Means of Complexity is a proposition, a sonic stage for something to happen.

Xong is the name of the collection produced by Xing, a vinyl-only record label of works by both Italian and international personalities linked to the variegated worlds of live performativity. The collection explores a geography of artists who present this sonic field as a platform to expand their staged worlds. "The space of the record" is given focus and amplifies their poetics as both a sonic and physical phenomenon. Xong is a unique project that draws out divergent understandings of the performative and live arts, beyond genre and intersecting between different practices. Xong collects a series of original creations that constitute an expanded program. Each physical record is a numbered edition on white vinyl hosting the solidification of the gesture. A wave upon wave, a series of "Music-Non-Music" to actualize both the artists' and listeners' imagination.

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Realised by Mattin at Abject Musik Studio, 2022, Mastered by Rashad Becker, Clunk Studio, Cover by Mattin, Artwork Xing, Printed by handle with care Berlin, Format vinyl (white), Released by Xing in an edition of 150 copies including collector’s edition of 20 copies, each accompanied by a different polaroid portraying fragments of the social media universe, signed by the artist, Cat.n° XONG collection XX09 (2023), Label Xing, Anti-Copyright

Seize the Means of Complexity

XX09: Mattin - Seize the Means of Complexity - excerpt A

https://cudighirecords.bandcamp.com/album/int-ressant

Composed and Recorded by Marion Molle in 2022 and 2023 in Marseille

Art and Design by Acacio Ortas
Mastered by Yan Hart-Lemonnier

Thank you Léo Hoffsaes for infinite support and listening

10 Nuit

From the album Scii Tenaph, which will be included as part of a forthcoming publication titled Ghost Semantics, released by Cripta747. More info here: https://www.instagram.com/ghostsemantics/

Scii Tenaph II (excerpt) | 2019-2022

"Disiecta Membra" (2014)
for six voices

Live Recording 
February 5th 2015 
Festival ECLAT Theaterhaus Stuttgart
Neue Vocalsolisten

Disiecta Membra, latin for “scattered fragments” is an expression used to refer to surviving fragments of ancient poetry, manuscripts and other literary or cultural objects, but can also literally means "scattered limbs" or "scattered members". 
The membra this piece is dealing with are the different cuts of Grunnius Cocotta, the imaginary pig whose last wills are summoned in the Testamentum Porcelli, a parodic middle-age text. The short excerpt of this text that I decided to use is an inventory of twelve body parts that the pig, right before being slaughtered, bequeaths to twelve categories of will beneficiaries.

Et de meis visceribus dabo donabo sutoribus saetas, 
rixoribus capitinas, 
surdis auriculas, 
causidicis et verbosis linguam, 
bubulariis intestina, 
isiciariis femora, 
mulieribus lumbulos, 
pueris vesicam, 
puellis caudam, 
cinaedis musculos, 
cursoribus et venatoribus talos, 
latronibus ungulas

[And from my body I shall give and contribute to the cobblers my bristles, to quarrelers my head-parts, to the deaf my ears, to lawyers and the wordy my tongue, to sausage-makers my intestines, to makers of meat products my thighs, to women my little loins, to boys my bladder, to girls my tail, to poofters my muscles, to runners and hunters my ankles, to brigands my hooves]
	
One can easily draw a comparison between this parodic list and the amass of dismembered bodies of saints that (still) populate catholic churches all around Europe. 
Mikhail Bakhtin in his “Rabelais and his time” elaborated the concept of grotesque body and wrote extensively about these holy remains: 

"At the time of Rabelais ridicule relics were quite common, especially, of course, in the Protestant satire […]
Dismembered body of the saint in medieval literature has repeatedly given rise to grotesque images, and transfers. In one of the best medieval parody travesties - in "Treatise Garcia" (1099), the hero, a wealthy Simonist archbishop of Toledo, brings to Rome as a gift the miraculous relics of holy martyrs Rufus and Albina […] "… from the kidneys Albina, from the innards Rufina, from the stomach, from the back, from the backside, from the edges of chest from the legs, the hands, from the neck. What else? - From all the members of both bodies of the martyrs. " We see that already in the XI century relics gave rise to a purely grotesque anatomy of the dismembered body"

While the catalog of pig cuts of the Testamentum has a direct influence on the form of the piece - which is indeed a catalog of short pieces, each related to a different body part -, this reference to relics is suggested by the use of several musical quotations issued from Membra Jesu Nostri, the famous set of seven cantatas by Dietrich Buxtehude, which is also a catalog of limbs: feet, knees, hands, side, breast, heart, and head. Curiously enough, what is considered to be the first Lutheran oratorio has the form of a massive immaterial reliquary for a body that left no material remains. 

The contrast between this longing for the absent flesh and the carnavalesque exuberance of the Testamentum was the basic source of inspiration for the composition of Disiecta Membra. 


Mauro Lanza - "Disiecta Membra" (2014)

Writing a work for a tour puts into perspective an essential and fascinating problematic of written music: abstract musical principles are distilled into specific individual sound-events created in specific spaces by specific musicians. Rather than write music that neutralizes these circumstances, I have attempted to ‘tune’ a work to the particularities of the various concert spaces where the work will be realized, and the specific instruments and instrumentalists that will realize it.  

I have researched the acoustics of the concert halls of the tour to generate musical material that will respond to their resonant frequencies. The form of the work mirrors the trajectory of the tour, structured as a sequence of spaces demarcated by an orchestration of the acoustic response of each hall. Features specific to Chloé Dominguez’ cello have guided the materials of the work as well, treating the cello as an interior space-within-a-space. Finally, field recordings from the larger environments around the work’s performance sites are a further source material.  

The work’s title emblematizes the problematic relationship between the abstract and the particular with the homographic word pairing ‘close’ and ‘close’. The two words are written the same but could mean either the adjective ‘close’ (near to) or the verb ‘close’ (to shut or bring to an end). The work hopes to examine the tension between these related ideas: first, the intimacy of the solo instrument and the sensation of being familiar with one’s environment. Second, the idea of ‘enclosure’ (the cello and the concert hall as enclosed spaces) and claustrophobia. 

Close / Close was commissioned by l’Ensemble contemporain de Montréal  with support from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

Recording: 11 November 2018, The Music Gallery, Toronto. Recording engineer: Paul Hodge

Close / Close - Chloé Dominguez + Ensemble contemporain de Montréal, Véronique Lacroix

This piece plays with the listener’s sonic expectations of what is familiar by fusing sounds, which a person can easily recognize, with new previously unheard sounds generated by algorithmic processing. By using various sounds and sonic artifacts that are common to the human experience, the work directs the listener to draw upon his inner visual associations with specific sounds and paint a mental soundscape of the acoustic experience. The introduction of other, unfamiliar processed sounds into the composition, invites the listener to break away from this familiar associative chain of acoustic phenomena and push the boundaries of his perception, in the process forming new sonic combinations and auditory experiences.
The musical piece was fully recorded and compiled in the Tonshoom Studio in April 2020. Some sounds were recorded using musical instruments, sound props, and speech; others were synthesized with SuperCollider. The final track was mixed down in Pro Tools and WFSCollider.

03. hybrid by Ivan Yerofeyev

James O’Callaghan is a composer and multimedia artist based in Berlin. His work has been described as “very personal… with its own colour anchored in the unpredictable,” (Goethe-Institut). It spans chamber, orchestral, live electronic and acousmatic idioms, audio installations, video-music, site-specific performances, electronic dance music, and interdisciplinary collaboration — most recently with choreographer Edouard Lock and artist Lois Brown. In 2016 an album of his acousmatic works, Espaces Tautologiques, was released by empreintes DIGITALes, and his extended collaboration with Ensemble Paramirabo resulted in a portrait album of his works in 2019, entitled Alone and unalone.
	His music has received nearly forty prizes and nominations, including the ISCM Young Composer Award (2017), the Salvatore Martirano Award (2016), and the SOCAN Foundation John Weinzweig Grand Prize (2014). Significant nominations include those for the Gaudeamus Award (2016), Prix Métamorphoses (2018), and two JUNO Awards (2014, 2020). In 2021 he received the Prix Opus for “Composer of the Year.” 
	Active as an arts organiser, he co-founded and co-directed the Montréal Contemporary Music Lab. Originally from British Columbia, he lived in Montréal for 11 years and since 2022 has been based out of Berlin.

Close / Close - Chloé Dominguez + Ensemble contemporain de Montréal, Véronique Lacroix

James O'Callaghan

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