This is an extract from a much longer (42 min, in two parts) piece  of electroacoustic music that I made using sounds from Jean Tinguely's mechanised sculptures. I recorded these at The Tinguely Museum in Basel.  Many of Tinguely's mechanised sculptures self-destructed, or were not maintained, and The Tinguely Museum is the only place where you can still see a ggod selection of his sculptures still in working order.  The sounds are sometimes manipulated drastically, sometimes minimally.  I also used some shortwave radio sounds as material.  Some of Tinguely's later works struck me as meditations on death and the afterlife, and I hope this comes across in the piece.  The image is a painting by Emma P. O'Bong, titled Fernschreiber III.

Ritual For Jean Tinguely

Ritual For Jean Tinguely PT 1 Extract

A founder member of the electroacoustic improvisation group Morphogenesis (formed 1985), Prime has also recorded and performed with artists such as Organum, Jim O’Rourke, Eddie Prevost, Max Eastley, David Toop and Geert Feytons.  Since 1987, the use of bioactivity translators to amplify the electrical activity of plants and fungi has been central to much of Prime’s work.  Michael has presented his plant sound installations at venues such as the Mendel Museum (Brno), the NTT InterCommunication Center (Tokyo), the Halles de Schaarbeek (Brussels), the Arnolfini Gallery (Bristol), the Peblink Gallery (Copenhagen), the Centre for Experimental and Improvised Music (Madrid), and the old Beamish Brewery in Cork (Ireland). His sound work has been the subject of programmes on radio stations in Denmark (Radio P2), Germany (WDR3 and HR2), Mexico (R. Mexico), the USA (WBZ and WDCD), Japan (Airplane Radio) and the UK (Resonance FM and BBC Radio 3).

An excerpt from Michael's "L-Fields" cd can be heard on the soundtrack to Gaspar Noe's film, "Enter The Void". His recordings of Silkworm Moths feature on the soundtrack to the forthcoming film by Peter Strickland, 'The Duke of Burgundy'.

Michael Prime

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