paranormal

live set for openning exhibitions djing for art galleries museums rt institutions etc....

elektronische-art-and-music

Relay is an online music project devised and curated by musician John Lambert (aka Chequerboard). Explore the project in full at www.relayproject.com 

Commissioned by The Model (Sligo) as part of model::offsite programme in 2009, Relay is an online music project devised and curated by musician John Lambert (aka Chequerboard). The concept being to create a chain or collection of music pieces by Irish and international artists where each work is directly influenced by the one before, creating an open ended but linear, conversation of ideas. On finishing their work each artist is asked to gather a cluster of sounds from their track for the next participant who is free to include them or not. Some responses are purely conceptual. The project is set to continue indefinitely.

The Relay Project

A short extract of my forthcoming collaboration flexi 7'' with Michael Esposito, to be released in 2013 on Geräuschmanufaktur Records.

Assembled by Francisco Meirino from a live collaboration recording and EVP results from a workshop at Standard/deluxe art gallery in Lausanne, 2012.

Francisco Meirino & Michael Esposito "The Pressure Of Knowledge"(extract)

Artist: Nymos
Title: Esoteria
Original track duration: 3:12
Track completion date: 30/03/2011


Nymos - Esoteria

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation. [Applause]

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity.

But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition.

In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check -- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God's children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.
Martin Luther King delivering the I Have a Dream Speech 	

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment and to underestimate the determination of the Negro. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.
  	
I Have a Dream

I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor's lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."
I Have a Dream Speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr 	

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

[The full video of this speech used to be available on YouTube here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbUtL_0vAJk EMI Publishing made them take it down for "infringement of copyright" - they own the rights to the only footage from that day. You might have imagined that in the so-called "creative industries" the historic importance of this speech being heard and seen all over the world as widely and as often as possible would count for something. You would be wrong.] 

MARTIN LUTHER KING - I Have A Dream

My latest creation. Slightly short, but I wrote and finished it in one straight session. 

To me it's 168 seconds of heartfelt emotion, hopefully it will transfer it to some of the listeners as well.

Nymos - Dysthymia

Here are the first 11 minutes of 
my forthcoming album in collaboration 
with EVP's master : Michael Esposito.

The cd, released by Firework Edition Records,  
will be available in late february.


Francisco Meirino & Michael Esposito "Ghosts Of Case File 142" (the 11 first min.)

The idea for this project formed during my time on a music fellowship programme in the Model Niland gallery in Sligo so it felt like a fitting start point to gather sounds from the gallery as a starting point. My motivation for doing this project is to explore unconventional ways for musicians and sound artists to respond to each others ideas.

The gallery building is a beautiful old school built in 1862 and has a wonderful heavy cosy structure with wooden floors throughout so a sonic portrait or homage seemed like the way forward. During my time in the gallery I had access to a resident studio and could also explore the building alone in the evening times which was when I set about collecting sounds from the gallery in winter 2007.

I had planned to first of all focus on sounds that would be most recognisable to the gallery staff. The sounds of everyday working life in the gallery. I suppose my aim here was to build on an already established relationship with these familiar sounds. So I focused on sampling the various doors that are pushed open all day long with that familiar 'squeel' followed by a firm 'shclock' noise as it closes of its own accord. I then moved up to the gallery rooms on the second floor which have wonderful creaking floor boards and sampled my footsteps in a few of the different rooms. I then walked down to the main cafe area and was drawn to the sounds of the fridge from the cafe humming and buzzing with multiple layers of vibrating tones only noticeable when frozen to the spot with ones full attention.

I was then pleased to find the resident grand piano on its side against a wall with its beautiful innner tapestry of strings and bolts exposed so I got busy gathering material from that. Some of the sounds I ended up using were plucked strings also bolts moving and clanking which found their way into the third guitar led part of the piece.

The final piece ended up being a kind of triptych linked together by the sounds of my footsteps around the gallery. The first patterned part of the piece features the tinkling sounds of a small metal chain being trailed across the inner strings of the grand piano placed over a loop segment of footsteps on the wooden gallery floors.

The second passage adopts a similar approach, this time featuring the more prominent sounds of plucked piano strings over different looping footsteps which then trails into sounds from the buzzing fridge from the cafe.
For the third passage in the piece I took a dictaphone recording of a guitar piece I had written around that time with my year in Sligo in mind and played it over the looped sound of one of the main doors in the gallery swinging open and closing. Mechanical clicking noises made from flicking small levers inside the piano feature here too.
trans
I then gathered together what I considered to be the most interesting moments from the piece and isolated the sounds and set them aside for the next relay candidate to respond to in whatever way they saw fit. Be it a literal link, where some of the audio may feature or wether the link was purely conceptual would be entirely up to them.
John Lambert / May 2008 
__________________________
Relay is an online music project devised and curated by musician John Lambert (aka Chequerboard). Explore the project in full at www.relayproject.com

A Year In Sligo  by Chequerboard

The way John (Chequerboard) used his recording of the gallery, which was a space which held some emotional resonance with him, led me to think about how sound can be used to document spaces or objects which have some emotional connection to the person recording them.
Such recordings do not always necessarily convey these emotions to a third party listener. Sound is recorded without the emotional coloration felt by the person who recorded them. It is an objective documentation, whose emotional resonances are felt by those with whom they hold some significant connection.

I think John highlighted this by adding a more ‘musical’ element to his piece which suggests to the listener that the preceding sounds were of some emotional relevance to him. While a recording of an object or space can tell us so much about its physical attributes (size, mass, density, texture etc.) it does not necessarily describe the emotional significance it holds with the person recording them. It can of course, trigger an emotional response in the listener, which may be relevant to their own experiences, which may or may not correlate directly with the original source.

For example, a recording of an empty building might remind a listener of a time when they got lost in an empty building when they were young, or a recording of waves crashing against rocks might trigger memories of time spent by the sea with a loved one.
A lot of my own work tries to explore how these recordings can be used to suggest a particular emotion, or at least lead the listener in a particular direction with regards their emotional response to them. Processing, or manipulation of the sounds, is one way by which the listener can be ‘manipulated’ towards a particular response. Context is another method by which the composer can suggest a particular emotional environment, in which the listener may be placed.
For example, a recording of a buzzing fly set against some birdsong might suggest a summery atmosphere of calm and relaxation, while the same buzzing fly recording with some reverb applied, set against some creaking, tapping sounds, might trigger a more fearful or ominous response.

My own piece attempts to describe an exaggerated sonic portrait, or caricature, of my own empty house while I am sleeping. Playing on the old question of “if a tree falls in the forest…”, I tried to imagine what the house, and various objects in it, (ornaments, cutlery, clocks, the ticking of an alarm sensor) might sound like if it could hear itself as I slept. I imagined these sounds to be completely different to what I might hear were I to be awake listening to it.

When I was a child, I always associated sounds I could hear while going asleep with something completely different to what they actually were. The water gurgling in the pipes became rushing rivers and the sound of the blood pumping in my ears I imagined to be big, clanking factories where hundreds of tiny insect slaves marched to and fro. Stories about how things in a house might come alive as its inhabitants slept always struck a chord with me too.

The piece is an extension of this idea, whereby there is another layer of hidden sonic activity going on just beyond our consciousness. Towards the end of the piece, as I approach waking, the sounds slowly become a more ‘real world’ representation of the house, as if it senses my conscious presence and is afraid of letting me in on its secrets.
Jimmy Behan / July 2008 
________________________

Relay is an online music project devised and curated by musician John Lambert (aka Chequerboard). Explore the project in full at www.relayproject.com

Untitled by Jimmy Behan

I have long been interested in sleep, the unconscious and the subconscious when it comes to audio, listening and music.  With the birth of my first daughter I became particularly interested in sleep and how to get more of it (I’m sure most parents go through this).  I composed several pieces of simple drone music as an aid to our family to try to help us relax and sleep.  I have no idea if it really worked.  Jimmy’s piece and write up led me back to some of these thoughts about sleep and particularly what role audio plays during sleep, getting us to sleep, meditation, relaxation, dreaming, etc.

Jimmy makes some comments in his write up about sounds detached from the listener.  While Jimmy sleeps he images the sounds being heard by the objects that make them.  This is a beautiful idea in and of itself but what strikes me as interesting is that Jimmy still includes himself in his sonic portrait; a body, lying still and unconscious, perhaps not listening to these sounds but somehow still connected to them.

What role does audio play in aiding sleep?  What role does audio play while we are asleep? These are both interesting questions to me and are central to my relay piece and inspired by Jimmy’s piece and thoughts.


I’ve sampled small portions of Jimmy’s piece and reconstructed them into very simple layered patterns that loop and oscillate.  For me they are the sounds of the process of sleep itself. They are the sounds of a sort of sleep machine, an audio bridge between the conscious and unconscious.
Scott Morgan (Loscil) / September 2008 
______________________________________
Relay is an online music project devised and curated by musician John Lambert (aka Chequerboard). Explore the project in full at www.relayproject.com

The Sleep Machine by Loscil

As a continuation of both Jimmy and Scott's ideas around the subject of sleep I tried to create something which represents the process of dreaming. It's a response to their work, a kind of release to the tension they created. If their music focused on the sound of places where we sleep or the transition into sleep from a conscious state then my piece is roughly intended as a kind of musical visitation, something which happens in the mind after we fall to sleep, –like a distant radio transmission rising out of silence and filling the void for a just short time.
One of the things which interests me most on this subject is the notion of 'dream memories', –memories of things which never happened or never could have happened, it's strange how our minds can hold onto these things and how real they actually feel sometimes regardless of their surreality. When it comes to being creative, I'd like to think that our dreams play a big part in informing the work we do.
My piece uses a small section of Scott's drone sounds which comes in about mid-way and is fairly mutated. This gave me just enough spark to form my own ideas. Mostly what you hear is some simple half-playing on ukulele, I wanted to put forward the power of suggestion. Also, I felt that a loose flow in the piece best suited the theme of dreaming.
Thomas Haugh (Hulk) / October 2008
____________________________________
Relay is an online music project devised and curated by musician John Lambert (aka Chequerboard). Explore the project in full at www.relayproject.com

Nightly Sweetly by Hulk

An ongoing pursuit in my work is to attempt to engage haptically with things that are considered virtual. This piece is essentially a reconstruction of Hulks samples, using scissors sounds to cut into his digital audio. The original samples are arranged tightly together by basically starting them all at the same point and from this a loop is created and repeated throughout. Scissors samples are layered over this and a crude edit made at the point of each closing of the blades.

Polly Fibre / January 2009

Reconstructing The Incredible by Polly Fibre

(excerpt from 29'17'' to 36'12'')
Allquestions, 2002
http://www.allquestions.net
HOW TO BUY: http://www.allquestions.net/orderinfo.html#AQ04

John Duncan, Phantom Broadcast (excerpt)

The first in a series of audio interventions for BBC Radio 4. Famous for The Clock - a 24-hour video collage - Christian Marclay's Open Air work is another feat of crafted montage-making. Familiar Radio 4 voices combine and compete in not-so-familiar ways...

More info here: http://bbc.in/13lS28T
More on the Open Initiative: http://www.artangel.org.uk/open

Open Air - Christian Marclay

One song taken from the new Maps and Diagrams EP 'Laska' in hand-stitched cork sleeves (limited edition of 50) on Handstitched*. http://handstitched.bandcamp.com/album/laska-ep

Maps and Diagrams - Laska

Linda's piece was so beautiful and haunting that I wanted to make sure the EVPs worked into it with a natural, non-challenging feel.  So I opened up her piece a bit and added some extra depth to widen the composition up a bit to absorb the natural harshness of the EVPs.  I also added some of the phrases in reverse to the overall composition to create an eerie uneasiness without losing that original ethereal appeal. I then carefully chose and placed the EVPs in a way to enhance the overall harmonic rhythm of the work. Some of the EVPs were repeated so the observer might be able to glean some of the actual utterances contained in them.

All the years I've spent in University Libraries I have always felt somehow never quite alone. (I actually fell asleep on the catwalks of the University of Notre Dame's Law Library once and spent the night with some disturbing nightmares!) So with all of the enlightened learning and such that goes on in those quiet and venerable places, I wondered if there wouldn't be some interesting attraction to our post -coil energy that might ebb there. And through my work, I found that the voices are clear, sometimes worried and insightful.

Michael Esposito/ June 2013

Case File 112 is the name given to a body of research undertaken at Purdue University Calumet Campus, Indiana.

____________________________
Relay is an online music project devised and curated by musician John Lambert (aka Chequerboard). Explore the project in full at www.relayproject.com

Haunt Of The Athenaeum Codex (2013) - Michael Esposito

The Relay Project