Dear Crow,

Fascinating, disquieting piece, something in the line to the music for Hitchcock's Birds. Definitely creepy (a word that, as you know, I've been struggling to bring into the art historical domain.) Hitomi Shimizu, the wife of one of my close friends in Kyoto, if you google her seeking "creepy music," usually comes up at the head of the category. Thanks for sharing this.

Most Sincerely, Allen S. Weiss





http://www.artribune.com/2013/10/un-coro-di-uccelli-per-la-nuit-blanche-il-progetto-di-radioartemobile-a-parigi/

Un coro di uccelli, per la Nuit Blanche. Il progetto di RadioArteMobile a Parigi
Un progetto che arriva dall'Italia, per l'undicesima Notte Bianca di Parigi. Lo organizza RadioArteMobile, che mette insieme ventitré artisti internazionali, scelti sulla base di un tema: gli uccelli, il volo, il cielo, storie di viaggi e di cinguettii, tra sound art e paesaggio
Notte di festa, di suoni, di veglia e di comunità. Notte Bianca, come ce ne sono centinaia, oramai, in tutta Europa; ma la notte delle notti, quella in bianco per eccellenza, trascorsa nel nome della cultura e della creatività, resta sempre lei, la prima, che inaugurò le danze undici anni fa, a Parigi. Qui, ogni 5 di ottobre, la città s’apparecchia per la sua Nuit Blanche, evento strepitoso che tramuta la metropoli in uno sfavillante palcoscenico, acceso dal tramonto all’alba. Musica, arte contemporanea, performance, teatro, dj set: coinvolti interi quartieri, le rive della Senna, le piazze, monumenti storici, hotel, musei, gallerie, concentrando tutta l’energia nelle poche ore rubate al sonno e consacrate alla bellezza. E si tratta spesso di allestimenti d’impatto, con grandi insallazioni luminose e sonore, con artisti locali ma anche star internazionali: quest’anno, sotto la direzione di Chiara Parisi e Julie Pellegrin, sfilano nomi eccellenti dell’art system globale, tra maestri e mid career d’Oriente e d’Occidente, da Fujiko Nakaya a Martin Creed, da Hassan Khan a Cai Guo Quiang, in un tripudio di concerti per campane, esposioni pirotecniche, mega luna park urbani e mirabolanti live set en plain air.
Ma in questa notte di luminosi landscape, così scenografica e avvolgente, c’è anche qualcosa che procede sottovoce, tra sussurri e cinguettii, appena udibile, appena visibile: notte di leggerezza e inconsistenza, in cui flussi video e materia sonora raccontano piccole storie di voli, di boschi, di rami, di piume, d’aria e di vento, di minime dimensioni ed ampie distanze. Si chiama Les Oiseau il progetto promosso da RadioArteMobile a Parigi, per questa nuova edizione della Nuit Blanche. Un progetto italiano, dunque, ma che attinge da un bagalio vasto di produzioni e di percorsi: artisti giovani o storicizzati, giunti da pogni parte del mondo, dediti a linguaggi diversi ma qui trovatisi a condividere, per una notte sola, memorie volatili e senza peso.
Una lunga playlist, da assaporare negli spazi de La Gaîté Lyrique, diventa colonna sonora laterale e impercettibile di questa notte di festa. Quasi un ultrasuono, un’altra narrazione.
Da il bosco ha qualcosa da dire di Gianfranco Baruchello, in cui il vuoto di uno spazio di natura si satura di suoni di uccelli, fino a tramutarsi in frastuono, a quella Porta Capuana a Napoli di Jimmie Durham e Maria Thereza Alves, su cui al calar delle sera piccoli uccelli migratori si posano, mentre il canto s’impasta col rumore sordo della città. Oppure, dalla nascita di una famiglia di piccioni, annidati in una finestra della casa di H.H. Lim e osservati durante la crescita, mentre una pioggia battente scandisce il trascorrere dei giorni, al gracchiare di corvi che Richard Crow ha catturato e cucito nelle sue composizioni, come un ipnotico richiamo nel mezzo di un tramonto dark.
E poi Alvin Curran, Cesare Viel, Francesco Cavaliere, David Bertocchi, Thomas Köner, Donatella Landi, Stephen Vitiello… e ancora una lunga carrellata di lavori sperimentali, dedicati a brevi traiettorie celesti. Tra questi anche il lavoro del giovane lituano Arturas Bumsteinas, Gwizdaly, in cui convivono scrittura e field recordings: una serie ininterrotta di fischettìi, registrati all’aperto, diventa materia prima intorno a cui si costruiscono nuove partiture fatte di sibili, di fruscii, di fiati, per un’esperienza assolutanente pura, aniconica e in simbiosi col paesaggio. Il danese Goodiepal, invece, resta su una poetica dell’oggetto e della nostalgia, lavorando al suo Mechanical Bird per ben dieci anni: un uccello meccanico capace di cinguettare, come un prezioso carillon trovato per caso, dentro una wunderkammer di qualche secolo fa. E infine Filippo Leonardi, con il suo progetto in progress “Volounico”: “Il colombo non conosce il viaggio andata e ritorno, può solo tornare alla sua colombaia“, scrive l’artista. Un gioco di destino e di obbedienza, d’istinto e di disciplina, di perdita, di volo e di ancoraggio, che Leonardi documenta montando una microcamera sul volatile ammeastrato: sarà il piccolo dispositivo a registrare, e poi restituire, lo sguardo dell’animale sulla città, durante il viaggio di ritorno verso casa.

Helga Marsala



Nuit Blanche 2

The 'real sound' of Brougham Road, Hackney. Recorded 94 Brougham Road, Hackney London, Winter 1984. [Reptile Brains] was the given 'name' to a very, very loose collective of aberrant spectres and abject individuals. On this basement demo(n) there can be 'identified' Matt Pond - Voice, (of course we knew him then as Matt MacLeod) Paul Forder (aka Fod), Alix Triggs, and Richard Crow (Scarecrow, Crow) - Assorted Metal objects, Drums (?), piano frame, strings. 

Thanks: In the photo is JC, the man who moved the fucking pianos without whom...
and to Anna Scheer who was kind enough to provide me with my first piano...


[Reptile Brains] - Untitled (In Silence.)(Vocals Matthew Pond)(1984)

1. Richard Crow - Ludertone(extract) from Ludertone (2023)

"2. Static Footprints (after Schreber)Shortwave radio frequencies recorded whilst artist in residence at Artspace, Sydney 1996 as part of the installation in progress exhibition Grenzganger Oct 1- 26, 1996 and later processed at the IOR in 2003. These are the first recorded works attributed to my work on /with Schreber, they would later become core compositional components of what would be realised as Radio Schreber. Here the recordings are re-mixed together for the first time at the Visconti Studio in 2022."



STATIC FOOTPRINTS
(after Schreber)

s/w radio frequencies
recorded 
whilst artist in residence
at Artspace, Sydney
August - September 1996
and later processed at the
Institution of Rot (London) 
in 2003

Remixed Visconti Studio, June 2022.

cover image: Crow - Grenzgänger
(performance detail)
Oct 1-26, 1996
Artspace, Sydney
photo of Richard Crow performance "Grenzganger" : Heidrun Löhr 
manipulation: Richard Crow

INSTITUTION OF ROT 2004, 2023

2. Static Footprints (after Schreber) Visconti Studio Remix 2022 (extract) from Ludertone (2023)

3. During the night, one single night, the Lower God (Ariman) appeared (2023) from Ludertone (2023)

Voice - Anna Teresa Scheer
Electronics - Richard Crow

This work gives voice to Schreber’s visionary writings, and explores a sonic tableau of the spectral and disembodied voices embedded in the text, as well as the physical and imaginary locations inhabited by the writer. The piece is also a meditation on the inner or psychological voice as both a sound object and a psychoanalytical subject.
In Pollutions (Sonnenstein), we enter into aural contact with Schreber’s imagined body (and mind) and travel with him on a journey through a schizophonic soundscape of text as a haunting sequence of fragments, auditory hallucinations, dissolving and re-forming, eroding and decomposing, as we listen.

4. Pollutions - Sonnenstein Mix x3(extract) from Ludertone (2023)

Voice - Gabriel Séverin
Electronics - Richard Crow

Effluvium 

1.	A usually invisible emanation or exhalation, as of vapor or gas.
2.	A byproduct or residue; waste.
3.	The odorous fumes given off by waste or decaying matter.


Schreber is obsessed with his supposedly decaying body. In this sound piece text is repeated several times, layered and superimposed - the effect is one of obsessive thinking the same compulsive thoughts over and over again, a kind of mental (parental) torture is at work, but also a noisy regurgitation, a reflux. RC 
 

"Further in the time I am discussing attempts were repeatedly made to cover my nerves with some noxious matter; it appeared as if the natural capacity of nerves to vibrate were thereby really impaired, so that even I myself had at times the impression of becoming temporarily stupid. One of the agents concerned was called “poison of intoxication”; I cannot say what its chemical nature was. From time to time also the liquids of the food I had taken were by miracle placed on the nerves of my head, so that these were covered with a sort of paste, and the capacity to think temporarily impaired, I remember distinctly that this happened once with coffee."

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Schreber, Daniel Paul; trans by Macalphine, Ida; Hunter, Richard. A, 1955, WM Dawson & Sons, pgs 147 -148

5. Effluvian mysteries /poison Of Intoxication (extract) from Ludertone (2023)

Voices - Richard Crow, Anna Teresa Scheer
Sound effects, foley - Richard Crow (April, 2011)

Original recording recorded by Gabriel Severin, Laboratorie Central, Brussels, 25 March 2011



This effect on my voice is created using obsolescent audio software.

Chapter 9   IX   Transfer to Sonnenstein. Changes in the contact with rays. “The Writing-down-system”, “Tying-to-celestial-bodies”


“One fine day (after a total stay of 8-14 days) I was taken from Dr. Pierson’s Asylum, “the Devil’s Kitchen,” to this Country Asylum Sonnenstein near Pirna – I later learnt that it was on the 29th of June 1894. I do not know the reasons for my transfer; at the time I felt I had to connect it with the tremendously increased influence of von W.’s soul during the last days of my stay in the Devil’s Kitchen, which had to be counter-balanced in some way. I had a warm bath before I left-the only one in Dr Pierson’s Asylum. I then travelled by cab (as on my way there) accompanied by the “Country Court attendant” to Coswig station; having drunk a cup of coffee there, I travelled by train via Dresden to Pirna without leaving the carriage. The human forms I saw during the journey and on the platform in Dresden I took to be “fleeting-improvised-men” produced by miracle; I did not pay any particular attention to them, because even then I was tired of all miracles. I was strengthened in my attitude by what the voices said; Flechsig’s soul used an expression it had invented of “fossilized.” Dresden, through which we were supposed to have travelled. From Pirna Station I travelled in a cab on a rather bumpy road up to this Asylum. More than a year elapsed before I realised that I had been brought to Pirna and to Sonnenstein, when, on one of the few occasions I had access to the “Museum” (common-room) of the Asylum. I saw pictures of earlier Kings of Saxony on the walls. When I first arrived the voices called the place “The Devils Castle.” I still occupy the same rooms I was given then-number 28 on the first floor of the Elbe wing, with an adjoining bedroom. A few times I temporarily had a different living-room because of some alterations and decorations; the bedroom destined for me, however-as I will mention again later-I did not use for about two years but slept in padded cells, particularly number 97 of the round wing on the ground floor. 

pgs 113-114 (Photocopy 1955 Dawson first edition) pgs 115-116 (NYRB 2000) (Richard Crow, Laboratorie Central, 25 March 2011) Recording#3  first take - close mic(high female voice)

6. The Devils Castle (extract) from Ludertone (2023)

Audio Sources - Richard Crow/ Paul Harrison

Psychological Studies - Melancholia (Demos)  Richard Crow/Paul Harrison, 2023

7. Forecourts Of Heaven (extract) from Ludertone (2023)

8. Miss Schreber  -  Voice Of The Filth (Talking Birds Edit)(extract) from Ludertum (2023)

The term “bellowing miracle” (das Brüllwunder) is the most frequently mentioned of all of Schreber's celebrated neologisms...

piano tinkling tune (two small devils) - Richard Crow
piano - Jonathan Bohman
bellowing - Adam Bohman
processing  - Richard Crow

9. Richard Crow - Bellowing Miracle / (das Brüllwunder) part 1 - 2023(extract) from Ludertone (2023)

The live sessions I recorded at the Visconti Studio, synth lab and the many rehearsals and lecture rooms at Combehurst Court (as well as online) with my past and present collaborators – Nick Couldry, Anna Teresa Scheer, Adam and Jonathan Bohman (sometimes as The BBC ), Luke Jordan, Miss Schreber, Gabriel Severin, Colin Potter, curator Lucia Farinati, Orlando Harrison, Chandor Gloomy, and tape archivist Mors Mea (Anja Bajuk) - are the creation of preparatory sonic /sound sources for an audio montage/sound collage that attempts to Treat the past storage of archival material as an embodied material present. Here the sonic material is brought into the rarefied recording studio to ossify and fossilize, mummify - that was once site specific, fleeting, improvised, ad hoc.  In teasing out all this in the re-enactments/dissections of key texts from over 30 years ago (Schreber, Rilke, Marx, Huysmans, Carrington, Zurn + found textual material) along with prepared piano ‘treatments” improvisations, and re-arrangements of Scriabin (played by Nick Couldry) -  something emerges from this decanting process, liquifying but also crystallised – this is the Institution of Rot’s remains immortalised – the mortal remains institutionalised if you like – this could also be thought of as a return to (there are many RETURNS in the Crow/IOR history) a technique and process I developed called a  ‘disinterment in sound’ (something which I began to explore in my MA in Sonic art at Middlesex)   The Visconti studio (and surrounds) allows for the continued return to this working with the ‘holy relics’ of the IOR ( I’m talking here about obsolescent, damaged, beyond repair audio devices – radios, tape recorders, 4-track recorders, record players, and other electronic equipment that still omit some kind of special ‘spectral’ haunted noise for me – like static, hum, feedback, white noise generation etc this is why they have been kept for their performative use (what Artaud calls “machines of instant utility”) allowing the real, imagined or phantasmic to emerge through what Paul Hegarty calls the ‘Hallucinatory life of tape’, or as Leah Kardos replied to me in a message “Tape knows things”.
I’m using sounds, old recordings on tape (extracted sometimes from the real physical object and sometimes digitised) from the IOR archive drawing from past techniques (analog) and bringing this into the realm of new digital technologies and tools and how the two can merge- I use both Pro-tools and Reaper to create layers of buried sound and use a (sometimes) random cut up and splice/collage technique, allowing for willed chance operations to emerge.  
Richard Crow, May 2023

Magnetic properties of ROT - Noise, Vibration, Dust – IOR – Laboratory of life (2023)

Mixed by Clive Graham (Paradigm Discs)

http://www.stalk.net/paradigm/pd01.html

Music for blind limbs (Voice/text Marie Gabrielle Rotie) (1995)

The Boy With The Thorn In His Side
The Boy With The Thorn In His Side
Je suis pas bien mais ca me fait pas de mal

cheval d'attaque (for H Chopin) part 6 - (unedited) (2024)

‘Artaud damaged’ - Richard Crow 
Incorporates ‘Speech act’ number 3 by Johanna Garnal,
that includes Lettre de Menage
Deuxieme lettre de Menage
Troisieme lettre de Menage
(Letters initially written for Genica Athanasiou)
From Antonin Artaud – Le Pèse-Nerfs (1925)
Recorded by Johanna Garnal and treated by Richard Crow,
and Fragments from Piano Sonata No.2: I. Extrèmement rapide
and Piano Sonata No.2: II. Lent by Pierre Boulez 
Performed by Nick Couldry. Recorded and treated by Richard Crow

Johanna’s art exists in a state of prosopopoeia, which in her own words consists in somehow staging, voicing absent persons, the dead, in this case dead Artaud, through her voice - making him, appear, act, speak and respond. Artaud manifested through hallucinatory, paranoid, supernatural or schizophonic presence. An oneiric other. “Richard, I very much like the idea of my recording some letters that I adore so much, and maybe some poems. I was thinking that I could be playful by extracting some single words from the body of the text which makes sense given Antonin Artaud 's perception of the body, plus the fact that my voice will be without body.”

‘Artaud damaged’ (Lettre de menage- voice Johanna Garnal)

‘Le rémouleur’ 
Performers – Adam Bohman, Jonathan Bohman, Crow, Antonin Artaud (1933) as ‘Le rémouleur’ from the film 'Liliom' by Fritz Lang

‘Le rémouleur’ (The Knife grinder)

Artaud and Noise - Live Electronic Dissections

1  ‘Mucilage’ 
Performers – Adam Bohman, Crow (Diastolic Murmurs) with Jonathan Bohman,

Recorded live at the Visconti Studio University of Kingston London, 29.7.2024.

Recorded by Isa Ferri (Iklectik)

'Mucilage'

Diastolic Murmurs (Adam Bohman and Richard Crow) with Jonathan Bohman. This piece ‘(Diseased) Heartbeats’ featured ‘clinical material’ and was in two parts, like Mucilage parts of the pieces were prepared and rehearsed although a certain amount of improvisation was manifest. A text was generated (by AI) from an archival recording and recited while a backing tape which features extracts from a recording of diseased heartbeats plays along with a ‘commentary’ cut up performed by Jonathan Bohman.
Recorded live at the Visconti Studio, Kingston University London as part of Artaud and Noise - Libe Electronic Dissections 29/7/2024.
Recorded by Isa Ferri (Iklectik)

(Diseasd) heartbeats

'Bowel Lumen'

Emission

Haunted hospital: ospedale infestato di spettri
Un covo di fantasmi
A ghost town, città fantasma
A Ghost hospital, L’ospedale fantasma
Haunt: ricovero, ritiro, ritrovo, covo
Spaces are (un)heard as much as they are (un)seen


In the summer of 2008 Richard Crow and Margherita Morgantin were (for a few hours) granted access to the disused and abandoned Walsgrave Hospital in the centre of Coventry (UK). 
 
In their ongoing performance/installation A Ghost hospital - L’ospedale fantasma/ Walsgrave Hospital Coventry Crow and Morgantin attempt to re-visit and re-haunt the now demolished hospital.
 
The live re-working and re-mapping of material focuses on the use of private and public space, the active archiving of memory, the abject body in performance, the performative use of found sound and noise in relation to architecture, emotive fragments and anxious soundscapes (explored through text, image, audio), and the subversion and re-activation of outmoded spaces and technologies.

The first performance of the work took place on the 14th of February, 2013 at Raum in Bologna.


L'osperdale fantasma(extract)Richard Crow with Margherita Morgantin live at Raum, Bologna 14/02/2013

Sound For Russian Picnic (twilight Version) with Natalia Mali (2005)

Richard Crow live @Sounding DIY Final Concert

Thu 5 Oct 7PM | £5 on the door – iklectikartlab.com/sounding-diy-final-concert/

Final Concert of the series Sounding DIY with London-based artists Richard Crow, xname, and Bioni Samp and heading the lineup from Berlin TMS. All artists are proposing #DIY performance practices as an alternative to industry and commercial music.


live leakage recorded by Isa Ferri
Image - Martin Delaney

Live leakage@Sounding DIY 5 Oct 2017@ Iklectik, London

Decompositions: Passengers (Homage to Ottorino Respighi)

as part of Come Hither Noise, FAC, Perth, WA 10 - 20 September 2009
http://dailyserving.com/2009/09/come-hither-noise/
http://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/event/come-hither-noise-1

A huge chunk of this piece was broadcast on ABC Classic FM’s New Music Up Late on Saturday 29 August 2009



---------------------------------------------

NOTES for music journalists

http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/12795366
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/acromegalia

Homage to Palinopsia (An Adhesive band) (2009) featuring the voice of Adam Bohman (Remix 2011)

A part of Live De-composition with desiring assemblages for Les Hommes n’en sauront Rien (Of This Men shall know Nothing), 1923, oil on canvas, 31 5/8 x 25 1/8 (80.5 x 64 cm) By Max Ernst (1891-1976). Premiered at Chronic Illness of Mysterious Origin (10/10/2015)at the Dungeons of Polymorphus Pan, London. Previously released on the compilation "Various ‎– Atonal Mail Music" Published by COMA †‡† KULTUR ƩNĐ ϴF DΔYS. (2018.) The work is also available at The British Library Sound Archive, Shelf mark DD00023648/8.

Ackku (2014) by Miss Schreber (Richard Crow)

Richard Crow: inter-disciplinary artist, working in the field of experimental audio research, and performance. MA in Sonic Arts from Middlesex University (2006). Crow manifests sound and noise for its disruptive, visceral and affective qualities and its psycho-physical implications for the listener. His solo and collaborative performances have consisted of highly conceptualized interventions into base materiality, investigations of alternative systems of organisation and research into a certain material decadence, most notably with the project The Institution of Rot.

Since the mid 80s Crow has collaborated, performed, and recorded with a number of experimental musicians, sound poets and sonic artists including Ashenden, Zan Hoffman, Phill Wachsmann, Adam Bohman (as Diastolic Murmurs), Richard Barrett, Furt, The Elision Ensemble, The Hafler Trio, Clive Graham, Michael Prime, Heimo Lattner, Dean Roberts, Kaffe Matthews, Michael Morley (Gate, The Dead C), Sandoz Lab Technicians, dy'na:mo, e-Xplo, Alessandro Bosetti, Dmitri Prigov, KREV (The Kingdoms of Elgaland Vargaland), Esther Planas, Gabriel Séverin, Gintas K, Colin Potter (Nurse with Wound), The Bohman Brothers, Richard Thomas, Aleksander Kolkowski, Nicola Woodham, Luke Jordan, Chandor Gloomy, and John Wall.
 
He has exhibited and performed internationally and published many sound works since 1984 on labels such as ZH27, Shelf Life, Institution of Rot, Vintage Productions, Paradigm Discs, Durian Records, Touch, Chocolate Monk, [RHP] CDRs, EAM, COMA †‡† KULTUR, Musica Dispersa Records, Nostalgie De La Boue, Psych.KG, La Bois Records and scatter archive.
 
Contact: crow.ior.16@gmail.com

Richard Crow

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