Commissioned for the BBC Radio 3 series, Between The Ears, this sound piece reflects on voice, memory and loss. The sound work takes the form of an audio memoir or reverie, based on over four decades of recordings of my mother’s voice.  The programme explores not only my personal relationship with my mother’s voice , but also our common desire to record and keep, and the particular qualities of recorded voice as distinct from the photographic record. 
The programme was produced in Bristol by Chris Ledgard. 

It's Just Where I Put My Words

9.Kasia Kadlubowska - Transient

You listen to: CD 2 – Christina Kubisch | NINE MAGNETIC PLACES | 2017

CD 2 – Christina Kubisch
NINE MAGNETIC PLACES | 2017 — (13:26)
BELOW BEHIND ABOVE | 2017 — (22:32)
Sound engineering: Eckehard Güther
Mixed at Studio Hoppegarten
Mastering: Douglas Henderson

======================

You want to know more?
Visit: www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=16443

The secret life of the inaudible | Christina Kubisch & Annea Lockwood | CD 2

from one of my last takes before moving to san francisco.

january 18 mini

180125 / last from brooklyn

Performance
Saturday, September 30th, 2017

ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn

Saturday, September 30th, ISSUE is pleased to present WITH, the second evening of FOR/WITH, a mini-festival featuring new commissions with some of America’s most iconoclastic composers and performers. A celebration of individual languages and the spirit of collaboration, the series continues with the premiere of Stem-Flower-Root by Michael Pisaro, a performance of Annea Lockwood’s 1995 work I Give You Back performed by Kristin Norderval, and a performance of Christian Wolff’s open score Edges or Exercises. The evening and series will close with a roundtable discussion and Q&A with Nate Wooley and all four of the series’ composers: Annea Lockwood, Ashley Fure, Christian Wolff and Michael Pisaro.

Organized by performer, composer and former ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Nate Wooley, FOR/WITH simultaneously premieres distinct new compositions for solo trumpet while also embarking on a celebration of the independent work of the series’ commissioned composers.

Stem-Flower-Root, the title of Michael Pisaro’s commissioned work for trumpet and sine waves, provides an apt metaphor for the FOR/WITH series at-large. Wooley describes how each of the composers featured have something in common with the structure outlined in Stem-Flower-Root; they demonstrate a power and creativity that can remain hidden, yet essential, in the structure (stem) of their works. Pisaro, Lockwood, Fure and Wolff all work with sound, but with a sense that the sound is coming from a deep and settled, human place (root). And, as will be heard, the music and ideas from these four composers bloom in incandescent ways.

Annea Lockwood’s 1995 composition I Give You Back, performed by Kristin Norderval, is a lament for unaccompanied mezzo-soprano and is set to a text by celebrated Mvskoke poet Joy Harjo. The score notes evoke the piece as “the simple image of one woman onstage, barefoot, letting loose great octave leaps and glissandos peaking in sharp cries, projecting a beautifully unfettered freedom.”

The evening then features a performance of Christian Wolff’s Edges or Exercises featuring Nate Wooley (trumpet), Christian Wolff (small percussion and melodica), Michael Pisaro (electric guitar) and Kristin Nordeval (voice). In the liner notes for Wolff’s 10 Exercises, the American composer Frederic Rzewski describes the work as “not reproducing familiar forms, but revealing, behind these, life’s unpredictability. You could say it is political; improvisatory; concerned with collaborative, non-hierarchical forms of social organization; but you can’t really say what it is like (although John Cage came close when he said, after a performance of the Exercises in New York, that it was like the classical music of an unknown civilization).”

Michael Pisaro: Stem-Flower-Root (Nate Wooley) - LIVE at ISSUE / September 30th, 2017

KEF201C

From forthcoming collaborative release with Stuart Chalmers - Awkward Objects on Fractal Meat Cuts.

Releases November 19, 2018 

Music by Tom White and Stuart Chalmers. 
Release notes by Joe Murray. 
Mastered by Jac Beloeil.

/ / 

Tape-music grandmasters play chess with eternity! 

OK (pause) 

Phew ... (wipes damp palms, mops shining brow) ... I’m a little excited here OK. (gasp for air, clears throat) 

Fans of modern tape wonk will already know the names of the righteous Tom White and Stuart Chalmers. For you lot at the back (and please try and keep up) Tom plays the large reel-to-reel tape machine manipulating the thick vintage tape with electronic effects and spectacularly hands-on physical loop-age systems. 

Stuart favours the household compact cassette and carefully takes these fragile babies apart making short micro loops that he magically extends with a dusting of effects pedals, fairy lights and a deep mystical understanding. 

Similar set ups for these gentlemen for sure but their work is clear-voiced, distinctive and individual. For Awkward Objects Tom brings a textural crunch that aches with the sound of sound itself. Each subtle click and whirr of the reel-to-reel is elevated to be a star in the show; a gentle hiss is looped into angels gossip, a tidy mechanical clunk becomes the snoring of a sleeping god. Stuart’s gift is for layering fragile sonic time-tissues. Each soft envelope of memory draws electrical activity from my hippocampus triggering flashbacks involving Blake’s Seven, Moonbase Alpha and the hot fug of a sleeping bag. 

This is heady stuff; circular, ever moving - a dignified collapse leading to a raw re-birth. Tom and Stuart’s styles merge and mesh perfectly into what some are calling Cubist sound collages. To my cloth ears it’s a great description as the angles are slightly askew, the colours muted and subtle. This recording is a beauty that’s hinted at, inferred, rather than presented as a garish centrefold spread. 

Expect to be drawn into a soundworld of new sensations, warm embraces and deft ear-fingering. 

So, in my best fairground barkers roar... 

”Here they are ladies and gentlemen. Together for the first time, Mister Tom White and Mister Stuart Chalmers proudly present their Awkward Objects for your edification and listening pleasure. Take it away gents...”

Awkward Objects

Tom White & Stuart Chalmers - Flux | From Awkward Objects (Fractal Meat Cuts 2018)

Nicolas Montgermont
Long Waves Scan
26:06

Before the invention of radio and electromagnetic wave theory, Thomas Watson spent time at night listening to the sounds “produced by the telephone” when no one was connected. Later we would learn that electricity travels through the air and that these sounds are natural radio waves heard through long power lines that act as an antenna.

Long Waves Scan is a practice of listening to radio signals blindly. Nicolas Montgermont performed Long Waves Scan live using only a radio set as the sound source. The frequencies that passed through the site were scanned to identify interesting sounds, and then used with a set of effects to modified their timbre and temporal structure. Over time, the frequencies gradually transform into music using only a radio set as a synthesizer.

https://theradius.us/episode89

Radius

Long Waves Scan

Donate

Episode 89: Nicolas Montgermont

Bryan Eubanks and Xavier Lopez, synthesis
first 16 minutes of an hour long piece
performance recording from November 2019 at Petersburg Artspace, Berlin

wave forming (astrum) excerpt

This stereo sound collage is a tribute to the spirit of late 70s/early 80s independent music, a period latterly referred to as post-punk. It sews together edits made from the albums of about 30 different bands. It is an entirely personal selection and not in any way representative of the time, just my experience of it, and some of my favourite moments. 

It should be listened to via a decent amp and speaker set up or good headphones - not computer speakers or smartphone, as much detail and subtlety will be lost. The piece is freely downloadable to transfer to suitable listening media.

Many of the fragments are merely a second or two long, but the identity that runs through the music, like the colour through a stick of Brighton Rock, is indelibly strong and is an immediate memory trigger, re-firing those synaptic leaps, bringing you back to the original context. The time travel element is strong, but great strength of this music is that it travels so well across time - it is both of its time and beyond it; still sounding fresh and vital. 

This was a time, in the wake of punk’s short-lived initial burst and eventual burn out, when bands were being more exploratory within conventional musical forms, breaking the format down and re-assembling it, often healthily cross-fertilizing genres such as funk, jazz, dub reggae, disco, krautrock, improvisation and non-Western musics. Forty years on, I continue to draw considerable satisfaction from it. Its currency remains strong.

It was music untethered to conventional musical skills, where only the most rudimentary understanding of musical structures was sufficient to make music. Now it was approached laterally, with intelligence and imagination in place of ‘chops’. That said, certain musicians from this time had considerable chops, but the spirit of the time was about stretching the form. Even if you didn’t have traditional instruments, you could find sonically rich material in scrapyards and docklands in the death throes of their associated industries. And you didn’t need a state-of-the-art recording studio.

This music was both a response to prevailing conditions as well as something facilitated by them, in the sense that, unlike now, people had more time on their hands by subsisting on the dole, living in squats and being in receipt of local authority third level grants. The conditions, though difficult on many levels, were ripe for experimentation.

I was a teenager at this time and this music made a huge and lasting impression on me. The DIY ethos was incredibly refreshing and the sense of possibility felt wide open. The music was rich and atmospheric, often like film soundtracks. Whole worlds opened up that you could lose yourself in. It created a fertile head space for making art. Some of the lyric writing drew from other parts of the culture: literature, film, art, and formed a gateway to further exploration. 

Unlike now, access to information was scarce - there were music weeklies such as the NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and (in Ireland) Hot Press. Then there was the proliferation of cheap home made fanzines thanks to the photocopier - Vox being a particularly good Irish example. John Peel’s radio programme was a complete anomaly for the BBC at the time, and a vital conduit into the scene which Peel was hugely supportive of. 

The tribute title, taken from the Gang Of Four’s song Ether, was chosen for its critique of consumerism’s empty promises at a time when the future it proposed was slowly being dismantled and we were being sold short. Now there is the hauntological dimension of this disinterring of musical history, and the idea of ‘cancelled futures’ - a lively area of study in recent years thanks to the work of Mark Fisher and others, drawing from the original ideas of Jacques Derrida.

Dirt Behind The Daydream

Visual and sound artist living in Winchester, England.

It's Just Where I Put My Words

sebastiane_hegarty