A track from the 2021 CD 'Magneto Mori: Vienna' on Canti Magnetici.

Magneto Mori: Vienna

The Periphery Defines The Centre

section X from Divisio Spiralis (2019)

JACK Quartet

February 25th-26th, 2021, Oktaven Audio, Mount Vernon, New York
Mastering engineer: Ryan Streber
Editing/Mixing: Christopher Botta and Christopher Otto

Catherine Lamb

Divisio Spiralis X

Light . Everywhere | Album 'LIGHT'

New Weird Australia, Collapse Theories is the 30th New Weird Australia compilation released since 2009 and is available as a free download / stream from Bandcamp from Friday 2 December 2022.  

newweirdaustralia.bandcamp.com/album/new-weird-australia-fragile-states-nwa022 

SLEEVE NOTES:
Brian Eno defined “ambience” as “atmosphere”, as “a surrounding influence: a tint”, and he created Ambient Music to induce “a space to think”. In the intervening forty-five years, the genre classified as ambient has instead generated an endless catalogue of anodyne day-spa sounds that run perilously close to the Muzak that he reacted against. 

  In Fragile States, we return to ambient’s origin story, to capture the atmospherics of our time, highlighting the values of “doubt and uncertainty” that were so present, and so prescient, in Eno’s work. Although he sought to make his ambient work “as ignorable as it is interesting”, we seek not to rescind the agency of sound. Our environments are too perilous to be ignored.  

Instead, Fragile States proposes a ‘conscious ambience’, one which is entirely in lock-step with our social and political malaise. Across 25 tracks, we find all manner of misgivings in our surrounding influences. The tint is now tainted, yet we move on nonetheless. This is ambient music for connection and purpose; a runway to resolution. Music for life support.

New Weird Australia, Fragile States | NWA022

K Wilson - Open Palm

Excerpt from Rebecca Lane & Clara de Asís "Distances Bending", live at Oscillation festival, Brussels (BE), 29 April 2023.

A collaborative composition by Clara de Asís and Rebecca Lane deriving from a series of encounters and explorations throughout different times, spaces and forms.

Distances Bending is an ever-expand­ing pro­cess — a build­ing up, dis­tilling, and mir­ror­ing of mater­i­als par­tic­u­lar to each artist, respond­ing to and inhab­it­ing a space over mul­tiple hours or days. A repeated time struc­ture, a tem­por­al loop that is altered through upwardly evolving ration­ally-tuned fre­quen­cies, vari­ous flutes (whose size, timbre and shape cor­res­pond to these fre­quen­cies), elec­tron­ics, and chan­ging light, the piece cre­ates a subtle space where per­cep­tion is transformed.

Rebecca Lane: flutes, organ pipes, whistles
Clara de Asís: synthesizer

Rebecca Lane & Clara de Asís / Distances Bending (Excerpt) – Live at Oscillation 2023

Boat horns in the port of Piraeus on 6 january celebrations.

Epiphany (Theophania) - Boat Horns in Piraeus Port, Greece- January 2017

((.....)) is a piece composed from fieldrecordings that I have made during a long period of my life, but especially around the time when I lived in Berlin, when my childhood home in Denmark was sold, and when I moved to France. Sentimental and cinematic.

((.....)) - 2018

Radiophonic work in 10 parts, duration - 30min.
Production: Radio Television Serbia - Radio Belgrade 3
Produced partly in Electronic Studio Radio Belgrade using EMS Synthi 100
Premiere: May 30, 11:10PM, Radio Belgrade 3
Artwork (sculpture): Goran Stojčetović - Art Brut Serbia
Photo: Milan Milutinovic - Black Sheep Produkcija
VIDEO: https://youtu.be/7bu6HcFKI1k
*Winner of the Serbian most prestigious composition prize "Mokranjac" for 2020

Post-excavation activities (teaser)

Track from:
Simon Whetham "Forced to Repeat Myself" CD

“When performing with a limited set of resources, through choices in materials to work with and the constraints of being nomadic, there can be a tendency to repeat actions and scenes that 'work', even when improvising and having to respond to each new situation in a unique way.”

One characteristic aspect of the touring experience that is not discussed often enough is the dilemma of repetition. Not repetition as a mechanism of the work itself, but as a tedious consequence of being obligated to perform night after night in quick succession. Generating a completely unique performance for each stop, even with the assistance of improvisation,  is a laborious undertaking that consumes too much time and sanity, while adhering to a rigid set of rules leaves one open to both burnout and diminishing returns. Is there a way to split the difference so that both performer and audience are always engaged to the highest standard?

“I set these constraints on myself. The need to produce something (at least a little) different in each event of a tour was fierce, especially when traveling with other musicians.”

Explicitly within the title itself of his latest CD, Forced To Repeat Myself, UK sound artist and composer Simon Whetham tackles these questions with both a sly wit and sincere inquisitiveness. The tracks, all collected from recordings documenting a 2018 tour, utilize analogous source material and means of execution.  Whetham paid particular attention to the contour and character of each venue when deciding how to best put the pieces together, offering a customization that subverts pure deja vu for a sharp observance of the unfamiliar.

“In each situation objects and materials unique to the space were incorporated into the performance setup and structure, generating sounds or resonating with them. And yet I could hear similar scenes, movements, even spaces. This repetition determined the dynamic of the composition, working with it and against it.”

By the very nature of their disseminating sparseness, the tracks of Forced To Repeat Myself demand from the listener an attentiveness fixed on nuance and variation. The amplified cracks and static of ethereal currents and anonymous electronics infer the works of others who’ve made it their mission to attune our attention toward sounds outside our natural perception, including Christina Kubisch’s electrical walks, Toshimaru Nakamura’s no-input mixer excursions, and Jason Zeh’s experiments with blank tapes and the mechanizations of his cassette players. Whetham’s shaping of the album’s source material to highlight certain exclusivities of each live performance emphasizes how the inherent dynamics of time and chance guide his self-imposed constraints into pathbreaking spectrums. 

“The title references a phrase many of us will have heard in our formative years, ’Why do you force me to repeat myself?’ I have no answer to this question. I never forced anyone to do anything. But with this work, I did.”

One inherent paradox of Forced To Repeat Myself is that each listen naturally manifests a distinct, individual experience. The way sounds are received and processed in one instance to the next each forget their own entryway into transcribing meaning from this abstraction. And Whetham is keenly aware of this as the sounds of Forced To Repeat Myself find consistent, unique ways to perpetuate themselves, ensuring any repetition to be delicately understated.

Forced to Repeat Myself

Forced to repeat Myself

Simon Whetham "08-11"

Excerpt from forthcoming album with MP Hopkins 'The Divine For Me Is Whatever Is Real', to be released on More Mars, 2021.
Recorded by Alexandra and MP at Tempe Jets, mastered by Renato Grieco.

The Divine For Me Is Whatever Is real

Piano & Flue

Piano & Flute - Alexandra Spence & MP Hopkins

Composer and sound artist. Professor of Creative Music Technology and Co-head of Electronic Studio - Basel. Ex Head of Radio Belgrade's Electronic Studio
www.svetlanamaras.com
marasoffice@gmail.com
*********************************
Maraš has presented her work internationally, at venues, festivals and events such as  Ruhr Triennial, CTM (Berlin), Ars Electronica (Linz), House of Electronic Arts (Basel), Ruhr Triennial, Espace Multimedia Gantner (Bourogne), Musikprotokoll (Graz), Heroines of Sound (Berlin), Onassis Cultural Centre (Athens), Museum of Contemporary Art (Belgrade), Ausland (Berlin), Izlog Suvremenog Zvuka (Zagreb), ICMC (New York), International Rostrum of Composers (Wroclaw), ISEA (Dubai), International Music Institute (Darmstadt), Orpheus Institute (Ghent) and many other places. Her music was used in theatre plays, experimental and documentary films, presented at places like MOMA (New York), Aubagne International Film Festival and Bitef theatre (Belgrade).
​
Svetlana Maraš was SHAPE artist for 2020, and co-curator of 4fakultät concert series in Hamburg.

Post-excavation activities (teaser)

Svetlana Maraš

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Klang&Schall

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