video feature
Lancaster (UK) 2003
Vancouver (Canada) 2003
Sao Paulo
Hipersonica Festival
2007
Vancouver
Wilfried is famous for his acrobatic performances – standing on one leg in South America and with the other leg in Canada or UK. Today it’s both, he is turning on his right leg – still standing in Sao Paolo – placing his left leg to Vancouver where New Forms Festival was taking place just some days ago at Round House Community Center presenting Wilfried’s audio-visual work – “Urban.early sunday morning_raw” (30 July – 3 August 2003) and then he turns his right leg lifting his left leg in direction of Lancaster (UK), where Lancaster Film and New Media Festival was taking place already earlier in July (12/13 July 2003 – presenting the same audio-visual work. Why Wilfried is still remaining partially in Sao Paulo, he wants to continue presenting SoundLAB IV today – the m’scapes 5-8 including another 40 soundartists. SoundLAB originally created in Flash like many other works, is representing one of the applications which can be transformed – in the HTML5 format without a major loss of design. So when Flash will be finally discontinued at the end of 2020, Wilfried will try to redesign the major projects, but establish an offline archives for artistic Flash projects. Because preserving the orginal software by Macromedia, will allow Wilfried to use the still existing project files in “.fla” format.
Lancaster
folly is a leading digital arts organisation. Working in Cumbria, Lancashire and online, folly is committed to enabling new audiences to explore art through technology.
–> Taylor Nuttall is Director of Folly a Media Arts Organisation based in Lancaster and has been working as a new media artist exploring internet technologies and virtual reality since 1995 showing work in VRML99 and 2000.
Taylor has actively engaged in online discussion and collaborations including moderating the vr-art mailing list. Taylor has also helped to co-ordinate and judge the Eurographics Web3D Games competition. Folly has been developing a number of online and new media initiatives including Unencoded, Lancaster Film and New Media Festival, new commissions and residencies. During web3dart 2002 Folly hosted a live online chat tocoincide with the ICA based exhibition. More recently Folly has been settingup a Linux based media lab called th Kitchen and hosting net art projects aspart of edit / copy / paste. A new online monthly newsletter ‘In TheKitchen’ is about about to be launched to promote new media networking and activities in the North West, UK region.
Synopsis
Video based on a poetic text by Agricola de Cologne inspired by the Central Station of Milan (Italy).
Metropolis: sunday morning, between open end and twilight, between hope and resignation, between following a dream and returning that night to the home town or village outside.
Coming from the disco, full of the impressions of that juicy girl or that horny boy, doubtful of whether preserving innocence or following the instinct for an outstanding erotic adventure.
It is the moment of not yet knowing, vacillating between yes or no.
It is a same ritual each week-end, even if decisions are made once.
It is a game between identifying and identity.
The work describes the urban landscape as a scenario of a play, where the protagonists are embedded in without any chance to escape.
13 August – 9 September 2007
FILE Hipersonica Festival Sao Paulo/Brazil
SoundLAB IV – memoryscapes
m’scape V
is featuring these artists—>
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Martin Stig Andersen (Denmark)
Donald Bousted (UK)
Audhild Dahlstrom (Norway)
Decker/Fuchs (Austria)
Dorsey Dunn (USA)
Matthew Giraudeau (UK)
Paulo Henrique (Portugal/UK)
Le Tuan Hung (Vietnam)
Mental Youth aka Robert Kroos (USA)
Paula Roush (UK)
tinydiva aka Margaret Jameson (USA)
Peter Wadham / Susannah Brown (Australia)
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Title: Sleepdriver 2004, 8:07”
Are Ua sleepdriver by any chance???
Composed in the City University Electroacoustic Music Studios, London, and the composer’s personal studio in Denmark 2003-2004.
Commissioned by the Foundation Ton Bruynél, the Netherlands.
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Titles: 1. A Memory Game 2002, 13mins
Uses recordings of my parents as they disentangle memories attached to 5 photographs. The work examines their personalities, their relationship together and, to some extent, their relationship with me.
2002, 12mins
An electro-acoustic piece based on spoken and sung vocal sounds. Preoccupations include memory, genetic hard-wiring and emotions associated with reproduction.
artist biography
Interview for SIP – SoundLAB Interview project
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Titles: 1.Me and My Sister’s Cat Year: 2005, 4min 36s
Sounds recorded from time spent in family home with my sister’s cat.
A product of experiencing the 7.7 London bombings.
Lighter and brighter summer nights, Bethnal Green, London.
Title: AEROM, 2005
Titles: 1. FE 2003, 20:00
FE began as a 12-channel site-specific sound installation. Composed of women’s voices and underpinned by acoustic and electronic instruments, FE fills a room with the sound of intimate but fragmented conversation. Touring the room at random reveals multiple and continuous linkages of speech, the tones of which are not normally heard in the public sphere. From the center of the room, the resulting environment is a diffuse, musical murmuring. As the listener moves about the space, particular stories come into focus. Thoughts heard cover a landscape of personal concerns: of time, its richness and evanescence; of gradual awakening; of
travel and homeland; of the influence of others’ lives; of dance, writing, and theater. The voices in FE were drawn from dozens of conversations recorded with the artist. FE is a highly personal interpretation of the memories, meanings, and aspirations implicit in speech.
It is an aural view of the wondering self. It is a series of recollections, remembrances, and visions of the future expressed in language that ranges from the mundane to the epiphanic. At the same time, FE examines the human perception of voice as it ranges from the comprehensible speech that emerges from each speaker to the complex tone arrangements that occur as the voices and instruments mix in various combinations throughout the space. As a stereo audio piece, FE retains the sense of drift from clear voice(s) to diffuse, layered
tone. Running time is variable, as each input triggers on its own, but I would suggest a time of 20 minutes.
3Blanks is from a series of pieces composed entirely of alto saxophone samples. These were played by the composer and then restructured in digital space with a view to looking again at the instrument as an electronic sound source. The objective was to capture in the listener a memory-sense of the saxophone, in its tonality and timbre, but then to add a completely new set of aural attributes to that ‘sense’ of what a saxophone sounds like.
Title: Improvise/Formalise(memorytest)” 2005, 2min 52 sec
The piece is a defined methodology, a way of
working that includes the openess of playing and recording live, but then re-alligning melodies to completely change the song. Each time a separate part is recorded, the same method is repeated. Each time the song changes, the composer attempts to grasp the new piece, but also to retain the memory of the original music. What evolves is not what was, but only a final
snapshot of what is.
artist biography
Interview for SIP – SoundLAB Interview project
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Title: “Flame A1” part of AROUND ONE 2002, 11:58
Concept for the audio» We opened a platform on the internet, so people could send sound samples (100% original) to be used in the project.
These sounds were reengineered and composed to create a sound tissue. Two composers were invited to do this filtering of the sounds and each of them created one music. These musics/sound textures, were later produced and performed for vinyl record – Around One – a 300 limited edition. A visual artist [Paulo Seabra] was invited to work on the cover design of the record and these 300 copies are numbered and signed and they are to be an independent piece of work besides the performance /installation AROUND ONE. It will be possible to listen the the final recorded pieces. In this way the intangible internet sounds (invisible/private) becomes the material vinyl (visible/public). Original concept: Paulo Henrique, Sound Collaborators : Rui Leitão + Valdjiu, Cover Design: Paulo Seabra, Executive production: Jorge Janela.
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Title: Memories of Water 2006, 6 minutes 14 seconds
Memories of Water is a musical metaphor about the emotional experiences of human. We are emotional creatures and our emotions journey across many landscapes through time. Like water evaporating from the calm surface of a lake and travelling wildly through space before storming down to rejoin the peacefulness of a greater body of water, our emotional
life moves in circles of joy and grief, of hatre and love. When will the wheel stop? Where would you like to stay in your emotional landscape?
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Title: Socks with sand 2006, 9.35
In the early 90’s I started serious productions mainly dance and house music. Back then I released quite some records also together with several other producers. (for instance Private Productions) During this time I got more and more focussed on making avantgarde and experimental music. Together with composer Frans Friederich I worked on a project called Recyclopedia. Lately I work together with musician/folosopher Cor Gout (Trespassers W) with who I explore the relationship of sound and spoken word. This will result in a soon to be released album called Gergelijzer. There is much more to say but this is a short impression of the things I do.
The track is based on a dream my girlfriend had. She wrote it into a story and I have used the story as guideline for the composition. I’m using short scentences out of the story in spoken word. While I was working on it I became aware of the call for soundart. There the piece is of experimental character, has voice -sound/music integration and tells about memory and identity I decided to finish this piece to submit for soundLAB.
Besides my own voice I use self made fieldrecordings like my watercooker and streetsounds. For this composition I also used many different kinds of vst ad dxi audiosoftware all in service to generate the kind of sounds I needed for this piece. For sampling I used a large area of sources coming from fieldrecordings of traditional music, old music, modern classical. I prefer not to talk too much and let the music speak for itself.
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Titles: 1. arphieldRecordings-0503266130-03
arphield recordings caledonian tube station london
arphield recordings brixton tube station london (16 days ago)
arphield recordings kings cross tube station london (16 days ago)
arphield recordings
arphield recordings is a new project documenting impromptu arphid sound performances produced by people scanning their oysters cards in the daily routine of access control to the london tube stations. the methodology of field recordings documentation of site-specific soundscapes through audio recording equipment is in this case focused on the sampling of sounds produced by the use of arphid (rfid) technology (cards and readers) complemented by digital processing involving sampling and synthesis from the source, speculating on the ad infinitum convergence of arphid tags and readers into an endless symphony of sound surveillance and compliance.
the project started with the idea for an arphid mob, inviting friends to join me at a designated tube station for a semi-coreographed sound jam using our oyster cards. the main question was: when and where as a major impediment would always be the heavy security at all the gates. it was decided I would do some observation and this would eventually indicate the best timing and location for our arphid mob. observing the familiar tube’s access control gates, initially with no equipment and later with a video recorder, I realised that people were already engaging in impromptu sound performances. my documentation led me to discern varied patterns and even participatory scores, with mass arphid soundscapes punctuated by silences,
glitches and cracks in the system, all warped up in an circadian rhythm of work-rush hours.
the first arphield recordings documenting the impromptu sound performance of people moving through the London tube access control gates were done in brixton, kings cross and caledonian road tube stations during march 2006 for the tagged open house day workshop, when cds with the tracks and locational tags are distributed.
the project remains open to contributions. one way of doing this is downloading the arphield recordings from http://odeo.com/channel/85358 and visiting the station gates with the sounds on a portable music player to experience a mix of live and prerecorded oyster beeps.
Another way of participating is by contributing arphield recordings from a tube station access control gate. you can do this by opening an odeo.com account and upload your recordings , tagging them as arphieldRecording followed by the number unique to your oyster card (as in arphieldRecordings-0503266130-03)
artist biography
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Title: Altitude 2006, 1:48
“Altitude” is a short soundscape designed to trigger childhood fantasies of flying or memories of being in an airplane for the first time.
A syncopated clock strikes twelve. We descend into the ghostly realm. A bassline played on samples of slapping my hand onto the end of a metal pipe. The clock reverberates backward and my voice appears, contorted through a 1970s vocoder.
A hand-drumming pattern is applied in fractals. 3 sixteenth notes from a fleeting modern jazz solo have been captured and slowed an octave or two, to be reconfigured into early jazz riffs, heard now for the first time.
The ghostly chords are played from a note sampled one day when a neighbourhood kid was constantly blowing a whistle. I just stuck a mic out the window and sampled it with a thickness of atmospheric noise.
A cute, spooky piece inspired by music of the 1930s and minimalist funk. All sounds and composition are unique and the work mixed through analogue equipment.
is a collaborative piece by Wonderfeel and Shadowsense. The piece contains all original acoustic sounds and is mixed on an analogue desk.
Smoshar is a reflective/meditative piece which identifies with a period of time long since past. Set in the early 1900s, where well groomed horses pulled black carriages, Smoshar offers the listener an opportunity to identify with a bygone era from an altered state of awareness.
The experimental nature of Smoshar creates the sense of a warping of time. Drawing the listener into a dream like, hypnotic state. As our awareness becomes more attuned we begin to form images in our mind as we identify with the haunting sounds.
Echoes of horses’ feet on cobble stones ring out, the crack of the whip, the town clock striking, echoes of a steam engine and a flock of birds passing overhead. Ending with the echoes of water dripping and a raven calling.
In summary Smoshar begins by creating a sense of time displacement and then establishes its hypnotic rhythm. Slowly it introduces sounds of activity heard in the streets and climaxes as the sounds are heard collectively. Gently winding down the listener is left feeling at peace.
m’scape VI
features these artists—>
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Sara Ayers (USA)
Gregory Chatonsky (France)
Luis Coronado (Guatemala)
Paul Devens (Belgium)
Federico Fronterrè (Italy)
Suguru Goto (Japan)
G.H. Hovagimyan & Peter Sinclair (USA)
Caroline de Lannoy (UK)
Matthew MacKisack (USA)
Janek Schaefer (UK)
Shirley Wegner (USA)
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Titles: 1. Dark Dark Empty 2001, 1:57
This piece embodies my memories of a recurring nightmare I had as a child. The most terrifying part of the dream was not being lost, alone or in the dark but a physical feeling I remember to this day of simultaneously falling and flying down the stairs.
A cruse is a small jar or vessel; in the context of this work it serves as a vessel of fragmented memories of transience, decay, hope and rebirth.
artist biography
Interview for SIP – SoundLAB Interview project
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Titles: 1. My last tape 2003 / 2:00
Translate Samuel Beckett “last tape” in obsolete comodore 64 tape sound
A cyborg fall in love.
A woman speaks to a ghost.
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Titles: 1.MONOS DE YAXHÁ ( Apes from Yaxhá ) 2006.
As a biology student, Luis spent many weeks in the deep jungles of Guatemala,where the penetrating growls of the Howler Monkeys, gives a deep feeling of littleness to anyone being in the midst of this dense vegetation. Sometimes the sounds stays in your mind for long periods of time. The impressive pitch and the varieties of growls ( according to the different ape families ), keep the treetops in order. Nothing can escape from the sensation of being surrounded by large amounts of Howler Monkeys. The physical and temporal distance from the heart of the jungle, helped to recreate this unique sound.
One of Guatemala´s most particular sounds, is the one produced by the colourfull “Camionetas”. This BLUE BIRD buses are the main transportation for local and foreigners, and their sound is very unique. Each Latinamerican country has different kind of buses, and the guatemalan buses in my memory, sounds like this. Its slow humming lows, the screams of the bus helpers, the radio playing….Its like a premoniton of the stormy trip ahead.
At 3600 meters above sea level, the dizziness in your mind makes your senses a little bit more concious. In Bolivia, lake Titicaca rests between huge snowy mountains. The little waves from the lake, melt in the rocky beaches with a bright clean sound. The height and the energetic fields around this breathtaking lake, completes the scene with magic and mistery.
artist biography
Interview for SIP – SoundLAB Interview project
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Titles: 1. On ‘Alkaline’ 01’43 (2006)
These compositions connect to the theme ‘Memoryscapes’ in the way sounds relate to previous occasions that such a sound is perceived in mind. You would recognise the sound of a car because you already heard a car before. Artists, like me for instance, could play with existing sounds, in order to evoke an idea, a thought, an atmosphere.. or brand new sounds get invented, thanks to the developments in technology. ‘Alkaline’ and ‘Dangerpie’ both oscillate in between alienation and recognition. The listeners’ mind is somehow triggered to place unknown ‘sonic objects’ into a mental realm. Maybe to deal with the fremdkorper or understand the non-understandable.
The sounds are produced with custom made virtual generators, home made electronics and effects, toys, field-recordings from urban life. The compositions are live at-once-recorded sessions.
Title: To Recognize (3’16”)
The conception of this track is related with the will of the expression of the duality between me and the world around me. I want to represent the condition of interaction and fight that is created in this relation. There are two levels in this track that represent the two elements whose I’ve spoke about. The low-mid frequencies are the indistinct, chaotic land of the unknown people. They create, in the beginning, a sense of uneasiness for the incapacity of discriminating the importance of every single element of the crowd.
Then you begin to understand the consonance between every part of this world and you can hear a melody where you heard an ensemble of strange and creepy sounds before.
The difficulty to be on the same wavelength with this shapeless reality is symbolized in the track with the scratchy sound(the second level in the track) representing somebody that wants to escape from an uncomfortable situation, from a reality in which he can’t survive.
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Title: o.m.2 – g.i. -p.p., 1997-2004, 19 min.
1. om1
Composition for BodySuit and Interactive Video
The sound for the original composition was generated from April until July in 1997 at IRCAM for instruments and computer. Some of the sections were modified later, and then adapted for use with BodySuit, creating this new version.
First the Max with ISPW on NeXT was mainly used to generate computer sound. The sound synthesis methods which are programmed for this composition are based upon additive Synthesis, FM synthesis and Granular Synthesis. These are now ported to Max/MSP. The algorithm is based on the idea to create mechanical texture which gradually transforms as time progresses. The parameters are decided with controlled random data which are sent through many levels of hierarchy. The Granular Synthesis was especially programmed to interpolate sound constantly.
This composition is based on the density of texture and the alternation between the dynamical and the statistical aspect of the movement. The ideas of the composition are summarized in the title of which the initials mean : o.m=Onomatopoeia and montage, both of them can be heard clearly in this composition, 2=second version, g=granular, i=interpolation ; p.p=poly-phase.
Title: Circular Time 2006
Bastien Gallet and Peter Sinclair decided to create a video with me talking about podcasting and memory and my ideas about time. Peter edited the sound in a layered manner and the results is a Borgesian style discussion about circular time. Cyrille C. de Laleu shot video of me and Bastien walking a circular hedge first one way and then the other. The finished piece should be quite interesting because she is a pretty terrific artist. In the meantime the sound piece by Peter does a neat trick of using stereo pairs to have me talking at myself.
artist biography
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Title: Indivisible 2006, 1:48
My sound piece “Indivisible” is the recollection of events exploring the nature of memory and methods through which it can be disorientated. It involves structured sounds with an implicit concept of time, place, associated emotions, pitch, and energy. The presence of these elements is organized into units with interrelated rhythm, harmony, and melody. It defines time as a nonspatial linear continuum wherein events of memories occur in an apparently irreversible order. The work invokes and conveys a sense of motion in time and space.
artist biography
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Title: guesswork (asirememberit) 2005 – 3m28s
Guesswork is a project that is: treating art as stimulus; sculpting the spectator?s mental imagery; asking how a mechanised and mediated society sculpts the contents of consciousness; trying to explain to myself problems of memory and epistemology; trying to argue myself out of my head. Guesswork (asirememberit) is talking about boxes: a room, the Cartesian “dark room of the mind”, a television, a Necker cube.
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Titles: 1. “His Masters Voices” 1997 [film 2006], 5.05min
‘His Master’s Voices’ is a simple and clear demonstration of the multi-arm simultaneous play back of the Tri-Phonic Turntable, and was the fist Plunderphonic collage I ever recorded on it. T.S.Elliot reads an extract in mono from his 1948 poem, ‘The Four Quartets’ which ponders on ‘Time’, past and present. Taking the spacing of the tone-arms as a basic delay device set out on a single copy of the LP, each output is panned across the stereo field which in turn ‘amplifies’ the content of the prose.
A collage of the messages I found left on the display model of a mini digital dictaphone bought at a Branch of Office Max in Minneapolis. In a condensed period of time we get to hear many different cultures and stereotypes interacting with the technology uninterrupted by the presence of sales staff. The piece concludes with a voice from my car radio as I tested it in the carpark outside talking about innovation and technology.
artist biography
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Title: 1. “I LOVE YOU”
2002/2006, 60 seconds soundtrack in a loop
‘I LOVE YOU’ is a 60 seconds soundtrack of gunshots played in a loop. The soundtrack is composed of two types of gunshots: a single gunshot or a burst-mode from a machinegun simulating the lines and the dots of Morse Code and edited in a sequence that spells out I LOVE YOU. (In a gallery the piece would be presented with the 10”x 10” aluminum plaque and a set of wireless headphones).
Inspired by my own experiences of my army service, in this piece I was interested in the ambiguity formed in juxtaposing two languages; a military language on one hand and a language of intimacy on the other.
This piece is part of a body of work that addresses the idea of construction of memory. Growing up in Israel and living and working in New York City, has created a geographical distance which allowed me to explore how my memories were formed, to expose their mechanism of construction. In each of the images I make I explore the relationship between the personal and the political, between my own private memory and the social political context in which the image operates.
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m’scape VII
Martin Aaserud (Norway)
BrailleBones (A.Desjardins) (France)
Jackie Bruce (Germany)
Jessica Curry (UK)
Jason Freeman (USA)
Phivos-Angelos Kollias (Greece)
Sara Lenzi (Italy)
Emily Lutzker (USA)
Debra Petrovich (Australia)
Grit Ruhland (Germany)
Kenji Siratori (Japan)
Shane Wilson aka Deciduous (USA)
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Title: 98_177_116_116_101_114_102_108_121 2006. 04:32
98 177 116 116 101 114 102 108 121, which in ASCII code says “butterfly” is made using nonlinear chaotic algorithms to create waveforms at sample level. I use the trajectory of the algorithms to synthesize sound with objects I have built for the programming environment Max/MSP.
The composition is part of a live improvisation set which focus on the general instability and beauty of numbers and ‘glitches’ that exist – that cannot be explained by numbers. To quote Carsten Nicolai, “Mathematics is one of the best philosophical ideas … But it does not exist in nature at all, it is just an abstract idea of how nature functions.” As we are constantly surrounded by abstractions, be they words or numbers, it is easy to confuse the abstractions to be real. In this sense I think mathematics is maybe the purest abstraction we know, and therefore strongly suited to represent what we find uttermost real.
The title “Butterfly” in this case has a double meaning; the ‘butterfly effect’ – that very small changes on a deep level usually cause massive changes on a grand scale, and the nature of a butterfly which is too complex to calculate with numbers, or even science (ex. the mystery of it’s metamorphosis).
artist biography
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Title: My Lullaby (swinging stereo remix) 2004, 4:32
The original recording was taken from the largest international border crossing between Canada and the United States. The Ambassador Bridge links the Canadian border city of Windsor Ontario to the city of Detroit Michigan. Hundreds of trains and trucks pass through these two cities on a daily bases. The purpose of this piece is to capture through live recordings the sounds of Detroit’s unique acoustic environment. These samples are arranged in a way that illustrates the cosmic frequencies that define us and affect our lives.
The rationale behind this collection of sound occurrences is to explore the natural frequencies and beats that surround us, and find a connection between the dynamics of our acoustic environment and the unique musical style and culture of the Windsor/Detroit area. This piece raises the question: Do the frequencies of a transient industry play a role in the art that is produced regionally? Has this played a part in the inspiration of techno music and gritty Detroit rock n roll?
Regardless, this is my home. This is my soundtrack, and at night, this is my lullaby.
artist biography
Interview for SIP – SoundLAB Interview project
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Title: Ich brauche nur eine Minute
I just need a minute – Electro-acoustic live concert
The concert “I just need a minute” begins with recording one minute of radio that’s used as the basis material for the entire concert.
Four movements structure the concert, starting with the one minute of radio, which is recorded onto tape. The second movement consists of three minutes of tape elaboration, followed by two movements of computer-elaborations that continue developing the sounds of the first minute.
With this method, the outcome remains unpredictable and live; no one – not even I – know what the base material will be until the first minute of the concert. The multiple editing (as set in a score) shows the slow, constant and traceable modulation and new organisation of the original sound.
For the soundlab edition IV, I’ll present the live-recording of the concert that took part October 14th 2006 in Weezie, (Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst) Leipzig.
artist biography
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Title1: 1. All Paths Lead to Hell 1999 3.28
Much of my work has to do with death, memory and perception, and this piece was no exception. This was the first work that I composed using a sampler and it paved the way both technically and thematically for my future career. It’s hard to intellectualise All Paths as it was a raw response to the death of a friend and as such was very visceral.
Emotionally I aimed to instill a sense of panic and despair in the listener, and used my voice in a variety of ways in order to achieve this. I aimed to make my cello playing as voice-like as possible, and attempted to echo and mimic the ululations and ritual moaning of Arab cultures when in mourning.
There are also hidden codes and meanings tucked into the work that hint at the darker and more sinister practices of religion, as I was really angry about that at the time. The piece tried to freeze in aspic aspects of my friend’s life and passions, so I wouldn’t forget him, but the darkness I was feeling seeps in to the piece and pollutes it. All Paths is about rituals
and anger and was an attempt to capture and exorcise a ghost that was haunting me. I failed, but I still love the work.
Secret was created for The Wellcome Trust to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA. It is an art work about layers, hidden codes, history and the complex structures, equations and histories that lie beneath the surface. It takes inspiration from Rosalind Franklin, whose X-Ray diffraction photographs suggestive of the double helix were integral to the discovery of the structure of DNA. The work is particularly influenced by
Franklin¹s story, and how the lack of recognition originally afforded to her has resulted in her being re-cast as an iconic figure. My imagination was captured by how Franklin¹s place within scientific history has emerged and the ways in which this mirrors the complexity of the rules and forms of DNA emerging from behind our everyday perceptions and understanding of life.
Sound is used in The Secret of Life to create a multi-sensory experience of DNA, a subject which is usually represented by silent images. The audio element uses numbers and rules derived from the hidden codes of the genetic alphabet to build an organic composition that can be experienced without referring to its inner nature. The rules remain buried: they exist invisibly within the music yet are integral to its form.
This piece was created during Labculture, an intensive week of work and debate, giving artists the opportunity to focus intently on their personal and professional practice. The artists came from very diverse backgrounds and disciplines- fine artists, writers, sound designers, installation artists, composers, web designers etc and we each produced a piece of work for the end of the week.
artist biography
Interview for SIP – SoundLAB Interview project
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Title: What I Listen To 2005, 4’57”
People often ask me what music I listen to, and I find it difficult to describe my enormous music collection in just a few sentences. So I created iTunes Signature Maker (iTSM), software that answers in sound a question I cannot answer in words. iTSM selects a small number of your “favorite” tracks based on some simple selection criteria, such as the number of times you have played them or the rating you have assigned them. Then it analyzes the audio content of these files, combining a small bit of each of them to create the signature.
I created What I Listen To (2005) during the course of developing the iTunes Signature Maker software. These three short experimental sound works algorithmically stitch together bits and pieces of the music I’ve listened to over the last year; the results are a mix of smooth textures, chaotic collages, and embarrassing revelations about my taste in music.
iTSM was commissioned by the Rhizome division of the New Museum of Contemporary Art. The Rhizome Commissions Program is made possible by support from the Jerome Foundation in celebration of the Jerome Hill Centennial, the Greenwall Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Additional support has been provided by members of the Rhizome community. Since its launch in December 2005, over 85,000 people have visited the site.
You can use iTSM yourself, browse a gallery of signatures, and download the open source code by visiting http://www.jasonfreeman.net/itsm/.
artist biography
Interview for SIP – SoundLAB Interview project
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Title: Asphatherios
for electroacoustic medium, diffused by human bodies’ spatial movement
Description of work
The performance starts with three performers coming from the stage, down to the spectators’ area. Each one holds a speaker projecting an individual channel of the electroacoustic medium. The performers are dressed homogenously and their faces are partly covered (surgical masks and sunglasses). The two performers are walking in the right and the left corridor and switching corridors in the back of the hall. In the meanwhile, the third one is moving in front of the audience. Sound’s spatial movement is affected by their interaction in the hall. Two minutes later, a fourth performer is entering into the audience’s hall, from the stage. The four of them now have the freedom to move all over the place however trying to avoid approaching to each other in order to broaden sound’s diffusion. Right in the middle of the work’s development, a conductor who was unnoticed all the time in the front row of the audience, is standing up and starts conducting the performer’s movement in space. Sound’s spatial movement is now in his authority. The work ends abruptly and the performers are leaving the hall, without responding to the audience, as the conductor is sitting down inexpressive.
The above description is of a particular performance. Adjustments can be made in accordance with the performing area.
Required equipment
four portable devices (ex. MiniDisk, DiskMan, iPod)
four units of portable speakers (ex. four couples of generic speakers with batteries)
four sunglasses, four surgical masks,
or four theatrical masks
Additional information
The work has been created as part of a project organised by Jonty Harrison and Richard Hoadley in 2003 and it was performed in Mumford Theatre, Cambridge. Since then, it was again performed this October, as a four-channel work, in the
“4th annual gathering of the Hellenic Electroacoustic Music Composers Association”.
For the original performance, four MiniDisks were used, each one loaded with one of the four channels. Generic PC speakers with “home-made” power packs were connected to each device. To achieve coordination a repeated sound in constant rhythm was added in the beginning of each channel. After being able to set the four sounds in coordination, thus synchronise the channels, the performers had ninety seconds before the beginning of the piece.
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Titles: 1. The memory of things 2006 5’42’’
This work was born as a study-work on objects’ sounds. All the sounds where recorded&sampled by the author, and subsequently modified with filtering and other sound processing.
The purpose of this work was to follow the nature of a sound through diverse transformation, which regarded different parameters: modification of the duration (time), modification of the “space” (use of reverb, and different filtering of the same sound to give the idea of position and movement), modification of “meaning” . Through giving a “rythm”, building rythmical patterns with each object sounds, I wanted them to overcome their “objective” nature, and to become pure “sonic&musical” objects, with the same function as notes¬ation.
Why memory? Because I realised that every sound has its own memory, in two different ways.
One is the memory of the sound’s source, in this case all the objects I sampled. Every sound, even if deeply modified, i s the result of tits origin, and tehrefore preserves a memory of it. Second, it’s the memory we have of this sounds, and therefore of this obejects. Memory of sounds, in its double significance.
This worked was inspired by the gnostic text of the Apocalypses. This one is supposed to be spoken by the firs man, Adam, who foresees the arrival of the true god. I have taken Adam as a symbol of mankind, a mankind at its very beginning that at the same time is already waiting and preparing its end. I tried to realise a sort of “drama” which could represent the percourse from nature to logos through rough material and human beings (as it is described in the gnostic text). The memoryscape here is that of the enternity of time that preceeded (and presumably will follow) the birth of the human being, that of mankind with its historical past and its historical future, and finally that of Adam, the first man: its memory of a perfect life lost forever, but lived already in the eternal wait for something or someone who would have revealed us the truth about the reasons of our existence.
For the Adam’s Apocalypse there is also a version with soprano saxophone and electronics.
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Titles: 1. space age love song, 2004
Music from audio project: The Bunny Jammers, Be Nice!
I created a 5 song EP, in which I picked four popular songs and employed 3 other participants plus myself (we called ourselves the Bunny Jammers) to create our own renditions of these songs, plus one original work. We met in the recording studio and with the original music playing on headphones; each of us sang or played along, expressing our own interpretations of the songs. The original music is not heard on the final album, and the result is only what the Bunny Jammers created, expressing our own fantasies of who we were in the band and what the music meant to us. What became crucial to the work was that none of the participants played an instrument that they were trained on, so the gap between the fantasy and reality was heightened, and mediocrity explored. This work was first heard as the soundtrack for the Be Nice to the Bunny Installation at the Pool Art Fair in New York. I call this technique “unkaraoke” and have employed it since for a live performance in Minneapolis, and will again for forthcoming performance in London and New York.
The songs I chose for the Bunny project were specifically resonant to me. I wanted to use songs that were meaningful in terms of my own personal fantasies during my adolescence, songs that were about other worlds and outer space. Ideas of fantasy and the future never turn out like we hope, but we remember those expectations so acutely. In these songs I remember mine.
artist biography
Interview for SIP – SoundLAB Interview project
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Title: ‘Solace in Black Sun’
was created as a catalyst for a performance where ‘I’ the performer used the energy to pull large weights across stones in order to confront, tease and meditate on many layers of embedded memory, at first to immerse, then to gather energy, then to react against or (abreact), bringing to the surface a myriad of memory-scapes. The act of struggling on the stones barefoot and dragging huge weights created a doorway to the soundscape which released a rhythmic pulse that built to a dynamic edge in a very organic fashion. This piece is part of an on-going investigation into the writing of Antonin Artaud and his call for a new theatre.
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Interview for SIP – SoundLAB Interview project
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3. ExMemory 2006, 6:11
ExMemory is a deconstructed memoryspace.
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Titles: 1.Endangered Observer 2:20, 2006
deciduous brings us another eclectic mix of sample material for this release. abrasive tibetan gons deconstructed into the mix blend with soothing pads and organs in track one – in just over 2 minutes we are brought down to the elastic, scuttering sounds of deciduous…track
two introduces us to more ambience and texture with slow rythmic clicks and dub inspired stabs within a backdrop of bit reduced field recordings. Track three has an almost oriental quality to it, as the name and the scenery of the cover art suggest…it’s almost as if we
are sitting in a japanese garden listening to the nightlife crawl out accross the mosses and well manicured garden beds..The suptle interactions of delays and beats on this song give it a dub like quality. the last track, battles lost, is a kalaidescope of sounds and textures, building tension and release…there is a story behind this song.
m’scape VIII –
includes these artists—>
Kari Besharse (USA)
Hervé Constant (UK)
Lukas Fütterer (Germany)
Gintas K (Lithuania)
Francis Heery (Ireland)
Volker Hennes (Germany)
John Maxwell Hobbs (Sweden)
Meri von KleinSmid (USA)
Luigi Mastandrea (Italy)
Jenni Meredith (UK)
Robert Rudolf (Slovakia)
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Title: Ear to the Ground (2005-06), 4:16
Ear to the Ground was originally composed for dancer/choreographer Jessica Ray. The work operates on idea of memory on several layers. On the surface, feelings of nostalgia are brought about through a Chopin piano piece, which I can remember my grandmother playing when I was a little girl. Below the surface however, the work approaches the imperfection of both organic memory and the unreliability of mechanical storage. In the human mind memories lose their clarity and eventually disappear. If we try and hold onto a memory through a storage medium such as a recording or a photograph, that too will eventually become corrupt and decay beyond recognition.
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Title: ‘DREAM’ 2006, 4:30
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01 – a bug’s life isn’t coordinated – 00:01:37 – 2005
Title: ring of the past , 2:44
Track “ring of the past“ is done out of one rhythmical segment which sounds at the beginning of the track. That segment is modulated, reversed, granulated and shuffled in various ways.
Imaginable “ring“ from which the track is done reminds me something from the passed life, from overpast history which keeps trying to remind me (us) something what never returns again. Track is done with audiomulch software.
artist biography
Interview for SIP – SoundLAB Interview project
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Titles: 1. Brownian Motion (2005), 4:07
The title is inspired by the chaotic movement of pollen grains in liquid whose paths can be likened to the countless, seemingly chaotic lines of thought that are pursued on an hourly/ monthly/ yearly basis throughout one’s lifetime. The thoughts we entertain at this moment are directly linked to those that precede them and so in this sense they are intimately connected with all the thoughts we have ever had. Because of this we can view the almost infinite strands of thought that are present in our lives as, in truth, belonging to one super strand; existing as one thought whose root lies in the most distant past. The totality of this chain of psychic events, summed and viewed at once so to speak, will create a pseudo-random, seething mass of memories from which the image of one’s entire life will emerge. It is this chaos, contained within the form of ‘lived experience’ that is expressed in the piece.
The work was composed using granular manipulation of short soundfiles using Csound.
This piece was inspired by the following poem by Dylan Thomas:
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
The sounds were created by manipulating and processing a recording of a detuned electric guitar played with a biro.
(2006), 4:19
This is an algorithmic composition based on the chess moves made in the final game between Gary Kasparov and the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in May 1997. Rows a to h on the chessboard were assigned to notes a1 to a2 with the columns 1 to 8 representing octaves. In this manner the coordinates for each move can be assigned a note. What is heard are alternately Deep Blue’s moves (the long sustained notes) and the Kasparov’s (the arpeggiated sequence). Each time a player’s move is represented what we hear is not only where the player has just moved to but also the notes corresponding to the positions of all the other pieces in play for that player. Each successive combination of notes acts as a memory imprint of all the moves of the pieces that remain for the player. Sounds such as paper ripping are used to designate the capture of a piece and the bell like sound midway through represents a check for Deep Blue.
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Titles: 1. »Bury And Forget« 2006, 4:04 min.
Speech as a medium of communication is both an acoustic and a semantic phenomenon. Sound and sense constitute an intimate connection. As transmission of sense is impossible without the transmission of sound in speech, we automatically perceive meanings from
the music behind the words [expression-parameters: tone, pitch, strength, modulation, tempo].
The recording-performance »Bury And Forget« uses a famous speech of the annoying voice from 1934. The recorded speech is processed using pitch analysis and assigned to an oscillator in order to remove any semantic parts of the annoying voice. Even so the annoying voice is still identifiable. Due to penetration it is burned in our collective associative memory. Therefore it was buried.
The range of attention is an intersubjective phenomenon that is temporally terminated. Our neural mechanisms limit the duration of perceptional integration to more or less three seconds.
How long is the integration limit created by media-machinery? What is the average decay time of the importance of information? This piece uses a method of superimposing sound. Audio source is an original three-minutes-excerpt recorded from german television on 9th of september 2001. During the three minutes it is first containing the hole information, then it thins out until the end. The metrum of the piece relates to a three-second-grid of awareness and is supported by a short click.
This experiment consists of four recordings of a thunderstorm, each sixtyfour times compressed. What happens to the rain, the birds, the wind and the thunder? A flag in the wind? A forest fire? Significant schizophonia.
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Title: 2005-12-17 (Remembering memory) 2005, 4’35
2005-12-17 is a piece from the Cinema Volta: Daily Ambience project. As an exploration of ambient music and the limits of my own creativity, I composed and released a new song each day for a year.Sometimes these songs were sketches, sometimes full-blown compositions, it all depended on my inspiration and my available time. This project began on 30 January, 2005 and ran for a year’s worth of songs.
From the book:
“In a review of his interactive online instrument, Web Phases, Kyle Gann of the Village Voice described it as being ‘on a noticeably higher artistic level’ than the earliest tape-music and computer-music pieces, concluding that ‘the potential for social reorientation is even more incredible,’ and predicting ‘we’ll look back and say 1998 was the year our relationship to music entered a new era.'”
For much of the ’90s he was the Producing Director of The Kitchen in New York where he produced the work of Philip Glass, DJ Spooky, David Hykes and many others.
He is the Vice President of the board of directors of Vanguard Visions, an organization founded by Lauren Dyer Amazeen dedicated to fostering the work of artists experimenting with technology and also served on the Digital Arts subcommittee of the Mayor’s Council on New Media in New York City. His interactive composition Web Phases was one of the winners of ASCI’s Digital ’98 competition. He has collaborated with artist/programmer Mark Napier on Ripple, an interactive musical instrument.
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Title: Ethereal Tether 2003, 4’54”
Ethereal Tether portrays importunate, anxiety-laden, and ultimately unresolved memories attached to a very peculiar mind. The piece incorporates, among other sounds, a Taiwanese soda can filled one-quarter with water, bird song, and the composer’s own voice. It was composed on paper and rendered with computer software.
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Titles: 1. Anniversary 2006 6’34’’
Inspired by the Chernobyl nuclear accident on its twentieth anniversary, this work wants to be an exploration of interaction between sound, historical events and the transformation of natural elements which intervenes in the nuclear process. Radiations, as sounds themselves, are invisible but like music, they affect our bodies. So I recreated with the use of several sinthetic sounds the physical and chemical process of the nuclear fission. The composition is also a way to remember the victims of a potentially unmanageable and illusory concept of human progress. The taped voices bring to our memory the victims and were recorded by the author with the help of the singer Carlo Bonarelli.
Inspired by the fourth part of Dario Jurilli’s Book of seasons, “Mémoire”. After Birth, Knowledge and Death, this moment resume through music, together with writing and painting/drawing, the human faculty of overcoming death, the end of a single life so as that of an historical period, the end of childhood so as that of a section of a piece of music…The work is therefore full of internal references which return periodically, but alway slightly changed.
I used sounds that suggest childhood, like children’ voices; that remind the gesture of writing; the H-note and its repetition at the higher octave is a bachian symbolism which indicates life after death.
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Titles: 1) Caesiumn 137 2006, 38 seconds
An audio text about the dark ‘memories’ that linger in the grass around Chernobyl. Like the caeusium 137 memories have a long half life.
Created using MacinTalk, editing layers of captured TTS audio in Premiere, Sound Edit and Adacity
Textscape exploring ideas about virtual identities and digital memory_ ‘the universe reduced to digits spins between the clicks and taps…’
Created using vsptured audio processed and edited on both Apple mac and Windows platforms using various sound editing applications.
Computer generated voices reciting texts about the history of computing. The line ‘iterative loops’ is derived from one of the first programming techniques as recognised by Ada, Countess of Lovelace, a colleague of Charles Babbage in the mid 1800s.
The early machines, The Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine are the ancestors of today’s miniaturised laptops, hand helds and desktops; great grandfathers of the computers which create and perform these texts about their own family tree and the hstory of the new. This is digital memory translated to mean the memory of anthropomorphised digital devices.
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Title: Memory Ex Machina (june 2006), 9’45”
Memory Ex Machina is based on idea witch is to outline a portrait of a computer using the complete repertory of its hard disk memory. This piece is a short version of longer 32 min. project. The starting point, the complete text of the contents of the machine, which is rearranged, is put in music by the voices of the automatic computer reading. This revision of the contents of the memory evokes the “memories” of the machine. She seeks its “memories” by its own means, while being lost in the avalanche of information contained in its hard disk. It is at the same time an attempt to be detached from the identity of its Master and to find his own image by sorting the information contained in its memory. The sudden appearance of the traces of deleted memories disturbs the obstinate search for a proper hierarchy of information. A panic process supervenes, before the machine arrives at a result likely to be regarded as an accomplished task.
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