David Tagg - Waist Deep Seas of Milk (review) New York musician, David Tagg, has seen The Future of Modern Guitar. And this sonic seer’s astral projections are sumptuously spread across the ambient expanses of Waist Deep Seas of Milk, though all trace of twang, pluck and strum is dissolved in FX haze and spun out in endless echo returns. Review by Alan Lockett.

Favourite Places (review) Everyone has a favourite place, whether cosy internal retreat or cherished patch of Great Outdoors. Forest, bathtub, museum and alley find common cause on this audio-document from Audiobulb, compiling ten pieces representing selected artists’ Favourite Places. Captured field recordings blend with musical treatments to make mementos enfolding inspiring source within inspired composition. Review by Alan Lockett.

Hectic Tenuous - Chic Nerve (review) Starting with flanged, panned scratching (ala fingernails, not decks), this solo CDR from The Caution Curves laptop lady Rebecca Mills, is an eleven track melange of textures, echoes, drones, processed field recordings and even the occasional bit of singing! Review by Mark Francombe.

La Ciutat Ets Tu - Tomasz Krakowiak (review) La Ciutat Et Tu surrounds the listener with evolving percussive transformations in timbre. The compositions have a circular unwinding quality, never abrasive and utterly hypnotic. Tomasz Krakowiak is a Polish-born percussionist now living in Toronto, Canada. Having collaborated with the likes of Kaffe Matthews, John Oswald, Phil Minton, Otomo Yoshihide, Gert-Jan Prins among other. Review by Derek Morton.

Love City by Dsic (review) Dsic, also known as Greg Godwin, is a Bristol-based noise artist that employs a wide range of influences and sound sources. Love City and the miniDsic EP, both released through Lf Records, weave their way through noise, drone, glitch, ambient and microsound. Review by Alex Young.

Nelson Foltz and Tom Lynn - Still Life (series) (review) The internally themed Rothko-esque cover art of the Still Life series could stand as a semiotic of Nelson Foltz and Tom Lynn’s sound, with its slow-shifting tones that spread across a spartan canvas - ostensibly static swathes that reveal micro-variativity on deeper insertion. Review by Alan Lockett.

Of Memory & Dreams - Bill Thompson (review) There is a trajectory that many improvised electro acoustic performances reach, which although unique in every given context, often manage to take you to a zen like point where you become one with the signal and phase in and out of listening to the development of structure or dynamic of the work. Review by Roger Mills.

Three Rooms - Steve Peters (review) Sound artist Steve Peters’ recent CD, Three Rooms documents three of his site-specific installations. The three pieces succeed without reference to the installations for which the pieces were originally composed, capturing the quiet reflection of the original locations. Review by Caleb Deupree.

The data stream is transmitted via wireless LAN from PALAOA to the German Neumayer Base. From there, a permanent satellite link transmits the data to the AWI in Germany. A constant hiss pervading the signal is the natural, isotropic background noise made audible here through the use of ultra sensitive hydrophones. Additional broad band noise caused by wind, waves and currents adds to it on occasion. Due to the limited bandwidth of the satellite link, jamming of the WLAN link due to storms, or energy shortage, the connection might temporarily be down or scrammed.”

You can listen to the underwater sound of the Antarctic Ocean with a delay of a few seconds. [MP3 audio stream. OGG-Vorbis audio stream - provides better sound quality at a lower bitrate, for a list of compatible players please check out www.vorbis.com.] [via]

What does it mean to navigate? What is the importance of location specificity? What does it mean to get lost? The increasing accuracy of satellite navigation strives to eliminate the possibility of human error, but it also produces a sense of dislocation from one’s immediate environment by abstracting location as the coordinates of longitude and latitude. What place is there for one’s body, one’s senses, one’s conscious and unconscious awareness of space, if this knowledge is so apparently made redundant by GPS? What, if any, role can historical skills of navigation at sea, of observation, choice, intuition and improvisation play in navigating the spaces of the future? The symposium Navigating the Space of the Future will take these questions as its starting point to see if we can find our way within the dense environment of global positioning technologies. The field is open but the practice is just starting to form itself by looking at ways to counter locative media strategies where geographical walks are organised that use the city and the street as a playing field negating the relation between space, architecture, time, body and mind. The presentations will focus on new ways of interpreting data of location and navigation by relating these directly to the physical (space) through the use of sound.

Yolande Harris - Sun Run Sun (Artist in Residence NIMk): Sun Run Sun explores the individual experience of current location technologies through a personal experience of sound. It seeks to (re)establish a sense of personal connectedness to one’s environment, and to (re)negotiate this through an investigation into old, new, future and animal navigation using sound. Sun Run Sun investigates the split between the embodied experience of location and the calculated data of position. A series of portable personal instruments ?satellite sounders? developed for the residency, transform satellite data directly into a sonic composition. This composition constantly varies in response to the changing location of the player as they move through their physical environment. ‘The experience of sound is internal, as a process that influences the relationship between the self and the environment. True navigation consists of a continuously coherent relationship between the two.’

David Dunn takes his research into the bioacoustics of bark beetles and entomogenic climate change, and on ultrasonic audio phenomena in both human and non-human environment as starting points to talk about Acoustic Ecologies. He wants to bring forth the sonic presence of these worlds for human contemplation of their inherent aesthetic beauty and to show the amazing continuity of life, with its capacity for infinite variation in audible communication. “Given the superabundance of how music as a human activity has been used, I believe that music has simultaneously been a strategy to evolve our capacity to structurally-couple with our environment through our aural perception, and a significant force for defining the boundaries of group affiliation and for the affirmation of cultural status, giving voice to an evolutionary heritage of an abundance of other coupling modes that are greater than the rational mind alone.” [From Acoustic Ecology and the Experimental Music Tradition by By David Dunn]

Atau Tanaka bridges the fields of media art, experimental music, and research. He creates music for sensor instruments, wireless network infrastructures, and democratized digital forms. Tanaka is best known for his performances where he uses physical gestures to articulate music and sound synthesis and real-time image transformation. For the past years, inspired by the ever-changing social, geographic, ecological, emotional context of using mobile technology for creative ends Tanaka focusses his attention towards mobile media projects. He is exploring the creative, critical and commercial potential of mobile music. “My interest is to take interactive music practice off the stage and outside the concert hall into the urban sphere. Mobile communications devices are meant to connect groups of people. Musical concerts, similarly, are situations that bring people together for a common purpose. Can we elicit commonalities to make a community-based musical process, creating a! shared experience among users?” In his presentation he will pay attention to the description of the architecture of an audio-visual hard- and software framework that was developed for the realization of a series of locative media artworks, and eliciting from this, he brings afore fundamental issues and questions that can be generalized and applicable to the growing practice of locative media.

This is a unique (for British audiences probably the very last) opportunity to hear the music of Jon Rose and two of his own very favourite acoustic settings: The Kryonics: Jon Rose, violins (including the Stroh cello); Aleks Kolkowski, violin (including the Stroh violin); Joe Williamson, contrabass violin :: Temperament: Jon Rose, violins; Veryan Weston, resident Brindley & Foster wind organ with tracker action.

At last audiences in London can find out what this euro-star-music is all about as the wind organ at the oldest church in Britain - St. Pancras, London (founded 314 AD) - has been confirmed for a Weston-Rose concert on 11th April with Aleks Kolkowski’s Kryonics Stroh Violin project on the same bill.

Not since the gothic horror of H P Lovecraft in his ‘Music of Erich Zahn’ has the art of music offered such an evening of candlelit weirdness and intrigue. The combination of Tenor violin, half stopped organ, Stroh violin, bass violin, and bowed saw will set the spine erect and tingling. The setting? None other than London’s home of spook - St Pancras Old Church. Equipped with the notable stiffs of Johann Christian Bach, Mary Shelley, and Thomas Hardy to name but a few, the graveyard offers little comfort for those who would entertain an evening on the hard pew contemplating mortality and the ancient and modern of music. The crow awaits you at the door. Dress code: Black. Makeup: Black.

Netrooms: The Long Feedback is a participatory network piece which invites the public to contribute to an extended feedback loop and delay line across the internet. The work explores the juxtaposition of multiple spaces as the acoustic, the social and the personal environment becomes permanently networked. The performance consists of live manipulation of multiple real-time streams from different locations which receive a common sound source. Netrooms celebrates the private acoustic environment as defined by the space between one audio input (microphone) and output (loudspeaker). The performance of the piece consists of live mixing a feedback loop with the signals from each stream.

To participate email Pedro at P.Rebelo [at] qub.ac.uk by the 1st of April and we will send you a PD patch. You can participate from anywhere in the world with a broadband connection. All you need to do is load the patch during the performance times and listen… You can make a sound, be silent, play music, talk to others and listen… but remember it’s a long feedback loop!

Technical Requirements:

- 1 laptop with Microphone (internal or external) and Loudspeaker (internal or external)
- Pure data-extended 0.39.3-extended
- Patch provided when you email us
- Broadband Connection with UDP and TCP ports 8100 open

Performances:

April 2, 2008 Berkeley, California - CNMAT, University of California Berkeley :: The performance of Netrooms: The Long Feedback is integrated in a concert of music from the Sonic Arts Research Centre. The piece will begin at 8:30pm (PDT)

April 4, 2008 Stanford, California - CCRMA, Stanford University :: The performance of Netrooms: The Long Feedback is integrated in a concert of music from the Sonic Arts Research Centre. The piece will begin at 8:30pm (PDT)

Tuned City is seeking proposals for short performances and artist presentations addressing issues of sound and architecture. These proposals should relate to one or more of the topics listed below, and should include links to online documentation of the proposed performance/presentation, or to similar work by the same artist / author. The deadline for proposals is April 30, 2008, but proposals will be considered as they are received. Please submit proposals in English.

Tuned City - Between Sound and Space Speculation is an exhibition and conference project planned for 1-6 July 2008 in Berlin which proposes a new evaluation of architectural spaces from the perspective of the acoustic. The project draws the traditions of critical discussion about urban space within the architecture and urban planning discourse–as well as its strategies and working methods–into the context of sound art. This expanded discussion reinforces the potential of the spatial and communicative properties of sound as a tool and means of urban practice.

At the foundations of this event are artists’ works and theoretical approaches which examine in a critical and sensitive way the given urban and architectural situations alongside their resulting socio-political implications, that re-use existing spaces or that conceive and open new spaces.

A dialog will be built at the intersection of both disciplines which traces out the complex relations and interactions of space-sound, both presenting and testing new strategies, methods, possibilities and potentials of sound work within the artistic and applied context.

TOPICS:

The Built Space:
- examples that illustrate phenomena, problems or possibilities in the relation of sound and architecture
- usage of architecture as a space for sound and as an instrument

The Public Space:
- relation of sound and city
- situated sonic practices, site-specific sound awareness
- sound as a system of social communication, division and defense
- mobile sound

The Imaginary / Speculative Space:
- hearing-space - virtual acoustic spaces
- sound space in relation to human anatomy, memory and psyche
- mechanics and principles of translating sound into architecture and vice versa

PRODUCTION TEAM:

Carsten Stabenow
Gesine Pagels
Carsten Seiffarth
Derek Holzer
Anke Eckardt
Anne Kockelkorn

Dan’s parallel work in sound art and electronic music often influences his visual output, the Analogue Miniatures series being a good example. These tiny models of fictional synthesizers and recording equipment were inspired by Japanese capsule toys and the vintage aesthetic of cluttered analogue control panels.

Dan has produced work for record sleeves (as featured on Steve Jansen’s ‘Slope’), magazines, books and websites, and has exhibited his work in Australia and overseas.He explains his interest in miniatures this way:

… I’ve always been interested in human/machine interfaces and I think analogue synths and equipment are quite exciting visually because of all the knobs and sliders (usually one control for every function). I always wanted to design a synth but lacked the skills and resources, and making small models was something I could do.

As far as I was aware nobody had built miniature synths before. I was already building small sculptures out of framing mattboards so this seemed like a logical step.

How long does it take to make one?

Generally I’ll spend 2 to 3 days on each model, but I’m a perfectionist so if something isn’t right I will always redo it.

Can anyone buy one?

They can, but there is a bit of a wait. I have my hands full with other projects at the moment but hopefully in the second half of 2008 there will be some more available. In the meantime, we are working towards a few exhibitions in the US and Japan where people will have the chance to purchase.

Read more here.

Tuesday 11: Miya Masaoka (New York) will perform interactive koto and video pieces, also using Super 8 loop and projector; this work will be inspired by a quasi-documentary of the quest for the ‘Minetta Creek,’ the impassioned search for the last living natural stream of water in Lower Manhattan; she has recently created pieces where ordinary plant activity derails a model train, and insect movement and plane flight schedules create the structure and the formal design of audio compositions. www.miyamasaoka.com www.myspace.com/miyamasaoka.

Wednesday 12: Pierre Marietan (Paris and Switzerland) - BLACK OR WHITE’: existing sounds - collected sounds - small instruments - voices; usually, the listener follows the musical path previously taken by the composer; the latter may also give a shape to an existing acoustic material in such a way that this process preserves the listener’s freedom of interpretation; the four sequences proposed for the evening can be perceived through either listening mode; in ‘WITHOUT ANYTHING’, the existing acoustic structure that is revealed creates the music of the place; ‘CAPTIVE VOICES’ qualifies the space as a place of music; in ‘RUMEUR / EMERGENCES’, the sounds from elsewhere transferred into the place, take us off to other worlds; ‘RYTHMUS 21-23′ is a movie by Hans Richter associated with ‘EMPREINTES’, a musical piece for strings, piccolo, side-drum and saxophones. www.pierremarietan.com www.music-environment.com.

Friday 14: Christian Kesten (Berlin) performs works for breathing sounds (in-/exhaling) in monochrome textures, for tongue (acoustically and visually), for jokes in five languages with leaving out the punch lines while building up an installation on a table made out of mundane things, and works for video and voice.

Sunday 16: Manuel Rocha Iturbide (Mexico City) - Some of his compositions have been involved with daily sounds and their transformation through electroacoustic means, as well as with their spacialization; he will present various pieces composed in the last 4 years, most of them created in a multichannel format; with Margot Leverett, clarinet.

Monday 17: Esther Venrooy (Gent, Belgium) - The Spiral Staircase is a suite of short electronic vignettes that constitute two vertical movements; the piece was partly composed with the EMS Synthi 100 analogue modular synthesizer at the IPEM (Institute for Psycho-acoustics and Electronic Music) in Ghent. www.esthervenrooy.com www.myspace.com/esthervenrooy.

Tuesday 18: Screen Compositions - The fourth edition of Screen Compositions, the yearly evening dedicated to intersections of moving image with sonic art; a program of screen works representing dynamic two-way collaborations between video/ film artists and sound/ music artists specifically intended for single-channel projection with no live or performance component; featuring collaborations by: Liora Belford / Ido Govrin; Kjell Bjorgeengen / Marc Ribot; Yan Breuleux / Alain Thibault; Alexandra Dementieva / Aernoudt Jacobs; Richard Garet / Wolfgang R. von Stuermer; Katherine Liberovskaya / Phill Niblock; Francesca Llopis / Barbara Held; Marlena Novak / Jay Alan Yim; Billy Roisz / Toshimaru Nakamura; Billy Roisz / dieb13.

Wednesday 19: Folke Rabe (Sweden) - Composer of vocal and instrumental music with some emphasis on brass; but this will be a retrospective with tape pieces - ARGH!, Cyclone, What?? - and Ship of Fools, a video with the New Culture Quartet; works composed in the 1960s thru 80s.

Thursday 20: Jean Piche (Montreal) - Three triple-channel videomusic works are presented, forming a suite that has helped define a particular genre of pluridisciplinary work: the composer as visual artist; fabricating color and sound, stream and movement, shape and timbre, the artist articulates a highly kinetic discourse at the juncture of abstraction and documentary.

In their collaborative practice Achim Lengerer & Dani Gal deal with audio-acoustics and storage media used for acoustic material. Their core interests are audio-recordings, particularly of language, spoken word and speech, original footage taken from radio-broadcastings or other archives. Their work found its multiple form in the project voiceoverhead which is rooted in a record collection of approximately 350 records, including footage documenting political speeches and language orientated radio-programs. The records aurally cover historical events and were originally designed to function as “documentations of the real”. This notion of the ‘documentary’ has been questioned throughout the history of the medium itself and developed as one of the inherent debates around the emerging modes of reproduction in the late 19th century - the phonograph, film and photography. Starting with the early Lumière-movie ‘Workers Leaving the Factory,’ this discussion emerges. Harun Farocki has shown, in his 1995 video-essay on the Lumière-sequence, the complexity of a playful representational conspiracy between the audience / viewer, the document / documentarian and the documented beginning at the birth of the genre itself. This act of conspiracy takes place when any document from the archive is brought back to the public sphere as a kind of reenactment of a communicative and rhetorical figure.

Lengerer & Gal developed the idea voiceoverhead in order to locate the record collection and their artistic practice within a broader context and to include the work of other artists, filmmakers and musicians working with archived language materials in multiple ways and diverging modes. So too do divisions exist in the cultural field: such as electronic music that is entrenched in elements of language and radio-sounds and there is a sub-genre of visual artists, filmmakers and documentarians who also focus their work in this area. Both fields are conceptually and practically applying different approaches to the given speech material: differences in working and presentation methods, as well as differences in distribution and public reception. voiceoverhead presents, confronts and merges the approaches applied in these diverse cultural productions in the exhibition and in an evening of sound performances, taking place on Friday 29 February.

voiceoverhead is a co-production with the Jan van Eyck Academy.

http://www.smartprojectspace.net/

Over the past year, the Cambridge University City Seminar at CRASSH has explored diverse and enlivening topics in the study of cities, urban space, architecture, and visual and material culture. These topics have ranged widely in time and space, from predictions for the age of the supermetropolis to the use of digital technology in architectural space to an analysis of Mussolini’s use of Rome’s imperial past in the construction of its present.

Out of these encounters emerged an aspiration to allow for a more intense investigation of a particular area within this field. This will find its preliminaryculmination in a one-day conference to be hosted by the City Seminar organisers at CRASSH in Lent term 2008. Taking as its theme the intersection of sound and the city, this seminar seeks to present theoretical, artistic and empirical accounts of the complex relationships between acoustics, sensory awareness and performance in the context of urban space, landscape and the built environment (historic and contemporary). But the concepts of ’sound’ and ‘the city’ are only intended to serve as departure points for more creative reflections on, or interventions into, this theme. A discussion of sound could well include an account of silence, just as a description of a city or urban space might well ask where the city ends and its other begins. Consequently, we expect an eclectic and illuminating discussion stemming from a variety of differing disciplines and backgrounds and forming previously unimagined connections.Confirmed speakers:

• Janet Cardiff (Installation artist, Berlin & New York)
  via videoconference
• Eric Clarke (Professor, Faculty of Music, University of Oxford)
  Various Realities: Sound, Music, and Ecological Theory
• Michael Bull (Media and Film, University of Sussex)
  Sounding Out Cosmopolitanism - Mobile Technologies and the migration of Difference
• Graham Jeffery (Institute for Performing Arts Development (IPAD), University of East London)
  Expanding the learning soundscape: notes from some interventions in urban arts education
• Juliana Hodkinson (Composer and arts writer, Copenhagen)
  Instrumentality and the urban instrumentarium: representation and agency in urban sound art
• Jacob Kreutzfeldt (Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen)
  Acoustic territoriality in a Japanese shopping area
• Robin Rimbaud/Scanner (Sound artist and composer, www.scannerdot.com)
  Imaginary Highways: Sound Polaroids in the City

A provisional programme can be downloaded HERE. [posted on Mediateletipos]