This Weekly is culled from a series of posts (1) (2) (3) on Continuo:

According to the Harvestworks website, TELLUS was created in 1983 at the Rum Runner Bar on Canal Street in New York City. Joseph Nechvatal, a visual artist, Claudia Gould, a curator and Carol Parkinson, a composer and staff member of Harvestworks/Studio PASS met to discuss the idea of a magazine on cassette which would feature interesting and challenging sound works. With the advent of the Walkman and the Boom Box, the editors perceived a need for an alternative to radio programming and the commercially available recordings on the market at that time… Continue reading

Upgrade! Scotland: Mark Vernon and Zoë Irvine :: November 27, 2007; 7.00 -9:00 pm :: CCA, Glasgow. Join us for a glass of wine from 6.30 pm. Admission is free, but to make sure of a seat please email: rsvp ‘at’ mediascot ‘dot’ org.

Mark Vernon and Zoë Irvine work between art, music, radio and sound. The artists have been working prolifically at the forefront of their field since shifting from predominantly visual practices. They will talk about their individual practices and touch on their numerous collaborations together. Including their recent project, Hairwaves: which produced an irreverent blend of music, interviews, haircuts, dog groomers and the paranormal. Continue reading

this is not memorex: sample culture revisited by Greg Smith - In familiarizing myself with this work over the past few weeks, I’ve felt an odd sense of nostalgia developing. These projects collectively highlight various facets of what we have dubbed sample culture, that is the continued evolution of the triumph of the fragment. There are dozens of threads that can be traced back to the 1980s and while I am personally indebted to the potent combination of Brian Eno and David Byrne, the perpetual litigation of Negativland, and the sonic collage of the Bomb Squad, I am going to instead direct my attention to another dusty artifact from collective memory. Continue reading

By using records, cassettes, and a radio transmitter to perform live sound collages, Kristen Roos pays homage to the history of the phonograph, tape and radio as tools for the development of experimental sound art. His alternative use of commercial media is also a Situationist technique—detournement, in which a familiar medium is re-purposed to create something new.

The Micro Radio project started as a site-specific sound and radio project in 2005. It involved collecting site specific sounds, creating compositions, and broadcasting them back to the collection site. Roos stored the sounds on his laptop and broadcast using a low-power radio transmitter (capable of transmitting 150 feet). Continue reading

2007 Cassette Jockey World Championships: Call for Competitors :: CALLING ALL: Cassette Jockies • Retro-Tech Lovers • Magnetic Media Monsters • Circuit Benders • Multi-Media DJs • Walkman Hot-Rodders.

In 2003 at a festival in Chicago, a group of retro-tech geniuses organized The Cassette Jockey World Championships. Like the popular DJ (Disk Jockey) competitions with record-toting DJs showing off their turntable skills, the CJ Championships aimed to transplant their skills and styles to the venerable world of cassettes. Since CJs were encouraged to hot-rod their own equipment, eviscerated boomboxes, disembodied tape heads, and overclocked Walkmans were the weapons of choice–anything that used the standard cassette as its ammo. Continue reading

DaveX recently started a new experimental music label, Naked Arrival, a personal outlet for extremely limited-run releases of experiments in sound– recordings located somewhere between the natural world and the realm of music. He plans to make frequent recordings, each of which will be available to a single purchaser. Upon receipt, the recording will be made freely available online. No other actual physical copy of any recording will exist save the original, which he hopes to feature in imaginative packaging with extensive information.

The first Naked Arrival release (SOLD OUT), Tenex, features three massive conference calls with over thirty U.S. government agencies digitally recorded, with the results mixed to microcassette– a little over fifteen minutes long. “Tenex” is housed in a burgandy card file, with a full list detailing each call participant.