“Music like you’ve never seen before and art like you’ve never heard before.” — Interview magazine

Among the works presented in the exhibition are Gestures (1999), Crossfire (2007), Mixed Reviews (1999 - 2001) and the centerpiece of the exhibition Video Quartet (2002), a large, four-screen projection featuring hundreds of clips from old Hollywood films, with actors and musicians making sound or playing instruments. An elaborate audio-visual collage, Video Quartet is a visually stunning and aurally complex work, which builds masterfully to a proper musical composition.

Christian Marclay explores the fusion of fine art and audio cultures, transforming sounds and music into visible, physical form, through performance, collage, sculpture, installation, photography and video. The outcome is a full sensory experience where the realms of image and sound are combined with a sharp pop-culture sensibility and the traditions of avant-garde artists such as John Cage, Laurie Anderson and the Fluxus group

Christian Marclay was born in California in 1955, raised in Switzerland and now lives in New York and London. His work has been featured in two Venice Biennales and in major exhibitions at the Tate, Pompidou and Guggenheim museums. As a musician and DJ, he has collaborated with groups as diverse as Sonic Youth and Kronos Quartet.

REPLAY was originally presented at the Cité de la musique (Paris) in 2007 and curated by Emma Lavigne.

ALSO NOT TO BE MISSED:

The Sounds of Christmas
CHRISTIAN MARCLAY
December 14 - 20, 2008

After successful presentations at the New Museum in New York and Tate Modern in London among other venues, DHC/ART in collaboration with the Darling Foundry is pleased to host Christian Marclay’s The Sounds of Christmas for 2008. First organised in 1999, this seasonal work is presented annually in a different city during the month of December.

The Sounds of Christmas is an installation of 1200 Christmas LPs made available to the public for consultation, a six-channel video work documenting the album covers and projections of past performances. During the one-week installation, noted local DJs are invited to create remixes of their own selection from Marclay’s Christmas records – transforming sentimentality into experimentation. Part community project, part art installation, this work provides an impressive and exhaustive archive of Christmas music to DJ’s and turntablists, which transform the usually dismal and hackneyed holiday season soundscape.

Darling Foundry, 745 Ottawa Street (corner Queen Street)
, Montreal (Québec).

PERFORMANCES:
Sunday, December 14, 2008
5 PM – 9 PM
Christof Migone
Mitchell Akiyama
With special appearance by Christian Marclay.

Saturday, December 20, 2008
5 PM – 9 PM
Nancy Tobin
Martin Tétrault
Olivier Alary & Raf Katigbak

We are privileged to present the première of new work from Rob Kennedy followed by a discussion with the artist. The three video works were born out of a series of collaborative projects working with composers Peter Dowling, Giles Lamb, Martin Parker and Sue Tompkins. The emphasis in each of the works is the desire to integrate ideas and methods of improvisation into the video and sound production process. This evolving collaboration and dialogue continually shapes, distorts and then reshapes the direction of the work. Steering away from a reliance on a single directive, this project draws on the experience of each of the individual composers who have a background in improvised music ranging from free jazz through to electro-acoustic and vocal performance.

Each work has at its starting point a need to form some kind of dialogue with the norms and conventions of television production in order to understand, adapt and re-define these codes into a grammar that can subsequently be used to suggest other readings, other outcomes, other problems, than those previously prescribed.

Comprising ambitious works by nine artists — Libero Colimberti, Jan Hendrickse, Simone Izzi, Nitin Lachhani, Luc Messinezis, Maria Papadomanolaki, Vytis Puronas, Mark Shorey and Mark Wright — who employ sound as the principle media of their practice, Audio Forensics demonstrates the breadth of engagement with sound in the arts, and how it can be re-evaluated in the context of an increasingly noisy world. Sound art encompasses a wide range of forms and concerns and has its precedence across many creative fields, yet, as these artists demonstrate, the acknowledgment of sounds significance in the arts is becoming of greater importance as technologies develop, and as the public become ever more aware of the interactions between sound, space and artistic practice. Audio Forensics provides an extraordinarily comprehensive inquiry into how sound, and its manipulation, influences our experience and understanding of our environment.

Audio Forensics is an exhibition and symposium presenting the final work of the first MA Sound Arts graduates of London College of Communication. The groundbreaking work in the exhibition demonstrates the high level of critical debate in sonic disciplines fostered by the university’s Department of Sound Art and Design since 1998. The exhibition is co-curated by Electra and IMT.

Symposium in which Ben Borthwick, Assistant Curator at Tate Modern, and Steven Connor, professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck, address issues of sonic practice raised by Audio Forensics.

Binary Waves is an urban and cybernetic installation based on the measuring of flows and their transposition into luminous, sonic and kinetic rules. The installation is constituted by a network of rotating and luminous panels of 3 meter-high and 60 centimetres wide, forming a kinetic wall. Their rotation is controlled by microprocessors, allowing to determine precisely the rotation speed and angle, while their networking allows to synchronise the movement of the panels. The microprocessors are connected to infrared sensors, capturing the movement of passer-by’s.

According to this set up, each impulse is transmitted from one panel to the other, describing visual waves running from one side of the installation to the other, and then bouncing back while progressively loosing oscillation.

Light reinforces the kinetic principle of the panels. The kinetic and illumination vocabulary is based on the parameter of time (duration = repercussion of a signal over the panels), speed (force of impulse) and the sense of rotation. These parametric settings of light in correspondence to the urban flows designate the intensity of light from flux to lux.

Furthermore, each captured signal is related to a sound reinforcing the perception of the circulation frequency and leading to a soundscape. All these principles relate the ‘micro-events’ happening in the area to a unified play of light, colours and sounds directly derived from the rhythm of the city flows.

What do buildings sound like? What is the residue of a building? How do structures house the process of their construction? Multimedia artist Daniel Perlin will use screws, glue, nails, sawhorses, an audio cassette and a laptop to question work and construction as auditory processes. In re:construction — a layered, hour-long performance piece — Perlin will build a small house at Studio-X. Recording and manipulating samples from the construction process, he will simultaneously build a large orchestral work with rhythm, melody and harmony to be recorded onto a cassette tape in real-time. This cassette will then be housed in within this new structure as an artifact built to highlight process, and to archive the sounds of its own creation. Watch a video of re.drill:

“Rolf Julius integrates acoustic and visual coordinates in his installative, synaesthetic concepts. Far removed from elaborate electronics, he works with simple things and sounds of everyday life, an aesthetic and acoustic minimalism with the simplest use of cassettes and loudspeakers, effecting a concentrated perception…” - Rudolf Frieling

“One should bend down more often to pick up the tones lying around everywhere. In Manhattan, I saw and heard the really huge and thick and loud tones, the brown and the violet, but also the little quiet ones between the cracks in the walls, under the bridges, and among the chirping crickets on Roosevelt Island. I noticed this in 1984 during my stay at PS-1 in Queens. Now I would like to bring some of these small sounds into the gallery, sounds I picked up during many years, together with some new visual ones.” - Rolf Julius

Rolf Julius (b. 1939, Wilhelmshaven) studied art in Bremen and Berlin from 1961-69. In the mid- 70s he began experimenting with contemporary music to further elucidate his perception of the visual. In 1979 Julius started to integrate sound and noise into his creative work and initiated his own tape compositions. During 1995-96 Julius was a visiting professor at Hochschule für Künste in Bremen. He now lives and works in Berlin.

Julius has presented work at Documenta 8 in Kassel, Germany, InSite ‘94 in San Diego, CA, Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, PA, PS-1 in New York, National Gallery in Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum for Contemporary Art Berlin, Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial in Niigata, Japan, Centre Pompidou in Paris, The National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan, and Museum of Modern Art Bremen in Germany, among other institutions.

This exhibition is a co-production with Singuhr Gallery in Berlin and has been generously supported by Charlie Morrow.

Curated by Carsten Seiffarth

Diapason gallery for sound and intermedia presents is a non-profit performance and exhibition space that invites the public, artists and composers to engage with contemporary music and sound practices. Established in 2001 by composer Michael J. Schumacher and choreographer Liz Gerring, Diapason has built on his efforts at Studio Five Beekman, a sound gallery he founded in1996. With two high-quality multi-channel sound systems Diapason’s listening environment draws a regular audience, and Diapason continues to be the sole venue in New York City (and one of few internationally) that is dedicated to both presenting multichannel sound installations and providing space for composers and sound artists to experiment, exhibit and perform. Diapason is supported by NYSCA, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Phaedrus Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, The Trust for Mutual Understanding, Kirk Radke, and other generous individuals. Diapason is a registered 501(c)(3) organization.

Composer/performer Joan La Barbara writes: “I’ll be performing my works Shimmer and ROTHKO with live video projection by Kurt Ralske. Shimmer explores impossible sounds, sounds inside the mind, and the exploration of the creative process in real-time. ROTHKO, monochromatic and densely layered, was inspired by the paintings in the Rothko Chapel in Houston.” Kurt Ralske’s video projections mix pre-selected images with live capture/live modified ones, using his own specialized software to allow La Barbara’s live voice and sonic atmospheres to modulate the visuals.

Steve Horowitz - Bass/Conductor; Dafna Naphtali - VOX / Conductor / Sampler / Wii controllers; Michael Evans - Percussion & Theremin; Hans Tammen - Endangered Guitar.

Designed for kids 5-99, Gloorf is an interactive show introducing participants to all kinds of wacky and historical concepts in new music, sound art and digital performance. Gloorf! invites children of all ages to participate as we make music out of kitchen appliances, electronic instruments, Theremin, samplers and voice processing, animal sound, electronic toys and various body parts and other surprises.

Gloorf! lso seeks to express universal musical ideas in a fun & interactive way. Style, form, the role of the conductor and the performer are all examined in a fun & engaging way.

EMF presents a concert and champagne reception to honor the 50th anniversary of the Paris-based Groupe de Recherches Musicales (Music Research Group), the world’s first research group in electronic music. Our guests from Paris will be Daniel Teruggi, director of GRM, François Bayle, past director of GRM, and Marc Battier, professor at the Sorbonne. The evening will include some introductory remarks on the history, current activities, and future of GRM, followed by a concert and reception.

Amir Lahav is a Visiting Scientist in Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School.

The Department of Music presents a year-long interdisciplinary lecture series entitled “Music and the Body” in the coming academic year. Broadly-conceived, the series is designed to inform contemporary and historical music-related questions concerning ritual and dance; display and gesture; gender and sexuality; and perception and memory. Through our choice of speakers and our active promotion efforts, we hope to draw audience members from Cognitive Science, Gender Studies, Theater and Performance Studies, and Anthropology. We also expect to attract members of the university and local communities who are interested in the social, physiological, and psychological aspects of contemporary musical practices. With this diverse group of speakers, we intend to inspire wide-ranging discussions focused on the intersections of performance, reception, ethnography, and the body.