[Image: Garrett Phelan] Garrett Phelan works and lives in Dublin, Ireland. In recent years Phelan has focussed his practice on extensive explorations into the formation of opinion and the absolute present, particularly manifested through independent FM radio transmission projects, drawing, video, photography and web based projects in both gallery and non gallery environments.

At what point will common sense prevail, 26 sound works to be presented for a 5 year period, was commissioned by the Lewis Glucksman Gallery and curated by René Zechlin. It marks the second phase of a series of projects exploring the formation of opinion; it deals with how cognition occurs in conversation, discussion or debate. Continue reading

Welcome to the April 08 Issue of Furthernoise.org (Roger Mills, Editor). Along with a host of new reviews, we bring you news of upcoming events and performances as well as an audio player stacked with all the best tracks of the issue.

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. Continue reading

Dramazon is a new audio track by Novi_sad on TouchRadio. A droney journey in the jungle. Elegiac and mournful tones with subtlety and elegant roughness. Immersive birds in pain…

The whole piece is based on field recordings from: Mamori Lake, Amazonia, Brazil; Alphios Bridge, Ancient Olympia, Greece; Vibrations from the bridge which connects Denmark with Sweden; A bottling plant in operation and hydrophone recordings from Mamori Lake. Also used were sounds and notes from a church organ. Output signals have been manipulated and electronically treated. Continue reading

Join us, and nations all over the world for International Noise Awareness Day - Hear for the Future :: April 16, 2008 :: Twisted Village 12b Eliot St., Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Beginning at 2:00 pm there will be in-store hearing tests administered on an audiometer :: 2:15 – 2:16 (EDT) International Minute of Silence :: 8:00 pm Concert – Brendan Murray, Asher, Jed Speare.

The concert will feature an investigation into the earliest known recording, from 1860, predating Edison’s by 28 years. A recent article in the NY Times on Edourard-Leon Scott de Martinville’s phonautogram included the sound file of this recently played-back recording. Continue reading

Transmitting live from the Ocean below the Antarctic Ice: “Providing an acoustic live stream of the Antarctic underwater soundscape is a formidable challange. After all, more than 15000 km lie between Antarctica and our institute in Germany. Underwater sound is recorded by means of two hydrophones by PALAOA (Perennial Acoustic Observatory in the Antarctic Ocean), an autonomous, wind and solar powered observatory located on the Ekström ice shelf (Boebel et al., 2006).

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. Continue reading

[’til death do us a part] by Tobias c. van Veen (aka saibotuk) - Dead media unwinds time from its spools. Two electromagnetic machines capture the unfolding of an era in which memory encodes the loving caress of electron imprinted tape. Time out of joint falls in & out of tape sync; more inhuman than human loops the frequency. “I wanted my human experience with machinic love to have the intensity of a hands-on relationship.”

Thus, van Veen turned to reel-to-reel (RTR) tape machines and Konstantin Raudive’s experiments with blank media in which he attempted to record the ‘voices of the dead’. (Little did van Veen know that John Hudak was exploring similar terrain in Voices from the Paradise Network.) Continue reading

[Image: Phonautograph] “An “ethereal” 10 second clip of a woman singing a French folk song has been played for the first time in 150 years. The recording of “Au Clair de la Lune”, recorded in 1860, is thought to be the oldest known recorded human voice. A phonograph of Thomas Edison singing a children’s song in 1877 was previously thought to be the oldest record.

The new “phonautograph”, created by etching soot-covered paper, has now been played by US scientists using a “virtual stylus” to read the lines. “When I first heard the recording as you hear it … it was magical, so ethereal,” audio historian David Giovannoni, who found the recording, told AP.” Continue reading Oldest recorded voices sing again, BBC News. You can also listen to the recording.

Diapason gallery for sound and intermedia presents Alessandro Bosetti and Christian Kesten’s Mask/Mirror, a performance :: March 29, 2008; 8:00 pm :: Diapason, 882 Third Avenue (between 32nd and 33rd Street), 10th floor, Brooklyn, NY.

A few months ago I wrote a note to myself: “Try to create a mask that that doesn’t have anything to do with anything” and kept wondering what that could mean until I started to imagine Mask/Mirror. Mask/Mirror a sampler to process recordings of spoken language in real time… The sampler follows both sound and meaning criteria in sorting, organizing and processing samples and in formulating utterances. Continue reading

Chris Watson live at Cabaret Voltaire, Spiegelgasse 1, 8001 Zurich :: April 9, 2008; 7:00 pm.

Newcastle-based Chris Watson — who Stephen Vitiello calls “a brilliant master of environmental and field recordings” in his recent interview with Peter Traub for NMR — is one of the world’s leading recorders of wildlife and natural phenomena. A former sound archivist for the RSPB, Watson was a BAFTA award-winning force behind David Attenborough’s The Life of Birds, The Blue Planet and The Life of Mammals.

“I love the sounds of these parallel worlds,” he says - “spaces we occupy alongside other animals but rarely tune into.” On location he explores his experiments in sound, then weaves them into haunting recordings. Continue reading

Stephen Vitiello creates sound installations that often feature pristine recordings of natural environments and phenomena – the Amazon rain forest or flapping moth wings for example– sonically magnified to expose their internal detail and beauty. His installation work also focuses heavily on the use and implications of space as a compositional parameter. Vitiello has released several CDs and his work has been performed at The Tate Modern, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Kitchen, NYC. His work was also featured in the 2006 Biennale of Sydney and the 2002 Whitney Biennial. He is currently Assistant Professor of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University.

On September 21, 2007, Vitiello visited the University of Virginia. We sat and discussed his work for an hour in the university’s Jefferson Rotunda. The recording and transcript of that interview is presented below. Continue reading