SoundLAB - sonic art projects

edition04.e. m’scape 04

Enter – m’scape 04 – directly here

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m’scape IV
is featuring these artists—>
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Leandro Barzabal (Argentina)
David Chesworth / Sonja Leber (USA)
Kyong Mee Choi (S.Korea)
Linda Rae Dornan (Canada)
Heloisa Escudero (Brazil/USA)
Jeremy Hight (USA)
Mikhail Karikis (UK)
Al Larsen (USA)
Le Lavatrici Rosse (Italy)
Rie Nakajima (Japan)
Khaled Sabsabi (Australia)
tarofonika – aka Rick Foot (USA)

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  • Leandro Barzabal
  • artist biography

    Titles:
    1. 00´2006, 5:18
    as I grew farther on developing a sound that remained in my head for several days, I encountered the difficulty of pasting it to a certain surface. First voice came to assist, broadcasting a basic signal through my vocal cords, soft palate and lisping. Voice became the prime tool to make sound tangible, coming out of a memory of an old idea.
    Sculpting this raw sound was the next step. Re-recording the original sound, thinking of the hidden meaning and background minimalistic melodies of the original recording. When that was achieved, I found myself reconstructing a visual image of that memory and translating this to a sound sculpture, using pieces of the sounds previously processed. The sculpture is “00”. The memory is a walk, going to someones’s house, who wasn’t there.

    2. pesado
    2006, 5:41
    the piece was made out of phonographies taken during a short trip to the beach last summer. Eventually, this became the only memory I’ve got on those days. “pesado” fue el momento en el cual este recuerco toma partido. Wish I had recorded more memories.
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  • David Chesworth / Sonja Leber
  • artist biography

    Titles:
    1: 5000 Calls
    4:18

    5000 Calls is a large-scale multi-channel sound installation installed throughout the Urban Forest, an extensive 4.5 hectare loose grid of eucalyptus trees surrounding the Stadium Australia in Sydney. The ever-changing soundscape utilises 5000 ‘charged’ human vocalisations
    uncovered from everyday life: the sighs, gasps and groans of work, pleasure, sport, song and struggle. 5000 Calls particularly utilises the vocalisations of people in extreme physical states.
    The ‘sense’ of speech has been removed from these everyday recordings to reveal a sonic trace. A memory of ‘human effort’.
    Commissioned by the Sydney Olympic Park Public Art Program to be part of the permanent built environment, it can be heard daily during daylight hours.

    2. Proximities:
    8: 54
    Proximities: local histories/global entanglements is a soundscape conceived as a sonic corridor of human voices. The project is built up around recordings made by the artists of people from the 53 Commonwealth nations who are now living in Australia.
    Each individual voice contributes a distinctive singing style with specific melodic and rhythmic ornamentation shaped over centuries of cultural tradition. Each singer sings from memory, songs learned from their country of origin. The work was created to show that it is not easy to represent an Australian identity. That national identity is defined by difference rather than
    homogeneity. Memory and identity are therefore major themes of this work. The artwork can be seen as an imagined crowd system through which actual crowds of pedestrians pass for a time between destinations.

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  • Kyong Mee Choi
  • artist biography

    Titles:
    1. Photogene
    (2005) – Duration: 7′
    As its title suggests, Photogene is based on the interpretation of the visual phenomenon of ‘afterimage’ in the sonic world. Subtle and soft sound sections intermittently evoke the sense of an afterimage. The beginning is loud and dramatic, representing corporeal manifestation. Soft, flute-oriented sound comes later, implying unresolved, vague, ambiguous, even imaginative world. Through the dialog of two worlds, the piece intends to depict a constant flux in the manifestation and mystery of life.

    2. Tranquility
    (2004) – Duration: 7′
    This piece is inspired by the image of a tranquil pond at dawn. It starts with mystic and hazy scenery of the pond represented by a relatively wet sound. Gradually, dry and more transparent sonic material is introduced. While the essence of the piece, tranquility, is presented, subtle tension is still achieved through dynamics and articulations of sonic gestures. The majority of sound samples are processed by CLM (Common Lisp Music); utilizing instruments such as expandn, grani, expsrc, ring-modulate, vkey, fullmix, and nrev.lisp.

    3. Onomatopoetic Mimesis
    (2003) – Duration: 7’11”
    ‘Onomatopoeia’ is words that imitate sounds and ‘mimesis’ is words that imitate gestures. As the title suggests, the material that is formed by imitating sounds is transformed into sound that imitates the gestures. Four different sections gradually unfold with quiet bird-like sounds, increasing wedge, strong attack, and a decreasing wedge gesture along with a different type of organ sound that is processed in a variety of ways. This piece is the composer’s poetic interpretation, subtly presented, of the relationship between Messiaen and the bird sounds that he loved.

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  • Linda Rae Dornan
  • artist biography

    Title:
    1.Do You Remember? Marshwalk
    2004, 3:13 minutes
    A conversation between a couple where one partner, the man, has dementia. The soundtrack also plays recordings from several years of the man’s singing as his abilities to communicate deteriorate and yet, he still remembers to sing.

    2. Blinded
    2006, 2:26 minutes
    A woman’s mythological struggle to reach outside of herself.

    3. A Certain History of a Town
    2006, 12:38 minutes
    The daily routine of an unusual woman who walks the periphery of her hometown, counting and documenting every detail which attracts her attention.

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  • Heloisa Escudero
  • artist biography

    Titles:
    Bending Conversation
    2005, Running time: 2:20
    Bending musical notes to create a melody representing the constant distortion our memory trying to create/feed our urge to gain comprehation of especific verbal interaction with over humans. The goal of comprehation is achieved but without any truth. The brain is working unconciously with your memory to minimazi suffering. All you are left with is a sweet and sad melody of a Bending Conversation.

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  • Jeremy Hight
  • artist biography

    Interview for SIP – SoundLAB Interview project

    Title:
    Scan Loop Symmetry
    2006, run time:1:00
    This piece was composed to the shifts and patterns in a brain scan film. The project was composed for the Digital Museum of Modern Art. The corrolation can be made in sound patterns and interlocking of forms to the mind and its forms and sttructures. Memory essentially is lightning in this fleshy mazy and sound as composed electronically is essentially the analog to this.

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  • Mikhail Karikis
  • artist biography

    Interview for SIP – SoundLAB Interview project

    Work Statement
    Mikhail Karikis’ practice encompasses composition, music performance, film, drawing
    and installation; it is dedicated to the development and performance of innovative
    music and the exploration of auditory culture. In his work, he combines scientific
    experimentation with mythological themes. He employs traditional vocalizations and
    extended vocal techniques, which fragment language and distort the voice, to
    explore the poetics of voice, the power of unvoiced oppression and the difficulty to
    speak of it.

    Titles:
    1.‘Untitled in CoF Minor’
    2005, 4mins 12secs
    ‘Untitled in CoF Minor’ is sound work for voice, two violins, two harpsichords, cello and electronics. A central concern in this work is the question: how does one communicate without being able to? The vocalist of the work is a character who suddenly realizes that he has lost/forgotten language. He begins with a loud cry of panic and explores different ways of voicing in order to communicate. Finally, out of this limitation (the lack of language), he discovers expressive possibilities in vocal ‘accidents’, doubtful notes, unrefined breaks between his vocal registers, the popping of his lips, clicks, knots, scratches, grunts, growls and his breath. This work is divided into four parts: the opening, where the various instruments are introduced sequentially; the following part in which an electronic beat lies under the melodic section of the work and drives it forward; the main part where voice acquires a central role; the coda in which the vocal improvisations lead to a climax and the finale of the piece.

    2. ‘Love Song’
    2005, 1minute
    ‘Love Song’ is inspired by Beckett’s one-minute-long stage work ‘Breath’. It is an experimental sound-work that uses a single voice, which produces sound in an ‘inverted’ way, i.e. voicing during inhalation rather than exhalation. Due to the ‘inverted’ manner of voice-production the voice is distorted and unrecognisable. The composition starts with the sound of exhaling; then a voice is heard repeating a phrase that means ‘I love you’ in Greek, until the lungs of the performer are physically completely filled with air, and he begins to cough and choke. In the recording, all the ‘takes’ are overlaid as they were performed until no further vocalisations were physically possible at that point. Thus on one level, the piece engages with the over-familiar theme of the ‘love song’ and responds to it with ‘emotional honesty’ and ‘obsessive persistence’ unmediated by harmonic rules. On another level, ‘Love Song’ explores the evocative and material power of voice, and it tests the limits of the performer’s throat and his endurance.

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  • Al Larsen
  • artist biography

    Interview for SIP – SoundLAB Interview project

    Title:
    “The Crow Harasses the Hawk”
    Can you record a spoken word album without a microphone? If so, would it be music? You can sequence sound clips and make them go “boom, bip, boom-bip.” You can take the mic and go, “the boom, the bip, the boom-bip” (Push It Along). So the door between poetry and a drum track is definitely open. Beat poets and beat-boxers have been crossing that threshhold for awhile. Kurt Schwitters may have left that door unlocked.
    But in the cut and paste era what’s a performance anyway? I saw Camille Paloque-Berges read her myspace comments the other night and that was pretty good. Performative typing taken into performance poetry vocal-space. Justin Katko combs active duty military message boards and recombines the vernacular through multiple voices funnelled through his own performing throat. Yes. Now let’s throw it backwards: Funnel our poetry back through some unwieldly and half-baked consumer software machine logic. “The Crow Harasses the Hawk” is part of an ongoing attempt to confuse syllables with beats, machine-voice with spoken word,
    text with score, and to question the intentionality we project onto our environment through our use of language.

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  • Le Lavatrici Rosse
  • artist biography

    Interview for SIP – SoundLAB Interview project

    Title:
    Hey man, so cool
    2005, 6’08’’
    research, exploration, re-elaborationand creation of the sonic world in its own whole, that of the instruments and the one that surrounds us and interacts with our existence. Rediscover the primary qualities of sound and the means that allow its birth and development, a route towrd deconstruction of traditional aesthetical canons and a stimulus to an intelligent listening. The use of technology as a mean to overcome the “limits” of the primary instruments meets with improvisation, a visceral and unrepeatable act. The italian popular music meets the electronics.
    The tune “hey man, so cool” is divided in two parts; the first, with a lot of overdubbed voices on the first riff in a 15/8 rhythm, it represent something complex that, with the increasing of his structure, become instead a powerful cell, a passion push to life.
    The second part it represents the reality; it began with something like “going in a nightmare”, till the expression “hey man, so cool” and the beginning of the second riff. “Hey man so cool” is an ironic vision of the reality and also is taken like a typical expression of the contemporary awareness less man. Than the music become hard and dirty, screaming voices are the suffering society, there is fear for the breaking point of balance. This song is the sound-materialize of a conflict in-act.

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  • Rie Nakajima
  • artist biography

    Interview for SIP – SoundLAB Interview project

    Title:
    17mobiles ringing tones 140017032006
    2006, [1:00] The work 17mobiles ringing tones 140017032006 is a 1 minute sound performance which was held inside of the Slade School building in London. The date was 17th of March, 2006, the time duration was between 14:00-14:01 in the afternoon. 34 participants were involved. 17 people made a circle and were waiting for receiving the phone calls from Japan, Germany, Czech, England and China. They have never met each other. Nobody knows to whom they were calling and from whom they were receiving the calls. Nobody was allowed to answer the phone there. I was interested in how people associate with the sounds of their own mobile ring tones at that time. They seem very intimate and personal to us even we choose boring nokia ring tone. As they are messengers who tell you that here is somebody who wants to talk to you. They can be almost fictional to us. By making all mobiles ringing at the same time by my friends and family calls, I intended to detach the mobile ring tones and their owners and unite their different fictional sounds under ‘my’ fiction without using my mobile.

    2. The Realm of Mare Street
    2005, [4:00] This piece is a recorded street noise which resonates inside of 2 meter paper pipe. The sound of car wheels scratching the wet street, loud music, noise of the scream of girls, all street noise was transformed into tonal, acoustic sound through the 2m hole of the paper pipe. It was recorded in my bed room. The room situated by high street in East London and every night I was struggling with sleeping in piece. One night I spontaneously put the 2 M pipe into the window of the room and succeed in transforming the awful noise into tonal, rather harmonic sound. (original is 17 min)

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  • Khaled Sabsabi
  • artist biography

    Interview for SIP – SoundLAB Interview project

    Title:
    Casula live 2004
    2004., 3 min 28 sec
    This work represents time, people and place in relation to the question of survival and identity. Each is interconnected with the “other”.

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  • tarofonika – aka Rick Foot
  • artist biography

    Title:
    a phenomenology of identity
    2006 2m57s
    this was originally conceived as a live performance piece using a strip of magnetic tape bowed across a tapehead to record and play back the speech of the performer. reworked for this submission, it consists of four statements about the nature of the self, layered against a spurious narrative : a backing comprised of manipulations of the statements themselves and a processed double bass part. the central thread comes from the opening statement :
    “the self is a fiction designed to account for the delusion that our lives have a narrative”
    the episodic & fragmented continuum that follows serves to illustrate this delusion.
    all sound manipulation was done using a delay line granulator patch in audiomulch; text, voice, bass and processing all provided by the composer.

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