Enter – m’scape 09 – directly here
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m’scape IX
includes these artists—>
Andreja Andric (Serbia/Italy)
Rich Bitting (USA)
Bibi Calderaro (USA)
Chelsea Cargill (UK)
Matt Dotson (USA)
Alex Hetherington (UK)
Stephanie Loveless (UK)
Jeff Morris (USA)
Luz MarÃa Sánchez (Mexico)
Peter V. Swendsen (USA)
JEFF THOMPSON (USA)
unclejim – Goard, David & Robinson, Rob (UK)
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Title:
1.Tuesday, February 28th, 19:10:22 2006
2006, 5min
2.Tuesday, February 28th, 22:55:32 2006
2006, 5min
In recent years I’ve liked to work with the sound of a music box. It is gentle and tranquilizing, yet, even in a loud bar atmosphere it can be heard clearly, due to its high pitch and bright sound color.
Lullaby Generator is a program for MS-DOS/Windows that generates music for music box. The mood, tonality and phrasing changes from piece to piece, thus forming a unique cycle of music pieces. No input is required. Just start the program and it will create a final wav file with a new composition. As calculating the waveform from 20-voice polyphony is a complex task, the process might take several minutes.
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Title:
Toaster, Knife & Percolator from The Breakfast Suite
Toaster
2006, 3:52
Knife
2006, 2:16
Percolator
2006, 3:07
The Breakfast Suite is an exploration of the micro-acoustic sound world of some humble kitchen appliances. These common but little-regarded kitchen appliances are an all-but-ignored part of the morning breakfast ritual. As we wait each morning in Pavlovian anticipation while our eggs sizzle to sunrise perfection and our coffee is perking to its savory conclusion, do our minds register the fantastic soundscapes that are being revealed? If a crumb falls in a toaster and no one is there to hear it does it make a sound?
We Twenty-first Century humans have come to rely primarily on our sense of sight, while our brains function as earlids to filter out “noise†and process only that sound we deem necessary as information. I invite you to close your eyes, open your mind, and listen to the world through fresh ears.
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Title:
In-Deed
2005. 8:54 minutes.
IN-DEED is a collage of words and sentences belonging to the Lenape, Choctaw and Navajo languages, extracted from teach-yourself tapes. Mixed with it are some of the English translations to these sentences which I turned to chanting.
The title of this piece is a pun composed by using a dash between the words IN and DEED. It speaks of a transaction whose translation, as between languages, is always not pure, always hiding another layer of meaning, making uncertain what the outcome of that transaction may be.
IN-DEED is both an assertion and a negation, as in the fact that an almost extint language is recorded for the purpose of being taught in the future to English speakers, although its signified elements might be already lost.
With this piece I would like to raise questions concerning identity and language, such as: Is it possible to speak a language whose culture is gone?
When is a language considered dead? How does a second language interfere or influence in the formation of identity?
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Interview for SIP – SoundLAB Interview project
Title:
st mary
2006, 3:04
In St Mary I recorded my own voice improvising vocal sounds that are sung with delay and stereo panning effects. Vocal phrases emerge almost by accident and are alternately inchoate and complete – only to be obscured by breath, vocal and static sound. Throughout the piece the same musical motifs are repeated but never emerge predictably; they are always posited differently within the overall structure of sound. Overall, the piece concerns the unreliable nature of memory and its ability to obscure and embellish.
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Title:
Memory
2005, 9:34
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Interview for SIP – SoundLAB Interview project
Title:
House/Lights Kate Valk Radio
2006, 2.00 mins
This sound work is an element in my research on the theater production House/Lights by New York’s The Wooster Group. This work combines the libretto from Gertrude Stein’s Dr Faustus Lights the Lights with the text from Joseph Mawra’s film Olga’s House of Shame. I have been systematically connecting this work with the biography of Raphael Carlos Gordon, a Scot
and one-time Mayor of Madrid, who briefly ruled Spain during the Franco era in Spain and to the Wardhouse Estate, the seat of the Gordon family, in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. I have been researching the aristocracy of Spain and to laws and regulations that supported them. This sound work employs a combining of texts using a public radio broadcast where Kate Valk of the
Wooster Group describes some of their working methods. This is accompanied by a stage direction from Gertrude Stein’s original libretto, a tone that mimics a chorus. In Stein’s modernist libretto Faustus sells his soul for electricity. I am interested in notions of radical theater, behaviors intrinsic to making performance, theater, art and mapping the real with the
fictional. In this work I want to establish a correspondence to the memory of theater, the memory of identities, the memory of meaning.
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Titles:
“when you go”
(5:00), 2006
“trying”
(7:11), 2006
“When You Go” and “Trying” are two from series of five short sound pieces based on instrumental compositions recorded in an empty house in my hometown (Montreal, Canada). These recordings were brought into a sound-processing environment with the intention of discovering additional sonic material through their manipulation with relatively simple digital processing tools. I am interested in this mining of a sound source for the sonic, musical and
affective material within it — trying not so much to take the original sounds to new places, as to make them even more themselves. Smaller sounds (floorboard creaks, breath, piano groans) are privileged, and become an intrinsic part of the composition. The pieces are emotionally melancholic, as were the original instrumental compositions, and this emotional state is also mined, stretched — hopefully — to a point of transcendence.
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Titles:
1. StillMotion
2004 — 5’00”
2. Harmonies (They Spin)
2003 — 5’42”
3. Tappatappatappa
2005 — 9’22”
StillMotion:
All source sounds have been recorded during an average day in the lives of different people. In performance, the sound clips are fractured, so that the treble, middle, and bass frequencies of the sound act as three facets of a flexible beat pattern that articulates time. As they are played, the sounds travel toward, past, and away from the observer independently, causing their speed and pitch to be warped in time and space. The result is a texture of fragmented scenes, woven together, from multiple and mobile points of view in time and space, presenting the sound events as ephemeral strands of instants in time. StillMotion explores the ordinary sublime: on the one hand the impossibility of recording the everyday (as soon as it is marked, it is elevated in some way), and the impossibility of recording a performance (as soon as it is recorded it is a frozen text).StillMotion was originally created for a collaboration with guest choreographers Rosane Chamecki and Andrea Lerner, and the dance and visual arts departments of Texas Woman’s University. Photographs and sounds were taken of the dancers acting out an average day in their lives. The photos were used as a basis for the choreography, and the music, choreography and set design grew together organically. The performance (January 31, 2004) consisted of dance depicting functions or feelings captured in the photos, stylized versions of photos on scrims hanging within space (sometimes invading the dance space), and this music, from processed sounds of the “average day.”
Harmonies (They Spin):
The title is an anagram of “Riemann Hypothesis,” one of seven mathematical mysteries that are part of the Millennium Problem challenge (offering a $1 million prize for a solution). It suggests that there is an underlying order to the distribution of prime numbers, which otherwise seems to be unpredictable. In a similar spirit, “Harmonies (They Spin)” conjectures an underlying order to the seemingly ungraspable or irreconcilable. The counterpoint of sound and image presents an interaction between the attainable and the elusive, the harmonious and the dissonant. Binary oppositions are established, including noisy versus pitched timbres and regular pulses versus freely sweeping gestures, to explore the stable and unstable qualities of each when juxtaposed in various ways, approaching or diverging from a common center.
Tappatappatappa:
This performance was created live by the composer tapping on a microphone and improvising with custom software. In a complex system of feedback and self-imitation, complex textures and gestures are built up from a small simple sound of being alone.
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Interview for SIP – SoundLAB Interview project
Title:
2487
year of production: 2006
“Spoken names sound from spare, low-mounted speakers in 2487. A role-call of absent persons, the installation records 2,487 of the estimated 8,000 who have died while trying to traverse into the United States from Mexico since 1993. Like the border, this list is not exclusive. It reflects the breadth of Latin America’s poverty-driven exodus, including old and young, male and female, and an ethnic spectrum of Mexican-nationals as well as other foreign citizens. (…) Written specifically for 2487, [a MAX/MSP] program raises name after name out of silence and into organic arrangement. This act of calling, basic but defining, restores these lost individuals to the present. Overlapping in time the names become forceful together, a symbol of common escape and shared fate.â€
Kurt Dominick Mueller
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Title:
“Little Girl Lostâ€
2003, 12 minutes
“As daughters we possess a sense of our mothers that is physical. There are parts of her in us—the sound of her voice, similar facial expressions, maybe even the same life choices. What do we find when we mine these aspects of our mothers from within us and what of ourselves gets lost.†– Mary Carbonara, choreographer for Little Girl Lost The score for Little Girl Lost is based on many hours of interview recordings made by the composer. These recordings were edited to their most focused and basic elements before being layered and arranged. Additional text came from stories written by the dancers of the piece. Violin recordings were also made and much of the material results from similar processes being applied to the text and violin. The live violin part straddles the worlds present in the piece, sometimes driving the rhythms, sometimes providing melodic material, and sometimes merging with the pre-recorded violin through the use of live processing. The music seeks to provide both internal and external dialogue for the performers. Special thanks to violinist, Rodica Filipoi.
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Interview for SIP – SoundLAB Interview project
Title:
“Performance with Toysâ€
2006, 04’ 08
Created during an artists’ residency at Elsewhere, a former thrift store in Greensboro, North Carolina USA. The piece was created using contact microphones and the signal-processed sounds of toys found within the store. As the thesis for my stay at the residency, I attempted to draw out the lives of the former owners of the objects left in the store. By rubbing, moving, and manipulating the toys, sounds are pulled from them and layering, forming a soundscape that bridges the past and present, memory and tactility.
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Goard, David & Robinson, Rob
Interview for SIP – SoundLAB Interview project
Titles:
1. in a vertical city
2006 – 3.05
This piece is intended to evoke memories and emotions related to the more unsettling aspects of high-rise city life. Menace is implied by the insistent rhythm that provides the backdrop for the track. The rhythm is broken by interjections – of unidentifiable sounds and disembodied speech – insinuating and emphasising a sense of displacement.
2. gesicht
2006 – 2.33
gesicht describes a fleeting moment in time – a state of semi consciousness, immediately after a serious accident for example, when one half of the brain struggles to perceive immediate surroundings – faces looming, the sound of breathing etc – whilst another part of oneself attempts to restore a sense of personal identity with thoughts of home and loved ones.
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