Borderlands

I've just had word that my proposal for a regular experimental music, sound and radio show - Borderlands - has been approved by the CHRY programming committee. Needless to say, I'm delighted by this and will post more details as and when they emerge.

Scripts for the Pageant Mix

New label Blackest Ever Black have put together a singular mix of the jarring music inspiring their output. In their words:

"This mixtape aims to give some sense of the predilections and prejudices that stirred Blackest Ever Black into being. Most of its content is drawn from the 1980s - not a conscious choice, but rather a natural result of favouring music of real character, imagination and volatility. Music to make you feel all over again a truth which the mind becomes adept at evading, and which can be expressed in a single, simple command: you must change your life."

Listen here.

Ways of Listening #1: Reductive Listening (Pierre Schaeffer)

Select a sound, the sound of a cough, a mobile phone text alert, the sound of a single spoken word, any sound. Close your eyes, try to forget that it is the sound of something or that it means something and focus on the sound itself. Become obsessed with the sound, record it, play it back, do it again and again. Change it, use some free audio-edit software from the internet to add effects, reverb, echo and so on. Stretch it, bend it, slow it down, speed it up, make as many changes as you can. Save them. Listen to the modified sound, one file after the other. Maintain focus on the sound and notice invariant qualities existing across the different files. These properties belong to the sound object - the essence of the sound - and you have just listened to it.

That’s not all, the sound object has a strangely mute side. In perceiving the invariant properties of the sound object, in recognising the sound object across a variety of manifestations you have created it. You have given it its unity, the foundation of its earthly subsistence. What began as an eminently realist enterprise, to uncover the essential nature of sound itself, turns out to be idealist. Lesson learnt? You can’t listen to the sonic real? Not quite, only one part is accessible via perception, that part that comes from our (very real) relation to the real sound. The sound object is henceforth split in two: there are the primary (mathematic) properties of frequency, wavelength, amplitude and so on, and their corresponding secondary (sonorous) qualities of pitch, loudness etc that we perceive. Each modification that you made before thus created a new sound object.

If you'd like to read a more detailed account of Schaeffer's reductive listening than this glib outburst take a look at Brian Kane's more scholarly essay.

In the dark

How, using only sound, do you 'reflect the economic and cultural dissonance to be found in an area currently in the throes of a major urban metamorphosis'? Not, as the creators of The Dark Hours (an exhibit at last night's Torontonian Nuit Blanche) disappointingly attempted - with a fifteen-min, absurdly abstract bass drone that eliminated all Parkdale's identity, its historic socio-political specificity.

If you are interested in a politically engaged artistic response to urban gentrification you should check out Laura Oldfield Ford's growing body of extrordinary work.

all ears

From a flyer for a night of techno in Leeds.