Tonight on CHRY

I make my radio debut. I'll be deejaying from 11.00 until 1.00 Eastern time (GMT -5) on York University's CHRY 105.5 FM. I'm providing cover for the Found Sound show whose musical remit is pretty open. My plan, which may change in the intervening hours, is to play a load of ambient - Caretaker, GAS, and a Beckett radio play amongst other stuff suitable for the wee hours.

If you're not in the northern Toronto region and wish to listen you can here or alternatively I'll post a link to a download in the next couple of days.

EDIT

So, I didn't manage to make a satisfactory recording, the show however went pretty well despite my lack of technical skill. Anyway, I'll be back on air next week at the same time.

Speculative Realism and Art Event

URBANOMIC PRESENTS ‘LATE AT TATE BRITAIN’:
THE REAL THING: SPECULATIVE REALISM IN CONTEMPORARY ART

Amanda Beech Sanity Assassin (2010)
John Gerrard Lufkin (near Hugo, Colorado) (2009)
Mikko Canini The Black Sun Rise (2010)
Pamela Rosenkranz Bow Human (2009)

On 3rd September 2010, Urbanomic present Late at Tate: The Real Thing, an evening event at Tate Britain with contemporary sound, video and sculptural work, and other interventions exploring the emerging philosophical paradigm of Speculative Realism and its impact on contemporary art practice.

Featuring work by artists Amanda Beech, William Bennett, Mikko Canini, John Gerrard, Florian Hecker and Pamela Rosenkranz, the event will include:

* Premieres of two new sound works commissioned by Urbanomic:
* – Speculative Solution by Florian Hecker, exploring conceptual themes from French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude, which argues for the absolute contingency of all laws of nature;
* – Extralinguistic Sequencing by William Bennett (Whitehouse) + Mimsy DeBlois, using processed voice recordings and disorienting language patterns to expose an extralinguistic reality operating beneath ‘meaning’.

* Screenings of British artist Amanda Beech's Sanity Assassin (2009), a claustrophobic journey through exiled German philosopher Adorno's LA nightmares, and drawing on philosopher Ray Brassier's nihilist masterpiece Nihil Unbound, with its declaration that we are all ‘already dead’; and Canadian artist Mikko Canini’s The Black Sun Rise (2010), a darkly abstract survey of a depopulated London.
* An invasion of one of the Tate’s sculpture galleries by work drawn from Swiss artist Pamela Rosenkranz's 2009 Venice Biennale show Our Sun. A speculative-realist interrogation of the classic Venetian aesthetic of ‘light and water’, Rosenkranz’s work opens a dialogue with Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia, a ‘theory-fiction’ that rethinks the relation between sun and earth.
* A curatorial intervention rethinking the Tate Britain room Art and the Sublime as The Real and the Sublime, with a work by Irish artist John Gerrard, who uses advanced 3d technology to create uncannily ‘real’ virtual environments.

* A panel discussion with Amanda Beech, Mikko Canini, Mark Fisher (K-Punk), Iain Hamilton Grant, Robin Mackay, and Pamela Rosenkranz.

Centred around the approaches of philosophers Quentin Meillassoux (Paris), Ray Brassier (American University in Beirut), Iain Hamilton Grant (Bristol UWE) and Graham Harman (American University in Cairo), and with the additional tangential influence of Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani, Speculative Realism refuses to interrogate reality through human (linguistic, cultural or political) mediations of it, instead drawing upon objective discourses such as mathematics, geology, astrophysics and chemistry to explore the possibility of conceiving of a reality indifferent to humans – a universe that exists before, after, and despite its manifestation in human experience.

As well as generating tremendous interest in philosophical circles, Speculative Realism has also been taken up in cultural theory and contemporary art, suggesting that the paradigm of a human-indifferent universe strikes a chord with twenty-first century cultural preoccupations.

Urbanomic’s journal Collapse was instrumental in bringing Speculative Realism to public attention, having published in 2007 (in Collapse III) the proceedings of the group’s inaugural conference at Goldsmiths, University of London, and having consistently featured original work by the members of the group.

Programme
Sackler Octagon
1800-1900 and 1930-2100 William Bennett + Mimsy De Blois Extralinguistic Sequencing
1900 and 2100 Florian Hecker Speculative Solution

Clore Auditorium
1800-1930 and 2100-2200 Amanda Beech Sanity Assassin (25 min., timed screenings)
1945 - 2045 Panel Discussion: The Real, Representation, and the In-Itself.

Manton Studio
Mikko Canini The Black Sun Rise (3.54., continuous screening)

Ongoing Interventions
Room 9
Urbanomic The Real and the Sublime
John Gerrard Lufkin (near Hugo, Colorado)

Room 13
Pamela Rosenkranz Our Sun

Pamela Rosenkranz’s work courtesy of Karma International, Zurich.
John Gerrard’s work courtesy of Thomas Dane, London.
Hecker commission supported by The Elephant Trust.

Hauntology Today

Showing that this idea is far from done - some new and new-ish Hauntology related stuff online:

There's an excellent short documentary (and accompanying interview) on Position Normal who is, rightly or wrongly, considered the Godfather of Hauntological music.

There's a great looking group hauntology blog called Found Objects.

Thanks to K-Punk for those.

And also there's an interesting panel discussion including the Ghost Box lads Julian House and Jim Jupp who among other things talk about the spectres haunting their work.

Joyful Noise

Among recent additions to the superb UBU web archive I found this 60 minute documentary on Sun Ra (1914-1993). For anyone unfamiliar with Ra this is a great introduction. Apart from the amazing music, virtuosic playing, and outlandish costumes, what makes him so interesting a subject is his theoretical sophistication and originality. Director Robert Mugges gives Ra time to introduce and expound both the afro-futurist ‘mythocracy’ underpinning his work and the more concrete, everyday philosophy of discipline and precision instilled in the Arkestra’s musicians.

Singing/Rain

Ive become a little obsessed with the Gouldian positioning of voice(s) against noise. Here is yet another recording with this arrangement, this time recorded from our apartment window. The voice in this instance sounds like it might be a Karaoke or pub singer. After making the recording I wandered the streets to locate the source and my ears led me happily astray to a free outdoor short-film screening. The film showing when I arrived had music by Aphex Twin, Brian Eno and John Foxx!

Oh - the animal calling towards the end of the recording is, by the way, a racoon.

Ariel's Freaky Disco

I went to see Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti last night. My big question going into the evening was: what is he going to be like as a live performer? Before-hand he was out on stage brooding and looking awkward. Dressed in white jeans and striped Russian navel shirt he aimlessly paced up and down playing anxiously with his hair. He stared vacantly at band mates as they hurriedly readied their instruments and then he stood, centre stage, rocking from one foot to the other scrutinizing the crowd face by face. His demeanor changed as soon as the music started. Singing he looked focused, and as the set progressed he relaxed and started to let loose. During one early song he removed his belt and proceeded to swing it around his head accidentally whipping his own arm. Then he took the belt and feebly lashed the monitor speakers lining the front of the stage. Returning to the mic stand, he dropped his trousers to the knee revealing baggy black under-pants rumpled up at either side to his hips. This wasn’t the first time the trousers came down either, later when asked to ‘show us your cock’, they came off again, only this time fully and permanently. He performed the final stages of the show in what could have been his pajamas - underpants and tee. He thrashed about the stage with great energy and exuberance but he can’t really dance. He was pretty inventive with the belt though, it featured throughout - done up in a noose around his neck, swung around lasso-like or just dangled between his legs. There’s no doubting his creative intelligence and originality. I suspect as time goes and he settles into this new way of doing things we’ll see more drama (and, I hope, costumes!) in Pink’s performances. His theatrics last night were a bit silly but never-the-less endearing, there was no irony; this is just the way the man gets down - like a child messing about in his bedroom when no one’s looking.

Much has been made recently of the new material and what Pink’s transition from lone bedroom recordist to live group means for his distinctive lo-fi sound. I’ve not got much to add now, skint I haven’t heard all the new album yet. Based solely on last night I’d say having a band has extended his range of possibilities. For example: though some of his old tracks have a swaggering rhythm, I’ve never danced to them. His music has always been a head-phone listen for me in part because the loose beats and less-than-metronomic playing don’t help a dancer keep time, but also because his small sound was never sufficiently enveloping. Last night, backed by a tight band and amplified over a huge sound-system I felt it and danced...

Explore the Roar

I got chance to visit Niagara earlier on in the week and so took some recordings. The first is of a quick auditory drift around an amusement arcade. The second is of the falls – I wrapped my recorder and microphone in cling film to waterproof them and took the Maid of the Mist boat with a hundred or so other tourists right up to the foot of the Horseshoe Falls.

Sound Diary #2

In Treatment Season one DVD box set - 01/06/2010 - 10/06/2010

The sounds heard are simply those made by the therapist and patient – mostly talking, and some ambient sound. For the voices the show uses the audio equivalent of a close-up shot, but when the camera pulls away to reveal the larger context of the therapist’s office, with its collection of model boats and shelves full of books, the microphone stays stolidly still. And so the dialogue is at a higher volume than the dialogue of other TV shows I’ve seen, or at least without music and significant background noise, it seems louder. You hear vocal nuance clearly – inhalations and exhalations of breath, heavy silences, breaking and broken voices, sighs and you often hear emotion affecting speech. The therapist is a professional listener and this show makes demands on the audience to attain a level of listening skill akin to his.

In this way sound contributes to one of the shows most important effects - the creation of a deep, humanist involvement on the part of the audience with therapist and patient. The ambient sound has it’s role to play here too. You hear the sound of an occasional car passing on the road outside or bird song in the nearby trees. These background sounds make the show perfect for home viewing as the ambient sounds of our own environment merge seamlessly with those from the TV set. Again, the sound functions to draw the ‘viewer’ into a very particular setting.

Music rarely accompanies the action, when patients speak about their emotions, relationships and memories there is no heavy handed music guiding our interpretation or marking moments of high drama and clinical breakthrough. There are a number of different tracks that feature as the closing credits roll, but the DVD package`s main piece is a gentle piano motif repeated slowly over the top of a warm, continuous, subtly modulating, synthesizer chord. It`s sparse, minimal and entirely appropriate for the mood of the show. Often I found myself just listening to this piece, re-living the episode`s key moments, or thinking about my own life and the parallels with the issues and emotions brought up in the session. Either way this music, empty and soothing, provides a welcome rest from the emotional intensity of the scenes.

Anempathetic film music

Last week I saw Eisenstein's Strike (1924) screened at Toronto's Gladstone Hotel as part of Early Monthly Segments' celebration of Worker's month. Given the global age of austerity we are now entering the choice couldn't of been more apposite. The film was accompanied by a live score performed by Canadian composer and experiemental muscian Allison Cameron. Cameron used a range of different instruments and sound making machines – guitar, thumb piano, effects pedal, record player, wireless radio – to create a sparse and abstract sound world - isolated notes pierced unevenly textured sheets of radio static and a broken record skipped relentlessly, its pops and crackles repeating in a rhythmical pattern that partially masked the original orchestral content. This foreboding mechanical monotony, which drove the piece forward, was accentuated by something beyond Cameron’s control - the basso continuo for the entire work was the film projector's whir. Its light, flitting drone underscored the haunted feeling evoked by the music.

The music didn’t take on the scene’s rhythms or express its emotional core. There were accidental points of convergence where sound met vision; moments where that heard could conceivably have been the sound of events seen. But for the most part the score was, in Michel Chion's term, anemapathetic, meaning it proceeded, like the broken record and vintage projector, ineluctably, undaunted and almost oblivious to the film’s unfolding narrative. There’s a dramatic scene early on in the picture: a factory machinist is wrongly accused of stealing a company micrometre. The cost of replacing the lost tool, which management cruely demands, stands to financially ruin him. His shame in unfairly shouldering this accusation and his frustration and anger at not being believed were almost unbearably intense emotions to share. This unusually ferocious intensity was, I would argue, the result of Cameron’s skilful positioning of the scene against a backdrop of profound sonic indifference. This is for me where the power of her score lay – it made you feel more strongly.

'eavesdropping on what isn't there'

David Toop in conversation with Geeta Dayal -

I think that the point is – and this is the main thread of the book, if you like – that sound has this characteristic of the uncanny, that sound is to some degree a ghost, and hence this expression in the mediumship of the listener. Sound is transitory, ambiguous in its location in space, and it’s uncertain; it lends itself to representations of uncertainty. It lends itself to feelings of dread and fear and loss and these emotional states, these extreme psychic states. It lends itself to mysticism, all these ineffable experiences. These sensations of immateriality. And so it’s a very powerful tool for musicians, but at a certain level, in social functioning or whatever, it’s perceived as being unreliable.

The way we describe reality is always through seeing and touch; seeing is believing. So listening has this negative quality, which is of course tremendously interesting. It can always have this sense of the uncanny. You can never be quite sure of what somebody has said to you. You can never be quite sure of the source of a sound, particularly when the source of the sound is hidden from you, which is often the case. We make suppositions all the time about what we hear. For that reason, sound is very important in, for example, supernatural fiction. One section of the book is focused on ghost stories and horror stories particularly from the 19th century beginning with Edgar Allan Poe, going through to all these late 19th century and early 20th century writers like Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood and Wilkie Collins, and onto 20th century writers like Shirley Jackson. Sound is often a kind of portent; it’s a sign that something bad is about to happen. Very often there’s a silence, and then there's a strange sound and the bad stuff begins. It’s almost like sound is the presence of a ghost, because sound has the quality of a ghost. You know, that the sensory quality of the uncanny is mentioned by Freud in his famous essay on the uncanny. He doesn’t elaborate on sound; he just makes the point that we have these deep childhood fears. In that sense for me, the book is personal. I went back to my first memories of sound, and they tended to be very fearful. Things that go bump in the night. These hyper-acute experiences of listening – which I tend to think of as paranoid listening – in a way you’re eavesdropping on what isn’t there. It’s manufactured in the imagination but it becomes very real, in an experience of terror.

The rest of the interview is here.