https://www.soundonsound.com/people/autechre#top
Booth has talked about “the idea of engineering being beautiful”, and when asked to elaborate he enthuses “Yeah, totally. I think we have a natural ability to recognise harmony and I think this exists as much within an engineering context as it does within music. Working in a studio is really no different than building a bridge from metal girders, isn’t it? Constructing harmony from a load of predefined frequencies is essentially no different. To me it’s all construction, building.”
Author Archives: d.perry
“When I am trying to make a song, through trial and error,
there are times when I touch the door or source of music.
On the collaboration too,
there is a feeling of being in touch with the music,
as if we are holding out our hand to a spring
that has been gushing out there for a long time.
We play with sounds, and resonate with stretching out the time that
we are (or were) present at shifts into memory.
Walking, feeling the wind, laughing, every conversation, remembering songs on the spot,
being in the musical space together is the inspiration itself for me.”
– Saya
“All these beefy Caucasians with guns. Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they’d grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain’t what it used to be. The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it.”
http://surround.noquam.com/membrane-window-mirror/?fbclid=IwY2xjawNbv-NleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFyemYySmVnZ0xabGMyNnF4AR40EhsPVFD95Uh9etCWlExzCXMoZEyCxUhIbuo0iXUAzwItaNulyvXQCZncaw_aem_1LEi9ZLnJQeONdDlSD_n0Q
http://media.experimentalmusicyearbook.com/emy_media/2010/michael_pisaro/pisaro_essay2010.pdf?fbclid=IwY2xjawNbv-JleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFyemYySmVnZ0xabGMyNnF4AR7Ae2YpFmhFvCOuS8H7Q5cSNMYM1jDjCPhTtgX7bsjt3wyL8VZoW4IDTxX7aw_aem_0TmOGr-UMwBlLuVQHU7HGg
https://eartripmagazine.wordpress.com/articles/articles-issue-7/listening-to-sachiko-m/?fbclid=IwY2xjawNbv-BleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFyemYySmVnZ0xabGMyNnF4AR4b1np_-pRBMyPzgz0JOqTAnTm-MQV6rI6hJDYQ0N-Lae2h8g_cKw-MEYwvlQ_aem_UJEZeyNLnj71pVIytNaOWA
‘“I think with these musicians, focuses are on hearing the sound, not physically playing musical instruments,” Sachiko concludes. “Sometimes the instrument is an obstruction. They just want to listen more to the sound.”
Clive Bell, ‘Sachiko M: Sampler Amnesia’ (The Wire, April 1999)
…
In his recently published ‘Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener’, David Toop describes his fascination with the disembodied, uncanny nature of sounds: hearing is the first sense to develop, inside the womb; a state of aural innocence in which the developing foetus has no idea that the sounds it hears might ‘mean’ something, might signify something other than themselves, might have any other significance than mere presence. Once we emerge into the world of sight, however, a sense which allows one to get a clearer fix on things – I know that something is there because I can see it – hearing becomes less trustworthy, relegated to the domain of music – moments of aesthetic pleasure within certain defined, delimited boundaries (sometimes even tied to sight, as with the case of the music video) – or registered on the periphery of the audible threshold as annoying, briefly interesting, as background sound or ignorable environmental chatter.
Given that hearing is no longer connected to the struggle of survival –it might be useful to listen for the sound of approaching cars when crossing the road, or to notice the shrill of a fire alarm when the building is set ablaze, but we do not need to listen for approaching predators round every corner – it becomes easy to ignore, and, despite the fact that our lives are made up of a myriad of different sounds, hearing can become ambient in a way that sight less often does, or does to a lesser extent. Perhaps this tendency to ignore sound comes from a fear that it is easier to trick by means sound than by sight – sound, as something immaterial, instant, temporary, gives us no sense of permanence or stability, nothing certain to latch on to: even recurring sonic patterns (the sound of a rain shower or a thunderstorm, the roar of an accelerating car) are never quite the same in each repeated instance.
When we cannot tie what we hear to what we see, it becomes doubly difficult to evaluate the significance of a particular sonic event: to filter out peripheral noises and to concentrate on those that might offer us immediately relevant information. This is the basis, as Toop points out, of the classic trick purveyed in horror films (and in horror fiction before that): we hear something, maybe several things, but cannot tell its source or what it is ‘meant’ to signify. Removed from their usual contexts, sounds become uncanny: canned Light Music floating down the corridors in ‘The Shining’, the sound of a harp when none is physically present in ‘The Haunting’.
…
“When producing sound, even if one reduces as much as possible what is called “self-consciousness,” one can never completely eliminate it. This is because the “I” that produces, decides to produce, and thinks about producing sound and the “I” that listens to, decides to listen to, and thinks about listening to sound are always there. The minimal “I” performing minimal “listening” and “sound production,” possessing a minimal “will”…
Atsushi Sasaki, ‘The Oscillating “Will” and the Flickering “Self” ’
(Liner Notes to Filament, ‘20902000’)
…
In comparison with the wind, or with a saxophone, sine waves – most familiar to people as the ‘test tones’ heard during the interruption of a TV transmission – seem to have far less specific ‘purpose’, far less connection with any specific cultural, emotional, or otherwise meaning-centred experience. They simply are what they are – a near tabula-rasa. As Nakamura puts it, “I wouldn’t say I like my music, I would just say my music is very comfortable to me and very natural to me. It’s not really important if I like it or not, it’s just there.”
And again: “A couple of days ago, a guy came to me after a concert in Nantes, and told me; “I read you don’t want to express your emotion but I think your music is very emotional.” So I told him, “It’s you who find it’s emotional. It’s your emotion, not mine. I don’t try to spray my emotion to the audience.” “So, can I say it’s an emotional music?” “Please enjoy your own emotion.” […] Sorry to keep repeating it, but my music is just happening. Maybe listeners want to make some association with something else and then want to understand more deeply. “OK, he is from Japan so their must be some relationship with his tradition.” Maybe in the air and in some part of my body, yes, but it’s not my intention and I don’t know anything about it.”
RIP
Excerpt from The University of Man by Henry Dumas:
“Is it not true that without tools one’s knowledge can become useless?”
“Perhaps it is true.”
“Then what does one get at the university?”
Tyros thought again. “Knowledge and how to use it.”
“And then after you have gained the knowledge from the Universities of the East, West, North, and South, what will you do?”
“I do not know.”
“There is one more university. And the tools of its knowledge are learned all through the flow of one’s years.”
“What is the name of this university?”
“It has no name. It is a mystery.”
“What happens to those who graduate from this university?”
“Very few ever finish…. The weight of the tool is usually too heavy.”
Tyros reflected. “What is the tool? I would like to attend it someday. Where might I find it?”
“If one’s own weight is not too heavy a burden, if you can bear to look into the mirror of the river, you are very close to it, then. The greatest tool of education is the soul. The truly educated man is like a giant stylus etching in the sands of the earth. As he walks, words and songs flow behind him.”
“Who might be writing with the stylus?” asked Tyros.
“Who can name the source of a river?”
“It is a mystery,” said Tyros.
“Who can name the source of a canal?”
“Any man with knowledge of where it begins and ends.”
“With the knowledge gained at the university with no name, one does one’s work and there is no end to it. Knowledge flows as time flows.”
Excerpts from https://eastofborneo.org/articles/into-the-sun-of-sadness/:
“Dean’s essay is titled “And he fell into the sea,” and begins with an epigraph about Icarus, yet another tale of the seduction and glory of failure: had his wings held, had he touched the sun, we would remember Icarus not as the fool who drowned but as the fool who burned alive.
…
While thousands of climate refugees crowd into unworthy boats and rafts, collectors ply the Mediterranean in their yachts, like the one decorated in razzle dazzle pop art camo by Jeff Koons for Cypriot industrialist Dakis Joannou. The ship’s name, painted across its transom, is Guilty.
…
“We’re often told that art can’t really change anything,” writes British author Olivia Laing in the introduction to her collected writings, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, published in May 2020. “But I think it can.” And how? “It shapes our ethical landscapes; it opens us to the interior lives of others. It is a training ground for possibility. It makes plain inequalities, and it offers other ways of living. Don’t you want it, to be impregnate with all that light? And what will happen if you are?”
…
In a column on the Grenfell Tower tragedy, Laing writes of Turner painting a burning building, “Set it down: as spectacle and artefact, as testimony, witness report and permanent record. The sky is rose-pink, rose-yellow patched with blue; the sky is very lovely, full of small gold darts of burning debris. Here’s the first challenge: how not to aestheticize tragedy.” …Don’t romanticize doom; don’t treat an ashen sky like a Rothko. But don’t look away, either.
…
In her first Frieze column, from December 2015, she compares another work of his, a self-portrait with his lips sewn shut, to journalistic photos of migrants on hunger strike who sewed their mouths closed as a protest against the inhumane conditions of detention camps. Perhaps, as she writes, images can speak for the voiceless: “You make a migrant image, an image that can travel where you cannot.”