Thursday, 2 September 2010
Sunday, 15 June 2008
ATMOSPHERES 2 : FIELD RECORDING and the World of NATURAL SOUND
FENNESZ : Friday 9th May
TREE LISTENING with Alex Metcalf
For more information please visit www.alexmetcalf.co.uk
Alex is an inventor and artist with a fascination for the natural world. One of his recent inventions is a device which records the sound of water as it seeps through the trunks of trees. The sound is amplified hundreds of times so it can be audibly heard and as Alex will demonstrate, each tree has its own particular 'sound'. Alex will carry out demonstrations in the Museum's garden on Saturday 10th.
TREE LISTENING with Alex Metcalf
For more information please visit www.alexmetcalf.co.uk
Alex is an inventor and artist with a fascination for the natural world. One of his recent inventions is a device which records the sound of water as it seeps through the trunks of trees. The sound is amplified hundreds of times so it can be audibly heard and as Alex will demonstrate, each tree has its own particular 'sound'. Alex will carry out demonstrations in the Museum's garden on Saturday 10th.
ATMOSPHERES 2 : FIELD RECORDING and the World of NATURAL SOUND
ROBERT HAMPSON : PHILIP JECK : MARCUS DAVIDSON : Thursday 8th May
Tuesday, 1 January 2008
Jodi Cave ::: For Myria ::: 12K1043
Not so much ‘music’ as sound drawings or paintings:
there is something quite visual, or sculptural,
about these presentations: the way the space is created
via the play of light and shade in the minimal arrangements,
and the kaleidoscopic variations within these: line crossing
over line, creating forms that briefly coalesce
together creating recordings possibly of the
impressions of a rarified space and its afterlife in
memory.
Although it might be mistaken to assume a diagrammatic
rather than an organic quality, as the spaces do tend
towards the organic, rather more like paintings, or
drawings, as opposed to diagrams.
There is an analogue quality at work here despite the
( assumed ) ‘digital’ production process. The
voicings, and the ambience (are we still allowed to
use that word?) are similar to some of Fridges
compositions, like on ‘Happiness’, but more abstracted
and less rhythmically dynamic. This creates a
confident presentation, not trying to be more
sophisticated than they need to be, a quite contented
and philosophical art-music in many ways. Or, put
another way, a kind of collation of radioactive
artefacts, the sound literally trickling and sparkling
along at times, at others somewhat more hesitant and
haphazard. The sound presence takes place in quite a
dignified and thoughtful, unrushed way.
http://www.12k.com/
Opitope ::: Hau ::: spekk KK: 011
This cd opens with precise but soft sky high harmonic fuzzy melodic voicings and treated field recordings, one of which sounded like a very soft filtered jetplane. Tomoyoshi Date and Chihei Hatakeyama combine electric and acoustic guitars, piano, electronics and bass in a fairly glitch free collection of landscape sound portraiture. Although this is sloppy to say, since their cd’s contents read more like a list of more cropped, and at times conceptual (‘a white cloth falling from the snow branches’) images.
This may be nostalgia or reverence, for example, and it is a question of belief in so much as how far we go along with the story….I am reminded of Brian Eno’s early work on the EG label, for example ‘On Land’ ( 1982 ) or with Robert Fripp on ‘Evening Star’ ( 1975 ).
Liner notes to ‘On Land’ :
“ This record represents one culmination of that development ( studio created music ) and in it the landscape has ceased to be a backdrop for something else to happen in front of: instead, everything that happens is a part of the landscape. There is no longer a sharp distinction between foreground and background.
In using the terms landscape I am thinking of places, times, climates and the moods that they evoke. And of expanded moments of memory too…One of the inspirations for this record was watching Fellini’s “Amarcord” ( “I remember” ), a presumably unfaithful reconstruction of childhood memories. Watching that film, I imagined an aural counterpart to it, and that became one of the threads woven into the fabric of this music.
What qualified a piece for inclusion on the record was that it took me somewhere, but this might be somewhere that I’d never been before, or somewhere I’d only imagined going to. Lantern Marsh, for example, is a place only a few miles from where I grew up in East Anglia, but my experience of it derives from not having visiting it (although I almost certainly did) but from having subsequently seen it on a map and imagining where and what it might be. We feel affinities not only with the past, but also with the futures that didn’t materialise, and with other variations of the present that we suspect run parallel to the one we have agreed to live in.
The choice of sonic elements in these pieces arose less from listening to music than from listening to the world in a musical way.………Listening in this way, I realised that I had been moving towards a music that had this feeling: as the listener, I wanted to be situated inside a large field of loosely-knit sound, rather than placed before a tightly organised monolith ( or stereolith, for that matter ). I wanted to open out the oral field, to put much of the sound a considerable distance from the listener ( even locating some of it ‘out of earshot ) and to allow the sounds a to live their lives separately from one another, clustering occasionally but not ‘musically’ bound together…….
As I made these pieces, I began to take a different attitude towards both the materials and the procedures I was using. I found the synthesiser, for example, of limited usefulness because its sound tended towards a diagrammatic rather than an organic quality. My instrumentation shifted gradually through electro-mechanical and acoustic instruments towards non-instruments like pieces of chain and sticks and stones. Coupled with this transition was an increasing interest in found sound as a completely plastic and malleable material; I never felt any sense of obligation about realism. In this category I included not only recordings of rooks, frogs and insects, but also the complete body of my own earlier work. As a result, some earlier pieces I worked on became digested by later ones, which in turn became digested again. This technique is like composting, converting what would otherwise have been waste into nourishment.
Brian Eno : 1982 : revised February 1986 “
So where does this take us? Have Tomoyoshi Date and Chihei Hatakeyama taken this idea further? Are they revisionists, updating these ideas and techniques / manifesto, or are they repeating it ( beautifully ) or what?
Admittedly, the titling suggests difference: ‘mist on the sea’ or ‘bird standing on the fall’ could be drawings in some ways, which is different from the idea of a landscape and more conceptual in some ways, more minimal, say, than ‘Lizard Point’ or ‘Dunwich Beach, Autumn 1960’. The cover artwork, a very minimal and abstract watercolour painting / drawing by Shinji Miyazawa is a bit Ralph Steadman, a bit stark in its use of line, and in a way offers a way into to the sounds via its very abstract use of form and the subtle colour gradations / balance that exist within it.
http://www.spekk.net/catalog/hau.html
http://www.thesilentballet.com/dnn/Home/tabid/36/ctl/Details/mid/384/ItemID/911/Default.aspx
http://www.kualauk.net/press.html
Monday, 29 October 2007
Ben Guiver interviews Baz Nichols of Level / Fourm and WHITE_LINE
Ben Guiver (BG) Interviews Baz Nichols (BN) of Level / Fourm and WHITE_LINE about his work and inlfluences
July – September 2007 : via e mail conversations.
On Philosophy…
BG: Have you read much Heidegger? Or have you read any Foucault?
BN: Neither I’m afraid, although of course I’m aware of them..I find that philosophers speak in a totally different language, that tends to obscure the very thing that it sets out to clarify. Most of it traverses that high intellectual “nosebleed” territory that is almost inpenetrable. So I don’t subscribe to any one philosophy, or philosopher. I read a lot of Koestler when I was younger, and that was very inspiring,but that was more psychology than philosophy. I still haven’t found anyone who cans satisfactorily resolve any of the BIG questions, but I suspect that our saviour will be Richard Dawkins one day not too far from now…..he makes a lot of sense, and has a very “grounded” and amazing ability to explain and quantify some of the more important components of the Human Condition.
BG: How was Koestler inspiring for you?
BN: Well you have to remember this was a long time ago, maybe twenty years or so, and I no longer have the books to refer to, but “The Act of Creation”, and “Ghosts in the Machine “, were particularly inspiring, especially the former..The Act of Creation was very influential, as it examined elements of poetic, scientific, and humorous creativity. It struck me at the time, as much of what Koestler was saying concerned phenomenological linkages between thoughts and disciplines, and how all of those formal elements are interconnected cognitively ..it also re-affirmed some of the creative turmoil I was going through at the time by indicating that we can be at our most creative when in altered states of mind, most obviously through hypnagogic sleep and hallucinations etc, which I suppose was the corollary of Dali’s “Paranoid Critical” method..Koestler kind of gave me permission to use this deep psychic material to feed the work, without ever having to explain it..in instances like this language is redundant, and as a visual artist at the time, it gave some validation to what I was doing.
BG: how does philosophy impact upon your practice as an
artist?
BN: I always refer to “philosophy” in very broad terms, and it feeds into my work on a more subtle, subliminal level. We are to an extent enslaved by religious and philosophical dogma, and I prefer to keep my personal philosophy very fluid and transitional..I don’t like things set in stone, so find myself constantly sitting on the fence on most of the big issues..a bit of a revisionist I suppose…I guess a lot of people would think that is a cop out, and most hard liners feel very uneasy at such an approach, and would doubtless spend their lives in turmoil deprived of the anchor of truth or dogma..I view that anchor as a SHACKLE. I learned a long time ago that any single unifying truth/proof is almost unattainable, and THAT is what excites me and inspires me most, the fact that, as with the quantum realm, the very act of observing the minutiae of life radically alters it..like a recurrent Schrodinger’s Cat theory, it can never truly be observed.
BG: What is Schrodinger’s Cat Theory please?
BN: .How long have you got? This comes from quantum theory, and it postulates the analogy of a cat being sealed in a metal box with a vial of acid. If some change in the nature of the box were to destroy the vial of acid, would the cat be dead or alive? This loosely explains the theory of “superposition” , in which matter can be in any number of states at the same time until it is observed..the very act of observing changes the state of the matter..we can only know if the cat is dead or alive by opening the box… heavy stuff..
BG:do you still do any visual work?
BN: I do quite a lot of visual work, but mostly digital these days. It’s a medium that I’m exploring more and more. I used to do a lot of painting and collage work, mostly with natural pigments like earth, grass, blood, plant juices etc..never paint and paint brush! And I still love doing graphics, and typography, and have learned a lot by observing and absorbing influences from contemporary design manuals.
The computer enables me to work a lot more intuitively alongside the technology – and I really like the fact that not only is the computer a tool, it is also a collaborator . I mean that in the sense that I work with images in almost identical ways to the way I work with sound. There really isn’t a pre-determined image, or a set of parameters..nothing definable that I want to emerge..I like to set up conditions where the output is completely unknowable, and I apply filters, and generally allow fortuitous mistakes to happen..so in that sense, the computer is as much the artist as I am. We did an experiment last year with the Hyperlanguage installation..along with Andrew Lagowski (S.E.T.I) , and Paul Wilson (N-Spaces), we each had a bank of sounds to work with, but unlike improvisation, we took each others’ sounds and crash-edited and manipulated them live, creating a kind of live work in progress, the idea being that we might stimulate some sort of dialogue between ourselves, a kind of technological proto- language. I love the excitement and unpredictability of creating something with (and through) the technology, and the fact that the emergent sounds bear almost no relation to the sounds being fed into the system and edited.
BG: I know you said in a previous interview that you
compose sound pieces visually, i.e. that they are
represented in your mind visually.
i think that that’s an interesting idea, i don’t know if
you could say any more, i mean does a visual narrative
direct what you do in terms of sound composition? or
is it more disparate than that, like the idea of a
collage?
BN: I wouldn’t use the term “narrative”, as that suggests to me a story, or a flow of thought. For me, it is very much more disparate, and diffuse than that. As I mentioned above, the end result is almost never a priority when I’m working on a piece – the process is much more interesting for me, and it gets much more interesting and absorbing once images start to form in my mind, and that subliminally feeds the sounds, and hence the general flow of the piece...so what eventually emerges is a synthesis…a dual process of thoughts and ideas..
I have been working on a series of pieces called “Archisonics” for a couple of years, and these sounds are very much informed by the principles of architecture, scale, form, rhythm, and spatiality all have a place in these works, so in a sense, I have an image in my head that I want to manifest through the sound. I am very inspired by Goethe’s (largely misquoted) tenet that “architecture is frozen music” – and the Archisonics works are designed to reverse the process by making music from fluid architecture..this is a work in progress…
BG: thinking about Aeus I: I liked the aesthetic, it
sounds like you'd slowed down a lot of the samples and
thus entered into the piece - intervened if you like -
in a way that slows down time. Is this right? Can you
say any more about this? It’s a bit hard since I haven’t
heard the 'original' recordings.
BN: Exactly right…..that is incredibly perceptive, and I’m really pleased that you picked up on that, as it really was the framework for the whole Aeus project..I didn’t do it in an obvious way, so I’m pleased that that came across. Aeus was very much inspired by notions of infinity (I used the title, “The Image Between Two Mirrors” to reference this, an unattainable, unknowable truism….once again, like Schrodinger’s Cat….as soon as you try to see the image, it is lost), and also the slowing down of time, and the gaps or interstices between tiny moments of time…frozen moments that so few of us are able to experience and really take spiritual succour from. I time stretched the source sounds in order to make a kind of phorensic investigation of these moments, and from there, draw out certain frequencies from within the piano sounds, and my organic sampling. That will be a lot more prevalent on the newer work, OPALE (Spekk, Japan, February 2008). In this frenetic, chaotic existence that many of us have, the ability to slow our inner clock has become more and more difficult….I think it is the reason why there is so much civil unrest, people have lost the ability to truly connect with their world, by slowing everything down, and truly become enriched by the wonders of nature, and the beauty that surrounds us constantly, opening up those infamous doors of perception. Not in a hippy-trippy “everything is wonderful” sort of way, more of a deeply felt appreciation of our existence, and the mechanisms of life. I think this is why I am so drawn to minimalism also….the fact that my whole creative world is composed of a very rigorous aesthetic, a process of elimination, taking out anything that is frilly or unessential, a return to essence….preserving only the most important elements. You can’t teach that in a school, it has to be enculturated.
BG: I know you don’t think that what you do is 'music', but I think that as we go on with technology, developing how we relate to the world (put crudely), I
don’t know whether this distinction can hold up. I relate to sound - ooops there it is, the distinction - in a similar way to music, in that timing is only one
small part of the whole thing, and the way you deploy sounds is comparable to the way musicians deploy sounds, only I think you do it in a much more cautious way. Listening to the Aeus cd on my phone right now, I can hear little bits of treble information, kinda like timing I think, or very much a part of the whole piece anyway.....i just don’t invest too much in distinctions
like sound / music, but i'd be interested to hear what you think.
BN: Well of course, fundamentally there are no distinctions between pure sound and music, nor should there be….both are languages , and languages constantly mutate and evolve in parallel to the human organism, and now, more independently of it, now that music has become a creature of high technology. The point that I always try to make is summed up by one word – INTENT..I don’t intend to create a piece of music, I try to create audible artworks….a musician would of course call it music, but that was not my intention, it’s all about interpretation. My work as Level will always be perceived as music because I work with instruments, so in a sense, I’ve really scuppered my own theory! I don’t think this will ever be resolved, but essentially, especially with Level, I tried to adopt a wider step….take a different approach to conventional musical structure by breaking it into fragments, and re-assembling it in a different way, very much in the way that the deconstructionists work with architecture. I’m not saying that my work is new, or radically different, but for me, it offered unique solutions that gave the sound a life of its own, freeing it from my personality and my guidance. Reading between the lines, you have no doubt guessed that my authorship of a piece is not so important to me, what I love, and what really energises me is when things happen by accident, when random events yield interesting results that could not possibly be pre-determined. Now I think THAT is where I fundamentally differ from the greater percentage of musicians….I’m a lot more interested in how the technology can speak through me, whether that is via a piano, a soft synth, or a field recording, it all goes through my PC, and is alchemically transmuted into something completely different. To clarify slightly further, but hopefully without labouring the point, the nearest analogy I can give is that moment of inspiration when Jackson Pollock stumbled upon his drip paintings….he didn’t INTEND to create a picture of a house, or tell a story….he simply worked through the process and allowed the painting to happen....paint flowed, drips happened.. a beautiful image emerged….how much control did he have over the end result, and what percentage of authorship was his in comparison to paint working with or against gravity? That is how I work with sound. Incidentally, after OPALE has been released, Level will take on a totally different persona, and the formula that has taken me this far will be changed quite drastically....it might upset the audience that I have thus far cultivated, but this is the way that I have to grow, and progress.
BG: How did you first get into working in sound?
BN: Sound had always been a part of my creative language, right from when I was a child….having grown up in a very industrialised part of London, I was always fascinated with the mystical sounds emanating from local factories and workshops, and that fired my young imagination at a very early stage….I remember writing little stories about these places within a sci-fi setting, and imagining what was going on inside….creatively, I began working with visuals, and after meeting with Ben Ponton of Zoviet France, realised that my work finally had it’s natural home on the fringes of the art world. I did cassette covers for various people, and then ended up doing CD cover work for people like Brume and Origami, and my old and very dear friend Justin Mitchell of Cold Spring (I did the original, misprinted cover art for his first CD, “Shrine”), and was gradually gravitating towards extreme experimentalism both visually and conceptually.
After a few years of doing this, listening to, and absorbing various influences, (Joseph Beuys, Antoni Tapies, visually) I stumbled upon the work of the Hafler Trio. Some of Mckenzie’s influences and theoretical approach resonated with me (good word that, resonated), I loved what he was doing, and I began collecting his works extensively. I bought The Sea Org, and was fascinated by the “sound paintings” that were contained in the accompanying booklet, and began some investigations of my own....how could sound be legitimately manifested visually? What would sound truly look like? So this later became the impetus for “Trace” that I did as ECM323 with Linden Hale at the Museum of Installation in London. At the time I was good friends with Joe Banks of Disinformation, and he very generously invited me to do several installations with him at various influential galleries and art spaces, and it all started to take off from there really….I owe Joe a great debt of gratitude for that...I remember him being very envious of Trace, but he went on and did some wonderful work all over the world, especially the material he did for Sonic Boom at the Hayward.
BG:What has impressed you about Richard Dawkins?
BN: More than anything his resolute courage and conviction….he has never been deterred from expressing very radical opinions about the nature and mechanisms of religion, and evolution, despite furious opposition. I also admire the way that he makes his subject so accessible through a very broad range of disciplines without ever “dumbing down”, or being condescending.
BG: I was surprised - in a good way - to hear that you'd done visual work in the past with natural pigments, i.e. grass, blood, earth, plant juices. are there any available sources of your current visual work please, or is it more commissioned for other people's work?
BN: I know of a handful of people that have original pieces by me around the world, but I was never really prolific at doing big pieces of work. Most of my material was created for CD covers, or incorporated as graphics. I did a lot of work for Pushing Against The Wire, a festival that I dreamed up and curated with Justin Mitchell in my home town in 1992. I did a lot of sub-Beuysian pieces that were quite potent for me….it was a kind of rite of passage, and I sold a few pieces, and then pretty much gave up for a long time, until I started making digital work. A very transitional period in my creativity.
I have just started taking commissions for visuals again, for my old friend Christian Renou (formerly Brume), and doing visual works for my WHITE_LINE Editions series.
BG: What were the first pieces of technology that you engaged with? Was it a tape recorder? Or something else? Did you engage with it on your own or with other people?
BN: I guess, like many others in this little scene of ours, it was a combination of radio and tape recorder. I did a lot of stuff messing around with odd frequencies and wavebands in my late 20’s. My first interventions were with some old punk pals, one of whom gave me his grandmother’s upright piano. I stripped it down to the framework, and started recording it being struck with various objects. I finally burned it, and recorded it being burned, never did anything with the recordings though…it was more of a conceptual provocation than a recording project really.
BG: It was interesting to hear you talk about liking the computer and generally embracing technology, as a lot of people either don’t like technology or want it to be seamless and unobstructive ( which I can understand in some ways ). It made me think about some of Kodwo Eshuns thoughts / theory on music, for example one of Kodwo Eshun’s points in his “Sonotronic Manifesto” is that
‘The sampler doesn’t care who you are. Its only using you to reproduce”;
In an interview with Eshun by Dee, the point(s) are made that
“Dee: If you take someone like Hendrix, it is almost like he is encouraging the Cry Baby Wah Wah pedal and the amplifier to go off on their own. He’s giving them permission to release themselves and to catalyse themselves.
KE: Feedback is the machine that was taking over from humans, that is why it is always a buck. The engineer’s job is to stop feedback, stop errors, but Hendrix decided to say no, its not an error, it’s something that’s been charted, listen to the frequencies, listen to the harmonics, listen to the oceanic roar of the feedback. He realised that what sounded like a crisis was in fact an opportunity, so he turned an error into a feature, and the feature into a new organisational principle. So ugliness repeated became beauty.
So sampladelia opens a continuum between visual sound and audio sound. Visual sound is always feeding in from one to the other. Hence why I love a lot of film samples. Probably why I love the visual so much is that it's always being grabbed any way by the music. By extinguishing the visual output, the music is switching it on elsewhere. It's almost as if the eyes start to have ears, as if, Michel Chion would say this, your ears have had their optical capacity switched on. In a strange way, your ear starts to see. Chion is saying that each of the senses have the full capacity of all the others. It's simply that hearing happens to go through the ear, but all the other senses can go through the ear as well. The ear is meant to hear, but it can do all the other things as well, if it was switched on to the right capacity. I think that's what he meant, but that's what I take from it any way.
[Also that….]
Postmodernism doesn’t mean anything in music at all. It doesn't mean anything, it hasn't meant anything since at least ‘68 when the first versions started coming out of Jamaica. As soon as you had the particular social condition of no copyright, this nineteenth century copyright was already gone, instantly you had the freedom to replicate, to literally recombinate, almost immediately. That encouraged a wildstyle of rhythms where things would attach themselves and recombinate. And as soon as you had that, that's postmodernism accomplished and done with, right then in ‘68, this is another reason why traditional things don't make any sense in music, ever since then by definition you've had postmodernism and it hasn't been any big deal at all, it's just already been accomplished. The key thing is to go even further back. For instance, Walter Benjamin's traditional "Work of Art in the Age of ..", that argument doesn't work any more, because Benjamin simply says, one of his main points, or the one his admirers use over and over again, although he says loads of other stuff, the main thing they always say is that in the age of reproduction there's obviously no aura left, the single, unique aura has gone, but of course as soon as you have the dubplate then that's all gone out of the window. The dub plate is where you've got the reproductive process, the mechanical process of pressing vinyl onto the plate that's being played, and suddenly in the middle of that you've got the one-off remix, you've got the track that there's only one of in the world, but it's not an original, it's like a copy, or a third copy. So you've got this thing that's never supposed to exist in Benjamin's world: you've got the one-off copy, you've got the one-off fifth remix, you've got the one-off tenth remix, you've got the one-off twentieth remix. There's only one of it. So the dubplate means that the whole idea of the aura being over doesn't make any sense because the aura is reborn in the middle of the industrial reproduction.”
I wondered if you had any thoughts about the above quotations and if they related to what you do at all?
BG: Well to break that all down is complex...we would need another twenty pages….I did some work with feedback as ECM323, this got published in Resonance Magazine’s Feedback Issue, that was curated by Knut Auferman. I saw feedback as a sonic manifestation of life….it exhibits many of the signifiers of a truly electronic life form, and as well as sounding extraordinary, as a process, it has become integral to life and many living processes, as well as audio synthesis…it’s too much to discuss here.
I still can’t truly understand those people that don’t like technology, or are suspicious of it in some way….we are creatures of technology, and anyone who wears glasses, has a hearing aid, or even takes a tablet has instantly become a cyborg, whether they like it or not….they have been enhanced with technology. Even the most rudimentary instruments are technological, so the computer is simply a more complex form. I can understand why some musicians want it to be seamless….you get so many CD’s that proudly announce that they have been created “without samples or synthesisers”, but we are all actively sampling and remixing either consciously or unconsciously….it’s just by different degrees….I’m really at home with technology, and it seems pointless to deny it. I am still disappointed that digital visual art is so undervalued in the mainstream art world, but I guess it will eventually have its day once it has been truly assimilated into our culture....it’s still early days yet.
As for post modernism....well as far as music is concerned, the great comedian Eric Morecambe got it right when he was accused by the composer Andre Previn of playing the wrong notes on one of his pieces....he replied
“ No, I’m playing the RIGHT notes, but not necessarily in the right ORDER”.
That was a perfect, and hilarious interpretation of Post modernism. But seriously, I really think that the last ten to fifteen years have seen technology radically transforming our culture….I mentioned this in my previous interview with Matt Spendlove….we are more globally connected through technology, and for me personally this has been a truly liberating experience....finding commonalities with artists from all over the world in a globally networked way, and making, producing, and selling music all from my laptop....meeting and interacting with wonderfully creative people very quickly….this has greatly enriched my life, as my fringe interests and activities do not find friends in my immediate vicinity....technology used in this way is incredible....not insidious. I’m as much a fan of other artists as I am an artist in my own right….I really do love the work of other people, and that is why I have my review site, to pay homage to my peers!
BG: Can you say any more about process work please? Perhaps viewing the computer as an extension of you puts the emphasis more onto process rather than end state, as it is power to your arm, so to speak....
BN: Well for me, process is all about allowing things to happen….like I said earlier....letting the raw materials do what they want to do, and it’s the same with the computer. Most of my sound work evolves from many hours of experimentation….allowing things to happen….setting up conditions where errors might occur, and then exploiting these errors….after all a computer is as much prone to errors as a human is, and most of the time those errors are unwanted, waste material, but in extremely fortuitious instances, some of these errors can either throw up an unexpected and interesting result, or at least put you in a different frame of reference to explore, and throw up ideas that you wouldn’t have considered on your own…
BG: Are the results of your collaborations / experimentation with the hyperlanguage installation available please?
BN: Yes..I’ve been wrestling with the release for over a year now….the trouble is that I had four hours of really great material to edit and shave down into one CD….and that has been a task in itself. I now have an hour’s worth of material ready to release, but it will probably be a limited edition CDR....maybe 100 copies .. I just don’t don’t get enough time to trawl around looking for labels that would be willing to put it out....a few people have expressed an interest, so I may try and re-edit and do another edition at some later date….it’s been a busy time lately.
BG: I am also interested in your Archisonics' pieces....
BN: Ah..that’s another story..the Archisonics project is going to be tricky....I’m constantly revising and revisiting it, and have used some of the material as sources in my new work..so it won’t be released officially as a single entity….as it tends to inform a lot of the work I am currently preparing under the FOURM project name.It is once again a fragmented project that will materialise and unfold slowly, but I want to incorporate some of it into some kind of Book / CD type release when I have time and money on my hands to do so..I’m looking into that possibility right now. I’ve been very much inspired by the so-called “Deconstructionist “ architects, and their work and methodology has fuelled the archisonics project..it has been a major influence. So what I’m trying to achieve sonically with this portion of the project, is what they try to achieve visually/structurally. Anyone who is interested should look at their works and thought processes….it is so much more interesting than a lot of contemporary art.
BG: Regarding the two Aeus cd's: thanks for your feedback re this question and my comments re slowing down time / timing.
A friend of mine, Carl Collins, who once ran a jungle / drum and bass label in the early / mid 1990's, said that he thought that the meaning of music could be located in the silences between the sounds, i.e. that the meaning comes after the sounds, and lies or dwells in the decay, or the time after the event. [in an immediate sense i think he meant] : so it seems to me that in some ways you’re taking very meaningful segments from the overall pieces and slowing them down, making us more conscious of the meaning, amplifying it via the dissipation of time, of the temporal. An analogy that comes to mind is that of focussing in on segments of poems, a kind of minimal remix that amplifies parts of the piece, a bit like looking in at a picture with magnifying sheets in front of certain details, and that this is only really possible beyond a certain point with technology - as I said power to your arm - so in a sense it’s like a post-modern way of looking at ourselves.
i don’t mean to get too caught up in this - in a sense anyone with a couple of video recorders has been able to do this for quite a while, slow time down and repeatedly look at a section of material until its magnified, you're inside it, or shrunk in respect of it, the sense of scale is reset.
I liked your use of the word 'phorensic' since it combines forensic and phosphorus / phosphorescent.
I thought that it was an interesting point about people becoming estranged from their centers, that this is perhaps one of the dangers of technology, since people can be drawn to identify away from themselves as opposed to connecting with themselves, like time being sped up in a typical 'i want it now' twenty-first century way, as opposed to technology helping us slow down, rather like more analog or biological technologies i.e. yoga. I interviewed a man called Nico, who ran a drum and bass / jungle label – No U Turn – in the 1990’s, and it was noticeable that we found ourselves focussing on technology, and gradients. Technology in the sense of bio-tech, like crack cocaine, which you could say has a steep gradient, and more silicon based, like watches that have tv remote controls inside them, the evolution of samplers and how this channelled the evolution of the music really. Also gambling, since as his friend said in a video Nico had made about gambling that “when you’ve got a bet on you’re dreaming”. I thought that that was very insightful. We looked at the growth of technology like cash-quest machines, which have been limited to a maximum of four in every gambling shop, since they’re so addictive. So yes we can relate to technology positively or negatively, or a mixture.
That was part of the reason why I asked you about how you got into technology, since you’ve done artwork in a more prime way, with natural pigments, and here you are on Aeus using the software package Reason to manipulate and animate fragments in a very eerie way indeed, that’s incredibly powerful. It reminds me a bit of the William Basinski’s set of works, The Disintegration Loops I-IV, in a way, since that set of works also plays with time, timing, and dissipation, or at least one could make the comparison.
BN: Well I could argue that I’ve always been into technology….just like we all have..but that would me being pedantic. I get your point though….I think for me the turning point was many years ago. I saw an interview with Peter Greenaway in the Times Review, and he had been working on Prospero’s Books, and was describing his working methods, and how he had been using Photoshop, which was still quite new software....I was amazed at the results, and intrigued enough to get hold of a PC and a pirate copy of the software, and began playing around with various tools and filters. Now this to me, was completely natural, and I still find it difficult to differentiate between, say paint and brush (which I never used to apply colour with anyway) and PC software. There was very little difference to me, except that it wasn’t as tactile, and certainly not as messy....the really insightful moments came when accidents happened, and it was EXACTLY the same as when I used to make accidents with natural pigments….allowing things to run, drip, bleed, and generally find their own direction. It was very much a pivotal moment, and that then translated to sound a few years later. I don’t think technology should make people fearful….a lot of people get these Frankenstein / Collossus moments envisioning their creations running amok, and starting to destroy everything, and that is why many people are afraid of technology, because thev have a primal fear of losing control. Once you get to grips with the idea that losing control to an extent is what true creativity is all about, then you are to some extent, home and dry.
The down side of all this is that these technologies are now being used to radically confuse , re-map, and re-edit our realities, particularly in the media....hi-tech methods are being used to create simulacra….it’s a bit unnerving. You can see what’s happening with all these airbrushed Photoshopped models looking pristine and perfect...and various mediatised events that are totally bogus, or at best, radically edited....no wonder there is so much paranoia about our current reality….look how many people out there are believing that 9/11 was perpetrated by the US Government, or how the Moon Landings never happened….in this way, technology and the media is making cynics of us all….it’s of great concern to me…and THAT is where technology can be very dangerous. There was a small instance here in the UK last week, where a politician was unable to make an important presentation at a public building....the newspaper cloned an image of him amongst all the dignitaries that DID attend, making it look like he had been there....it was later discovered, and there was a huge furore about it….if it’s happening at that level….how far up the scale does it go? It IS very much like Orwell’s 1984. I think a lot of that is happening now….history being re-written in front of our eyes….except our eyes are being deceived.
http://benguiver.blogspot.com/2007/04/level-cycla-spekk-k007-eno-style-slow.html
http://sicomm.blogspot.com
http://www.smallfish.co.uk
http://www.myspace.com/sicomm
http://www.spekk.net
http://www.vibrofiles.com/artists/artists_si_comm.php
http://hyperlanguage.blogspot.com/
July – September 2007 : via e mail conversations.
On Philosophy…
BG: Have you read much Heidegger? Or have you read any Foucault?
BN: Neither I’m afraid, although of course I’m aware of them..I find that philosophers speak in a totally different language, that tends to obscure the very thing that it sets out to clarify. Most of it traverses that high intellectual “nosebleed” territory that is almost inpenetrable. So I don’t subscribe to any one philosophy, or philosopher. I read a lot of Koestler when I was younger, and that was very inspiring,but that was more psychology than philosophy. I still haven’t found anyone who cans satisfactorily resolve any of the BIG questions, but I suspect that our saviour will be Richard Dawkins one day not too far from now…..he makes a lot of sense, and has a very “grounded” and amazing ability to explain and quantify some of the more important components of the Human Condition.
BG: How was Koestler inspiring for you?
BN: Well you have to remember this was a long time ago, maybe twenty years or so, and I no longer have the books to refer to, but “The Act of Creation”, and “Ghosts in the Machine “, were particularly inspiring, especially the former..The Act of Creation was very influential, as it examined elements of poetic, scientific, and humorous creativity. It struck me at the time, as much of what Koestler was saying concerned phenomenological linkages between thoughts and disciplines, and how all of those formal elements are interconnected cognitively ..it also re-affirmed some of the creative turmoil I was going through at the time by indicating that we can be at our most creative when in altered states of mind, most obviously through hypnagogic sleep and hallucinations etc, which I suppose was the corollary of Dali’s “Paranoid Critical” method..Koestler kind of gave me permission to use this deep psychic material to feed the work, without ever having to explain it..in instances like this language is redundant, and as a visual artist at the time, it gave some validation to what I was doing.
BG: how does philosophy impact upon your practice as an
artist?
BN: I always refer to “philosophy” in very broad terms, and it feeds into my work on a more subtle, subliminal level. We are to an extent enslaved by religious and philosophical dogma, and I prefer to keep my personal philosophy very fluid and transitional..I don’t like things set in stone, so find myself constantly sitting on the fence on most of the big issues..a bit of a revisionist I suppose…I guess a lot of people would think that is a cop out, and most hard liners feel very uneasy at such an approach, and would doubtless spend their lives in turmoil deprived of the anchor of truth or dogma..I view that anchor as a SHACKLE. I learned a long time ago that any single unifying truth/proof is almost unattainable, and THAT is what excites me and inspires me most, the fact that, as with the quantum realm, the very act of observing the minutiae of life radically alters it..like a recurrent Schrodinger’s Cat theory, it can never truly be observed.
BG: What is Schrodinger’s Cat Theory please?
BN: .How long have you got? This comes from quantum theory, and it postulates the analogy of a cat being sealed in a metal box with a vial of acid. If some change in the nature of the box were to destroy the vial of acid, would the cat be dead or alive? This loosely explains the theory of “superposition” , in which matter can be in any number of states at the same time until it is observed..the very act of observing changes the state of the matter..we can only know if the cat is dead or alive by opening the box… heavy stuff..
BG:do you still do any visual work?
BN: I do quite a lot of visual work, but mostly digital these days. It’s a medium that I’m exploring more and more. I used to do a lot of painting and collage work, mostly with natural pigments like earth, grass, blood, plant juices etc..never paint and paint brush! And I still love doing graphics, and typography, and have learned a lot by observing and absorbing influences from contemporary design manuals.
The computer enables me to work a lot more intuitively alongside the technology – and I really like the fact that not only is the computer a tool, it is also a collaborator . I mean that in the sense that I work with images in almost identical ways to the way I work with sound. There really isn’t a pre-determined image, or a set of parameters..nothing definable that I want to emerge..I like to set up conditions where the output is completely unknowable, and I apply filters, and generally allow fortuitous mistakes to happen..so in that sense, the computer is as much the artist as I am. We did an experiment last year with the Hyperlanguage installation..along with Andrew Lagowski (S.E.T.I) , and Paul Wilson (N-Spaces), we each had a bank of sounds to work with, but unlike improvisation, we took each others’ sounds and crash-edited and manipulated them live, creating a kind of live work in progress, the idea being that we might stimulate some sort of dialogue between ourselves, a kind of technological proto- language. I love the excitement and unpredictability of creating something with (and through) the technology, and the fact that the emergent sounds bear almost no relation to the sounds being fed into the system and edited.
BG: I know you said in a previous interview that you
compose sound pieces visually, i.e. that they are
represented in your mind visually.
i think that that’s an interesting idea, i don’t know if
you could say any more, i mean does a visual narrative
direct what you do in terms of sound composition? or
is it more disparate than that, like the idea of a
collage?
BN: I wouldn’t use the term “narrative”, as that suggests to me a story, or a flow of thought. For me, it is very much more disparate, and diffuse than that. As I mentioned above, the end result is almost never a priority when I’m working on a piece – the process is much more interesting for me, and it gets much more interesting and absorbing once images start to form in my mind, and that subliminally feeds the sounds, and hence the general flow of the piece...so what eventually emerges is a synthesis…a dual process of thoughts and ideas..
I have been working on a series of pieces called “Archisonics” for a couple of years, and these sounds are very much informed by the principles of architecture, scale, form, rhythm, and spatiality all have a place in these works, so in a sense, I have an image in my head that I want to manifest through the sound. I am very inspired by Goethe’s (largely misquoted) tenet that “architecture is frozen music” – and the Archisonics works are designed to reverse the process by making music from fluid architecture..this is a work in progress…
BG: thinking about Aeus I: I liked the aesthetic, it
sounds like you'd slowed down a lot of the samples and
thus entered into the piece - intervened if you like -
in a way that slows down time. Is this right? Can you
say any more about this? It’s a bit hard since I haven’t
heard the 'original' recordings.
BN: Exactly right…..that is incredibly perceptive, and I’m really pleased that you picked up on that, as it really was the framework for the whole Aeus project..I didn’t do it in an obvious way, so I’m pleased that that came across. Aeus was very much inspired by notions of infinity (I used the title, “The Image Between Two Mirrors” to reference this, an unattainable, unknowable truism….once again, like Schrodinger’s Cat….as soon as you try to see the image, it is lost), and also the slowing down of time, and the gaps or interstices between tiny moments of time…frozen moments that so few of us are able to experience and really take spiritual succour from. I time stretched the source sounds in order to make a kind of phorensic investigation of these moments, and from there, draw out certain frequencies from within the piano sounds, and my organic sampling. That will be a lot more prevalent on the newer work, OPALE (Spekk, Japan, February 2008). In this frenetic, chaotic existence that many of us have, the ability to slow our inner clock has become more and more difficult….I think it is the reason why there is so much civil unrest, people have lost the ability to truly connect with their world, by slowing everything down, and truly become enriched by the wonders of nature, and the beauty that surrounds us constantly, opening up those infamous doors of perception. Not in a hippy-trippy “everything is wonderful” sort of way, more of a deeply felt appreciation of our existence, and the mechanisms of life. I think this is why I am so drawn to minimalism also….the fact that my whole creative world is composed of a very rigorous aesthetic, a process of elimination, taking out anything that is frilly or unessential, a return to essence….preserving only the most important elements. You can’t teach that in a school, it has to be enculturated.
BG: I know you don’t think that what you do is 'music', but I think that as we go on with technology, developing how we relate to the world (put crudely), I
don’t know whether this distinction can hold up. I relate to sound - ooops there it is, the distinction - in a similar way to music, in that timing is only one
small part of the whole thing, and the way you deploy sounds is comparable to the way musicians deploy sounds, only I think you do it in a much more cautious way. Listening to the Aeus cd on my phone right now, I can hear little bits of treble information, kinda like timing I think, or very much a part of the whole piece anyway.....i just don’t invest too much in distinctions
like sound / music, but i'd be interested to hear what you think.
BN: Well of course, fundamentally there are no distinctions between pure sound and music, nor should there be….both are languages , and languages constantly mutate and evolve in parallel to the human organism, and now, more independently of it, now that music has become a creature of high technology. The point that I always try to make is summed up by one word – INTENT..I don’t intend to create a piece of music, I try to create audible artworks….a musician would of course call it music, but that was not my intention, it’s all about interpretation. My work as Level will always be perceived as music because I work with instruments, so in a sense, I’ve really scuppered my own theory! I don’t think this will ever be resolved, but essentially, especially with Level, I tried to adopt a wider step….take a different approach to conventional musical structure by breaking it into fragments, and re-assembling it in a different way, very much in the way that the deconstructionists work with architecture. I’m not saying that my work is new, or radically different, but for me, it offered unique solutions that gave the sound a life of its own, freeing it from my personality and my guidance. Reading between the lines, you have no doubt guessed that my authorship of a piece is not so important to me, what I love, and what really energises me is when things happen by accident, when random events yield interesting results that could not possibly be pre-determined. Now I think THAT is where I fundamentally differ from the greater percentage of musicians….I’m a lot more interested in how the technology can speak through me, whether that is via a piano, a soft synth, or a field recording, it all goes through my PC, and is alchemically transmuted into something completely different. To clarify slightly further, but hopefully without labouring the point, the nearest analogy I can give is that moment of inspiration when Jackson Pollock stumbled upon his drip paintings….he didn’t INTEND to create a picture of a house, or tell a story….he simply worked through the process and allowed the painting to happen....paint flowed, drips happened.. a beautiful image emerged….how much control did he have over the end result, and what percentage of authorship was his in comparison to paint working with or against gravity? That is how I work with sound. Incidentally, after OPALE has been released, Level will take on a totally different persona, and the formula that has taken me this far will be changed quite drastically....it might upset the audience that I have thus far cultivated, but this is the way that I have to grow, and progress.
BG: How did you first get into working in sound?
BN: Sound had always been a part of my creative language, right from when I was a child….having grown up in a very industrialised part of London, I was always fascinated with the mystical sounds emanating from local factories and workshops, and that fired my young imagination at a very early stage….I remember writing little stories about these places within a sci-fi setting, and imagining what was going on inside….creatively, I began working with visuals, and after meeting with Ben Ponton of Zoviet France, realised that my work finally had it’s natural home on the fringes of the art world. I did cassette covers for various people, and then ended up doing CD cover work for people like Brume and Origami, and my old and very dear friend Justin Mitchell of Cold Spring (I did the original, misprinted cover art for his first CD, “Shrine”), and was gradually gravitating towards extreme experimentalism both visually and conceptually.
After a few years of doing this, listening to, and absorbing various influences, (Joseph Beuys, Antoni Tapies, visually) I stumbled upon the work of the Hafler Trio. Some of Mckenzie’s influences and theoretical approach resonated with me (good word that, resonated), I loved what he was doing, and I began collecting his works extensively. I bought The Sea Org, and was fascinated by the “sound paintings” that were contained in the accompanying booklet, and began some investigations of my own....how could sound be legitimately manifested visually? What would sound truly look like? So this later became the impetus for “Trace” that I did as ECM323 with Linden Hale at the Museum of Installation in London. At the time I was good friends with Joe Banks of Disinformation, and he very generously invited me to do several installations with him at various influential galleries and art spaces, and it all started to take off from there really….I owe Joe a great debt of gratitude for that...I remember him being very envious of Trace, but he went on and did some wonderful work all over the world, especially the material he did for Sonic Boom at the Hayward.
BG:What has impressed you about Richard Dawkins?
BN: More than anything his resolute courage and conviction….he has never been deterred from expressing very radical opinions about the nature and mechanisms of religion, and evolution, despite furious opposition. I also admire the way that he makes his subject so accessible through a very broad range of disciplines without ever “dumbing down”, or being condescending.
BG: I was surprised - in a good way - to hear that you'd done visual work in the past with natural pigments, i.e. grass, blood, earth, plant juices. are there any available sources of your current visual work please, or is it more commissioned for other people's work?
BN: I know of a handful of people that have original pieces by me around the world, but I was never really prolific at doing big pieces of work. Most of my material was created for CD covers, or incorporated as graphics. I did a lot of work for Pushing Against The Wire, a festival that I dreamed up and curated with Justin Mitchell in my home town in 1992. I did a lot of sub-Beuysian pieces that were quite potent for me….it was a kind of rite of passage, and I sold a few pieces, and then pretty much gave up for a long time, until I started making digital work. A very transitional period in my creativity.
I have just started taking commissions for visuals again, for my old friend Christian Renou (formerly Brume), and doing visual works for my WHITE_LINE Editions series.
BG: What were the first pieces of technology that you engaged with? Was it a tape recorder? Or something else? Did you engage with it on your own or with other people?
BN: I guess, like many others in this little scene of ours, it was a combination of radio and tape recorder. I did a lot of stuff messing around with odd frequencies and wavebands in my late 20’s. My first interventions were with some old punk pals, one of whom gave me his grandmother’s upright piano. I stripped it down to the framework, and started recording it being struck with various objects. I finally burned it, and recorded it being burned, never did anything with the recordings though…it was more of a conceptual provocation than a recording project really.
BG: It was interesting to hear you talk about liking the computer and generally embracing technology, as a lot of people either don’t like technology or want it to be seamless and unobstructive ( which I can understand in some ways ). It made me think about some of Kodwo Eshuns thoughts / theory on music, for example one of Kodwo Eshun’s points in his “Sonotronic Manifesto” is that
‘The sampler doesn’t care who you are. Its only using you to reproduce”;
In an interview with Eshun by Dee, the point(s) are made that
“Dee: If you take someone like Hendrix, it is almost like he is encouraging the Cry Baby Wah Wah pedal and the amplifier to go off on their own. He’s giving them permission to release themselves and to catalyse themselves.
KE: Feedback is the machine that was taking over from humans, that is why it is always a buck. The engineer’s job is to stop feedback, stop errors, but Hendrix decided to say no, its not an error, it’s something that’s been charted, listen to the frequencies, listen to the harmonics, listen to the oceanic roar of the feedback. He realised that what sounded like a crisis was in fact an opportunity, so he turned an error into a feature, and the feature into a new organisational principle. So ugliness repeated became beauty.
So sampladelia opens a continuum between visual sound and audio sound. Visual sound is always feeding in from one to the other. Hence why I love a lot of film samples. Probably why I love the visual so much is that it's always being grabbed any way by the music. By extinguishing the visual output, the music is switching it on elsewhere. It's almost as if the eyes start to have ears, as if, Michel Chion would say this, your ears have had their optical capacity switched on. In a strange way, your ear starts to see. Chion is saying that each of the senses have the full capacity of all the others. It's simply that hearing happens to go through the ear, but all the other senses can go through the ear as well. The ear is meant to hear, but it can do all the other things as well, if it was switched on to the right capacity. I think that's what he meant, but that's what I take from it any way.
[Also that….]
Postmodernism doesn’t mean anything in music at all. It doesn't mean anything, it hasn't meant anything since at least ‘68 when the first versions started coming out of Jamaica. As soon as you had the particular social condition of no copyright, this nineteenth century copyright was already gone, instantly you had the freedom to replicate, to literally recombinate, almost immediately. That encouraged a wildstyle of rhythms where things would attach themselves and recombinate. And as soon as you had that, that's postmodernism accomplished and done with, right then in ‘68, this is another reason why traditional things don't make any sense in music, ever since then by definition you've had postmodernism and it hasn't been any big deal at all, it's just already been accomplished. The key thing is to go even further back. For instance, Walter Benjamin's traditional "Work of Art in the Age of ..", that argument doesn't work any more, because Benjamin simply says, one of his main points, or the one his admirers use over and over again, although he says loads of other stuff, the main thing they always say is that in the age of reproduction there's obviously no aura left, the single, unique aura has gone, but of course as soon as you have the dubplate then that's all gone out of the window. The dub plate is where you've got the reproductive process, the mechanical process of pressing vinyl onto the plate that's being played, and suddenly in the middle of that you've got the one-off remix, you've got the track that there's only one of in the world, but it's not an original, it's like a copy, or a third copy. So you've got this thing that's never supposed to exist in Benjamin's world: you've got the one-off copy, you've got the one-off fifth remix, you've got the one-off tenth remix, you've got the one-off twentieth remix. There's only one of it. So the dubplate means that the whole idea of the aura being over doesn't make any sense because the aura is reborn in the middle of the industrial reproduction.”
I wondered if you had any thoughts about the above quotations and if they related to what you do at all?
BG: Well to break that all down is complex...we would need another twenty pages….I did some work with feedback as ECM323, this got published in Resonance Magazine’s Feedback Issue, that was curated by Knut Auferman. I saw feedback as a sonic manifestation of life….it exhibits many of the signifiers of a truly electronic life form, and as well as sounding extraordinary, as a process, it has become integral to life and many living processes, as well as audio synthesis…it’s too much to discuss here.
I still can’t truly understand those people that don’t like technology, or are suspicious of it in some way….we are creatures of technology, and anyone who wears glasses, has a hearing aid, or even takes a tablet has instantly become a cyborg, whether they like it or not….they have been enhanced with technology. Even the most rudimentary instruments are technological, so the computer is simply a more complex form. I can understand why some musicians want it to be seamless….you get so many CD’s that proudly announce that they have been created “without samples or synthesisers”, but we are all actively sampling and remixing either consciously or unconsciously….it’s just by different degrees….I’m really at home with technology, and it seems pointless to deny it. I am still disappointed that digital visual art is so undervalued in the mainstream art world, but I guess it will eventually have its day once it has been truly assimilated into our culture....it’s still early days yet.
As for post modernism....well as far as music is concerned, the great comedian Eric Morecambe got it right when he was accused by the composer Andre Previn of playing the wrong notes on one of his pieces....he replied
“ No, I’m playing the RIGHT notes, but not necessarily in the right ORDER”.
That was a perfect, and hilarious interpretation of Post modernism. But seriously, I really think that the last ten to fifteen years have seen technology radically transforming our culture….I mentioned this in my previous interview with Matt Spendlove….we are more globally connected through technology, and for me personally this has been a truly liberating experience....finding commonalities with artists from all over the world in a globally networked way, and making, producing, and selling music all from my laptop....meeting and interacting with wonderfully creative people very quickly….this has greatly enriched my life, as my fringe interests and activities do not find friends in my immediate vicinity....technology used in this way is incredible....not insidious. I’m as much a fan of other artists as I am an artist in my own right….I really do love the work of other people, and that is why I have my review site, to pay homage to my peers!
BG: Can you say any more about process work please? Perhaps viewing the computer as an extension of you puts the emphasis more onto process rather than end state, as it is power to your arm, so to speak....
BN: Well for me, process is all about allowing things to happen….like I said earlier....letting the raw materials do what they want to do, and it’s the same with the computer. Most of my sound work evolves from many hours of experimentation….allowing things to happen….setting up conditions where errors might occur, and then exploiting these errors….after all a computer is as much prone to errors as a human is, and most of the time those errors are unwanted, waste material, but in extremely fortuitious instances, some of these errors can either throw up an unexpected and interesting result, or at least put you in a different frame of reference to explore, and throw up ideas that you wouldn’t have considered on your own…
BG: Are the results of your collaborations / experimentation with the hyperlanguage installation available please?
BN: Yes..I’ve been wrestling with the release for over a year now….the trouble is that I had four hours of really great material to edit and shave down into one CD….and that has been a task in itself. I now have an hour’s worth of material ready to release, but it will probably be a limited edition CDR....maybe 100 copies .. I just don’t don’t get enough time to trawl around looking for labels that would be willing to put it out....a few people have expressed an interest, so I may try and re-edit and do another edition at some later date….it’s been a busy time lately.
BG: I am also interested in your Archisonics' pieces....
BN: Ah..that’s another story..the Archisonics project is going to be tricky....I’m constantly revising and revisiting it, and have used some of the material as sources in my new work..so it won’t be released officially as a single entity….as it tends to inform a lot of the work I am currently preparing under the FOURM project name.It is once again a fragmented project that will materialise and unfold slowly, but I want to incorporate some of it into some kind of Book / CD type release when I have time and money on my hands to do so..I’m looking into that possibility right now. I’ve been very much inspired by the so-called “Deconstructionist “ architects, and their work and methodology has fuelled the archisonics project..it has been a major influence. So what I’m trying to achieve sonically with this portion of the project, is what they try to achieve visually/structurally. Anyone who is interested should look at their works and thought processes….it is so much more interesting than a lot of contemporary art.
BG: Regarding the two Aeus cd's: thanks for your feedback re this question and my comments re slowing down time / timing.
A friend of mine, Carl Collins, who once ran a jungle / drum and bass label in the early / mid 1990's, said that he thought that the meaning of music could be located in the silences between the sounds, i.e. that the meaning comes after the sounds, and lies or dwells in the decay, or the time after the event. [in an immediate sense i think he meant] : so it seems to me that in some ways you’re taking very meaningful segments from the overall pieces and slowing them down, making us more conscious of the meaning, amplifying it via the dissipation of time, of the temporal. An analogy that comes to mind is that of focussing in on segments of poems, a kind of minimal remix that amplifies parts of the piece, a bit like looking in at a picture with magnifying sheets in front of certain details, and that this is only really possible beyond a certain point with technology - as I said power to your arm - so in a sense it’s like a post-modern way of looking at ourselves.
i don’t mean to get too caught up in this - in a sense anyone with a couple of video recorders has been able to do this for quite a while, slow time down and repeatedly look at a section of material until its magnified, you're inside it, or shrunk in respect of it, the sense of scale is reset.
I liked your use of the word 'phorensic' since it combines forensic and phosphorus / phosphorescent.
I thought that it was an interesting point about people becoming estranged from their centers, that this is perhaps one of the dangers of technology, since people can be drawn to identify away from themselves as opposed to connecting with themselves, like time being sped up in a typical 'i want it now' twenty-first century way, as opposed to technology helping us slow down, rather like more analog or biological technologies i.e. yoga. I interviewed a man called Nico, who ran a drum and bass / jungle label – No U Turn – in the 1990’s, and it was noticeable that we found ourselves focussing on technology, and gradients. Technology in the sense of bio-tech, like crack cocaine, which you could say has a steep gradient, and more silicon based, like watches that have tv remote controls inside them, the evolution of samplers and how this channelled the evolution of the music really. Also gambling, since as his friend said in a video Nico had made about gambling that “when you’ve got a bet on you’re dreaming”. I thought that that was very insightful. We looked at the growth of technology like cash-quest machines, which have been limited to a maximum of four in every gambling shop, since they’re so addictive. So yes we can relate to technology positively or negatively, or a mixture.
That was part of the reason why I asked you about how you got into technology, since you’ve done artwork in a more prime way, with natural pigments, and here you are on Aeus using the software package Reason to manipulate and animate fragments in a very eerie way indeed, that’s incredibly powerful. It reminds me a bit of the William Basinski’s set of works, The Disintegration Loops I-IV, in a way, since that set of works also plays with time, timing, and dissipation, or at least one could make the comparison.
BN: Well I could argue that I’ve always been into technology….just like we all have..but that would me being pedantic. I get your point though….I think for me the turning point was many years ago. I saw an interview with Peter Greenaway in the Times Review, and he had been working on Prospero’s Books, and was describing his working methods, and how he had been using Photoshop, which was still quite new software....I was amazed at the results, and intrigued enough to get hold of a PC and a pirate copy of the software, and began playing around with various tools and filters. Now this to me, was completely natural, and I still find it difficult to differentiate between, say paint and brush (which I never used to apply colour with anyway) and PC software. There was very little difference to me, except that it wasn’t as tactile, and certainly not as messy....the really insightful moments came when accidents happened, and it was EXACTLY the same as when I used to make accidents with natural pigments….allowing things to run, drip, bleed, and generally find their own direction. It was very much a pivotal moment, and that then translated to sound a few years later. I don’t think technology should make people fearful….a lot of people get these Frankenstein / Collossus moments envisioning their creations running amok, and starting to destroy everything, and that is why many people are afraid of technology, because thev have a primal fear of losing control. Once you get to grips with the idea that losing control to an extent is what true creativity is all about, then you are to some extent, home and dry.
The down side of all this is that these technologies are now being used to radically confuse , re-map, and re-edit our realities, particularly in the media....hi-tech methods are being used to create simulacra….it’s a bit unnerving. You can see what’s happening with all these airbrushed Photoshopped models looking pristine and perfect...and various mediatised events that are totally bogus, or at best, radically edited....no wonder there is so much paranoia about our current reality….look how many people out there are believing that 9/11 was perpetrated by the US Government, or how the Moon Landings never happened….in this way, technology and the media is making cynics of us all….it’s of great concern to me…and THAT is where technology can be very dangerous. There was a small instance here in the UK last week, where a politician was unable to make an important presentation at a public building....the newspaper cloned an image of him amongst all the dignitaries that DID attend, making it look like he had been there....it was later discovered, and there was a huge furore about it….if it’s happening at that level….how far up the scale does it go? It IS very much like Orwell’s 1984. I think a lot of that is happening now….history being re-written in front of our eyes….except our eyes are being deceived.
http://benguiver.blogspot.com/2007/04/level-cycla-spekk-k007-eno-style-slow.html
http://sicomm.blogspot.com
http://www.smallfish.co.uk
http://www.myspace.com/sicomm
http://www.spekk.net
http://www.vibrofiles.com/artists/artists_si_comm.php
http://hyperlanguage.blogspot.com/
Friday, 14 September 2007
On Isolation ::: Various Artists ::: Room 40
On Isolation ::: Various Artists ::: Room 40
This little release offers up some gems, along the lines / theory / inspiration of disconnection, isolation and solitude in the current climate of media overload.
The cd was provided to conference delegates at the University of Tasmania’ in 2006 to “help awaken a deep imagination and engagement with these matters. The conference, set up as an antidote to dominant discourses of globalism, seamless connectivity and information flows, provided a space to discuss both the despair and enchantments that might be contained within numerous fractured spaces, unknown remaining landscapes and social constellations”.
The cd contains fifteen tracks by notable artists such as Stephen Vitiello, David Toop, Richard Chartier – who also designs the minimal packaging - Sebastien Roux and Robin Rimbaud. There are also artists who I haven’t heard of, one of whom – Dale Lloyd – ( WWW.AND-OAR.ORG/DALELLOYD.HTML ) provides one of the tracks I liked the most, ‘Among The Many’. It’s a collage of field recordings, and musical pieces. On the third or fourth listening I realised that part of the recording I was listening to was the sound of passing cars, in a rather liquid, relaxing type of aesthetic. Beautiful.
www.room40.org
http://www.audioh.com/releases/on_isolation.html
Saturday, 8 September 2007
Where has all the birdsong gone? ::: Edwards Lane Gallery, Stoke Newington, N16 (behind Stoke Newington Library, off church street )
this exhibition contains much work.
an awful lot of little birds.
some musical type sculpture that children are allowed to play with, and
other sculptural works, most of them by Kate Bradbury, i think, but somne of them may be by Peter Haslunds partner whose name i am afraid to say i forget.
some embroidered pictures that are pretty stunning.
photography, portraiture and more abstract material, by Peter Haslund.
( www.peterhaslund.com )
and some sculptures by a man called Oliver Sparks, that could be great big sculptures: heres hoping....... they made me think about opacity, but in a mental way, like the possibility of someone being open to you / thinking about you, rather than blanking you out.
i'll try and update this a bit more later on with some more names, but its open saturday 9 to 5 and sunday 1 to 5pm. until the 15th september.
L-R - 1, 2, sorry i couldnt remember your names, 3 Peter Haslund, 4 Kate Bradbury
an awful lot of little birds.
some musical type sculpture that children are allowed to play with, and
other sculptural works, most of them by Kate Bradbury, i think, but somne of them may be by Peter Haslunds partner whose name i am afraid to say i forget.
some embroidered pictures that are pretty stunning.
photography, portraiture and more abstract material, by Peter Haslund.
( www.peterhaslund.com )
and some sculptures by a man called Oliver Sparks, that could be great big sculptures: heres hoping....... they made me think about opacity, but in a mental way, like the possibility of someone being open to you / thinking about you, rather than blanking you out.
i'll try and update this a bit more later on with some more names, but its open saturday 9 to 5 and sunday 1 to 5pm. until the 15th september.
L-R - 1, 2, sorry i couldnt remember your names, 3 Peter Haslund, 4 Kate Bradbury
Friday, 7 September 2007
Finding, Transmitting, Receiving ::: Hannah Collins ::: Black Dog Publishing
This book is introduced by an interesting foreword by Iwona Blazwick, director of the Whitechapel Gallery, which kind of composes and introduces the collection.
It contains photographs documenting the human condition in the current time, alluding and/or referencing the past, present and future: or visualising different kinds of ‘time’, slower more traditional time and newer more technological time, to put it crudely.
‘Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future is contained in time past.’
T.S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’.
Sometimes disturbing – the picture ‘Life on Film I 2003’ shows us a car in India in good condition, with a man asleep in front of it: it is unlikely to be his car I think – often showing us the provisional nature of life for much of the population, for example in photographs of gypsy encampments within ‘modern’ cities. That this is juxtaposed with pictures such as ‘In the Course of Time, The Road to Auschwitz, 1995’ is unsettling to say the least. One of the earliest shots from 1986, ‘Thin Protective Coverings’, of cardboard boxes, the staple of homeless dwellings and alluding to other more provisional dwellings, offers up questions of modernism, and how far we’ve progressed. This may be a little clumsy a reading, but I cant help noticing. The focus is wider than this, for example in her beautiful black and white portrait of fans (‘In the Course of Time 2, fans, 1996 ) and ramshackle dwellings topped with many, many television aerials ( True Stories I, 1998 ): it’s like she’s showing us the growth of modernism through contrasting the ‘old’ and the ‘new’, and in the conjunction wondering about how they’ll combine, and develop, which might be a more realistic word for what used to be called progress.
It’s also why Iwona Blazwick might refer to the photographs as being able to ‘be experienced as an image and as a kind of architecture; as two dimensional surface and as sculpture’. As well as being a powerfully visual kind of poetry – for example her close up of three ants on the surface of an inflated balloon (Life for Life, 1990) – the pictures suggest something about the politics of space in terms of the quiet contrast between images of more provisional type dwellings and the more hygienic, defined spaces of modern des-res’s ( Mies Pavilion ) and commercial spaces ( Supermarket (pills) 2004 ). One particularly memorable image is ‘True Stories London ( detail )’, which is of rooftops, showing – I presume – a mosques tower in the foreground with the Natwest tower and the city on the horizon.
http://www.hannahcollins.net/
http://www.blackdogonline.com/art/finding,-transmitting,-receiving.html
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/blogon/2007/05/book_hannah_collins_finding_tr.php
Design Anarchy ::: Kalle Lasn ::: Adbusters (inc. DVD)
“As a a child I played in the gaps between buildings, ruins of buildings, fallow land, abandoned industrial areas, gravel pits and sand mines. Formed through misplanning, they were our empire, the empire of children.
Ours was a dirty, unused place, with snakes, lizards, insects of every category and wild vegetation.
Children instinctively understand the language of natural vegetation. They can read it, if only they’re allowed to climb the fence and play undisturbed.
But the city gardeners arrive – the eliminators of mystery, the killers of the empty spaces. They mow, pave and plant in zones where children and teenagers once played.
They pave the paths people may walk upon and prohibit walking upon the grass. The grass is always framed with perfectly composed borders and the flowers are always placed in identical pots of cement.
Naturalness is understood as the annihilation of spontaneity through perfect gardening”.
This book raises the questions of the power of the visual, and the politics of space. Whose space, and whose visuals, and is it a democracy or something less than that. Most networks won’t take advertisements who offer the idea of not consuming anything, or that some of our consumption might be wasteful. The lack of hope, or difficulty in hoping, in design as a left wing activity : now seen as merely the tool of commerce:
“In the struggle between commerce and culture, commerce has triumphed and the war is over” : Milton Glaser.
is covered here in some depth and passion. Essentially the book asks, through a mostly visual language that’s quite provocative at times, important questions about the state of the world today: whether it’s a global state of commerce or whether its possible for it to be other than that, whether all the space has to be owned and regimented commercially. It references alternative ideas and movements, such as larger scale ones like Reclaim the Streets and smaller ones that can be just as effective, such as moving the electricity meters out of the cupboard and into somewhere visible, so that you can see how much the meters spinning when you leave the house, and thus how much energy you’re wasting.
In short a stunning extended visual essay on the perils of global hypercapitalism, possible reactions to this, and an impassioned and at times provocative plea for something else. This does not really do justice to the impact of many of the pictures within the book, ranging from the cut and paste political hits ( ‘cognitive dissonance’ ) to beautiful landscapes.
On a slightly tangential tip, Alice Stepanek and Steven Maslin have an exhibition on in Paris, starting on the 8th September and running to the 29th, at the Galerie Jean-Luc & Takako Richard. I include it here as its on a similar theme in some ways, about how the worlds been commercialised. They approach their subject via some eiree oil paintings of landscapes.
http://www.galerierichard.com/
http://adbusters.org/blogs/Communication_Arts_on_Design_Anarchy.html
https://secure.adbusters.org/orders/designanarchy/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalle_Lasn
http://benguiver.blogspot.com/
http://brainwash.robertundhorst.de/uncategorized/guerilla-buzz-virales-marketing-adbusters/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdBusters
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