Category: resources
Soundwalkers
A film about sound was shown at the subtropics festival that I found interesting and valuable on a number of levels. Raquel Castro directed and edited it, and she was there for the festival. I was very glad to find out from her that the film is available online. Give it a little time to load, and wait until about the 00:08 mark for it to start. It's just over half an hour long.
Soundwalkers from raquel castro on Vimeo.
Some upcoming events and promising instruments
There are several events coming up that are worth knowing about.
I'm hugely looking forward to the subtropics festival in Miami next weekend.
Seth Josel is performing the US premiere of an Ablinger piece and a reconstruction of Morton Feldman's "The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar" (1966), at a CD release party at Yale on March 7th and then in Brooklyn on March 8th. He has written about the Feldman project here.
The folds ensemble will be performing works by Michael Pisaro, Jason Brogan, Joe Kudirka, Sam Sfirri, and Taylan Susam in at the ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn on March 6th.
Craig Shepard's piece, Trompetensee, will be performed along Lake Zürich on March 28th. If you follow that link, take a look at the description of his new book, which you can learn more about from the Paris Transatlantic review. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on it here.
And since I've gotten that far ahead, MaerzMusik (in Berlin) looks very promising this year. I had hoped to go, but it doesn't really look possible at this point. Please let me know if you will be going. I think it may be possible to hear some of it on the radio, but I would love to get some first-hand impressions.
Regardless of whether you can make it to any of these events, I hope you'll enjoy these videos I came across at MAKE magazine.
Tim Kaiser makes instruments out of scavenged objects.
And take a look at the first segment of this video, which about a balloon organ. I want one. Badly.
iSAW
Every couple of weeks now, whether or not I intend to, I start diving into web links related to experimental music. One place takes me to another, and before I know it two things have happened: the clock has mysteriously advanced, and I've landed on some page that is so essential and so fascinating that I wonder how I could have lasted so long without knowing about it. It happened again this morning: iSAW.
Now I'm suddenly making plans to go to Miami for the subtropics festival, playing with Jason Freeman and Mark Godfrey's Sound Microscope, and sharing this most entertaining "example of resonance in physical structures" with my friends:
I am in awe of the utility and intelligence of the iSAW's operations. The question that is featured in their Institutional Mission Statement is compelling:
How can we strengthen our aural sense within a visually dominant culture and what is gained by such a shift towards an aural perception of the world?
A new site
There's a new website that you need to know about. Upload .. Download .. Perform is "a repository of scores for contemporary experimental performance." Composers, upload your scores. You'll keep your copyright under the Creative Commons license, while allowing for distribution. Performers, look around for new pieces. They are fully and freely available for you to perform. Other interested parties look around and see what interests you. It's available for everyone's use. Many of the composers who have submitted pieces are based in Los Angeles, but I trust that will change as word spreads. The idea for this site is so good that it seems wonderfully obvious...now that it exists.
UbuWeb
UbuWeb is an free resource that embraces experimental music, as well as other streams of what they term the avant-garde. That term isn't the one I would choose for what they offer, but I'm not sure I could come up with a better one. In any case, the content is fantastic, and it is very relevant to the themes I'm exploring here at sound expanse.
Recently I've gotten interested in projects carried out with an open source methodology. Project Gutenberg (a library of over 25,000 free ebooks) was quite helpful to me as I looked up some William James quotes for my dissertation last September. I clicked on a banner ad, and quickly got involved in PG's virtual back room, Distributed Proofreaders. The skills and conversations (not to mention the friendships) that have developed through this volunteer work have opened my eyes to other great work that is happening that has no basis in traditional currency. Here's a relevant excerpt from UbuWeb's FAQs.
How do I purchase something from your site?
You can't. Nothing is for sale on UbuWeb. It's all free. We know it's a hard idea to get used to, but there's no lush gift shop waiting for you at the end of this museum.
In fact, the whole site is a lush gift shop, with the singular omission of a cash register. Everything is available to see, hear, or download.
In Aspen: The multimedia magazine in a box, you'll find:
- John Cage's How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)
- Morton Feldman's The King of Denmark
- Max Neuhaus's realization of Cage's Fontana Mix
- an entire Fluxus issue
- an article on the potential nature of music by La Monte Young that I wish I had found when I was writing a paper on him, followed by a striking Terry Riley score excerpt, in The Psychedelic Issue
In the incredible Publishing the Unpublishable series, you'll find Tom Johnson's The Voice of New Music, a collection of his Village Voice reviews from 1972-1982. It is fine writing, coming from a standpoint of experience, knowledge, and interest.
The list of artists in UbuWeb: Sound will look very different from my set of links, and there are good reasons for that. I'm planning on delving into these links in any case, but here is the explanation for the difference:
Originally focusing on Sound Poetry proper, UbuWeb's Sound section has grown to encompass all types of sound art, historical and contemporary...Categories include Dadaism, Futurism, early 20th century literary experiments, musique concrete, electronic music, Fluxus, Beat sound works, minimalist and process works, performance art, plunderphonics and sampling, and digital glitch works, to name just a few. As the practices of sound art continue to evolve, categories become increasingly irrelevant, a fact UbuWeb embraces. Hence, our artists are listed alphabetically instead of categorically.
I can't recommend the site highly enough. If I have any objection to it at all, it's that huge treasures are hidden behind tiny links. Sometimes I wish the scale of their offerings was at least partially visible on the front page. But when you walk into an enormous library, you know there will be some research and careful browsing involved. One discovery will lead to another. Why not approach UbuWeb in the same way?
Here's one of thousands of examples of what UbuWeb has to offer: footage of a live performance by Maja Ratkje in Paris in 2005.
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