Though I loved the Zap comics of the late 60’s, it seemed to me that it was
the psychedelic music was the art from that was the most profound. (Albeit,
I never did see a Joshua light show since they were more or less obsolete by
the early seventies when I began going to concerts.) The tremendous
influence of psychedelic music never really left due to the highly popular
(and profitable) heritage of the 60’s groups Pink Floyd, the Doors, the
psychedelic era Beatles, the Jefferson Airplane (who had 2 number 1 hits in
1967 when they came out with the brilliant and inscrutable “After Bathing at
Baxter’s”) …and of course the Grateful Dead (one of the highest grossing
performing acts of all times - until the mid nineties when Jerry Garcia
died). Now the Incredible String Band pastiche “new weird folk” music of
Joanna Newsom, Bandhart and others seems to be gaining real popularity.
Although the art punk era of 76 – 80’s was a reaction to the excesses of
hippydom, I believe punk-post-punk had a lot more in common with psychedelic
music than is normally let on through what Steven Pinker calls the status
seeking “conspicuous outrage’ of hair styles and dress, dada-like musical
styles (as with Captain Beefheart’s highly influential dada-psychedelic
approach), and their libertarian socialist/anarchist tendencies. The
beautiful Dead C recordings in the 80s were quite psychedelic in my view as
were the proto “new weird folk” of the Tall Dwarfs and Alistair Galbraith.
Even the Fall admit they owe quite a bit to this psychedelic era… as do the
songs of the post-post-post-pop punk of Green Day.
And there have been many cross-overs with “serious” music. When my friends
and I first heard Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” in the late 70’s we
were astounded by the similarity of passages with Pink Floyd’s “Meddle” from
1971. The transcendental eastern influences of Steve Reich’s 70’s work
attracted both aging hippies and young art punks. As those who went to see
the Kronos Quartet at Womad, heard one of Steve Reich’s main interpreters
easily segue from the minimalism of Reich to an amazing interpretation of
Jimi Hendrix’s feedback drenched “Star Spangle Banner”. A number 1 song by
the Who in the late seventies had (instead of the normal Spinal Tap guitar
solo) a psychedelic interlude that owed more to Philip Glass than the Magic
Bus era Who.
What does this all have to do with Image and Space? Well I’m not sure, but
as Sun Ra said, “space is the place” – that irrational and creative bit of
our minds that psychedelic music seems to encourage (or at least it does
with me).
Cheers,
Brit
--
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: seanc [mailto:waikatoscreen@mac.com]
> Sent: Monday, 31 October 2005 8:18 p.m.
> To: Aotearoa Digital Arts
> Subject: Re: [Ada_list] Fw: Summer of Love
>
> curiously i've been broiwsing in the remarkable oral history
> Days in the Life collected by Jonathan Green
>
> It's fuill of stories about Syd Barrett's acid od and
> similarly grubby tales of Michael X and general pawkiness
>
> in essence, like all great moments, there was a patina of
> glamour over a miasma of tat.
"Psychedelia takes its name from psychedelic (mind manifesting) drugs, which assisted in fueling an entire subculture of fusing together different genres and mediums where strong boundaries had previously existed."
I'm not sure if it was the drugs per se that had a lasting effect but it is the fusing together of the genres, that is perhaps the greatest legacy of 60's Psychedelia? Marcuse, the 60's new left's hero, was dead set against drugs. Abbie Hoffman (a protégé of Marcuse - of sorts) practiced his activism with similar sensibility to the Fluxus artists. For instance, he organized a group to go the NY stock exchange and throw fistfuls of fake dollar bills (mixed with some real ones) down to the traders below, who began to scramble frantically to grab the money as fast as they could.
Hoffman's downside was perhaps LSD (a a bad mix with his bi-polar disorder). The world may have narrowly averted catastrophe when Nixon's secret service prevented Grace Slick (pop hero of the summer of love...and college classmate of Nixon's daughter) and her date Abbie Hoffman from going to Nixon's daughter's birthday party even though Grace Slick had an official invitation. They reportedly intended to spike the warmongering President's drink with LSD.
>
> In between the people who really made stuff happen got intensely
> ignored: read any history of london in the 60s and Hoppy will figure
> large: by the late 80s, Hoppy was increasingly marginalised
> and buggered off over the horizon, pissed off with the
> bureaucratisation of culture under Thatcher - something that
> at the time seemed intolerable, bit which we;'ve all learned
> to tolerate. Yep, there were exquisite moments (the
> Incredibles at the roundhouse, the Doors at the Roundhouse,
> hendrix at the isle of Wight the Open Theatre bla bla, but
> most of the time it was just teenagers sicking up in the lav as usual.
Yeah...it was an immature and inpatient youth culture in many ways.
>
> This is the third revival of 1967 i can recall. The only one
> with any credibility was the mMadchester 1987 second summer
> of love, when the acid house scene really broke out of the
> underground.
Yes they keep trying to milk the market for all they can get. On the other hand, the legacy of the 60's (Psychedelia - political activism) is still very much in effect in many ways: the establishment of minority (or majority...with women) rights and respect in identity politics (which with relentless damage control, the conservative purveyors of propaganda call "PC"), an anarchist-libertarian outlook on life (distrust of hierarchies and bureaucracies - which the intellectual purveyors of propaganda also sensing damage control, morphed it into the right winged libertarianism of the new right and the third way), and the arts -especially music... which as Sean points out below has changed little since the late seventies. Since punk's conspicuous outrage mostly came out of 60's garage and the nihilism of such groups as VU, and hip hop out of the Last Poets and other like minded proto rappers of the 60's - it all was an extension of the sixties in my mind.
The 60's were certainly much different that what had gone on before, and a far more radical break with the immediate past than, say, looking 30 years before from 1969 to the culture of 1939. There is some merit to the argument that the '20th century ended in 1968'. With the exception of Duchamp (also the maverick sixties hero who had been all but forgotten until that decade), I think the same could be said about the fine arts (that it was -with few exceptions - the intellectual theory/philosophy based art that fused together different genres, methodologies and mediums was a radical break from the formalism of modernism)??
But as you mention below...it is not so much an epiphenomena but a (very big) stepping stone, and I suppose we all have moved on.
For instance, in retrospect the psychedelic novel, Gravity's Rainbow seemed embarrassingly dated the last time I tired to read it - in spite of my fond memories (and influence -now as a pastiche- on my artwork), its importance in university literature courses ...and not to mention its inclusion on the Simpsons!
>
> With that honourable exception, youth culture has been a
> depressing cycle of revivals for thirty years since punk and hip-hop.
>
> I'm with Stella, in that the materials of her exquisite
> embroidery are a thousand times more memorable than yet
> another 4-square Pipilotti Rist projection; but speaking of
> revivals that aren't Janine Randerson'srecent wellington
> show, Douglas's robot, sean's ensemble improvisations (a la
> Scratch Orchestra) and Brit's flight sof fancy are all
> closest to the spirit for being more removed from the
> epiphenomena (I take Stella's other psycedelica as comment on
> their poasthumous exhaustion at the hands of microsoft and
> iTunes, not celebrations
>
> If I never do acid again it will be too soon.
No s***! (Though I never...uh... swallowed... and never inhaled.)
>
> s
>
> >
> >
> Sean Cubitt * Screen and Media Studies * University of
> Waikato * Private Bag 3105 * Hamilton * New Zealand * T +64
> (0)7 838 4543 * F +64
> (0)7 4767 * seanc(a)waikato.ac.nz
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ada_list mailing list
> Ada_list(a)list.waikato.ac.nz
> http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/ada_list
>
>
____________________________________________________
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(0800 46 8265) or txt free 3388 for more information
and make a good move to UCOL Universal College of
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____________________________________________________
"in essence, like all great moments, there was a patina of glamour over
a miasma of tat."
Sean, that was excellant. positively Wilde-ean. can't wait to drop it
triumphantly in various end of year round-ups, and the Xmas party of
course!
Let me invite another blinder by briefly advertising the following;
Thursday 7pm,
EMU and Disasteradio present live electronic music with images from
the world of consumer electronics and veteran arcade game 'Pong'.
Venue: The New Zealand Community Trust mediatheatre, The Film Archive,
Wellington
Cost: $8 / $6
thanks,
Mark
------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------
Mark Williams
Screening Projects
Nga Kaitiaki O Nga Taonga Whitiahua
The New Zealand Film Archive
PO Box 11449 Wellington
Aotearoa, New Zealand
ph +64 4 384 7647 ext 829
fax +64 4 382 9595
http://www.filmarchive.org.nz
> but speaking of revivals that aren't Janine
Randerson'srecent wellington show, Douglas's robot, sean's ensemble
improvisations (a la Scratch Orchestra) and Brit's flight sof fancy are
all closer to the spirit for being more removed from the epiphenomena
> I take it from the number of people who said they would like to hang one of my screens above their bed that there was some kind of hallucinatory - psycedelic - love connection. I am also sure I heard someone say - 'aargh my brain is melting' at one point.
At the conceptual stage of "Peace in Space' I was thinking more about the proto -immersive environments such as Scriabin's colour organ (and particularly his symphony 'Prometheus Poem of Fire') but the audience made their own update to 60s psycedelica. I guess with the title there is a reference to the spirit of the 60s-70s Peace movement and their current move into Space.
And come to think of it, I have always loved the very slowly revolving (sometimes circular) abstractions of the oil projector as well.
Tord Boontje made a great circular cellophane lamp which projected coloured light and silhouette figures images in a lighting exhibition called 'Brilliant' at the V&A last year.
Some thoughts
Janine
>>> waikatoscreen(a)mac.com 10/31/05 8:18 PM >>>
curiously i've been broiwsing in the remarkable oral history Days in
the Life collected by Jonathan Green
It's fuill of stories about Syd Barrett's acid od and similarly grubby
tales of Michael X and general pawkiness
in essence, like all great moments, there was a patina of glamour over
a miasma of tat.
In between the people who really made stuff happen got intensely
ignored: read any history of london in the 60s and Hoppy will figure
large: by the late 80s, Hoppy was increasingly marginalised and
buggered off over the horizon, pissed off with the bureaucratisation of
culture under Thatcher - something that at the time seemed intolerable,
bit which we;'ve all learned to tolerate. Yep, there were exquisite
moments (the Incredibles at the roundhouse, the Doors at the
Roundhouse, hendrix at the isle of Wight the Open Theatre bla bla, but
most of the time it was just teenagers sicking up in the lav as usual.
This is the third revival of 1967 i can recall. The only one with any
credibility was the mMadchester 1987 second summer of love, when the
acid house scene really broke out of the underground.
With that honourable exception, youth culture has been a depressing
cycle of revivals for thirty years since punk and hip-hop.
I'm with Stella, in that the materials of her exquisite embroidery are
a thousand times more memorable than yet another 4-square Pipilotti
Rist projection; but speaking of revivals that aren't Janine
Randerson'srecent wellington show, Douglas's robot, sean's ensemble
improvisations (a la Scratch Orchestra) and Brit's flight sof fancy are
all closert to the spirit for being more removed from the epiphenomena
(I take Stella's other psycedelica as comment on their poasthumous
exhaustion at the hands of microsoft and iTunes, not celebrations
If I never do acid again it will be too soon
s
>
>
Sean Cubitt � Screen and Media Studies � University of Waikato �
Private Bag 3105 � Hamilton � New Zealand � T +64 (0)7 838 4543 � F +64
(0)7 4767 � seanc(a)waikato.ac.nz
_______________________________________________
Ada_list mailing list
Ada_list(a)list.waikato.ac.nz
http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/ada_list
Dear ADA
I have only been thinking about this subject for the last 10 years(at least) and trying to see if psychedelia is in fact something we can engage with today. Does it not appear as a chimera, constantly changing it's focus or direction, mimicing the hallucinatory aspect of the primary source. It seems that psychedelia is one thing and hallucinatory imagery is another thing, although they converge in many meaningful ways, and I don't want to say these are two distinct things because I bet they are not, or at least I "feel" like they are not. That word "feel" is used here in a very incorrect way. I am searching for the origins of the imagery I guess, before the 1960's, before Dr Leary, before the miltary-industrial-complex became interested in it as a means of population control (is this not myth, although Sadie Plant does not think so, and I tend to side with her on most things). And my apologies but it seems quite removed from anything to do with Sound/Music. Those psych bands do seem to be very lite when examining the possibilities of psychedelic music. Tony Conrad, or Popol Vuh, or Faust, or Steve Reich seem more appropriate here although they never feature in a discussion on Psychedelic Muisc because they weren't "rock" enough?, a mad stipulation by any account but only supported by the stupidity of the recording industry and the systems of dissemination. I cannot begin to tell you all how many times I have found a Terry Riley or Tony Conrad record in the New Age section of NZ record stores?!?! There is certainly a major problem there, not just for the artists that are being "miss-catagorised". or incorrectly pigeon-holed by persons who obviously lack any musical knowledge beyond the recent "top ten" as defined by CocoCola or PepsiCola sponsored advertorials(music shows), but also for the novice who will be directed to fifth-generation psych as the "authentic" article. Is that the Dandy Warhols? But I am ranting.
The search for this answer to the question about Psychedelia and hallucination in contemporary practice has led me to examine James Ensor in some detail, the belgian artist 1860-1949. Although no "tripper" he seems or appears to bypass the chemical for the visual experience itself. There are some beautiful "Fireworks" paintings that just seem so wrong they could in fact be the ideal representation of hallucination I have seen. I cannot continence digital stills or moving images as being representative because it is all too controlled, too preplanned, and lacking the intuitive nature of Ensor's investigations, or for that matter the psychedelic experience itself. And in the final analysis, for me, the digital forgoes so much in order to appear "as a dream" or "as an hallucination".
Thanks for sending through the stuff about the summer of love show, it looks really fascinating, and the catalogue looks like a real winner with the number and quality of writers onboard.
Thanks
MM
e-fluxPs. I nearly forgot to mention proto-psychedelic things like colour organs. I seem to recall reading about one of the early Futurists [Arnoldo Ginna?] insisting that his audience dress in white so he could project colours onto them. Where were the Theosophists when the Summer of Love came round?
----- Original Message -----
From: Andrew Clifford
To: Aotearoa Digital Arts
Sent: Monday, October 31, 2005 10:25 AM
Subject: Fw: Summer of Love
Speaking of psychedelia and art, this exhibition will be showing in different international venues until late next year, with an accompanying catalogue.
For synaesthetic experience [... snip]
>
Hi all,
Apologies for not being present earlier - tied up with school holidays
in a non-internet environment (they still exist!).
Anyway, have enjoyed all the ruminations which I hope to digest soon...
I'm interested Zita in your thoughts on noise - have to think about
anthropological theories associating noise with a change of state.
The very loud red crackers that the Chinese let off en masse for the
New Year for instance.
The adolescents fascination for the loud - on various levels
(cars/motorbikes/speaker power etc etc) can be seen as a
response/recognition of their changing state into adulthood.
The tin cans on the back of the wedding vehicle, now often replaced (at
least in my current neck of the woods) by a procession of cars - horns
blaring jubilantly...
Does this connect with any of your reflections?
Coming very much from practise based rather than theoretical based
music-making and not considering myself much of a nerd I am slightly
afloat as to my possible contribution (short of performing)in this
symposium. However at present I am very interested with performance
issues within a laptop environment, and maybe this is something worth
discussing.
Having watched the Amsterdam electro/impro scene becoming somewhat
overwhelmed by laptop musicians has made me consider what I want from a
live/flesh and blood situation as opposed to any media(radio/cd etc) in
which the visual is not present. Is there a place for acoustic
musicians who may have considerable skills concerning certain kinds of
physical dexterities, musical understanding and performance techniques
within an electronic environment? Is this something worth persuing?
I recognise that different scenes contain their own aesthetics - not
only concerning audio but also visual/performing styles. What does
concern me is an absence of aesthetics. Every performance is some kind
of theatre- even if it's no(h) theatre - in my opinion, and I am
interested in considering how decisions are made about this.
Just the beginnings and of course being someone coming from an acoustic
music training to laptop to some kind of integration I have my own take
on this.
Any comments are welcome, looking forward to meeting you all soon!
Alison
>
>
>
> Quoting zita <zita(a)ethermap.org>:
>
>> Hi all
>>
>> I've enjoyed the thoughts so far, sorry for being so slow to post on
>> my
>> own presentation, my thoughts have been gathering pretty slowly on it,
>> and this is still a bit of a testing of the waters, so i'd like some
>> feedback/ideas/responses etc...
>>
>> This comes out of my phd thesis research, which is about the radio
>> spectrum: the ways it is defined by different discourses (science,
>> law,
>> economics, technology etc), and the movements of power and resistance
>> through processes of control - and the subversion of control - over
>> radio waves. An important part of it means looking at ways in which
>> activists and artists respond to radio waves in ways that operate
>> outside the dominant structures of control established by legislation
>> and finance.
>>
>> Anyway, for this 'sound and noise' session, I've been thinking about
>> possible intersections and overlaps between R. Murray Schafer's
>> mapping
>> of the 'soundscape', and my own thinking of radio spectrum as a
>> spectrumscape. For the conference I'm planning to work through some
>> analogies and comparisons between the two, and show some sketches of
>> plans for visualising the spectrumscape. The spectrumscape is the
>> movement of radiowaves around and through us, and it is even more
>> dense
>> and omnipresent than the soundscape, we just don't have biological
>> sensors of our own to perceive it - we have to rely on radios, tv's,
>> cellphones, scanners etc to translate radio waves into sound waves so
>> that we can use our ears and eyes to perceive parts of it at a time.
>>
>> As individuals, we contribute to the soundscape through our audible
>> sound making - speech, breathing, heartbeat, the rustling of our
>> clothing etc, but we also add to the spectrumscape with the infrared
>> radiation we emit. And increasingly, as we carry around cellphones,
>> itrips, bluetooth headsets, GPS systems, wifi devices, items with RF
>> stocktracking tags in them, in fact any electronic object, we are
>> leaking into the spectrumscape at multiple wavelengths, just as our
>> footsteps, laughter, and the overflow from our headphones and car
>> stereos extend us into the soundscape. Through our electronic objects,
>> we exist in both physical and non-physical or semi-physical?)
>> dimensions at once - English 'critical designer' Anthony Dunne refers
>> to this sweetly as the 'dreaming' of electronic objects.
>>
>> Both the spectrumscape and the soundscape are influenced by
>> geography,
>> and they have both become denser and increasingly dominated by
>> technological emissions at the expense of natural elements since the
>> industrial revolution (more recently than that in the case of radio
>> waves). Both penetrate physical structures to various extents,
>> predominantly in the low frequencies, and both are constructed of
>> semi-permanent major sources, and smaller mobile sources.
>>
>> There are I think interesting relationships to draw between the
>> 'power'
>> to emit powerful electromagnetic signals, and the 'power' to produce
>> really big noises. Obviously, this is both social/economic/political
>> power, and electrical power. Schafer makes some nice points about the
>> power to make a lot of noise shifting from the church to the factory
>> with industrialisation, and it's interesting to think about who is
>> allowed to make a lot of noise now - airports and particular kinds of
>> factory are the ones that leap to mind at the moment, acting like big
>> transmitters would in the spectrumscape, with emergency sirens,
>> concerts, sports games, and police/rescue helicopters as other more
>> occasional official erruptions, maybe like sporadic radio
>> communications. Other loud noises exist as rebellious interventions -
>> like the cars that sometimes trigger other cars' alarms with their
>> noise on the street outside my house, and have the power to disrupt
>> ordered interactions in a similar way to pirate transmissions on
>> official broadcast/communications channels. 'Noise' of course exists
>> in
>> the spectrumscape as well, in the static produced by interference in
>> transmissions.
>>
>> I'm interested in any other ideas about the location and functions of
>> different noises in the soundscape, particularly the ones that are
>> either powerful and officially sanctioned, or those that are more
>> interventionist. Too many to list I'm sure, but I'd like to hear of
>> any
>> particularly resonant instances anyone has come across. And the same
>> for 'pirate' transmission interventions in the spectrumscape.
>>
>> Also, i've been thinking about this in relation to the musings on
>> silence sparked by Michael Morley's post, and reflecting that since
>> all
>> electronic objects emit electromagnetic waves, when a laptop, amp,
>> guitar etc is 'silent' in terms of sound waves, it's still making
>> 'noise' in the spectrumscape (as long as it is turned on). Does this
>> add anything to or change our ideas about 'silence' in electrical
>> music
>> making?
>>
>> And has anyone ever noticed odd moments when seemingly benign,
>> contained, objects reveal their dreamy electromagnetic selves,
>> creating
>> strange burst of interference?
>> for example, I notice a weird point in Auckland where Wellington St
>> comes up out of Freemans bay on the way into the city, by all those
>> traffic lights where the motorway interferes with the pedestrian ways.
>> There's a loud high pitched noise that comes in over the top of fm
>> radio for a few metres near the traffic island with the trees (i'm
>> still hazy on street names round there). It happens over both
>> national
>> radio (101fm) and b (95fm), I'm never listening to any other
>> frequencies there so i'm not sure how far it stretches. It's really
>> loud in the radio, and there's nothing I can hear when i take my
>> headphones off. I can't figure out what it's coming from, it might be
>> the red light camera, but I'm sure it happens when the camera's not
>> there. Anyway, it's a weird moment of electromagnetic noise
>> interfering
>> in my walkman soundscape....
>>
>> Righto, that's enough for tonight. I'll collect my thoughts together
>> more fully before the conference, and any ideas, thoughts, responses
>> etc in the meantime would be excellent...
>>
>> zita
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ada_list mailing list
>> Ada_list(a)list.waikato.ac.nz
>> http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/ada_list
>>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 08:04:31 -0700
> From: jackysaw(a)telus.net
> Subject: Re: [Ada_list] soundscape - spectrumscape: ADA Peer Review
> Topic One - Sound and Noise
> To: Aotearoa Digital Arts <ada_list(a)list.waikato.ac.nz>
> Message-ID: <1130166271.435cf7ff05ca5(a)webmail.telus.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Hi Zika,
>
> thanks for your interesting abstract.
>
> I want to add some reflections. They might be of use.
>
> The development of technology is headed towards reducing the amount
> of disturbance
> in a signal. This 'progression' for accuracy, clarity, precision aims
> to eliminate
> noise hereby making noise less available for the consumer of the
> technologies.
> (note: if you are in the economical position to buy the newer gadgets)
> Noise is
> filtered out by the developers of the technological devices and less
> so by the
> agility of the user of the technology. For example the turning of the
> nob on an old
> transistor radio versus the pressing of the button to punch in the
> accurate
> frequency.
>
> I live at an artist residency on Toronto island, an island 10 minutes
> ferry ride
> from Toronto in Canada. The cellphone signal at the centre is not
> readily available
> for people with older cellphones and has to be found. This search
> comes with a new
> set of interesting movement patterns accommodated by vocal
> confirmations like, yes,
> can you hear me, wait, is this better,.... thus adds 'new' noises to
> the
> soundscape. But also puts people in awkward body positions and odd
> locations. One
> day in the winter (-20c outside) I encountered a person on the
> cellphone in the
> garbage space enduring a not to pleasant smell (noise?) to have a
> private
> conversation with his girlfriend in Australia.
>
>
> Jacky Sawatzky
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Quoting zita <zita(a)ethermap.org>:
>
>> Hi all
>>
>> I've enjoyed the thoughts so far, sorry for being so slow to post on
>> my
>> own presentation, my thoughts have been gathering pretty slowly on it,
>> and this is still a bit of a testing of the waters, so i'd like some
>> feedback/ideas/responses etc...
>>
>> This comes out of my phd thesis research, which is about the radio
>> spectrum: the ways it is defined by different discourses (science,
>> law,
>> economics, technology etc), and the movements of power and resistance
>> through processes of control - and the subversion of control - over
>> radio waves. An important part of it means looking at ways in which
>> activists and artists respond to radio waves in ways that operate
>> outside the dominant structures of control established by legislation
>> and finance.
>>
>> Anyway, for this 'sound and noise' session, I've been thinking about
>> possible intersections and overlaps between R. Murray Schafer's
>> mapping
>> of the 'soundscape', and my own thinking of radio spectrum as a
>> spectrumscape. For the conference I'm planning to work through some
>> analogies and comparisons between the two, and show some sketches of
>> plans for visualising the spectrumscape. The spectrumscape is the
>> movement of radiowaves around and through us, and it is even more
>> dense
>> and omnipresent than the soundscape, we just don't have biological
>> sensors of our own to perceive it - we have to rely on radios, tv's,
>> cellphones, scanners etc to translate radio waves into sound waves so
>> that we can use our ears and eyes to perceive parts of it at a time.
>>
>> As individuals, we contribute to the soundscape through our audible
>> sound making - speech, breathing, heartbeat, the rustling of our
>> clothing etc, but we also add to the spectrumscape with the infrared
>> radiation we emit. And increasingly, as we carry around cellphones,
>> itrips, bluetooth headsets, GPS systems, wifi devices, items with RF
>> stocktracking tags in them, in fact any electronic object, we are
>> leaking into the spectrumscape at multiple wavelengths, just as our
>> footsteps, laughter, and the overflow from our headphones and car
>> stereos extend us into the soundscape. Through our electronic objects,
>> we exist in both physical and non-physical or semi-physical?)
>> dimensions at once - English 'critical designer' Anthony Dunne refers
>> to this sweetly as the 'dreaming' of electronic objects.
>>
>> Both the spectrumscape and the soundscape are influenced by
>> geography,
>> and they have both become denser and increasingly dominated by
>> technological emissions at the expense of natural elements since the
>> industrial revolution (more recently than that in the case of radio
>> waves). Both penetrate physical structures to various extents,
>> predominantly in the low frequencies, and both are constructed of
>> semi-permanent major sources, and smaller mobile sources.
>>
>> There are I think interesting relationships to draw between the
>> 'power'
>> to emit powerful electromagnetic signals, and the 'power' to produce
>> really big noises. Obviously, this is both social/economic/political
>> power, and electrical power. Schafer makes some nice points about the
>> power to make a lot of noise shifting from the church to the factory
>> with industrialisation, and it's interesting to think about who is
>> allowed to make a lot of noise now - airports and particular kinds of
>> factory are the ones that leap to mind at the moment, acting like big
>> transmitters would in the spectrumscape, with emergency sirens,
>> concerts, sports games, and police/rescue helicopters as other more
>> occasional official erruptions, maybe like sporadic radio
>> communications. Other loud noises exist as rebellious interventions -
>> like the cars that sometimes trigger other cars' alarms with their
>> noise on the street outside my house, and have the power to disrupt
>> ordered interactions in a similar way to pirate transmissions on
>> official broadcast/communications channels. 'Noise' of course exists
>> in
>> the spectrumscape as well, in the static produced by interference in
>> transmissions.
>>
>> I'm interested in any other ideas about the location and functions of
>> different noises in the soundscape, particularly the ones that are
>> either powerful and officially sanctioned, or those that are more
>> interventionist. Too many to list I'm sure, but I'd like to hear of
>> any
>> particularly resonant instances anyone has come across. And the same
>> for 'pirate' transmission interventions in the spectrumscape.
>>
>> Also, i've been thinking about this in relation to the musings on
>> silence sparked by Michael Morley's post, and reflecting that since
>> all
>> electronic objects emit electromagnetic waves, when a laptop, amp,
>> guitar etc is 'silent' in terms of sound waves, it's still making
>> 'noise' in the spectrumscape (as long as it is turned on). Does this
>> add anything to or change our ideas about 'silence' in electrical
>> music
>> making?
>>
>> And has anyone ever noticed odd moments when seemingly benign,
>> contained, objects reveal their dreamy electromagnetic selves,
>> creating
>> strange burst of interference?
>> for example, I notice a weird point in Auckland where Wellington St
>> comes up out of Freemans bay on the way into the city, by all those
>> traffic lights where the motorway interferes with the pedestrian ways.
>> There's a loud high pitched noise that comes in over the top of fm
>> radio for a few metres near the traffic island with the trees (i'm
>> still hazy on street names round there). It happens over both
>> national
>> radio (101fm) and b (95fm), I'm never listening to any other
>> frequencies there so i'm not sure how far it stretches. It's really
>> loud in the radio, and there's nothing I can hear when i take my
>> headphones off. I can't figure out what it's coming from, it might be
>> the red light camera, but I'm sure it happens when the camera's not
>> there. Anyway, it's a weird moment of electromagnetic noise
>> interfering
>> in my walkman soundscape....
>>
>> Righto, that's enough for tonight. I'll collect my thoughts together
>> more fully before the conference, and any ideas, thoughts, responses
>> etc in the meantime would be excellent...
>>
>> zita
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ada_list mailing list
>> Ada_list(a)list.waikato.ac.nz
>> http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/ada_list
>>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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> End of Ada_list Digest, Vol 32, Issue 16
> ****************************************
>
This post from Warren Burt on the Australasian Computer Music list coincides
nicely with discussion around here.
Andrew
----- Original Message -----
From: "Warren Burt" <waburt(a)melbourne.dialix.com.au>
To: <waburt(a)melbourne.dialix.com.au>
Subject: [Acma-l] WB on ORF Kunstradio
Dear Friends:
My new 35 minute long radio piece "Radio Namings" made for Austrian
Radios "Kunstradio" (Artradio) program will be broadcast on Sunday night
(Vienna Time) at 11:05 PM on Radio Stations O1 and RO1 (shortwave). For
those of you with a fast internet connection, the show is already up and
ready for mp3 streaming at the following weblink:
http://kunstradio.at/2005B/30_10_05.html
Click on the "Mp3 Listen Now" link to hear it.
What this connects you to is a .pls file. For some of you, this will
mean that you will automatically hear the piece in mp3 format. For
others, you might have to download the pls file (88 bytes, its tiny),
and then load it into realplayer or some other mp3 player and then listen
The program notes for the piece are already at the above link, in
German. English notes should be up shortly. However, since the notes are
small, I enclose the English version below. I hope you enjoy the piece!
It's part of the ongoing and current Frequency Post series of pieces,
curated by Andrew Garton. More info on the whole site is on the
http://kunstradio.at website, where you'll also find lots of other good
listening.
Cheers,
Warren
Notes to "Radio Namings":
“Frequency Post” is a project that deals with the materials of radio -
frequency spectra, their uses, and their histories. My original intent
was to research the bureaucracy of radio frequency management in
Australia. I wanted to find out who had made what decisions when, and
why we didn’t know their names. Along the way, though, in my research
into the history of radio, I discovered something much more interesting
and fascinating - the early history of radio in Australia, when there
were amateur experimenters, early broadcasters, technicians, inventors,
AND bureaucrats, all of whom were making contributions to the early
development of radio. I discovered a number of parallels between the
early days of radio and the current hysterical frenzy over the
development of the internet. It was all there, utopian dreams, idiotic
attempts at regulation, and crazed attempts at grabbing space for
commercial development in a medium not known to exist before.
Most of my texts for this piece simply consist of lists of names - of
scientists, technicians, amateurs, broadcasters, administrators, sound
effects people, and the most heroic of all, the developers of the Royal
Flying Doctor Service of Australia, which used radio to save lives in a
way uniquely suited to Australia’s harsh and remote geography. The same
names sometimes occur in several lists, because some people involved in
radio filled different functions at different times, moving between the
roles of amateur experimenter, technician, broadcaster, engineer, and
regulator. Additionally, there are 3 short texts from the early 1920s
which express some of the spirit of those early times: a utopian
statement by J. W. Hambly-Clark; a description of one of his early
experimental broadcasts, which may very well have included some of the
earliest experimental music in Australia (!), and a 1924 government
regulation, so ridiculous in its misunderstanding of technology, that it
stands, in both English and German, as an ur-example of a continuous
history of regulatory gaffes and mistakes that continues unabated up to
the present day.
Frequency Post had a double brief - not only did the pieces have to deal
with the history of radio, they had to be examples of generative music
as well. Along these lines, each of the 10 sections of the piece uses at
least 5 or 6 different generative processes for both music and texts.
The original texts are processed through the text modifying programs
Anagram Genius and Brekdown, producing fragmented or abstract processing
of the texts. These are usually spoken or sung by computer voices, which
are then further processed by various generative processes applied to
the recorded computer voices. Additionally, generative processes were
applied to the musical materials in each section. Each process uses the
texts of that section as materials for many kinds of text-to-music
conversions. One of these involves setting up maps of microtonal pitches
(the entire piece is in the scale of 26 equally tempered pitches per
octave - one pitch for each letter of the English alphabet) on the
typewriter keyboard, and typing relevant texts to produce music that has
the rhythm of typing. Another involves loading the ASCII characters of
the text into a MIDI sequencer, and treating that material as sources
for an automatic selection of pitches, durations, dynamics, octave
choice and tempo choice for each section. Because these choices occur at
different rates, the melodies generated have a kind of fractal
self-similarity to them. Yet another technique involves having drones
covering two octaves (a lower octave for upper case letters, a higher
octave for lower case letters), with the pitches of the drones
determined by names or initials of the texts. For example, the
vibraphone-like chords in the first section are an orchestration of the
name J W Hambly-Clark, while the wind chords of the last section are an
orchestration of the name of Alfred Traeger, who was one of the protean
inventors of Australian radio. Another interesting technique involved
taking pictures of early radio pioneers and activities, and converting
them into sound using the slow scan TV transmission techniques used by
radio amateurs today. A number of different transmission standards are
used, each of which converts a picture into different modulated signals,
and these are usually broadcast on short wave at very low power to
produce the picture at the receiving end. For my purposes, however, I
used them as sound material, and transposed them, modulated them,
fragmented them, and used them as textures to accompany the texts and
their computer-sung fragmentations. The piece is fairly thick in its
textures, and is fairly unrelenting. It plays with the differences
between narrative and abstract presentation of the material. I hope I
have created a homage to these early pioneers of radio; have made my
not-so-subtle critiques of government regulations in the realm of sound
texture, and not primarily words; and have shared a child’s sense of
delight at the world of radio sound effects as well.
Thanks to John Tranter, who introduced me to the text modification
program Brekdown, Jon Rose for samples of his famous predecessor Jo
“Doc” Rosenberg playing with Hambly-Clark in Adelaide, Stephen Gard for
introducing me to the early history of radio in Australia, Andrew Garton
for the commission to produce this piece, and Gudrun Markowsky and
Catherine Schieve for their voices and translations. The piece was
produced by me entirely on two Windows computers in my home studio in
Wollongong, NSW, Australia.
____________________________________________________
Acma-l Mailing List
http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/acma-l
ACMA Web site http://www.acma.asn.au/
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hi
i hope you are all good, happy, n healthy. At the moment I am working on
an event about spectrography for the Latvian media lab 'RIXC':
http://rixc.lv/projects/spectrography/
The event is based in Paris at the new 'hip' venue in town called
Point Ephemere:
http://www.pointephemere.org/
The event is on Nov 5 from 1400-1900 local time which is about 0100-0600
NZ time on sunday (lovely! ;)
I am writing to both AF and ADA to see if anyone would like to
remotely (via skype / ichatav / stream etc ) present or perform on the
topic of Spectrum cartography. We have had some good debate on these two
lists the
last weeks (mainly on ADA) about the Spectrumscape as proposed by Zita. So
I thought maybe I would write to see if anyone that has been working in or
near this area would be interested in doing a presentation / performance.
Presentations are 10 - 15 minutes.
There is no budget for this, so I shouldnt really be asking but I thought
its worth dropping this in the mix just incase.
Anyways, it will also be streamed if anyone is interested in checking out
the event (or maybe its better to get up, have a coffee and check the
archives ;). The event is also a precursor to the larger event happening
in Riga next year called Waves:
http://rixc.lv/waves/
adam
Adam Hyde
~/.fr
r a d i o q u a l i a
http://www.radioqualia.net
the streaming suitcase
http://www.streamingsuitcase.com
Free as in 'media'
contact:
email : adam(a)xs4all.nl
