Tag Archives: noise

chantelle gray live at the window (2017)

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Chantelle Gray live at The Window, an evening of experimental music, performance and visual art at the Theatre Arts Collective, Observatory, Cape Town, 29 January 2017.

Chantelle’s movements are captured by a 3d motion sensor and translated live into controller data for a musical piece written in Supercollider by Aragorn Eloff.

lliezel ellick, rosemary lombard & roxanne de freitas live at the window (2017)

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Live non-verbal improvisation performed in absolute darkness, interacting with a cellphone recording from the day before, at The Window, an evening of experimental music, performance and visual art at the Theatre Arts Admin Collective, Observatory, Cape Town, 29 January 2017.

“It’s not easy to improvise… It’s the most difficult thing to do. Even when one improvises in front of a camera or microphone, one ventriloquizes or leaves another to speak in one’s place the schemas and languages that are already there. There are already a great number of prescriptions that are prescribed in our memory and in our culture. All the names are already pre-programmed. It’s already the names that inhibit our ability to ever really improvise. One can’t say what ever one wants, one is obliged more or less to reproduce the stereotypical discourse. And so I believe in improvisation and I fight for improvisation. But always with the belief that it’s impossible. And there where there is improvisation I am not able to see myself. I am blind to myself. And it’s what I will see, no, I won’t see it. It’s for others to see. The one who is improvised here… no, I won’t ever see him.”

— Jacques Derrida, unpublished interview, 1982, reproduced in David Toop’s Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation and the Dream of Freedom: Before 1970, Bloomsbury, 2016, pg 21.

the window – 29 january 2017

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the-window

Join us! More details HERE. Dedicating my performance to Mark Fisher, who took his own life the other day. His brilliant work, particularly this blog post on hauntology, has been profoundly influential on how I understand archive and aspire to use sound. I’m so sad he is gone.

love & sincerity – holy screaming (1993)

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Off Come Again II, a Japanese noise compilation released on Furnace Records in 1993, put together by Michio Teshima, head of Vanilla Records, who released the Tawamure – Come Again compilation in 1991.

The liners to the second Come Again compilation call the Japanese noise genre “an exorcism of limits as performed under the clever disguise of music,” a description which effectively negates the idea that the bands which fall under this banner are all about aggression.

rest in peace, pauline oliveros

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2016, haven’t you taken enough from us for one year now?

Here is a clip of this brilliant composer and experimental sound artist speaking about the difference between hearing and listening last year:

“In hearing, the ears take in all the sound waves and particles and deliver them to the audio cortex where the listening takes place. We cannot turn off our ears–the ears are always taking in sound information–but we can turn off our listening. I feel that listening is the basis of creativity and culture. How you’re listening, is how you develop a culture, and how a community of people listens, is what creates their culture.”

pharmakon – bestial burden (short film, 2014)

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Directed by: Nina Hartmann and Margaret Chardiet.

Four days before New York noise musician Margaret Chardiet was supposed to leave for her first European tour as Pharmakon, she had a medical emergency which resulted in a major surgery. Suddenly, instead of getting on a plane, she was bedridden for three weeks, missing an organ.

“After seeing internal photographs taken during the surgery, I became hyperaware of the complex network of systems just beneath the skin, any of which were liable to fail or falter at any time,” Chardiet said. “It all happened so fast and unexpectedly that my mind took a while to catch up to the reality of my recovery. I felt a widening divide between my physical and mental self. It was as though my body had betrayed me, acting as a separate entity from my consciousness. I thought of my corporeal body anthropomorphically, with a will or intent of its own, outside of my will’s control, and seeking to sabotage. I began to explore the idea of the conscious mind as a stranger inside an autonomous vessel, and the tension that exists between these two versions of the self.”

Consumed by these ideas, and unable to leave her bed, Chardiet occupied herself by writing the lyrics and music that would become Bestial Burden, the second Pharmakon LP for Sacred Bones Records. The record is a harrowing collection of deeply personal industrial noise tracks, each one brimming with struggle and weighted with the intensity of Chardiet’s internal conflict.

Release date: 10/14/2014

Listen to the full album HERE.

 

pharmakon – abandon (2013/2016)

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Margaret Chardiet describes her drive to make noise music as something akin to an exorcism where she is able to express her “deep-seated need/drive/urge/possession to reach other people and make them FEEL something [specifically] in uncomfortable/confrontational ways.” Engineered by Sean Ragon of Cult of Youth at his self-built recording studio Heaven Street, Abandon is Pharmakon’s first proper studio album and also her first widely distributed release.

Release date: 5/14/2016

Unlike other experimental projects, Pharmakon does not improvise when performing or recording. She is concise and exact; each song/movement is linear with a clear trajectory. Perhaps more than any other style of music, noise is a genre almost exclusively dominated by male performers. Spin Magazine is apt to point out that her,“perfectionism might explain why her recordings are few and far between—a rarity in a scene where noise bros are wont to puke out hour after endless hour of stoned basement jams into a limitless stream of limited-edition tapes. Her music may be as cuddly as a trepanning drill, but it’s also just as precise: She glowers in measured silence as often as she shrieks, and every serrated tone cuts straight to the bone, a carefully calibrated interplay between frequency and resistance.” The songs on this album were all written and recorded during a turbulent three month time period during which several fundamental life changes forced her to begin living in a completely new way and in a new space. She describes the lyrical themes of this album as being about, “Loss. Losing everything. Relinquishing control. Complete psychic abandon. Blind leaps of faith into the fire, walking out unscathed. Crawling out of the pit.”

 

note to self (live at the blah blah bar)

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A poem by Louise Westerhout, accompanied by Lliezel Ellick (cello) and Rosemary Lombard (autoharp), performed on 28 July 2016 at the Blah Blah Bar’s Open Mouth night.

Next time we’ll make sure we find a venue where rude men at the bar are not entitled to talk through performances…

luigi russolo – serenade for intonarumori and instruments (1921)

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mechanical musichttps://youtu.be/8GpN5FHO60c

Russolo designed and constructed a number of noise-generating devices called Intonarumori, and assembled a noise orchestra to perform with them. A performance of his “Gran Concerto Futuristico” (1917) was met with strong disapproval and violence from the audience, as Russolo himself had predicted. None of his intoning devices have survived, though recently some have been reconstructed and used in performances. (Check this out!) Although Russolo’s works bear little resemblance to modern noise music, his pioneering creations cannot be overlooked as an essential stage in the evolution of the several genres in this category. Many artists are now familiar with Russolo’s Art of Noises manifesto.

At first the art of music sought purity, limpidity and sweetness of sound. Then different sounds were amalgamated, care being taken, however, to caress the ear with gentle harmonies. Today music, as it becomes continually more complicated, strives to amalgamate the most dissonant, strange and harsh sounds. In this way we come ever closer to noise-sound.

Antonio Russolo, another Italian Futurist composer and Luigi’s brother, produced a recording of two works featuring the original Intonarumori. The phonograph recording, made in 1921, included works entitled “Corale” and “Serenata”, which combined conventional orchestral music set against the sound of the noise machines. It is the only surviving contemporaneous sound recording of Luigi Russolo’s noise music.

Russolo intonorumori

Russolo, Piatti and the intonarumori

SOURCE: Good old Wikipedia.

edge of wrong festival – 10th anniversary this month

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As part of the Edge of Wrong organising team, I’d like to invite you to join us for our tenth annual music festival, happening in Cape Town on the 22nd and 23rd of April (with a mini edition in Johannesburg on 15th April) and featuring an array of international and local artists presenting a wide range of experimental, uncompromising and dangerous music.edge of wrong 2016

In celebration of our first ten years of existence, during which time we have hosted more than 30 cutting-edge events, we’ve compiled an extra-eclectic line-up of South African and Norwegian musicians, including Daniel MacKenzie, Gunfire Orchestra (Reza Khota, Beat Keller and Morten Minothi Kristiansen), Arnfinn Killingtveit, Kenneth Angerhand and Amantha, Ad undas, Mark Fransman, Darren English, Brendon Bussy, Justin Allart and Hezron Chetty.

Expect everything from feedback guitar and malfunctioning drum machines to improv violin, dance-controlled piano and walls of screeching noise from hand-built instruments.

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__VENUES, LINE-UPS, COST, ETC.:

*** FRIDAY 22nd ***
Atlantic House
1 Perth Rd, Maitland, CT
http://www.atlantichouse.co/
Doors open at 7pm, music starts at 8pm
Pay what you can – recommended contribution R50-R100

PERFORMING:
∞ Brendon Bussy (SA)
∞ Daniel W J Mackenzie (UK)
∞ Ad undas (NO)
∞ Kenneth Angerhand with Amantha23 (KI)
∞ Arnfinn Killingtveit (NO)

*** SATURDAY 23rd ***
Moholo Live House
42 Ncumo Rd, Harare Square, Harare, Khayelitsha, CT
Doors open at 7pm, music starts at 8pm
Pay what you can – recommended contribution R50-R100
https://www.facebook.com/MoholoLiveHouse

PERFORMING:
∞ Gunfire Orchestra (NO/SA)
∞ HORNS NOISE (NO/SA)
∞ Swamps up Nostrils (NO/SA)
∞ Hezron Chetty (SA)

*** SUNDAY 24th ***
Music Hacker Lab – details to be confirmed!

GENERAL INFO: Right of admission reserved. Drinks will be available for purchase at the venues. Cellphones to be switched off during performances.

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Performing in Johannesburg on the 15th are:

* Gunfire Orchestra (Reza Khota, Beat Keller and Morten Minothi Kristiansen) (https://gunfireorchestra.bandcamp.com/) (NO/SA)
* Kenneth Angerhand (www.further.co.za/asqus) (KI)
* Jill Richards (www.jillrichards.com) (SA)
* Carlo Mombelli (www.carlomombelli.com) (SA)
* Daniel MacKenzie (www.danielwjmackenzie.com) (UK)

edge of wrong 10 festival next week!

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I’m on the organising team for the Edge of Wrong. Join us in Cape Town next week – it’s going to be an exhilarating ride!edge of wrong ten 1-poster

Edge of Wrong Cape Town 10: A five day festival of experimental, improvised and provocative music.

It’s been a busy six months for EOW. Last October’s event saw noise artists, opera singers, free jazz, chiptunes and the sound of the Ebola genome perform at a metalworks. In January, we hosted a performance of Terry Riley’s In C for two laptops, improvised analogue synth, a postrock/drone quintet, and a memorable moment under a highway bridge with cello and saxophone accompanying traffic noise.

Now, we invite you to join us for our flagship event, the annual Edge of Wrong festival: five days from 25 to 29 March 2015, featuring a diverse range of international and local artists, each of whom epitomises our ethos of encouraging experimental, uncompromising, dangerous music.

This year, the line-up includes cutting-edge Norwegian performers Vilde Sandve Alnæs, Inga Margrete Aas, Harald Fetveit and Morten Minothi Kristiansen (founder and chief provocateur of Edge of Wrong), along with improv jazz outfit As Is, Juliana Venter and her motorbike ensemble, EOW stalwart Dizu Plaatjies and his Souls of Ancient Fish project (with Ruben Mowszowski and Maxim Starke), the Darkroom Contemporary dance troupe, Gugulethu’s jazzy G-Clef, US field recording artist Erik Deluca and EOW co-organiser Aragorn23 on custom electronics and live data manipulation.

The festival will unfold over several days at a number of venues (including a spontaneous flashmob orchestra in the central city which you can join) so be sure to check out the details on our Facebook event page. You can choose between buying tickets for individual events or an all-access pass for the week.

come with us to the edge of wrong tomorrow

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I’m part of the South African curatorial/organising team for this series of collaborative multi-medium performances. If you’re in Cape Town, check EOW 9.1 out tomorrow night.

It will involve an insane mash-up of guitarists, violinists, opera singers, noise musicians, circuitbenders, chiptunists, avant-percussionists, pianists, body modification, visuals generated from cellular automata, experimental improv dance, provocative video art and the livecoded sound of the Ebola genome…

More information HERE.

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