Wilted Valid Space– Let It Burn A Million Times is the title of a video installation by Rosh Zeeba, exhibited at Galerie 21/Vorwerkstift in Hamburg on September 5th 2020. The three channel installation was accompanied by sounds specifically assembled for this event. The resulting audio piece consists mainly of loops edited from 1970s Iranian popsongs that were suggested by Rosh Zeeba. These loops were played through a modular synthesizer, creating a ‚hauntological‘ soundscape – the aim of the work being to create an uncanny atmosphere that functions like an anachronistic radio broadcast from pre-revolutionary Iran. The exhibition and accompanying performance by Joscha X Ende (aptly titled Noise Reduction) lasted for four hours. Below you can find a recording of the soundscape, edited down to 48 minutes, videoclips showing the installation and a foto of the performance.
Fr. 23.10.20, 20:00 in der Hörbar/B-Movie, Brigittenstr. 5. 20359 Hamburg
Im Rahmen des Blurred Edges Festivals. Einlass nur mit Kartenvorbestellung an csh44[at]gmx.de
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Jan Jelinek
Jelineks Arbeiten befassen sich mit der Transformation von Klang bzw. mit der Übersetzung von populären Musikquellen in abstrakte und reduzierte Texturen. Dabei kommen keine traditionellen Musikinstrumente zum Einsatz, vielmehr werden Collagen aus winzigen Klangsamples konstruiert. Diese Samples kommen aus den unterschiedlichsten Aufzeichnungsgeräten wie Tonbandmaschinen, digitale Sampler, Mediaplayer. Die Aufnahmen werden zu repetitiven Loops verarbeitet, reduziert auf die wesentlichste klangliche Eigenschaft des Originalmaterials, wobei das Ausgangsmaterial in den meisten Fällen nicht mehr dechiffrierbar ist.
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Jetzmann / Wallraf
Jetzmann, bei diesem Konzert mit Mikrofon für Texte und Sampler für Sounds, macht sonst Radioarbeit und Bühnenmusik. An diesem Abend interessiert an den Möglichkeiten von Text und Noise.
David Wallraf forscht seit 2010 zur Theorie und Praxis von Noise. Besonderes Interesse für die verdrängte und unheimliche Akustik des Alltagslebens, an diesem Abend in Relation zu Jetzmanns Texten.
New Delhi’s gallery ONKAF comissioned international sound artists and musicians to produce works for their Life Inbetween series, running 03-12 October. My contribution, the 09:30 min. track Psyche – A Model of Infection is now available on ONKAFs website and on YouTube.
The Greek word psyche, analogous to the Latin spiritus, originally meant breath as well as soul or spirit. The invisible and ephemeral phenomenon of inhalation and exhalation connects the inside and outside of the body, it is both a carrier substance of language and of airborne diseases and also a sign for the liveliness of bodies. Breath is the starting point of this work: a single and solitary breath, recorded with a throat microphone. The inside corresponds to the body of the individual in a symbolic isolation, which becomes a social reality through the distancing measures against the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. This isolated sound, a reference to the desire for interaction with others, is linked to field recordings. These sounds were recorded during the recent years in places that are no longer accessible or difficult to visit due to travel restrictions (a collage of street sounds from Tel Aviv, Istanbul, Tokyo and Warsaw). Due to the currently unbridgeable distance, the acoustic reminiscences of these places are charged with nostalgia. On a further level of the work, an interplay of four different waveforms produced by analog oscillators unfolds in the stereo image – sine wave (left channel), triangular wave (right channel), square wave (half left) and sawtooth wave (half right) appear in a fixed frequency ratio and form a chord. At minute 03:45 a noise signal begins to modulate the first oscillator, the random voltage distribution ‘infecting’ the homogeneous sine wave. The resulting ‘symptoms’ are fluctuations in frequency, a distraction from the normal or ‘healthy’ state. This audio infection is passed on to the next oscillator, while maintaining the characteristics of the sinusoidal oscillation – it is no longer the same noise signal, but a ‘mutation’. This process is repeated until all four oscillations are infected. At the end of the cycle, the output of the last oscillator is fed back to the first – an exponential growth of modulations/infections that changes the characteristics of the whole system. What remains is the sound of breathing, but no longer as an isolated sound event. By using a vocoder, the sound of breathing becomes the envelope for the collected field recordings, a hybrid sound event that refers to the singularly plural dynamics of the social.
First shows since February with an actual audience are due on October 6th at MS Stubnitz in Hamburg and on the 7th at Schwankhalle Bremen. Playing with KvT, Sonic Glitch and Ana Berkenhoff. Organized by Anachronism, tickets are availbale here.
Now available is the 2x CDr No Audience Participation on Econore records. The 5 tracks were originally released as a series of downloads under the title Culture’s Cancelled in March/April. It’s a documentation of concerts I played pre-COVID 19 in late 2019 and early 2020.
Econore turned my collection of recordings and collages into this amazing thing with lots of goodies like show flyers, a 12 page booklet and a button. Limited edition of 20.
A new limited edition cassette is now available. My tracks Not Bored & Just Angry were recorded during lockdown in April 2020, Jeans Beast’s Decay & Destroyed by Machines in July. J. Flemming did the cover artwork and offset printing. We split the 20 copies and they are available both through my and Jeans Beast’s Bandcamp.
In the latest episode Difficult Music played some tracks from the Inconvenient tape. Also featured are The Primitive Painter, Akuma No Numa, Klara Lewis, Klein, Conrad Schnitzler and Bérangère Maximin.
These recordings were assembled in a rather inconvenient way during a period in 2019 when the audio interface on DW’s computer did not work properly. All sounds had to be recorded on mobile devices and then transferred to a DAW for mixing.
The pieces revolve around impossibilities – transducing and transposing inaudible events into the hearable spectrum and mixing unrelated audio from different locations to create the simulacrum of a place that never really existed.
The détournements of song titles by Bob Dylan and Don van Vliet act as a reminder to the possibility of deconstructing your own memories and archives.
The aesthetic choices made during the recording process were influenced by the collage work Une Semaine de Bonté by Max Ernst.
