Mathias Delplanque: "La Plinthe"

Like many other musicians, Mathias Delplanque works under different guises to present different kinds of music. As Lena he plays dub like music, and under his own name things are more microsound.

I wasn't blown away by his previous "Le Pavillon Temoin", but this new one, "La Plinthe" (meaning The Baseboard) is better. Although, I readily admit that the differences aren't that big. Again, Delplanque seems to be using various acoustic instruments (such as guitar, piano, drums etc.) but treats them to such an extent that that can be no longer traced back to the original source, so I must admit I am guessing here.

It's a bit hard to say why I like this album better than the previous. Maybe it's because there are lesser attempts to create small melodies and overall it seems that album is more abstract, working more along the lines of say Richard Chartier or Roel Meelkop. The pieces are more worked out, and have tension throughout, which grabs the listener more than before.

Throughout "La Plinthe" is a pretty strong album. Maybe not in its genre per se, but quite a leap forward.

[CD by Optical Sound]

Frans de Waard / Vital Weekly
Photo: R.R.

Angel: "Kalmukia"

The word "hobby project" is a word I don't particularly like. It sounds like something is not serious or for plain fun, without too much effort. With various releases as Angel, it's probably safe to say that Angel is no longer the hobby project of Ilpo Vaisanen (from Pan Sonic), Dirk Dresselhaus (Schneider TM) and since their last CD also Hildur Gudnadottir (Lost In Hildurness, she also plays on the latest Pan Sonic release) - it's as much a real thing as their "main" occupations.

Four lengthy cuts here of guitar, cello and loads of electronics - loads as in many, but they are not used all the time and to the same extent.
The pieces are rather empty, like a dessert can be empty, yet full of sand, if you look at the detail. "Kalmukia" seems like a concept album, with the four pieces linked together. It moves away from the previous, much louder and fuller releases. More is less it seems. The empty music is not always bright, or rather: hardly bright. This is not black but grey music - an area in between the sun doing down, or autumn changing for winter. In between space music. The music howls about like cold wind over the tundra - perhaps a better reference than a hot dessert. Cello and guitar strum about, while the electronics shiver in the background.

A bit of raw and a bit quiet. Very nice, this grey and cold winter music.

[CD by Editions Mego]

Frans de Waard / Vital Weekly
Image: Editions Mego

Elliott Sharp: "Octal: Book One"

Image: Clean Feed

“Octal: Book One” is Elliott Sharp’s second solo recording for Clean Feed. The first was his all-acoustic take on Thelonious Monk. This time around, however, he tackles his own compositions and plays them on a custom-made electroacoustic “guitarbass”, which is a hollow-bodied electric guitar with two extra bass strings.

Sharp has long worked with solid-bodied, double-necked guitar-basses, most notably in his noise-rich group Carbon. This new instrument is certainly more manageable than the earlier two-headed monsters, but its real advantage, and the one the Sharp exploits notably on this recording, is its acoustic qualities. He combines the acoustic and electric qualities of the Saul Koll guitar by placing one microphone close its sound hole, processing its built-in acoustic pickups, and running its magnetic pickup into a small amplifier and putting a microphone near that too.

The result is a rich sound environment in which Sharp’s every snap, tap, pluck, wiggle, drone, and ebow activation feels completely organic. The eight notated, but spontaneously interpreted, Sharp originals on “Octal: Book One” sing as though they are alive.

A GPInformation interview to Elliott Sharp can be viewed here.

Also available from Cleed Feed, from February 2008:

Jason Stein's Locksmith Isidore: "A Calculus of Loss"

Personnel: Jason Stein (bs), Kevin Davis (cel), Mike Pride (perc)

Empty Cage Quartet: "Stratostrophic"

Personnel: Ivan Johnson (b), Jason Mears (as), Kris Tiner (t), Paul Kikuchi (d)

Scott Fields Freetet: "Bitter Love Songs"

Personnel: João Lobo (d), Scott Fields (g), Sebastian Gramss (b)

Kassin+2

Para entender de onde vén a riqueza de "Futurismo" (2007), o último disco de Kassin+2, cómpre dar un paseo polo sur de Rio de Janeiro. Nas poirentas tendas de discos dos soportais ruinosos de Copacabana pódese sentir o crepitar dos vinilos nos clásicos da música popular brasileira dos 60, como Elis Regina ou Jorge Ben. Na bohemia Santa Theresa, os sons psicodélicos dos Mutantes e Tom Zé. Ao longo do paseo da praia de Ipanema, a bossa nova de Tom Jobim e João Gilberto, reflexo desta elegante beira da cidade.

E en todos os lados, dende o centro da cidade até os arrabaldes máis periféricos, o samba, mentres nas favelas dos outeiros, os golpes e o ruxir do favela funk expresan unha realidade ben máis dura.

"Futurismo" é o novo retrato desa ricaz variedade cultural, étnica e musical de Rio. Última parte da triloxía "+2" (os compañeiros de banda Moreno Veloso e Domenico Lancellotti foron os nomes que encabezaron os dous primeiros traballos), este disco é tan carioca como as hawaianas, as caipirinhas e a habilidade de pasar o día na praia sen levar para a casa a area apegada ao corpo. Alexandre Kassin, un nativo de Rio que leva toda a vida na procura de tesouros en vinilo, di que cando fai un álbum quere que encaixe felizmente na súa colección de discos. Este último vai máis alá: é como unha colección dentro dunha colección que contén o seu mundo.

Kassin+2 é unha sociedade musical que até o momento leva gravados tres álbums con tres eixes alternativos: unha cara, un nome e un son diferentes. O primeiro foi o de Moreno Veloso, o fillo do popular Caetano Veloso, e chamouse Music "Typewriter" (2000); seguiulle o de Domenico, "Sincerely Hot" (2004), e o pasado ano publicouse en Luaka Bop o de Alexandre Kassin, este "Futurismo".




Benvidos á porta xiratoria musical que forman Moreno, Domenico e Kassin. As súas florecentes traxectorias individuais, até hoxe, inclúen moitos anos de experiencia en xiras con algúns dos pais fundadores da bossa nova e colaboracións con músicos tan diversos como o produtor dos Beastie Boys, Mario Caldato, o gurú Arto Lindsay ou o artista Takako Minekawa.

De estilo pioneiro, consumados instrumentalistas, respectados produtores, herdeiros dunha familia de tropicàlia e samba, e á vangarda dunha nova xeración de músicos brasileiros, son tres artistas consumados cuxa mestura única da canción tradicional brasileira cos ritmos raros e os sons de electrónica contemporánea está a definir o son do novo Brasil.

SINSAL Comunicación
Fotografia: D.R.


Nota: No âmbito do festival SINSALaudio, os Kassin+2 deram recentemente um concerto no Auditório do Centro Cultural Caixanova, em Vigo, que pode ser visto aqui.

Interview: Terre Thaemlitz

The question of identity

Located in Kawasaki, Japan, for some years now, American artist Terre Thaemlitz keeps reflecting the concepts of non-essentialist transgenderism and pansexual sexuality through sound, image and word. Testimony of a (re)search on identity, full of critique towards the commercial society.

Can you tell something about your latest projects, as well as what you’re working on at the moment?
At this very moment I am finishing my debut album as DJ Sprinkles, the pseudonym I have used on various vinyl EP's and remixes. The album is titled "Midtown 120 Blues" (which is a reference to the Midtown Manhattan clubs I used to DJ at in the late 1980s /early 90s, and the 120 beats per minute tempo of deep house music at that time, which is different from the vocal house that Europeans call deep house), and it will be released in the fall of 2008 on Mule Musiq here in Japan, as well as distributed in the EU by Kompakt.
The album continues with themes from my 1998 DJ Sprinkes EP, "Sloppy 42nds: A Tribute to the 42nd Streen Transsexual Clubs Destroyed by Walt Disney's Buyout of Times Square" (a track recently featured on Ame's "Coast2Coast" DJ mix compilation for NRK).
While the world celebrates the revival of New York House Music, constructing utopian fictions about the genre as it goes along, I still associate Deep House with transgendered sex work, black-market hormones, drug and alcohol addiction, racism, gender and sexual crises, unemployment, and censorship. It's pretty straight forward dance music, but it revolves around this question of how to incorporate issues of social context into a commercial CD. There will also be some tracks on compilations and remix EP's by Mule, as well as an old ambient track I did in 1994 coming out on a compilation by InnerVisions (Ame's label).
Last year also saw the release of "The Laurence Rassel Show", a 90 minute electroacoustic radio drama which is available for free download from Public Record and Comatonse Recordings. Laurence is a Belgian cyber-feminist who generally works anonymously, as a response to the problems of being "named" under patriarchy. Our project deals with issues of authorship and copy-left from feminist and transgendered perspectives, using a lot of black humor. It was originally developed under commission by German national radio as a follow-up to my previous radio drama on issues of transgendered travel and migration, called "Trans-Sister Radio". Unfortunately, "feminism" is not as sexy as "transgenderism," and the broadcast was eventually cancelled for content reasons that have been documented elsewhere. Needless to say, we were incredibly disappointed (emotionally and financially), but we put it out ourselves. There is also a deluxe double-CD edition available through Comatonse with lots of bonus audio, poster, transcript, etc.
I am actually working on my next electroacoustic project, which will be called "Soulnessless", and takes a critical look at intersections of spirituality, identity and politics (I'm coming from a clearly non-spiritual perspective). It seems the "new spiritualism" is a liberalist trend in the EU these days, which is kind of disturbing for me. The project is planned as a double disc audio CD and video DVD set, the materials on the two discs being different from each other.
I'm also trying to put together an MP3 collection of my entire back catalog – over 400 tracks – on DVD-R. It will be called "Dead Stock Archive". This is in response to the unauthorized sale of my albums by iTunes with absolutely no contract, and their ignoring my direct requests to stop their illegal sale of my works. It makes me sick to think of corporate fucks like iTunes creating an environment against open file sharing, but then turning around and selling music they have no rights to.
Weirdest of all, if I can hardly make any money with my music, why the hell do they want to try to sell it? [laughs] It's total blind greed and the attempted accumulation of all information by corporations, no matter how unnecessary the information is to them…So, I would like to make my audio available as MP3's, but I can't afford the bandwidth to handle online distribution, so a single DVD-R collection seems the best solution.
Oh, and the Berlin based publisher b_books is putting out a bilingual German/English compendium of all my writings, called "Nuisance: Writings on Identity Jamming and Digital Audio Production". I'm really excited about that, especially having my writings in German! Germany is really my main audience for those writings, and I've always felt uncomfortable about the difficulties presented by the specialized English terminology used in many of my texts.

Sometimes you make a verbal introduction before starting a live show, and the fact is that at an electronic music concert it is unusual to hear what the artist wants to express…
Yes, and sadly that’s because a lot of times the artist just doesn’t want to express anything… The majority of "experimental" music still attempts to function in purely formalist terms of "sound as sound", making it no different than high-modernism from a half century ago.

Do you do give introductions to all of your shows?
No, I do have different types of shows, including festival performances, deep house DJ events, or even academic lectures. But a lot of my electroacoustic performances – like the Mille Plateaux stuff – do stick to this format of beginning with an introduction and ending with a question and answer session afterwards. This is in direct response to the promoters and performers I am usually working with, as a critique of the silence around content based work within electroacoustic festivals, etc.
I also want to explain things for the audience to help them make the most of the time – maybe I'm afraid of wasting people's time [laughs]. There are also some subtexts that people usually don’t catch about my performances, like the fact that I'm always considering my performances in relation to the transgendered stage. People usually have preconceptions about the transgender stage being very flamboyant and active. But, for instance, in the “Interstices” show there were definitely moments that were the antithesis of action, or at least using very slow movements. I always tried to get away of that idea of transgenderism being so over the top.

It's been some time now that you have lived in Japan. What took you to make that decision?
Yes, it's actually been seven years as of the end of January, and last year I somehow managed to get permanent resident status! Immigration is a difficult and stressful experience, for sure.
There are many answers to your question as to why, and I'm never sure where to begin when someone asks me that. The main impetus were that I always disliked the U.S., as long as I have my equipment I can work anywhere in the world, Japan has always been the main supporter of my label Comatonse Recordings (I am more known as a house DJ here, not so much for electroacoustic music or writing), and my partner was Japanese.
If you can't tell from my projects, I never got along well in the U.S., but given my economic status I also never thought it realistic to leave the U.S. I had considered Berlin, since I tend to work the most in the EU, but I didn't know how to go about making it happen in a long-term way.
Then, I had a chance to come to Japan sponsored by my partner at the time, who is a Japanese woman. In my project "Trans-Sister Radio", I dealt with some of the emotional and political dynamics of being a transgendered person living on a spousal visa – the transcript for which is available on Comatonse –, but it's definitely scary to try and discuss those things publicly when you're going through various approval processes.
I'm a transgendered identified male (both my transgenderism and maleness are documented in different public spheres), in a committed relationship with a documented woman, my sexuality is often simplistically described as "gay" by the Japanese press… from the eyes of an immigration officer trained to weed out "fake marriages”, how does one defend the sincerity of my situation as an immigrant whose material circumstances are in complete conformity with the social contract, but whose identity is not? (Of course, this is a question that has plagued my long-term relationships with women for decades, as discussed long ago in my text "I am not a Lesbian")
And in the end, like so many things in life, all of these encounters we have with massive bureaucratic systems are not systematized at all. They are random, and even reversible at any time. I can't look at my experience and write a guide for transgendered immigration.
There is no such thing. The system is fluid, changing, subject to human decision, rigid yet flexible – this is somehow related to how I have been struggling with identity constructs all along, but on a bureaucratic level I had never encountered before. I'm not sure how to talk about it clearly. I guess this is why I get flustered when people ask how I came to be here. The question implies a degree of free will that, as we all know, does not exist.
Everything must be bought, especially when dealing with government agencies, and if you don't have money that means selling bits of yourself in other ways. Building and breaking social ties all the way. This is symptomatic of why I feel any model of "community building" is inherently suspect. Unity is rooted in denial, for sure!
With all of that being said, the reason I enjoy living in Japan and hope to remain here is that it's incredibly safe and friendly (in a kind of reserved, keep-to-yourself way). Take away people's access to guns and narcotics, and they can actually be pretty nice!

Was it difficult to convey your messages in the United States?
Yes. I never get to perform in the U.S. There never seems to be an interest in my performances there, or even electronic performances generally. It's too rock'n'roll. But to be honest, my music is really non-performative. For me, to come up with a performance strategy for music that is completely pre-processed in the studio isn't very interesting for me.
However, economically people like me rely on performances, and not album sales, so it's part of playing the game. This again ties things back to the transgender stage and the idea of pantomime, "faking it," finding a way to turn pressing play and standing on stage for an hour into something interesting. I often play with the image of having high-tech gadgetry on stage but making people wonder what is happening – what is pantomime and what is "live" action? What are their expectations about "live" performance to begin with?

Is there a political stance, at that level?
Well, I have my intentions associated with each project, a socio-political theme which I try to convey, but in a conventional performance situation I don’t think that it’s inherent an audience will be able to catch my intended content. Electroacoustic performance is often abstract, and in the same way most people cannot explain "modern art" they are usually not able to explain "modern music". I mean, that’s why I’m explaining it now [laughs]. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that – like we said earlier – the artists don’t really want to talk about anything and the audience doesn’t expect anything.

There’s also the question of image. Despite the “flashy” aesthetics, there exists a lot of content in your performances…
I try to approach those "flashy" ideas with a sense of humour, too, like the mirror ball segment during the “Interstices” show. I mean, even though it's supposed to be a serious computer music concert, you can’t have a drag show without the mirror balls! I like mixing those elements of humour and inappropriateness into an electroacoustic concert, which is traditionally very academic. In one way, it’s about reducing the computer music to a kind of level of superficiality and, on the other hand, is about trying to imply a larger context – the contexts in which I work and operate, as well as the contexts the audience bring with them.




Focusing on the sound production, in itself, is the final result dependent upon the software you use?
No, not strictly. There’s always a lot of manual editing and cutting. For instance, the process I call systolic composition is a subtractive process that involves a lot of manual editing of a sample's wave forms. There are also a lot of things like the good old buzzes, clicks and stuff – some of those are made by software, but most come from manually selecting and repeating very small pieces of audio.
But the idea isn’t to arrive at some romantic notion of gesture or to put a "human touch" back into it – it’s not like that. In some way, it’s just trying to get away from the sounds of Max MSP and the automated plug-ins that most people rely on these days. For me, that sound is too institutionalized and standardized. And we have to look at how the spread of electroacoustic music techniques into some mainstream music circles affects the ways in which we read the genre.
Things have definitely changed within the past 15 years. Just like you can't say today's Punk music is really Punk at all by 1970s standards. I see this as a crisis and a challenge. It seems most others don't see it in cultural terms at all, simply as a technological shift.

But that human touch that you mentioned is present in your works for piano, no?
The Rubato Series piano solos, as well as the house music released on my private label Comatonse Recordings, both definitely play with signs of the human touch. But it is not about authenticity or an ability to play instruments (which, of course, I cannot play any!). It is about how a person with no musical ability can invoke an image of virtuosity (in the words of some reviewers), simply by regurgitating what I have heard on the albums I own. And, more importantly, how an audience places more value on works which they can identify as "coming from the heart".
I firmly believe this is a conditioned response created in consumers, despite the desire for people to feel music is "universal". It amazes me that the very people who say music is universal, whether they are western classical musicians or house DJ's, never address the fact that everyone has a genre of music they truly hate, defeating any model of universality.
For example, I truly hate classical music, both in terms of sound and in terms of what it represents historically as the sound of feudal elitism. That horrible sound has survived hundreds of years while the sounds of people on my corresponding economic level from that era have been forgotten. In a similar way, I consider the projects I produce as works to be forgotten. Queer history, transgendered history, the history of the poor, all of these are constantly being buried, only to be excavated in fragments. So the entire presumption that producers or DJ's like myself are contributing to a "universal canon" capable of appealing to everyone is just offensive and ignorant to me. It also clearly shows a lack of perspective as to one's actual potential audiences. But it is standard thinking, of course.
That is the context I am playing with when incorporating the sounds of a "human touch", the rhetoric of which is imposed on my works regardless. So I might as well engage it directly.

Are you still into activism, these days?
Not so much with the straight-on, direct, social action type of stuff anymore… For me, that was mostly in the late 1980s, and the majority of those grass-roots organizations have since changed into CBO's (Community Based Organizations) or NGO's (Non-Government Organizations).
The age of direct activism is gone, it's tactics for social disruption all coopted by mass media. We need a new approach, one that is neither the old model of activism, nor easily adaptable to business models and corporate endowments. Right now, I don't know what that might be. Recently, Ultra-red has been doing work around that question. But personally, I got kind of disillusioned with activism…

In what way?
Basically, I always had to advocate for my own non-essentialist approach to identity in consistently essentialist terms… Especially when it comes to identity issues, there’s always so much emphasis on legislation, making identities legally recognized, and that sort of thing. But the presumption that visibility always equals power is flawed.
Also, the ways that most gay and lesbian agendas approach transgendered issues is all so incredibly reductionist and over-simplified. They always put the drag queens in the front of events, like the Pride parades, but hide us from sight when it's time to legislate. It’s like putting the clowns in the front and that sort of bull-shit attitude… There are personal issues that I just couldn’t always deal with. That kind of pressure…

So, do you think that there’s been an assimilation procedure, regarding gays and lesbians, in the U.S.?
Yeah, I tried to address that in my “Love for Sale” project. But not only in America. It’s interesting that in a lot of times, and in different countries – especially in Germany, perhaps simply because I have the most exposure there – people are really quick to explain how progressive and open society is around issues of sexuality. They ask why I need to present this information about transgenderism if everyone is ok with it, to which I can only ask when was the last time they saw a transgendered person in the context of "everyday work", such as doing the register at a supermarket, or working at a gas station, or in an office? A liberal belief in social openness does not equate with social mobility.

Do you believe that it’s a case of lack of sincerity?
I don’t think that it’s lack of sincerity, but lack of exposure, on a real, material, social interactive level. Statistically, when we discuss queer or transgendered interaction, we're not only talking numerically about a certain fraction of the larger population, but culturally about bodies and behaviours that revolve around invisibility, hiding, closets, passing as people we "are not", etc.
This makes it very complicated to discuss visibility when we are simultaneously relying on a kind of duplicitous silence that – despite the slogan – does not always equal death. Silence is also how people survive. So, in that way all these ideas and notions of a society being accepting and free just float around – it’s just ideas, a kind of weird exercise. It’s over-simplistic.
It reminds me of when I was a child in the Midwest U.S., where an entire community could be White. It doesn't mean everyone in that community was racist, but how could you effectively discuss issues of racial discrimination within such a context, where the dynamics of how the community came to be so racially homogenous in the first place are cloaked in social processes that are just taken for granted?

There’s only the exposure that the system wants to exist?
Yes, I guess so.

What’s your relationship with the gay and lesbian community? You seem to joke about everything, like the parades. How do they react to your work?
Well, in general my work has been ignored by the queer press and events. “Love for Sale” did get some coverage, simply because of its cover, which was a parody of a stock market exchange, but with all the different currency symbols replaced by the rainbow flag and other queer commercial symbols. But the reviews stayed on a totally superficial level, without getting into it.
They ended up saying, “Hey, based on the cover this is for us”, which was the kind of marketing response I wanted to trigger – this desire to commercially consume one's sexuality. Then they opened it and there was this big critique of the pink economy and the commodification of sexuality, deconstructing the very urges that made them want to buy something with a rainbow flag on it.
But, anyway, I do have affinities with the gay and lesbian community, and part of my queer identity is, of course, a relation to gay and lesbianism. The thing is that, for my experience, I don’t fit cleaning into one identity, so I try to be critical of them all – heterosexual and homosexual as sides of the same ideological coin - which isolates me.

Is Japan different, at that level?
Yeah, I’m much happier here. It's clear that I’m totally an outsider from the start, and so people don’t expect anything from me – it’s liberating. Especially in the transgendered community, there’s a different relationship that I’m allowed to have to the public. In the U.S., the response to my walking in public in drag would be verbal and physical abuse. It’s a very tactile form of critique, when you’re going down the street… In Japan, it’s more a silent ostracism.
So for me, the silence is golden. But I also have to explain that, for people born here, the silence and ostracism is a painful nightmare. There are never mass solutions in this world. One person's "liberation" is hand-in-hand with another's oppression. This hypocrisy is unavoidable, even though the liberals will continue to fantasize about "freedom".

Let’s talk on politics now. How deep is your interest on Marxism?
Is Marxism actually political anymore? [laughs] Well, I do love Karl Marx writings – he’s my favourite author. For me, the thing that’s really valuable about Marxism, besides the idea of historical materialism, is that he has a great sense of humour. There’s a lot of satire and sarcasm in his work, which I really appreciate.
But I also think that it is really valuable to talk and think about how Marxism failed. The point where I deviate from Marxism is that I’m really interested in the failures of Marx' theories – I don’t identify myself as a Marxist.

Or, at least, you’re a deviant one...
Yeah [laughs]. And actually, I would not be afraid to call myself a Marxist, but my use of the title would be a bit sarcastic, and probably just to piss off someone I consider Right-wing.
It’s like in my Sanriot design project, where I took the Sanrio Hello Kitty aesthetic and used that style to make renderings of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxembourg and all these leftist heroes as cute, cuddley characters. On the one hand, the project was about making their images accessible. On the other hand, it was a cynical comment on the commodification and institutionalization of Leftism, Like the Che Guevara logos found everywhere.

In which way is your design work connected to the music? Or are they two totally different “universes”?
I definitely consider all of my projects "multi-media" in that they include audio, visual design and often an analytical text. The designs of CD's are always limited, not only by the format but by the labels themselves.
Usually it's a budget issue. It can also be that the labels have their own look under which audio producers are expected to facelessly release our materials (remember Fax Records? that was the model for the Instinct Ambient Series, by the way). But I've always struggled to have my texts included, and done my own design work. Graphics are really the least flexible part of a commercial audio release, and the printers always make mistakes, and they assemble things wrong. For example, the CD "Oh, No! It's Rubato" was sold with my full parody of DEVO's album cover showing, but in fact my intended cover was the other side of that tray card, etc.
In terms of quality control, it's really the most difficult aspect of a project. There are only a few covers I've designed that I think live up to the audio and texts, which I don't think is asking very much to begin with [laughs].
But the graphics are not always intended to illustrate the audio or text, just as the text is usually not a description of the audio. The different elements are intended to play off one other, so maybe in that way there is still an allowance for space between "universes", as you say.
I think the "Lovebomb" video is my best synergy of visuals, audio and text, even though the three elements often contrast one another. It probably comes closest to being what I had hoped to produce since I first started doing this…just in time for Mille Plateaux to go under, and the collapse of the electronic music market. Another lovebomb…

Nuno Loureiro and Rui Farinha
Photos: Comatonse Recordings


Note: This work is based on a first interview recorded years ago for broadcast in the Tecnosterona radio show , at Radio Universidade de Coimbra, at the time of a Terre Thaemlitz' presentation of the "Interstices" performance (Serralves Contemporary Art Museum, Oporto).

The “It” series, by Crispin Hellion Glover

Currently on presentation in several cinemas and theatres throughout the USA, “It is Fine! Everything is Fine.” is the part two of the “It” Trilogy, by veteran actor Crispin Hellion Glover, who has appeared in over 30 films, including “River's Edge”, “Charlie's Angels”, “The Doors”, “Willard”, “Dead Man”, “Back to the Future”, “What's Eating Glibert Grape”, “Wild At Heart”, “The People vs. Larry Flynt”, as well as the more recent “Beowulf”, “The Wizard of Gore” and “Epic Movie”.

In this production, Glover collaborated with Utah writer-actor Steven C. Stewart, who also appears in “What is it?” the first film of this feature series. Stewart passed away from complications from cerebral palsy in 2001.

One important element on this film is the soundtrack, which makes use of Wagner and Bartok excerpts to ironic effect, as well as tracks by late Church of Satan high priest Anton LaVey, Charles Manson and a country track by Klassic Klan recording artist Johnny Rebel. Let’s not forget that Glover is a musician himself, having issued the “The Big Problem does not equal the solution. The Solution equals Let It Be” album, which can somehow be considered as the sound version of his very own imaginary.

Known for creating many memorable, incredibly quirky characters onscreen as an actor, Crispin Hellion Glover's “What is it?” – his first effort as a director – does not disappoint the fans of his offbeat sensibilities and eccentric taste.

Featuring a cast largely comprised of actors with Down Syndrome, the film is not about Down Syndrome. Glover describes it as being «the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are snails, salt, a pipe and how to get home, as tormented by an hubristic racist inner psyche». He also explains that the film is his psychological reaction to corporate controls of expression limiting the exploration of taboo.

In addition to writing and directing “What is it?”, Glover also appears in the film as an actor in the role of «Dueling Demi-God Auteur and the young man's inner psyche».

Fairuza Balk voices one of the snails.




GPInformation
Photos: R.R.

AGF: "Words are Missing"

Music by Antye Greie, also known as AGF, didn't make it in Vital Weekly for reasons that will never be known. AGF was once a member of Laub, an electronic pop duo and released solo work on Orthlong Musork, Asphodel, Mixer and since some time on her own AGF Producktion.

I lost count what she released so it's a bit hard for me to place her new CD (her fourth solo), "Words Are Missing", in the larger context of her work. Poetry, vocals, language play an important role in her work, but for this new one words are missing - she uses the voice to create sound and the computer to transform those sounds. In the booklet every track gets a picture - sometimes a photo, but it can also be words, letters or something that could something like that.



The music by AGF is highly personal music, in which she puts together personal emotions, feelings and experiences. Yet this is no an entirely closed work, the title of the pieces in combination with the visual aspect give the listener an idea what they are about. "KZ" (short in German for concentration camp) is based on a visit to Buchenwald when she was sixteen. From her voice she constructs beats, drones, cut up voices are looped and it might be best easy to say her work is click n cuts. Not abstract as with many of her male counterparts, not danceable as related to the dancefloor, yet strong on rhythm, moods and atmospheres. Perhaps sixteen tracks is a bit long, but it's certainly a varied work, sometimes heavy on rhythm, sometimes as quiet as poetry can be.

Very nice. I should check out what else I missed from her.

[CD by AGF Producktion]

Frans de Waard / Vital Weekly
AGF photo: Vladislav Delay

João Canavilhas: "Webnoticia: Propuesta de Modelo Periodístico Para La WWW"

João Canavilhas é docente e investigador na UBI, e publicou a sua tese de doutoramento defendida na Universidade de Salamanca. “Webnoticia: Propuesta de Modelo Periodístico Para La WWW” é um trabalho que aborda as mudanças trazidas pela comunicação na web ao modelo de comunicação jornalístico.

«O jornalismo na web continua sem encontrar um modelo que lhe permita demarcar-se claramente dos jornalismos escrito, televisivo e radiofónico.

Embora os investigadores tenham identificado várias características próprias deste jornalismo – hipertextualidade, multimedialidade, interactividade, instantaneidade, personalização, memória e ubiquidade – apenas as quatro últimas são visíveis na esmagadora maioria das publicações online. As três características relacionadas com linguagem - hipertextualidade, multimedialidade, interactividade - continuam ausentes das publicações e por isso está ainda por definir uma linguagem específica para o webjornalismo.

Este livro é parte da tese de doutoramento “Webnoticia: propuesta de modelo periodístico para la WWW” e pretende ser um pequeno contributo para a identificação de uma linguagem convergente para o webjornalismo».

«En la actualidad la reciente evolución técnica de hardware y software, la reducción de precios de los equipos informáticos y el crecimiento de la banda ancha, permiten unos planteamientos más experimentales en los que se desarrollan y ponen a prueba modelos informativos que exploran las características de Internet o, más particularmente, las características de la Word Wide Web».

Alexandre Gamela / O Lago
Imagem: D.R.

Beatriz Sánchez: "Paraoffelias" (video)

"Paraoffelias" (fotografia: D.R.)

"Paraoffelias" é o título de um fascinante trabalho em vídeo da autoria de Beatriz Sánchez, com música de David Dalmazzo, disponível através da videolabel Alg-a.

Trata-se de uma co-produção entre a TV3 da Catalunha e a NU2's, com a colaboracão do departamento de Cultura da Generalitat de Catalunya.

Sinopse:

«"Paraoffelias" arranca de la idea de la infeliz y enigmática Ofelia shakespeariana ahogada, tomando como referencia la iconografía humanista del Renacimiento (Bosco, Miguel Ángel y Boticcelli). Pero al final, en este vídeo no existe una sola Ofelia, sino vari@s, Parte de un rodaje realizado bajo agua donde diez personajes practican, con raros movimientos, una especie de danza. El montaje y la posproducción se encargan de componer una coreografía. La música es más bien una extraña atmósfera que sumerge más aun estas imágenes en un misterioso y oscuro ambiente».

Information report from V2 / Spread the Word

21 Million Stickers and Continued Activities Worldwide
Having just passed the 21 million sticker milestone, STW extends a very special thanks once again to our ever-constant and kind friends in Mexico City for their heroic diligence there, despite occasional frustrations with abducted packages. We also wish to acknowledge our brave ally in Bulgaria facilitating sticker distribution in Macedonia and the Balkans. To our old friend in Portugal, thank you for helping to spread the word in your language via the Internet. Anonymous resisters at the Burning Man event in Nevada made the emblem quite visible once again, for which we are extremely grateful, as attendance was near 50,000 this year. Thanks always to all our friends in the music industry worldwide. Continued gratitude to our longtime friend in Texas for ongoing distribution efforts at the local library there. And to our brethren from delusionresistance.org who were the voice of resistance at the Roswell Festival, we salute you all.

Resistance in Action
Courtesy of Eclipse Records, STW has a Street Team!

Accolades to Mail Artists and Relay for Life Team
STW would like to offer a long delayed extension of gratitude and respect to the worldwide mail-art network. Mail artists from around the globe have distributed stickers for over a decade through their own unique and creative web. We are honored to be a part of the mail-art community whose correspondences have colored the STW mailbox for many years. Our deep thanks also to the American Cancer Society Relay for Life Team/Florida for their fine efforts supporting both causes this past spring. Well done everyone!

Resistance efforts in South America

Many thanks to the major record and concert production company in Bogota, Colombia, for its resistance efforts in South America. The company distributes stickers at concerts, and includes a sticker on every event ticket. Through industry magazines, this company has offered networking of resistance materials in conjunction with international band promotion. Spread the Word wishes to extend deepest gratitude to the tour manager/editor who has been behind the alien resistance movement for nearly 10 years. Muchas gracias to our loyal andcaring friend for continued and tireless dedication.

Resistance activities underway in Kosovo, formerly Yugoslavia

Kosovo is a struggling country with an average monthly salary of $30 and unemployment rate of 60%, yet still wanting participation in world issues. For security reasons, supplies were sent to a contact person in a neighboring country who was kind enough to deliver the stickers across the border to a library in Kosovo, where they will be distributed. STW extends our deep gratitude to the courageous individuals behind this effort.

Akkord I On: "ppp-fff"

Slowly Vital Weekly conquers the world - or rather the world conquers Vital Weekly. Akkord I On are from Almaty, Kazakhstan - the very first time I receive something from that part of the world, of which I know nothing (but I never go the cinema either).

The label Replica was launched during a festival of the same name, the very first (again!) in that country. Akkord I On is a duo of Roman Bliznetsov and Konstantin Timoshenko, who released an EP before and now come with "ppp-fff", which classical music phrase for "pianissimo-fortissimo" - very strong silence that is.




Timoshenko plays laptop, field recordings and electronics, while Bliznetsov plays accordion (hence the band name), small horns and objects. Just as we recently saw with the release by Zavoloko, this seems to be a new wave of artists merging music from their own country along with microsound, techno or more experimental music. Akkord I On does it mainly with techno like music. Pieces are held together with a 4/4 rhythm, over which they freely (and more experimentally) freak out with their sounds.

Not every moment succeeds well, such as "Grace" which is way too long, and muddles in dub effects, but the opening "F Birds" is very nice, with clear field recordings, melancholy on the accordion and a strong beat. Also "Shoegazetta" is quite alright (and the titles shows their humor, "L'Amourmansk" is another fine example).

This release may have needed a bit more editing, but as debut it's quite alright.

[CD-R by Replica]

Frans de Waard / Vital Weekly
Photos: R.R.

Interview: Elliott Sharp

New York blues

He’s one of those who have been symbols of the avant-garde in New York, but his relation with that city has changed, because – he says – «it's not the same». The multifaceted sound artist Elliott Sharp talks to GPInformation on this subject, as well as on his work and its origins and identity.

Let's start by the present. What are your current projects? In what are you working these days?
I'm in the middle of composing a 45-minute piece, "Polymerae", for Frankfurt's Ensemble Modern, that will premiere in April with the dance company of Jacopo Godoni, and I've just completed a piece titled "Sidebands", dedicated to Karlheinz Stockhausen for the Fylkingen Festival in Stockholm in February. I've also just finished recording a set of my recent string quartets with the Sirius Quartet. There are also recently recorded improvised duos with Frances-Marie Uitti, Josef von Wissem, Scott Fields, and Saadet Turkoz.

Throughout your career, you have been developing a close relation between "conventional" instrumentation and electronics. However, in the "Sharp? Monk? Sharp! Monk!" project your option was to play only with a guitar. Was that a conceptual option, or did you just felt that it was the best way for interpreting Thelonious Monk?
I often play acoustic guitar at home and Monk's music is something I enjoy playing. It seemed natural to record it that way. I've done a number of fully acoustic recordings in recent years and I like the sound very much.

After the more "classical" sound of previous projects, "Hums 2 Terre" brought you back to more experimental territories. Was that intentional on any way, or was it only a part of a natural process?
I don't believe I've ever left any of my operating zones - through-composed orchestra pieces, "experimental" work, improvisations, blues, film scores, electronic and computer music. They're all parallel threads.

You have studied a wide range of academic disciplines, like for instance, ethnomusicology. What's the importance of that scientific background on your musical production? And, in the same line of thought, how does physics reflects on your work?
Everything I read or study ends up being part of the process! I do like the way mathematicians and physicists map reality to abstraction. It's very resonant with the way I compose and I like to imagine my musical processes as operating in a similar way.

Probably this is a limitative question, but - and in spite of your other influences - would you consider blues and jazz to be a kind of a "skeleton" of your musical work?
I don't know if I would put it that way. I grew up listening to and playing blues and jazz - they're as much a part of my daily life as speaking English or drinking coffee.

Who were your favourite musicians, back then?
The first jazz record that I really "heard" was John Coltrane's "Live at The Village Vanguard" – I listened to it because of his published obituary in the “NY Times” the day of his death. It whetted my curiosity and a friend's father had the record which we put on – I was blown away by it! Next for me was the Mingus record "Oh Yeah" on Atlantic - absolutely killing.
I became very excited by jazz and tried to listen to everything I could get my hands on, searching record store bargain piles (because I had no money!) and in libraries. When I became a radio DJ at Carnegie-Mellon University's WRCT during a summer session there, as a "junior scientist", when I was still in high school in 1968, I dug into the ESP records as well as lots of Ornette, Ayler, Cecil Taylor, Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra.
My exposure to blues started with The Yardbirds and The Stones and I soon was listening mostly to Howlin' Wolf with Hubert Sumlin, Muddy Waters, Lightnin' Hopkins, Skip James, Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson, Big Joe Williams, Blind Willie Johnson, Otis Rush, Albert Collins, B.B. King, Albert King, Freddie King.




When was the moment in which you started to get into more experimental sounds?
As soon as I began to explore music, I was into the outer limits. I was a science fiction fan growing up and I loved the soundtracks to sci-fi films (and still love), Bernard Herrman's score to "The Day The Earth Stood Still" and "Mysterious Island", as well as the wonderful electronic soundtrack to "Forbidden Planet" by Bebe and Louis Barron, which I first heard around 1963.
My access to the music library at WRCT allowed me to dig in deep to various composers such as Cage, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Partch, Ligeti (saw "2001:A Space Odyssey" that Summer as well with Ligeti's incredible music) and more.

Although being a multi-instrumentist, is there a special instrument for you, in terms of use and sound?
I'm most comfortable with guitars but when I have the time to keep in practice I truly love playing saxophone and clarinets.

While performing live, do you prefer to perform "prepared" works, or just improvise, taking yourself by the moment?
I like them all – it's only dependent on the desired situation.

I can't help having in mind your contribution for the "Alphabet City" album (released on the Sub Rosa United Series). In which way are you inspired by cities, in general, and New York, in particular?
New York was (and I'm using the past tense purposefully) a very inspiring place for creative work. I still love living here but it's not the same – it's about marketing and consumption, not about living out a creative fantasy and manifesting it in art.




In your online tour diary, you mentioned the fact having played in Portugal only a few weeks after 9/11. Were you in New York that day? Which are your mains memories of it?
I arrived back from Warsaw the day before. My main thoughts were anger at the people who perpetrated this horror – NOT the ones who piloted the planes but the government of George Bush and his cohorts in the corporate oligarchy. If not actually ordering the attack, their policies created the conditions. There's too much to go into here!

After these years, what's your vision on what was changed in the city, both from the social and artistic points of view?
This city is controlled by real estate forces. Its character has changed and there's not much we can do about it in terms of keeping it vital as a creative place – cities change and the creative force moves to other locales.

Talking of New York, do you feel close to the Radical Jewish Culture, promoted by John Zorn?
Not at all. "Jewish culture" had almost always been radical, but this particular movement is very Zionistic and reactionary. I presented my piece "Intifada" at the first Radical Jewish Culture festival in NYC, at the Knitting Factory, and I was booed and shouted down when I gave a preamble to the concert saying that Judaism, whether cultural or religious, is not necessarily the same as Zionism and that as the son of a Holocaust survivor, I find the Israeli oppression of the rightful and long-time inhabitants of the area known as Palestine to be shameful and abhorrent. I greatly dislike religion and nationalism - the source of much human suffering!

Artists like Zorn himself or Z'ev have inspired some of their works on the Jewish heritage. Did you ever have a similar approach?
Just as all of my work is informed by my interest in the sciences and acoustics, all of my work is informed by my Jewish heritage. I just don't wear it on my sleeve!

Nuno Loureiro
(Interview + photos)


This interview is also available at the Clean Feed and Trem Azul blogs.

Iris Ollschewski: "Sound-Destillation"

Destillaat is a yearly exhibition of young artists at Extrapool, taking the form of video, installation, painting, printing and in some cases music. To distill the new talent from the various art schools in The Netherlands.

One of this year' s participants was German's Iris Ollschewski, who asked a whole bunch of people that at one point or another played at Extrapool to send in some sounds from which she would distill a composition that was played on four speakers in a small room. Thirteen people responded positively and Iris composed a six minute piece out of that. It's hard to believe that it comes from such diverse sources, even when Iris applies collage like methods to create the piece. The various sources flow quite naturally into eachother and form a coherent music composition of little over six minutes, also when "reduced" to a stereo mix.

Comes with a nice cover and limited to a few handful copies. Completists for the works of say Roel Meelkop, Harald Sack Ziegler or Machinefabriek should pay notice!

"SoundBodies, oder wohin führt ein Kreis?"
(turntable installation by Iris Ollschewski)

[3"CD-R, private release]

Frans de Waard / Vital Weekly
Photo: R.R.

Vaimous: "Box"

The man behind Vaimous is one Johan Sandsjö, who still uses software he downloaded to his 486 computer in 1998, when the Swedish government started a program of bringing PCs to their civilians.

The pieces on this CD were recorded over a long period, from 2003-2006, and they were recorded to be played live. Thirteen relatively short electro pop tracks are to be found here: stomping rhythm box, fat bass and vocoder vocals. Maybe it lacks some variation here and there, but throughout it's a very pleasant listening. I was reminded of good Suction Records releases (whatever happened there?) and releases of Swedish Slowball label - which also seems very old by now.

But that doesn't mean that this sounds old or worn out, Vaimous brings quirky uptempo electro-pop punk and it's great. A small strip of sunlight on a rainy day.

[CD by Empop]

Frans de Waard / Vital Weekly
Photo: R.R

jliat: "now thats what i call noise" vol. 10

«Oh yes - i do. In the past whether and whatever i did i always had to push onto something new - even the drones in the end became from the point of making them less and less interesting / exciting. I remember feeling sick that this happened and envious of painters like Pollock who could continue the same kind of thing for many works over a period. But with the noise works this just hasn't happened!

So i've been making these short tracks for soon a year and have recorded already up to volume 20. When time allows i want to make many more and create a virtual Mall online of downloads. Maybe an animated shopping Mall where all the shops stock jliat noise... so just as the 3.59 tracks parody the pop single i can parody the present consumerism...»

Note: This collection is already on its 12th volume.

[CD-R by jliat]

Frans de Waard / Vital Weekly
Photo: R.R.

Novidades Alg-a

D.R.

"aliaXe", de Xe, é um dos mais recentes lançamentos da netlabel Alg-a. Este projecto, «que disolve os anteriores plumbandplumber e uveaele», apresenta «un conxunto de "accións percusivas" nos elementos da batería (caixa, charles, timbáis), coa axuda de diversos obxetos (de forma non ortodoxa e en baixa calidade), para mais tarde mesturar, transformar e descontextualizar os sons resultantes das accións, con procesos electroacústicos e dixitáis. Un total de dez micro-composicións deseñadas tanto para a escoita con auriculares, coma para levalos de ton no móbil».

Entretanto, também disponível no site da Alg-a está o (muito interessante) vídeo "irration4l", de MARULA, uma artista visual galega que trabalha sobretudo no campo do video jockey.

D.R.

Senses - Ciclo de Música Electrónica e Multimédia

Mika Vainio (fotografia: D.R.)

Depois do óptimo cartão de visita que foi a actuação de Tim Hecker, em Outubro do ano passado, o ciclo Senses, dedicado à música electrónica e ao multimédia, volta ao palco do Teatro Académico de Gil Vicente (TAGV), em Coimbra.

E o início não poderia ser melhor, com a apresentação ao vivo, no próximo dia 24 de Janeiro, de Mika Vainio, uma das "caras-metade" do projecto finlandês Pan Sonic. O ciclo segue em Fevereiro, nomeadamente no dia 28, com os alemães Rechenzentrum. Para Abril, está já confirmada a presença de Colleen.

Rechenzentrum
(fotografia: Martin Eberle)

Recorde-se que, em 2007, esta iniciativa contou com a presença de nomes como People Like Us, Murcof, ISAN, Vítor Joaquim ou FM3, entre outros.

Senses é uma organização do TAGV, com programação de Afonso Macedo.

Colleen (fotografia: D.R.)

Alfredo Costa Monteiro: "Allotropie"

Despite my name, my French is not what it could have been if I paid more attention in school, but if I understand correctly from the short liner notes of this release, the music was made for an installation made in Barcelona, using sounds from 100 different kinds of paper and there is no use of electronics.

Monteiro is one half of Cremaster, as well as many other improvisation musics. The twenty minute piece is an interesting one, especially if we are indeed to believe that it's the paper who does the talking. I am not entirely sure how these sounds are generated (microphone recording? contact microphones? tearing? rubbing? cutting?), but it's very hard to believe that this just the sound of paper. It seems like an onkyo recording of a saxophone, but in a multi-layered fashion. The collage like approach works quite well here. Part noise, totally culled from improvisations.

Very nice release.

[CD-R by Bourbaki Records]

Frans de Waard / Vital Weekly
Photo: Bourbaki Records