with YANN GOURDON, RAFAËL ROZENDAAL, FLORIS VAN HOOF, JUSTIN BENNETT, REMCO VAN BLADEL A.O.
Moving back and forth between sound and scripture, this evening consists of experimental performances and short lectures, with a special focus on Charlemagne Palestine’s visual renderings of sound included in his exhibition “GesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandtttt” at Witte de With CCA in Rotterdam.
Can a tune be translated into an image? Can the “detuning” of music generate new ways of thinking about the relation between sound and scripture? The notation of sound has a long and varied history, from Gregorian chants conducted following signs written in the air to the standard notation of western music we know today, and the possibilities offered by new computer technologies. The program includes performances by Yann Gourdon and Floris van Hoof, works by Rafaël Rozendaal and a reading by Remco van Bladel. Next to that there will be graphic works by students of ArtEZ - Graphic Design.
As a production platform, specialised in the relationship between sound, art, publishing and performance, for ART Rotterdam 2017 DE PLAYER presents works of artists within the frame of the project Pu-shi-ng-Sco-res; a project by DE PLAYER and Remco van Bladel, Dutch graphic designer.
Live event for our Pushing the Score project with Telcosystems (nl), Julia Buennagel (de) and Derek Holzer (us). Focussing on the potential of grahic scores and publishing of sound and image we present Telcosystems with their recent publication Resonanz, a reading on Schematic as a Score plus concert by Derek Holzer plus a live performance of Julia Bünnagel with modified records.
An evening with remarkable experiments and materialised conceptual flip flop. DE PLAYER will unveil its third issue of Tetra Gamma Circulaire (TGC) – the unknown audio magazine. TGC #3 is compiled in collaboration with students of the Piet Zwart Institute, and is also part of their Experimental Publishing programme of the Media Design Master, named XPUB.
Tetra Gamma Circulaire #3 is travelling now as an open floppy platform. First station is at Pinkie Bowtie Antwerp where we will introduce the TGC#3 in its entity as an unknown music magazine and point out its specific features by demonstrating the floppy works which are already in the collection. By travelling with TGC#3 we aim to expand the floppy collection of it and focus on experimental ways of publishing. For the Pinkie Bowtie session we invited Antwerp related artists to contribute to the project. So far Evelin Brosi. AMVK and JODI will show up to get informed on matters and will start to produce their floppy for the collection from there. The meeting is open for public who is interested in experimental ways of publishing or just like to hang out in a ambiance of artistic nouveauté.
This day the work 'Para-phonic Poly-diso' will be launched at The Small Museum of Paradiso, Amsterdam. 'Para-phonic Poly-diso' is a graphic score for a digital, polyphonic choir wherein visitors of Paradiso can participate with their mobile phone. This work, developed for the Small Museum project of Paradiso, is part of Pushing the Score; a research project by DE PLAYER i.c.w. Remco van Bladel about the current state and potential of the concept of 'graphical score'. The voice for this work is by Laetitia Saedier of Stereolab.
‘Greatest Hits’ is an exhibition based on 25 hand drawn scores by Matthieu Reijnoudt. His best ones. Thirteen of these scores will be on show on the billboards underneath Maashaven Metrostation. Just so you can see them day and night, for about three weeks long. The complete selection of scores is published in a music book. The entire music book will be performed three times during the South Explorer weekend. For every performance a different instrument has been selected.
As you know, there are those evenings after which the sun rises differently. The E-ARTHHA event is about the search for new interfaces and possibilities of sound composition, image and performance. In his lecture, Douglas Kahn discards old categories of sound and performance and replaces them with a new category of "energy" in the bigger narrative of ecology and other sensitivities. Coming from different biotopes, our other guests will all have different points of departure for their performances.
On this evening we focus on archiving our Pushing the Score project. This project on the nowadays meaning of the 'graphic score' has been running the last 2-3 years.
What are the possibilities of graphic scores, in a day and age in which graphic notation is still usually seen as a ‘drawing’, serving as some kind of sheet music?
Throughout 2016 and 2018, this project will research the phenomenon of notation and the graphic representation of music.
It unfolds through a nomadic program which includes the creation of newly commissioned artworks and public events that addres scontemporary questions and issues in this particular field.
Graphic scores and notation have a long history, dating back to the tenth century, when the Gregorian chants of the scola cantorum were already being conducted through the writing of signs in the air. Later on this developed into the type of musical notation we are familiar with in Western music. In the early- and mid-twentieth century, the abstract developments in the visual arts played a vital role in new approaches to the question of music notation and contemporary avant-garde music. This continues to question the representation of sound in media; so what is the current state of the graphic score?
Throughout the project, Jacques Attali’s book ‘Noise: The Political Economy of Music’ will function as a reference and inspirational guide; “pushing the score” in search of its current potential. It will seek concepts and configurations that produce new, previously unknown, relationships in the field of sound, visual arts, and performance. The discursive program for 2016–2017 will include lectures, presentations of newly commissioned artworks, concert evenings, and workshops.
Pushing the Score is a project researching graphic notation, based on a desire to update this form of music and sound notation for the 21^st century. Starting from the motto ‘from Cage to JODI and beyond’ and from the avant-garde music and sound art of the 20^th century, the project researches new audio-visual languages, media and functions of graphic notation in a contemporary context characterised by a fundamental transformation of sound culture and visual culture. A number of specific themes will be initiated, developed and presented in the context of a public research programme in collaboration with artists, designers and various cultural organisations such as the Piet Zwart Institute, the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, and Sonic Acts.
What are the possibilities of graphic scores, in a day and age in which graphic notation is still usually seen as a ‘drawing’ serving as some kind of sheet music? In an attempt to redefine this concept, we will be compiling a programme in which artists, musicians,
theoreticians and practitioners are invited to participate. The collective goal is to develop and present new audio-visual and media-technical forms of graphic notation through artistic research and development. Based on our compilation of the most contemporary and innovative graphic notation practices in the fields of music, sound art, performance art, e-culture, new-media art, graphic design and media design, we will introduce artists and designers from various creative disciplines to a national and international audience, with the goal of collectively developing new forms of graphic notation.
The incentive for this project is the belief that graphic notation in 20^th -century avant-garde music and sound art constitutes an important, still radically innovative but wrongfully marginalised form, which can play a key role in the development of new audio-visual languages and media. Our ambition, and that of our collaborating partners, is to emancipate graphic notation from the confines of the modernist tradition, in such a way that it may remain an innovative and provocative medium for decades to come.
Concrete object with floppydrive, local wifi station and diverse electronic applications - edition 12 pieces.
TGC #3 is compiled in collaboration with students of the Piet Zwart Institute, and is also part of their Experimental Publishing programme of the Media Design Master, named XPUB.
TGC #3 is a particular kind of publishing platform engineered for sonic experiments, instruments, and installations. Some dare say it's a kind of jukebox.
Made of concrete as a body, an internal stand alone wifi station enables you to get in touch with the content of this floppyesk magazine.
artists: Piet Zwart Institute XPUB, DE PLAYER, Karina Dukalska, Max Franklin, Giulia de Giovanelli, Francisco González, Margreet Riphagen, Nadine Rotem-Stibbe, Kimmy Sreeuwenberg
DE PLAYER was asked by XPUB of Piet Zwart Institute to do a seminar during a 3 month period with their students. We proposed them to make a publication in our Tetra Gamma Circulaire. This is a magazine without any format and meant to be developed each time. We worked around the idea of Pushing Scores. each student had to develop its own project around the proces of making a score. All these scores had to come together in one magazine/object. The restriction was made that the scores had to be presented on floppy disc. This was to limit possibilities and also to unite the format. The result is a mix of several media. All comes together in a designed concrete object. “feed Flintstone meets 21st century”. A Raspberry Pi is the core which is programmed for several applications. Besides that there is a floppy drive, speakers, audio input, a camera, touchpads, LED light.
Presentation of PRINCIPIUM 2.0 (DOB 073) in Stadslimiet Antwerp. The installation setup contains 6 of 12 releases of PRINCIPIUM 2.0. During the performance which took, several hours visitors could freely join, listen and ask questions to the artist, Remörk aka Kris Delacourt.
Description: Can a tune be translated into an image? Can the “detuning” of music generate new ways of thinking about the relation between sound and scripture? The notation of sound has a long and varied history, from Gregorian chants conducted following signs written in the air to the standard notation of western music we know today, and the possibilities offered by new computer technologies. The program includes performances by Yann Gourdon and Floris van Hoof, works by Rafaël Rozendaal and a reading by Remco van Bladel. Next to that there will be graphic works by students of ArtEZ Arnhem - Graphic Design.
* Moving back and forth between sound and scripture, this evening consists of experimental performances and short lectures, with a special focus on Charlemagne Palestine’s visual renderings of sound included in his exhibition “GesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandtttt” at Witte de With CCA in Rotterdam.
Hurdy-gurdy player, composer, and sound artist Yann Gourdon looks at vibratory fields and sound perception as a medium. He focuses mainly on acoustic phenomena that have a dynamic relationship with their environment. Every aspect of his work deals with quality of sound. It's not a matter of an event between spectators and a musician, it's 'a space to submit to a process.
RAFAËL ROZENDAAL (nl) A visual artist who uses the internet as his canvas. These works deal with continuïty and an endless accessibility. Visual and audio intensified perceptions in a specific space. His websites attract a large audience of over 40 million unique visits per year. His artistic practice consists of websites, installations, lenticulars, lectures and haiku.
Filmmaker & musician from Belgium. Connecting his many worlds, ideas and influences into highly personal live performances and recordings, Floris Vanhoof keeps on amazing people here and abroad. For this event he will work with filmscreening and synthesizer which he influences with his brainwaves.
JUSTIN BENNETT (uk) is an artist working with sound and visual media. The everyday sound of our urban surroundings at every level of detail is the focus of his work where he develops the reciprocity of music and architecture, and sound and image.
Amsterdam based graphic designer, and co-founder of noise band/art collective Sonido Gris. He is also an art book publisher ('Onomatopee', 'WdW Review'). His studio work focusses on editorial book design, publishing projects, curatorial projects, institutional identities, interactive applications and websites.
He is a typography and graphic design tutor at ArtEZ — Art and Design, Arnhem and is a frequent guest teacher at art schools throughout the Netherlands and abroad.
We were discussing several projects and possibilities of cooperation with Defne Ayas and Samuel Saelmakers of Witte de With CCA when they asked us to cooperate in the exhibition “GesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandtttt” by organizing a live event. I knew the work of Charlemagne and we have met already in earlier events so it was clear we could do something that makes sense. As a composer, funnily enough, Charlemagne hardly uses any scores. Nevertheless, he showed me some books he once made in New York of which he said that those ones are to be seen as musical scores. They are cheap dummy books on which he poured ink in several colors. The ink was absorbed by the books and after drying it had become pieces which turned out to be a serie of morphing colors by each page turn. These books were the starting point of curating the event which we fitted in our Pushing Scores project. Yann Gourdon was asked to do a hurry curdy noisette while these books were being projected page by page on the wall. Rafael Rozendaal showed his web work ‘Slow Empty’, which functioned as a real clockwork for the event. Floris VanHoof played a set in which he used his brainwaves to influence his synthesizer sounds combining it with projection and laserbeam.
Justin Bennet showed his project Shot Gun Architecture and remco van Bladel introduced our project Pushing Scores by doing a reading on historical en contemporary graphic scores and the concepts behind it.
Project title:"Carlson invents, Colson presents: 99 spines produced on a modified Canon IR2016 copy machine" by Vaast Colson. Produced on a 'prepared copier'
Description: Presented at WIELS Art Book fair 2016 was this live made copy zine named "Carlson invents, Colson presents: 99 spines produced on a modified Canon IR2016 copy machine" by Vaast Colson. Produced on a 'prepared copier'. The copy machine is amplified by several internal microphones by which the sound of every run is recorded. Each copy-run of 99 copies (the maximum run of the machine) on transparent foil will be accompanied by a foil cover with the dub cut audiofile in it. The image copied in the zine is a drawing which is engraved in the glassplate of the copy machine.
Vaast Colson we know already for quite a while as an interesting artist. Because his work is pretty conceptual, you could say that there is always a strategy (call it a score) which works as a framework behind his artistic output. This can be a performance , object, book or whatever. We worked with Kris delacourt on Principium 2.0 which is a reinterpretation of Colson his work Principium and asked Colson also to work on a sound publication with him. He came up with this idea of the Xerox copier which makes in a run the audio, the booklet as well as the printed image. This printing run is to be seen as the performative action. It is a complex work as well as that it is simple in its final execution.
Colson belongs to a younger generation of Antwerp artists who could be called ‘post-ironic’. These artists don’t shy away from the big questions revolving around the place and role of the artist in society and the world around them. Colson's works examine core questions: what power does art have to change us and our society, what emotions and ethical choices guide an artist in a process of continuous change? From a spontaneous and rather naive approach to art and performance, Colson wants to shape his ideas. He opens up the artistic field and explores what is happening in the art world. Everything he undertakes can thus be considered as artistic intervention.
In his work, Colson constantly questions the relationship with the audience and is also strongly interested in mythology, and by the authentic (or not) mystique of the artist's existence, which he usually explores in his performances. The process is always important, but the end result, which is variable for Colson and influenced by the context, is an important part of his work.
In addition, Colson explores the commercial side of the art world and the economic consequences of artistry. His works, which are regularly made in situ, are often difficult to sell. The commercial potential and the associated value assessment are problematic for Colson. The making of editions can be understood in this context.
Description: This release has a shifting one-note drone (i believe I used D, F#, A, G#) that gets turned on and off by a magnetic sensor. the magnets for the sensor ride on top of the record players platter and could be placed freely to make your own patterns. The final installation will have all 12 separate pieces, a complete octave. This piece is based on a question. Vaast Colson asked Remörk to reinterpret his work 'Principium’, which was a joyful (but strictly ruled) play with sticky color dots. Principium 1.0 appeared as a hacked synth reduced to a single octave, to be played with magnets on a colorful playing field, parallelling the same patterns. Principium 2.0 comes as 12 records, also with this magnetic application, also following very elementary rules - some old, some new. All 12 records together form the complete set which 1 'game' needs. Join the community.
We first got in touch with Principium 1.0. Kris Delacourt (Remörk) made a modified Casio keyboard as a reinterpretation of Vaast Colson his work Principium. We showed this piece of Remark at the ART Rotterdam and than I asked Kris if he was willing to make a publication of it. Meaning a record. He was ok with it but i took a long time. Nevertheless finally we fine-tuned concepts and decided not to go for recordings but to embed the concept of Principium into a record and a music tool in one Principium 2.0. This was quite a proces but ended up in a beautiful limited edition of 12 pieces. Developed and designed in good cooperation between Kris and the team of DE PLAYER. It was presented in Stadslimiet Antwerp, Belgium as an installation piece at 2 July 2015.
Funny things is that after the presentation in Stadslimiet the recordings of this 8 hours performance were edited back to a 12” vinyl record which has been released on Ultra Eczema label shortly after.
Principium comes from the title of a project by Vaast Colson. Colson used tiny paper sticker dots, the kind that most art galleries use to denote which works in a show have been sold. Office material; those colourful little dots.
What he did was draw a bunch of random lines across the sticker sheets, and since there’s 8x12 stickers on a sheet you end up with stickers with tiny line segments on them. Line segments he reassembled into new shapes and new lines. All pretty nonsensical in a way but really beautiful in its result, and quite fragile. Abstract poetry.
There are two booklets Colson made with the Principium series - reproductions of each used sticker sheets and the result. The funny thing was that he thought his resulting collages would be nice to use as scores - and they probably would be, it’s just that Kris Delacourt was so intrigued by the leftover sticker sheets, with their 8x12 grid that they just screamed ‘SEQUENCER!’, to him, so he went to design Principium part 1. A magnetic board with the same field as the sticker sheets which he activated with magnets as a synthesizer. The first version was a modified Casio keyboard. He reduced the number of keys to twelve, and added a magnetic sequencer board to it. The idea is to put white magnets on top of the coloured dots to kind of blank them out. The sequencer controller is a reed switch matrix that, when a magnet is present, allow step pulses to pass to digital switches that bridge the original Casio keys.
For Principium 2 the DOB073 piece is another step in the principle of Pricipoium. As for Delacourt didn’t just want to publish a record with recordings of the Principium 1 he decided to transpose the idea onto a prepared record player using magnets and a specific device…
This is an interview on Kris delacourt (Remörk) his practices and the Principium story. The interview was made after showcasing the Principium 2.0 in an installation setting at Stadslimiet at
>I’ve been following the principium story on your blog, which goes back to the summer of 2012, so four years ago. Short version: first it was a one octave Casio keyboard, then it became 12 10" records, then it became an 8 hour performance and eventually now a 12" LP. This is the short version, can you give me the full story?
-Kris Delacourt: Well actually, it started out as an artwork, or rather a series of artworks. At least that’s where the initial form and the name came from.
The works are by a friend of mine, the Belgian artist Vaast Colson. He made these beautiful pieces where he used tiny paper sticker dots, you know the ones, the kind that most art galleries use to denote which works in a show have been sold. Office material really, those colourful little dots.
What he did was draw a bunch of random lines across the sticker sheets, and since there’s 8x12 stickers on a sheet you end up with stickers with tiny line segments on them. Line segments he reassembled into new shapes and new lines. It’s all pretty nonsensical in a way I guess, especially if you try to put something like that into words, but it’s also really beautiful, and quite fragile. Don’t know, it just rang poetic to me.
Anyway, Vaast was putting together a show where other people would do reinterpretations of some of his works, and around the same time we had a nice chat about alternative musical scores, graphic scores and what not. And at a certain point he went something like: ‘I’ve made some work that might be interesting to use as a score, would you be up for it?’. So he showed me the two booklets he made with the Principium series - reproductions of each used sticker sheets and the result. The funny thing was that he thought his resulting collages would be nice to use as scores - and they probably would be, it’s just that I was so intrigued by the leftover sticker sheets, with their 8x12 grid that just scream ‘SEQUENCER!’, that I went that way.
And the first version was indeed a modified Casio keyboard. I reduced the number of keys to twelve, and added a magnetic sequencer board to it. It’s an iron board, it has the same visuals as the sticker sheets, and the idea is to put white magnets on top of the coloured dots to kind of blank them out, so you end up with something analogous to taking a sticker off the sheet - a white space in a field of colour. I don’t know if I need to go into too much technical detail, but the sequencer controller is just a reed switch matrix that, when a magnet is present, allow step pulses to pass to digital switches that bridge the original Casio keys.
I was really happy with the results, and especially with the fact that it’s so inviting towards an audience. It looks like a game of four-in-a-row, totally appealing to get your hands on it. And I never gave it that much thought, but the fact that when you stick magnets somewhere, it makes a musical phrase - I guess to some people that would be wizardry, hah.
The next step was when Peter Fengler of DEPLAYER/DOB records said he wanted to do a record with the Casio version. And I really like it when people are enthusiastic, so I said yes, obviously. But there were several reasons for me to hold back a little on the idea. Well, a little, two years, actually. First is that the Casio version really works best through audience interaction - people moving magnets around, changing the sounds on the keyboard and so on. It’s meant to be in a continued state of flux. The idea of just me making a record totally ignores that, to me it turns it into something really static and rigid. Now Peter is really nice guy, and clever at that, and I guess he understood my doubts. So we discussed other possibilities, like capturing a live performance, possibly even cutting records on the fly with his vinyl lathe, so you end up with all different records.. now DOB records have put out some crazy releases, really pushing the boundaries of what can be done with the medium of vinyl. For example, there’s this box set which has records that have built-in radio transmitters, records with impossible shapes where you need to turn the stylus of your record player upside down, shit like that. Really great stuff. And I don’t know, maybe a part of me wanted to be a part of that, more than just doing a ‘recording’. Just recording the Casio would definitely have been one of the safer, more boring options. I just felt like making another interpretation of an existing piece, instead of merely documenting it.
Meanwhile I had been toying around with leftover magnets and magnetic sensors, sticking magnets to a metal turntable platter and using the sensors to switch audio on and off, sort of like a programmable tremolo. Well, pattern programmable, but at a fixed speed. So we put two and two together, and ended up doing twelve 10” lathe cuts, that came in a box with those electronic switches, 8 magnets each as based on the original grid, and a 12” metal platter to go under the 10” to stick the magnets to.
And because I couldn’t make up my mind about what sounds to record from the Casio, I ended up not recording the Casio at all. I decided to stop worrying, which after two years of doubting might not be such a bad thing, and did a 10 minute improvised recording on organ and MS20, playing only C notes. I played around with filtering and octaves, because during testing we’d found that if we used slowly evolving records, the results were a lot more interesting. If we just used test tones, so to speak, you end up with something close to morse code. Also nice, but not really musical. And I don’t mind a good concept now and then, but I guess I’m too much of a musician, so I went for what was more appealing to me musically. That same 10 minute piece then was sped up for the other notes, going up in pitch and becoming shorter for each record. So the C note runs for 10 minutes, the B note is something like 5 minutes 20. Which also makes for much more interesting overlaps when played together. I guess I do tend to overthink things, hah. Peter did a great job cutting the vinyl in coloured perspex, with colours matching the paper stickers. And an honourable mention to Koos of DOB who did an amazing job on designing the packaging.
Vaast and Dennis Tyfus of Ultra Eczema run a space in Antwerp together called Stadslimiet, and that’s where we had the record presentation. Peter brought 6 record players, matching the 6 colours of the vinyl nicely - 2 notes each. And since I’m a sucker for random scores, I wrote myself a score generator in PureData with tons of random functions. Basically, the program decided for me which records to play, whether to repeat them or not when they were finished, whether to leave the turntable empty, whether the electronics should punch holes in the sound when a magnet was detected or the opposite, how may magnets on each turntable, and playback volume. The only thing I had any control over was where to put the magnets, determining the rhythm. And since all the records have different lengths, it ended up being one long shifting overlapping piece. I followed that score for 8 hours straight. Funny thing was that we’d agreed to let it run until 23h, and at about two minutes to eleven I got the first ever instruction to leave all the turntables empty. End of piece. That was an amazing moment.
After that, Dennis asked me if I wanted to do a release of the recordings. I think initially he wanted to do a tape. So I went through 8 hours of recordings, selecting bits that I liked and that I thought would be interesting enough to listen to as pieces in their own right, and not just as part of this monster performance. I think the idea to make a vinyl record came after Dennis heard some of the selections and thought they shouldn’t be out on tape but on vinyl instead. So that’s what happened.
-Oh, I think it’s definitely something that’s still evolving. I can still see unexplored possibilities there - as an installation, or as a truly playable musical instrument, and even those two do not have to be mutually exclusive. There’s something appealing in using a single octave as a building block, there’s something appealing in the number 12 even, there’s the appeal of building instruments.. I don’t think I’ve quite finished with it, no.
>Dennis said you were not really keen on doing this record at first. Why so? What was the problem? Was one of your fears that, by making it into a 12", you would have to bring this project to a final version?
-Not really, at least not in this case. I guess that fear was much more of an issue with DOB records. Recording the Casio felt too definitive at the time.
But now, having made that 12-vinyl version, and having done a performance that worked quite well, I didn’t mind starting from what is essentially the documentation of a past event. Also because I really am convinced that this is just one more step in something that can keep going, that it doesn’t have to be final. I guess my main fear was that cutting chunks out of a much larger whole, you risk losing the context - and I’m still not sure what this record sounds like to people that weren’t there. I know it’s not a final version, but it is a version nonetheless, and I want all versions to be of a certain quality. I thought it worked really well as a performance, but I wanted to make sure it was good enough to be a record.
>Bringing an 8 hour performance back to an album format seems like a hell of a job. How do you do that? How do you decide which parts 'work' on an album, and which don't?
-You do it in short sessions, hah. The thing is, all 8 hours have the turntables spinning at 33 rpm, so the basic underlying tempo never changes. That’s quite brutal to listen to in concentration, to be honest. It took me about two months to sit through all eight hours, and put markers and comments with bits I liked more than others. Sometimes because of harmonic information, notes that work well together, sometimes of rhythms that worked well, etc. So you end up with a first rough selection. And then you go through that selection again. And so on, until you really narrow it down.
Of course, because the basic tempo is the same, it would have been relatively easy to start editing, splicing things together. But to be honest I've never even considered that - 8 hours of material and endless editing possibilities, that’s a nightmare.. the decision to have straight up documentation, just select bits instead of editing them some more, really made the selection process easier. If something was interesting for a while, but didn’t stay interesting, it had to go. I think I ended up with five or six pieces that I though could hold their own on a record, four of which made the final cut.
>Do you think that, by bringing it back to an LP, you're making it easier for the listener? Were there people who actually listened to the whole 8 hour performance? Do you think that listening to an 8 hour performance demands another kind of concentration from the listener than listening to an LP?
-There were some people there that sat through the whole thing, yes. But I’m not sure if it is at all possible to listen with concentration to 8 hours of something like this. And that was never the question either. It was continually shifting, so it didn’t really have a beginning or an end - you could drop in any time you liked. But it was pretty intense, so yes, this record is probably the light version. Still, not sure if it is easy listening at all, although I think it has a beauty of it’s own.
-I guess there was the point where I decided to just do a 10 minute organ improv, that was a bit of a turning point. I could have gone for something more ‘correct’ in terms of concept - I don’t know, pure sine waves or something. The improv might be one of the major flaws, actually, conceptually speaking. But I really needed a break from thinking it over and just do something... plus, it adds a much needed layer of spontaneity that works beautifully, not in the least musically, so no regrets. I like working with concepts a lot, as a starting point, but I’m also interested enough in the results to loosen up the concept if I feel it’s needed.
>I could say that the 10" records were vinyl records as a tool, and that this LP is a vinyl record as a product. What you think about this statement? How do you look at the function a piece of vinyl can have?
-The 10” records have all been sold as well, so they’re somewhere on middle ground - they were intended as a release, and therefore a product, just as well.
But they do form one big piece, and as far as final forms go, I guess you could consider that performance the final form of that particular piece. That’s also purely pragmatical: now they’ve all been sold, it’s going to be very difficult to get all 12 of them together again for a second performance. It really was a one time event, with the vinyls as a tool, yes. Of course, taking what is essentially a reproduction medium, and turning it into something of an instrument in it’s own right again, that’s nothing new.. think hip hop, turntablism, even things like the mellotron did that. But it’s still a relevant idea to me, this kind of creative misuse.
>You release this album as a Remörk album, but there were more people involved in this project than just you: there's Vaast Colson, Peter Flenger and Dennis Tyfus too. So do you see this album as a solo record or as a collaboration?
-I do look at it as a solo thing. You know, the music on the record came from a performance I did, based on a concept I came up with. Now, I never would have though it up if it weren’t for Vaasts initial invitation, or for Peter’s asking me to do a record, or Dennis wanting to present it in Antwerp, that whole chain reaction, so in that way it’s definitely the result of collaborating with all those people. But Vaast for instance refuses to regard it as his doing. He always stressed, right from the start, that any interpretation I gave of his work was no longer his work. And I follow that. They’re just new pieces in their own right.
Peter and Koos asked me to do a record because they run a record label and they want to release stuff they think is interesting. That’s awesome, and I’m flattered to be a part of that, but in a way it’s also what record labels are supposed to be doing, no? We worked on the packaging together, and it looks amazing because of them. But musically, I still feel it’s my work. And the same goes for this record on Ultra Eczema: I have to say I’m really happy we finally got an Ultra Eczema release together, it’s something Dennis had been asking for for quite some time... he’d actually given up asking. But now with this thing it just seemed to fall into place perfectly.
>When Joseph Beuys was asked why he hated the term 'conceptual art', he said: "Because a concept, an idea is a starting point, not a final form. If you stick to the concept, you miss out on the creative aspect, which should be the most important part. Otherwise you're not an artist. Art is not pinning things down. Art is letting things go, let it flow". Does this sound recognisable to you? And how would you relate this quote to your LP?
-Not having to execute ideas into a physical and therefore flawed final form was the whole point of conceptual art, no? The notion that an idea can be just as valid and just as creative as its execution.. but anyway.
I for myself am always glad if I manage to turn an idea into a physical form. Did I mention I tend to overthink things? So I don’t think I belong in the conceptual art section. But then, I don’t fully agree that you miss out on creativity by sticking to a concept. Coming up with a concept can be as much a creative process. And sometimes, by sticking to it, you end up with the most unexpected results - adhering to rules you impose on yourself makes you do stuff you would never have decided for yourself. It can make you go against your natural inclinations, which does not always have to be a bad thing. It can free you from repeating yourself, from your own mannerisms. That’s just another way of letting things go, of giving up control.
-I think I would consider that series of twelve ten inches my vinyl debut.. but maybe because it was 12 different records or in ten inch format, that it doesn’t really count? Or maybe Dennis thinks of that series as a tool more than a product. Still, the Ultra Eczema one is definitely the first record that is more widely available, and much more of a pure record than an artists’ edition, so I know what he’s saying. And a statement.. I don’t know. I don’t think of it as a manifesto or anything. It’s a document of what I’m happy to be working on at the moment, and hopefully it’s something that others can enjoy as well.
-If you force me to choose between those two, then drone. I tend to associate collage records with cut and paste editing, jumpcuts, going from one atmosphere to the next in no time.. I don’t feel this record has that. Quite the contrary. The only thing remotely close to jumpcuts that are on this record were due to the electronics of the installation, the sensors turning the sound on and off. But they were live events, not editing choices made afterwards. So this is very much a straightforward live recording of a pretty weird DJ set, if you will. And even though it has strong rhythmic patterns, the underlying harmonies and atmosphere shift quite slowly. So more drone, definitely.
>Do you think this LP would be also enjoyable if someone would listen to it without knowing a single thing about the whole concept behind it? Or do you even think you would have failed if it wouldn't be an enjoyable record without the concept?
-I certainly do hope that it’s enjoyable.. like I said, I know it’s not easy listening per se, and some might probably find it boring at first try, with the tempo being the same for the whole record and all. But I did try to select bits that I thought had a beauty or a strong appeal to them, an interesting evolution or whatever, so much so that I hope they can survive as musical pieces in their own right. aiming for the best of both worlds there. Type of object: event
Description: Live event for our Pushing the Score project with Telcosystems (nl), Julia Buennagel (de) and Derek Holzer (us). Focussing on the potential of grahic scores and publishing of sound and image we present Telcosystems with their recent publication Resonanz, a reading on Schematic as a Score plus concert by Derek Holzer plus a live performance of Julia Bünnagel with modified records.
In our event series during the Pushing Scores project we programmed this evening after we got in touch with the resonant publication of Telcosystems. They approach DE PLAYER for some input in the production and distribution of it. because of the direct relation of sound and image and the new interface an object like that represents it was a clear match. They did a reading on the concepts and necessity of the project as well as all the implications it had in its development and production.
To complete the event we searched for 2 completely different angles on composing. Derek Holzer eventually was asked because of his Tonewheels but that was logistically not possible. He came over to do a reading on Schematic as a score and did a live set on Tektronix Oscilloscope Music. Julia Buennagel was invited to do a more physical input. She works with prepared records and played a live set.
about prepared records:
The record or musical piece in these cases is not used as a reproductive technique. In contrast to the composer or musician who perceives the record first and foremost as a vehicle transporting his or her musical ideas, here the interest lies especially in the optical/sculptural as well as the acoustic presence and the compression of an idea working with the playback possibilities and impossibilities of recording techniques. The end result is not a reproduction but a transformation of the original source and ultimately becomes an autonomous score and/or unique graphic/sculptural piece in and of itself.
The defective record and not the even, smooth reproduction means quality and concept at the same time.
Lazlo Moholy Nagy said about this in the perspective of New Plasticism that it lies in the peculiarity of human nature that:
“The abuse and misunderstanding are nessecary to gain result. It is nessecary for evolution and survival. After every new recording the functioning apparatus is pushed ahead to further new impressions. That is one of the reasons for the necessity to always continue experiments in New Plasticism. From this standpoint the configurations are only worthwhile when they produce new, previously unknown, relationships. In other words, this means that reproduction (repetitions of already existing relations) without richer viewpoints from the special standpoint of creative production can, only in the best cases, be considered as a virtuosic opportunity. As production, meaning here productive creation, above all serves the human condition, we must attempt to further our purposes of creative production through the uses of those apparatuses or methods which until now have been used only for reproduction purposes.”
In 1989 the Broken Music exhibition was held in Berlin at the DAAD gallery with work by, among others, Nam June Paik, John Cage, Milan Knížák, Christian Marclay. All had lifted the medium (the vinyl record) over themselves and added a new use / application. Whether or not as an installation to be played by the public or as a plastic work in which the plate was transformed, mutated. The code of the usual record as defined by the music industry was broken in all works.
Later the exhibition traveled to the Hague and to Grenoble in the early 1990s. The book which came along with the exhibition has recently been republished. As a sourcebook, it is without peer, focusing on recordings, record objects, artwork for records, and record installations made by hundreds of artists between World War II and 1989.
-With Resonanz, Telcosystems presents an electronic book, combining a series of visual artworks with a sound publication in one. Incorporated in the structure of the book are sensors and electronics, providing each page with its own unique soundtrack, which can be listened to via speakers or headphones. This evening Resonanz will be the starting point of Q&A, demonstration and live presentation. In their audiovisual works Telcosystems research the relation between the behavior of programmed numerical logic and the human perception of this behavior; they aim at an integration of human expression and programmed machine behavior. This becomes manifest in the immersive audiovisual installations they make, in films, videos, soundtracks, prints and in live performances. The software they write enables them to compose ever-evolving audiovisual worlds. Telcosystems’ installations and films focus on real-time, self-structuring, generative processes, in their live performances they focus on the interaction with these processes.
“Resonanz is an electronic book that I had first dismissed. Until i tried it. As you turn the thick pages of the book, you encounter a different pattern along with a different soundtrack. It’s strangely hypnotizing. I turned and turned the pages, each time trying to think about the possible connections between the colours and patterns printed on the pages and the sound they emitted.”
-Julia Bünnagel is a contemporary sound and sculpting artist based Cologne. Working with sound performance and art installation. She is part of the sound-art-collective Sculptress of Sound. Julia's solo live performance primarily refers to the modified vinyl records which produces extraordinary sounds. Julia's peculiar method of modifying vinyl records includes the various ways of physical treatment such as sewing, painting or pasting the vinyl surfaces and afterwards mixing them together for yielding an imprudently driving, rhythmic soundscapes following by the white noise, multiple fragments of music along with dirty boom beats.
-Derek Holzer is an American instrument builder and sound artist based in Helsinki FI & Berlin DE, whose current interests include DIY analog electronics, the relationship between sound + space, media archaeology and the meeting points of electroacoustic, noise, improv and extreme music. He has performed live, taught workshops and created scores of unique instruments and installations since 2002 across Europe, North and South America, and New Zealand.
For the PUSHING event Derek will do a reading entitled Schematic as Score: Uses and Abuses of the (In)Deterministic Possibilities of Sound Technology and after that he will do a live set based on researching analog visuals with the oscilloscope.
The reading starts out of the fact that over the past few years, a strong reaction against the sterile world of laptop sound and video has inspired a new interest in analog processes, or "hands dirty" art in the words of practitioner John Richards3. With this renewed analog interest comes a fresh exploration of the pioneers of the electronic arts during the pre-digital era of the 1960s and 1970s. Artists and inventors such as Nam June Paik, Steina & Woody Vasulka, Don Buchla, Serge Tcherepnin, Dan Sandin and David Tudor all constructed their own unique instruments long before similar tools became commercially available or freely downloadable.
About the live oscilloscope concert he states: „The Vectorian Era opens with a screaming across the sky. Analog electronic computers predate their digital counterparts by several decades, and one of the first practical applications of the analog computer was in controlling the trajectories of German V2 rockets as they traced their rainbow of gravity from Flanders towards London during the Second World War. Informed by the discourse of media archaeology, my own personal interest in analog vector graphics isn’t merely retro-for-retro’s-sake. Rather, it is an exploration of a once-current and now discarded technology linked with specific utopias and dystopias from another time.”
Description: For ART Rotterdam we present Experimental Jetset, Davide Mosconi, DUPAC, Moniker, Cold Void [Rafaël Rozendaal/Luuk Bouwman] and Telcosystems.
As a production platform, specialised in the relationship between sound, art, publishing and performance, for ART Rotterdam 2017 DE PLAYER presents works of artists within the frame of the project Pu-shi-ng-Sco-res; a project by DE PLAYER and Remco van Bladel, Dutch graphic designer.
For a certain period we yearly took part in the ART Rotterdam. An annual art fair in which commercial galleries as well as initiatives take part. The Intersection part is where the initiatives gather. It works because of getting in contact with an audience which will never come by at DE PLAYER itself. For this year it was clear that we present the Pushing Score project. We decided to set up a framework as if it was a three dimensional staff to write down music. In this framework we presented new, specifically for Pushing Scores, produced works in combination with existing works we thought would be interesting to combine and by that give a multidimensional approach on what tactics can be used by making scores and how it will be finally as a tradable object.
People could continuously listen to some publications (Telcosystems, Cold Void, Davide Mosconi) as well take part in the economic process of it by spraying new works for the next potential costumer (Moniker).
Description: An evening with remarkable experiments and materialised conceptual flip flop. DE PLAYER will unveil its third issue of Tetra Gamma Circulaire (TGC) – the unknown audio magazine. TGC #3 is compiled in collaboration with students of the Piet Zwart Institute, and is also part of their Experimental Publishing programme of the Media Design Master, named XPUB.
Sometimes 1 + 1 is greater than the sum of its parts, but if you put two of Belgium’s finest composers and musicians together, it adds up to an infinite number. Hiele Martens, or the collaboration of Lieven Martens Moana and Roman Hiele, delve deep into new territory that could be interpreted as a 2017 update of Maurice Kagel’s "Exotica", but made by self-aware electronic musicians. Hiele Martens' debut record is about to be released on Ultra Eczema and is expected to become one of the highlights of this year.
Whether culminating into actions or objects, Helga Jakobson's work responds to conditions of limbo within existence and acts as a platform to confront the unknown; it focuses on death, time and ephemerality. Currently she is constructing a digital and physical web; weaving together the overlapping, intuitive and sometimes complicated interconnections that comprise her interest in handcraft, witchcraft, and digitalcraft. The main threads that run between these interests are the experience of women, their traditional work and their sharing of knowledge. Jakobson has great reverence for intuition and it’s use as a technology. At DE PLAYER she will demonstrate her 'spider web record player'.
Johannes Bergmark is a Fylkingen affiliated sound artist, instrument builder and piano technician. His performances have been described as surrealist puppet theatre in which the characters are amplified objects such as old tools, kitchen utensils, toys, springs and decorative kitsch. Using contact microphones, Bergmark reveals their hidden acoustics, dynamic scales and unique timbres. Bergmark is the ultimate rethinker of what music can be, in sound and in performance, as you can sometimes find him hanging on two piano strings from a ceiling.
Experimental Publishing is a new course of the Piet Zwart Institute's Media Design Master programme. The concept of the course revolves around two core principles: first, the inquiry into the technological, political and cultural processes through which things are made public; and second, the desire to expand the notion of publishing beyond print media and its direct digital translation. The Experimental Publishing students who contributed to the development of TGC #3 are: Karina Dukalska, Max Franklin, Giulia de Giovanelli, Clàudia Giralt, Francisco González, Margreet Riphagen, Nadine Rotem-Stibbe and Kimmy Spreeuwenberg.
-Piet Zwart Institute > TGC #3 seminar + live event
Together with the Experimental Publishing team of the Master of Media Design students of the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam, a seminar was organized for the students in a period of 3 months in which the principles of Pushing the Score were leading. A publication was taken as a joint focal point, the form of which could be determined in more detail. However, it was decided to start from a floppy disc as a medium. Each student could design his/her own project on this medium. The idea of a score functioned as a guideline to shape their project and to test the work process. It resulted in the Tetra Gamma Circular #3 subtitled "an unknown audio magazine" and is in itself a certain kind of publication platform that functions almost as a jukebox for floppies. It is an experimental platform designed for sonic experiments, instruments and installations. Concretely, a designed concrete object in which various techniques are incorporated. Its core consists of a floppy drive and a Raspberry Pi platform, on which a local wifi station, a camera, audio in/out, touch sensors, LED lighting are realized. The local wifi station makes it possible to access all projects (on floppy) by receiving these projects on mobile phone or on the computer. Via beamer and audio system everything becomes visible and audible. Most projects are aimed at interaction with an audience (one or more people).
Karina Dukalska, for example, created a work entitled 'Rock Step Triple Step'. As a dancer she is curious why there is no universal graphic notation system in the dance. Whether it is about recording movements for archiving, or writing new choreographies for the future, she concentrated on which elements of dance are overwritable (such as direction or footwork) and which are not. The performance of 'Rock Step Triple Step' started as an experiment based on psychological theories to change memory, time perception and flow in dance. The audience has the opportunity to control the dancers' steps on stage through a web interface that shows her personal approach to graphically representing ten jive steps.
Max Franklin's research focuses on the fragile nature of improvisation in music, with software. Through research into the act of improvisation in music, Max investigates ideas about liberation and resistance that improvisation can offer. Both in artistic practices, and their broader application as a critical methodology of research and exploration. For TGC#3 he developed a tool that is a learning counterpartner for his own musical input.
title event: ARCHIVING \ PUSHING SCORES WITH VALENTINA VUKSIC, ANA GUEDES, VARIA, NIEK HILKMANN
During this evening we focus on the archiving of our Pushing Scores project. A project on the nowadays meaning of the 'graphic score', which has been running for over the last 2-3 years. What are the possibilities of graphic scores, in a day and age in which graphic notation is still usually seen as a ‘drawing’, serving as some kind of sheet music?
To communicate the project to a larger audience DE PLAYER asked Varia to develop a context and technical environment as a web-based archival publication for the Pushing Scores project. The idea is that this material will be embodied by a dynamic, accessible and therefore active archive, which creates new relations, new perspectives and, at its best, new concepts for the production and/or processes of making scores. Varia will explain their ideas and approach on this matter.
- Valentina Vuksic will bring a live performance in which she approaches computers with transducers that transform electromagnetic radiation into sound within choreographically setups. The ‘runtime’ of executed software is staged for an audience to provide an acoustic experience: that of logic encountering the physical world.
Valentina Vuksic was involved in the ARTKILLART Xyears JUBILEE event at 21-04-2017. She played a set in which she used her computer to generate sound by live programming. It was a good concert and het concept of working fitted very well in our ideas of exploring graphic scores. Her score was made on the spot with programming language. A sort of live coding. The Artkillart label operates from both Paris and Berlin since 2007, promoting experimental audiovisual and sound art. In reaction to the dematerialization of music (the general disappearance of music released in its physical form), the artists of the Artkillart label roster refocus their releases as material objects.
Artists who joined the event: Valentina Vuksic, Arnaud Rivière, Nicolas Montgermont, Jan Kees Van Kampen
Valentina Vuksic is a computer artist and programmer based in Zürich. Her work is a personal exploration of the possibilities afforded by articulated hard- and software mediation. She approaches computer systems via inductive microphones for magnetic fields, so-called “telephone adapters." With choreographies for software and computer elements, she utilizes these as actors in software/noise pieces for, and in, computers.
Vuksic considers time and space of computer processor and memory as levels of reality. Software being processed creates own temporal and spatial dimensions, which are staged for a public. She aims for a sensual experience of the analytical sphere becoming concrete, where logic encounters the physical world. The mechanic noises serve as mediators to a public. They reveal in an immediate way the activities taking place between computer processes in the widest sense and the computer electronics they are running on.
'Para-phonic Poly-diso' is a graphic score for a digital, polyphonic choir wherein visitors of Paradiso can participate with their mobile phone. The voice for this work is by Laetitia Saedier of Stereolab.
1) An interactive graphic score / light box / kinetic work fixed inside the cabinet. (see jpeg drafts below)
2) A mobile website that connects you to the hardware inside the cabinet and turns your phone into a local speaker for a polyphonic voice piece.
In the eleventh century, the Italian Guido of Arezzo, one of the most important founders of musical notation, developed a scale consisting of six notes: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la. Later the seventh tone 'si' was added. From this the well-known "Do-Re-Mi" and the solfege, a teaching method in music for learning pitch and the singing of sheet music, developed itself.
The Small Museum, the former announcement box on the front of Paradiso, is being converted by Remco van Bladel into a local wifi point that will stream a polyphonic "Pa-Ra-Di-So". An algorithmic choir is compiled live by the mobile phones that connect to the Wi-Fi point while they are waiting in line for Paradiso to enter.
Paradiso invited Remco van Bladel to take part in their Small Museum project. For him it fitted very well to use this public place for a project he had in mind for Pushing Scores. The idea was to create a choir with mobile phones for the audience waiting to get in of the Dutch pop tempel Paradiso.
The work:
The work was installed for a period at The Small Museum; a cabinet on the facade of Paradiso, Amsterdam.
'Para-phonic Poly-diso' is a graphic score where Paradiso visitors can participate in a digital polyphonic choir.
In eleventh century Italy, the music theorist Guido of Arezzo developed an ascending scale consisting of six-notes: ut, re, mi, fa, sol and la. A 7th note, 'si' or 'ti', was added later. This scale is the basis for 'Do-Re-Mi' and solfège, a music education method used to teach singing of Western music.
The Small Museum, which was used for the public announcements of the church, will be transformed into a local wifi hotspot to stream a multi vocal 'Pa-Ra-Di-So Rapsodia'. A live algorithmic choir composition created through the phones connected to the score while waiting in front of the building to enter.
Before music was established in writing, each choir leader led the Gregorian chants of the scola cantorum with movements. This method of conducting, called cheironomy, consisted of writing signs in the air that contained clear instructions for the trained choir singers in terms of pitch change, duration and tone strength. These signs or neumens were written down, modified or not, first without any reference line. Later, the neumens - depending on the relative pitch differences - were noted above, on, or below a line referring to a pitch determined by the choral conductor.
As far as melody is concerned, humming was increasingly defined by the expansion of the number of lines, which first corresponded by colour, and later by keys to certain steps in the medieval ranges. In the eleventh century Guido van Arezo introduced the staff with four lines (this is still in use). In the middle of the thirteenth century Peter de Cruce came to a notation in which the relative duration of each note is indicated by the form of the note. This so-called manural notation was of great importance to ensure the reproducibility of the various rhythmic possibilities in the developing polyphonic music of Western Europe.
One of the influences for our project Pushing Scores.
Jacques Attali (born 1 November 1943) is a French economic and social theorist, writer, political adviser and senior civil servant, who served as a counselor to President François Mitterrand from 1981 to 1991 and was the first head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in 1991-1993.
After getting it touch with Attali’s book ‘Noise: The Political Economy of Music’ we used it as inspiration for the project Pushing Scores. This particularly because of the fact that he focusses on the reproduction of music.
Attali believes that music has gone through four specific cultural stages in its history:
1. Sacrificing
2. Representing
3. Repeating
4. Post-Repeating
The 2nd phase is important in the perspective of sound reproduction, graphic score and the tangibility of sound and / or the object. It refers to the era of printed music (1500 - 1900). During this period, the music is tied to a physical carrier for the first time, and thus becomes a commodity for sale in the market. This notation of music can be considered as a highly coded written guideline for how music should sound. He calls this chapter Represent because it is the project of the executive. This represents the music in the absence of the maker and in the presence of an audience an effort must be made to read and articulate the intensity of the composer of the magazine. With the rise of the various avant-garde movements from the beginning of the 20th century, in addition to new forms of "sound", the relationship between sound and its visual representation is also being re-examined.
The 3rd stage deals with the mechanical reproduction and the 4th stage could be interpreted that he already was referring to the idea of sampling although it was first published in translation by the University of Minnesota in 1985. In that time it would have been quite prophetic. Because of this ambiguity we are interested for the project what this stage of music could represent. What kind of scores can be made with aal new techniques and media which have been developed since and definitely are of influence in our conceptual thinking of music and its reproduction.Jacques Attali (born 1 November 1943) is a French economic and social theorist, writer, political adviser and senior civil servant, who served as a counselor to President François Mitterrand from 1981 to 1991 and was the first head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in 1991-1993.
Attali is the first to point out the other possible logical consequence of the “reciprocal interaction” model—namely, the possibility of a superstructure to anticipate historical developments, to foreshadow new social formations in a prophetic and annunciatory way. The argument of Noise is that music, unique among the arts for reasons that are themselves overdetermined, has precisely this annunciatory vocation; that the music of today stands both as a promise of a new, liberating mode of production, and as the menace of a dystopian possibility which is that mode of production’s baleful mirror image.event:
the entire Pushing Scores project was set up in cooperation with Remco van Bladel. The conceptualization, the funding, the execution.We new that Remco had written his essay 'Musical Theories in Graphic Design' on the subject of graphic notation within a broader field of theory formation in contemporary
music. It seemed to be a good match to work with him and DE PLAYER on a research of the graphic score. WE had common interest but at the same time a different angle and network in our practice as a stage, publisher and designer. This brought us together and made Pushing Scores to be real.Remco van Bladel (Amersfoort, 1977) is a graphic designer, based in Amsterdam. His studio focusses on editorial book design, curatorial projects, institutional identities, interactive applications and websites. Remco is co-founder of 'WdW Review' (Witte de With, Rotterdam), Dutch art book publisher Onomatopee and teaches graphic design at ArtEZ, Arnhem. He designed the publication and identity of the Aalto Natives, at the Finnish Pavilion of this year's 57th Venice Biennale. For the 2015 edition of the Venice Biennale the studio was responsible for the design of the publication and identity of ‘to be all ways to be’, the exhibition of herman de vries of the Dutch pavilion.
His clients include artists like: Navid Nuur, Jonas Staal, Justin Bennett, Esther Tielemans, Gert-Jan Prins and Erik van Lieshout besides institutions like Witte de With, e-flux, New World Summit, Extra City Kunsthal, Arts Writers Grant Program, Art Agenda, Council, Cobra Museum and STEIM (studio for electro-instrumental music). The studio takes care of the graphic design of the art magazine and website Metropolis M.
Remco van Bladel grew up as a kid in the recordstore of his father. The relation between the sound/music on the records and the visuals on the sleeves and packaging had a strong influence on his nowadays practice. Especially the strategy and concepts he creates for graphic design.
In his essay 'Musical Theories in Graphic Design', from 2002, treated Bladel with the subject of graphic notation within a broader field of theory formation in contemporary
music. In it he transposed compositional methodologies of the avant-gardists in the 20th century to graphical design methodologies. For instance by understanding the phase shifting technique from inside Steve Reich to design. But also work from Stockhausen, and Cage to view and differ and looking for similarities. Rhythm, shifts, pairs, tonality, counterpoints. This was not about hard comparisons and 1 on 1 projections, but more
to interpret, think and work with elements. An investigation into methodologies within his own artistic practice.
From his own position he considers himself as (editorial) designer, curator, musician and publisher with a strong predilection for language and typography. His artistic practice is formed by a number of ingredients that have always been present in his work to a greater or lesser extent. The most important, from his youth, is sound or music. Both as a source or inspiration, as a metaphor, as a thinking model and as an 'attitude' in relation to his practice. He sees it as punk, experiment, noise, investigative, critical. Searching for dissonance and ordering of information, for rhythm and tonality. Sound in relation to image remains an elusive phenomenon that continues to fascinate me because sound / music is the most abstract art form. The subjective nature, the way in which vibrations can release such strong emotions, makes it possible to deal speculatively and to use them for use in typography, image, material choices, folding methods and bookbinding systems. This tactility, the application of materiality and the use of printing techniques as a metaphor for sound play a major role in his entire practice.
event title: PU-SH-ING WITH TELCOSYSTEMS, JULIA BUENNAGEL AND DEREK HOLZER
Live event for our Pushing the Score project with Telcosystems (nl), Julia Buennagel (de) and Derek Holzer (us). Focussing on the potential of grahic scores and publishing of sound and image we present Telcosystems with their recent publication Resonanz, a reading on Schematic as a Score plus concert by Derek Holzer plus a live performance of Julia Bünnagel with modified records.
What are the possibilities of graphic scores, in a day and age in which graphic notation is still usually seen as a ‘drawing’ serving as some kind of sheet music? In an attempt to redefine this concept, we will be compiling a programme in which artists, musicians, theoreticians and practitioners are invited to participate. The collective goal is to develop and present new audio-visual and media-technical forms of graphic notation through artistic research and development. Based on our compilation of the most contemporary and innovative graphic notation practices in the fields of music, sound art, performance art, e-culture, new-media art, graphic design and media design, we will introduce artists and designers from various creative disciplines to a national and international audience, with the goal of collectively developing new forms of graphic notation.
Telcosystems presents Resonanz; an electronic book combining a series of visual artworks with a sound publication in one. Incorporated in the structure of the book are sensors and electronics, providing each page with its own unique soundtrack, which can be listened to via speakers or headphones. This evening Resonanz will be the starting point of Q&A, demonstration and live presentation. In their audiovisual works Telcosystems research the relation between the behavior of programmed numerical logic and the human perception of this behavior; they aim at an integration of human expression and programmed machine behavior. This becomes manifest in the immersive audiovisual installations they make, in films, videos, soundtracks, prints and in live performances. The software they write enables them to compose ever-evolving audiovisual worlds. Telcosystems’ installations and films focus on real-time, self-structuring, generative processes, in their live performances they focus on the interaction with these processes.
Julia Bünnagel is a contemporary sound and sculpting artist based Cologne. Working with sound performance and art installation. She is part of the sound-art-collective Sculptress of Sound. Julia's solo live performance primarily refers to the modified vinyl records which produces extraordinary sounds. Julia's peculiar method of modifying vinyl records includes the various ways of physical treatment such as sewing, painting or pasting the vinyl surfaces and afterwards mixing them together for yielding an imprudently driving, rhythmic soundscapes following by the white noise, multiple fragments of music along with dirty boom beats.
Derek Holzer is an American instrument builder and sound artist based in Helsinki FI & Berlin DE, whose current interests include DIY analog electronics, the relationship between sound + space, media archaeology and the meeting points of electroacoustic, noise, improv and extreme music. He has performed live, taught workshops and created scores of unique instruments and installations since 2002 across Europe, North and South America, and New Zealand.
For the PUSHING event Derek will do a reading entitled Schematic as Score: Uses and Abuses of the (In)Deterministic Possibilities of Sound Technology and after that he will do a live set based on researching analog visuals with the oscilloscope.
The reading starts out of the fact that over the past few years, a strong reaction against the sterile world of laptop sound and video has inspired a new interest in analog processes, or "hands dirty" art in the words of practitioner John Richards. With this renewed analog interest comes a fresh exploration of the pioneers of the electronic arts during the pre-digital era of the 1960s and 1970s. Artists and inventors such as Nam June Paik, Steina & Woody Vasulka, Don Buchla, Serge Tcherepnin, Dan Sandin and David Tudor all constructed their own unique instruments long before similar tools became commercially available or freely downloadable.
About the live oscilloscope concert he states: „The Vectorian Era opens with a screaming across the sky. Analog electronic computers predate their digital counterparts by several decades, and one of the first practical applications of the analog computer was in controlling the trajectories of German V2 rockets as they traced their rainbow of gravity from Flanders towards London during the Second World War. Informed by the discourse of media archaeology, my own personal interest in analog vector graphics isn’t merely retro-for-retro’s-sake. Rather, it is an exploration of a once-current and now discarded technology linked with specific utopias and dystopias from another time.”
http://macumbista.netWe got in touch with the work of Derek Holzer through his project on Tone Wheels; an experiment in converting graphical imagery to sound, inspired by some of the pioneering 20th Century electronic music inventions. Transparent tonewheels with repeating patterns are spun over light-sensitive electronic circuitry to produce sound and light pulsations and textures.
This analog way of getting sound from graphic notation was an impuls to check him out for the Pushing Scores project. He came up with a reading on Schematics as a Score, because that was a current issue of his practice. It fully fitted in our search for how to see the concept of composing and making scores.Derek Holzer (USA 1972) is a sound + light artist based in Helsinki & Berlin, whose current interests include DIY electronics, audiovisual instrument building, the relationship between sound and space, media archaeology, and participatory art forms. He has performed live, taught workshops and created scores of unique instruments and installations since 2002 across Europe, North and South America, and New Zealand.
Derek Holzer gave a lecture with the theme "Schematic as Score: use and abuse of the (im)deterministic possibilities of sound technology". In it he considers it axiomatic that, for every work of art that must be considered experimental, the possibility of failure must be built into his process. By this he does not mean the aestheticized, satisfying disturbances and cracking that Kim Cascone valorizes, but the lack of satisfaction caused by a misplaced or misdirected procedure in the experiment, colossal or banal. These are not mistakes that should be looked up, sampled and celebrated, but the flat-on-your-ass gaffs and embarrassment that would disturb the sleep of all but the most Zen of musicians or composers. The presence of failure in a musical system represents feedback in the negative, a turning point in anticlimax, irrelevance, the everyday, the cliché or even unintentional silence. Many artists try to eliminate true, catastrophic failures by scripting, scoring, sequencing or programming their work in as many predictable, risk-free quantums as possible in advance. But this unwanted presence also guarantees the vitality of that fiercely fought area; the live electronic music performance.
The past few years there has been a strong response to the sterile world of sound and video from the laptop. This has led to a new interest in analogue processes or dirty hands art. With this renewed analog interest comes a fresh exploration of the pioneers of electronic art during the pre-digital era of the sixties and seventies. Artists and inventors such as Nam June Paik, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Don Buchla, Serge Tcherepnin, Dan Sandin and David Tudor all constructed their own unique instruments long before similar tools became commercially available or could be freely downloaded.
Over the past few years, a strong reaction against the sterile world of laptop sound and
video has inspired a new interest in analog processes, or "hands dirty" art in the words of practitioner John Richards. With this renewed analog interest comes a fresh exploration of the pioneers of the electronic arts during the pre-digital era of the 1960s and 1970s.
Artists and inventors such as Nam June Paik, Steina & Woody Vasulka, Don Buchla, Serge
Tcherepnin, Dan Sandin and David Tudor all constructed their own unique instruments
through a long, rigorous process of self-education in electronics.
John Cage once quipped that Serge Tcherepnin's synthesizer system was "the best musical
composition that Serge had ever made", and it is precisely Cage's reformulation of the
concert score from a list of deterministic note values to a set of indeterministic
possibilities that allowed the blurring of lines between instrument-builder and music
composer that followed.
In 2011 Derek Holzer wrote an essay on this issue which has been published as a pdf on internet as VAGUE TERRAIN 19.Vector Synthesis Workshop Piksel
Derek Holzer, Vector Synthesis workshop
Building: Piksel Studio 207, Bergen NO
Dates: 9-11 March 2018
Time: tba
All workshops are free entrance. To sign up send an email to:
prod(at)piksel(dot)no
VECTOR SYNTHESIS is an audiovisual, computational art project using sound synthesis and vector graphics display techniques to investigate the direct relationship between sound+image. It draws on the historical work of artists such as Mary Ellen Bute, John Whitney, Nam June Paik, Ben Laposky, and Steina & Woody Vasulka among many others, as well as on ideas of media archaeology and the creative re-use of obsolete technologies. Audio waveforms control the vertical and horizontal movements as well as the brightness of a single beam of light, tracing shapes, points and curves with a direct relationship between sound and image.
The Vector Synthesis library allows the creation and manipulation of 2D and 3D vector shapes, Lissajous figures, and scan processed image and video inputs using audio signals sent directly to oscilloscopes, hacked CRT monitors, Vectrex game consoles, ILDA laser displays, or oscilloscope emulation softwares using the Pure Data programming environment.
During this workshop, you will learn how to use a custom library in the Pure Data programming environment to directly control the vertical and horizontal movements, as well as the brightness, of a beam of light. You will then explore Lissajous figures, waveform representations, and other multiplexed, audio-driven visual shapes and forms which can be displayed and manipulated in real time on an XY oscilloscope, Vectrex game console, ILDA laser display, and other analog vector displays, or with oscilloscope emulating software directly on your laptop.
Derek Holzer was invited for the event PU-SH-ING at 20 Jan 2017. He did a reading on Schematic as a Score, but also did a live concert from his research in analog visuals with the oscilloscope.
a theoretical/historical text about the concept written by Derek Holzer
23 NOV 2016, Helsinki, Finland
THE VECTORIAN ERA: an Investigation into Analog Computer Graphics
The Vectorian Era opens with a screaming across the sky. Analog electronic computers predate their digital counterparts by several decades, and one of the first practical applications of the analog computer was in controlling the trajectories of German V2 rockets as they traced their rainbow of gravity from Flanders towards London during the Second World War. As Friedrich Kittler has observed, the relationship of media technology to military tools of destruction was sealed by moments such as these.
Post-war developments continued in this direction. Tennis for Two, programmed in 1958 by William Higinbotham on an analog computer at Brookhaven National Laboratories in Long Island NY USA, using an oscilloscope as the display. It combined a two-player interface with physics models of a bouncing ball displayed as vectors in motion, and is arguably the first publicly-playable video game. The laboratory itself performed government research into nuclear physics, energy technology, and national security.
In the early 1960’s, the composer Morton Subotnik employed engineer Don Buchla to help him create “the music of the future”. Buchla redesigned the existing function generators of analog computers to respond to voltage controls of their frequency and amplitude. This gave birth to the realtime-controllable, analog modular synthesizer which was subsequently expanded by others such as Bob Moog and Serge Tcherepnin.
In 1967, the Sony Portapak revolutionized video by taking the camera out of the television studio and into the hands of amateurs and artists. And by the early 1970’s, an interest in cybernetics, systems theory and automatic processes brought the analog computer closer to the worlds of art, music, and architecture. Figures such as Heinz von Foerster, Gordon Pask, Nam June Paik, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Iannis Xenakis and R. Buckminster Fuller all speculated on the effect of computers on society, and used computer-derived forms in their work. The 1972 Rutt-Etra Video Synthesizer, used famously by the Vasukas in several works, employed an analog computer to manipulate and deconstruct the raster of a conventional video signal with very otherworldly effects.
Vector graphics were widely adopted by video game manufacturers in the late 1970’s due to their computational efficiency, and the wealth of experience using them that the history of analog computing provided. Perhaps the most iconic of these games is Asteroids, a space shooter released by Atari in 1979. Battle Zone (1980), Tempest (1981), and Star Wars (1983) all stand as other notable examples from this Vectorian Era, and also as rudimentary training tools for the future e-warriors who would remotely guide missiles into Iraqi bunkers at the start of the next decade. As electronics became cheaper, smaller, and faster in the 1980’s, the dated technology of using analog vectors to directly manipulate a Cathode Ray Tube fell out of favor and rasterized graphics, animations and moving image quickly took their place.
Informed by the discourse of media archaeology, my own personal interest in analog vector graphics isn’t merely retro-for-retro’s-sake. Rather, it is an exploration of a once-current and now discarded technology linked with specific utopias and dystopias from another time. The fact that many aspects of our current utopian aspirations (and dystopian anxieties!) remain largely unchanged since the dawn of the Vectorian Era indicates to me that seeking to satisfy them with technology alone is quite problematic. Therefore, an investigation into “tried-and-failed” methods from the past casts our current attempts and struggles in a new kind of light.
George Brecht is most famous for his Event Scores such as Drip Music 1962 and is widely seen as an important precursor to conceptual art. He described his own art as a way of “ensuring that the details of everyday life, the random constellations of objects that surround us, stop going unnoticed.”
Event Scores are works Event Scores are simple instructions to complete everyday tasks which can be performed publicly, privately, or negatively (meaning deciding not to perform them at all).
Initially writing theatrical scores similar to Kaprow's earliest Happenings, Brecht grew increasingly dissatisfied with the didactic nature of these performances. After performing in one such piece, Cage quipped that he'd "never felt so controlled before." prompting Brecht to pare the scores down to haiku-like statements, leaving space for radically different interpretations each time the piece was performed.The Event Scores of George Brecht are still actual pieces. He is inspiring for a lot of performance based composers. Specifically that is works out of simple instructions and can be done by anybody it has a highly democratic factor, without losing its artistic impact. Also interesting is the fact that it is purely language based lays in our interest. DE PLAYER has been publishing and presenting a lot of sound poetry.George Brecht (August 27, 1926 – December 5, 2008), born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer, as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Mobil Oil. He was a key member of, and influence on, Fluxus, the international group of avant-garde artists centred on George Maciunas, having been involved with the group from the first performances in Wiesbaden 1962 until Maciunas' death in 1978.
One of the originators of 'participatory' art, in which the artwork can only be experienced by the active involvement of the viewer, he is most famous for his Event Scores such as Drip Music 1962, and is widely seen as an important precursor to conceptual art. He described his own art as a way of “ensuring that the details of everyday life, the random constellations of objects that surround us, stop going unnoticed.”
Steve Joy took me to meet George Brecht in his studio when I was in residence at St Michael's in Manhattan (c.1962). We became friends and he mailed instruction cards to me. I brought Steve Joy to St. Vincent College when I returned to the monastery from Paris in 1963. George Brecht agreed to provide instructions for an event at St. Vincent. For his "Vehicle Sundown Event", he published a set of about 50 cards to be given to participants who participated in the event with their vehicles. Each card held an instruction to be performed with a vehicle. Drivers were instructed to assemble at sundown in a parking lot and randomly park their vehicles. Then each driver, with a shuffled deck of instructions, would begin performing at the sound of a signal. Participants performed about 50 events such as "turn on lights", "start engine", "stop engine", "open window". This work was performed at St. Vincent College under the direction of Stephen Joy with Roman Verostko assisting. c. 1963
A baton is a stick that is used by conductors primarily to enlarge and enhance the manual and bodily movements associated with directing an ensemble of musicians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baton_(conducting)This object is chosen to be part of the archive because it is the first and most simple tool to translate a written score to the musician who has to execute it. It is the first intermediary after the score itself and comes from a method of conducting called cheironmy.
Before music was established in writing, each choir leader led the Gregorian chants of the scola cantorum with movements. This method of conducting, called cheironomy, consisted of writing signs in the air that contained clear instructions for the trained choir singers in terms of pitch change, duration and tone strength. These signs or neumens were written down, modified or not, first without any reference line. Later, the neumens - depending on the relative pitch differences - were noted above, on, or below a line referring to a pitch determined by the choral conductor.
10" vinyl dubplate each one with original sound and related artwork
edition 40 pieces
Piringer has performed in DE PLAYER with his visual sound poetry pieces based on computer programming. For Pushing the Score we invited him to make special work for a limited edition. For this he developed specific software that generates poetry in spoken word form. For each record a unique piece is generated that is spoken and performed by the same software. The packaging of each record is also linked to the unique file and consists of an original visual work that is derived/transformed via a formula from the programming language that underlies the audio poem to be heard on the record.
Jörg Piringer is a member of the Institute for Trans-acoustic Research, member of the Vegetable Orchestra, radio artist, sound poet, visual poet, musician and holds a master's degree in computer science. He is also involved in the online poetry platform Huelkorven. The way in which he arrives at his poetry is very closely linked to his knowledge and skills of the programming language.
For example his work ‘frakativ’; an electronic visual sound poetry performance. ‘Fricatives’ are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together.
The performance ‘frikativ’ is real-time generated visual and sound poetry. Image and sound are created immediately during the performance by speaking and vocalizing into a microphone and modifying the voice through signal processors and samplers while the software is analyzing the sound to create animated abstract visual text-compositions.
Piringer is also involved in Huellkurven; an online sound poetry magazine and a series of events dedicated to sound poetry, poésie sonore, lautpoesie, noise poetry, sound-text composition, auditive poetry, audio poetry etc.
https://monoskop.org/Concrete_poetryDE PLAYER is interested in sound that fraternises in the abstract sense and makes people communicate with each other, without having to understand each other specifically in terms of language. In a multicultural situation, abstract sounds are the forms of recognition; then there is, for example, the music. The cultural identity is communicated with this. Music and dance are good elements to be together without literally understanding each other word for word. Subcultures form through music. In addition to the all-dominating impact of the music industry that determines lifestyle at the confection level, all sorts of de-mass-splintering genres are forming on the periphery of the musical firmament. The style / genre determines the identity. New generations are born.
It is important here that the language is sung off the usual value of speech. The limits of speech become communication and nonsense, which both have the potential of speech. Orientation with regard to giving meaning changes by inserting moments when improper use of thought, material and technology takes place.
The foundation of language as an information transmission is the foundation of these tendencies and is at the heart of the oral tradition principle. How stories can be told, how traditions are passed on, how past feeds the present and how the present forms itself by muttering the past.
Multilingualism is important in giving meaning to the things around us. Publishing, as mentioned above, is important to communicate various ways of expression. Signification also plays a major role in this. Within "Radical Listening" we want to see what the possibilities are of communication and publishing with the current means that are available to us. This idea is closely intertwined with the project "Pushing the Score", in which the materialization of sound plays a role. Listening in the sense of "Radical Listening" is therefore not only about ears specifically, but generally about exploring our world, our position in it and the way in which communication is possible.
We investigate how contemporary means are used to shape language, sign and sound. The analogue and virtual voice play a major role in this. Use of consumer electronics for improper use (eg tape recorder, telephone) but also self-invented technical devices and software, other machines (computer, record player, effect equipment) and a variety of speech techniques are used so that, among other things, classical reading forms are exceeded.
Inspiration is the vocal poetry, poésie sonore and text-sound composition. In our opinion, this area is an important one, both in the experimental sound, in the lecture and in the visual arts. Here it has played an important role and as such it is still current. The connection of the word and sound can be found in many ways within the art and music of fluxus, rap, early avant-garde, soundproof, laut poetry, music theater, opera, performative series, musical theatrical dad shows, radio plays and installational settings.
Fersteinn from Iceland will come and bring us a clear bold construction of tones and notes in space. They sound like a completely crushed partiture which comes out in it's pure elements just ordered in a way you are not so used to listen to. Good practise for the ears.
Fersteinn is a quartet of multi-instrumentalists that performs music by composer Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson. The music focuses on elastic rhythms, that are not easily confined to a grid. The musicians read the music from a score, but the score consists of moving images on a computer screen. This is done in order to communicate rhythms not easily notated. The music mostly consists of hockets where each sound is like one letter in a word. With flutes or recorder, plucked string instruments, duck calls and winds or brass, various types of rhythmical sound textures are conveyed. Some parts of the music might resemble animal sounds or the rhythm of animal movements.
To quote the composer: "By intently focusing on small differences, both in rhythm and pitch, the ear gets tuned to a microscopic mode of listening. When things then open up, a new sense of variety is gained."Fersteinn works with the method of so called Animation. This means animated notation. They had been performing before we started the Pushing Scores project. Nevertheless we claim it to be part of it.FERSTEINN (is)
Fersteinn is a quartet of multi-instrumentalists that play compositions by Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson, a repertoire that is written especially for the ensemble. Fersteinn usually performs in the quietest of settings. They are a group that plays music in a “extra-musical” or “non-musical” sort of rhythm (so to speak). They did quite an impressive set 2 years ago at De Vleeshal and Wallgallery, for those who missed it.
Fersteinn plays from animations made as compositions on a laptop. Most compositions are made by Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson.
Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson (born 1982) is an Icelandic composer, performer and a founding member of S.L.Á.T.U.R., an experimental arts organization in Reykjavík. In his compositions he has developed a rhythmic language devoid of regular beat or metre, and he has created a new musical notation to represent his music.
Guðmundur Steinn's musical style combines sound patterns without using a rigid rhythmic grid structure or pulse. This approach has led to the development of his animated notation, or 'anitation', instead of using traditional musical scores. During the performance, the musicians follow specific instructions that move across a computer screen. This rhythmic language and animated notation and the structural methods he uses in composition were the subject of his M.A. thesis in Mills College. As Guðmundur Steinn explains, "By intently focusing on small differences, both in rhythm and pitch, the ear gets tuned to a microscopic mode of listening. When things then open up, a new sense of variety is gained."
He is a founding member of the S.L.Á.T.U.R. ("samtök listrænt ágengra tónsmiða umhverfis Reykjavík" or "The Association of Artistically Obtrusive Composers around Reykjavík"[6]), an experimental composers collective in Iceland, and he is co-curator of the festival Sláturtíð. He also a co-curates the concert series Jaðarber at the Reykjavík Art Museum
‘Anitation’is the term for animated notation. Instead of using traditional musical scores, during the performance, the musicians follow specific instructions that move across a computer screen. This rhythmic language and animated notation and the structural methods were the subject of Guðmundur Steinn M.A. thesis in Mills College. As Guðmundur Steinn explains, "By intently focusing on small differences, both in rhythm and pitch, the ear gets tuned to a microscopic mode of listening. When things then open up, a new sense of variety is gained." This technique of composing is performed by Gudmundur Steinn his quartet Fersteinn.
Gudmundur Steinn has been part of DE PLAYER its program with his quartet Fersteinn several times. This Icelandic quartet plays with little analog instruments animation scores Steinn made on his computer. It results in real delicate and unconventional chamber music.
The animations of Steinn were also used by Goodiepal when he visited DE PLAYER on 17 December 2015 with his project on Icelandic animated notation. He a lecture on this subject and played together with Daniel S. Bøtcher, Grøn, Nynne Roberta Pedersen several pieces. Amongst which some of Gudmundur Steinn.
The idea of Anitation and the work of Gudmunder Steinn fits perfectly in Pushing Scores.Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson is an Icelandic composer writing music based on irregular or non-pulse oriented rhythms. It inhabits a world where grids or straight lines are almost non-existent. This often requires presenting the music as moving graphics on computer screens. That way the most irregular things can become very intelligible.
He has been active with a composer collective in Iceland called S.L.Á.T.U.R. and taken part in founding its festival Sláturtíð and used to be a co-curator of the Jaðarber concert series and Fengjastrútur Ensemble. He runs his own multi-instrumentalist quartet which is called Fersteinn.
His music has been performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Caput Ensemble, Reykjavík Chamber Orchestra, Ensemble Adapter, Tøyen Fil og Klafferi, Ensemble l’Arsenale, Ensemble CRUSH, Aksiom Ensemble, Nordic Affect, Defun Ensemble, Iceland Flute Choir, Duo Harpverk, Roberto Durante, Markus Hohti, Mathias Ziegler, Georgia Browne, Timo Kinnunen, Shayna Dunkelmann, Una Sveinbjarnardóttir and Tinna Þosteinsdóttir.
Some of the festivals that have included Guðmundur’s music are Tectonics Reykjavík and Glasgow, MATA, Musikin Aika, Ultima, November Music, Transit, Music for People and Thingamajigs, Nordlichter Biennale, Timisoara International Music Festival and ISSTC 2014 in Maynooth, Ireland, where Guðmundur was also Keynote speaker.
Guðmundur Steinn studied composition at Mills College, Iceland Academy of the Arts, Reykjavík College of Music, privately and at summer courses in Kürten and Darmstädt. His teachers have been Alvin Curran, Fred Frith, John Bischoff, Atli Ingólfsson, Hilmar Þórðarsson and Úlfar Ingi Haraldsson.Silence has kinetic roles in social exchanges: quietude, reflective pauses, withdrawal, displays of consent or dissent, reception and interpretation. But how can we score something not present, yet also not absent? Is there a positive notation for this critical issue of performance, of silence in the voice, other than merely the courtesies of extended rests, or blanks in the score? The reader will see inscriptions that oscillate between pictures and writing, and between visual and auditory, exemplifying those capacities of drawing to operate in the spaces between languages. In the context of an experimental music notation, seeking to make an instrumental gesture of silence, how can we draw incipience?“Before god needed to be invented there were man.
As bart plantenga stated in his reading on yodeling.
I think silence has that same trelations with music.
emptiness has that same relation with notation.
event:
title: MUSIC&CAPITALISM
date:Sat 18 May 2013 09.00 hrs - 24.00 hrs
location:SKAR office, Groot Handelsgebouw, Rotterdam |
artists: MARCO FUSINATO & JOHANNES KREIDLER
description:
A reading in combination with a 6 hrs concert by Marco Fusinato.
DE PLAYER and WORM present a day about music and economy, revolving around two authoritative sound-artists/composers, whose work is engaged with political-economical processes. Marco Fusinato's (AU) mangled noise-guitar excursions are informed by the political explosions and pitfalls of of radical collectives from Autonomia and beyond. Johannes Kreidler (DE) who made a piece consisting of 70 thousand samples, and for each of these fragments he asked permission from the GEMA (the German BUMA). The authority who controls copy right specifically for musicians.
publication:
Project name: DOB 060
Description : Product Placements - 10" blue vinyl with poster and xerox copies - edition of 150 pieces
Johannes Kreidler is a special duck in the bite when it comes to composing. His works can often be regarded as composition, performance, sculpture and indictment. His work is described as conceptual music. He usually uses multimedia elements. He approaches the themes he uses (including authorship) through various entities directly linked to society. By acting consistently within these structures he creates his works. A few examples appeal to the imagination with regard to how a score can be understood and which elements and/or processes can play a role in this.
Johannes Kreidler is a composer, concept- and media artist. His way of composing has a multimedia conceptual approach which is mostly linked with processes in society. This makes it interesting in the perspective of experimentation and onorthodox composing. The AEX index, outsourcing of labor or copyright processes and social questions and implication around these issues form the fundament of some of his compositions. We asked Johannes to do a reading about his practice as a composer during the event we organized around Music & Capitalism.
We produced with him a record which contains one piece of him named Product Placements
This piece is to be seen as a plunder phonic composition in extremis. A press echoed in September 2008 his action Product Placements out, with which he wanted to initiate a discussion on copyright and the height of creation in music. In a 33-second piece of music, he processed 70,200 quotes of foreign works, which he all individually enrolled at the GEMA. For this purpose, he accompanied by numerous press representatives with a small truck full of completed applications at the GEMA Directorate General in Berlin before. The plant is deliberately located in a legal gray area, which has greatly increased by digital technologies, so that it is impossible to clarify the case so far.(How Could You) Bring Him Home by Eamon
From 2000 to 2006 Kreidler studied composition with Mathias Spahlinger, electronic music with Orm Finnendahl and Mesias Maiguashca, and music theory with Eckehard Kiem at the University of Music Freiburg and at the Institute of Sonology (Computer Music) of the Koninklijk Conservatorium The Hague. He also studied philosophy and art history at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.
He works as a lecturer in music theory, ear training and electronic music at the Rostock Academy of Music and Theater, the Detmold Academy of Music, the Hanover University of Music and Drama and at the Hamburg University of Music and Drama.
His work/action Product Placements, which helped to discuss copyright and the level of creation in music, was widely spread. In a 33 second piece he processed 70,200 quotations of foreign works, all of which he submitted individually via forms to the GEMA (the German Buma Stemra). Eventually he was accompanied by numerous journalists with a small truck full of completed applications to the GEMA Directorate General in Berlin. A few cubic metres of printed matter were placed in the reception hall of the GEMA office. The system was therefore completely stuck. The minimal samples used (milli-seconds) are intended to test the credibility and effectiveness of the GEMA in relation to the digital reality. The music production is consciously located in a legal grey area, which has been greatly enlarged by digital technologies. If such a fraction can still be labelled as music, it can still be linked to the original and the performing artist in terms of financial compensation for use.
This is close to his work Charts Music, in which he used the share prices of various companies to derive pitches. Besides the share prices, some other statistics were used, such as the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq. In this piece, too, reference is made to the borderline areas of copyright, and credits such as composers and copyright holders mention the respective companies instead of Kreidler himself.
For another work he commissioned composers from low-wage countries to plagiarize his own music for a commission for the Festival Klangwerkstatt Berlin. For much less money than Kreidler himself received as a commission, he had pieces ready for concert that were made for him in China and India. According to Kreidler, the action entitled Fremdarbeit is intended to focus attention on the themes of exploitation and authorship.
During this evening we focus on the archiving of our Pushing Scores project. A project on the nowadays meaning of the 'graphic score', which has been running for over the last 2-3 years. What are the possibilities of graphic scores, in a day and age in which graphic notation is still usually seen as a ‘drawing’, serving as some kind of sheet music?
To communicate the project to a larger audience DE PLAYER asked Varia to develop a context and technical environment as a web-based archival publication for the Pushing Scores project. The idea is that this material will be embodied by a dynamic, accessible and therefore active archive, which creates new relations, new perspectives and, at its best, new concepts for the production and/or processes of making scores. Varia will explain their ideas and approach on this matter.
- Valentina Vuksic will bring a live performance in which she approaches computers with transducers that transform electromagnetic radiation into sound within choreographically setups. The ‘runtime’ of executed software is staged for an audience to provide an acoustic experience: that of logic encountering the physical world.
- Ana Guedes is introducing her project Untitled Records; a performative sound installation weaving historical and emotional narratives through the “instrumentalisation” of a collection of records.
- Niek Hilkmann (part of Varia) will present his UNI (Universal Notation Ideal), a Pay2Print investigation in the simultaneous production and distribution of standardised graphical scores through the mediation of an automaton. It is developed by Niek Hilkmann and Joseph Knierzinger, based on a new notation system that is created to help conceptual composers in developing and exchanging conceptual music within one uniform language. The actual printing of the thermal paper is a stochastic performance in itself. By emphasizing this aspect of the machine as a musical entrepreneur, earning its own income, we explore the conditions of mechanised labour within the cultural industry and its corresponding ethics
Ana Guedes her project UNTITLED RECORDS fits in our idea of finding new ways for composing. Her archival approach and its political and personal implication are the starting point of this work. Because she uses and record archive it finally almost turns out to be a DJ set. This 'other way' around to come to sound is an interesting phenomenon. Also the technical implementation of possibilities to program the record players is interesting regarding for example the idea of schematics as a score.
-Ana Guedes is a multidisciplinary artist from Portugal who lives and works in The Hague. She works with sound, video, installation and performance. Her research focuses on the 'dialectic of tuning'. Within this framework she investigates the working of memory with the intention of recreating situations and thus evoking a 'presence'. Through subjective interpretations of the ability to instrumentalize objects, she creates catalysts for thinking and contemplation. Her project Untitled Records is a performative sound installation that interweaves historical and emotional narratives through the 'instrumentalisation' of a collection of vinyl records. An ensemble of Arduino-powered prepared record players is built as an instrumentation to make an intimate selection from a family archive of popular music. The records come from Angola, Portugal and Canada.
UNTITLED RECORDS is a performative sound installation weaving historical and emotional narratives through the “instrumentalisation” of a collection of records. An ensemble of reimagined record players are instruments built to perform an intimate selection from a family archive of popular music : “..a set of records carefully shipped home from a country at war forty years ago”.
The vinyls were purchased in Angola, Portugal and Canada over a time span from the 60s to the early 80s and have travelled over three continents.
Stained by the passage of time, scratched, with their covers eaten by moths the records are signed and dated; they exist as passive witnesses of a displacement in time and space.
Each date and signature is a coordinate, a clue in the reconstruction of a map tracing complex historical occurrences splitting into an infinite number of threads.
The multi arm record players with which several timelines can be played - from one single record to an ensemble of vinyls intertwine a juxtaposition of temporalities and imagined narratives trapped within the collection.
event title:TGC # 3 / MAT>NET>PU
participating artists: JOHANNES BERGMARK, HIELE MARTENS, HELGA JAKOBSON, XPUB
An evening with remarkable experiments and materialised conceptual flip flop. DE PLAYER will unveil its third issue of Tetra Gamma Circulaire (TGC) – the unknown audio magazine. TGC #3 is compiled in collaboration with students of the Piet Zwart Institute, and is also part of their Experimental Publishing programme of the Media Design Master, named XPUB.
Tetra Gamma Circulaire was initiated in 2015 by DE PLAYER with the aim to become an experimental audio magazine series without any restrictions in appearance, style, and/or shape. TGC #3 fits right in. Concretely, TGC #3 is a particular kind of publishing platform engineered for sonic experiments, instruments, and installations. Some dare say it's a kind of jukebox. The first edition of TGC #3 is limited to just twelve copies, and its presentation at this event is augmented with works created and compiled by the XPUB students. Next to the presentation of TGC#3 we are also hosting exciting demonstrations and live sets from the sound makers and breakers described below.
Sometimes 1 + 1 is greater than the sum of its parts, but if you put two of Belgium’s finest composers and musicians together, it adds up to an infinite number. Hiele Martens, or the collaboration of Lieven Martens Moana and Roman Hiele, delve deep into new territory that could be interpreted as a 2017 update of Maurice Kagel’s "Exotica", but made by self-aware electronic musicians. Hiele Martens' debut record is about to be released on Ultra Eczema and is expected to become one of the highlights of this year.
Whether culminating into actions or objects, Helga Jakobson's work responds to conditions of limbo within existence and acts as a platform to confront the unknown; it focuses on death, time and ephemerality. Currently she is constructing a digital and physical web; weaving together the overlapping, intuitive and sometimes complicated interconnections that comprise her interest in handcraft, witchcraft, and digitalcraft. The main threads that run between these interests are the experience of women, their traditional work and their sharing of knowledge. Jakobson has great reverence for intuition and it’s use as a technology. At DE PLAYER she will demonstrate her 'spider web record player'.
Johannes Bergmark is a Fylkingen affiliated sound artist, instrument builder and piano technician. His performances have been described as surrealist puppet theatre in which the characters are amplified objects such as old tools, kitchen utensils, toys, springs and decorative kitsch. Using contact microphones, Bergmark reveals their hidden acoustics, dynamic scales and unique timbres. Bergmark is the ultimate rethinker of what music can be, in sound and in performance, as you can sometimes find him hanging on two piano strings from a ceiling.
Experimental Publishing is a new course of the Piet Zwart Institute's Media Design Master programme. The concept of the course revolves around two core principles: first, the inquiry into the technological, political and cultural processes through which things are made public; and second, the desire to expand the notion of publishing beyond print media and its direct digital translation. The Experimental Publishing students who contributed to the development of TGC #3 are: Karina Dukalska, Max Franklin, Giulia de Giovanelli, Clàudia Giralt, Francisco González, Margreet Riphagen, Nadine Rotem-Stibbe and Kimmy Spreeuwenberg.
We got in touch with Helga Jakobson her work through Bas van den Hurk who in that time was teaching at St Joost post graduate program in which Helga took part. Because of the fact that she was developing a machine which produces sound through the process of reading spider webs, Bas tipped her to contact DE PLAYER. We had an appointment and it was clear that this definitely got our interest and the decided to present her prototype at an event in which other more inventive ways of sound making were presented. Also the idea of a spider web as a score of course matched with the Pushing Scores project. Het Arachnes Sonifier got more and more developed and soon we will publish an album (DOB094) with the sound, images and conceptual information on our label.Helga Jakobson is a Canadian artist whose practice consists of exploring conditions of limbo, with a focus on death, time and the ephemeral. Often her research leads her to short-lived and organic material with which she develops new systems and methods for engagement. This takes shape by building digital interfaces; instrumentation used to explore, amplify and reflect what is barely visible, tangible or audible, while expressing the resonance and relationship between people, plants and organic matter. She presented her project entitled Arachnes Sonifier, in which she captures and makes audible spider webs. Her spider web record player (Arachnes Sonifier), which she developed for this purpose, is an instrument that plays, registers and converts a spider web into sound by means of light sensors. She passes on the notation she distils from this to music companies in order to come to performances.
Knowledge sharing across traditions has often taken place through oral mythology. Creation myths, such as in the Hopi and Navajo traditions, often centre around a Grandmother Spider figure who wove the night sky with her silk. There are spider figures in West African, Akan, and Caribbean myths personifying the spider as a trickster. In Japan there’s a focus on the lure of the spider, where it is sometimes likened to a prostitute. However, my favourite spider myth is from Greek mythology; that of Arachne who wove a tapestry better than Athena, the Goddess of weaving and war. Arachne challenged Athena, believing in the superiority of her own abilities and with the support of her community. During the competition, Athena wove a tapestry depicting all of the times mortals challenged the Gods and lost, while Arachne wove accounts of the many times Zeus had raped mortal women. After Arachne won the competition, Athena transformed her into a spider, and this is where the name for arachnids originates. Arachne, a disturber of the status quo, is thought of as one of the first feminist authors.
Using the material bequeathed to Arachne’s doomed progeny, I’ve been weaving a visual and sonic tapestry of my own, using digital technology to form new means of mythologizing and disseminating non-verbal experience. The sonification of spiderwebs asserts a reverence for the environment, the beauty of the ephemeral and loss. When the webs are harvested, my hand effects their original form. These webs then become a game of Cat’s Cradle of sorts between the spider and I, not quite a collaboration but rather more of an exercise in ongoingness and recognition of loss. The intact web will not exist long in the world, and with my interference; even less so. This strange, affective relay continues into the recording process which results in the interpreted sound of an interpreted web. These actions are complicated and tenuous, as most human relations with companion species are. The recordings I make of the webs are an act of commemoration, and as Myers and Husk propose; "This requires reading with our sense attuned to stories told in otherwise muted registers.”
The idea of a graphic score, a readable gesture, aids in the playability/repeatability of a piece of music which through it’s repetition allows for exploration, interpretation and imagination. These spiders have laid out scores in the form of webs that are barely visible ephemera drifting between branches or street signs or windows and I long to understand them. They remind me of George Crumb’s circular compositions; minus the pen and paper. In actuality, they are visual representations of the spider’s consciousness (who can forget Dr Peter Witt’s experiments with drug use on spiders and their resulting webs). A spiderweb is not only an illustration of a spider’s mental landscape, but an instrument it plucks and plays. These structures are scores and instruments unreadable/unplayable by humans, but interpretable through speculative fabulation, in the case of the recordings I create.
The webs I’ve chosen for this publication were harvested in the fall of 2018, after the first snowfall in Winnipeg, Canada. To find them I searched through basements, and bars, and zoos, and homes, and parks; though I found the majority of them in a greenhouse where I teetered over cacti and lavender bushes to collect them. The process of finding them could be likened to trying to make the invisible visible. In searching; imagining where I would make a web, and then marvelling when I find it in the most unlikely place, which only enchants me further into the world of spiders and webs and mythology. They aren’t entirely in line with Darwinian structures after all, not serving a solely evolutionary purpose; unlikely structures vulnerable and more powerful in space and time.
This work by BJ Nilsen can be seen as an observing documentary and is related to time lapse filmmaking. In addition, it places itself in the tradition of electro acoustic music and 'musique concrète'; a French music movement that makes use of everyday sounds that are processed with the help of electronics into compositions and sound collages.
From the Dark Ecology project of Sonic Acts, Amsterdam, BJ Nilsen has visited many mines and mining areas over time. As a sound artist he realized how much sound there is in the mining industry and began to think in sonic terms about its impact and meaning. What is the relationship between the sounds of mining and the community that surrounds it? Where does mining stop? How much influence does it have on a community? Over the years he has built up an extensive sound archive around this subject. Both in active mines and in the abandoned mines, buildings, surrounding areas and logistics locations in Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Russia and elsewhere. In it he found the fragility of mining processes and the impact that mining activities have on the population and their biotope and he also expanded his archive with all related logistic processes. In the final processing of the sound, he uses the facets of mining as different sound tracks.
The composition follows a more or less linear path - starting with 'deep' time. This line is interrupted a few times and the different time periods work together and overlap. It is a mix of sound recordings made at different times. Sometimes recordings from four years ago are combined with more recent recordings. Thus different layers of time are presented, from slowly unfolding sounds that represent a deep geological time, to sounds of transport, to the kind of sounds that we recognize as science fiction to indicate the future. For example, mining is in the arctic zone and research and an asteroid mining law was adopted in Luxembourg in 2017 that gives companies ownership of what they extract from celestial bodies. The idea is that you find an asteroid that is really rich in some rare metal that we really need and that one can claim that. Of course, it only becomes interesting when the resources on earth are exhausted.
For example, in the composition radio broadcasts from space are used as well as a recoding of the probe that has ended up on an asteroid. In this way the work creates a third space that belongs to the individual listener and that arises from the interaction between the original space and the imaginary space, created by the composition, the sound processing and the perception of the listener.
There is a small tribute to GRM (Groupe de recherches Musicales) in Paris and Pierre Henry which is directly related to iron ore. The 'musique concrète' as developed by Henry at GRM was made by magnetic tape. Some of the recordings were finally mixed in the studios of GRM. Magnetic tape was the medium of BJ Nilsen's youth. He had hundreds of cassette tapes, like many at the time. It made him realize how closely he was actually involved in the process of iron ore, and how his development as an artist was shaped thanks to iron ore.
Benny Nilsen approached us for his project ORE. We thought he would fit very well in the E-ARTHHA event with Douglas Kahn which we had planned.
Douglas Kahn is Professor of Media and Innovation at the National Institute of Experimental Arts (NIEA), University of New South Wales, Sydney, and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis, where he was the Founding Director of Technocultural Studies. He is known primarily for his writings on the use of sound in the avant-garde and experimental arts and music, and history and theory of the media arts. His writings have also been influential in the scholarly area of sound studies and the practical area of sound art. His best known book 'Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts' was published by MIT Press in 1999.
Currently Kahn is researching new interfaces and possibilities of sound composition, image and performance. He discards old categories of sound and performance and replaces them with a new category of "energy" in the bigger narrative of ecology and other sensitivities.
That evening Kahn did some kind of improv session on the works of the three invited artists. ‘Mining’ BJ Nilsen, ‘Jazz’ Max Franklin and ‘Earthquake’ Aurelie Lierman.
‘In Ore different layers of time are overlapping, from the deep time of geology to the superfast time of our current economy and the future. For the record I used recordings from the iron ore processing plant in Kirkenes, both with the plant working and not working. When it was empty, I mapped out the building by recording it. You hear the room tones, pigeons flying around, doors flapping, and the sound of the town blending in. I used recordings from Pasvik, south of Kirkenes, where the rock is at least 2.9 billion years old. The north of Norway is one of the oldest rock formations in the world. It doesn’t relate directly to mining, but it extends the project to include geology, deep time and stone. Those recordings symbolise the stasis of time. The mountain just sits there. The sounds are environmental. I made field recordings in the winter, you hear ice crystals cracking because there was a layer of ice on the snow. I also went to Näätämö/Neiden and just over the border to Finland because it’s land of the Sámi, and I wanted to have that in. The Sámi have a lot of respect for nature. Throughout the landscape there are sacred stones that are very important to them. I also worked with stone as an instrument, striking and recording it. I did the same with coal. I made recordings of the sound of striking coal at the house of Hilde Methi, a curator who lives in Kirkenes. She still stores coal there in a small outhouse (called ‘kullbingen’). There are recordings from the harbour of Murmansk with the coal trains coming in from Kuzbass in southwestern Siberia. The next phase in the processing of iron is represented by recordings from inside the Tata Steel factories in Wijk aan Zee, 30 kilometers from Amsterdam. I also visited Most in the Czech Republic because there is a huge operational open pit mine. It’s not iron ore but lignite, ‘braunkohle’. It is vast scar in the landscape, and really an incredible place. The recordings I did in the former mining region of the Netherlands are again more environmental: the mine near Heerlen has been developed into a park and nature area. I’m very interested in the hidden layers and history the landscape. That’s why I wanted to have a thread about the regeneration of mining areas. I think it is important to explore the changes that the surrounding landscape and the mining site itself are undergoing, from active to closed, from contaminated landscape to re-vegetation. The future is represented through using radio emissions from space and a recoding from the probe that landed on the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. And then there are sounds used for seismic interferometry: the decoding of ambient seismic noise, micro earthquakes and also surface bound sounds. What I like about these recordings is that they already have been processed through the rock and soil and transposed into human hearing range.’
‘This mining work is tied directly to the computer age, itself an alchemic expression of man’s ingenious use of the earth. Modernity is made by the manipulation and transmutation of organic and synthetic materials through design and research. Without tantalum and niobium, there are no micro-capacitors; without gallium, no photovoltaics.’
‘In mining there are two types of waste. One is the waste you make to get to the ore. If you have a gold mine and the gold layer sits 50 metres below surface, you have to remove 50 metres of waste. The ore layer contains only a certain amount of the mineral that will bring you revenue. The ore goes to a processing plant and there you take out the tailings and the rest is the waste of your process. It can be a slurry, it may contain chemicals or poisonous materials so you have to contain it and treat and store it properly. Sometimes this can go horrible wrong. It is important for companies to manage this. More waste means more costs.’
‘The composition follows a more or less linear path – starting with deep time. It just turned out that way, perhaps because that’s how we generally tend to structure material. But the chronology is interrupted a couple of times, and the different time planes are cut-up, they interact and overlap, because I mix sound recordings that were done at different times. In that way I present different layers of time, from slowly unfolding sounds that represent deep geological time, to sounds of transport, to the sort of sounds we recognise as science fiction to denote the future. The work creates a third space that belongs to the individual listener and which arises from the interaction between the original space and imaginary space, created through the composition and sound processing.’
‘We dig deep into the earth to get to layers of deep time, extract it and use the ancient material, in the case of coal, for electricity, for heating the house, commodities, to type a message on a phone. It’s absurd when you start to think about it. So much time is compressed in this material and it’s burned up in minutes. It’s not like wind or the sun, which give you immediate energy. It’s millions of years compressed into hard materials that are burned up, like coal, or painstakingly refined to yield useful metal. This ungraspable void of deep time fascinates me: the time compressed in iron ore, the coal that started billions of years ago as organic material, the gold flecked asteroid far away in space, or the more recent ‘slambanken’ in Kirkenes, a manmade landscape of unusable slag that might be mined in the future.’
‘We trace out all the veins of the earth, and yet, living upon it, undermined as it is beneath our feet, are astonished that it should occasionally cleave asunder or tremble: as though, forsooth, these signs could be any other than expressions of the indignation felt by our sacred parent!’
‘If, as Novalis and many of his friends believed, stones, metals, and rock strata amount to transcriptions of the earth’s history, what better place to study that history than in the mines and caverns of the earth, where the entire record is preserved and exposed? At this point the ancient conception of mines and mountain caverns as places of lapidary activity encounters a a second folkoristic notion—that in the interior of mountains time stands still.’
‘The slambanken is a totally artificial, man-made landscape that has formed because the waste of the iron ore processing was flushed into the fjord. It is a base of hard rock under the water with different layers of material. It is a playground for sedimentologists because you can see how land and deltas form. We did a study and tried to identify how thick the layer was in different areas. We took samples and ran them through the laboratory in order to identify how many tons of final concentrate we would be able to get out of the slambanken. When they were cleaning the old silos they flushed everything out into the slambanken. This was part of a test production of around 30.000 tons. We can see layers of hematite. It is not enough to make a mine plan, but enough to get a small cash flow. You have to take a boat to get there. We have a tunnel that leads there.’
Interview with Ylva Ståhl and Kristoffer Johansson from the Sydvaranger mine in Kirkenes, by Benny Nilsen, Hilde Methi and Annette Wolfsberger, March 2018.
‘You cannot talk about mining in the North without getting into the question what it means for the landscape, for the people and the animals living there, for the communities and the relations between all these. In a sense, you cannot not bring out those relations: how a society depends on mining and how it affects it.’
‘The sound of the mine was always present. It created a vacuum after it closed. When the mill was in full operation the only time when we woke up in the night was when the train was not going. We were living quite close to the railway, so when the train did not run we knew instantaneously that something had happened, either in the mine or in the mill.’
Interview with Ylva Ståhl and Kristoffer Johansson from the Sydvaranger mine in Kirkenes, by Benny Nilsen, Hilde Methi and Annette Wolfsberger, March 2018.
‘I am drawn to the Arctic as a sound person because of its relative remoteness. The landscape is fairly untouched, it is scarsely populated, it’s desolate. The sounds of nature are not often interrupted by other sounds. Except for the mining, but that then is also why I find mining in the Arctic especially interesting. The relentless nature in the Arctic constantly reminds you that you are a human being and that you are nor really supposed to be there because the harshness of the environment might kill you. It’s good for the human psyche to be reminded of that. You can only survive there if you work with nature. If you work against it, it will kill you. The people in the Arctic have a lot of respect for nature, it forms them.’
‘The Arctic is changing quickly. If it goes on like it goes now, the ice will open up and it will not be so desolate anymore. That is quite scary. Will it mean that other places will become desolate instead, uninhabitable? What shifts will we see? What shifts happened in the past? Why did people in the past settle in an environment like this? Were they forced up North by circumstances? These questions are really haunting me.’
‘Far down in the Earth the rock is actually moving. Workers hear the rock talk, it crackles, it makes sounds, spits slivers. These can be an indicator that something is about to happen, the sounds tell something about the stability of the rock. Listening underground is like reading the environment. Geologists read the stone, but they also listen to it. By physically interacting with the stone you can determine what material it is. Different types of stone give different frequency readings. Geologists use seismic soundings to map out the resources in the earth. They put geophones in an array, and record the blast of a detonation underground. It gives them an image, a bit similar to sonar. It’s mostly really low sounds that you have to transpose up three times to get within human hearing range. In practice it’s quite mathematical, but it still it is part of the sound world too. Through soundwaves geologists are able to map what is underground.’
‘There is a little homage to GRM and Pierre Schaeffer on the record. For me it relates directly to iron ore in so far that the type of musique concrète and tape music developed at GRM was made possible by magnetic tape. I mixed part of the recording in the GRM studios in Paris where I was working on another acousmatic piece. Magnetic tape was the medium of my youth. I had hundreds of cassette tapes, mostly TDK. It made me recognise again how close we are to the source of ore, and how my development as an artist was shaped by iron ore.’
‘The iron ore is refined and filtered, making sure the pure magnetite comes out. Only a small percentage of the ore is iron, the rest is slag and waste. It is a process that somehow relates to my own artistic process. I’m always processing and refining my field recordings. I apply filters, use electronics. It’s a kind of sound alchemy. All to get to the desired result: the gold!’
Black Moon is composed of shortwave radio signals, recorded via the online receiver website of the Technical University of Enschede. Each signal was chosen for the resonance it evokes in the listener, later interwoven with other signals recorded from the same source for several days. The selection of sounds is done according to properties that lie outside the predictable controllable parameters in order to arrive at a complex multidimensional listening experience. By compactly interweaving the frequencies, a different image is created for the listener at each listening session because of the psycho-acoustic selections that take place at the listener. The record can thus be considered as a potential composition, which is performed by the listener himself through the aforementioned process.
John Duncan took part in our event at 5 October 2018. His background in performance and his multimedia and confrontational approach gives him full credits to be part of DE PLAYER its program. When we met we had discussions on several professional subjects and decided to realize a publication. The fact that the sound on the records is an everchanging piece because of the psycho acoustic effects, make the record more into a tool than a static recording. This approach can also be seen in the approach of the electronic voice phenomena (EVP) of Friedrich Jürgenson, a researcher who claimed to have detected voices of the dead hidden in radio static. Duncan’s also works sometimes together with Carl Michael Hausswolff who is an expert in EVP.John Duncan has been active for decades at the cutting edge of performances, video, experimental music, installation, pirate radio and television. He has played a central role in the development of performing arts in Los Angeles, experimental music as a member of LAFMS, Japanese noise and pirate radio in Tokyo. Duncan's work has a lasting influence on experimental music because his art is generally still refined and refined and he regularly collaborates with young artists. He is currently a sound designer at the art academy of Bologna, Italy. Since the beginning of his work, he has made extensive use of recorded sound. His music consists mainly of recordings of shortwave radio, field recordings and voice.
In the mid-1980s Duncan began pirate radio and television broadcasting with his own custom-built portable channels, operating illegally from the roofs of apartment buildings in central Tokyo and from an abandoned American military hospital near Sagamihara. He also made periodic broadcasts from his own home.
The medium of radio still plays a role in arriving at compositions. The publication Black Moon (DOB 096) is composed of shortwave radio signals, recorded via the online receiver website of the Technical University of Enschede.
event
title: ARCHIVING \ PUSHING SCORES
date:Thu 29 Nov 2018 20:00hrs
location: Varia, Rotterdam
artists: VALENTINA VUKSIC, ANA GUEDES, VARIA, NIEK HILKMANN
During this evening we focus on the archiving of our Pushing Scores project. A project on the nowadays meaning of the 'graphic score', which has been running for over the last 2-3 years. What are the possibilities of graphic scores, in a day and age in which graphic notation is still usually seen as a ‘drawing’, serving as some kind of sheet music?
- Valentina Vuksic will bring a live performance in which she approaches computers with transducers that transform electromagnetic radiation into sound within choreographically setups. The ‘runtime’ of executed software is staged for an audience to provide an acoustic experience: that of logic encountering the physical world.
- Ana Guedes is introducing her project Untitled Records; a performative sound installation weaving historical and emotional narratives through the “instrumentalisation” of a collection of records.
- Niek Hilkmann (part of Varia) will present his UNI (Universal Notation Ideal), a Pay2Print investigation in the simultaneous production and distribution of standardised graphical scores through the mediation of an automaton. It is developed by Niek Hilkmann and Joseph Knierzinger, based on a new notation system that is created to help conceptual composers in developing and exchanging conceptual music within one uniform language. The actual printing of the thermal paper is a stochastic performance in itself. By emphasizing this aspect of the machine as a musical entrepreneur, earning its own income, we explore the conditions of mechanised labour within the cultural industry and its corresponding ethicsWe know Varia as a community based initiative which combines several knowledge in the interdisciplinary filed of music, programming, publishing, hacking, social interventions, critical positions, etc. It is based in Rotterdam in the area were we operate. We knew some of its members and thought it would be nice and effective to approach them with a question of doing something with the archive of Pushing Scores. Instead of making a paintwork publication we wanted it to be more adventurous and in line with the concept of the project.
To communicate the Pushing Scores to a larger audience DE PLAYER asked Varia to develop a context and technical environment as a web-based archival publication. The idea is that this material will be embodied by a dynamic, accessible and therefore active archive, which creates new relations, new perspectives and, at its best, new concepts for the production and/or processes of making scores. During an evening at the Varia collective, where Valentia Vuksic and Ana Guedes also played a live set and explained their work and backgrounds, Niek Hilkmann, who is part of the Varia team, presented his UNI (Universal Notation Ideal); a Pay2Print research into the simultaneous production and distribution of standardized graphic scores by means of an automatic machine. The UNI was developed by Niek Hilkmann and Joseph Knierzinger. It is a machine into which a coin is inserted and from which a score printed on a roll of paper is then delivered. It is based on a new notation system designed to help conceptual composers develop and exchange conceptual music in one uniform language. The actual printing of the thermal paper is a stochastic performance in itself. By emphasizing this aspect of the machine as a musical entrepreneur earning his own income, the conditions of mechanized labor within the cultural industry and the associated ethics are investigated within this project. His presentation was a cross-over between a lecture and a demonstration. On the spot, the audience could activate the UNI.
Black MIDI is a music genre consisting of compositions that use MIDI files to create a song remix containing a large number of notes, typically in the thousands or millions, and sometimes billions. People who make black MIDIs are known as blackers. However, there are no specific criteria of what is considered "black"; as a result, finding an exact origin of black MIDI is impossible.
DE PLAYER always has a strong interest in decoupling publising from a stereotypical understanding of making things public that comes from an historical and economical media constraint linked to the print, software, music, and film industries, and that has limited any form of meaningful explorative complementary or conflictual combinations between media in the field of cultural production. This not only counts for publishing but also for exploring new possibilities for the art practise in general.
Transformation of information is a fact that occurs during the process of composing and performing the compositions. In that sense there is never a perfect reproduction but always an interpretation. This is an interesting process in which boundaries can be explored and in which the idea of 'cracked media', whose performers challenge the intended effect of the technology and actively use alternative acts through subversive acts of abuse and misconception to generate results, is an interesting one. position.
Black MIDI is a beautiful example of how new technology / consumer electronics and its abuse leads to great new implications and applications. This one is pretty contemporary one and results in great imagery and sound.
Origins and early history
Though the two are unrelated in origin, the concept of impossible piano existed long before black MIDI, manifesting itself within Conlon Nancarrow's work involving player pianos where he punched holes in piano cards, creating extremely complex musical compositions in the same impossible, unplayable spirit of black MIDI.
Black MIDI was first employed in Shirasagi Yukki at Kuro Yuki Gohan's rendition of "U.N. Owen Was Her?", an extra boss theme from the Touhou Project shooter video game The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. It was uploaded to the site Nico Nico Douga in 2009, and public awareness of Black MIDI started to spread from Japan to China and Korea in the following two years. In its beginning years, Black MIDIs were represented visually with traditional, two-stave piano sheet music,contained a number of notes only in the thousands. They were created with MIDI sequencers such as Music Studio Producer, and Singer Song Writer, and played through MIDI players such as MAMPlayer and Timidity++. The Black MIDI community in Japan vanished quickly because, according to Jason Nguyen (owner of the channel Gingeas), the group was “analogous to those TV shows where there’s a mysterious founder of a civilization that is not really known throughout the course of the show.”
The popularity of Black MIDI transitioned into Europe and the United States due to a video of a composition uploaded by Kakakakaito1998 in February 2011, and shortly thereafter, blackers from around the world began pushing limits of the style by making compositions with notes increasing into the millions and using an enormous number of colors and patterns to match the complexity of the notes. They also formed the sites Guide to Black MIDI and Official Black MIDI Wikia that introduced and set the norm of Black MIDI.
The first of these tracks to reach the million-note mark was that of “Necrofantasia” from Touhou Project video game Perfect Cherry Blossom, arranged by TheTrustedComputer. The end of the title of many Black MIDI videos displays how many notes are in the piece. The number of notes and file sizes that could be played back have grown with the rising amount of processing and 64-bit programs computers are able to handle, and while Black MIDIs of Japanese video game music and anime are still common, the genre has also begun spilling into modern-day pop songs, such as "Wrecking Ball" by Miley Cyrus. Despite this increased computer storage, there are still Black MIDI files that could cause an operating system to slow down. The two largest black MIDIs are "Armageddon v3" and "TheTrueEnd," both of which contain the maximum number of notes allowed in the MIDI standard (about 93 trillion). Due to the nature of their creation and their sheer size, they are unable to be played back and recorded.
English-language blackers have formed collaboration groups, such as the Black MIDI Team, where they make MIDI files and visuals together so they can be uploaded online sooner. Blackers around the world have used software such as Synthesia, FL Studio, SynthFont, Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard, Piano From Above, MIDITrail, vanBasco Karaoke Player, MIDIPlayer (Java program), MAMPlayer, Music Studio Producer, Singer Song Writer, Tom's MIDI Player, TMIDI, and Timidity++ to create Black MIDIs. Some of them, like Jason, record the MIDI files at a slow tempo and then speed the footage in video-editing to avoid RAM and processing issues.
The term "black MIDI" is derived from how there are so many notes in each piece that the score would look nearly black (or would look really black) on traditional sheet music. According to California-based blacker TheTrustedComputer, black MIDI was intended as more of a remix style than an actual genre, and derived from the idea of "bullet hell" shoot 'em up games, which involved "so many bullets at a time your eyes can't keep up."[3] Black MIDI has also been considered the digital equivalent, as well as a response, to composer Conlon Nancarrow's use of the player piano which also involved experimenting with several thick notes to compose intricate pieces without hands. The Guide to Black MIDI, however, denies this influence: “We believe that references to Conlon Nancarrow and piano rolls are too deep and Black MIDI origins must be found in digital MIDI music world [sic]."
Black MIDI first received coverage by Michael Connor, a writer for the non-profit arts organization Rhizome, in September 2013, leading to attention from publications and bloggers including Aux, Gawker's Adrian Chen, Jason Kottke,[8] and The Verge. It has garnered acclaim from journalists, bloggers and electronic musicians, with many noting it as a distinctive and engaging genre thanks to how regular piano notes are combined to make new, abstract sounds not heard in many styles of music, as well as the visuals representing the notes. Hackaday's Elliot Williams spotlighted the style as ironic, given that the fast-paced arpeggios and "splatter-chords" that are developed with a restricted number of voices come together to make other tones that leads a piano sounding more like a chiptune and less like an actual piano.
event:
title: MUSIC&CAPITALISM
date:Sat 18 May 2013 09.00 hrs - 24.00 hrs
location: SKAR office , Groot Handelsgebouw, Rotterdam
artists: MARCO FUSINATO & JOHANNES KREIDLER
description:
A reading in combination with a 6 hrs concert by Marco Fusinato.
DE PLAYER and WORM present a day about music and economy, revolving around two authoritative sound-artists/composers, whose work is engaged with political-economical processes. Marco Fusinato's (AU) mangled noise-guitar excursions are informed by the political explosions and pitfalls of of radical collectives from Autonomia and beyond. Johannes Kreidler (DE) who made a piece consisting of 70 thousand samples, and for each of these fragments he asked permission from the GEMA (the German BUMA-STEMRA). The authority who controls copy right specifically for musicians.
publication:
title: Spectral Arrows
catalogue number: DOB 065
artist: Marco Fusinato
liverecordings by Gerben Kokmeijer
edited by Marco Fusinato
description:
Stuttering live concret, wailing feedback, Xenakis-esque swarms of descending glissandi, abusive guitar wrangling, walls of harsh static on a double sided black vinyl containing edited sound from the live recording of Marco Fusinato his endurance performance Spectral Arrows for DE PLAYER at 18 May 2013 at Groothandelsgebouw, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Spectral Arrows is an ongoing series of long-duration performances for guitar and electronics. In Spectral Arrows, Fusinato arrives at the venue when it opens for business, sets up his equipment facing a wall and proceeds to play for the whole day until the end of business hours. Fusinato presents himself here in the guise of a worker, clocking on and unceremoniously clocking off at the end, refusing to allow the behind-the-scenes mystery of rehearsals and preparations to lend an aura to the performance, and affirming the deskilled ethos of his work.
For the audience, the length of the performance frustrates the expectation of a manageable form, forcing all but the hardiest audience members to content themselves with only a fragment of the whole. Even for those who stick it out, the extended duration, like in the late works of Morton Feldman, destroys the listener’s ability to retain and assess the structure of the performance. Breaking with both the traditional form of the musical performance and, through Fusinato’s resolutely anti-social position facing away from the audience, the standard affective relationship between audience and performer, the sound of Spectral Arrows becomes a monumental aural sculpture, filling the space, not with steel or concrete, but with vibrations travelling through air. We got in touch with Marco Fusinato through our 8-INCH series. For this we published 8 inch records with artists and labels. One of these labels was Circle Records which had been running for a few years by John Nixon, Julian Dashper and Marc Fusinato. For the release event only John Nixon could be present. Julian unfortunately died at young age. Marco was primarily active as a visual artist. One of his projects is called Black Mass Implosion. In this project he appropriates scores of avant tgarde composers and connects each not with one arbitrary point on the horizon. This creates strong graphic works and partly blackens out the original score. From this perspective also his live performances can be considered as black mass implosions. Also because most of his work deals strongly with political issues we invited him for a performance in the event bnamed Music & Capitalism. He suggested to do an 8 hour performance in an official office building. On a Saturday from 09.00 to 17.00 hrs. When normally people are doing there office work now Marco played for 8 hrs in an empty office building. People were guided to the 8th floor into the directors room which was darkened with newspapers stacked on the windows. A huge PA was in the office blazing loud but very articulated. Good food and drinks were served.
Marco Fusinato is a contemporary artist and musician whose work has taken the form of installation, photographic reproduction, performance and recording. His overall aesthetic project combines allegorical appropriation with an interest in the intensity of a gesture or event. As a musician, Fusinato explores the notion of noise as music, using the electric guitar and associated electronics to improvise intricate, wide-ranging and physically affecting frequencies.
Marco Fusinato’s Mass Black Implosion series began in 2007. Serial in form, each work uses an existing cultural document – a 20th or 21st-century avant-garde music score – as the formal, material and conceptual basis for a set of actions or interventions. Specifically, working with facsimile sheets of the score, Fusinato draws lines from each note on the page to one chosen point. Where a composition comprises more than one sheet, these are then singularly framed and installed sequentially on the gallery wall, creating an extraordinary graphic rendering of the energy of aural compression and expansion.
In these works, treated by Fusinato as propositions for new noise compositions, the qualities of each individual note and their relation to those around them are effectively compressed into a single point of intense concentration. This is the energy of implosion, which always infers at least the potential of its counter-energy in explosion, energy radiating out from the single point of origin. Fusinato’s intervention into the scores therefore visualises and proposes the possibility of a dialectical energy running through the original work that has a political dimension as much as an artistic one – a relentless propensity to both destruction and expressive creation in the single action, or in this case to the production of noise.
Moving back and forth between sound and scripture, this evening consists of experimental performances and short lectures, with a special focus on Charlemagne Palestine’s visual renderings of sound included in his exhibition “GesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandtttt” at Witte de With CCA in Rotterdam.
Can a tune be translated into an image? Can the “detuning” of music generate new ways of thinking about the relation between sound and scripture? The notation of sound has a long and varied history, from Gregorian chants conducted following signs written in the air to the standard notation of western music we know today, and the possibilities offered by new computer technologies. The program includes performances by Yann Gourdon and Floris van Hoof, works by Rafaël Rozendaal and a reading by Remco van Bladel. Next to that there will be graphic works by students of ArtEZ - Graphic Design.
For ART Rotterdam we present Experimental Jetset, Davide Mosconi, DUPAC, Moniker, Cold Void [Rafaël Rozendaal/Luuk Bouwman] and Telcosystems.
As a production platform, specialised in the relationship between sound, art, publishing and performance, for ART Rotterdam 2017 DE PLAYER presents works of artists within the frame of the project Pu-shi-ng-Sco-res; a project by DE PLAYER and Remco van Bladel, Dutch graphic designer.
Live event for our Pushing the Score project with Telcosystems (nl), Julia Buennagel (de) and Derek Holzer (us). Focussing on the potential of grahic scores and publishing of sound and image we present Telcosystems with their recent publication Resonanz, a reading on Schematic as a Score plus concert by Derek Holzer plus a live performance of Julia Bünnagel with modified records.
An evening with remarkable experiments and materialised conceptual flip flop. DE PLAYER will unveil its third issue of Tetra Gamma Circulaire (TGC) – the unknown audio magazine. TGC #3 is compiled in collaboration with students of the Piet Zwart Institute, and is also part of their Experimental Publishing programme of the Media Design Master, named XPUB.
Tetra Gamma Circulaire #3 is travelling now as an open floppy platform. First station is at Pinkie Bowtie Antwerp where we will introduce the TGC#3 in its entity as an unknown music magazine and point out its specific features by demonstrating the floppy works which are already in the collection. By travelling with TGC#3 we aim to expand the floppy collection of it and focus on experimental ways of publishing. For the Pinkie Bowtie session we invited Antwerp related artists to contribute to the project. So far Evelin Brosi. AMVK and JODI will show up to get informed on matters and will start to produce their floppy for the collection from there. The meeting is open for public who is interested in experimental ways of publishing or just like to hang out in a ambiance of artistic nouveauté.
This day the work 'Para-phonic Poly-diso' will be launched at The Small Museum of Paradiso, Amsterdam. 'Para-phonic Poly-diso' is a graphic score for a digital, polyphonic choir wherein visitors of Paradiso can participate with their mobile phone. This work, developed for the Small Museum project of Paradiso, is part of Pushing the Score; a research project by DE PLAYER i.c.w. Remco van Bladel about the current state and potential of the concept of 'graphical score'. The voice for this work is by Laetitia Saedier of Stereolab.
A solo exhibition by Matthieu Reijnoudt curated by Willem de Haan
Location: corner of Maashaven Oostzijde and Brieselaan, next to metrostation Maashaven
‘Greatest Hits’ is an exhibition based on 25 hand drawn scores by Matthieu Reijnoudt. His best ones. Thirteen of these scores will be on show on the billboards underneath Maashaven Metrostation. Just so you can see them day and night, for about three weeks long. The complete selection of scores is published in a music book. The entire music book will be performed three times during the South Explorer weekend. For every performance a different instrument has been selected.
As you know, there are those evenings after which the sun rises differently. The E-ARTHHA event is about the search for new interfaces and possibilities of sound composition, image and performance. In his lecture, Douglas Kahn discards old categories of sound and performance and replaces them with a new category of "energy" in the bigger narrative of ecology and other sensitivities. Coming from different biotopes, our other guests will all have different points of departure for their performances.
On this evening we focus on archiving our Pushing the Score project. This project on the nowadays meaning of the 'graphic score' has been running the last 2-3 years.
What are the possibilities of graphic scores, in a day and age in which graphic notation is still usually seen as a ‘drawing’, serving as some kind of sheet music?
Throughout 2016 and 2018, this project will research the phenomenon of notation and the graphic representation of music.
It unfolds through a nomadic program which includes the creation of newly commissioned artworks and public events that addres scontemporary questions and issues in this particular field.
Graphic scores and notation have a long history, dating back to the tenth century, when the Gregorian chants of the scola cantorum were already being conducted through the writing of signs in the air. Later on this developed into the type of musical notation we are familiar with in Western music. In the early- and mid-twentieth century, the abstract developments in the visual arts played a vital role in new approaches to the question of music notation and contemporary avant-garde music. This continues to question the representation of sound in media; so what is the current state of the graphic score?
Throughout the project, Jacques Attali’s book ‘Noise: The Political Economy of Music’ will function as a reference and inspirational guide; “pushing the score” in search of its current potential. It will seek concepts and configurations that produce new, previously unknown, relationships in the field of sound, visual arts, and performance. The discursive program for 2016–2017 will include lectures, presentations of newly commissioned artworks, concert evenings, and workshops.
Pushing the Score is a project researching graphic notation, based on a desire to update this form of music and sound notation for the 21^st century. Starting from the motto ‘from Cage to JODI and beyond’ and from the avant-garde music and sound art of the 20^th century, the project researches new audio-visual languages, media and functions of graphic notation in a contemporary context characterised by a fundamental transformation of sound culture and visual culture. A number of specific themes will be initiated, developed and presented in the context of a public research programme in collaboration with artists, designers and various cultural organisations such as the Piet Zwart Institute, the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, and Sonic Acts.
What are the possibilities of graphic scores, in a day and age in which graphic notation is still usually seen as a ‘drawing’ serving as some kind of sheet music? In an attempt to redefine this concept, we will be compiling a programme in which artists, musicians,
theoreticians and practitioners are invited to participate. The collective goal is to develop and present new audio-visual and media-technical forms of graphic notation through artistic research and development. Based on our compilation of the most contemporary and innovative graphic notation practices in the fields of music, sound art, performance art, e-culture, new-media art, graphic design and media design, we will introduce artists and designers from various creative disciplines to a national and international audience, with the goal of collectively developing new forms of graphic notation.
The incentive for this project is the belief that graphic notation in 20^th -century avant-garde music and sound art constitutes an important, still radically innovative but wrongfully marginalised form, which can play a key role in the development of new audio-visual languages and media. Our ambition, and that of our collaborating partners, is to emancipate graphic notation from the confines of the modernist tradition, in such a way that it may remain an innovative and provocative medium for decades to come.
Concrete object with floppydrive, local wifi station and diverse electronic applications - edition 12 pieces.
TGC #3 is compiled in collaboration with students of the Piet Zwart Institute, and is also part of their Experimental Publishing programme of the Media Design Master, named XPUB.
TGC #3 is a particular kind of publishing platform engineered for sonic experiments, instruments, and installations. Some dare say it's a kind of jukebox.
Made of concrete as a body, an internal stand alone wifi station enables you to get in touch with the content of this floppyesk magazine.
artists: Piet Zwart Institute XPUB, DE PLAYER, Karina Dukalska, Max Franklin, Giulia de Giovanelli, Francisco González, Margreet Riphagen, Nadine Rotem-Stibbe, Kimmy Sreeuwenberg
DE PLAYER was asked by XPUB of Piet Zwart Institute to do a seminar during a 3 month period with their students. We proposed them to make a publication in our Tetra Gamma Circulaire. This is a magazine without any format and meant to be developed each time. We worked around the idea of Pushing Scores. each student had to develop its own project around the proces of making a score. All these scores had to come together in one magazine/object. The restriction was made that the scores had to be presented on floppy disc. This was to limit possibilities and also to unite the format. The result is a mix of several media. All comes together in a designed concrete object. “feed Flintstone meets 21st century”. A Raspberry Pi is the core which is programmed for several applications. Besides that there is a floppy drive, speakers, audio input, a camera, touchpads, LED light.
Presentation of PRINCIPIUM 2.0 (DOB 073) in Stadslimiet Antwerp. The installation setup contains 6 of 12 releases of PRINCIPIUM 2.0. During the performance which took, several hours visitors could freely join, listen and ask questions to the artist, Remörk aka Kris Delacourt.
Description: Can a tune be translated into an image? Can the “detuning” of music generate new ways of thinking about the relation between sound and scripture? The notation of sound has a long and varied history, from Gregorian chants conducted following signs written in the air to the standard notation of western music we know today, and the possibilities offered by new computer technologies. The program includes performances by Yann Gourdon and Floris van Hoof, works by Rafaël Rozendaal and a reading by Remco van Bladel. Next to that there will be graphic works by students of ArtEZ Arnhem - Graphic Design.
* Moving back and forth between sound and scripture, this evening consists of experimental performances and short lectures, with a special focus on Charlemagne Palestine’s visual renderings of sound included in his exhibition “GesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandtttt” at Witte de With CCA in Rotterdam.
Hurdy-gurdy player, composer, and sound artist Yann Gourdon looks at vibratory fields and sound perception as a medium. He focuses mainly on acoustic phenomena that have a dynamic relationship with their environment. Every aspect of his work deals with quality of sound. It's not a matter of an event between spectators and a musician, it's 'a space to submit to a process.
RAFAËL ROZENDAAL (nl) A visual artist who uses the internet as his canvas. These works deal with continuïty and an endless accessibility. Visual and audio intensified perceptions in a specific space. His websites attract a large audience of over 40 million unique visits per year. His artistic practice consists of websites, installations, lenticulars, lectures and haiku.
Filmmaker & musician from Belgium. Connecting his many worlds, ideas and influences into highly personal live performances and recordings, Floris Vanhoof keeps on amazing people here and abroad. For this event he will work with filmscreening and synthesizer which he influences with his brainwaves.
JUSTIN BENNETT (uk) is an artist working with sound and visual media. The everyday sound of our urban surroundings at every level of detail is the focus of his work where he develops the reciprocity of music and architecture, and sound and image.
Amsterdam based graphic designer, and co-founder of noise band/art collective Sonido Gris. He is also an art book publisher ('Onomatopee', 'WdW Review'). His studio work focusses on editorial book design, publishing projects, curatorial projects, institutional identities, interactive applications and websites.
He is a typography and graphic design tutor at ArtEZ — Art and Design, Arnhem and is a frequent guest teacher at art schools throughout the Netherlands and abroad.
We were discussing several projects and possibilities of cooperation with Defne Ayas and Samuel Saelmakers of Witte de With CCA when they asked us to cooperate in the exhibition “GesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandtttt” by organizing a live event. I knew the work of Charlemagne and we have met already in earlier events so it was clear we could do something that makes sense. As a composer, funnily enough, Charlemagne hardly uses any scores. Nevertheless, he showed me some books he once made in New York of which he said that those ones are to be seen as musical scores. They are cheap dummy books on which he poured ink in several colors. The ink was absorbed by the books and after drying it had become pieces which turned out to be a serie of morphing colors by each page turn. These books were the starting point of curating the event which we fitted in our Pushing Scores project. Yann Gourdon was asked to do a hurry curdy noisette while these books were being projected page by page on the wall. Rafael Rozendaal showed his web work ‘Slow Empty’, which functioned as a real clockwork for the event. Floris VanHoof played a set in which he used his brainwaves to influence his synthesizer sounds combining it with projection and laserbeam.
Justin Bennet showed his project Shot Gun Architecture and remco van Bladel introduced our project Pushing Scores by doing a reading on historical en contemporary graphic scores and the concepts behind it.
Type of object: Publication
catalogue number: DOB 079
date: 09/09/2016
Project title:"Carlson invents, Colson presents: 99 spines produced on a modified Canon IR2016 copy machine" by Vaast Colson. Produced on a 'prepared copier'
artist: Vaast Colson
Description: Presented at WIELS Art Book fair 2016 was this live made copy zine named "Carlson invents, Colson presents: 99 spines produced on a modified Canon IR2016 copy machine" by Vaast Colson. Produced on a 'prepared copier'. The copy machine is amplified by several internal microphones by which the sound of every run is recorded. Each copy-run of 99 copies (the maximum run of the machine) on transparent foil will be accompanied by a foil cover with the dub cut audiofile in it. The image copied in the zine is a drawing which is engraved in the glassplate of the copy machine.
URL:https://www.deplayer.nl/releases/dob079
Vaast Colson we know already for quite a while as an interesting artist. Because his work is pretty conceptual, you could say that there is always a strategy (call it a score) which works as a framework behind his artistic output. This can be a performance , object, book or whatever. We worked with Kris delacourt on Principium 2.0 which is a reinterpretation of Colson his work Principium and asked Colson also to work on a sound publication with him. He came up with this idea of the Xerox copier which makes in a run the audio, the booklet as well as the printed image. This printing run is to be seen as the performative action. It is a complex work as well as that it is simple in its final execution.
Colson belongs to a younger generation of Antwerp artists who could be called ‘post-ironic’. These artists don’t shy away from the big questions revolving around the place and role of the artist in society and the world around them. Colson's works examine core questions: what power does art have to change us and our society, what emotions and ethical choices guide an artist in a process of continuous change? From a spontaneous and rather naive approach to art and performance, Colson wants to shape his ideas. He opens up the artistic field and explores what is happening in the art world. Everything he undertakes can thus be considered as artistic intervention.
In his work, Colson constantly questions the relationship with the audience and is also strongly interested in mythology, and by the authentic (or not) mystique of the artist's existence, which he usually explores in his performances. The process is always important, but the end result, which is variable for Colson and influenced by the context, is an important part of his work.
In addition, Colson explores the commercial side of the art world and the economic consequences of artistry. His works, which are regularly made in situ, are often difficult to sell. The commercial potential and the associated value assessment are problematic for Colson. The making of editions can be understood in this context.
Type of object: release
title: PRINCIPIUM 2.0
catalog number: DOB073
Description: This release has a shifting one-note drone (i believe I used D, F#, A, G#) that gets turned on and off by a magnetic sensor. the magnets for the sensor ride on top of the record players platter and could be placed freely to make your own patterns. The final installation will have all 12 separate pieces, a complete octave. This piece is based on a question. Vaast Colson asked Remörk to reinterpret his work 'Principium’, which was a joyful (but strictly ruled) play with sticky color dots. Principium 1.0 appeared as a hacked synth reduced to a single octave, to be played with magnets on a colorful playing field, parallelling the same patterns. Principium 2.0 comes as 12 records, also with this magnetic application, also following very elementary rules - some old, some new. All 12 records together form the complete set which 1 'game' needs. Join the community.
We first got in touch with Principium 1.0. Kris Delacourt (Remörk) made a modified Casio keyboard as a reinterpretation of Vaast Colson his work Principium. We showed this piece of Remark at the ART Rotterdam and than I asked Kris if he was willing to make a publication of it. Meaning a record. He was ok with it but i took a long time. Nevertheless finally we fine-tuned concepts and decided not to go for recordings but to embed the concept of Principium into a record and a music tool in one Principium 2.0. This was quite a proces but ended up in a beautiful limited edition of 12 pieces. Developed and designed in good cooperation between Kris and the team of DE PLAYER. It was presented in Stadslimiet Antwerp, Belgium as an installation piece at 2 July 2015.
Funny things is that after the presentation in Stadslimiet the recordings of this 8 hours performance were edited back to a 12” vinyl record which has been released on Ultra Eczema label shortly after.
Principium comes from the title of a project by Vaast Colson. Colson used tiny paper sticker dots, the kind that most art galleries use to denote which works in a show have been sold. Office material; those colourful little dots.
What he did was draw a bunch of random lines across the sticker sheets, and since there’s 8x12 stickers on a sheet you end up with stickers with tiny line segments on them. Line segments he reassembled into new shapes and new lines. All pretty nonsensical in a way but really beautiful in its result, and quite fragile. Abstract poetry.
Colson asked some artist to make reinterpretations of the works and from that perspective there was an idea to use them as a music score.
There are two booklets Colson made with the Principium series - reproductions of each used sticker sheets and the result. The funny thing was that he thought his resulting collages would be nice to use as scores - and they probably would be, it’s just that Kris Delacourt was so intrigued by the leftover sticker sheets, with their 8x12 grid that they just screamed ‘SEQUENCER!’, to him, so he went to design Principium part 1. A magnetic board with the same field as the sticker sheets which he activated with magnets as a synthesizer. The first version was a modified Casio keyboard. He reduced the number of keys to twelve, and added a magnetic sequencer board to it. The idea is to put white magnets on top of the coloured dots to kind of blank them out. The sequencer controller is a reed switch matrix that, when a magnet is present, allow step pulses to pass to digital switches that bridge the original Casio keys.
For Principium 2 the DOB073 piece is another step in the principle of Pricipoium. As for Delacourt didn’t just want to publish a record with recordings of the Principium 1 he decided to transpose the idea onto a prepared record player using magnets and a specific device…
This is an interview on Kris delacourt (Remörk) his practices and the Principium story. The interview was made after showcasing the Principium 2.0 in an installation setting at Stadslimiet at
>I’ve been following the principium story on your blog, which goes back to the summer of 2012, so four years ago. Short version: first it was a one octave Casio keyboard, then it became 12 10" records, then it became an 8 hour performance and eventually now a 12" LP. This is the short version, can you give me the full story?
-Kris Delacourt: Well actually, it started out as an artwork, or rather a series of artworks. At least that’s where the initial form and the name came from.
The works are by a friend of mine, the Belgian artist Vaast Colson. He made these beautiful pieces where he used tiny paper sticker dots, you know the ones, the kind that most art galleries use to denote which works in a show have been sold. Office material really, those colourful little dots.
What he did was draw a bunch of random lines across the sticker sheets, and since there’s 8x12 stickers on a sheet you end up with stickers with tiny line segments on them. Line segments he reassembled into new shapes and new lines. It’s all pretty nonsensical in a way I guess, especially if you try to put something like that into words, but it’s also really beautiful, and quite fragile. Don’t know, it just rang poetic to me.
Anyway, Vaast was putting together a show where other people would do reinterpretations of some of his works, and around the same time we had a nice chat about alternative musical scores, graphic scores and what not. And at a certain point he went something like: ‘I’ve made some work that might be interesting to use as a score, would you be up for it?’. So he showed me the two booklets he made with the Principium series - reproductions of each used sticker sheets and the result. The funny thing was that he thought his resulting collages would be nice to use as scores - and they probably would be, it’s just that I was so intrigued by the leftover sticker sheets, with their 8x12 grid that just scream ‘SEQUENCER!’, that I went that way.
And the first version was indeed a modified Casio keyboard. I reduced the number of keys to twelve, and added a magnetic sequencer board to it. It’s an iron board, it has the same visuals as the sticker sheets, and the idea is to put white magnets on top of the coloured dots to kind of blank them out, so you end up with something analogous to taking a sticker off the sheet - a white space in a field of colour. I don’t know if I need to go into too much technical detail, but the sequencer controller is just a reed switch matrix that, when a magnet is present, allow step pulses to pass to digital switches that bridge the original Casio keys.
I was really happy with the results, and especially with the fact that it’s so inviting towards an audience. It looks like a game of four-in-a-row, totally appealing to get your hands on it. And I never gave it that much thought, but the fact that when you stick magnets somewhere, it makes a musical phrase - I guess to some people that would be wizardry, hah.
The next step was when Peter Fengler of DEPLAYER/DOB records said he wanted to do a record with the Casio version. And I really like it when people are enthusiastic, so I said yes, obviously. But there were several reasons for me to hold back a little on the idea. Well, a little, two years, actually. First is that the Casio version really works best through audience interaction - people moving magnets around, changing the sounds on the keyboard and so on. It’s meant to be in a continued state of flux. The idea of just me making a record totally ignores that, to me it turns it into something really static and rigid. Now Peter is really nice guy, and clever at that, and I guess he understood my doubts. So we discussed other possibilities, like capturing a live performance, possibly even cutting records on the fly with his vinyl lathe, so you end up with all different records.. now DOB records have put out some crazy releases, really pushing the boundaries of what can be done with the medium of vinyl. For example, there’s this box set which has records that have built-in radio transmitters, records with impossible shapes where you need to turn the stylus of your record player upside down, shit like that. Really great stuff. And I don’t know, maybe a part of me wanted to be a part of that, more than just doing a ‘recording’. Just recording the Casio would definitely have been one of the safer, more boring options. I just felt like making another interpretation of an existing piece, instead of merely documenting it.
Meanwhile I had been toying around with leftover magnets and magnetic sensors, sticking magnets to a metal turntable platter and using the sensors to switch audio on and off, sort of like a programmable tremolo. Well, pattern programmable, but at a fixed speed. So we put two and two together, and ended up doing twelve 10” lathe cuts, that came in a box with those electronic switches, 8 magnets each as based on the original grid, and a 12” metal platter to go under the 10” to stick the magnets to.
And because I couldn’t make up my mind about what sounds to record from the Casio, I ended up not recording the Casio at all. I decided to stop worrying, which after two years of doubting might not be such a bad thing, and did a 10 minute improvised recording on organ and MS20, playing only C notes. I played around with filtering and octaves, because during testing we’d found that if we used slowly evolving records, the results were a lot more interesting. If we just used test tones, so to speak, you end up with something close to morse code. Also nice, but not really musical. And I don’t mind a good concept now and then, but I guess I’m too much of a musician, so I went for what was more appealing to me musically. That same 10 minute piece then was sped up for the other notes, going up in pitch and becoming shorter for each record. So the C note runs for 10 minutes, the B note is something like 5 minutes 20. Which also makes for much more interesting overlaps when played together. I guess I do tend to overthink things, hah. Peter did a great job cutting the vinyl in coloured perspex, with colours matching the paper stickers. And an honourable mention to Koos of DOB who did an amazing job on designing the packaging.
Vaast and Dennis Tyfus of Ultra Eczema run a space in Antwerp together called Stadslimiet, and that’s where we had the record presentation. Peter brought 6 record players, matching the 6 colours of the vinyl nicely - 2 notes each. And since I’m a sucker for random scores, I wrote myself a score generator in PureData with tons of random functions. Basically, the program decided for me which records to play, whether to repeat them or not when they were finished, whether to leave the turntable empty, whether the electronics should punch holes in the sound when a magnet was detected or the opposite, how may magnets on each turntable, and playback volume. The only thing I had any control over was where to put the magnets, determining the rhythm. And since all the records have different lengths, it ended up being one long shifting overlapping piece. I followed that score for 8 hours straight. Funny thing was that we’d agreed to let it run until 23h, and at about two minutes to eleven I got the first ever instruction to leave all the turntables empty. End of piece. That was an amazing moment.
After that, Dennis asked me if I wanted to do a release of the recordings. I think initially he wanted to do a tape. So I went through 8 hours of recordings, selecting bits that I liked and that I thought would be interesting enough to listen to as pieces in their own right, and not just as part of this monster performance. I think the idea to make a vinyl record came after Dennis heard some of the selections and thought they shouldn’t be out on tape but on vinyl instead. So that’s what happened.
>Is this LP the final version of this project, or do you see it even evolve into next stages?
-Oh, I think it’s definitely something that’s still evolving. I can still see unexplored possibilities there - as an installation, or as a truly playable musical instrument, and even those two do not have to be mutually exclusive. There’s something appealing in using a single octave as a building block, there’s something appealing in the number 12 even, there’s the appeal of building instruments.. I don’t think I’ve quite finished with it, no.
>Dennis said you were not really keen on doing this record at first. Why so? What was the problem? Was one of your fears that, by making it into a 12", you would have to bring this project to a final version?
-Not really, at least not in this case. I guess that fear was much more of an issue with DOB records. Recording the Casio felt too definitive at the time.
But now, having made that 12-vinyl version, and having done a performance that worked quite well, I didn’t mind starting from what is essentially the documentation of a past event. Also because I really am convinced that this is just one more step in something that can keep going, that it doesn’t have to be final. I guess my main fear was that cutting chunks out of a much larger whole, you risk losing the context - and I’m still not sure what this record sounds like to people that weren’t there. I know it’s not a final version, but it is a version nonetheless, and I want all versions to be of a certain quality. I thought it worked really well as a performance, but I wanted to make sure it was good enough to be a record.
>Bringing an 8 hour performance back to an album format seems like a hell of a job. How do you do that? How do you decide which parts 'work' on an album, and which don't?
-You do it in short sessions, hah. The thing is, all 8 hours have the turntables spinning at 33 rpm, so the basic underlying tempo never changes. That’s quite brutal to listen to in concentration, to be honest. It took me about two months to sit through all eight hours, and put markers and comments with bits I liked more than others. Sometimes because of harmonic information, notes that work well together, sometimes of rhythms that worked well, etc. So you end up with a first rough selection. And then you go through that selection again. And so on, until you really narrow it down.
Of course, because the basic tempo is the same, it would have been relatively easy to start editing, splicing things together. But to be honest I've never even considered that - 8 hours of material and endless editing possibilities, that’s a nightmare.. the decision to have straight up documentation, just select bits instead of editing them some more, really made the selection process easier. If something was interesting for a while, but didn’t stay interesting, it had to go. I think I ended up with five or six pieces that I though could hold their own on a record, four of which made the final cut.
>Do you think that, by bringing it back to an LP, you're making it easier for the listener? Were there people who actually listened to the whole 8 hour performance? Do you think that listening to an 8 hour performance demands another kind of concentration from the listener than listening to an LP?
-There were some people there that sat through the whole thing, yes. But I’m not sure if it is at all possible to listen with concentration to 8 hours of something like this. And that was never the question either. It was continually shifting, so it didn’t really have a beginning or an end - you could drop in any time you liked. But it was pretty intense, so yes, this record is probably the light version. Still, not sure if it is easy listening at all, although I think it has a beauty of it’s own.
>Weren't you afraid at some point that this whole idea would grow over your head, that it would become too complicated, too smart, too conceptual?
-I guess there was the point where I decided to just do a 10 minute organ improv, that was a bit of a turning point. I could have gone for something more ‘correct’ in terms of concept - I don’t know, pure sine waves or something. The improv might be one of the major flaws, actually, conceptually speaking. But I really needed a break from thinking it over and just do something... plus, it adds a much needed layer of spontaneity that works beautifully, not in the least musically, so no regrets. I like working with concepts a lot, as a starting point, but I’m also interested enough in the results to loosen up the concept if I feel it’s needed.
>I could say that the 10" records were vinyl records as a tool, and that this LP is a vinyl record as a product. What you think about this statement? How do you look at the function a piece of vinyl can have?
-The 10” records have all been sold as well, so they’re somewhere on middle ground - they were intended as a release, and therefore a product, just as well.
But they do form one big piece, and as far as final forms go, I guess you could consider that performance the final form of that particular piece. That’s also purely pragmatical: now they’ve all been sold, it’s going to be very difficult to get all 12 of them together again for a second performance. It really was a one time event, with the vinyls as a tool, yes. Of course, taking what is essentially a reproduction medium, and turning it into something of an instrument in it’s own right again, that’s nothing new.. think hip hop, turntablism, even things like the mellotron did that. But it’s still a relevant idea to me, this kind of creative misuse.
>You release this album as a Remörk album, but there were more people involved in this project than just you: there's Vaast Colson, Peter Flenger and Dennis Tyfus too. So do you see this album as a solo record or as a collaboration?
-I do look at it as a solo thing. You know, the music on the record came from a performance I did, based on a concept I came up with. Now, I never would have though it up if it weren’t for Vaasts initial invitation, or for Peter’s asking me to do a record, or Dennis wanting to present it in Antwerp, that whole chain reaction, so in that way it’s definitely the result of collaborating with all those people. But Vaast for instance refuses to regard it as his doing. He always stressed, right from the start, that any interpretation I gave of his work was no longer his work. And I follow that. They’re just new pieces in their own right.
Peter and Koos asked me to do a record because they run a record label and they want to release stuff they think is interesting. That’s awesome, and I’m flattered to be a part of that, but in a way it’s also what record labels are supposed to be doing, no? We worked on the packaging together, and it looks amazing because of them. But musically, I still feel it’s my work. And the same goes for this record on Ultra Eczema: I have to say I’m really happy we finally got an Ultra Eczema release together, it’s something Dennis had been asking for for quite some time... he’d actually given up asking. But now with this thing it just seemed to fall into place perfectly.
>When Joseph Beuys was asked why he hated the term 'conceptual art', he said: "Because a concept, an idea is a starting point, not a final form. If you stick to the concept, you miss out on the creative aspect, which should be the most important part. Otherwise you're not an artist. Art is not pinning things down. Art is letting things go, let it flow". Does this sound recognisable to you? And how would you relate this quote to your LP?
-Not having to execute ideas into a physical and therefore flawed final form was the whole point of conceptual art, no? The notion that an idea can be just as valid and just as creative as its execution.. but anyway.
I for myself am always glad if I manage to turn an idea into a physical form. Did I mention I tend to overthink things? So I don’t think I belong in the conceptual art section. But then, I don’t fully agree that you miss out on creativity by sticking to a concept. Coming up with a concept can be as much a creative process. And sometimes, by sticking to it, you end up with the most unexpected results - adhering to rules you impose on yourself makes you do stuff you would never have decided for yourself. It can make you go against your natural inclinations, which does not always have to be a bad thing. It can free you from repeating yourself, from your own mannerisms. That’s just another way of letting things go, of giving up control.
>The Ultra Eczema site refers to this record as your debut LP. Does it feel like that for you too: as your first 'real' album, as a statement?
-I think I would consider that series of twelve ten inches my vinyl debut.. but maybe because it was 12 different records or in ten inch format, that it doesn’t really count? Or maybe Dennis thinks of that series as a tool more than a product. Still, the Ultra Eczema one is definitely the first record that is more widely available, and much more of a pure record than an artists’ edition, so I know what he’s saying. And a statement.. I don’t know. I don’t think of it as a manifesto or anything. It’s a document of what I’m happy to be working on at the moment, and hopefully it’s something that others can enjoy as well.
>Do you see this as a drone record? Or as a collage record?
-If you force me to choose between those two, then drone. I tend to associate collage records with cut and paste editing, jumpcuts, going from one atmosphere to the next in no time.. I don’t feel this record has that. Quite the contrary. The only thing remotely close to jumpcuts that are on this record were due to the electronics of the installation, the sensors turning the sound on and off. But they were live events, not editing choices made afterwards. So this is very much a straightforward live recording of a pretty weird DJ set, if you will. And even though it has strong rhythmic patterns, the underlying harmonies and atmosphere shift quite slowly. So more drone, definitely.
>Do you think this LP would be also enjoyable if someone would listen to it without knowing a single thing about the whole concept behind it? Or do you even think you would have failed if it wouldn't be an enjoyable record without the concept?
-I certainly do hope that it’s enjoyable.. like I said, I know it’s not easy listening per se, and some might probably find it boring at first try, with the tempo being the same for the whole record and all. But I did try to select bits that I thought had a beauty or a strong appeal to them, an interesting evolution or whatever, so much so that I hope they can survive as musical pieces in their own right. aiming for the best of both worlds there. Type of object: event
title: Pu-shi-ng-Sco-res
date: 20 January 2017
location: DE PLAYER
artists: Telcosystems, Julia Buennagel, Derek Holzer
Description: Live event for our Pushing the Score project with Telcosystems (nl), Julia Buennagel (de) and Derek Holzer (us). Focussing on the potential of grahic scores and publishing of sound and image we present Telcosystems with their recent publication Resonanz, a reading on Schematic as a Score plus concert by Derek Holzer plus a live performance of Julia Bünnagel with modified records.
In our event series during the Pushing Scores project we programmed this evening after we got in touch with the resonant publication of Telcosystems. They approach DE PLAYER for some input in the production and distribution of it. because of the direct relation of sound and image and the new interface an object like that represents it was a clear match. They did a reading on the concepts and necessity of the project as well as all the implications it had in its development and production.
To complete the event we searched for 2 completely different angles on composing. Derek Holzer eventually was asked because of his Tonewheels but that was logistically not possible. He came over to do a reading on Schematic as a score and did a live set on Tektronix Oscilloscope Music. Julia Buennagel was invited to do a more physical input. She works with prepared records and played a live set.
about prepared records:
The record or musical piece in these cases is not used as a reproductive technique. In contrast to the composer or musician who perceives the record first and foremost as a vehicle transporting his or her musical ideas, here the interest lies especially in the optical/sculptural as well as the acoustic presence and the compression of an idea working with the playback possibilities and impossibilities of recording techniques. The end result is not a reproduction but a transformation of the original source and ultimately becomes an autonomous score and/or unique graphic/sculptural piece in and of itself.
The defective record and not the even, smooth reproduction means quality and concept at the same time.
Lazlo Moholy Nagy said about this in the perspective of New Plasticism that it lies in the peculiarity of human nature that:
“The abuse and misunderstanding are nessecary to gain result. It is nessecary for evolution and survival. After every new recording the functioning apparatus is pushed ahead to further new impressions. That is one of the reasons for the necessity to always continue experiments in New Plasticism. From this standpoint the configurations are only worthwhile when they produce new, previously unknown, relationships. In other words, this means that reproduction (repetitions of already existing relations) without richer viewpoints from the special standpoint of creative production can, only in the best cases, be considered as a virtuosic opportunity. As production, meaning here productive creation, above all serves the human condition, we must attempt to further our purposes of creative production through the uses of those apparatuses or methods which until now have been used only for reproduction purposes.”
In 1989 the Broken Music exhibition was held in Berlin at the DAAD gallery with work by, among others, Nam June Paik, John Cage, Milan Knížák, Christian Marclay. All had lifted the medium (the vinyl record) over themselves and added a new use / application. Whether or not as an installation to be played by the public or as a plastic work in which the plate was transformed, mutated. The code of the usual record as defined by the music industry was broken in all works.
Later the exhibition traveled to the Hague and to Grenoble in the early 1990s. The book which came along with the exhibition has recently been republished. As a sourcebook, it is without peer, focusing on recordings, record objects, artwork for records, and record installations made by hundreds of artists between World War II and 1989.
-With Resonanz, Telcosystems presents an electronic book, combining a series of visual artworks with a sound publication in one. Incorporated in the structure of the book are sensors and electronics, providing each page with its own unique soundtrack, which can be listened to via speakers or headphones. This evening Resonanz will be the starting point of Q&A, demonstration and live presentation. In their audiovisual works Telcosystems research the relation between the behavior of programmed numerical logic and the human perception of this behavior; they aim at an integration of human expression and programmed machine behavior. This becomes manifest in the immersive audiovisual installations they make, in films, videos, soundtracks, prints and in live performances. The software they write enables them to compose ever-evolving audiovisual worlds. Telcosystems’ installations and films focus on real-time, self-structuring, generative processes, in their live performances they focus on the interaction with these processes.
“Resonanz is an electronic book that I had first dismissed. Until i tried it. As you turn the thick pages of the book, you encounter a different pattern along with a different soundtrack. It’s strangely hypnotizing. I turned and turned the pages, each time trying to think about the possible connections between the colours and patterns printed on the pages and the sound they emitted.”
Régine Debatty we-make-money-not-art.com
URL:https://telcosystems.net/product/resonanz/
-Julia Bünnagel is a contemporary sound and sculpting artist based Cologne. Working with sound performance and art installation. She is part of the sound-art-collective Sculptress of Sound. Julia's solo live performance primarily refers to the modified vinyl records which produces extraordinary sounds. Julia's peculiar method of modifying vinyl records includes the various ways of physical treatment such as sewing, painting or pasting the vinyl surfaces and afterwards mixing them together for yielding an imprudently driving, rhythmic soundscapes following by the white noise, multiple fragments of music along with dirty boom beats.
-Derek Holzer is an American instrument builder and sound artist based in Helsinki FI & Berlin DE, whose current interests include DIY analog electronics, the relationship between sound + space, media archaeology and the meeting points of electroacoustic, noise, improv and extreme music. He has performed live, taught workshops and created scores of unique instruments and installations since 2002 across Europe, North and South America, and New Zealand.
For the PUSHING event Derek will do a reading entitled Schematic as Score: Uses and Abuses of the (In)Deterministic Possibilities of Sound Technology and after that he will do a live set based on researching analog visuals with the oscilloscope.
The reading starts out of the fact that over the past few years, a strong reaction against the sterile world of laptop sound and video has inspired a new interest in analog processes, or "hands dirty" art in the words of practitioner John Richards3. With this renewed analog interest comes a fresh exploration of the pioneers of the electronic arts during the pre-digital era of the 1960s and 1970s. Artists and inventors such as Nam June Paik, Steina & Woody Vasulka, Don Buchla, Serge Tcherepnin, Dan Sandin and David Tudor all constructed their own unique instruments long before similar tools became commercially available or freely downloadable.
About the live oscilloscope concert he states: „The Vectorian Era opens with a screaming across the sky. Analog electronic computers predate their digital counterparts by several decades, and one of the first practical applications of the analog computer was in controlling the trajectories of German V2 rockets as they traced their rainbow of gravity from Flanders towards London during the Second World War. Informed by the discourse of media archaeology, my own personal interest in analog vector graphics isn’t merely retro-for-retro’s-sake. Rather, it is an exploration of a once-current and now discarded technology linked with specific utopias and dystopias from another time.”
http://macumbista.netType of object: event
title:Pushing Scores
date: 20 January 2019
location:ART Rotterdam, Rotterdam, NL
artists: Moniker, Rafaël Rozendaal, Luuk Bouwman, Telcosystems, Remco van Bladel
Description: For ART Rotterdam we present Experimental Jetset, Davide Mosconi, DUPAC, Moniker, Cold Void [Rafaël Rozendaal/Luuk Bouwman] and Telcosystems.
As a production platform, specialised in the relationship between sound, art, publishing and performance, for ART Rotterdam 2017 DE PLAYER presents works of artists within the frame of the project Pu-shi-ng-Sco-res; a project by DE PLAYER and Remco van Bladel, Dutch graphic designer.
For a certain period we yearly took part in the ART Rotterdam. An annual art fair in which commercial galleries as well as initiatives take part. The Intersection part is where the initiatives gather. It works because of getting in contact with an audience which will never come by at DE PLAYER itself. For this year it was clear that we present the Pushing Score project. We decided to set up a framework as if it was a three dimensional staff to write down music. In this framework we presented new, specifically for Pushing Scores, produced works in combination with existing works we thought would be interesting to combine and by that give a multidimensional approach on what tactics can be used by making scores and how it will be finally as a tradable object.
People could continuously listen to some publications (Telcosystems, Cold Void, Davide Mosconi) as well take part in the economic process of it by spraying new works for the next potential costumer (Moniker).
event
title: MAT>NET>PU - PZI_XPUB TGC3 presentation
date: 24 March 2017
location: DE PLAYER
artists: JOHANNES BERGMARK, HIELE MARTENS, HELGA JAKOBSON, XPUBPiet Zwart Institute XPUB, (Karina Dukalska, Max Franklin, Giulia de Giovanelli, Francisco González, Margreet Riphagen, Nadine Rotem-Stibbe, Kimmy Sreeuwenberg)
Description: An evening with remarkable experiments and materialised conceptual flip flop. DE PLAYER will unveil its third issue of Tetra Gamma Circulaire (TGC) – the unknown audio magazine. TGC #3 is compiled in collaboration with students of the Piet Zwart Institute, and is also part of their Experimental Publishing programme of the Media Design Master, named XPUB.
WHO???
HIELE MARTENS (be)
Sometimes 1 + 1 is greater than the sum of its parts, but if you put two of Belgium’s finest composers and musicians together, it adds up to an infinite number. Hiele Martens, or the collaboration of Lieven Martens Moana and Roman Hiele, delve deep into new territory that could be interpreted as a 2017 update of Maurice Kagel’s "Exotica", but made by self-aware electronic musicians. Hiele Martens' debut record is about to be released on Ultra Eczema and is expected to become one of the highlights of this year.
Whether culminating into actions or objects, Helga Jakobson's work responds to conditions of limbo within existence and acts as a platform to confront the unknown; it focuses on death, time and ephemerality. Currently she is constructing a digital and physical web; weaving together the overlapping, intuitive and sometimes complicated interconnections that comprise her interest in handcraft, witchcraft, and digitalcraft. The main threads that run between these interests are the experience of women, their traditional work and their sharing of knowledge. Jakobson has great reverence for intuition and it’s use as a technology. At DE PLAYER she will demonstrate her 'spider web record player'.
www.helgajakobson.com
JOHANNES BERGMARK (se)
Johannes Bergmark is a Fylkingen affiliated sound artist, instrument builder and piano technician. His performances have been described as surrealist puppet theatre in which the characters are amplified objects such as old tools, kitchen utensils, toys, springs and decorative kitsch. Using contact microphones, Bergmark reveals their hidden acoustics, dynamic scales and unique timbres. Bergmark is the ultimate rethinker of what music can be, in sound and in performance, as you can sometimes find him hanging on two piano strings from a ceiling.
http://bergmark.org
XPUB (int'l)
Experimental Publishing is a new course of the Piet Zwart Institute's Media Design Master programme. The concept of the course revolves around two core principles: first, the inquiry into the technological, political and cultural processes through which things are made public; and second, the desire to expand the notion of publishing beyond print media and its direct digital translation. The Experimental Publishing students who contributed to the development of TGC #3 are: Karina Dukalska, Max Franklin, Giulia de Giovanelli, Clàudia Giralt, Francisco González, Margreet Riphagen, Nadine Rotem-Stibbe and Kimmy Spreeuwenberg.
https://xpub.pzimediadesign.nl
www.facebook.com/xpub.pietzwart
-Piet Zwart Institute > TGC #3 seminar + live event
Together with the Experimental Publishing team of the Master of Media Design students of the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam, a seminar was organized for the students in a period of 3 months in which the principles of Pushing the Score were leading. A publication was taken as a joint focal point, the form of which could be determined in more detail. However, it was decided to start from a floppy disc as a medium. Each student could design his/her own project on this medium. The idea of a score functioned as a guideline to shape their project and to test the work process. It resulted in the Tetra Gamma Circular #3 subtitled "an unknown audio magazine" and is in itself a certain kind of publication platform that functions almost as a jukebox for floppies. It is an experimental platform designed for sonic experiments, instruments and installations. Concretely, a designed concrete object in which various techniques are incorporated. Its core consists of a floppy drive and a Raspberry Pi platform, on which a local wifi station, a camera, audio in/out, touch sensors, LED lighting are realized. The local wifi station makes it possible to access all projects (on floppy) by receiving these projects on mobile phone or on the computer. Via beamer and audio system everything becomes visible and audible. Most projects are aimed at interaction with an audience (one or more people).
Karina Dukalska, for example, created a work entitled 'Rock Step Triple Step'. As a dancer she is curious why there is no universal graphic notation system in the dance. Whether it is about recording movements for archiving, or writing new choreographies for the future, she concentrated on which elements of dance are overwritable (such as direction or footwork) and which are not. The performance of 'Rock Step Triple Step' started as an experiment based on psychological theories to change memory, time perception and flow in dance. The audience has the opportunity to control the dancers' steps on stage through a web interface that shows her personal approach to graphically representing ten jive steps.
Max Franklin's research focuses on the fragile nature of improvisation in music, with software. Through research into the act of improvisation in music, Max investigates ideas about liberation and resistance that improvisation can offer. Both in artistic practices, and their broader application as a critical methodology of research and exploration. For TGC#3 he developed a tool that is a learning counterpartner for his own musical input.
title event: ARCHIVING \ PUSHING SCORES WITH VALENTINA VUKSIC, ANA GUEDES, VARIA, NIEK HILKMANN
date: Thu 29 Nov 2018 20:00hrs
Location: Varia, Rotterdam
During this evening we focus on the archiving of our Pushing Scores project. A project on the nowadays meaning of the 'graphic score', which has been running for over the last 2-3 years. What are the possibilities of graphic scores, in a day and age in which graphic notation is still usually seen as a ‘drawing’, serving as some kind of sheet music?
To communicate the project to a larger audience DE PLAYER asked Varia to develop a context and technical environment as a web-based archival publication for the Pushing Scores project. The idea is that this material will be embodied by a dynamic, accessible and therefore active archive, which creates new relations, new perspectives and, at its best, new concepts for the production and/or processes of making scores. Varia will explain their ideas and approach on this matter.
- Valentina Vuksic will bring a live performance in which she approaches computers with transducers that transform electromagnetic radiation into sound within choreographically setups. The ‘runtime’ of executed software is staged for an audience to provide an acoustic experience: that of logic encountering the physical world.
Valentina Vuksic was involved in the ARTKILLART Xyears JUBILEE event at 21-04-2017. She played a set in which she used her computer to generate sound by live programming. It was a good concert and het concept of working fitted very well in our ideas of exploring graphic scores. Her score was made on the spot with programming language. A sort of live coding. The Artkillart label operates from both Paris and Berlin since 2007, promoting experimental audiovisual and sound art. In reaction to the dematerialization of music (the general disappearance of music released in its physical form), the artists of the Artkillart label roster refocus their releases as material objects.
Artists who joined the event: Valentina Vuksic, Arnaud Rivière, Nicolas Montgermont, Jan Kees Van Kampen
Valentina Vuksic is a computer artist and programmer based in Zürich. Her work is a personal exploration of the possibilities afforded by articulated hard- and software mediation. She approaches computer systems via inductive microphones for magnetic fields, so-called “telephone adapters." With choreographies for software and computer elements, she utilizes these as actors in software/noise pieces for, and in, computers.
Vuksic considers time and space of computer processor and memory as levels of reality. Software being processed creates own temporal and spatial dimensions, which are staged for a public. She aims for a sensual experience of the analytical sphere becoming concrete, where logic encounters the physical world. The mechanic noises serve as mediators to a public. They reveal in an immediate way the activities taking place between computer processes in the widest sense and the computer electronics they are running on.
'Para-phonic Poly-diso' is a graphic score for a digital, polyphonic choir wherein visitors of Paradiso can participate with their mobile phone. The voice for this work is by Laetitia Saedier of Stereolab.
'Para-phonic Poly-diso’ (Polyphonic Paradiso) and it consists out of two parts:
1) An interactive graphic score / light box / kinetic work fixed inside the cabinet. (see jpeg drafts below)
2) A mobile website that connects you to the hardware inside the cabinet and turns your phone into a local speaker for a polyphonic voice piece.
In the eleventh century, the Italian Guido of Arezzo, one of the most important founders of musical notation, developed a scale consisting of six notes: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la. Later the seventh tone 'si' was added. From this the well-known "Do-Re-Mi" and the solfege, a teaching method in music for learning pitch and the singing of sheet music, developed itself.
The Small Museum, the former announcement box on the front of Paradiso, is being converted by Remco van Bladel into a local wifi point that will stream a polyphonic "Pa-Ra-Di-So". An algorithmic choir is compiled live by the mobile phones that connect to the Wi-Fi point while they are waiting in line for Paradiso to enter.
Paradiso invited Remco van Bladel to take part in their Small Museum project. For him it fitted very well to use this public place for a project he had in mind for Pushing Scores. The idea was to create a choir with mobile phones for the audience waiting to get in of the Dutch pop tempel Paradiso.
The work:
The work was installed for a period at The Small Museum; a cabinet on the facade of Paradiso, Amsterdam.
'Para-phonic Poly-diso' is a graphic score where Paradiso visitors can participate in a digital polyphonic choir.
In eleventh century Italy, the music theorist Guido of Arezzo developed an ascending scale consisting of six-notes: ut, re, mi, fa, sol and la. A 7th note, 'si' or 'ti', was added later. This scale is the basis for 'Do-Re-Mi' and solfège, a music education method used to teach singing of Western music.
The Small Museum, which was used for the public announcements of the church, will be transformed into a local wifi hotspot to stream a multi vocal 'Pa-Ra-Di-So Rapsodia'. A live algorithmic choir composition created through the phones connected to the score while waiting in front of the building to enter.
For this multi vocal composition Remco van Bladel collaborated with Lætitia Sadier (Stereolab, Lætitia Sadier Source Ensemble).
On Notation:
Before music was established in writing, each choir leader led the Gregorian chants of the scola cantorum with movements. This method of conducting, called cheironomy, consisted of writing signs in the air that contained clear instructions for the trained choir singers in terms of pitch change, duration and tone strength. These signs or neumens were written down, modified or not, first without any reference line. Later, the neumens - depending on the relative pitch differences - were noted above, on, or below a line referring to a pitch determined by the choral conductor.
As far as melody is concerned, humming was increasingly defined by the expansion of the number of lines, which first corresponded by colour, and later by keys to certain steps in the medieval ranges. In the eleventh century Guido van Arezo introduced the staff with four lines (this is still in use). In the middle of the thirteenth century Peter de Cruce came to a notation in which the relative duration of each note is indicated by the form of the note. This so-called manural notation was of great importance to ensure the reproducibility of the various rhythmic possibilities in the developing polyphonic music of Western Europe.
One of the influences for our project Pushing Scores.
Jacques Attali (born 1 November 1943) is a French economic and social theorist, writer, political adviser and senior civil servant, who served as a counselor to President François Mitterrand from 1981 to 1991 and was the first head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in 1991-1993.
He wrote the book ‘Noise: The Political Economy of Music’ which is one of the inspirations for our project Pushing Scores.
After getting it touch with Attali’s book ‘Noise: The Political Economy of Music’ we used it as inspiration for the project Pushing Scores. This particularly because of the fact that he focusses on the reproduction of music.
Attali believes that music has gone through four specific cultural stages in its history:
1. Sacrificing
2. Representing
3. Repeating
4. Post-Repeating
The 2nd phase is important in the perspective of sound reproduction, graphic score and the tangibility of sound and / or the object. It refers to the era of printed music (1500 - 1900). During this period, the music is tied to a physical carrier for the first time, and thus becomes a commodity for sale in the market. This notation of music can be considered as a highly coded written guideline for how music should sound. He calls this chapter Represent because it is the project of the executive. This represents the music in the absence of the maker and in the presence of an audience an effort must be made to read and articulate the intensity of the composer of the magazine. With the rise of the various avant-garde movements from the beginning of the 20th century, in addition to new forms of "sound", the relationship between sound and its visual representation is also being re-examined.
The 3rd stage deals with the mechanical reproduction and the 4th stage could be interpreted that he already was referring to the idea of sampling although it was first published in translation by the University of Minnesota in 1985. In that time it would have been quite prophetic. Because of this ambiguity we are interested for the project what this stage of music could represent. What kind of scores can be made with aal new techniques and media which have been developed since and definitely are of influence in our conceptual thinking of music and its reproduction.Jacques Attali (born 1 November 1943) is a French economic and social theorist, writer, political adviser and senior civil servant, who served as a counselor to President François Mitterrand from 1981 to 1991 and was the first head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in 1991-1993.
He wrote the book ‘Noise: The Political Economy of Music’ which is one of the inspirations for our project Pushing Scores.
Attali is the first to point out the other possible logical consequence of the “reciprocal interaction” model—namely, the possibility of a superstructure to anticipate historical developments, to foreshadow new social formations in a prophetic and annunciatory way. The argument of Noise is that music, unique among the arts for reasons that are themselves overdetermined, has precisely this annunciatory vocation; that the music of today stands both as a promise of a new, liberating mode of production, and as the menace of a dystopian possibility which is that mode of production’s baleful mirror image.event:
the entire Pushing Scores project was set up in cooperation with Remco van Bladel. The conceptualization, the funding, the execution.We new that Remco had written his essay 'Musical Theories in Graphic Design' on the subject of graphic notation within a broader field of theory formation in contemporary
music. It seemed to be a good match to work with him and DE PLAYER on a research of the graphic score. WE had common interest but at the same time a different angle and network in our practice as a stage, publisher and designer. This brought us together and made Pushing Scores to be real.Remco van Bladel (Amersfoort, 1977) is a graphic designer, based in Amsterdam. His studio focusses on editorial book design, curatorial projects, institutional identities, interactive applications and websites. Remco is co-founder of 'WdW Review' (Witte de With, Rotterdam), Dutch art book publisher Onomatopee and teaches graphic design at ArtEZ, Arnhem. He designed the publication and identity of the Aalto Natives, at the Finnish Pavilion of this year's 57th Venice Biennale. For the 2015 edition of the Venice Biennale the studio was responsible for the design of the publication and identity of ‘to be all ways to be’, the exhibition of herman de vries of the Dutch pavilion.
His clients include artists like: Navid Nuur, Jonas Staal, Justin Bennett, Esther Tielemans, Gert-Jan Prins and Erik van Lieshout besides institutions like Witte de With, e-flux, New World Summit, Extra City Kunsthal, Arts Writers Grant Program, Art Agenda, Council, Cobra Museum and STEIM (studio for electro-instrumental music). The studio takes care of the graphic design of the art magazine and website Metropolis M.
Remco van Bladel grew up as a kid in the recordstore of his father. The relation between the sound/music on the records and the visuals on the sleeves and packaging had a strong influence on his nowadays practice. Especially the strategy and concepts he creates for graphic design.
In his essay 'Musical Theories in Graphic Design', from 2002, treated Bladel with the subject of graphic notation within a broader field of theory formation in contemporary
music. In it he transposed compositional methodologies of the avant-gardists in the 20th century to graphical design methodologies. For instance by understanding the phase shifting technique from inside Steve Reich to design. But also work from Stockhausen, and Cage to view and differ and looking for similarities. Rhythm, shifts, pairs, tonality, counterpoints. This was not about hard comparisons and 1 on 1 projections, but more
to interpret, think and work with elements. An investigation into methodologies within his own artistic practice.
From his own position he considers himself as (editorial) designer, curator, musician and publisher with a strong predilection for language and typography. His artistic practice is formed by a number of ingredients that have always been present in his work to a greater or lesser extent. The most important, from his youth, is sound or music. Both as a source or inspiration, as a metaphor, as a thinking model and as an 'attitude' in relation to his practice. He sees it as punk, experiment, noise, investigative, critical. Searching for dissonance and ordering of information, for rhythm and tonality. Sound in relation to image remains an elusive phenomenon that continues to fascinate me because sound / music is the most abstract art form. The subjective nature, the way in which vibrations can release such strong emotions, makes it possible to deal speculatively and to use them for use in typography, image, material choices, folding methods and bookbinding systems. This tactility, the application of materiality and the use of printing techniques as a metaphor for sound play a major role in his entire practice.
event title: PU-SH-ING WITH TELCOSYSTEMS, JULIA BUENNAGEL AND DEREK HOLZER
date:Fri 20 Jan 2017 20:00hrs
location: DE PLAYER, Rotterdam, NL
description: WHY ?
Live event for our Pushing the Score project with Telcosystems (nl), Julia Buennagel (de) and Derek Holzer (us). Focussing on the potential of grahic scores and publishing of sound and image we present Telcosystems with their recent publication Resonanz, a reading on Schematic as a Score plus concert by Derek Holzer plus a live performance of Julia Bünnagel with modified records.
What are the possibilities of graphic scores, in a day and age in which graphic notation is still usually seen as a ‘drawing’ serving as some kind of sheet music? In an attempt to redefine this concept, we will be compiling a programme in which artists, musicians, theoreticians and practitioners are invited to participate. The collective goal is to develop and present new audio-visual and media-technical forms of graphic notation through artistic research and development. Based on our compilation of the most contemporary and innovative graphic notation practices in the fields of music, sound art, performance art, e-culture, new-media art, graphic design and media design, we will introduce artists and designers from various creative disciplines to a national and international audience, with the goal of collectively developing new forms of graphic notation.
participating artists: WHO ?
Telcosystems presents Resonanz; an electronic book combining a series of visual artworks with a sound publication in one. Incorporated in the structure of the book are sensors and electronics, providing each page with its own unique soundtrack, which can be listened to via speakers or headphones. This evening Resonanz will be the starting point of Q&A, demonstration and live presentation. In their audiovisual works Telcosystems research the relation between the behavior of programmed numerical logic and the human perception of this behavior; they aim at an integration of human expression and programmed machine behavior. This becomes manifest in the immersive audiovisual installations they make, in films, videos, soundtracks, prints and in live performances. The software they write enables them to compose ever-evolving audiovisual worlds. Telcosystems’ installations and films focus on real-time, self-structuring, generative processes, in their live performances they focus on the interaction with these processes.
Julia Bünnagel is a contemporary sound and sculpting artist based Cologne. Working with sound performance and art installation. She is part of the sound-art-collective Sculptress of Sound. Julia's solo live performance primarily refers to the modified vinyl records which produces extraordinary sounds. Julia's peculiar method of modifying vinyl records includes the various ways of physical treatment such as sewing, painting or pasting the vinyl surfaces and afterwards mixing them together for yielding an imprudently driving, rhythmic soundscapes following by the white noise, multiple fragments of music along with dirty boom beats.
Derek Holzer is an American instrument builder and sound artist based in Helsinki FI & Berlin DE, whose current interests include DIY analog electronics, the relationship between sound + space, media archaeology and the meeting points of electroacoustic, noise, improv and extreme music. He has performed live, taught workshops and created scores of unique instruments and installations since 2002 across Europe, North and South America, and New Zealand.
For the PUSHING event Derek will do a reading entitled Schematic as Score: Uses and Abuses of the (In)Deterministic Possibilities of Sound Technology and after that he will do a live set based on researching analog visuals with the oscilloscope.
The reading starts out of the fact that over the past few years, a strong reaction against the sterile world of laptop sound and video has inspired a new interest in analog processes, or "hands dirty" art in the words of practitioner John Richards. With this renewed analog interest comes a fresh exploration of the pioneers of the electronic arts during the pre-digital era of the 1960s and 1970s. Artists and inventors such as Nam June Paik, Steina & Woody Vasulka, Don Buchla, Serge Tcherepnin, Dan Sandin and David Tudor all constructed their own unique instruments long before similar tools became commercially available or freely downloadable.
About the live oscilloscope concert he states: „The Vectorian Era opens with a screaming across the sky. Analog electronic computers predate their digital counterparts by several decades, and one of the first practical applications of the analog computer was in controlling the trajectories of German V2 rockets as they traced their rainbow of gravity from Flanders towards London during the Second World War. Informed by the discourse of media archaeology, my own personal interest in analog vector graphics isn’t merely retro-for-retro’s-sake. Rather, it is an exploration of a once-current and now discarded technology linked with specific utopias and dystopias from another time.”
http://macumbista.netWe got in touch with the work of Derek Holzer through his project on Tone Wheels; an experiment in converting graphical imagery to sound, inspired by some of the pioneering 20th Century electronic music inventions. Transparent tonewheels with repeating patterns are spun over light-sensitive electronic circuitry to produce sound and light pulsations and textures.
This analog way of getting sound from graphic notation was an impuls to check him out for the Pushing Scores project. He came up with a reading on Schematics as a Score, because that was a current issue of his practice. It fully fitted in our search for how to see the concept of composing and making scores.Derek Holzer (USA 1972) is a sound + light artist based in Helsinki & Berlin, whose current interests include DIY electronics, audiovisual instrument building, the relationship between sound and space, media archaeology, and participatory art forms. He has performed live, taught workshops and created scores of unique instruments and installations since 2002 across Europe, North and South America, and New Zealand.
http://macumbista.net
Derek Holzer gave a lecture with the theme "Schematic as Score: use and abuse of the (im)deterministic possibilities of sound technology". In it he considers it axiomatic that, for every work of art that must be considered experimental, the possibility of failure must be built into his process. By this he does not mean the aestheticized, satisfying disturbances and cracking that Kim Cascone valorizes, but the lack of satisfaction caused by a misplaced or misdirected procedure in the experiment, colossal or banal. These are not mistakes that should be looked up, sampled and celebrated, but the flat-on-your-ass gaffs and embarrassment that would disturb the sleep of all but the most Zen of musicians or composers. The presence of failure in a musical system represents feedback in the negative, a turning point in anticlimax, irrelevance, the everyday, the cliché or even unintentional silence. Many artists try to eliminate true, catastrophic failures by scripting, scoring, sequencing or programming their work in as many predictable, risk-free quantums as possible in advance. But this unwanted presence also guarantees the vitality of that fiercely fought area; the live electronic music performance.
The past few years there has been a strong response to the sterile world of sound and video from the laptop. This has led to a new interest in analogue processes or dirty hands art. With this renewed analog interest comes a fresh exploration of the pioneers of electronic art during the pre-digital era of the sixties and seventies. Artists and inventors such as Nam June Paik, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Don Buchla, Serge Tcherepnin, Dan Sandin and David Tudor all constructed their own unique instruments long before similar tools became commercially available or could be freely downloaded.
Over the past few years, a strong reaction against the sterile world of laptop sound and
video has inspired a new interest in analog processes, or "hands dirty" art in the words of practitioner John Richards. With this renewed analog interest comes a fresh exploration of the pioneers of the electronic arts during the pre-digital era of the 1960s and 1970s.
Artists and inventors such as Nam June Paik, Steina & Woody Vasulka, Don Buchla, Serge
Tcherepnin, Dan Sandin and David Tudor all constructed their own unique instruments
long before similar tools became commercially available or freely downloadable4– often
through a long, rigorous process of self-education in electronics.
John Cage once quipped that Serge Tcherepnin's synthesizer system was "the best musical
composition that Serge had ever made", and it is precisely Cage's reformulation of the
concert score from a list of deterministic note values to a set of indeterministic
possibilities that allowed the blurring of lines between instrument-builder and music
composer that followed.
In 2011 Derek Holzer wrote an essay on this issue which has been published as a pdf on internet as VAGUE TERRAIN 19.Vector Synthesis Workshop Piksel
Derek Holzer, Vector Synthesis workshop
Building: Piksel Studio 207, Bergen NO
Dates: 9-11 March 2018
Time: tba
All workshops are free entrance. To sign up send an email to:
prod(at)piksel(dot)no
VECTOR SYNTHESIS is an audiovisual, computational art project using sound synthesis and vector graphics display techniques to investigate the direct relationship between sound+image. It draws on the historical work of artists such as Mary Ellen Bute, John Whitney, Nam June Paik, Ben Laposky, and Steina & Woody Vasulka among many others, as well as on ideas of media archaeology and the creative re-use of obsolete technologies. Audio waveforms control the vertical and horizontal movements as well as the brightness of a single beam of light, tracing shapes, points and curves with a direct relationship between sound and image.
You can see several demo videos here:
http://macumbista.net/?page_id=5000
SOFTWARE
The Vector Synthesis library allows the creation and manipulation of 2D and 3D vector shapes, Lissajous figures, and scan processed image and video inputs using audio signals sent directly to oscilloscopes, hacked CRT monitors, Vectrex game consoles, ILDA laser displays, or oscilloscope emulation softwares using the Pure Data programming environment.
https://github.com/macumbista/vectorsynthesis
During this workshop, you will learn how to use a custom library in the Pure Data programming environment to directly control the vertical and horizontal movements, as well as the brightness, of a beam of light. You will then explore Lissajous figures, waveform representations, and other multiplexed, audio-driven visual shapes and forms which can be displayed and manipulated in real time on an XY oscilloscope, Vectrex game console, ILDA laser display, and other analog vector displays, or with oscilloscope emulating software directly on your laptop.
LINKS
http://macumbista.net/?page_id=4869
https://www.instagram.com/macumbista/
More info at: http://17.piksel.no/?p=72
Photo credit: Anders Børup
Derek Holzer was invited for the event PU-SH-ING at 20 Jan 2017. He did a reading on Schematic as a Score, but also did a live concert from his research in analog visuals with the oscilloscope.
a theoretical/historical text about the concept written by Derek Holzer
23 NOV 2016, Helsinki, Finland
THE VECTORIAN ERA: an Investigation into Analog Computer Graphics
The Vectorian Era opens with a screaming across the sky. Analog electronic computers predate their digital counterparts by several decades, and one of the first practical applications of the analog computer was in controlling the trajectories of German V2 rockets as they traced their rainbow of gravity from Flanders towards London during the Second World War. As Friedrich Kittler has observed, the relationship of media technology to military tools of destruction was sealed by moments such as these.
Post-war developments continued in this direction. Tennis for Two, programmed in 1958 by William Higinbotham on an analog computer at Brookhaven National Laboratories in Long Island NY USA, using an oscilloscope as the display. It combined a two-player interface with physics models of a bouncing ball displayed as vectors in motion, and is arguably the first publicly-playable video game. The laboratory itself performed government research into nuclear physics, energy technology, and national security.
In the early 1960’s, the composer Morton Subotnik employed engineer Don Buchla to help him create “the music of the future”. Buchla redesigned the existing function generators of analog computers to respond to voltage controls of their frequency and amplitude. This gave birth to the realtime-controllable, analog modular synthesizer which was subsequently expanded by others such as Bob Moog and Serge Tcherepnin.
In 1967, the Sony Portapak revolutionized video by taking the camera out of the television studio and into the hands of amateurs and artists. And by the early 1970’s, an interest in cybernetics, systems theory and automatic processes brought the analog computer closer to the worlds of art, music, and architecture. Figures such as Heinz von Foerster, Gordon Pask, Nam June Paik, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Iannis Xenakis and R. Buckminster Fuller all speculated on the effect of computers on society, and used computer-derived forms in their work. The 1972 Rutt-Etra Video Synthesizer, used famously by the Vasukas in several works, employed an analog computer to manipulate and deconstruct the raster of a conventional video signal with very otherworldly effects.
Vector graphics were widely adopted by video game manufacturers in the late 1970’s due to their computational efficiency, and the wealth of experience using them that the history of analog computing provided. Perhaps the most iconic of these games is Asteroids, a space shooter released by Atari in 1979. Battle Zone (1980), Tempest (1981), and Star Wars (1983) all stand as other notable examples from this Vectorian Era, and also as rudimentary training tools for the future e-warriors who would remotely guide missiles into Iraqi bunkers at the start of the next decade. As electronics became cheaper, smaller, and faster in the 1980’s, the dated technology of using analog vectors to directly manipulate a Cathode Ray Tube fell out of favor and rasterized graphics, animations and moving image quickly took their place.
Informed by the discourse of media archaeology, my own personal interest in analog vector graphics isn’t merely retro-for-retro’s-sake. Rather, it is an exploration of a once-current and now discarded technology linked with specific utopias and dystopias from another time. The fact that many aspects of our current utopian aspirations (and dystopian anxieties!) remain largely unchanged since the dawn of the Vectorian Era indicates to me that seeking to satisfy them with technology alone is quite problematic. Therefore, an investigation into “tried-and-failed” methods from the past casts our current attempts and struggles in a new kind of light.
George Brecht is most famous for his Event Scores such as Drip Music 1962 and is widely seen as an important precursor to conceptual art. He described his own art as a way of “ensuring that the details of everyday life, the random constellations of objects that surround us, stop going unnoticed.”
Event Scores are works Event Scores are simple instructions to complete everyday tasks which can be performed publicly, privately, or negatively (meaning deciding not to perform them at all).
Initially writing theatrical scores similar to Kaprow's earliest Happenings, Brecht grew increasingly dissatisfied with the didactic nature of these performances. After performing in one such piece, Cage quipped that he'd "never felt so controlled before." prompting Brecht to pare the scores down to haiku-like statements, leaving space for radically different interpretations each time the piece was performed.The Event Scores of George Brecht are still actual pieces. He is inspiring for a lot of performance based composers. Specifically that is works out of simple instructions and can be done by anybody it has a highly democratic factor, without losing its artistic impact. Also interesting is the fact that it is purely language based lays in our interest. DE PLAYER has been publishing and presenting a lot of sound poetry.George Brecht (August 27, 1926 – December 5, 2008), born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer, as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Mobil Oil. He was a key member of, and influence on, Fluxus, the international group of avant-garde artists centred on George Maciunas, having been involved with the group from the first performances in Wiesbaden 1962 until Maciunas' death in 1978.
One of the originators of 'participatory' art, in which the artwork can only be experienced by the active involvement of the viewer, he is most famous for his Event Scores such as Drip Music 1962, and is widely seen as an important precursor to conceptual art. He described his own art as a way of “ensuring that the details of everyday life, the random constellations of objects that surround us, stop going unnoticed.”
Steve Joy took me to meet George Brecht in his studio when I was in residence at St Michael's in Manhattan (c.1962). We became friends and he mailed instruction cards to me. I brought Steve Joy to St. Vincent College when I returned to the monastery from Paris in 1963. George Brecht agreed to provide instructions for an event at St. Vincent. For his "Vehicle Sundown Event", he published a set of about 50 cards to be given to participants who participated in the event with their vehicles. Each card held an instruction to be performed with a vehicle. Drivers were instructed to assemble at sundown in a parking lot and randomly park their vehicles. Then each driver, with a shuffled deck of instructions, would begin performing at the sound of a signal. Participants performed about 50 events such as "turn on lights", "start engine", "stop engine", "open window". This work was performed at St. Vincent College under the direction of Stephen Joy with Roman Verostko assisting. c. 1963
A baton is a stick that is used by conductors primarily to enlarge and enhance the manual and bodily movements associated with directing an ensemble of musicians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baton_(conducting)This object is chosen to be part of the archive because it is the first and most simple tool to translate a written score to the musician who has to execute it. It is the first intermediary after the score itself and comes from a method of conducting called cheironmy.
Before music was established in writing, each choir leader led the Gregorian chants of the scola cantorum with movements. This method of conducting, called cheironomy, consisted of writing signs in the air that contained clear instructions for the trained choir singers in terms of pitch change, duration and tone strength. These signs or neumens were written down, modified or not, first without any reference line. Later, the neumens - depending on the relative pitch differences - were noted above, on, or below a line referring to a pitch determined by the choral conductor.
publication
title: Each One
catalogue number: DOB 089
artist: Jörg Piringer
description:
10" vinyl dubplate each one with original sound and related artwork
edition 40 pieces
Piringer has performed in DE PLAYER with his visual sound poetry pieces based on computer programming. For Pushing the Score we invited him to make special work for a limited edition. For this he developed specific software that generates poetry in spoken word form. For each record a unique piece is generated that is spoken and performed by the same software. The packaging of each record is also linked to the unique file and consists of an original visual work that is derived/transformed via a formula from the programming language that underlies the audio poem to be heard on the record.
Jörg Piringer is a member of the Institute for Trans-acoustic Research, member of the Vegetable Orchestra, radio artist, sound poet, visual poet, musician and holds a master's degree in computer science. He is also involved in the online poetry platform Huelkorven. The way in which he arrives at his poetry is very closely linked to his knowledge and skills of the programming language.
For example his work ‘frakativ’; an electronic visual sound poetry performance. ‘Fricatives’ are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together.
The performance ‘frikativ’ is real-time generated visual and sound poetry. Image and sound are created immediately during the performance by speaking and vocalizing into a microphone and modifying the voice through signal processors and samplers while the software is analyzing the sound to create animated abstract visual text-compositions.
Piringer is also involved in Huellkurven; an online sound poetry magazine and a series of events dedicated to sound poetry, poésie sonore, lautpoesie, noise poetry, sound-text composition, auditive poetry, audio poetry etc.
URL: http://huellkurven.net
https://monoskop.org/Concrete_poetryDE PLAYER is interested in sound that fraternises in the abstract sense and makes people communicate with each other, without having to understand each other specifically in terms of language. In a multicultural situation, abstract sounds are the forms of recognition; then there is, for example, the music. The cultural identity is communicated with this. Music and dance are good elements to be together without literally understanding each other word for word. Subcultures form through music. In addition to the all-dominating impact of the music industry that determines lifestyle at the confection level, all sorts of de-mass-splintering genres are forming on the periphery of the musical firmament. The style / genre determines the identity. New generations are born.
It is important here that the language is sung off the usual value of speech. The limits of speech become communication and nonsense, which both have the potential of speech. Orientation with regard to giving meaning changes by inserting moments when improper use of thought, material and technology takes place.
The foundation of language as an information transmission is the foundation of these tendencies and is at the heart of the oral tradition principle. How stories can be told, how traditions are passed on, how past feeds the present and how the present forms itself by muttering the past.
Multilingualism is important in giving meaning to the things around us. Publishing, as mentioned above, is important to communicate various ways of expression. Signification also plays a major role in this. Within "Radical Listening" we want to see what the possibilities are of communication and publishing with the current means that are available to us. This idea is closely intertwined with the project "Pushing the Score", in which the materialization of sound plays a role. Listening in the sense of "Radical Listening" is therefore not only about ears specifically, but generally about exploring our world, our position in it and the way in which communication is possible.
We investigate how contemporary means are used to shape language, sign and sound. The analogue and virtual voice play a major role in this. Use of consumer electronics for improper use (eg tape recorder, telephone) but also self-invented technical devices and software, other machines (computer, record player, effect equipment) and a variety of speech techniques are used so that, among other things, classical reading forms are exceeded.
Inspiration is the vocal poetry, poésie sonore and text-sound composition. In our opinion, this area is an important one, both in the experimental sound, in the lecture and in the visual arts. Here it has played an important role and as such it is still current. The connection of the word and sound can be found in many ways within the art and music of fluxus, rap, early avant-garde, soundproof, laut poetry, music theater, opera, performative series, musical theatrical dad shows, radio plays and installational settings.
event
title: IRREGULAR # 2313 STRIPPED
date:Fri 14 Oct 2011 21:00hrs
location: Wall Gallery, Rotterdam, NL
artist: Fersteinn
Fersteinn from Iceland will come and bring us a clear bold construction of tones and notes in space. They sound like a completely crushed partiture which comes out in it's pure elements just ordered in a way you are not so used to listen to. Good practise for the ears.
Fersteinn is a quartet of multi-instrumentalists that performs music by composer Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson. The music focuses on elastic rhythms, that are not easily confined to a grid. The musicians read the music from a score, but the score consists of moving images on a computer screen. This is done in order to communicate rhythms not easily notated. The music mostly consists of hockets where each sound is like one letter in a word. With flutes or recorder, plucked string instruments, duck calls and winds or brass, various types of rhythmical sound textures are conveyed. Some parts of the music might resemble animal sounds or the rhythm of animal movements.
To quote the composer: "By intently focusing on small differences, both in rhythm and pitch, the ear gets tuned to a microscopic mode of listening. When things then open up, a new sense of variety is gained."Fersteinn works with the method of so called Animation. This means animated notation. They had been performing before we started the Pushing Scores project. Nevertheless we claim it to be part of it.FERSTEINN (is)
Fersteinn is a quartet of multi-instrumentalists that play compositions by Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson, a repertoire that is written especially for the ensemble. Fersteinn usually performs in the quietest of settings. They are a group that plays music in a “extra-musical” or “non-musical” sort of rhythm (so to speak). They did quite an impressive set 2 years ago at De Vleeshal and Wallgallery, for those who missed it.
Fersteinn plays from animations made as compositions on a laptop. Most compositions are made by Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson.
Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson (born 1982) is an Icelandic composer, performer and a founding member of S.L.Á.T.U.R., an experimental arts organization in Reykjavík. In his compositions he has developed a rhythmic language devoid of regular beat or metre, and he has created a new musical notation to represent his music.
Guðmundur Steinn's musical style combines sound patterns without using a rigid rhythmic grid structure or pulse. This approach has led to the development of his animated notation, or 'anitation', instead of using traditional musical scores. During the performance, the musicians follow specific instructions that move across a computer screen. This rhythmic language and animated notation and the structural methods he uses in composition were the subject of his M.A. thesis in Mills College. As Guðmundur Steinn explains, "By intently focusing on small differences, both in rhythm and pitch, the ear gets tuned to a microscopic mode of listening. When things then open up, a new sense of variety is gained."
He is a founding member of the S.L.Á.T.U.R. ("samtök listrænt ágengra tónsmiða umhverfis Reykjavík" or "The Association of Artistically Obtrusive Composers around Reykjavík"[6]), an experimental composers collective in Iceland, and he is co-curator of the festival Sláturtíð. He also a co-curates the concert series Jaðarber at the Reykjavík Art Museum
website by RYAN ROSS SMITH all about animated notation:
‘Anitation’is the term for animated notation. Instead of using traditional musical scores, during the performance, the musicians follow specific instructions that move across a computer screen. This rhythmic language and animated notation and the structural methods were the subject of Guðmundur Steinn M.A. thesis in Mills College. As Guðmundur Steinn explains, "By intently focusing on small differences, both in rhythm and pitch, the ear gets tuned to a microscopic mode of listening. When things then open up, a new sense of variety is gained." This technique of composing is performed by Gudmundur Steinn his quartet Fersteinn.
Gudmundur Steinn has been part of DE PLAYER its program with his quartet Fersteinn several times. This Icelandic quartet plays with little analog instruments animation scores Steinn made on his computer. It results in real delicate and unconventional chamber music.
The animations of Steinn were also used by Goodiepal when he visited DE PLAYER on 17 December 2015 with his project on Icelandic animated notation. He a lecture on this subject and played together with Daniel S. Bøtcher, Grøn, Nynne Roberta Pedersen several pieces. Amongst which some of Gudmundur Steinn.
https://vimeo.com/151283154
We also produced a limited poly urethan record with Fersteinn.
The idea of Anitation and the work of Gudmunder Steinn fits perfectly in Pushing Scores.Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson is an Icelandic composer writing music based on irregular or non-pulse oriented rhythms. It inhabits a world where grids or straight lines are almost non-existent. This often requires presenting the music as moving graphics on computer screens. That way the most irregular things can become very intelligible.
He has been active with a composer collective in Iceland called S.L.Á.T.U.R. and taken part in founding its festival Sláturtíð and used to be a co-curator of the Jaðarber concert series and Fengjastrútur Ensemble. He runs his own multi-instrumentalist quartet which is called Fersteinn.
His music has been performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Caput Ensemble, Reykjavík Chamber Orchestra, Ensemble Adapter, Tøyen Fil og Klafferi, Ensemble l’Arsenale, Ensemble CRUSH, Aksiom Ensemble, Nordic Affect, Defun Ensemble, Iceland Flute Choir, Duo Harpverk, Roberto Durante, Markus Hohti, Mathias Ziegler, Georgia Browne, Timo Kinnunen, Shayna Dunkelmann, Una Sveinbjarnardóttir and Tinna Þosteinsdóttir.
Some of the festivals that have included Guðmundur’s music are Tectonics Reykjavík and Glasgow, MATA, Musikin Aika, Ultima, November Music, Transit, Music for People and Thingamajigs, Nordlichter Biennale, Timisoara International Music Festival and ISSTC 2014 in Maynooth, Ireland, where Guðmundur was also Keynote speaker.
Guðmundur Steinn studied composition at Mills College, Iceland Academy of the Arts, Reykjavík College of Music, privately and at summer courses in Kürten and Darmstädt. His teachers have been Alvin Curran, Fred Frith, John Bischoff, Atli Ingólfsson, Hilmar Þórðarsson and Úlfar Ingi Haraldsson.Silence has kinetic roles in social exchanges: quietude, reflective pauses, withdrawal, displays of consent or dissent, reception and interpretation. But how can we score something not present, yet also not absent? Is there a positive notation for this critical issue of performance, of silence in the voice, other than merely the courtesies of extended rests, or blanks in the score? The reader will see inscriptions that oscillate between pictures and writing, and between visual and auditory, exemplifying those capacities of drawing to operate in the spaces between languages. In the context of an experimental music notation, seeking to make an instrumental gesture of silence, how can we draw incipience?“Before god needed to be invented there were man.
Before language there was the song.
Before the song there was the yodel.”
As bart plantenga stated in his reading on yodeling.
I think silence has that same trelations with music.
emptiness has that same relation with notation.
event:
title: MUSIC&CAPITALISM
date:Sat 18 May 2013 09.00 hrs - 24.00 hrs
location:SKAR office, Groot Handelsgebouw, Rotterdam |
artists: MARCO FUSINATO & JOHANNES KREIDLER
description:
A reading in combination with a 6 hrs concert by Marco Fusinato.
DE PLAYER and WORM present a day about music and economy, revolving around two authoritative sound-artists/composers, whose work is engaged with political-economical processes. Marco Fusinato's (AU) mangled noise-guitar excursions are informed by the political explosions and pitfalls of of radical collectives from Autonomia and beyond. Johannes Kreidler (DE) who made a piece consisting of 70 thousand samples, and for each of these fragments he asked permission from the GEMA (the German BUMA). The authority who controls copy right specifically for musicians.
publication:
Project name: DOB 060
Description : Product Placements - 10" blue vinyl with poster and xerox copies - edition of 150 pieces
Johannes Kreidler is a special duck in the bite when it comes to composing. His works can often be regarded as composition, performance, sculpture and indictment. His work is described as conceptual music. He usually uses multimedia elements. He approaches the themes he uses (including authorship) through various entities directly linked to society. By acting consistently within these structures he creates his works. A few examples appeal to the imagination with regard to how a score can be understood and which elements and/or processes can play a role in this.
Johannes Kreidler is a composer, concept- and media artist. His way of composing has a multimedia conceptual approach which is mostly linked with processes in society. This makes it interesting in the perspective of experimentation and onorthodox composing. The AEX index, outsourcing of labor or copyright processes and social questions and implication around these issues form the fundament of some of his compositions. We asked Johannes to do a reading about his practice as a composer during the event we organized around Music & Capitalism.
We produced with him a record which contains one piece of him named Product Placements
This piece is to be seen as a plunder phonic composition in extremis. A press echoed in September 2008 his action Product Placements out, with which he wanted to initiate a discussion on copyright and the height of creation in music. In a 33-second piece of music, he processed 70,200 quotes of foreign works, which he all individually enrolled at the GEMA. For this purpose, he accompanied by numerous press representatives with a small truck full of completed applications at the GEMA Directorate General in Berlin before. The plant is deliberately located in a legal gray area, which has greatly increased by digital technologies, so that it is impossible to clarify the case so far.(How Could You) Bring Him Home by Eamon
From 2000 to 2006 Kreidler studied composition with Mathias Spahlinger, electronic music with Orm Finnendahl and Mesias Maiguashca, and music theory with Eckehard Kiem at the University of Music Freiburg and at the Institute of Sonology (Computer Music) of the Koninklijk Conservatorium The Hague. He also studied philosophy and art history at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.
He works as a lecturer in music theory, ear training and electronic music at the Rostock Academy of Music and Theater, the Detmold Academy of Music, the Hanover University of Music and Drama and at the Hamburg University of Music and Drama.
His work/action Product Placements, which helped to discuss copyright and the level of creation in music, was widely spread. In a 33 second piece he processed 70,200 quotations of foreign works, all of which he submitted individually via forms to the GEMA (the German Buma Stemra). Eventually he was accompanied by numerous journalists with a small truck full of completed applications to the GEMA Directorate General in Berlin. A few cubic metres of printed matter were placed in the reception hall of the GEMA office. The system was therefore completely stuck. The minimal samples used (milli-seconds) are intended to test the credibility and effectiveness of the GEMA in relation to the digital reality. The music production is consciously located in a legal grey area, which has been greatly enlarged by digital technologies. If such a fraction can still be labelled as music, it can still be linked to the original and the performing artist in terms of financial compensation for use.
This is close to his work Charts Music, in which he used the share prices of various companies to derive pitches. Besides the share prices, some other statistics were used, such as the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq. In this piece, too, reference is made to the borderline areas of copyright, and credits such as composers and copyright holders mention the respective companies instead of Kreidler himself.
For another work he commissioned composers from low-wage countries to plagiarize his own music for a commission for the Festival Klangwerkstatt Berlin. For much less money than Kreidler himself received as a commission, he had pieces ready for concert that were made for him in China and India. According to Kreidler, the action entitled Fremdarbeit is intended to focus attention on the themes of exploitation and authorship.
During this evening we focus on the archiving of our Pushing Scores project. A project on the nowadays meaning of the 'graphic score', which has been running for over the last 2-3 years. What are the possibilities of graphic scores, in a day and age in which graphic notation is still usually seen as a ‘drawing’, serving as some kind of sheet music?
To communicate the project to a larger audience DE PLAYER asked Varia to develop a context and technical environment as a web-based archival publication for the Pushing Scores project. The idea is that this material will be embodied by a dynamic, accessible and therefore active archive, which creates new relations, new perspectives and, at its best, new concepts for the production and/or processes of making scores. Varia will explain their ideas and approach on this matter.
- Valentina Vuksic will bring a live performance in which she approaches computers with transducers that transform electromagnetic radiation into sound within choreographically setups. The ‘runtime’ of executed software is staged for an audience to provide an acoustic experience: that of logic encountering the physical world.
- Ana Guedes is introducing her project Untitled Records; a performative sound installation weaving historical and emotional narratives through the “instrumentalisation” of a collection of records.
- Niek Hilkmann (part of Varia) will present his UNI (Universal Notation Ideal), a Pay2Print investigation in the simultaneous production and distribution of standardised graphical scores through the mediation of an automaton. It is developed by Niek Hilkmann and Joseph Knierzinger, based on a new notation system that is created to help conceptual composers in developing and exchanging conceptual music within one uniform language. The actual printing of the thermal paper is a stochastic performance in itself. By emphasizing this aspect of the machine as a musical entrepreneur, earning its own income, we explore the conditions of mechanised labour within the cultural industry and its corresponding ethics
Ana Guedes her project UNTITLED RECORDS fits in our idea of finding new ways for composing. Her archival approach and its political and personal implication are the starting point of this work. Because she uses and record archive it finally almost turns out to be a DJ set. This 'other way' around to come to sound is an interesting phenomenon. Also the technical implementation of possibilities to program the record players is interesting regarding for example the idea of schematics as a score.
-Ana Guedes is a multidisciplinary artist from Portugal who lives and works in The Hague. She works with sound, video, installation and performance. Her research focuses on the 'dialectic of tuning'. Within this framework she investigates the working of memory with the intention of recreating situations and thus evoking a 'presence'. Through subjective interpretations of the ability to instrumentalize objects, she creates catalysts for thinking and contemplation. Her project Untitled Records is a performative sound installation that interweaves historical and emotional narratives through the 'instrumentalisation' of a collection of vinyl records. An ensemble of Arduino-powered prepared record players is built as an instrumentation to make an intimate selection from a family archive of popular music. The records come from Angola, Portugal and Canada.
UNTITLED RECORDS is a performative sound installation weaving historical and emotional narratives through the “instrumentalisation” of a collection of records. An ensemble of reimagined record players are instruments built to perform an intimate selection from a family archive of popular music : “..a set of records carefully shipped home from a country at war forty years ago”.
The vinyls were purchased in Angola, Portugal and Canada over a time span from the 60s to the early 80s and have travelled over three continents.
Stained by the passage of time, scratched, with their covers eaten by moths the records are signed and dated; they exist as passive witnesses of a displacement in time and space.
Each date and signature is a coordinate, a clue in the reconstruction of a map tracing complex historical occurrences splitting into an infinite number of threads.
The multi arm record players with which several timelines can be played - from one single record to an ensemble of vinyls intertwine a juxtaposition of temporalities and imagined narratives trapped within the collection.
event title:TGC # 3 / MAT>NET>PU
participating artists: JOHANNES BERGMARK, HIELE MARTENS, HELGA JAKOBSON, XPUB
An evening with remarkable experiments and materialised conceptual flip flop. DE PLAYER will unveil its third issue of Tetra Gamma Circulaire (TGC) – the unknown audio magazine. TGC #3 is compiled in collaboration with students of the Piet Zwart Institute, and is also part of their Experimental Publishing programme of the Media Design Master, named XPUB.
Tetra Gamma Circulaire was initiated in 2015 by DE PLAYER with the aim to become an experimental audio magazine series without any restrictions in appearance, style, and/or shape. TGC #3 fits right in. Concretely, TGC #3 is a particular kind of publishing platform engineered for sonic experiments, instruments, and installations. Some dare say it's a kind of jukebox. The first edition of TGC #3 is limited to just twelve copies, and its presentation at this event is augmented with works created and compiled by the XPUB students. Next to the presentation of TGC#3 we are also hosting exciting demonstrations and live sets from the sound makers and breakers described below.
Sometimes 1 + 1 is greater than the sum of its parts, but if you put two of Belgium’s finest composers and musicians together, it adds up to an infinite number. Hiele Martens, or the collaboration of Lieven Martens Moana and Roman Hiele, delve deep into new territory that could be interpreted as a 2017 update of Maurice Kagel’s "Exotica", but made by self-aware electronic musicians. Hiele Martens' debut record is about to be released on Ultra Eczema and is expected to become one of the highlights of this year.
Whether culminating into actions or objects, Helga Jakobson's work responds to conditions of limbo within existence and acts as a platform to confront the unknown; it focuses on death, time and ephemerality. Currently she is constructing a digital and physical web; weaving together the overlapping, intuitive and sometimes complicated interconnections that comprise her interest in handcraft, witchcraft, and digitalcraft. The main threads that run between these interests are the experience of women, their traditional work and their sharing of knowledge. Jakobson has great reverence for intuition and it’s use as a technology. At DE PLAYER she will demonstrate her 'spider web record player'.
Johannes Bergmark is a Fylkingen affiliated sound artist, instrument builder and piano technician. His performances have been described as surrealist puppet theatre in which the characters are amplified objects such as old tools, kitchen utensils, toys, springs and decorative kitsch. Using contact microphones, Bergmark reveals their hidden acoustics, dynamic scales and unique timbres. Bergmark is the ultimate rethinker of what music can be, in sound and in performance, as you can sometimes find him hanging on two piano strings from a ceiling.
Experimental Publishing is a new course of the Piet Zwart Institute's Media Design Master programme. The concept of the course revolves around two core principles: first, the inquiry into the technological, political and cultural processes through which things are made public; and second, the desire to expand the notion of publishing beyond print media and its direct digital translation. The Experimental Publishing students who contributed to the development of TGC #3 are: Karina Dukalska, Max Franklin, Giulia de Giovanelli, Clàudia Giralt, Francisco González, Margreet Riphagen, Nadine Rotem-Stibbe and Kimmy Spreeuwenberg.
We got in touch with Helga Jakobson her work through Bas van den Hurk who in that time was teaching at St Joost post graduate program in which Helga took part. Because of the fact that she was developing a machine which produces sound through the process of reading spider webs, Bas tipped her to contact DE PLAYER. We had an appointment and it was clear that this definitely got our interest and the decided to present her prototype at an event in which other more inventive ways of sound making were presented. Also the idea of a spider web as a score of course matched with the Pushing Scores project. Het Arachnes Sonifier got more and more developed and soon we will publish an album (DOB094) with the sound, images and conceptual information on our label.Helga Jakobson is a Canadian artist whose practice consists of exploring conditions of limbo, with a focus on death, time and the ephemeral. Often her research leads her to short-lived and organic material with which she develops new systems and methods for engagement. This takes shape by building digital interfaces; instrumentation used to explore, amplify and reflect what is barely visible, tangible or audible, while expressing the resonance and relationship between people, plants and organic matter. She presented her project entitled Arachnes Sonifier, in which she captures and makes audible spider webs. Her spider web record player (Arachnes Sonifier), which she developed for this purpose, is an instrument that plays, registers and converts a spider web into sound by means of light sensors. She passes on the notation she distils from this to music companies in order to come to performances.
Knowledge sharing across traditions has often taken place through oral mythology. Creation myths, such as in the Hopi and Navajo traditions, often centre around a Grandmother Spider figure who wove the night sky with her silk. There are spider figures in West African, Akan, and Caribbean myths personifying the spider as a trickster. In Japan there’s a focus on the lure of the spider, where it is sometimes likened to a prostitute. However, my favourite spider myth is from Greek mythology; that of Arachne who wove a tapestry better than Athena, the Goddess of weaving and war. Arachne challenged Athena, believing in the superiority of her own abilities and with the support of her community. During the competition, Athena wove a tapestry depicting all of the times mortals challenged the Gods and lost, while Arachne wove accounts of the many times Zeus had raped mortal women. After Arachne won the competition, Athena transformed her into a spider, and this is where the name for arachnids originates. Arachne, a disturber of the status quo, is thought of as one of the first feminist authors.
Using the material bequeathed to Arachne’s doomed progeny, I’ve been weaving a visual and sonic tapestry of my own, using digital technology to form new means of mythologizing and disseminating non-verbal experience. The sonification of spiderwebs asserts a reverence for the environment, the beauty of the ephemeral and loss. When the webs are harvested, my hand effects their original form. These webs then become a game of Cat’s Cradle of sorts between the spider and I, not quite a collaboration but rather more of an exercise in ongoingness and recognition of loss. The intact web will not exist long in the world, and with my interference; even less so. This strange, affective relay continues into the recording process which results in the interpreted sound of an interpreted web. These actions are complicated and tenuous, as most human relations with companion species are. The recordings I make of the webs are an act of commemoration, and as Myers and Husk propose; "This requires reading with our sense attuned to stories told in otherwise muted registers.”
The idea of a graphic score, a readable gesture, aids in the playability/repeatability of a piece of music which through it’s repetition allows for exploration, interpretation and imagination. These spiders have laid out scores in the form of webs that are barely visible ephemera drifting between branches or street signs or windows and I long to understand them. They remind me of George Crumb’s circular compositions; minus the pen and paper. In actuality, they are visual representations of the spider’s consciousness (who can forget Dr Peter Witt’s experiments with drug use on spiders and their resulting webs). A spiderweb is not only an illustration of a spider’s mental landscape, but an instrument it plucks and plays. These structures are scores and instruments unreadable/unplayable by humans, but interpretable through speculative fabulation, in the case of the recordings I create.
The webs I’ve chosen for this publication were harvested in the fall of 2018, after the first snowfall in Winnipeg, Canada. To find them I searched through basements, and bars, and zoos, and homes, and parks; though I found the majority of them in a greenhouse where I teetered over cacti and lavender bushes to collect them. The process of finding them could be likened to trying to make the invisible visible. In searching; imagining where I would make a web, and then marvelling when I find it in the most unlikely place, which only enchants me further into the world of spiders and webs and mythology. They aren’t entirely in line with Darwinian structures after all, not serving a solely evolutionary purpose; unlikely structures vulnerable and more powerful in space and time.
This work by BJ Nilsen can be seen as an observing documentary and is related to time lapse filmmaking. In addition, it places itself in the tradition of electro acoustic music and 'musique concrète'; a French music movement that makes use of everyday sounds that are processed with the help of electronics into compositions and sound collages.
From the Dark Ecology project of Sonic Acts, Amsterdam, BJ Nilsen has visited many mines and mining areas over time. As a sound artist he realized how much sound there is in the mining industry and began to think in sonic terms about its impact and meaning. What is the relationship between the sounds of mining and the community that surrounds it? Where does mining stop? How much influence does it have on a community? Over the years he has built up an extensive sound archive around this subject. Both in active mines and in the abandoned mines, buildings, surrounding areas and logistics locations in Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Russia and elsewhere. In it he found the fragility of mining processes and the impact that mining activities have on the population and their biotope and he also expanded his archive with all related logistic processes. In the final processing of the sound, he uses the facets of mining as different sound tracks.
The composition follows a more or less linear path - starting with 'deep' time. This line is interrupted a few times and the different time periods work together and overlap. It is a mix of sound recordings made at different times. Sometimes recordings from four years ago are combined with more recent recordings. Thus different layers of time are presented, from slowly unfolding sounds that represent a deep geological time, to sounds of transport, to the kind of sounds that we recognize as science fiction to indicate the future. For example, mining is in the arctic zone and research and an asteroid mining law was adopted in Luxembourg in 2017 that gives companies ownership of what they extract from celestial bodies. The idea is that you find an asteroid that is really rich in some rare metal that we really need and that one can claim that. Of course, it only becomes interesting when the resources on earth are exhausted.
For example, in the composition radio broadcasts from space are used as well as a recoding of the probe that has ended up on an asteroid. In this way the work creates a third space that belongs to the individual listener and that arises from the interaction between the original space and the imaginary space, created by the composition, the sound processing and the perception of the listener.
There is a small tribute to GRM (Groupe de recherches Musicales) in Paris and Pierre Henry which is directly related to iron ore. The 'musique concrète' as developed by Henry at GRM was made by magnetic tape. Some of the recordings were finally mixed in the studios of GRM. Magnetic tape was the medium of BJ Nilsen's youth. He had hundreds of cassette tapes, like many at the time. It made him realize how closely he was actually involved in the process of iron ore, and how his development as an artist was shaped thanks to iron ore.
Benny Nilsen approached us for his project ORE. We thought he would fit very well in the E-ARTHHA event with Douglas Kahn which we had planned.
Douglas Kahn is Professor of Media and Innovation at the National Institute of Experimental Arts (NIEA), University of New South Wales, Sydney, and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis, where he was the Founding Director of Technocultural Studies. He is known primarily for his writings on the use of sound in the avant-garde and experimental arts and music, and history and theory of the media arts. His writings have also been influential in the scholarly area of sound studies and the practical area of sound art. His best known book 'Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts' was published by MIT Press in 1999.
Currently Kahn is researching new interfaces and possibilities of sound composition, image and performance. He discards old categories of sound and performance and replaces them with a new category of "energy" in the bigger narrative of ecology and other sensitivities.
That evening Kahn did some kind of improv session on the works of the three invited artists. ‘Mining’ BJ Nilsen, ‘Jazz’ Max Franklin and ‘Earthquake’ Aurelie Lierman.
‘In Ore different layers of time are overlapping, from the deep time of geology to the superfast time of our current economy and the future. For the record I used recordings from the iron ore processing plant in Kirkenes, both with the plant working and not working. When it was empty, I mapped out the building by recording it. You hear the room tones, pigeons flying around, doors flapping, and the sound of the town blending in. I used recordings from Pasvik, south of Kirkenes, where the rock is at least 2.9 billion years old. The north of Norway is one of the oldest rock formations in the world. It doesn’t relate directly to mining, but it extends the project to include geology, deep time and stone. Those recordings symbolise the stasis of time. The mountain just sits there. The sounds are environmental. I made field recordings in the winter, you hear ice crystals cracking because there was a layer of ice on the snow. I also went to Näätämö/Neiden and just over the border to Finland because it’s land of the Sámi, and I wanted to have that in. The Sámi have a lot of respect for nature. Throughout the landscape there are sacred stones that are very important to them. I also worked with stone as an instrument, striking and recording it. I did the same with coal. I made recordings of the sound of striking coal at the house of Hilde Methi, a curator who lives in Kirkenes. She still stores coal there in a small outhouse (called ‘kullbingen’). There are recordings from the harbour of Murmansk with the coal trains coming in from Kuzbass in southwestern Siberia. The next phase in the processing of iron is represented by recordings from inside the Tata Steel factories in Wijk aan Zee, 30 kilometers from Amsterdam. I also visited Most in the Czech Republic because there is a huge operational open pit mine. It’s not iron ore but lignite, ‘braunkohle’. It is vast scar in the landscape, and really an incredible place. The recordings I did in the former mining region of the Netherlands are again more environmental: the mine near Heerlen has been developed into a park and nature area. I’m very interested in the hidden layers and history the landscape. That’s why I wanted to have a thread about the regeneration of mining areas. I think it is important to explore the changes that the surrounding landscape and the mining site itself are undergoing, from active to closed, from contaminated landscape to re-vegetation. The future is represented through using radio emissions from space and a recoding from the probe that landed on the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. And then there are sounds used for seismic interferometry: the decoding of ambient seismic noise, micro earthquakes and also surface bound sounds. What I like about these recordings is that they already have been processed through the rock and soil and transposed into human hearing range.’
‘This mining work is tied directly to the computer age, itself an alchemic expression of man’s ingenious use of the earth. Modernity is made by the manipulation and transmutation of organic and synthetic materials through design and research. Without tantalum and niobium, there are no micro-capacitors; without gallium, no photovoltaics.’
‘In mining there are two types of waste. One is the waste you make to get to the ore. If you have a gold mine and the gold layer sits 50 metres below surface, you have to remove 50 metres of waste. The ore layer contains only a certain amount of the mineral that will bring you revenue. The ore goes to a processing plant and there you take out the tailings and the rest is the waste of your process. It can be a slurry, it may contain chemicals or poisonous materials so you have to contain it and treat and store it properly. Sometimes this can go horrible wrong. It is important for companies to manage this. More waste means more costs.’
‘The composition follows a more or less linear path – starting with deep time. It just turned out that way, perhaps because that’s how we generally tend to structure material. But the chronology is interrupted a couple of times, and the different time planes are cut-up, they interact and overlap, because I mix sound recordings that were done at different times. In that way I present different layers of time, from slowly unfolding sounds that represent deep geological time, to sounds of transport, to the sort of sounds we recognise as science fiction to denote the future. The work creates a third space that belongs to the individual listener and which arises from the interaction between the original space and imaginary space, created through the composition and sound processing.’
‘We dig deep into the earth to get to layers of deep time, extract it and use the ancient material, in the case of coal, for electricity, for heating the house, commodities, to type a message on a phone. It’s absurd when you start to think about it. So much time is compressed in this material and it’s burned up in minutes. It’s not like wind or the sun, which give you immediate energy. It’s millions of years compressed into hard materials that are burned up, like coal, or painstakingly refined to yield useful metal. This ungraspable void of deep time fascinates me: the time compressed in iron ore, the coal that started billions of years ago as organic material, the gold flecked asteroid far away in space, or the more recent ‘slambanken’ in Kirkenes, a manmade landscape of unusable slag that might be mined in the future.’
‘We trace out all the veins of the earth, and yet, living upon it, undermined as it is beneath our feet, are astonished that it should occasionally cleave asunder or tremble: as though, forsooth, these signs could be any other than expressions of the indignation felt by our sacred parent!’
‘If, as Novalis and many of his friends believed, stones, metals, and rock strata amount to transcriptions of the earth’s history, what better place to study that history than in the mines and caverns of the earth, where the entire record is preserved and exposed? At this point the ancient conception of mines and mountain caverns as places of lapidary activity encounters a a second folkoristic notion—that in the interior of mountains time stands still.’
‘The slambanken is a totally artificial, man-made landscape that has formed because the waste of the iron ore processing was flushed into the fjord. It is a base of hard rock under the water with different layers of material. It is a playground for sedimentologists because you can see how land and deltas form. We did a study and tried to identify how thick the layer was in different areas. We took samples and ran them through the laboratory in order to identify how many tons of final concentrate we would be able to get out of the slambanken. When they were cleaning the old silos they flushed everything out into the slambanken. This was part of a test production of around 30.000 tons. We can see layers of hematite. It is not enough to make a mine plan, but enough to get a small cash flow. You have to take a boat to get there. We have a tunnel that leads there.’
Interview with Ylva Ståhl and Kristoffer Johansson from the Sydvaranger mine in Kirkenes, by Benny Nilsen, Hilde Methi and Annette Wolfsberger, March 2018.
‘You cannot talk about mining in the North without getting into the question what it means for the landscape, for the people and the animals living there, for the communities and the relations between all these. In a sense, you cannot not bring out those relations: how a society depends on mining and how it affects it.’
‘The sound of the mine was always present. It created a vacuum after it closed. When the mill was in full operation the only time when we woke up in the night was when the train was not going. We were living quite close to the railway, so when the train did not run we knew instantaneously that something had happened, either in the mine or in the mill.’
Interview with Ylva Ståhl and Kristoffer Johansson from the Sydvaranger mine in Kirkenes, by Benny Nilsen, Hilde Methi and Annette Wolfsberger, March 2018.
‘I am drawn to the Arctic as a sound person because of its relative remoteness. The landscape is fairly untouched, it is scarsely populated, it’s desolate. The sounds of nature are not often interrupted by other sounds. Except for the mining, but that then is also why I find mining in the Arctic especially interesting. The relentless nature in the Arctic constantly reminds you that you are a human being and that you are nor really supposed to be there because the harshness of the environment might kill you. It’s good for the human psyche to be reminded of that. You can only survive there if you work with nature. If you work against it, it will kill you. The people in the Arctic have a lot of respect for nature, it forms them.’
‘The Arctic is changing quickly. If it goes on like it goes now, the ice will open up and it will not be so desolate anymore. That is quite scary. Will it mean that other places will become desolate instead, uninhabitable? What shifts will we see? What shifts happened in the past? Why did people in the past settle in an environment like this? Were they forced up North by circumstances? These questions are really haunting me.’
‘Far down in the Earth the rock is actually moving. Workers hear the rock talk, it crackles, it makes sounds, spits slivers. These can be an indicator that something is about to happen, the sounds tell something about the stability of the rock. Listening underground is like reading the environment. Geologists read the stone, but they also listen to it. By physically interacting with the stone you can determine what material it is. Different types of stone give different frequency readings. Geologists use seismic soundings to map out the resources in the earth. They put geophones in an array, and record the blast of a detonation underground. It gives them an image, a bit similar to sonar. It’s mostly really low sounds that you have to transpose up three times to get within human hearing range. In practice it’s quite mathematical, but it still it is part of the sound world too. Through soundwaves geologists are able to map what is underground.’
‘There is a little homage to GRM and Pierre Schaeffer on the record. For me it relates directly to iron ore in so far that the type of musique concrète and tape music developed at GRM was made possible by magnetic tape. I mixed part of the recording in the GRM studios in Paris where I was working on another acousmatic piece. Magnetic tape was the medium of my youth. I had hundreds of cassette tapes, mostly TDK. It made me recognise again how close we are to the source of ore, and how my development as an artist was shaped by iron ore.’
‘The iron ore is refined and filtered, making sure the pure magnetite comes out. Only a small percentage of the ore is iron, the rest is slag and waste. It is a process that somehow relates to my own artistic process. I’m always processing and refining my field recordings. I apply filters, use electronics. It’s a kind of sound alchemy. All to get to the desired result: the gold!’
Black Moon is composed of shortwave radio signals, recorded via the online receiver website of the Technical University of Enschede. Each signal was chosen for the resonance it evokes in the listener, later interwoven with other signals recorded from the same source for several days. The selection of sounds is done according to properties that lie outside the predictable controllable parameters in order to arrive at a complex multidimensional listening experience. By compactly interweaving the frequencies, a different image is created for the listener at each listening session because of the psycho-acoustic selections that take place at the listener. The record can thus be considered as a potential composition, which is performed by the listener himself through the aforementioned process.
John Duncan took part in our event at 5 October 2018. His background in performance and his multimedia and confrontational approach gives him full credits to be part of DE PLAYER its program. When we met we had discussions on several professional subjects and decided to realize a publication. The fact that the sound on the records is an everchanging piece because of the psycho acoustic effects, make the record more into a tool than a static recording. This approach can also be seen in the approach of the electronic voice phenomena (EVP) of Friedrich Jürgenson, a researcher who claimed to have detected voices of the dead hidden in radio static. Duncan’s also works sometimes together with Carl Michael Hausswolff who is an expert in EVP.John Duncan has been active for decades at the cutting edge of performances, video, experimental music, installation, pirate radio and television. He has played a central role in the development of performing arts in Los Angeles, experimental music as a member of LAFMS, Japanese noise and pirate radio in Tokyo. Duncan's work has a lasting influence on experimental music because his art is generally still refined and refined and he regularly collaborates with young artists. He is currently a sound designer at the art academy of Bologna, Italy. Since the beginning of his work, he has made extensive use of recorded sound. His music consists mainly of recordings of shortwave radio, field recordings and voice.
In the mid-1980s Duncan began pirate radio and television broadcasting with his own custom-built portable channels, operating illegally from the roofs of apartment buildings in central Tokyo and from an abandoned American military hospital near Sagamihara. He also made periodic broadcasts from his own home.
The medium of radio still plays a role in arriving at compositions. The publication Black Moon (DOB 096) is composed of shortwave radio signals, recorded via the online receiver website of the Technical University of Enschede.
event
title: ARCHIVING \ PUSHING SCORES
date:Thu 29 Nov 2018 20:00hrs
location: Varia, Rotterdam
artists: VALENTINA VUKSIC, ANA GUEDES, VARIA, NIEK HILKMANN
During this evening we focus on the archiving of our Pushing Scores project. A project on the nowadays meaning of the 'graphic score', which has been running for over the last 2-3 years. What are the possibilities of graphic scores, in a day and age in which graphic notation is still usually seen as a ‘drawing’, serving as some kind of sheet music?
- Valentina Vuksic will bring a live performance in which she approaches computers with transducers that transform electromagnetic radiation into sound within choreographically setups. The ‘runtime’ of executed software is staged for an audience to provide an acoustic experience: that of logic encountering the physical world.
- Ana Guedes is introducing her project Untitled Records; a performative sound installation weaving historical and emotional narratives through the “instrumentalisation” of a collection of records.
- Niek Hilkmann (part of Varia) will present his UNI (Universal Notation Ideal), a Pay2Print investigation in the simultaneous production and distribution of standardised graphical scores through the mediation of an automaton. It is developed by Niek Hilkmann and Joseph Knierzinger, based on a new notation system that is created to help conceptual composers in developing and exchanging conceptual music within one uniform language. The actual printing of the thermal paper is a stochastic performance in itself. By emphasizing this aspect of the machine as a musical entrepreneur, earning its own income, we explore the conditions of mechanised labour within the cultural industry and its corresponding ethicsWe know Varia as a community based initiative which combines several knowledge in the interdisciplinary filed of music, programming, publishing, hacking, social interventions, critical positions, etc. It is based in Rotterdam in the area were we operate. We knew some of its members and thought it would be nice and effective to approach them with a question of doing something with the archive of Pushing Scores. Instead of making a paintwork publication we wanted it to be more adventurous and in line with the concept of the project.
To communicate the Pushing Scores to a larger audience DE PLAYER asked Varia to develop a context and technical environment as a web-based archival publication. The idea is that this material will be embodied by a dynamic, accessible and therefore active archive, which creates new relations, new perspectives and, at its best, new concepts for the production and/or processes of making scores. During an evening at the Varia collective, where Valentia Vuksic and Ana Guedes also played a live set and explained their work and backgrounds, Niek Hilkmann, who is part of the Varia team, presented his UNI (Universal Notation Ideal); a Pay2Print research into the simultaneous production and distribution of standardized graphic scores by means of an automatic machine. The UNI was developed by Niek Hilkmann and Joseph Knierzinger. It is a machine into which a coin is inserted and from which a score printed on a roll of paper is then delivered. It is based on a new notation system designed to help conceptual composers develop and exchange conceptual music in one uniform language. The actual printing of the thermal paper is a stochastic performance in itself. By emphasizing this aspect of the machine as a musical entrepreneur earning his own income, the conditions of mechanized labor within the cultural industry and the associated ethics are investigated within this project. His presentation was a cross-over between a lecture and a demonstration. On the spot, the audience could activate the UNI.
Black MIDI is a music genre consisting of compositions that use MIDI files to create a song remix containing a large number of notes, typically in the thousands or millions, and sometimes billions. People who make black MIDIs are known as blackers. However, there are no specific criteria of what is considered "black"; as a result, finding an exact origin of black MIDI is impossible.
DE PLAYER always has a strong interest in decoupling publising from a stereotypical understanding of making things public that comes from an historical and economical media constraint linked to the print, software, music, and film industries, and that has limited any form of meaningful explorative complementary or conflictual combinations between media in the field of cultural production. This not only counts for publishing but also for exploring new possibilities for the art practise in general.
Transformation of information is a fact that occurs during the process of composing and performing the compositions. In that sense there is never a perfect reproduction but always an interpretation. This is an interesting process in which boundaries can be explored and in which the idea of 'cracked media', whose performers challenge the intended effect of the technology and actively use alternative acts through subversive acts of abuse and misconception to generate results, is an interesting one. position.
Black MIDI is a beautiful example of how new technology / consumer electronics and its abuse leads to great new implications and applications. This one is pretty contemporary one and results in great imagery and sound.
Origins and early history
Though the two are unrelated in origin, the concept of impossible piano existed long before black MIDI, manifesting itself within Conlon Nancarrow's work involving player pianos where he punched holes in piano cards, creating extremely complex musical compositions in the same impossible, unplayable spirit of black MIDI.
Black MIDI was first employed in Shirasagi Yukki at Kuro Yuki Gohan's rendition of "U.N. Owen Was Her?", an extra boss theme from the Touhou Project shooter video game The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. It was uploaded to the site Nico Nico Douga in 2009, and public awareness of Black MIDI started to spread from Japan to China and Korea in the following two years. In its beginning years, Black MIDIs were represented visually with traditional, two-stave piano sheet music,contained a number of notes only in the thousands. They were created with MIDI sequencers such as Music Studio Producer, and Singer Song Writer, and played through MIDI players such as MAMPlayer and Timidity++. The Black MIDI community in Japan vanished quickly because, according to Jason Nguyen (owner of the channel Gingeas), the group was “analogous to those TV shows where there’s a mysterious founder of a civilization that is not really known throughout the course of the show.”
The popularity of Black MIDI transitioned into Europe and the United States due to a video of a composition uploaded by Kakakakaito1998 in February 2011, and shortly thereafter, blackers from around the world began pushing limits of the style by making compositions with notes increasing into the millions and using an enormous number of colors and patterns to match the complexity of the notes. They also formed the sites Guide to Black MIDI and Official Black MIDI Wikia that introduced and set the norm of Black MIDI.
The first of these tracks to reach the million-note mark was that of “Necrofantasia” from Touhou Project video game Perfect Cherry Blossom, arranged by TheTrustedComputer. The end of the title of many Black MIDI videos displays how many notes are in the piece. The number of notes and file sizes that could be played back have grown with the rising amount of processing and 64-bit programs computers are able to handle, and while Black MIDIs of Japanese video game music and anime are still common, the genre has also begun spilling into modern-day pop songs, such as "Wrecking Ball" by Miley Cyrus. Despite this increased computer storage, there are still Black MIDI files that could cause an operating system to slow down. The two largest black MIDIs are "Armageddon v3" and "TheTrueEnd," both of which contain the maximum number of notes allowed in the MIDI standard (about 93 trillion). Due to the nature of their creation and their sheer size, they are unable to be played back and recorded.
English-language blackers have formed collaboration groups, such as the Black MIDI Team, where they make MIDI files and visuals together so they can be uploaded online sooner. Blackers around the world have used software such as Synthesia, FL Studio, SynthFont, Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard, Piano From Above, MIDITrail, vanBasco Karaoke Player, MIDIPlayer (Java program), MAMPlayer, Music Studio Producer, Singer Song Writer, Tom's MIDI Player, TMIDI, and Timidity++ to create Black MIDIs. Some of them, like Jason, record the MIDI files at a slow tempo and then speed the footage in video-editing to avoid RAM and processing issues.
The term "black MIDI" is derived from how there are so many notes in each piece that the score would look nearly black (or would look really black) on traditional sheet music. According to California-based blacker TheTrustedComputer, black MIDI was intended as more of a remix style than an actual genre, and derived from the idea of "bullet hell" shoot 'em up games, which involved "so many bullets at a time your eyes can't keep up."[3] Black MIDI has also been considered the digital equivalent, as well as a response, to composer Conlon Nancarrow's use of the player piano which also involved experimenting with several thick notes to compose intricate pieces without hands. The Guide to Black MIDI, however, denies this influence: “We believe that references to Conlon Nancarrow and piano rolls are too deep and Black MIDI origins must be found in digital MIDI music world [sic]."
Black MIDI first received coverage by Michael Connor, a writer for the non-profit arts organization Rhizome, in September 2013, leading to attention from publications and bloggers including Aux, Gawker's Adrian Chen, Jason Kottke,[8] and The Verge. It has garnered acclaim from journalists, bloggers and electronic musicians, with many noting it as a distinctive and engaging genre thanks to how regular piano notes are combined to make new, abstract sounds not heard in many styles of music, as well as the visuals representing the notes. Hackaday's Elliot Williams spotlighted the style as ironic, given that the fast-paced arpeggios and "splatter-chords" that are developed with a restricted number of voices come together to make other tones that leads a piano sounding more like a chiptune and less like an actual piano.
event:
title: MUSIC&CAPITALISM
date:Sat 18 May 2013 09.00 hrs - 24.00 hrs
location: SKAR office , Groot Handelsgebouw, Rotterdam
A reading in combination with a 6 hrs concert by Marco Fusinato.
DE PLAYER and WORM present a day about music and economy, revolving around two authoritative sound-artists/composers, whose work is engaged with political-economical processes. Marco Fusinato's (AU) mangled noise-guitar excursions are informed by the political explosions and pitfalls of of radical collectives from Autonomia and beyond. Johannes Kreidler (DE) who made a piece consisting of 70 thousand samples, and for each of these fragments he asked permission from the GEMA (the German BUMA-STEMRA). The authority who controls copy right specifically for musicians.
Stuttering live concret, wailing feedback, Xenakis-esque swarms of descending glissandi, abusive guitar wrangling, walls of harsh static on a double sided black vinyl containing edited sound from the live recording of Marco Fusinato his endurance performance Spectral Arrows for DE PLAYER at 18 May 2013 at Groothandelsgebouw, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Spectral Arrows is an ongoing series of long-duration performances for guitar and electronics. In Spectral Arrows, Fusinato arrives at the venue when it opens for business, sets up his equipment facing a wall and proceeds to play for the whole day until the end of business hours. Fusinato presents himself here in the guise of a worker, clocking on and unceremoniously clocking off at the end, refusing to allow the behind-the-scenes mystery of rehearsals and preparations to lend an aura to the performance, and affirming the deskilled ethos of his work.
For the audience, the length of the performance frustrates the expectation of a manageable form, forcing all but the hardiest audience members to content themselves with only a fragment of the whole. Even for those who stick it out, the extended duration, like in the late works of Morton Feldman, destroys the listener’s ability to retain and assess the structure of the performance. Breaking with both the traditional form of the musical performance and, through Fusinato’s resolutely anti-social position facing away from the audience, the standard affective relationship between audience and performer, the sound of Spectral Arrows becomes a monumental aural sculpture, filling the space, not with steel or concrete, but with vibrations travelling through air. We got in touch with Marco Fusinato through our 8-INCH series. For this we published 8 inch records with artists and labels. One of these labels was Circle Records which had been running for a few years by John Nixon, Julian Dashper and Marc Fusinato. For the release event only John Nixon could be present. Julian unfortunately died at young age. Marco was primarily active as a visual artist. One of his projects is called Black Mass Implosion. In this project he appropriates scores of avant tgarde composers and connects each not with one arbitrary point on the horizon. This creates strong graphic works and partly blackens out the original score. From this perspective also his live performances can be considered as black mass implosions. Also because most of his work deals strongly with political issues we invited him for a performance in the event bnamed Music & Capitalism. He suggested to do an 8 hour performance in an official office building. On a Saturday from 09.00 to 17.00 hrs. When normally people are doing there office work now Marco played for 8 hrs in an empty office building. People were guided to the 8th floor into the directors room which was darkened with newspapers stacked on the windows. A huge PA was in the office blazing loud but very articulated. Good food and drinks were served.
Marco Fusinato is a contemporary artist and musician whose work has taken the form of installation, photographic reproduction, performance and recording. His overall aesthetic project combines allegorical appropriation with an interest in the intensity of a gesture or event. As a musician, Fusinato explores the notion of noise as music, using the electric guitar and associated electronics to improvise intricate, wide-ranging and physically affecting frequencies.
Marco Fusinato’s Mass Black Implosion series began in 2007. Serial in form, each work uses an existing cultural document – a 20th or 21st-century avant-garde music score – as the formal, material and conceptual basis for a set of actions or interventions. Specifically, working with facsimile sheets of the score, Fusinato draws lines from each note on the page to one chosen point. Where a composition comprises more than one sheet, these are then singularly framed and installed sequentially on the gallery wall, creating an extraordinary graphic rendering of the energy of aural compression and expansion.
In these works, treated by Fusinato as propositions for new noise compositions, the qualities of each individual note and their relation to those around them are effectively compressed into a single point of intense concentration. This is the energy of implosion, which always infers at least the potential of its counter-energy in explosion, energy radiating out from the single point of origin. Fusinato’s intervention into the scores therefore visualises and proposes the possibility of a dialectical energy running through the original work that has a political dimension as much as an artistic one – a relentless propensity to both destruction and expressive creation in the single action, or in this case to the production of noise.
with YANN GOURDON, RAFAËL ROZENDAAL, FLORIS VAN HOOF, JUSTIN BENNETT, REMCO VAN BLADEL A.O.
Moving back and forth between sound and scripture, this evening consists of experimental performances and short lectures, with a special focus on Charlemagne Palestine’s visual renderings of sound included in his exhibition “GesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandtttt” at Witte de With CCA in Rotterdam.
Can a tune be translated into an image? Can the “detuning” of music generate new ways of thinking about the relation between sound and scripture? The notation of sound has a long and varied history, from Gregorian chants conducted following signs written in the air to the standard notation of western music we know today, and the possibilities offered by new computer technologies. The program includes performances by Yann Gourdon and Floris van Hoof, works by Rafaël Rozendaal and a reading by Remco van Bladel. Next to that there will be graphic works by students of ArtEZ - Graphic Design.
As a production platform, specialised in the relationship between sound, art, publishing and performance, for ART Rotterdam 2017 DE PLAYER presents works of artists within the frame of the project Pu-shi-ng-Sco-res; a project by DE PLAYER and Remco van Bladel, Dutch graphic designer.
Live event for our Pushing the Score project with Telcosystems (nl), Julia Buennagel (de) and Derek Holzer (us). Focussing on the potential of grahic scores and publishing of sound and image we present Telcosystems with their recent publication Resonanz, a reading on Schematic as a Score plus concert by Derek Holzer plus a live performance of Julia Bünnagel with modified records.
An evening with remarkable experiments and materialised conceptual flip flop. DE PLAYER will unveil its third issue of Tetra Gamma Circulaire (TGC) – the unknown audio magazine. TGC #3 is compiled in collaboration with students of the Piet Zwart Institute, and is also part of their Experimental Publishing programme of the Media Design Master, named XPUB.
Tetra Gamma Circulaire #3 is travelling now as an open floppy platform. First station is at Pinkie Bowtie Antwerp where we will introduce the TGC#3 in its entity as an unknown music magazine and point out its specific features by demonstrating the floppy works which are already in the collection. By travelling with TGC#3 we aim to expand the floppy collection of it and focus on experimental ways of publishing. For the Pinkie Bowtie session we invited Antwerp related artists to contribute to the project. So far Evelin Brosi. AMVK and JODI will show up to get informed on matters and will start to produce their floppy for the collection from there. The meeting is open for public who is interested in experimental ways of publishing or just like to hang out in a ambiance of artistic nouveauté.
This day the work 'Para-phonic Poly-diso' will be launched at The Small Museum of Paradiso, Amsterdam. 'Para-phonic Poly-diso' is a graphic score for a digital, polyphonic choir wherein visitors of Paradiso can participate with their mobile phone. This work, developed for the Small Museum project of Paradiso, is part of Pushing the Score; a research project by DE PLAYER i.c.w. Remco van Bladel about the current state and potential of the concept of 'graphical score'. The voice for this work is by Laetitia Saedier of Stereolab.
‘Greatest Hits’ is an exhibition based on 25 hand drawn scores by Matthieu Reijnoudt. His best ones. Thirteen of these scores will be on show on the billboards underneath Maashaven Metrostation. Just so you can see them day and night, for about three weeks long. The complete selection of scores is published in a music book. The entire music book will be performed three times during the South Explorer weekend. For every performance a different instrument has been selected.
As you know, there are those evenings after which the sun rises differently. The E-ARTHHA event is about the search for new interfaces and possibilities of sound composition, image and performance. In his lecture, Douglas Kahn discards old categories of sound and performance and replaces them with a new category of "energy" in the bigger narrative of ecology and other sensitivities. Coming from different biotopes, our other guests will all have different points of departure for their performances.
On this evening we focus on archiving our Pushing the Score project. This project on the nowadays meaning of the 'graphic score' has been running the last 2-3 years.
What are the possibilities of graphic scores, in a day and age in which graphic notation is still usually seen as a ‘drawing’, serving as some kind of sheet music?
Throughout 2016 and 2018, this project will research the phenomenon of notation and the graphic representation of music.
It unfolds through a nomadic program which includes the creation of newly commissioned artworks and public events that addres scontemporary questions and issues in this particular field.
Graphic scores and notation have a long history, dating back to the tenth century, when the Gregorian chants of the scola cantorum were already being conducted through the writing of signs in the air. Later on this developed into the type of musical notation we are familiar with in Western music. In the early- and mid-twentieth century, the abstract developments in the visual arts played a vital role in new approaches to the question of music notation and contemporary avant-garde music. This continues to question the representation of sound in media; so what is the current state of the graphic score?
Throughout the project, Jacques Attali’s book ‘Noise: The Political Economy of Music’ will function as a reference and inspirational guide; “pushing the score” in search of its current potential. It will seek concepts and configurations that produce new, previously unknown, relationships in the field of sound, visual arts, and performance. The discursive program for 2016–2017 will include lectures, presentations of newly commissioned artworks, concert evenings, and workshops.
Pushing the Score is a project researching graphic notation, based on a desire to update this form of music and sound notation for the 21^st century. Starting from the motto ‘from Cage to JODI and beyond’ and from the avant-garde music and sound art of the 20^th century, the project researches new audio-visual languages, media and functions of graphic notation in a contemporary context characterised by a fundamental transformation of sound culture and visual culture. A number of specific themes will be initiated, developed and presented in the context of a public research programme in collaboration with artists, designers and various cultural organisations such as the Piet Zwart Institute, the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, and Sonic Acts.
What are the possibilities of graphic scores, in a day and age in which graphic notation is still usually seen as a ‘drawing’ serving as some kind of sheet music? In an attempt to redefine this concept, we will be compiling a programme in which artists, musicians,
theoreticians and practitioners are invited to participate. The collective goal is to develop and present new audio-visual and media-technical forms of graphic notation through artistic research and development. Based on our compilation of the most contemporary and innovative graphic notation practices in the fields of music, sound art, performance art, e-culture, new-media art, graphic design and media design, we will introduce artists and designers from various creative disciplines to a national and international audience, with the goal of collectively developing new forms of graphic notation.
The incentive for this project is the belief that graphic notation in 20^th -century avant-garde music and sound art constitutes an important, still radically innovative but wrongfully marginalised form, which can play a key role in the development of new audio-visual languages and media. Our ambition, and that of our collaborating partners, is to emancipate graphic notation from the confines of the modernist tradition, in such a way that it may remain an innovative and provocative medium for decades to come.
Concrete object with floppydrive, local wifi station and diverse electronic applications - edition 12 pieces.
TGC #3 is compiled in collaboration with students of the Piet Zwart Institute, and is also part of their Experimental Publishing programme of the Media Design Master, named XPUB.
TGC #3 is a particular kind of publishing platform engineered for sonic experiments, instruments, and installations. Some dare say it's a kind of jukebox.
Made of concrete as a body, an internal stand alone wifi station enables you to get in touch with the content of this floppyesk magazine.
artists: Piet Zwart Institute XPUB, DE PLAYER, Karina Dukalska, Max Franklin, Giulia de Giovanelli, Francisco González, Margreet Riphagen, Nadine Rotem-Stibbe, Kimmy Sreeuwenberg
DE PLAYER was asked by XPUB of Piet Zwart Institute to do a seminar during a 3 month period with their students. We proposed them to make a publication in our Tetra Gamma Circulaire. This is a magazine without any format and meant to be developed each time. We worked around the idea of Pushing Scores. each student had to develop its own project around the proces of making a score. All these scores had to come together in one magazine/object. The restriction was made that the scores had to be presented on floppy disc. This was to limit possibilities and also to unite the format. The result is a mix of several media. All comes together in a designed concrete object. “feed Flintstone meets 21st century”. A Raspberry Pi is the core which is programmed for several applications. Besides that there is a floppy drive, speakers, audio input, a camera, touchpads, LED light.
Presentation of PRINCIPIUM 2.0 (DOB 073) in Stadslimiet Antwerp. The installation setup contains 6 of 12 releases of PRINCIPIUM 2.0. During the performance which took, several hours visitors could freely join, listen and ask questions to the artist, Remörk aka Kris Delacourt.
Description: Can a tune be translated into an image? Can the “detuning” of music generate new ways of thinking about the relation between sound and scripture? The notation of sound has a long and varied history, from Gregorian chants conducted following signs written in the air to the standard notation of western music we know today, and the possibilities offered by new computer technologies. The program includes performances by Yann Gourdon and Floris van Hoof, works by Rafaël Rozendaal and a reading by Remco van Bladel. Next to that there will be graphic works by students of ArtEZ Arnhem - Graphic Design.
* Moving back and forth between sound and scripture, this evening consists of experimental performances and short lectures, with a special focus on Charlemagne Palestine’s visual renderings of sound included in his exhibition “GesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandtttt” at Witte de With CCA in Rotterdam.
Hurdy-gurdy player, composer, and sound artist Yann Gourdon looks at vibratory fields and sound perception as a medium. He focuses mainly on acoustic phenomena that have a dynamic relationship with their environment. Every aspect of his work deals with quality of sound. It's not a matter of an event between spectators and a musician, it's 'a space to submit to a process.
RAFAËL ROZENDAAL (nl) A visual artist who uses the internet as his canvas. These works deal with continuïty and an endless accessibility. Visual and audio intensified perceptions in a specific space. His websites attract a large audience of over 40 million unique visits per year. His artistic practice consists of websites, installations, lenticulars, lectures and haiku.
Filmmaker & musician from Belgium. Connecting his many worlds, ideas and influences into highly personal live performances and recordings, Floris Vanhoof keeps on amazing people here and abroad. For this event he will work with filmscreening and synthesizer which he influences with his brainwaves.
JUSTIN BENNETT (uk) is an artist working with sound and visual media. The everyday sound of our urban surroundings at every level of detail is the focus of his work where he develops the reciprocity of music and architecture, and sound and image.
Amsterdam based graphic designer, and co-founder of noise band/art collective Sonido Gris. He is also an art book publisher ('Onomatopee', 'WdW Review'). His studio work focusses on editorial book design, publishing projects, curatorial projects, institutional identities, interactive applications and websites.
He is a typography and graphic design tutor at ArtEZ — Art and Design, Arnhem and is a frequent guest teacher at art schools throughout the Netherlands and abroad.
We were discussing several projects and possibilities of cooperation with Defne Ayas and Samuel Saelmakers of Witte de With CCA when they asked us to cooperate in the exhibition “GesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandtttt” by organizing a live event. I knew the work of Charlemagne and we have met already in earlier events so it was clear we could do something that makes sense. As a composer, funnily enough, Charlemagne hardly uses any scores. Nevertheless, he showed me some books he once made in New York of which he said that those ones are to be seen as musical scores. They are cheap dummy books on which he poured ink in several colors. The ink was absorbed by the books and after drying it had become pieces which turned out to be a serie of morphing colors by each page turn. These books were the starting point of curating the event which we fitted in our Pushing Scores project. Yann Gourdon was asked to do a hurry curdy noisette while these books were being projected page by page on the wall. Rafael Rozendaal showed his web work ‘Slow Empty’, which functioned as a real clockwork for the event. Floris VanHoof played a set in which he used his brainwaves to influence his synthesizer sounds combining it with projection and laserbeam.
Justin Bennet showed his project Shot Gun Architecture and remco van Bladel introduced our project Pushing Scores by doing a reading on historical en contemporary graphic scores and the concepts behind it.
Type of object: Publication
catalogue number: DOB 079
date: 09/09/2016
Project title:"Carlson invents, Colson presents: 99 spines produced on a modified Canon IR2016 copy machine" by Vaast Colson. Produced on a 'prepared copier'
Description: Presented at WIELS Art Book fair 2016 was this live made copy zine named "Carlson invents, Colson presents: 99 spines produced on a modified Canon IR2016 copy machine" by Vaast Colson. Produced on a 'prepared copier'. The copy machine is amplified by several internal microphones by which the sound of every run is recorded. Each copy-run of 99 copies (the maximum run of the machine) on transparent foil will be accompanied by a foil cover with the dub cut audiofile in it. The image copied in the zine is a drawing which is engraved in the glassplate of the copy machine.
Vaast Colson we know already for quite a while as an interesting artist. Because his work is pretty conceptual, you could say that there is always a strategy (call it a score) which works as a framework behind his artistic output. This can be a performance , object, book or whatever. We worked with Kris delacourt on Principium 2.0 which is a reinterpretation of Colson his work Principium and asked Colson also to work on a sound publication with him. He came up with this idea of the Xerox copier which makes in a run the audio, the booklet as well as the printed image. This printing run is to be seen as the performative action. It is a complex work as well as that it is simple in its final execution.
Colson belongs to a younger generation of Antwerp artists who could be called ‘post-ironic’. These artists don’t shy away from the big questions revolving around the place and role of the artist in society and the world around them. Colson's works examine core questions: what power does art have to change us and our society, what emotions and ethical choices guide an artist in a process of continuous change? From a spontaneous and rather naive approach to art and performance, Colson wants to shape his ideas. He opens up the artistic field and explores what is happening in the art world. Everything he undertakes can thus be considered as artistic intervention.
In his work, Colson constantly questions the relationship with the audience and is also strongly interested in mythology, and by the authentic (or not) mystique of the artist's existence, which he usually explores in his performances. The process is always important, but the end result, which is variable for Colson and influenced by the context, is an important part of his work.
In addition, Colson explores the commercial side of the art world and the economic consequences of artistry. His works, which are regularly made in situ, are often difficult to sell. The commercial potential and the associated value assessment are problematic for Colson. The making of editions can be understood in this context.
Description: This release has a shifting one-note drone (i believe I used D, F#, A, G#) that gets turned on and off by a magnetic sensor. the magnets for the sensor ride on top of the record players platter and could be placed freely to make your own patterns. The final installation will have all 12 separate pieces, a complete octave. This piece is based on a question. Vaast Colson asked Remörk to reinterpret his work 'Principium’, which was a joyful (but strictly ruled) play with sticky color dots. Principium 1.0 appeared as a hacked synth reduced to a single octave, to be played with magnets on a colorful playing field, parallelling the same patterns. Principium 2.0 comes as 12 records, also with this magnetic application, also following very elementary rules - some old, some new. All 12 records together form the complete set which 1 'game' needs. Join the community.
We first got in touch with Principium 1.0. Kris Delacourt (Remörk) made a modified Casio keyboard as a reinterpretation of Vaast Colson his work Principium. We showed this piece of Remark at the ART Rotterdam and than I asked Kris if he was willing to make a publication of it. Meaning a record. He was ok with it but i took a long time. Nevertheless finally we fine-tuned concepts and decided not to go for recordings but to embed the concept of Principium into a record and a music tool in one Principium 2.0. This was quite a proces but ended up in a beautiful limited edition of 12 pieces. Developed and designed in good cooperation between Kris and the team of DE PLAYER. It was presented in Stadslimiet Antwerp, Belgium as an installation piece at 2 July 2015.
Funny things is that after the presentation in Stadslimiet the recordings of this 8 hours performance were edited back to a 12” vinyl record which has been released on Ultra Eczema label shortly after.
Principium comes from the title of a project by Vaast Colson. Colson used tiny paper sticker dots, the kind that most art galleries use to denote which works in a show have been sold. Office material; those colourful little dots.
What he did was draw a bunch of random lines across the sticker sheets, and since there’s 8x12 stickers on a sheet you end up with stickers with tiny line segments on them. Line segments he reassembled into new shapes and new lines. All pretty nonsensical in a way but really beautiful in its result, and quite fragile. Abstract poetry.
There are two booklets Colson made with the Principium series - reproductions of each used sticker sheets and the result. The funny thing was that he thought his resulting collages would be nice to use as scores - and they probably would be, it’s just that Kris Delacourt was so intrigued by the leftover sticker sheets, with their 8x12 grid that they just screamed ‘SEQUENCER!’, to him, so he went to design Principium part 1. A magnetic board with the same field as the sticker sheets which he activated with magnets as a synthesizer. The first version was a modified Casio keyboard. He reduced the number of keys to twelve, and added a magnetic sequencer board to it. The idea is to put white magnets on top of the coloured dots to kind of blank them out. The sequencer controller is a reed switch matrix that, when a magnet is present, allow step pulses to pass to digital switches that bridge the original Casio keys.
For Principium 2 the DOB073 piece is another step in the principle of Pricipoium. As for Delacourt didn’t just want to publish a record with recordings of the Principium 1 he decided to transpose the idea onto a prepared record player using magnets and a specific device…
This is an interview on Kris delacourt (Remörk) his practices and the Principium story. The interview was made after showcasing the Principium 2.0 in an installation setting at Stadslimiet at
>I’ve been following the principium story on your blog, which goes back to the summer of 2012, so four years ago. Short version: first it was a one octave Casio keyboard, then it became 12 10" records, then it became an 8 hour performance and eventually now a 12" LP. This is the short version, can you give me the full story?
-Kris Delacourt: Well actually, it started out as an artwork, or rather a series of artworks. At least that’s where the initial form and the name came from.
The works are by a friend of mine, the Belgian artist Vaast Colson. He made these beautiful pieces where he used tiny paper sticker dots, you know the ones, the kind that most art galleries use to denote which works in a show have been sold. Office material really, those colourful little dots.
What he did was draw a bunch of random lines across the sticker sheets, and since there’s 8x12 stickers on a sheet you end up with stickers with tiny line segments on them. Line segments he reassembled into new shapes and new lines. It’s all pretty nonsensical in a way I guess, especially if you try to put something like that into words, but it’s also really beautiful, and quite fragile. Don’t know, it just rang poetic to me.
Anyway, Vaast was putting together a show where other people would do reinterpretations of some of his works, and around the same time we had a nice chat about alternative musical scores, graphic scores and what not. And at a certain point he went something like: ‘I’ve made some work that might be interesting to use as a score, would you be up for it?’. So he showed me the two booklets he made with the Principium series - reproductions of each used sticker sheets and the result. The funny thing was that he thought his resulting collages would be nice to use as scores - and they probably would be, it’s just that I was so intrigued by the leftover sticker sheets, with their 8x12 grid that just scream ‘SEQUENCER!’, that I went that way.
And the first version was indeed a modified Casio keyboard. I reduced the number of keys to twelve, and added a magnetic sequencer board to it. It’s an iron board, it has the same visuals as the sticker sheets, and the idea is to put white magnets on top of the coloured dots to kind of blank them out, so you end up with something analogous to taking a sticker off the sheet - a white space in a field of colour. I don’t know if I need to go into too much technical detail, but the sequencer controller is just a reed switch matrix that, when a magnet is present, allow step pulses to pass to digital switches that bridge the original Casio keys.
I was really happy with the results, and especially with the fact that it’s so inviting towards an audience. It looks like a game of four-in-a-row, totally appealing to get your hands on it. And I never gave it that much thought, but the fact that when you stick magnets somewhere, it makes a musical phrase - I guess to some people that would be wizardry, hah.
The next step was when Peter Fengler of DEPLAYER/DOB records said he wanted to do a record with the Casio version. And I really like it when people are enthusiastic, so I said yes, obviously. But there were several reasons for me to hold back a little on the idea. Well, a little, two years, actually. First is that the Casio version really works best through audience interaction - people moving magnets around, changing the sounds on the keyboard and so on. It’s meant to be in a continued state of flux. The idea of just me making a record totally ignores that, to me it turns it into something really static and rigid. Now Peter is really nice guy, and clever at that, and I guess he understood my doubts. So we discussed other possibilities, like capturing a live performance, possibly even cutting records on the fly with his vinyl lathe, so you end up with all different records.. now DOB records have put out some crazy releases, really pushing the boundaries of what can be done with the medium of vinyl. For example, there’s this box set which has records that have built-in radio transmitters, records with impossible shapes where you need to turn the stylus of your record player upside down, shit like that. Really great stuff. And I don’t know, maybe a part of me wanted to be a part of that, more than just doing a ‘recording’. Just recording the Casio would definitely have been one of the safer, more boring options. I just felt like making another interpretation of an existing piece, instead of merely documenting it.
Meanwhile I had been toying around with leftover magnets and magnetic sensors, sticking magnets to a metal turntable platter and using the sensors to switch audio on and off, sort of like a programmable tremolo. Well, pattern programmable, but at a fixed speed. So we put two and two together, and ended up doing twelve 10” lathe cuts, that came in a box with those electronic switches, 8 magnets each as based on the original grid, and a 12” metal platter to go under the 10” to stick the magnets to.
And because I couldn’t make up my mind about what sounds to record from the Casio, I ended up not recording the Casio at all. I decided to stop worrying, which after two years of doubting might not be such a bad thing, and did a 10 minute improvised recording on organ and MS20, playing only C notes. I played around with filtering and octaves, because during testing we’d found that if we used slowly evolving records, the results were a lot more interesting. If we just used test tones, so to speak, you end up with something close to morse code. Also nice, but not really musical. And I don’t mind a good concept now and then, but I guess I’m too much of a musician, so I went for what was more appealing to me musically. That same 10 minute piece then was sped up for the other notes, going up in pitch and becoming shorter for each record. So the C note runs for 10 minutes, the B note is something like 5 minutes 20. Which also makes for much more interesting overlaps when played together. I guess I do tend to overthink things, hah. Peter did a great job cutting the vinyl in coloured perspex, with colours matching the paper stickers. And an honourable mention to Koos of DOB who did an amazing job on designing the packaging.
Vaast and Dennis Tyfus of Ultra Eczema run a space in Antwerp together called Stadslimiet, and that’s where we had the record presentation. Peter brought 6 record players, matching the 6 colours of the vinyl nicely - 2 notes each. And since I’m a sucker for random scores, I wrote myself a score generator in PureData with tons of random functions. Basically, the program decided for me which records to play, whether to repeat them or not when they were finished, whether to leave the turntable empty, whether the electronics should punch holes in the sound when a magnet was detected or the opposite, how may magnets on each turntable, and playback volume. The only thing I had any control over was where to put the magnets, determining the rhythm. And since all the records have different lengths, it ended up being one long shifting overlapping piece. I followed that score for 8 hours straight. Funny thing was that we’d agreed to let it run until 23h, and at about two minutes to eleven I got the first ever instruction to leave all the turntables empty. End of piece. That was an amazing moment.
After that, Dennis asked me if I wanted to do a release of the recordings. I think initially he wanted to do a tape. So I went through 8 hours of recordings, selecting bits that I liked and that I thought would be interesting enough to listen to as pieces in their own right, and not just as part of this monster performance. I think the idea to make a vinyl record came after Dennis heard some of the selections and thought they shouldn’t be out on tape but on vinyl instead. So that’s what happened.
-Oh, I think it’s definitely something that’s still evolving. I can still see unexplored possibilities there - as an installation, or as a truly playable musical instrument, and even those two do not have to be mutually exclusive. There’s something appealing in using a single octave as a building block, there’s something appealing in the number 12 even, there’s the appeal of building instruments.. I don’t think I’ve quite finished with it, no.
>Dennis said you were not really keen on doing this record at first. Why so? What was the problem? Was one of your fears that, by making it into a 12", you would have to bring this project to a final version?
-Not really, at least not in this case. I guess that fear was much more of an issue with DOB records. Recording the Casio felt too definitive at the time.
But now, having made that 12-vinyl version, and having done a performance that worked quite well, I didn’t mind starting from what is essentially the documentation of a past event. Also because I really am convinced that this is just one more step in something that can keep going, that it doesn’t have to be final. I guess my main fear was that cutting chunks out of a much larger whole, you risk losing the context - and I’m still not sure what this record sounds like to people that weren’t there. I know it’s not a final version, but it is a version nonetheless, and I want all versions to be of a certain quality. I thought it worked really well as a performance, but I wanted to make sure it was good enough to be a record.
>Bringing an 8 hour performance back to an album format seems like a hell of a job. How do you do that? How do you decide which parts 'work' on an album, and which don't?
-You do it in short sessions, hah. The thing is, all 8 hours have the turntables spinning at 33 rpm, so the basic underlying tempo never changes. That’s quite brutal to listen to in concentration, to be honest. It took me about two months to sit through all eight hours, and put markers and comments with bits I liked more than others. Sometimes because of harmonic information, notes that work well together, sometimes of rhythms that worked well, etc. So you end up with a first rough selection. And then you go through that selection again. And so on, until you really narrow it down.
Of course, because the basic tempo is the same, it would have been relatively easy to start editing, splicing things together. But to be honest I've never even considered that - 8 hours of material and endless editing possibilities, that’s a nightmare.. the decision to have straight up documentation, just select bits instead of editing them some more, really made the selection process easier. If something was interesting for a while, but didn’t stay interesting, it had to go. I think I ended up with five or six pieces that I though could hold their own on a record, four of which made the final cut.
>Do you think that, by bringing it back to an LP, you're making it easier for the listener? Were there people who actually listened to the whole 8 hour performance? Do you think that listening to an 8 hour performance demands another kind of concentration from the listener than listening to an LP?
-There were some people there that sat through the whole thing, yes. But I’m not sure if it is at all possible to listen with concentration to 8 hours of something like this. And that was never the question either. It was continually shifting, so it didn’t really have a beginning or an end - you could drop in any time you liked. But it was pretty intense, so yes, this record is probably the light version. Still, not sure if it is easy listening at all, although I think it has a beauty of it’s own.
-I guess there was the point where I decided to just do a 10 minute organ improv, that was a bit of a turning point. I could have gone for something more ‘correct’ in terms of concept - I don’t know, pure sine waves or something. The improv might be one of the major flaws, actually, conceptually speaking. But I really needed a break from thinking it over and just do something... plus, it adds a much needed layer of spontaneity that works beautifully, not in the least musically, so no regrets. I like working with concepts a lot, as a starting point, but I’m also interested enough in the results to loosen up the concept if I feel it’s needed.
>I could say that the 10" records were vinyl records as a tool, and that this LP is a vinyl record as a product. What you think about this statement? How do you look at the function a piece of vinyl can have?
-The 10” records have all been sold as well, so they’re somewhere on middle ground - they were intended as a release, and therefore a product, just as well.
But they do form one big piece, and as far as final forms go, I guess you could consider that performance the final form of that particular piece. That’s also purely pragmatical: now they’ve all been sold, it’s going to be very difficult to get all 12 of them together again for a second performance. It really was a one time event, with the vinyls as a tool, yes. Of course, taking what is essentially a reproduction medium, and turning it into something of an instrument in it’s own right again, that’s nothing new.. think hip hop, turntablism, even things like the mellotron did that. But it’s still a relevant idea to me, this kind of creative misuse.
>You release this album as a Remörk album, but there were more people involved in this project than just you: there's Vaast Colson, Peter Flenger and Dennis Tyfus too. So do you see this album as a solo record or as a collaboration?
-I do look at it as a solo thing. You know, the music on the record came from a performance I did, based on a concept I came up with. Now, I never would have though it up if it weren’t for Vaasts initial invitation, or for Peter’s asking me to do a record, or Dennis wanting to present it in Antwerp, that whole chain reaction, so in that way it’s definitely the result of collaborating with all those people. But Vaast for instance refuses to regard it as his doing. He always stressed, right from the start, that any interpretation I gave of his work was no longer his work. And I follow that. They’re just new pieces in their own right.
Peter and Koos asked me to do a record because they run a record label and they want to release stuff they think is interesting. That’s awesome, and I’m flattered to be a part of that, but in a way it’s also what record labels are supposed to be doing, no? We worked on the packaging together, and it looks amazing because of them. But musically, I still feel it’s my work. And the same goes for this record on Ultra Eczema: I have to say I’m really happy we finally got an Ultra Eczema release together, it’s something Dennis had been asking for for quite some time... he’d actually given up asking. But now with this thing it just seemed to fall into place perfectly.
>When Joseph Beuys was asked why he hated the term 'conceptual art', he said: "Because a concept, an idea is a starting point, not a final form. If you stick to the concept, you miss out on the creative aspect, which should be the most important part. Otherwise you're not an artist. Art is not pinning things down. Art is letting things go, let it flow". Does this sound recognisable to you? And how would you relate this quote to your LP?
-Not having to execute ideas into a physical and therefore flawed final form was the whole point of conceptual art, no? The notion that an idea can be just as valid and just as creative as its execution.. but anyway.
I for myself am always glad if I manage to turn an idea into a physical form. Did I mention I tend to overthink things? So I don’t think I belong in the conceptual art section. But then, I don’t fully agree that you miss out on creativity by sticking to a concept. Coming up with a concept can be as much a creative process. And sometimes, by sticking to it, you end up with the most unexpected results - adhering to rules you impose on yourself makes you do stuff you would never have decided for yourself. It can make you go against your natural inclinations, which does not always have to be a bad thing. It can free you from repeating yourself, from your own mannerisms. That’s just another way of letting things go, of giving up control.
-I think I would consider that series of twelve ten inches my vinyl debut.. but maybe because it was 12 different records or in ten inch format, that it doesn’t really count? Or maybe Dennis thinks of that series as a tool more than a product. Still, the Ultra Eczema one is definitely the first record that is more widely available, and much more of a pure record than an artists’ edition, so I know what he’s saying. And a statement.. I don’t know. I don’t think of it as a manifesto or anything. It’s a document of what I’m happy to be working on at the moment, and hopefully it’s something that others can enjoy as well.
-If you force me to choose between those two, then drone. I tend to associate collage records with cut and paste editing, jumpcuts, going from one atmosphere to the next in no time.. I don’t feel this record has that. Quite the contrary. The only thing remotely close to jumpcuts that are on this record were due to the electronics of the installation, the sensors turning the sound on and off. But they were live events, not editing choices made afterwards. So this is very much a straightforward live recording of a pretty weird DJ set, if you will. And even though it has strong rhythmic patterns, the underlying harmonies and atmosphere shift quite slowly. So more drone, definitely.
>Do you think this LP would be also enjoyable if someone would listen to it without knowing a single thing about the whole concept behind it? Or do you even think you would have failed if it wouldn't be an enjoyable record without the concept?
-I certainly do hope that it’s enjoyable.. like I said, I know it’s not easy listening per se, and some might probably find it boring at first try, with the tempo being the same for the whole record and all. But I did try to select bits that I thought had a beauty or a strong appeal to them, an interesting evolution or whatever, so much so that I hope they can survive as musical pieces in their own right. aiming for the best of both worlds there. Type of object: event
Description: Live event for our Pushing the Score project with Telcosystems (nl), Julia Buennagel (de) and Derek Holzer (us). Focussing on the potential of grahic scores and publishing of sound and image we present Telcosystems with their recent publication Resonanz, a reading on Schematic as a Score plus concert by Derek Holzer plus a live performance of Julia Bünnagel with modified records.
In our event series during the Pushing Scores project we programmed this evening after we got in touch with the resonant publication of Telcosystems. They approach DE PLAYER for some input in the production and distribution of it. because of the direct relation of sound and image and the new interface an object like that represents it was a clear match. They did a reading on the concepts and necessity of the project as well as all the implications it had in its development and production.
To complete the event we searched for 2 completely different angles on composing. Derek Holzer eventually was asked because of his Tonewheels but that was logistically not possible. He came over to do a reading on Schematic as a score and did a live set on Tektronix Oscilloscope Music. Julia Buennagel was invited to do a more physical input. She works with prepared records and played a live set.
about prepared records:
The record or musical piece in these cases is not used as a reproductive technique. In contrast to the composer or musician who perceives the record first and foremost as a vehicle transporting his or her musical ideas, here the interest lies especially in the optical/sculptural as well as the acoustic presence and the compression of an idea working with the playback possibilities and impossibilities of recording techniques. The end result is not a reproduction but a transformation of the original source and ultimately becomes an autonomous score and/or unique graphic/sculptural piece in and of itself.
The defective record and not the even, smooth reproduction means quality and concept at the same time.
Lazlo Moholy Nagy said about this in the perspective of New Plasticism that it lies in the peculiarity of human nature that:
“The abuse and misunderstanding are nessecary to gain result. It is nessecary for evolution and survival. After every new recording the functioning apparatus is pushed ahead to further new impressions. That is one of the reasons for the necessity to always continue experiments in New Plasticism. From this standpoint the configurations are only worthwhile when they produce new, previously unknown, relationships. In other words, this means that reproduction (repetitions of already existing relations) without richer viewpoints from the special standpoint of creative production can, only in the best cases, be considered as a virtuosic opportunity. As production, meaning here productive creation, above all serves the human condition, we must attempt to further our purposes of creative production through the uses of those apparatuses or methods which until now have been used only for reproduction purposes.”
In 1989 the Broken Music exhibition was held in Berlin at the DAAD gallery with work by, among others, Nam June Paik, John Cage, Milan Knížák, Christian Marclay. All had lifted the medium (the vinyl record) over themselves and added a new use / application. Whether or not as an installation to be played by the public or as a plastic work in which the plate was transformed, mutated. The code of the usual record as defined by the music industry was broken in all works.
Later the exhibition traveled to the Hague and to Grenoble in the early 1990s. The book which came along with the exhibition has recently been republished. As a sourcebook, it is without peer, focusing on recordings, record objects, artwork for records, and record installations made by hundreds of artists between World War II and 1989.
-With Resonanz, Telcosystems presents an electronic book, combining a series of visual artworks with a sound publication in one. Incorporated in the structure of the book are sensors and electronics, providing each page with its own unique soundtrack, which can be listened to via speakers or headphones. This evening Resonanz will be the starting point of Q&A, demonstration and live presentation. In their audiovisual works Telcosystems research the relation between the behavior of programmed numerical logic and the human perception of this behavior; they aim at an integration of human expression and programmed machine behavior. This becomes manifest in the immersive audiovisual installations they make, in films, videos, soundtracks, prints and in live performances. The software they write enables them to compose ever-evolving audiovisual worlds. Telcosystems’ installations and films focus on real-time, self-structuring, generative processes, in their live performances they focus on the interaction with these processes.
“Resonanz is an electronic book that I had first dismissed. Until i tried it. As you turn the thick pages of the book, you encounter a different pattern along with a different soundtrack. It’s strangely hypnotizing. I turned and turned the pages, each time trying to think about the possible connections between the colours and patterns printed on the pages and the sound they emitted.”
-Julia Bünnagel is a contemporary sound and sculpting artist based Cologne. Working with sound performance and art installation. She is part of the sound-art-collective Sculptress of Sound. Julia's solo live performance primarily refers to the modified vinyl records which produces extraordinary sounds. Julia's peculiar method of modifying vinyl records includes the various ways of physical treatment such as sewing, painting or pasting the vinyl surfaces and afterwards mixing them together for yielding an imprudently driving, rhythmic soundscapes following by the white noise, multiple fragments of music along with dirty boom beats.
-Derek Holzer is an American instrument builder and sound artist based in Helsinki FI & Berlin DE, whose current interests include DIY analog electronics, the relationship between sound + space, media archaeology and the meeting points of electroacoustic, noise, improv and extreme music. He has performed live, taught workshops and created scores of unique instruments and installations since 2002 across Europe, North and South America, and New Zealand.
For the PUSHING event Derek will do a reading entitled Schematic as Score: Uses and Abuses of the (In)Deterministic Possibilities of Sound Technology and after that he will do a live set based on researching analog visuals with the oscilloscope.
The reading starts out of the fact that over the past few years, a strong reaction against the sterile world of laptop sound and video has inspired a new interest in analog processes, or "hands dirty" art in the words of practitioner John Richards3. With this renewed analog interest comes a fresh exploration of the pioneers of the electronic arts during the pre-digital era of the 1960s and 1970s. Artists and inventors such as Nam June Paik, Steina & Woody Vasulka, Don Buchla, Serge Tcherepnin, Dan Sandin and David Tudor all constructed their own unique instruments long before similar tools became commercially available or freely downloadable.
About the live oscilloscope concert he states: „The Vectorian Era opens with a screaming across the sky. Analog electronic computers predate their digital counterparts by several decades, and one of the first practical applications of the analog computer was in controlling the trajectories of German V2 rockets as they traced their rainbow of gravity from Flanders towards London during the Second World War. Informed by the discourse of media archaeology, my own personal interest in analog vector graphics isn’t merely retro-for-retro’s-sake. Rather, it is an exploration of a once-current and now discarded technology linked with specific utopias and dystopias from another time.”
Description: For ART Rotterdam we present Experimental Jetset, Davide Mosconi, DUPAC, Moniker, Cold Void [Rafaël Rozendaal/Luuk Bouwman] and Telcosystems.
As a production platform, specialised in the relationship between sound, art, publishing and performance, for ART Rotterdam 2017 DE PLAYER presents works of artists within the frame of the project Pu-shi-ng-Sco-res; a project by DE PLAYER and Remco van Bladel, Dutch graphic designer.
For a certain period we yearly took part in the ART Rotterdam. An annual art fair in which commercial galleries as well as initiatives take part. The Intersection part is where the initiatives gather. It works because of getting in contact with an audience which will never come by at DE PLAYER itself. For this year it was clear that we present the Pushing Score project. We decided to set up a framework as if it was a three dimensional staff to write down music. In this framework we presented new, specifically for Pushing Scores, produced works in combination with existing works we thought would be interesting to combine and by that give a multidimensional approach on what tactics can be used by making scores and how it will be finally as a tradable object.
People could continuously listen to some publications (Telcosystems, Cold Void, Davide Mosconi) as well take part in the economic process of it by spraying new works for the next potential costumer (Moniker).
Description: An evening with remarkable experiments and materialised conceptual flip flop. DE PLAYER will unveil its third issue of Tetra Gamma Circulaire (TGC) – the unknown audio magazine. TGC #3 is compiled in collaboration with students of the Piet Zwart Institute, and is also part of their Experimental Publishing programme of the Media Design Master, named XPUB.
Sometimes 1 + 1 is greater than the sum of its parts, but if you put two of Belgium’s finest composers and musicians together, it adds up to an infinite number. Hiele Martens, or the collaboration of Lieven Martens Moana and Roman Hiele, delve deep into new territory that could be interpreted as a 2017 update of Maurice Kagel’s "Exotica", but made by self-aware electronic musicians. Hiele Martens' debut record is about to be released on Ultra Eczema and is expected to become one of the highlights of this year.
Whether culminating into actions or objects, Helga Jakobson's work responds to conditions of limbo within existence and acts as a platform to confront the unknown; it focuses on death, time and ephemerality. Currently she is constructing a digital and physical web; weaving together the overlapping, intuitive and sometimes complicated interconnections that comprise her interest in handcraft, witchcraft, and digitalcraft. The main threads that run between these interests are the experience of women, their traditional work and their sharing of knowledge. Jakobson has great reverence for intuition and it’s use as a technology. At DE PLAYER she will demonstrate her 'spider web record player'.
Johannes Bergmark is a Fylkingen affiliated sound artist, instrument builder and piano technician. His performances have been described as surrealist puppet theatre in which the characters are amplified objects such as old tools, kitchen utensils, toys, springs and decorative kitsch. Using contact microphones, Bergmark reveals their hidden acoustics, dynamic scales and unique timbres. Bergmark is the ultimate rethinker of what music can be, in sound and in performance, as you can sometimes find him hanging on two piano strings from a ceiling.
Experimental Publishing is a new course of the Piet Zwart Institute's Media Design Master programme. The concept of the course revolves around two core principles: first, the inquiry into the technological, political and cultural processes through which things are made public; and second, the desire to expand the notion of publishing beyond print media and its direct digital translation. The Experimental Publishing students who contributed to the development of TGC #3 are: Karina Dukalska, Max Franklin, Giulia de Giovanelli, Clàudia Giralt, Francisco González, Margreet Riphagen, Nadine Rotem-Stibbe and Kimmy Spreeuwenberg.
-Piet Zwart Institute > TGC #3 seminar + live event
Together with the Experimental Publishing team of the Master of Media Design students of the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam, a seminar was organized for the students in a period of 3 months in which the principles of Pushing the Score were leading. A publication was taken as a joint focal point, the form of which could be determined in more detail. However, it was decided to start from a floppy disc as a medium. Each student could design his/her own project on this medium. The idea of a score functioned as a guideline to shape their project and to test the work process. It resulted in the Tetra Gamma Circular #3 subtitled "an unknown audio magazine" and is in itself a certain kind of publication platform that functions almost as a jukebox for floppies. It is an experimental platform designed for sonic experiments, instruments and installations. Concretely, a designed concrete object in which various techniques are incorporated. Its core consists of a floppy drive and a Raspberry Pi platform, on which a local wifi station, a camera, audio in/out, touch sensors, LED lighting are realized. The local wifi station makes it possible to access all projects (on floppy) by receiving these projects on mobile phone or on the computer. Via beamer and audio system everything becomes visible and audible. Most projects are aimed at interaction with an audience (one or more people).
Karina Dukalska, for example, created a work entitled 'Rock Step Triple Step'. As a dancer she is curious why there is no universal graphic notation system in the dance. Whether it is about recording movements for archiving, or writing new choreographies for the future, she concentrated on which elements of dance are overwritable (such as direction or footwork) and which are not. The performance of 'Rock Step Triple Step' started as an experiment based on psychological theories to change memory, time perception and flow in dance. The audience has the opportunity to control the dancers' steps on stage through a web interface that shows her personal approach to graphically representing ten jive steps.
Max Franklin's research focuses on the fragile nature of improvisation in music, with software. Through research into the act of improvisation in music, Max investigates ideas about liberation and resistance that improvisation can offer. Both in artistic practices, and their broader application as a critical methodology of research and exploration. For TGC#3 he developed a tool that is a learning counterpartner for his own musical input.
title event: ARCHIVING \ PUSHING SCORES WITH VALENTINA VUKSIC, ANA GUEDES, VARIA, NIEK HILKMANN
During this evening we focus on the archiving of our Pushing Scores project. A project on the nowadays meaning of the 'graphic score', which has been running for over the last 2-3 years. What are the possibilities of graphic scores, in a day and age in which graphic notation is still usually seen as a ‘drawing’, serving as some kind of sheet music?
To communicate the project to a larger audience DE PLAYER asked Varia to develop a context and technical environment as a web-based archival publication for the Pushing Scores project. The idea is that this material will be embodied by a dynamic, accessible and therefore active archive, which creates new relations, new perspectives and, at its best, new concepts for the production and/or processes of making scores. Varia will explain their ideas and approach on this matter.
- Valentina Vuksic will bring a live performance in which she approaches computers with transducers that transform electromagnetic radiation into sound within choreographically setups. The ‘runtime’ of executed software is staged for an audience to provide an acoustic experience: that of logic encountering the physical world.
Valentina Vuksic was involved in the ARTKILLART Xyears JUBILEE event at 21-04-2017. She played a set in which she used her computer to generate sound by live programming. It was a good concert and het concept of working fitted very well in our ideas of exploring graphic scores. Her score was made on the spot with programming language. A sort of live coding. The Artkillart label operates from both Paris and Berlin since 2007, promoting experimental audiovisual and sound art. In reaction to the dematerialization of music (the general disappearance of music released in its physical form), the artists of the Artkillart label roster refocus their releases as material objects.
Artists who joined the event: Valentina Vuksic, Arnaud Rivière, Nicolas Montgermont, Jan Kees Van Kampen
Valentina Vuksic is a computer artist and programmer based in Zürich. Her work is a personal exploration of the possibilities afforded by articulated hard- and software mediation. She approaches computer systems via inductive microphones for magnetic fields, so-called “telephone adapters." With choreographies for software and computer elements, she utilizes these as actors in software/noise pieces for, and in, computers.
Vuksic considers time and space of computer processor and memory as levels of reality. Software being processed creates own temporal and spatial dimensions, which are staged for a public. She aims for a sensual experience of the analytical sphere becoming concrete, where logic encounters the physical world. The mechanic noises serve as mediators to a public. They reveal in an immediate way the activities taking place between computer processes in the widest sense and the computer electronics they are running on.
'Para-phonic Poly-diso' is a graphic score for a digital, polyphonic choir wherein visitors of Paradiso can participate with their mobile phone. The voice for this work is by Laetitia Saedier of Stereolab.
1) An interactive graphic score / light box / kinetic work fixed inside the cabinet. (see jpeg drafts below)
2) A mobile website that connects you to the hardware inside the cabinet and turns your phone into a local speaker for a polyphonic voice piece.
In the eleventh century, the Italian Guido of Arezzo, one of the most important founders of musical notation, developed a scale consisting of six notes: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la. Later the seventh tone 'si' was added. From this the well-known "Do-Re-Mi" and the solfege, a teaching method in music for learning pitch and the singing of sheet music, developed itself.
The Small Museum, the former announcement box on the front of Paradiso, is being converted by Remco van Bladel into a local wifi point that will stream a polyphonic "Pa-Ra-Di-So". An algorithmic choir is compiled live by the mobile phones that connect to the Wi-Fi point while they are waiting in line for Paradiso to enter.
Paradiso invited Remco van Bladel to take part in their Small Museum project. For him it fitted very well to use this public place for a project he had in mind for Pushing Scores. The idea was to create a choir with mobile phones for the audience waiting to get in of the Dutch pop tempel Paradiso.
The work:
The work was installed for a period at The Small Museum; a cabinet on the facade of Paradiso, Amsterdam.
'Para-phonic Poly-diso' is a graphic score where Paradiso visitors can participate in a digital polyphonic choir.
In eleventh century Italy, the music theorist Guido of Arezzo developed an ascending scale consisting of six-notes: ut, re, mi, fa, sol and la. A 7th note, 'si' or 'ti', was added later. This scale is the basis for 'Do-Re-Mi' and solfège, a music education method used to teach singing of Western music.
The Small Museum, which was used for the public announcements of the church, will be transformed into a local wifi hotspot to stream a multi vocal 'Pa-Ra-Di-So Rapsodia'. A live algorithmic choir composition created through the phones connected to the score while waiting in front of the building to enter.
Before music was established in writing, each choir leader led the Gregorian chants of the scola cantorum with movements. This method of conducting, called cheironomy, consisted of writing signs in the air that contained clear instructions for the trained choir singers in terms of pitch change, duration and tone strength. These signs or neumens were written down, modified or not, first without any reference line. Later, the neumens - depending on the relative pitch differences - were noted above, on, or below a line referring to a pitch determined by the choral conductor.
As far as melody is concerned, humming was increasingly defined by the expansion of the number of lines, which first corresponded by colour, and later by keys to certain steps in the medieval ranges. In the eleventh century Guido van Arezo introduced the staff with four lines (this is still in use). In the middle of the thirteenth century Peter de Cruce came to a notation in which the relative duration of each note is indicated by the form of the note. This so-called manural notation was of great importance to ensure the reproducibility of the various rhythmic possibilities in the developing polyphonic music of Western Europe.
One of the influences for our project Pushing Scores.
Jacques Attali (born 1 November 1943) is a French economic and social theorist, writer, political adviser and senior civil servant, who served as a counselor to President François Mitterrand from 1981 to 1991 and was the first head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in 1991-1993.
After getting it touch with Attali’s book ‘Noise: The Political Economy of Music’ we used it as inspiration for the project Pushing Scores. This particularly because of the fact that he focusses on the reproduction of music.
Attali believes that music has gone through four specific cultural stages in its history:
1. Sacrificing
2. Representing
3. Repeating
4. Post-Repeating
The 2nd phase is important in the perspective of sound reproduction, graphic score and the tangibility of sound and / or the object. It refers to the era of printed music (1500 - 1900). During this period, the music is tied to a physical carrier for the first time, and thus becomes a commodity for sale in the market. This notation of music can be considered as a highly coded written guideline for how music should sound. He calls this chapter Represent because it is the project of the executive. This represents the music in the absence of the maker and in the presence of an audience an effort must be made to read and articulate the intensity of the composer of the magazine. With the rise of the various avant-garde movements from the beginning of the 20th century, in addition to new forms of "sound", the relationship between sound and its visual representation is also being re-examined.
The 3rd stage deals with the mechanical reproduction and the 4th stage could be interpreted that he already was referring to the idea of sampling although it was first published in translation by the University of Minnesota in 1985. In that time it would have been quite prophetic. Because of this ambiguity we are interested for the project what this stage of music could represent. What kind of scores can be made with aal new techniques and media which have been developed since and definitely are of influence in our conceptual thinking of music and its reproduction.Jacques Attali (born 1 November 1943) is a French economic and social theorist, writer, political adviser and senior civil servant, who served as a counselor to President François Mitterrand from 1981 to 1991 and was the first head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in 1991-1993.
Attali is the first to point out the other possible logical consequence of the “reciprocal interaction” model—namely, the possibility of a superstructure to anticipate historical developments, to foreshadow new social formations in a prophetic and annunciatory way. The argument of Noise is that music, unique among the arts for reasons that are themselves overdetermined, has precisely this annunciatory vocation; that the music of today stands both as a promise of a new, liberating mode of production, and as the menace of a dystopian possibility which is that mode of production’s baleful mirror image.event:
the entire Pushing Scores project was set up in cooperation with Remco van Bladel. The conceptualization, the funding, the execution.We new that Remco had written his essay 'Musical Theories in Graphic Design' on the subject of graphic notation within a broader field of theory formation in contemporary
music. It seemed to be a good match to work with him and DE PLAYER on a research of the graphic score. WE had common interest but at the same time a different angle and network in our practice as a stage, publisher and designer. This brought us together and made Pushing Scores to be real.Remco van Bladel (Amersfoort, 1977) is a graphic designer, based in Amsterdam. His studio focusses on editorial book design, curatorial projects, institutional identities, interactive applications and websites. Remco is co-founder of 'WdW Review' (Witte de With, Rotterdam), Dutch art book publisher Onomatopee and teaches graphic design at ArtEZ, Arnhem. He designed the publication and identity of the Aalto Natives, at the Finnish Pavilion of this year's 57th Venice Biennale. For the 2015 edition of the Venice Biennale the studio was responsible for the design of the publication and identity of ‘to be all ways to be’, the exhibition of herman de vries of the Dutch pavilion.
His clients include artists like: Navid Nuur, Jonas Staal, Justin Bennett, Esther Tielemans, Gert-Jan Prins and Erik van Lieshout besides institutions like Witte de With, e-flux, New World Summit, Extra City Kunsthal, Arts Writers Grant Program, Art Agenda, Council, Cobra Museum and STEIM (studio for electro-instrumental music). The studio takes care of the graphic design of the art magazine and website Metropolis M.
Remco van Bladel grew up as a kid in the recordstore of his father. The relation between the sound/music on the records and the visuals on the sleeves and packaging had a strong influence on his nowadays practice. Especially the strategy and concepts he creates for graphic design.
In his essay 'Musical Theories in Graphic Design', from 2002, treated Bladel with the subject of graphic notation within a broader field of theory formation in contemporary
music. In it he transposed compositional methodologies of the avant-gardists in the 20th century to graphical design methodologies. For instance by understanding the phase shifting technique from inside Steve Reich to design. But also work from Stockhausen, and Cage to view and differ and looking for similarities. Rhythm, shifts, pairs, tonality, counterpoints. This was not about hard comparisons and 1 on 1 projections, but more
to interpret, think and work with elements. An investigation into methodologies within his own artistic practice.
From his own position he considers himself as (editorial) designer, curator, musician and publisher with a strong predilection for language and typography. His artistic practice is formed by a number of ingredients that have always been present in his work to a greater or lesser extent. The most important, from his youth, is sound or music. Both as a source or inspiration, as a metaphor, as a thinking model and as an 'attitude' in relation to his practice. He sees it as punk, experiment, noise, investigative, critical. Searching for dissonance and ordering of information, for rhythm and tonality. Sound in relation to image remains an elusive phenomenon that continues to fascinate me because sound / music is the most abstract art form. The subjective nature, the way in which vibrations can release such strong emotions, makes it possible to deal speculatively and to use them for use in typography, image, material choices, folding methods and bookbinding systems. This tactility, the application of materiality and the use of printing techniques as a metaphor for sound play a major role in his entire practice.
event title: PU-SH-ING WITH TELCOSYSTEMS, JULIA BUENNAGEL AND DEREK HOLZER
Live event for our Pushing the Score project with Telcosystems (nl), Julia Buennagel (de) and Derek Holzer (us). Focussing on the potential of grahic scores and publishing of sound and image we present Telcosystems with their recent publication Resonanz, a reading on Schematic as a Score plus concert by Derek Holzer plus a live performance of Julia Bünnagel with modified records.
What are the possibilities of graphic scores, in a day and age in which graphic notation is still usually seen as a ‘drawing’ serving as some kind of sheet music? In an attempt to redefine this concept, we will be compiling a programme in which artists, musicians, theoreticians and practitioners are invited to participate. The collective goal is to develop and present new audio-visual and media-technical forms of graphic notation through artistic research and development. Based on our compilation of the most contemporary and innovative graphic notation practices in the fields of music, sound art, performance art, e-culture, new-media art, graphic design and media design, we will introduce artists and designers from various creative disciplines to a national and international audience, with the goal of collectively developing new forms of graphic notation.
Telcosystems presents Resonanz; an electronic book combining a series of visual artworks with a sound publication in one. Incorporated in the structure of the book are sensors and electronics, providing each page with its own unique soundtrack, which can be listened to via speakers or headphones. This evening Resonanz will be the starting point of Q&A, demonstration and live presentation. In their audiovisual works Telcosystems research the relation between the behavior of programmed numerical logic and the human perception of this behavior; they aim at an integration of human expression and programmed machine behavior. This becomes manifest in the immersive audiovisual installations they make, in films, videos, soundtracks, prints and in live performances. The software they write enables them to compose ever-evolving audiovisual worlds. Telcosystems’ installations and films focus on real-time, self-structuring, generative processes, in their live performances they focus on the interaction with these processes.
Julia Bünnagel is a contemporary sound and sculpting artist based Cologne. Working with sound performance and art installation. She is part of the sound-art-collective Sculptress of Sound. Julia's solo live performance primarily refers to the modified vinyl records which produces extraordinary sounds. Julia's peculiar method of modifying vinyl records includes the various ways of physical treatment such as sewing, painting or pasting the vinyl surfaces and afterwards mixing them together for yielding an imprudently driving, rhythmic soundscapes following by the white noise, multiple fragments of music along with dirty boom beats.
Derek Holzer is an American instrument builder and sound artist based in Helsinki FI & Berlin DE, whose current interests include DIY analog electronics, the relationship between sound + space, media archaeology and the meeting points of electroacoustic, noise, improv and extreme music. He has performed live, taught workshops and created scores of unique instruments and installations since 2002 across Europe, North and South America, and New Zealand.
For the PUSHING event Derek will do a reading entitled Schematic as Score: Uses and Abuses of the (In)Deterministic Possibilities of Sound Technology and after that he will do a live set based on researching analog visuals with the oscilloscope.
The reading starts out of the fact that over the past few years, a strong reaction against the sterile world of laptop sound and video has inspired a new interest in analog processes, or "hands dirty" art in the words of practitioner John Richards. With this renewed analog interest comes a fresh exploration of the pioneers of the electronic arts during the pre-digital era of the 1960s and 1970s. Artists and inventors such as Nam June Paik, Steina & Woody Vasulka, Don Buchla, Serge Tcherepnin, Dan Sandin and David Tudor all constructed their own unique instruments long before similar tools became commercially available or freely downloadable.
About the live oscilloscope concert he states: „The Vectorian Era opens with a screaming across the sky. Analog electronic computers predate their digital counterparts by several decades, and one of the first practical applications of the analog computer was in controlling the trajectories of German V2 rockets as they traced their rainbow of gravity from Flanders towards London during the Second World War. Informed by the discourse of media archaeology, my own personal interest in analog vector graphics isn’t merely retro-for-retro’s-sake. Rather, it is an exploration of a once-current and now discarded technology linked with specific utopias and dystopias from another time.”
http://macumbista.netWe got in touch with the work of Derek Holzer through his project on Tone Wheels; an experiment in converting graphical imagery to sound, inspired by some of the pioneering 20th Century electronic music inventions. Transparent tonewheels with repeating patterns are spun over light-sensitive electronic circuitry to produce sound and light pulsations and textures.
This analog way of getting sound from graphic notation was an impuls to check him out for the Pushing Scores project. He came up with a reading on Schematics as a Score, because that was a current issue of his practice. It fully fitted in our search for how to see the concept of composing and making scores.Derek Holzer (USA 1972) is a sound + light artist based in Helsinki & Berlin, whose current interests include DIY electronics, audiovisual instrument building, the relationship between sound and space, media archaeology, and participatory art forms. He has performed live, taught workshops and created scores of unique instruments and installations since 2002 across Europe, North and South America, and New Zealand.
Derek Holzer gave a lecture with the theme "Schematic as Score: use and abuse of the (im)deterministic possibilities of sound technology". In it he considers it axiomatic that, for every work of art that must be considered experimental, the possibility of failure must be built into his process. By this he does not mean the aestheticized, satisfying disturbances and cracking that Kim Cascone valorizes, but the lack of satisfaction caused by a misplaced or misdirected procedure in the experiment, colossal or banal. These are not mistakes that should be looked up, sampled and celebrated, but the flat-on-your-ass gaffs and embarrassment that would disturb the sleep of all but the most Zen of musicians or composers. The presence of failure in a musical system represents feedback in the negative, a turning point in anticlimax, irrelevance, the everyday, the cliché or even unintentional silence. Many artists try to eliminate true, catastrophic failures by scripting, scoring, sequencing or programming their work in as many predictable, risk-free quantums as possible in advance. But this unwanted presence also guarantees the vitality of that fiercely fought area; the live electronic music performance.
The past few years there has been a strong response to the sterile world of sound and video from the laptop. This has led to a new interest in analogue processes or dirty hands art. With this renewed analog interest comes a fresh exploration of the pioneers of electronic art during the pre-digital era of the sixties and seventies. Artists and inventors such as Nam June Paik, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Don Buchla, Serge Tcherepnin, Dan Sandin and David Tudor all constructed their own unique instruments long before similar tools became commercially available or could be freely downloaded.
Over the past few years, a strong reaction against the sterile world of laptop sound and
video has inspired a new interest in analog processes, or "hands dirty" art in the words of practitioner John Richards. With this renewed analog interest comes a fresh exploration of the pioneers of the electronic arts during the pre-digital era of the 1960s and 1970s.
Artists and inventors such as Nam June Paik, Steina & Woody Vasulka, Don Buchla, Serge
Tcherepnin, Dan Sandin and David Tudor all constructed their own unique instruments
through a long, rigorous process of self-education in electronics.
John Cage once quipped that Serge Tcherepnin's synthesizer system was "the best musical
composition that Serge had ever made", and it is precisely Cage's reformulation of the
concert score from a list of deterministic note values to a set of indeterministic
possibilities that allowed the blurring of lines between instrument-builder and music
composer that followed.
In 2011 Derek Holzer wrote an essay on this issue which has been published as a pdf on internet as VAGUE TERRAIN 19.Vector Synthesis Workshop Piksel
Derek Holzer, Vector Synthesis workshop
Building: Piksel Studio 207, Bergen NO
Dates: 9-11 March 2018
Time: tba
All workshops are free entrance. To sign up send an email to:
prod(at)piksel(dot)no
VECTOR SYNTHESIS is an audiovisual, computational art project using sound synthesis and vector graphics display techniques to investigate the direct relationship between sound+image. It draws on the historical work of artists such as Mary Ellen Bute, John Whitney, Nam June Paik, Ben Laposky, and Steina & Woody Vasulka among many others, as well as on ideas of media archaeology and the creative re-use of obsolete technologies. Audio waveforms control the vertical and horizontal movements as well as the brightness of a single beam of light, tracing shapes, points and curves with a direct relationship between sound and image.
You can see several demo videos here:
http://macumbista.net/?page_id=5000
SOFTWARE
The Vector Synthesis library allows the creation and manipulation of 2D and 3D vector shapes, Lissajous figures, and scan processed image and video inputs using audio signals sent directly to oscilloscopes, hacked CRT monitors, Vectrex game consoles, ILDA laser displays, or oscilloscope emulation softwares using the Pure Data programming environment.
https://github.com/macumbista/vectorsynthesis
During this workshop, you will learn how to use a custom library in the Pure Data programming environment to directly control the vertical and horizontal movements, as well as the brightness, of a beam of light. You will then explore Lissajous figures, waveform representations, and other multiplexed, audio-driven visual shapes and forms which can be displayed and manipulated in real time on an XY oscilloscope, Vectrex game console, ILDA laser display, and other analog vector displays, or with oscilloscope emulating software directly on your laptop.
Derek Holzer was invited for the event PU-SH-ING at 20 Jan 2017. He did a reading on Schematic as a Score, but also did a live concert from his research in analog visuals with the oscilloscope.
a theoretical/historical text about the concept written by Derek Holzer
23 NOV 2016, Helsinki, Finland
THE VECTORIAN ERA: an Investigation into Analog Computer Graphics
The Vectorian Era opens with a screaming across the sky. Analog electronic computers predate their digital counterparts by several decades, and one of the first practical applications of the analog computer was in controlling the trajectories of German V2 rockets as they traced their rainbow of gravity from Flanders towards London during the Second World War. As Friedrich Kittler has observed, the relationship of media technology to military tools of destruction was sealed by moments such as these.
Post-war developments continued in this direction. Tennis for Two, programmed in 1958 by William Higinbotham on an analog computer at Brookhaven National Laboratories in Long Island NY USA, using an oscilloscope as the display. It combined a two-player interface with physics models of a bouncing ball displayed as vectors in motion, and is arguably the first publicly-playable video game. The laboratory itself performed government research into nuclear physics, energy technology, and national security.
In the early 1960’s, the composer Morton Subotnik employed engineer Don Buchla to help him create “the music of the future”. Buchla redesigned the existing function generators of analog computers to respond to voltage controls of their frequency and amplitude. This gave birth to the realtime-controllable, analog modular synthesizer which was subsequently expanded by others such as Bob Moog and Serge Tcherepnin.
In 1967, the Sony Portapak revolutionized video by taking the camera out of the television studio and into the hands of amateurs and artists. And by the early 1970’s, an interest in cybernetics, systems theory and automatic processes brought the analog computer closer to the worlds of art, music, and architecture. Figures such as Heinz von Foerster, Gordon Pask, Nam June Paik, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Iannis Xenakis and R. Buckminster Fuller all speculated on the effect of computers on society, and used computer-derived forms in their work. The 1972 Rutt-Etra Video Synthesizer, used famously by the Vasukas in several works, employed an analog computer to manipulate and deconstruct the raster of a conventional video signal with very otherworldly effects.
Vector graphics were widely adopted by video game manufacturers in the late 1970’s due to their computational efficiency, and the wealth of experience using them that the history of analog computing provided. Perhaps the most iconic of these games is Asteroids, a space shooter released by Atari in 1979. Battle Zone (1980), Tempest (1981), and Star Wars (1983) all stand as other notable examples from this Vectorian Era, and also as rudimentary training tools for the future e-warriors who would remotely guide missiles into Iraqi bunkers at the start of the next decade. As electronics became cheaper, smaller, and faster in the 1980’s, the dated technology of using analog vectors to directly manipulate a Cathode Ray Tube fell out of favor and rasterized graphics, animations and moving image quickly took their place.
Informed by the discourse of media archaeology, my own personal interest in analog vector graphics isn’t merely retro-for-retro’s-sake. Rather, it is an exploration of a once-current and now discarded technology linked with specific utopias and dystopias from another time. The fact that many aspects of our current utopian aspirations (and dystopian anxieties!) remain largely unchanged since the dawn of the Vectorian Era indicates to me that seeking to satisfy them with technology alone is quite problematic. Therefore, an investigation into “tried-and-failed” methods from the past casts our current attempts and struggles in a new kind of light.
George Brecht is most famous for his Event Scores such as Drip Music 1962 and is widely seen as an important precursor to conceptual art. He described his own art as a way of “ensuring that the details of everyday life, the random constellations of objects that surround us, stop going unnoticed.”
Event Scores are works Event Scores are simple instructions to complete everyday tasks which can be performed publicly, privately, or negatively (meaning deciding not to perform them at all).
Initially writing theatrical scores similar to Kaprow's earliest Happenings, Brecht grew increasingly dissatisfied with the didactic nature of these performances. After performing in one such piece, Cage quipped that he'd "never felt so controlled before." prompting Brecht to pare the scores down to haiku-like statements, leaving space for radically different interpretations each time the piece was performed.The Event Scores of George Brecht are still actual pieces. He is inspiring for a lot of performance based composers. Specifically that is works out of simple instructions and can be done by anybody it has a highly democratic factor, without losing its artistic impact. Also interesting is the fact that it is purely language based lays in our interest. DE PLAYER has been publishing and presenting a lot of sound poetry.George Brecht (August 27, 1926 – December 5, 2008), born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer, as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Mobil Oil. He was a key member of, and influence on, Fluxus, the international group of avant-garde artists centred on George Maciunas, having been involved with the group from the first performances in Wiesbaden 1962 until Maciunas' death in 1978.
One of the originators of 'participatory' art, in which the artwork can only be experienced by the active involvement of the viewer, he is most famous for his Event Scores such as Drip Music 1962, and is widely seen as an important precursor to conceptual art. He described his own art as a way of “ensuring that the details of everyday life, the random constellations of objects that surround us, stop going unnoticed.”
Steve Joy took me to meet George Brecht in his studio when I was in residence at St Michael's in Manhattan (c.1962). We became friends and he mailed instruction cards to me. I brought Steve Joy to St. Vincent College when I returned to the monastery from Paris in 1963. George Brecht agreed to provide instructions for an event at St. Vincent. For his "Vehicle Sundown Event", he published a set of about 50 cards to be given to participants who participated in the event with their vehicles. Each card held an instruction to be performed with a vehicle. Drivers were instructed to assemble at sundown in a parking lot and randomly park their vehicles. Then each driver, with a shuffled deck of instructions, would begin performing at the sound of a signal. Participants performed about 50 events such as "turn on lights", "start engine", "stop engine", "open window". This work was performed at St. Vincent College under the direction of Stephen Joy with Roman Verostko assisting. c. 1963
A baton is a stick that is used by conductors primarily to enlarge and enhance the manual and bodily movements associated with directing an ensemble of musicians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baton_(conducting)This object is chosen to be part of the archive because it is the first and most simple tool to translate a written score to the musician who has to execute it. It is the first intermediary after the score itself and comes from a method of conducting called cheironmy.
Before music was established in writing, each choir leader led the Gregorian chants of the scola cantorum with movements. This method of conducting, called cheironomy, consisted of writing signs in the air that contained clear instructions for the trained choir singers in terms of pitch change, duration and tone strength. These signs or neumens were written down, modified or not, first without any reference line. Later, the neumens - depending on the relative pitch differences - were noted above, on, or below a line referring to a pitch determined by the choral conductor.
10" vinyl dubplate each one with original sound and related artwork
edition 40 pieces
Piringer has performed in DE PLAYER with his visual sound poetry pieces based on computer programming. For Pushing the Score we invited him to make special work for a limited edition. For this he developed specific software that generates poetry in spoken word form. For each record a unique piece is generated that is spoken and performed by the same software. The packaging of each record is also linked to the unique file and consists of an original visual work that is derived/transformed via a formula from the programming language that underlies the audio poem to be heard on the record.
Jörg Piringer is a member of the Institute for Trans-acoustic Research, member of the Vegetable Orchestra, radio artist, sound poet, visual poet, musician and holds a master's degree in computer science. He is also involved in the online poetry platform Huelkorven. The way in which he arrives at his poetry is very closely linked to his knowledge and skills of the programming language.
For example his work ‘frakativ’; an electronic visual sound poetry performance. ‘Fricatives’ are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together.
The performance ‘frikativ’ is real-time generated visual and sound poetry. Image and sound are created immediately during the performance by speaking and vocalizing into a microphone and modifying the voice through signal processors and samplers while the software is analyzing the sound to create animated abstract visual text-compositions.
Piringer is also involved in Huellkurven; an online sound poetry magazine and a series of events dedicated to sound poetry, poésie sonore, lautpoesie, noise poetry, sound-text composition, auditive poetry, audio poetry etc.
https://monoskop.org/Concrete_poetryDE PLAYER is interested in sound that fraternises in the abstract sense and makes people communicate with each other, without having to understand each other specifically in terms of language. In a multicultural situation, abstract sounds are the forms of recognition; then there is, for example, the music. The cultural identity is communicated with this. Music and dance are good elements to be together without literally understanding each other word for word. Subcultures form through music. In addition to the all-dominating impact of the music industry that determines lifestyle at the confection level, all sorts of de-mass-splintering genres are forming on the periphery of the musical firmament. The style / genre determines the identity. New generations are born.
It is important here that the language is sung off the usual value of speech. The limits of speech become communication and nonsense, which both have the potential of speech. Orientation with regard to giving meaning changes by inserting moments when improper use of thought, material and technology takes place.
The foundation of language as an information transmission is the foundation of these tendencies and is at the heart of the oral tradition principle. How stories can be told, how traditions are passed on, how past feeds the present and how the present forms itself by muttering the past.
Multilingualism is important in giving meaning to the things around us. Publishing, as mentioned above, is important to communicate various ways of expression. Signification also plays a major role in this. Within "Radical Listening" we want to see what the possibilities are of communication and publishing with the current means that are available to us. This idea is closely intertwined with the project "Pushing the Score", in which the materialization of sound plays a role. Listening in the sense of "Radical Listening" is therefore not only about ears specifically, but generally about exploring our world, our position in it and the way in which communication is possible.
We investigate how contemporary means are used to shape language, sign and sound. The analogue and virtual voice play a major role in this. Use of consumer electronics for improper use (eg tape recorder, telephone) but also self-invented technical devices and software, other machines (computer, record player, effect equipment) and a variety of speech techniques are used so that, among other things, classical reading forms are exceeded.
Inspiration is the vocal poetry, poésie sonore and text-sound composition. In our opinion, this area is an important one, both in the experimental sound, in the lecture and in the visual arts. Here it has played an important role and as such it is still current. The connection of the word and sound can be found in many ways within the art and music of fluxus, rap, early avant-garde, soundproof, laut poetry, music theater, opera, performative series, musical theatrical dad shows, radio plays and installational settings.
Fersteinn from Iceland will come and bring us a clear bold construction of tones and notes in space. They sound like a completely crushed partiture which comes out in it's pure elements just ordered in a way you are not so used to listen to. Good practise for the ears.
Fersteinn is a quartet of multi-instrumentalists that performs music by composer Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson. The music focuses on elastic rhythms, that are not easily confined to a grid. The musicians read the music from a score, but the score consists of moving images on a computer screen. This is done in order to communicate rhythms not easily notated. The music mostly consists of hockets where each sound is like one letter in a word. With flutes or recorder, plucked string instruments, duck calls and winds or brass, various types of rhythmical sound textures are conveyed. Some parts of the music might resemble animal sounds or the rhythm of animal movements.
To quote the composer: "By intently focusing on small differences, both in rhythm and pitch, the ear gets tuned to a microscopic mode of listening. When things then open up, a new sense of variety is gained."Fersteinn works with the method of so called Animation. This means animated notation. They had been performing before we started the Pushing Scores project. Nevertheless we claim it to be part of it.FERSTEINN (is)
Fersteinn is a quartet of multi-instrumentalists that play compositions by Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson, a repertoire that is written especially for the ensemble. Fersteinn usually performs in the quietest of settings. They are a group that plays music in a “extra-musical” or “non-musical” sort of rhythm (so to speak). They did quite an impressive set 2 years ago at De Vleeshal and Wallgallery, for those who missed it.
Fersteinn plays from animations made as compositions on a laptop. Most compositions are made by Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson.
Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson (born 1982) is an Icelandic composer, performer and a founding member of S.L.Á.T.U.R., an experimental arts organization in Reykjavík. In his compositions he has developed a rhythmic language devoid of regular beat or metre, and he has created a new musical notation to represent his music.
Guðmundur Steinn's musical style combines sound patterns without using a rigid rhythmic grid structure or pulse. This approach has led to the development of his animated notation, or 'anitation', instead of using traditional musical scores. During the performance, the musicians follow specific instructions that move across a computer screen. This rhythmic language and animated notation and the structural methods he uses in composition were the subject of his M.A. thesis in Mills College. As Guðmundur Steinn explains, "By intently focusing on small differences, both in rhythm and pitch, the ear gets tuned to a microscopic mode of listening. When things then open up, a new sense of variety is gained."
He is a founding member of the S.L.Á.T.U.R. ("samtök listrænt ágengra tónsmiða umhverfis Reykjavík" or "The Association of Artistically Obtrusive Composers around Reykjavík"[6]), an experimental composers collective in Iceland, and he is co-curator of the festival Sláturtíð. He also a co-curates the concert series Jaðarber at the Reykjavík Art Museum
‘Anitation’is the term for animated notation. Instead of using traditional musical scores, during the performance, the musicians follow specific instructions that move across a computer screen. This rhythmic language and animated notation and the structural methods were the subject of Guðmundur Steinn M.A. thesis in Mills College. As Guðmundur Steinn explains, "By intently focusing on small differences, both in rhythm and pitch, the ear gets tuned to a microscopic mode of listening. When things then open up, a new sense of variety is gained." This technique of composing is performed by Gudmundur Steinn his quartet Fersteinn.
Gudmundur Steinn has been part of DE PLAYER its program with his quartet Fersteinn several times. This Icelandic quartet plays with little analog instruments animation scores Steinn made on his computer. It results in real delicate and unconventional chamber music.
The animations of Steinn were also used by Goodiepal when he visited DE PLAYER on 17 December 2015 with his project on Icelandic animated notation. He a lecture on this subject and played together with Daniel S. Bøtcher, Grøn, Nynne Roberta Pedersen several pieces. Amongst which some of Gudmundur Steinn.
The idea of Anitation and the work of Gudmunder Steinn fits perfectly in Pushing Scores.Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson is an Icelandic composer writing music based on irregular or non-pulse oriented rhythms. It inhabits a world where grids or straight lines are almost non-existent. This often requires presenting the music as moving graphics on computer screens. That way the most irregular things can become very intelligible.
He has been active with a composer collective in Iceland called S.L.Á.T.U.R. and taken part in founding its festival Sláturtíð and used to be a co-curator of the Jaðarber concert series and Fengjastrútur Ensemble. He runs his own multi-instrumentalist quartet which is called Fersteinn.
His music has been performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Caput Ensemble, Reykjavík Chamber Orchestra, Ensemble Adapter, Tøyen Fil og Klafferi, Ensemble l’Arsenale, Ensemble CRUSH, Aksiom Ensemble, Nordic Affect, Defun Ensemble, Iceland Flute Choir, Duo Harpverk, Roberto Durante, Markus Hohti, Mathias Ziegler, Georgia Browne, Timo Kinnunen, Shayna Dunkelmann, Una Sveinbjarnardóttir and Tinna Þosteinsdóttir.
Some of the festivals that have included Guðmundur’s music are Tectonics Reykjavík and Glasgow, MATA, Musikin Aika, Ultima, November Music, Transit, Music for People and Thingamajigs, Nordlichter Biennale, Timisoara International Music Festival and ISSTC 2014 in Maynooth, Ireland, where Guðmundur was also Keynote speaker.
Guðmundur Steinn studied composition at Mills College, Iceland Academy of the Arts, Reykjavík College of Music, privately and at summer courses in Kürten and Darmstädt. His teachers have been Alvin Curran, Fred Frith, John Bischoff, Atli Ingólfsson, Hilmar Þórðarsson and Úlfar Ingi Haraldsson.Silence has kinetic roles in social exchanges: quietude, reflective pauses, withdrawal, displays of consent or dissent, reception and interpretation. But how can we score something not present, yet also not absent? Is there a positive notation for this critical issue of performance, of silence in the voice, other than merely the courtesies of extended rests, or blanks in the score? The reader will see inscriptions that oscillate between pictures and writing, and between visual and auditory, exemplifying those capacities of drawing to operate in the spaces between languages. In the context of an experimental music notation, seeking to make an instrumental gesture of silence, how can we draw incipience?“Before god needed to be invented there were man.
A reading in combination with a 6 hrs concert by Marco Fusinato.
DE PLAYER and WORM present a day about music and economy, revolving around two authoritative sound-artists/composers, whose work is engaged with political-economical processes. Marco Fusinato's (AU) mangled noise-guitar excursions are informed by the political explosions and pitfalls of of radical collectives from Autonomia and beyond. Johannes Kreidler (DE) who made a piece consisting of 70 thousand samples, and for each of these fragments he asked permission from the GEMA (the German BUMA). The authority who controls copy right specifically for musicians.
publication:
Project name: DOB 060
Description : Product Placements - 10" blue vinyl with poster and xerox copies - edition of 150 pieces
Johannes Kreidler is a special duck in the bite when it comes to composing. His works can often be regarded as composition, performance, sculpture and indictment. His work is described as conceptual music. He usually uses multimedia elements. He approaches the themes he uses (including authorship) through various entities directly linked to society. By acting consistently within these structures he creates his works. A few examples appeal to the imagination with regard to how a score can be understood and which elements and/or processes can play a role in this.
Johannes Kreidler is a composer, concept- and media artist. His way of composing has a multimedia conceptual approach which is mostly linked with processes in society. This makes it interesting in the perspective of experimentation and onorthodox composing. The AEX index, outsourcing of labor or copyright processes and social questions and implication around these issues form the fundament of some of his compositions. We asked Johannes to do a reading about his practice as a composer during the event we organized around Music & Capitalism.
We produced with him a record which contains one piece of him named Product Placements
This piece is to be seen as a plunder phonic composition in extremis. A press echoed in September 2008 his action Product Placements out, with which he wanted to initiate a discussion on copyright and the height of creation in music. In a 33-second piece of music, he processed 70,200 quotes of foreign works, which he all individually enrolled at the GEMA. For this purpose, he accompanied by numerous press representatives with a small truck full of completed applications at the GEMA Directorate General in Berlin before. The plant is deliberately located in a legal gray area, which has greatly increased by digital technologies, so that it is impossible to clarify the case so far.(How Could You) Bring Him Home by Eamon
From 2000 to 2006 Kreidler studied composition with Mathias Spahlinger, electronic music with Orm Finnendahl and Mesias Maiguashca, and music theory with Eckehard Kiem at the University of Music Freiburg and at the Institute of Sonology (Computer Music) of the Koninklijk Conservatorium The Hague. He also studied philosophy and art history at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.
He works as a lecturer in music theory, ear training and electronic music at the Rostock Academy of Music and Theater, the Detmold Academy of Music, the Hanover University of Music and Drama and at the Hamburg University of Music and Drama.
His work/action Product Placements, which helped to discuss copyright and the level of creation in music, was widely spread. In a 33 second piece he processed 70,200 quotations of foreign works, all of which he submitted individually via forms to the GEMA (the German Buma Stemra). Eventually he was accompanied by numerous journalists with a small truck full of completed applications to the GEMA Directorate General in Berlin. A few cubic metres of printed matter were placed in the reception hall of the GEMA office. The system was therefore completely stuck. The minimal samples used (milli-seconds) are intended to test the credibility and effectiveness of the GEMA in relation to the digital reality. The music production is consciously located in a legal grey area, which has been greatly enlarged by digital technologies. If such a fraction can still be labelled as music, it can still be linked to the original and the performing artist in terms of financial compensation for use.
This is close to his work Charts Music, in which he used the share prices of various companies to derive pitches. Besides the share prices, some other statistics were used, such as the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq. In this piece, too, reference is made to the borderline areas of copyright, and credits such as composers and copyright holders mention the respective companies instead of Kreidler himself.
For another work he commissioned composers from low-wage countries to plagiarize his own music for a commission for the Festival Klangwerkstatt Berlin. For much less money than Kreidler himself received as a commission, he had pieces ready for concert that were made for him in China and India. According to Kreidler, the action entitled Fremdarbeit is intended to focus attention on the themes of exploitation and authorship.
During this evening we focus on the archiving of our Pushing Scores project. A project on the nowadays meaning of the 'graphic score', which has been running for over the last 2-3 years. What are the possibilities of graphic scores, in a day and age in which graphic notation is still usually seen as a ‘drawing’, serving as some kind of sheet music?
To communicate the project to a larger audience DE PLAYER asked Varia to develop a context and technical environment as a web-based archival publication for the Pushing Scores project. The idea is that this material will be embodied by a dynamic, accessible and therefore active archive, which creates new relations, new perspectives and, at its best, new concepts for the production and/or processes of making scores. Varia will explain their ideas and approach on this matter.
- Valentina Vuksic will bring a live performance in which she approaches computers with transducers that transform electromagnetic radiation into sound within choreographically setups. The ‘runtime’ of executed software is staged for an audience to provide an acoustic experience: that of logic encountering the physical world.
- Ana Guedes is introducing her project Untitled Records; a performative sound installation weaving historical and emotional narratives through the “instrumentalisation” of a collection of records.
- Niek Hilkmann (part of Varia) will present his UNI (Universal Notation Ideal), a Pay2Print investigation in the simultaneous production and distribution of standardised graphical scores through the mediation of an automaton. It is developed by Niek Hilkmann and Joseph Knierzinger, based on a new notation system that is created to help conceptual composers in developing and exchanging conceptual music within one uniform language. The actual printing of the thermal paper is a stochastic performance in itself. By emphasizing this aspect of the machine as a musical entrepreneur, earning its own income, we explore the conditions of mechanised labour within the cultural industry and its corresponding ethics
Ana Guedes her project UNTITLED RECORDS fits in our idea of finding new ways for composing. Her archival approach and its political and personal implication are the starting point of this work. Because she uses and record archive it finally almost turns out to be a DJ set. This 'other way' around to come to sound is an interesting phenomenon. Also the technical implementation of possibilities to program the record players is interesting regarding for example the idea of schematics as a score.
-Ana Guedes is a multidisciplinary artist from Portugal who lives and works in The Hague. She works with sound, video, installation and performance. Her research focuses on the 'dialectic of tuning'. Within this framework she investigates the working of memory with the intention of recreating situations and thus evoking a 'presence'. Through subjective interpretations of the ability to instrumentalize objects, she creates catalysts for thinking and contemplation. Her project Untitled Records is a performative sound installation that interweaves historical and emotional narratives through the 'instrumentalisation' of a collection of vinyl records. An ensemble of Arduino-powered prepared record players is built as an instrumentation to make an intimate selection from a family archive of popular music. The records come from Angola, Portugal and Canada.
UNTITLED RECORDS is a performative sound installation weaving historical and emotional narratives through the “instrumentalisation” of a collection of records. An ensemble of reimagined record players are instruments built to perform an intimate selection from a family archive of popular music : “..a set of records carefully shipped home from a country at war forty years ago”.
The vinyls were purchased in Angola, Portugal and Canada over a time span from the 60s to the early 80s and have travelled over three continents.
Stained by the passage of time, scratched, with their covers eaten by moths the records are signed and dated; they exist as passive witnesses of a displacement in time and space.
Each date and signature is a coordinate, a clue in the reconstruction of a map tracing complex historical occurrences splitting into an infinite number of threads.
The multi arm record players with which several timelines can be played - from one single record to an ensemble of vinyls intertwine a juxtaposition of temporalities and imagined narratives trapped within the collection.
event title:TGC # 3 / MAT>NET>PU
participating artists: JOHANNES BERGMARK, HIELE MARTENS, HELGA JAKOBSON, XPUB
An evening with remarkable experiments and materialised conceptual flip flop. DE PLAYER will unveil its third issue of Tetra Gamma Circulaire (TGC) – the unknown audio magazine. TGC #3 is compiled in collaboration with students of the Piet Zwart Institute, and is also part of their Experimental Publishing programme of the Media Design Master, named XPUB.
Tetra Gamma Circulaire was initiated in 2015 by DE PLAYER with the aim to become an experimental audio magazine series without any restrictions in appearance, style, and/or shape. TGC #3 fits right in. Concretely, TGC #3 is a particular kind of publishing platform engineered for sonic experiments, instruments, and installations. Some dare say it's a kind of jukebox. The first edition of TGC #3 is limited to just twelve copies, and its presentation at this event is augmented with works created and compiled by the XPUB students. Next to the presentation of TGC#3 we are also hosting exciting demonstrations and live sets from the sound makers and breakers described below.
Sometimes 1 + 1 is greater than the sum of its parts, but if you put two of Belgium’s finest composers and musicians together, it adds up to an infinite number. Hiele Martens, or the collaboration of Lieven Martens Moana and Roman Hiele, delve deep into new territory that could be interpreted as a 2017 update of Maurice Kagel’s "Exotica", but made by self-aware electronic musicians. Hiele Martens' debut record is about to be released on Ultra Eczema and is expected to become one of the highlights of this year.
Whether culminating into actions or objects, Helga Jakobson's work responds to conditions of limbo within existence and acts as a platform to confront the unknown; it focuses on death, time and ephemerality. Currently she is constructing a digital and physical web; weaving together the overlapping, intuitive and sometimes complicated interconnections that comprise her interest in handcraft, witchcraft, and digitalcraft. The main threads that run between these interests are the experience of women, their traditional work and their sharing of knowledge. Jakobson has great reverence for intuition and it’s use as a technology. At DE PLAYER she will demonstrate her 'spider web record player'.
Johannes Bergmark is a Fylkingen affiliated sound artist, instrument builder and piano technician. His performances have been described as surrealist puppet theatre in which the characters are amplified objects such as old tools, kitchen utensils, toys, springs and decorative kitsch. Using contact microphones, Bergmark reveals their hidden acoustics, dynamic scales and unique timbres. Bergmark is the ultimate rethinker of what music can be, in sound and in performance, as you can sometimes find him hanging on two piano strings from a ceiling.
Experimental Publishing is a new course of the Piet Zwart Institute's Media Design Master programme. The concept of the course revolves around two core principles: first, the inquiry into the technological, political and cultural processes through which things are made public; and second, the desire to expand the notion of publishing beyond print media and its direct digital translation. The Experimental Publishing students who contributed to the development of TGC #3 are: Karina Dukalska, Max Franklin, Giulia de Giovanelli, Clàudia Giralt, Francisco González, Margreet Riphagen, Nadine Rotem-Stibbe and Kimmy Spreeuwenberg.
We got in touch with Helga Jakobson her work through Bas van den Hurk who in that time was teaching at St Joost post graduate program in which Helga took part. Because of the fact that she was developing a machine which produces sound through the process of reading spider webs, Bas tipped her to contact DE PLAYER. We had an appointment and it was clear that this definitely got our interest and the decided to present her prototype at an event in which other more inventive ways of sound making were presented. Also the idea of a spider web as a score of course matched with the Pushing Scores project. Het Arachnes Sonifier got more and more developed and soon we will publish an album (DOB094) with the sound, images and conceptual information on our label.Helga Jakobson is a Canadian artist whose practice consists of exploring conditions of limbo, with a focus on death, time and the ephemeral. Often her research leads her to short-lived and organic material with which she develops new systems and methods for engagement. This takes shape by building digital interfaces; instrumentation used to explore, amplify and reflect what is barely visible, tangible or audible, while expressing the resonance and relationship between people, plants and organic matter. She presented her project entitled Arachnes Sonifier, in which she captures and makes audible spider webs. Her spider web record player (Arachnes Sonifier), which she developed for this purpose, is an instrument that plays, registers and converts a spider web into sound by means of light sensors. She passes on the notation she distils from this to music companies in order to come to performances.
Knowledge sharing across traditions has often taken place through oral mythology. Creation myths, such as in the Hopi and Navajo traditions, often centre around a Grandmother Spider figure who wove the night sky with her silk. There are spider figures in West African, Akan, and Caribbean myths personifying the spider as a trickster. In Japan there’s a focus on the lure of the spider, where it is sometimes likened to a prostitute. However, my favourite spider myth is from Greek mythology; that of Arachne who wove a tapestry better than Athena, the Goddess of weaving and war. Arachne challenged Athena, believing in the superiority of her own abilities and with the support of her community. During the competition, Athena wove a tapestry depicting all of the times mortals challenged the Gods and lost, while Arachne wove accounts of the many times Zeus had raped mortal women. After Arachne won the competition, Athena transformed her into a spider, and this is where the name for arachnids originates. Arachne, a disturber of the status quo, is thought of as one of the first feminist authors.
Using the material bequeathed to Arachne’s doomed progeny, I’ve been weaving a visual and sonic tapestry of my own, using digital technology to form new means of mythologizing and disseminating non-verbal experience. The sonification of spiderwebs asserts a reverence for the environment, the beauty of the ephemeral and loss. When the webs are harvested, my hand effects their original form. These webs then become a game of Cat’s Cradle of sorts between the spider and I, not quite a collaboration but rather more of an exercise in ongoingness and recognition of loss. The intact web will not exist long in the world, and with my interference; even less so. This strange, affective relay continues into the recording process which results in the interpreted sound of an interpreted web. These actions are complicated and tenuous, as most human relations with companion species are. The recordings I make of the webs are an act of commemoration, and as Myers and Husk propose; "This requires reading with our sense attuned to stories told in otherwise muted registers.”
The idea of a graphic score, a readable gesture, aids in the playability/repeatability of a piece of music which through it’s repetition allows for exploration, interpretation and imagination. These spiders have laid out scores in the form of webs that are barely visible ephemera drifting between branches or street signs or windows and I long to understand them. They remind me of George Crumb’s circular compositions; minus the pen and paper. In actuality, they are visual representations of the spider’s consciousness (who can forget Dr Peter Witt’s experiments with drug use on spiders and their resulting webs). A spiderweb is not only an illustration of a spider’s mental landscape, but an instrument it plucks and plays. These structures are scores and instruments unreadable/unplayable by humans, but interpretable through speculative fabulation, in the case of the recordings I create.
The webs I’ve chosen for this publication were harvested in the fall of 2018, after the first snowfall in Winnipeg, Canada. To find them I searched through basements, and bars, and zoos, and homes, and parks; though I found the majority of them in a greenhouse where I teetered over cacti and lavender bushes to collect them. The process of finding them could be likened to trying to make the invisible visible. In searching; imagining where I would make a web, and then marvelling when I find it in the most unlikely place, which only enchants me further into the world of spiders and webs and mythology. They aren’t entirely in line with Darwinian structures after all, not serving a solely evolutionary purpose; unlikely structures vulnerable and more powerful in space and time.
This work by BJ Nilsen can be seen as an observing documentary and is related to time lapse filmmaking. In addition, it places itself in the tradition of electro acoustic music and 'musique concrète'; a French music movement that makes use of everyday sounds that are processed with the help of electronics into compositions and sound collages.
From the Dark Ecology project of Sonic Acts, Amsterdam, BJ Nilsen has visited many mines and mining areas over time. As a sound artist he realized how much sound there is in the mining industry and began to think in sonic terms about its impact and meaning. What is the relationship between the sounds of mining and the community that surrounds it? Where does mining stop? How much influence does it have on a community? Over the years he has built up an extensive sound archive around this subject. Both in active mines and in the abandoned mines, buildings, surrounding areas and logistics locations in Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Russia and elsewhere. In it he found the fragility of mining processes and the impact that mining activities have on the population and their biotope and he also expanded his archive with all related logistic processes. In the final processing of the sound, he uses the facets of mining as different sound tracks.
The composition follows a more or less linear path - starting with 'deep' time. This line is interrupted a few times and the different time periods work together and overlap. It is a mix of sound recordings made at different times. Sometimes recordings from four years ago are combined with more recent recordings. Thus different layers of time are presented, from slowly unfolding sounds that represent a deep geological time, to sounds of transport, to the kind of sounds that we recognize as science fiction to indicate the future. For example, mining is in the arctic zone and research and an asteroid mining law was adopted in Luxembourg in 2017 that gives companies ownership of what they extract from celestial bodies. The idea is that you find an asteroid that is really rich in some rare metal that we really need and that one can claim that. Of course, it only becomes interesting when the resources on earth are exhausted.
For example, in the composition radio broadcasts from space are used as well as a recoding of the probe that has ended up on an asteroid. In this way the work creates a third space that belongs to the individual listener and that arises from the interaction between the original space and the imaginary space, created by the composition, the sound processing and the perception of the listener.
There is a small tribute to GRM (Groupe de recherches Musicales) in Paris and Pierre Henry which is directly related to iron ore. The 'musique concrète' as developed by Henry at GRM was made by magnetic tape. Some of the recordings were finally mixed in the studios of GRM. Magnetic tape was the medium of BJ Nilsen's youth. He had hundreds of cassette tapes, like many at the time. It made him realize how closely he was actually involved in the process of iron ore, and how his development as an artist was shaped thanks to iron ore.
Douglas Kahn is Professor of Media and Innovation at the National Institute of Experimental Arts (NIEA), University of New South Wales, Sydney, and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis, where he was the Founding Director of Technocultural Studies. He is known primarily for his writings on the use of sound in the avant-garde and experimental arts and music, and history and theory of the media arts. His writings have also been influential in the scholarly area of sound studies and the practical area of sound art. His best known book 'Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts' was published by MIT Press in 1999.
Currently Kahn is researching new interfaces and possibilities of sound composition, image and performance. He discards old categories of sound and performance and replaces them with a new category of "energy" in the bigger narrative of ecology and other sensitivities.
That evening Kahn did some kind of improv session on the works of the three invited artists. ‘Mining’ BJ Nilsen, ‘Jazz’ Max Franklin and ‘Earthquake’ Aurelie Lierman.
‘In Ore different layers of time are overlapping, from the deep time of geology to the superfast time of our current economy and the future. For the record I used recordings from the iron ore processing plant in Kirkenes, both with the plant working and not working. When it was empty, I mapped out the building by recording it. You hear the room tones, pigeons flying around, doors flapping, and the sound of the town blending in. I used recordings from Pasvik, south of Kirkenes, where the rock is at least 2.9 billion years old. The north of Norway is one of the oldest rock formations in the world. It doesn’t relate directly to mining, but it extends the project to include geology, deep time and stone. Those recordings symbolise the stasis of time. The mountain just sits there. The sounds are environmental. I made field recordings in the winter, you hear ice crystals cracking because there was a layer of ice on the snow. I also went to Näätämö/Neiden and just over the border to Finland because it’s land of the Sámi, and I wanted to have that in. The Sámi have a lot of respect for nature. Throughout the landscape there are sacred stones that are very important to them. I also worked with stone as an instrument, striking and recording it. I did the same with coal. I made recordings of the sound of striking coal at the house of Hilde Methi, a curator who lives in Kirkenes. She still stores coal there in a small outhouse (called ‘kullbingen’). There are recordings from the harbour of Murmansk with the coal trains coming in from Kuzbass in southwestern Siberia. The next phase in the processing of iron is represented by recordings from inside the Tata Steel factories in Wijk aan Zee, 30 kilometers from Amsterdam. I also visited Most in the Czech Republic because there is a huge operational open pit mine. It’s not iron ore but lignite, ‘braunkohle’. It is vast scar in the landscape, and really an incredible place. The recordings I did in the former mining region of the Netherlands are again more environmental: the mine near Heerlen has been developed into a park and nature area. I’m very interested in the hidden layers and history the landscape. That’s why I wanted to have a thread about the regeneration of mining areas. I think it is important to explore the changes that the surrounding landscape and the mining site itself are undergoing, from active to closed, from contaminated landscape to re-vegetation. The future is represented through using radio emissions from space and a recoding from the probe that landed on the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. And then there are sounds used for seismic interferometry: the decoding of ambient seismic noise, micro earthquakes and also surface bound sounds. What I like about these recordings is that they already have been processed through the rock and soil and transposed into human hearing range.’
‘This mining work is tied directly to the computer age, itself an alchemic expression of man’s ingenious use of the earth. Modernity is made by the manipulation and transmutation of organic and synthetic materials through design and research. Without tantalum and niobium, there are no micro-capacitors; without gallium, no photovoltaics.’
‘In mining there are two types of waste. One is the waste you make to get to the ore. If you have a gold mine and the gold layer sits 50 metres below surface, you have to remove 50 metres of waste. The ore layer contains only a certain amount of the mineral that will bring you revenue. The ore goes to a processing plant and there you take out the tailings and the rest is the waste of your process. It can be a slurry, it may contain chemicals or poisonous materials so you have to contain it and treat and store it properly. Sometimes this can go horrible wrong. It is important for companies to manage this. More waste means more costs.’
‘The composition follows a more or less linear path – starting with deep time. It just turned out that way, perhaps because that’s how we generally tend to structure material. But the chronology is interrupted a couple of times, and the different time planes are cut-up, they interact and overlap, because I mix sound recordings that were done at different times. In that way I present different layers of time, from slowly unfolding sounds that represent deep geological time, to sounds of transport, to the sort of sounds we recognise as science fiction to denote the future. The work creates a third space that belongs to the individual listener and which arises from the interaction between the original space and imaginary space, created through the composition and sound processing.’
‘We dig deep into the earth to get to layers of deep time, extract it and use the ancient material, in the case of coal, for electricity, for heating the house, commodities, to type a message on a phone. It’s absurd when you start to think about it. So much time is compressed in this material and it’s burned up in minutes. It’s not like wind or the sun, which give you immediate energy. It’s millions of years compressed into hard materials that are burned up, like coal, or painstakingly refined to yield useful metal. This ungraspable void of deep time fascinates me: the time compressed in iron ore, the coal that started billions of years ago as organic material, the gold flecked asteroid far away in space, or the more recent ‘slambanken’ in Kirkenes, a manmade landscape of unusable slag that might be mined in the future.’
‘We trace out all the veins of the earth, and yet, living upon it, undermined as it is beneath our feet, are astonished that it should occasionally cleave asunder or tremble: as though, forsooth, these signs could be any other than expressions of the indignation felt by our sacred parent!’
‘If, as Novalis and many of his friends believed, stones, metals, and rock strata amount to transcriptions of the earth’s history, what better place to study that history than in the mines and caverns of the earth, where the entire record is preserved and exposed? At this point the ancient conception of mines and mountain caverns as places of lapidary activity encounters a a second folkoristic notion—that in the interior of mountains time stands still.’
‘The slambanken is a totally artificial, man-made landscape that has formed because the waste of the iron ore processing was flushed into the fjord. It is a base of hard rock under the water with different layers of material. It is a playground for sedimentologists because you can see how land and deltas form. We did a study and tried to identify how thick the layer was in different areas. We took samples and ran them through the laboratory in order to identify how many tons of final concentrate we would be able to get out of the slambanken. When they were cleaning the old silos they flushed everything out into the slambanken. This was part of a test production of around 30.000 tons. We can see layers of hematite. It is not enough to make a mine plan, but enough to get a small cash flow. You have to take a boat to get there. We have a tunnel that leads there.’
Interview with Ylva Ståhl and Kristoffer Johansson from the Sydvaranger mine in Kirkenes, by Benny Nilsen, Hilde Methi and Annette Wolfsberger, March 2018.
‘You cannot talk about mining in the North without getting into the question what it means for the landscape, for the people and the animals living there, for the communities and the relations between all these. In a sense, you cannot not bring out those relations: how a society depends on mining and how it affects it.’
‘The sound of the mine was always present. It created a vacuum after it closed. When the mill was in full operation the only time when we woke up in the night was when the train was not going. We were living quite close to the railway, so when the train did not run we knew instantaneously that something had happened, either in the mine or in the mill.’
Interview with Ylva Ståhl and Kristoffer Johansson from the Sydvaranger mine in Kirkenes, by Benny Nilsen, Hilde Methi and Annette Wolfsberger, March 2018.
‘I am drawn to the Arctic as a sound person because of its relative remoteness. The landscape is fairly untouched, it is scarsely populated, it’s desolate. The sounds of nature are not often interrupted by other sounds. Except for the mining, but that then is also why I find mining in the Arctic especially interesting. The relentless nature in the Arctic constantly reminds you that you are a human being and that you are nor really supposed to be there because the harshness of the environment might kill you. It’s good for the human psyche to be reminded of that. You can only survive there if you work with nature. If you work against it, it will kill you. The people in the Arctic have a lot of respect for nature, it forms them.’
‘The Arctic is changing quickly. If it goes on like it goes now, the ice will open up and it will not be so desolate anymore. That is quite scary. Will it mean that other places will become desolate instead, uninhabitable? What shifts will we see? What shifts happened in the past? Why did people in the past settle in an environment like this? Were they forced up North by circumstances? These questions are really haunting me.’
‘Far down in the Earth the rock is actually moving. Workers hear the rock talk, it crackles, it makes sounds, spits slivers. These can be an indicator that something is about to happen, the sounds tell something about the stability of the rock. Listening underground is like reading the environment. Geologists read the stone, but they also listen to it. By physically interacting with the stone you can determine what material it is. Different types of stone give different frequency readings. Geologists use seismic soundings to map out the resources in the earth. They put geophones in an array, and record the blast of a detonation underground. It gives them an image, a bit similar to sonar. It’s mostly really low sounds that you have to transpose up three times to get within human hearing range. In practice it’s quite mathematical, but it still it is part of the sound world too. Through soundwaves geologists are able to map what is underground.’
‘There is a little homage to GRM and Pierre Schaeffer on the record. For me it relates directly to iron ore in so far that the type of musique concrète and tape music developed at GRM was made possible by magnetic tape. I mixed part of the recording in the GRM studios in Paris where I was working on another acousmatic piece. Magnetic tape was the medium of my youth. I had hundreds of cassette tapes, mostly TDK. It made me recognise again how close we are to the source of ore, and how my development as an artist was shaped by iron ore.’
‘The iron ore is refined and filtered, making sure the pure magnetite comes out. Only a small percentage of the ore is iron, the rest is slag and waste. It is a process that somehow relates to my own artistic process. I’m always processing and refining my field recordings. I apply filters, use electronics. It’s a kind of sound alchemy. All to get to the desired result: the gold!’
Black Moon is composed of shortwave radio signals, recorded via the online receiver website of the Technical University of Enschede. Each signal was chosen for the resonance it evokes in the listener, later interwoven with other signals recorded from the same source for several days. The selection of sounds is done according to properties that lie outside the predictable controllable parameters in order to arrive at a complex multidimensional listening experience. By compactly interweaving the frequencies, a different image is created for the listener at each listening session because of the psycho-acoustic selections that take place at the listener. The record can thus be considered as a potential composition, which is performed by the listener himself through the aforementioned process.
John Duncan took part in our event at 5 October 2018. His background in performance and his multimedia and confrontational approach gives him full credits to be part of DE PLAYER its program. When we met we had discussions on several professional subjects and decided to realize a publication. The fact that the sound on the records is an everchanging piece because of the psycho acoustic effects, make the record more into a tool than a static recording. This approach can also be seen in the approach of the electronic voice phenomena (EVP) of Friedrich Jürgenson, a researcher who claimed to have detected voices of the dead hidden in radio static. Duncan’s also works sometimes together with Carl Michael Hausswolff who is an expert in EVP.John Duncan has been active for decades at the cutting edge of performances, video, experimental music, installation, pirate radio and television. He has played a central role in the development of performing arts in Los Angeles, experimental music as a member of LAFMS, Japanese noise and pirate radio in Tokyo. Duncan's work has a lasting influence on experimental music because his art is generally still refined and refined and he regularly collaborates with young artists. He is currently a sound designer at the art academy of Bologna, Italy. Since the beginning of his work, he has made extensive use of recorded sound. His music consists mainly of recordings of shortwave radio, field recordings and voice.
In the mid-1980s Duncan began pirate radio and television broadcasting with his own custom-built portable channels, operating illegally from the roofs of apartment buildings in central Tokyo and from an abandoned American military hospital near Sagamihara. He also made periodic broadcasts from his own home.
The medium of radio still plays a role in arriving at compositions. The publication Black Moon (DOB 096) is composed of shortwave radio signals, recorded via the online receiver website of the Technical University of Enschede.
During this evening we focus on the archiving of our Pushing Scores project. A project on the nowadays meaning of the 'graphic score', which has been running for over the last 2-3 years. What are the possibilities of graphic scores, in a day and age in which graphic notation is still usually seen as a ‘drawing’, serving as some kind of sheet music?
- Valentina Vuksic will bring a live performance in which she approaches computers with transducers that transform electromagnetic radiation into sound within choreographically setups. The ‘runtime’ of executed software is staged for an audience to provide an acoustic experience: that of logic encountering the physical world.
- Ana Guedes is introducing her project Untitled Records; a performative sound installation weaving historical and emotional narratives through the “instrumentalisation” of a collection of records.
- Niek Hilkmann (part of Varia) will present his UNI (Universal Notation Ideal), a Pay2Print investigation in the simultaneous production and distribution of standardised graphical scores through the mediation of an automaton. It is developed by Niek Hilkmann and Joseph Knierzinger, based on a new notation system that is created to help conceptual composers in developing and exchanging conceptual music within one uniform language. The actual printing of the thermal paper is a stochastic performance in itself. By emphasizing this aspect of the machine as a musical entrepreneur, earning its own income, we explore the conditions of mechanised labour within the cultural industry and its corresponding ethicsWe know Varia as a community based initiative which combines several knowledge in the interdisciplinary filed of music, programming, publishing, hacking, social interventions, critical positions, etc. It is based in Rotterdam in the area were we operate. We knew some of its members and thought it would be nice and effective to approach them with a question of doing something with the archive of Pushing Scores. Instead of making a paintwork publication we wanted it to be more adventurous and in line with the concept of the project.
To communicate the Pushing Scores to a larger audience DE PLAYER asked Varia to develop a context and technical environment as a web-based archival publication. The idea is that this material will be embodied by a dynamic, accessible and therefore active archive, which creates new relations, new perspectives and, at its best, new concepts for the production and/or processes of making scores. During an evening at the Varia collective, where Valentia Vuksic and Ana Guedes also played a live set and explained their work and backgrounds, Niek Hilkmann, who is part of the Varia team, presented his UNI (Universal Notation Ideal); a Pay2Print research into the simultaneous production and distribution of standardized graphic scores by means of an automatic machine. The UNI was developed by Niek Hilkmann and Joseph Knierzinger. It is a machine into which a coin is inserted and from which a score printed on a roll of paper is then delivered. It is based on a new notation system designed to help conceptual composers develop and exchange conceptual music in one uniform language. The actual printing of the thermal paper is a stochastic performance in itself. By emphasizing this aspect of the machine as a musical entrepreneur earning his own income, the conditions of mechanized labor within the cultural industry and the associated ethics are investigated within this project. His presentation was a cross-over between a lecture and a demonstration. On the spot, the audience could activate the UNI.
Black MIDI is a music genre consisting of compositions that use MIDI files to create a song remix containing a large number of notes, typically in the thousands or millions, and sometimes billions. People who make black MIDIs are known as blackers. However, there are no specific criteria of what is considered "black"; as a result, finding an exact origin of black MIDI is impossible.
DE PLAYER always has a strong interest in decoupling publising from a stereotypical understanding of making things public that comes from an historical and economical media constraint linked to the print, software, music, and film industries, and that has limited any form of meaningful explorative complementary or conflictual combinations between media in the field of cultural production. This not only counts for publishing but also for exploring new possibilities for the art practise in general.
Transformation of information is a fact that occurs during the process of composing and performing the compositions. In that sense there is never a perfect reproduction but always an interpretation. This is an interesting process in which boundaries can be explored and in which the idea of 'cracked media', whose performers challenge the intended effect of the technology and actively use alternative acts through subversive acts of abuse and misconception to generate results, is an interesting one. position.
Black MIDI is a beautiful example of how new technology / consumer electronics and its abuse leads to great new implications and applications. This one is pretty contemporary one and results in great imagery and sound.
Though the two are unrelated in origin, the concept of impossible piano existed long before black MIDI, manifesting itself within Conlon Nancarrow's work involving player pianos where he punched holes in piano cards, creating extremely complex musical compositions in the same impossible, unplayable spirit of black MIDI.
Black MIDI was first employed in Shirasagi Yukki at Kuro Yuki Gohan's rendition of "U.N. Owen Was Her?", an extra boss theme from the Touhou Project shooter video game The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. It was uploaded to the site Nico Nico Douga in 2009, and public awareness of Black MIDI started to spread from Japan to China and Korea in the following two years. In its beginning years, Black MIDIs were represented visually with traditional, two-stave piano sheet music,contained a number of notes only in the thousands. They were created with MIDI sequencers such as Music Studio Producer, and Singer Song Writer, and played through MIDI players such as MAMPlayer and Timidity++. The Black MIDI community in Japan vanished quickly because, according to Jason Nguyen (owner of the channel Gingeas), the group was “analogous to those TV shows where there’s a mysterious founder of a civilization that is not really known throughout the course of the show.”
The popularity of Black MIDI transitioned into Europe and the United States due to a video of a composition uploaded by Kakakakaito1998 in February 2011, and shortly thereafter, blackers from around the world began pushing limits of the style by making compositions with notes increasing into the millions and using an enormous number of colors and patterns to match the complexity of the notes. They also formed the sites Guide to Black MIDI and Official Black MIDI Wikia that introduced and set the norm of Black MIDI.
The first of these tracks to reach the million-note mark was that of “Necrofantasia” from Touhou Project video game Perfect Cherry Blossom, arranged by TheTrustedComputer. The end of the title of many Black MIDI videos displays how many notes are in the piece. The number of notes and file sizes that could be played back have grown with the rising amount of processing and 64-bit programs computers are able to handle, and while Black MIDIs of Japanese video game music and anime are still common, the genre has also begun spilling into modern-day pop songs, such as "Wrecking Ball" by Miley Cyrus. Despite this increased computer storage, there are still Black MIDI files that could cause an operating system to slow down. The two largest black MIDIs are "Armageddon v3" and "TheTrueEnd," both of which contain the maximum number of notes allowed in the MIDI standard (about 93 trillion). Due to the nature of their creation and their sheer size, they are unable to be played back and recorded.
English-language blackers have formed collaboration groups, such as the Black MIDI Team, where they make MIDI files and visuals together so they can be uploaded online sooner. Blackers around the world have used software such as Synthesia, FL Studio, SynthFont, Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard, Piano From Above, MIDITrail, vanBasco Karaoke Player, MIDIPlayer (Java program), MAMPlayer, Music Studio Producer, Singer Song Writer, Tom's MIDI Player, TMIDI, and Timidity++ to create Black MIDIs. Some of them, like Jason, record the MIDI files at a slow tempo and then speed the footage in video-editing to avoid RAM and processing issues.
The term "black MIDI" is derived from how there are so many notes in each piece that the score would look nearly black (or would look really black) on traditional sheet music. According to California-based blacker TheTrustedComputer, black MIDI was intended as more of a remix style than an actual genre, and derived from the idea of "bullet hell" shoot 'em up games, which involved "so many bullets at a time your eyes can't keep up."[3] Black MIDI has also been considered the digital equivalent, as well as a response, to composer Conlon Nancarrow's use of the player piano which also involved experimenting with several thick notes to compose intricate pieces without hands. The Guide to Black MIDI, however, denies this influence: “We believe that references to Conlon Nancarrow and piano rolls are too deep and Black MIDI origins must be found in digital MIDI music world [sic]."
Black MIDI first received coverage by Michael Connor, a writer for the non-profit arts organization Rhizome, in September 2013, leading to attention from publications and bloggers including Aux, Gawker's Adrian Chen, Jason Kottke,[8] and The Verge. It has garnered acclaim from journalists, bloggers and electronic musicians, with many noting it as a distinctive and engaging genre thanks to how regular piano notes are combined to make new, abstract sounds not heard in many styles of music, as well as the visuals representing the notes. Hackaday's Elliot Williams spotlighted the style as ironic, given that the fast-paced arpeggios and "splatter-chords" that are developed with a restricted number of voices come together to make other tones that leads a piano sounding more like a chiptune and less like an actual piano.
event:
title: MUSIC&CAPITALISM
date:Sat 18 May 2013 09.00 hrs - 24.00 hrs
location: SKAR office , Groot Handelsgebouw, Rotterdam
artists: MARCO FUSINATO & JOHANNES KREIDLER
description:
A reading in combination with a 6 hrs concert by Marco Fusinato.
DE PLAYER and WORM present a day about music and economy, revolving around two authoritative sound-artists/composers, whose work is engaged with political-economical processes. Marco Fusinato's (AU) mangled noise-guitar excursions are informed by the political explosions and pitfalls of of radical collectives from Autonomia and beyond. Johannes Kreidler (DE) who made a piece consisting of 70 thousand samples, and for each of these fragments he asked permission from the GEMA (the German BUMA-STEMRA). The authority who controls copy right specifically for musicians.
Stuttering live concret, wailing feedback, Xenakis-esque swarms of descending glissandi, abusive guitar wrangling, walls of harsh static on a double sided black vinyl containing edited sound from the live recording of Marco Fusinato his endurance performance Spectral Arrows for DE PLAYER at 18 May 2013 at Groothandelsgebouw, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Spectral Arrows is an ongoing series of long-duration performances for guitar and electronics. In Spectral Arrows, Fusinato arrives at the venue when it opens for business, sets up his equipment facing a wall and proceeds to play for the whole day until the end of business hours. Fusinato presents himself here in the guise of a worker, clocking on and unceremoniously clocking off at the end, refusing to allow the behind-the-scenes mystery of rehearsals and preparations to lend an aura to the performance, and affirming the deskilled ethos of his work.
For the audience, the length of the performance frustrates the expectation of a manageable form, forcing all but the hardiest audience members to content themselves with only a fragment of the whole. Even for those who stick it out, the extended duration, like in the late works of Morton Feldman, destroys the listener’s ability to retain and assess the structure of the performance. Breaking with both the traditional form of the musical performance and, through Fusinato’s resolutely anti-social position facing away from the audience, the standard affective relationship between audience and performer, the sound of Spectral Arrows becomes a monumental aural sculpture, filling the space, not with steel or concrete, but with vibrations travelling through air. We got in touch with Marco Fusinato through our 8-INCH series. For this we published 8 inch records with artists and labels. One of these labels was Circle Records which had been running for a few years by John Nixon, Julian Dashper and Marc Fusinato. For the release event only John Nixon could be present. Julian unfortunately died at young age. Marco was primarily active as a visual artist. One of his projects is called Black Mass Implosion. In this project he appropriates scores of avant tgarde composers and connects each not with one arbitrary point on the horizon. This creates strong graphic works and partly blackens out the original score. From this perspective also his live performances can be considered as black mass implosions. Also because most of his work deals strongly with political issues we invited him for a performance in the event bnamed Music & Capitalism. He suggested to do an 8 hour performance in an official office building. On a Saturday from 09.00 to 17.00 hrs. When normally people are doing there office work now Marco played for 8 hrs in an empty office building. People were guided to the 8th floor into the directors room which was darkened with newspapers stacked on the windows. A huge PA was in the office blazing loud but very articulated. Good food and drinks were served.
Marco Fusinato is a contemporary artist and musician whose work has taken the form of installation, photographic reproduction, performance and recording. His overall aesthetic project combines allegorical appropriation with an interest in the intensity of a gesture or event. As a musician, Fusinato explores the notion of noise as music, using the electric guitar and associated electronics to improvise intricate, wide-ranging and physically affecting frequencies.
Marco Fusinato’s Mass Black Implosion series began in 2007. Serial in form, each work uses an existing cultural document – a 20th or 21st-century avant-garde music score – as the formal, material and conceptual basis for a set of actions or interventions. Specifically, working with facsimile sheets of the score, Fusinato draws lines from each note on the page to one chosen point. Where a composition comprises more than one sheet, these are then singularly framed and installed sequentially on the gallery wall, creating an extraordinary graphic rendering of the energy of aural compression and expansion.
In these works, treated by Fusinato as propositions for new noise compositions, the qualities of each individual note and their relation to those around them are effectively compressed into a single point of intense concentration. This is the energy of implosion, which always infers at least the potential of its counter-energy in explosion, energy radiating out from the single point of origin. Fusinato’s intervention into the scores therefore visualises and proposes the possibility of a dialectical energy running through the original work that has a political dimension as much as an artistic one – a relentless propensity to both destruction and expressive creation in the single action, or in this case to the production of noise.
