Last July 2023, I wrote a one-page article for The Wire Magazine (July 2023, #473) featuring a collection of records and sound works that focus on the sonic proprieties of plants, biofeedback work, sonification of plant chemicals, plant-based field recordings, and plant music folklore. The article includes a short review of records/audioworks from Dr. George Milstein, Jeroen Diepenmaat, Ludwig Berger, Yuji Dogane & Mamoru Fujieda, Christine Ödlund, David Vélez and Zach Poff. This guide to plant life on disc is a companion to the article about Michael Allen Z Prime‘s new set of 3 CDs called Biolectrical Music compiling his audio and video work across bioelectrical compositions, bioelectrical field recordings, and bioelectrical installations.
Working With What You Have was created for the radio festival Radiophrenia (2023, Glasgow, Scotland) and is composed of field recordings collected during one year of work (April 2022-May 2023) in Manhattan, NY. This piece follows the making of a Tonkotsu ramen soup in a compact kitchen in Midtown. This type of ramen is known for its long periods of cooking that can extend for over 12 hours. The sounds of the different stages of preparing the ramen broth are interwoven with the fast-paced rhythms of commuting to the city, the sounds of the subway, traffic, sirens, walkways, and workers.
A sonic feature of Midtown, Manhattan, brought forward in this piece is the sound of artificial waterfalls abundant in small pocket gardens between corporate buildings, offices, and international consulates. The anesthetic quality of the sounds of the artificial waterfall in an otherwise stressful environment is a revealing piece of the fabric of this neighborhood. Its calmness and sense of rest constitute a feature of the capitalist structure of the city and the sense of empire-building, business as usual, serenity, and high productivity at work.
The latter sounds of this piece are from a Union rally in Manhattan, aiming to unionize a well-known grocery store chain. Voices from different labor unions and work sectors, including construction workers, delivery and service workers, baristas, and other professionals, come together for fairer work conditions in the city.
* The ramen broth is made of pork and chicken bones and served with chashu, toasted minced garlic, scallions, egg, and bean sprouts. ** The Union drive fell short by one vote.
This music chart was published in Issue #447 of The Wire Magazine, and it was inspired by works dealing with sounds sourced from commutes to work, public transportation, sonic interpretations of landscapes adjacent to roads or train tracks, and oral testimonies around transportation infrastructures.
Discontinued Commutes 15
Yara Mekawei & Mina Nasr – Shoubra Line (Atrellewa)
On Jan 17, I hosted one hour of radio on Radio Row, a new show on WFMU, run by the station music director Olivia Bradley-Skill. This hour featured new radio collages under the banner of career anxiety, show business tips, and self-help. Also, featuring listener calls, and other collages taken from the piece Second Hand Third Eye.
People Like Us/Vicki Bennett is currently Hallwalls Artist in Residence at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY. This residency is a multi-tier project consisting of an onsite new film called Fourth Wall and a six-channel audio collage called First Person featuring readings from her co-authored book The Fundamental Questions. In parallel to the onsite exhibition, Vicki Bennett created an online archive of new micro-commissions from collaborators across the field of visual, audio, and textual art. These works respond to the themes of first person / the fourth and can be heard and seen on this WFMU page:
Featured Artists: Dina Kelberman, Buttress O’Kneel, Mark Hurst, Scott Williams, Irene Moon, Jasmin Blasco, Matmos, id m theft able, Sheila B, Ergo Phizmiz, Yon Visell, Porest, David Shea, Gregor Weichbrodt, Carlo Patrão, Tim Maloney, Gwilly Edmondez, Jon Leidecker (aka Wobbly), People Like Us, Peter Jaeger, Ranjit Bhatnagar, Adriene Lilly, Micah Moses, Andrew Sharpley, Andie Brown, John Kilduff (Let’s Paint TV) & Hearty White.
Stills from “Fourth Wall” (2020) by People Like Us
For this project, I contributed with a 40-minute radio collage called Second Hand Third Eye that mixes themes related to self-image, consciousness, perception, existentialism, media theory, and extra-dimensions. The creative process for this piece started with a quick survey of academic literature anchored on selfhood and a compilation of terms orbiting the construct of self.*** This list of keywords was the starting point for creating a dedicated archive of over one thousand voice samples from radio and tv shows from the 1950s to the present day. Often contradictory, non-sensical, or meta-referential, these samples come together in a collective search for meaning, both local and cosmic. More info: wfmu.org/playlists/shows/95230
Hudson River fishermen heading out at dawn, Peter Lourie, 1998
Last February 2020, I visited the Constitution Marsh Audubon Center and Sanctuary Trail in the Hudson River to make some field recordings of the environment surrounding the brackish tidal marsh. The Constitution Marsh is one of five large estuarine environments connected to the Hudson River and provides natural habit to several species of birds, fish, plants, and many vertebrate and invertebrate species. This wetland area is located on the east side of the Hudson, near Cold Spring, and is surrounded by the Hudson Highlands.
Tidal Marsh, Hudson River, 10’20”, Feb 2020, download
The soundscape above was recorded on a small hill overlooking the tidal marsh. It was a very windy day, so I sheltered the microphone between the rocky steps of the trail. The resulting recording captures the sounds of branches and dry leaves rustling in the wind, bird calls, and the sound of the Amtrak train on the distance with its characteristic horn. The marsh provides foraging, nesting, and resting habitat to more than 200 species of birds. However, this New York State Bird Conservation Area is still subject to a large conglomeration of human-made noises like the train and low flying airplanes.
The more pervasive sound in the area is the constant sound of airplanes. I tried to record the sound of a passing aircraft through the vibrating trunk of a tree by placing a microphone inside of a hollow tree. The airplane’s sound reverberating on the wooden walls resulted in an eerie drone sound.
Phragmites australis, the common reed, is a non-native marsh plant spreading in many of the Hudson River wetlands. This plant forms fast-growing stands of stems, transforming the diversity of the habitat into a monoculture by crowding out native vegetation. Reeds introduce changes to the local microtopography, increase fire potential, decrease salinity, and outcompete plants. These changes have a ripple effect that ends up degrading the diversity of wetlands and coastal marshes and endangering wildlife. The Constitution Marsh Audubon Center dedicates its conservation efforts to the control and management of reeds in the area by using black geotextile material to flatten and cover patches of the vegetation. This method raises the temperature of the soil, killing the root system of the plant, allowing for the future growth of native vegetation.
Small brook flowing into the tidal marsh, Hudon River, 2’08”. Feb 2020, download
Carlo Patrão *photos by the Constitution Marsh Audubon Center
The February edition of The Wire magazine (issue 432) features the chart Waterfall as Metronome, composed of works inspired by the sight and sound of waterfalls including field recordings, on-site improvisation, sound installations, white noise, ethnographic work, and new-age interpretations of water, flow and the effects of negative ions. While putting together this list, I imagined a speculative history of music where compositions were not driven by metronome’s mechanical account of time, but by the continuous atemporal flow of a waterfall.
Waterfall as Metronome 15
Sarah Hennies – Gather (Category of manifestation)
I feel like a balloon going up into the atmosphere, looking, gathering information, and relaying it back. Rachel Rosenthal, 1985
Last April 2019, Sounding Out! published my two-part article, “On the poetics of balloon music,” exploring sound, listening, and the atmosphere through the object of the balloon. The first part focuses on late 18th-century balloon travels and the descriptions of silence in the upper air that constituted a staple of Victorian balloon memoirs and literature of the time. Ascending above the noise of the industrialized city, the first balloonists were constructing a sonic identity rooted in the privilege of buoyancy and constructs of the sublime, harmony, and silence that excluded other ways of sounding.
The sight of boundless space and the quietude of the higher regions of the atmosphere inspired colonial narratives of territorial expansion. Sounds produced outside this imperialist worldview were perceived as invasion, contamination, and noise. By establishing an early connection between the exploration of the atmosphere and a listening ear based on elitism, race, and class, the article goes on to analyze some contemporary sound-art practices that use balloons to explore the atmosphere and that take on the challenge of creating a more inclusive relationship with the medium of air.
Against Levity: Experimental Music and the Latex Balloon
Part 2 of this article features an interview with composer and sound artist Judy Dunaway, who has been developing sculptural sonic performances with balloons for over 25 years. Dunaway’s work with the balloon as a sound producer has been the exclusive focus of several records (e.g., Balloon Music, Mother of Balloon Music), scores, sound sculptures, solo performances, ensembles, and installations. In this interview, Judy Dunaway talks about how her balloon compositions are in active dialogue with questions relating to feminism, body/mind, ecology, civil rights, memory, and the overall creation of musical expression and lexicon that lives outside a classical heritage.
As Dunaway points out, the balloon as a musical instrument bypasses dominant hierarchies of music production, leveling the access to experimentation and sonic textures that are restricted by expensive electronic technology. Besides democratizing sound, the latex balloon functions as a resonant chamber, offering an embodied and inclusive mode of listening through the vibration of its membranes. This object duality of sounding and sensing opens up room for what the scholar Steph Ceraso calls a multi-modal listening that plays with the body, affect, behavior, design, space, and aesthetics.
“From my earliest work with balloons as musical instruments, I instinctively knew that I must limit myself to the balloon and my body. This required that the balloon function not only as a musical appendage by which I may transmit sound, but also one that transmitted vibrations back to me through its sensitive body. (…)” Judy Dunaway, The Balloon Music Manifesto
Interference~balloonis an audio piece made for Earlid’s annual Liminal Soundsunder the theme of Retreat, Disappearance. The work unfolds in three acts and is recorded in one take, exploring the balloon/breath as a low-tech noise-canceling tool. The sounds are recorded through a contact microphone placed inside a balloon. First, one can hear the balloon being inflated and the tunning of different radio stations. The song Take My Breath Away (1986) from the band Berlin is being broadcast on one of the stations, spurring the release of my breath from the mouth of the balloon. The song is interrupted by commercials and station ads, and the sound of the air release is used to cancel the airwaves and the pull from the atmosphere of commercial interest and capital.
~
“Liminal Sounds and its motif of retreat and disappearance: what arrives is the proximity of ghosted towns and birds, imagined dissipation of entities lurking in and out of real life, the canceling signals crossed and masked, anticipation of vaporized languages, words stuck inside mouths.” Joan Schuman
Still from Take My Breath Away music video by the band Berlin, 1986
This piece was produced for BBT Sun Radio and aired on Rádio Universidade de Coimbra (RUC) on July 6th, 2018. BBT Sun Radio is a radiophonic space dedicated to freeform radio and a celebration of our beloved friends and radio colleagues José Braga, Bruno Simões and João Terêncio. This hour is a travel-log of old and new interviews, radio cut-ups, collages and excursions on themes like deep time, sound, ecology, lucid dreaming, etc. Thanks to André Quaresma and Tiago André for the invitation and for curating this show.
On June 28, I’ll be talking about Music for Plants at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Colorado. This talk is part of an event series called 3 Things, Any 3 Things that mixes performance, lecture, and music. The tagline for the event reads: We bring you three experiences. We smash them together. We make no connections. Let’s see what happens.
Alongside music for plants there will be a Hip hop harpist (Erin Newton) and a whiskey tasting (Ryan Negley). I’m pleased to do this lecture in the hometown of Dorothy Retallack, author of the book Sound of Music and Plants (1973), that famously spread the rumors that plants don’t have an ear for Led Zeppelin or Jimi Hendrix’s acid rock.
MCA, Denver Colorado, June 28:
Music for Plants + Whiskey + Hip Hop Harpist with Carlo Patrão, Ryan Negley, and Erin Newton
Kalun Leung is a trombone player based in New York City. This interview was recorded during a visit to Freshkills Park in Staten Island organized by the sound artist John Roach, the designer Andrew Shea and their students from the New School. The group is developing a series of installations for the park that translate ecological data into sensory experiences. Freshkills Park, once the world’s largest landfill, is now being transformed into a public park three times the size of Central Park.
Zepelim’s radio piece Misophonia is included in the new Deep Wireless 13 radio art compilation curated by New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA). This work explores the condition of Misophonia and the varying degrees of sonic annoyances that arise from bodily functions while also reflecting upon the ways in which this health issue has been covered by the media. Deep Wireless 13 features several radio pieces on the spectrum of electroacoustic and experimental sound art. The album was produced for the 17th edition of Deep Wireless Festival of Radio & Transmission Arttaking place between January 17 and April 16, 2018. Pieces were selected from an international call for submissions on the theme Sonic Reflections.
“The Deep Wireless festival has been celebrating the art of the aural imagination since 2002 with annual performances, broadcasts, workshops and many special events. This year’s theme is Sonic Reflections. Reflections of South River that are broadcast out into the world and reflections of the world resonating in our memories and imagination.”— Darren Copeland, NAISA
Artistic Director: Darren Copeland Executive Director: Nadene Thériault-Copeland Image Illustration: Prashant Miranda
Next February 2nd, I’ll be doing a presentation entitled “Botanical Rhythms: A field guide to plant music” at the conference Ex-centric Music Studies at Harvard University. This presentation is included in the panel “Relocating research: the core of practice” chaired by Vijay Iyer. The conference will explore subjects, methods, and modes of presentation that have been deemed ‘peripheral’ to music studies, and aims to offer participants an opportunity to present projects that might exceed the bounds of academic convention.
Friday, February 2 at 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM EST
Holden Chapel, Harvard Yard, Cambridge (MA)
Botanical Rhythms: A field guide to plant music
ABSTRACT – Plants are the most abundant life form visible to us. Despite their ubiquitous presence, most of the time, we still fail to notice them. The botanists Wandersee and Schussler call it plant blindness, an extremely prevalent condition characterized by the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s own environment. Our bias towards animals, or zoochauvinism, has been shown to have negative implications on funding towards plant conservation. Authors argue that artistic practices that engage plants in a sensorial and meaningful way can potentially generate emotional responses and concern towards plant life. This presentation reviews musical and sound art practices that incorporate plants and discusses the ethics of plant life as a performative participant. Starting in the early 70s, Music to Grow Plants By became a small footnote in the history of recorded music. However, it showed how the veiled nature of plants became attached to personal narratives, tastes and social values. In parallel, avant-garde movements interested in amplifying the noises of everyday life started to appropriate the sounding materiality of plants through contact microphones. John Cage’s amplified cactus became an icon of indeterminacy music. Plant-based generative music attempts to take a step forward into the inner life of plants by translating their biological activity.
Creative chains linking plants, technology, music and touch can be found in site-specific installations and performances by artists like Mileece, Miya Masaoka, Michael Prime, Leslie Garcia and the collective Data Garden.
The recent blooming of plant bioacoustics studies and acoustic ecology have inspired artists to sonically explore plant matter combining artistic and scientific points of view. In the midst of a strong movement to revitalize the role of plants in the field of humanities, concerns related to plants ethics and performance with plants are being debated. The sonification and acoustic amplification of plant life evoke both a sense of connection and the realization of an ontological fracture. However, the act of listening to plant life can be an act of acknowledgment, a possibility for emotional identification and empathy, rendering plant life visible.
This year’s edition of Megapolis Audio Festival will be held on the weekend of September 16th and 17th as part of Philadelphia’s Fringe Festival. Megapolis is dedicated to sound art, featuring works and performances from musicians, filmmakers, educators, urban planners, scientists, and radio producers.
Zepelim’s radio piece about Misophoniawill be played at PhillyCam alongside other digital works. Radio will be one of the main focuses of the festival, with discussions about radio art with Joan Schuman from Earlid, the politics of storytelling with Karen Werner, live performances from Radio Wonderland, and radio in translation with Eleanor McDowall’s Radio Atlas.
Description: Portuguese radio artist Carlo Patrao tackles the recently discovered and little-understood chronic condition known as Misophonia. The condition is characterized by highly negative emotional responses to auditory triggers like chewing, breathing, sniffling, coughing, or slurping. This radio collage explores and utilizes this range of intrusive bodily sounds and discourse around it, while transforming those very sounds into music and performance art.
On August 19th to August 20th, KCRW‘s Independent Producer Projectkicked off its 5th edition of the 24-hour radio race. Radio producers from all over the world had one day to write, record, and edit a nonfiction radio story. We produced a story about Coney Island’s iconic landmark The Wonder Wheel and the journey of its owner Deno D. Vourderis, a Greek immigrant who bought and restored the ferris wheel in the early 80s. This piece is narrated by his grandson Deno John Vourderis, who continues the family tradition of maintaining and running the wheel with his father and brother. This story was made possible with the help of Amanda Deutch from Coney Island History Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to record, archive, and celebrate the oral history of Coney Island.
The only thing about America that interests me is Coney Island. Sigmund Freud
Kay Kyser And His Orchestra – Dreamland (1947)
Credits: Produced by Carlo Patrão and Erica Buettner Music by Dana Boulé. Thanks to Deno John Vourderis and Amanda Deutch
The September edition of The Wire magazine (issue 403) features the chart “15 For The Log Lady“, inspired by the Twin Peaks Log Lady character portrayed by Catherine E. Coulson. This tracklist is made up of musical compositions that use logs, wood, timber, and trees as a primary source of sound.
Good Things Mag is a documentarium series founded by Victoria Stöcker in Monterey, California. Each issue explores a theme through a number of art forms (articles, collage, photography, illustration, essays, poetry, etc). In Issue 2 (June 2017), Victoria gathered several contributors to reflect upon all the things we can learn from plants from a variety of viewpoints, such as the life of the tallest trees on Earth or the first plant harvested and consumed in space. I contributed to the article Plant Music with the collaboration of Victoria and Evan Crankshaw from the Flash Strap blog. In this article, we survey the history of plant music and review the different ways musicians and sound artists have used plants to create music.
Michael Prime, Mileece, Miya Masoaka, Joe Patitucci, Magz Hall, Mort Grason, John Cage, and Roger Roger are a few of the artists included. Plant music practices are divided into generative music by plants, vegetative music by plants, music for plants, and music about plants. The article expands on and updates some of the references featured in Zepelim’s installment, Plant Consciousness and Communication.
Good Things We Learn From Plants is a beautifully curated magazine full of gems about plant life and plant-related art. You can order a copy here or visit Victoria Stöcker’s page here.
April 30th, 2017 – It’s early afternoon on a Sunday when a small group of people starts to gather around a jug band playing near the Smith–Ninth Street subway station exit. Eli Smith, the co-founder of the Brooklyn Folk Festival and long time banjo player, welcomes everybody to this year’s edition of the Banjo Toss Competition, one of the most anticipated events of the three-day folk festival. The jug band leads the parade from the corner of Smith-Ninth Street to the Gowanus Canal, a federally designated Superfund site also known as the Brooklyn’s nautical purgatory. The rules are simple: whoever throws the banjo the furthest is the winner. But for everyone attending this ritual, throwing the banjo into the canal feels less like a competition and more like a moment of catharsis. Nevertheless, the banjo toss champion wins a brand new banjo. As a precaution, plastic gloves are provided to each participant to avoid contact with the polluted waters. Next, the banjo tossers test their throwing techniques, evaluate wind conditions, the jug band sets the rhythm, and the banjo finally makes its dive into the waters of the Gowanus Canal.
Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn
In this radio piece, Eli Smith guides us through the Banjo Toss, explaining its origins and mythos. Smith is a banjo player, writer, radio host, researcher and promoter of folk music. You can find more about his work and music here. Or visit the Brooklyn Folk Festival and the Jalopy Theatre & School of Music.
Zepelim’s radio piece Down The Royal Roadwill be broadcast at the FM exhibition wolFMoon by radioCona FM (88.8FM) from the Institute for Contemporary Arts Processing in Ljubljana, Slovenia. For eight nights in a row (12 – 19 January 2017) radioCona will tune in every evening at 6:20PM, at the time when day turns into night. More info – Flyer – Live Stream
This FM exhibition will focus on dreamscapes and the slipping between the conscious and unconscious states, coming and going from wakefulness to abandon, laying on the liminal zones of consciousness, or interrogating cognitive processes – from dream narratives to the unheard sounds of the sleeping bodies, from streams of consciousness to exploring listening as a psychoanalytical tool.
Curated by Elena Biserna, Irena Pivka, Brane Zorman and Anna Friz/ Konrad Korabiewski
Artists: Ximena Alarcon, Dinah Bird, Stéphane Claude, Richard Crow, Delia Derbyshire, Leif Elggren, Anna Friz, Mario Gauthier, Fernando Godoy, Magz Hall, Olivia Humphreys, GX Jupitter-Larsen, Konrad Korabiewski, Samo Kutin, Brandon LaBelle, Francisco López, Tumi Magnússon, Michael McHugh and Noizechoir, Mikel R. Nieto, Maria Papadomanolaki, Carlo Patrão, Boštjan Perovšek, Luka Prinčič, Jean-Philippe Renoult, Francois Tariq Sardi, tobias c.van Veen, Mark Vernon, Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec, James Webb, Jana Winderen, Emiliano Zelada, Brane Zorman.
After a radio broadcast malfunction, a man is left alone in the studio to break the bad news: “There’s nothing on this side, and I am not saying anything”. Nothing on This Side is a radio piece/sound collage created for WFMU‘s Optimized! online stream curated by Vicki Bennett exploring the theme of optimism.
All the shows are now archived at wfmu.org/playlists/UP, including live performances by Mr. Let’s Paint (John Kilduff).
This piece was also featured on Long Live the New Sound podcast andRadiophrenia, a two-week exploration into current sound and transmission arts trends at Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, UK.
Radio Fluxos on Antena 2, RTP will broadcast Sunday 5, 12, 19, 26 June 2016, 2pm More info:http://goo.gl/A9VmWG
Radio Fluxos is a series of 4 documentaries about sound and listening produced for the portuguese national radio station Antena 2, RTP. The series is divided into four chapters: Ether, Earth, Man, and Cosmos. Each show features personal testimonials from scientists, philosophers, historians, authors and sound artists. You will hear antarctic glaciers, waves bouncing off stars, sounds of insects and bats, the sounds of extinction and the darker tones of sound used during modern warfare.
Radio Fluxos invites you to join a community of seekers whose research in the world of sound reveals codes, messages, stories, and discoveries. There is a whole world waiting for us. All we have to do is listen.
Ep. 1 – Sounds of Ether – Listen here
Featuring voices of Luís Loureiro, João Baltasar, Vitor Cardoso, José Tito Mendonça, Pedro Machado, Rui Moreira, Filomena Oliveira.
Ep. 2 – Sounds of the Earth – Listen here
Featuring voices of Janet Sternberg, Carlos Augusto, Ana Salomé David, Jorge Palmeirim, Jorge Paiva and Peter Cusack.
Ep. 3 – Sounds of Men – Listen here
Featuring voices of João Lourenço, Arnaldo Mesquita, Juliane Braeur, Suzanne Cusick, Alfredo Caldeiras, Anabela Duarte and Domingos Abrantes.
Original music by Dana Boulé.
Ep. 4 – Sounds of the Cosmos – Listen here
Featuring voices of Fernando Coimbra, Vitor Cardoso, Mário Monteiro, Pedro Machado, Rui Agostinho, Carla Sofia Carvalho and Nicolas Becker.
Credits: Produced by Carlo Patrão Presented by Diamantino Guedes Voiceover by Eduarda Maio Production support by João Piedade Logo by Patrícia Rodrigues Special thanks to everyone at Academia RTP, Rita Leonor Barqueiro, Ricardo Mariano, Erica Buettner, Dana Boulé and Dennis Shafer.
OPTIMIZED! Expanded Radio Stream on WFMU will broadcast 6-10 June 2016, Noon-3pm (EST) Playlists and archives at http://wfmu.org/playlists/UP
Vicki Bennett/People Like Us has programmed 10 hours of new and exclusive recordings, radio and video that will be broadcasted on WFMU during 6-10 June 2016. These programs are part of an expanded radio stream on the New Jersey freeform radio WFMU dedicated to all things “Optimized!“. The radio shows run from noon to 3pm (EST) and are accompanied by a video stream with specially commissioned animated gifs created by Dina Kelberman. Also, live at Monty Hall John Kilduff will be performing “Let’s Paint TV” from 2-3pm, where he’s going to be taking listeners’ calls while simultaneously painting, cooking and running on a treadmill.
I’m happy to be participating with a new radio piece/sound collage called “Nothing On This Side” that will be broadcast on Monday, June 6th:
MONDAY 6 JUNE
12.00pm DO or DIY with People Like Us Introduction
12.28pm Carlo Patrão Nothing On This Side
12.58pm DW Robertson (formerly Ergo Phizmiz) Vogue Optimised for Advertising
1.05pm Drew Daniel Extreme Music DJ Set
1.35pm DW Robertson (formerly Ergo Phizmiz) The Manchurian Candidate Optimised for Plot
1.42pm Daniel Menche Arrow vs the World
1.58pm Jim Price Jim’s Debut Show
2pm-3pm John Kilduffwith Let’s Paint TV – Live from Monty Hall
Featuring specially created audio, radio shows, animated gifs and video by: Andrew Sharpley, Bodega Pop Live with Gary Sullivan, Brian Joseph Davis, Bryce, Busy Doing Nothing with Charlie, Buttress O’Kneel, Carlo Patrão, Dan Deacon, Daniel Menche, DIFM (Do It For Me) with Pseu Braun, Dina Kelberman, DO or DIY with People Like Us, Drew Daniel, DW Robertson (formerly Ergo Phizmiz), Gwilly Edmondez, Heather Phillipson, Irene Moon, Jason Willett & MC Schmidt, Jem Finer, Jim Price, John Kilduff / Let’s Paint TV, Ken Freedman, Miracle Nutrition with Hearty White, Nick the Bard, Osymyso, People Like Us, Peter Knight, Porest, Steinski, The Dusty Show with Clay Pigeon, Tim Maloney, Wreck This Mess with Bart Plantenga.
This is the second post in Sounding Out!’s 4th annual July forum on listening in observation of World Listening Day on July 18th, 2015. World Listening Day is a time to think about the impacts we have on our auditory environments and, in turn, their effects on us. For Sounding Out! World Listening Day necessitates discussions of the politics of listening and listening, and, as Carlo Patrão shares today, an examination of sounds that disturb, annoy, and threaten our mental health and well being. –Editor-in-Chief JS
An important factor in coming to dislike certain sounds is the extent to which they are considered meaningful. The noise of the roaring sea, for example, is not far from white radio noise (…) We still seek meaning in nature and therefore the roaring of the sea is a blissful sound. Torben Sangild, The Aesthetics of Noise
This installment of Zepelim explores easily overlooked daily sounds like lip smacking, chewing, breathing, sniffling, coughing, and sneezing. For some of us, these sounds might be annoying, but for a small, discrete population, they are sudden triggers of aggressive impulses and fight/flight responses. This condition has been named Misophonia and is a form of decreased sound tolerance characterized by highly negative reactions to the experience of hearing specific sounds. Misophonia has only recently started to be recognized by the mental health community and has just been given media attention for the first time. In this hour, Zepelim presents a sound collage of several reports on Misophonia alongside pieces by composers who work with sounds that could trigger episodes of profound distress.
Noise is all around us. It bursts from all corners – radios, engines, machines, advertising, traffic, the internet. Noise marks the social codes of human life. It makes the environment recognizable and ensures a soothing feeling of safeness against the predatory silence. But from the broad waveband of vibrations that constitute the everyday life of noises, there are some intruding sounds that make us wince. The sound of fingernails scraping across a chalkboard or the sound of two pieces of styrofoam being rubbed together are considered universal stimuli for an automatic and visceral reaction of dislike. But how can these sounds provoke such a strong negative reaction? The paper Psychoacoustics of a chilling soundsuggests that our negative response to scraping sounds might come from a vestigial reflex related to the warning cries of monkeys or from a sound resemblance to predators’ vocalizations. A recent study conducted by Trevor Cox tries to pin down the reason why we dislike disgusting sounds by analyzing a set of 34 sounds. Trevor Cox reached three main conclusions: first, the study seemed to confirm the prior connection between scraping sounds and a vestigial response of survival acquired by our ancestors. Second, the most disgusting sounds were the ones associated with bodily excretions and secretions, like the sounds of vomiting, sniffling, eating an apple, coughing, spitting, etc., among which the sound of vomiting was rated the most horrible of the disgusting sounds (hear the full clip here). Third, the study found that none of the sounds provided responses consistent with a disgust reaction linked to disease avoidance and survival. This may suggest that our reactions of disgust towards certain sounds may be socially learned and vary according to the cultural meaning attributed to them and whether it is acceptable or unacceptable to make disgusting sounds in public.
An important factor in coming to dislike certain sounds is the extent to which they are considered meaningful. The noise of the roaring sea, for example, is not far from white radio noise (…) We still seek meaning in nature and therefore the roaring of the sea is a blissful sound. Torben Sangild in The Aesthetics of Noise
For the ones suffering from Misophonia, it seems there are different processes in motion when perceiving certain sounds. The trigger sounds of Misophonia are perceived as something beyond annoyance or disgust — they are invasive, intrusive and associated with feelings of offense and violation. Bursts of rage are commonly described by people who suffer from Misophonia. The reason for such a strong reaction is still up for debate.
The not-so-well-tuned brain?
Some audiologists suggest that a hyperconnectivity between the auditory, limbic, and autonomic nervous systems can explain these heightened emotional responses. Other studies have found associations between Misophonia and other psychiatric conditions, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, but many patients with Misophonia appear to have no other major emotional condition.
Portrait of a Misophonic
A decreased tolerance to sounds characterizes several medical conditions. While Misophonia is a dislike of specific sounds, Hyperacusis is a lowered tolerance to most kinds of sounds above a certain intensity. Misophonia also differs fromPhonofobia, which is the fear of any sound, and Exploding Head Syndrome, which is the experience of loud, unexpected sounds while sleeping. The prevalence of Misophonia among the general population is still indeterminate. However, the high number of communities growing all over the internet (Sound Sensitive Community, Misophonia UK, reddit, Stop the sounds …) may suggest that this condition could be more common than initially supposed. The term Misophonia was first coined by Margaret and Pawel Jastreboff (2000). However, the use of this term is seen by specialists in the medical community as an anecdotal term. Some prefer the term Sound-Rage (Krauthamer, 2013); others believe that Soft Sound Sensitivity Syndrome, 4S (Johnson, 1999) is a better descriptor of this condition.
Nevertheless, the term Misophonia caught on among the general public after an article published in The New York Times in 2011, followed by many people sharing their experiences on various media platforms (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). For the first time, people could name what they thought was just an isolated idiosyncratic personality trait. The case reports on Misophonia describe an abnormal reaction to daily low-volume sounds and experiences of blood-boiling rage triggered by sound. The strategies to cope with this condition can range from avoidance of sound-triggering situations like family dinners, the movie theater, or the workplace to social isolation. Other coping mechanisms involve the use of earplugs, the search for auditory distractions like music (also auditory protection under white noise, pink noise, or brown noise), the mimicking of triggers to cancel out sounds, the use of internal dialog to help calm down, and the asking of others to stop making the sounds. The coping mechanisms to deal with the episodes of rage may vary according to personality traits. While some people may internalize the experience of distress, others may easily snap or act out towards the person making the sounds. In the majority of the cases, misophonia seems to have its onset in pre-puberty (around the age of 8-10) with lifelong persistence.
An Introduction to Misophonic Music
Between 1966 and 1967, John Cage and Morton Feldman recorded four open-ended conversations called Radio Happenings, at the studios of radio station WBAI in New York. Among many topics, Feldman expresses his annoyance with sonic intrusions blasted from several radios on a trip to the beach. Cage’s solution for the growing annoyance of his friend Feldman is to change the perception of unwanted sounds to sound sources for musical composition:
Well, you know how I adjusted to that problem of the radio in the environment, very much as the primitive people adjusted to the animals which frightened them and which probably, as you say, were intrusions. They drew pictures of them on their caves. And so I simply made a piece using radios. Now, whenever I hear radios – even a single one, not just twelve at a time, as you must have heard on the beach, at least – I think, “Well, they’re just playing my piece”. John Cage, Radio Happenings.
Cage proposes a remedy by appropriating environmental intrusions, making the annoying sounds his own. The emotional charge associated with the sound annoyances is reverted to a positive pole of affection. The sound intrusions become part of the self. They no longer exist as absolute external entities trying to intrude their way in. Ultimately, there are no sonic intrusions since the entire field of sound is desirable for composition.
If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all. John Cage.
Can the same line of thought be applied to annoying sounds? Paying attention to aversion stimuli and increasing our exposition to them may be a healthy way to deal with trigger sounds. But what if it’s possible to bring these sounds even closer to our sense of identity and change their representation of intrusion by playing with them: editing chews, cut-up sneezes, sound assemblages of snores and nose whistles, performing coughs and slurps, singing the poetics of throat clearing and performing hiccups.
Is it possible to redefine Misophonic trigger sounds as Misophonic music?
If so, Misophonic music could be defined as any composition that provokes the urge to flee the auditory scene, made up of trigger sounds produced by normal body functions such as breathing, sniffling, coughing, sneezing, chewing, and others. Examples of such compositions can already be found in the realms of sound poetry, utterance-based music, and other sound art practices. The trigger sounds can be grouped as:
1. Sounds associated with eating.
2. Sounds made by the mouth/throat (hiccups, throat clearing, aahs, S sound).
3. Sounds made by the nose (sniffing, nose breathing, nose whistling).
4. Sounds made by the human body (kissing, skin rubbing, joint cracking).
Oral Oddities
Sound poetry is a hybrid poetic form that exists between speech, music, and performance. As the avant-garde progressively expanded to incorporate the entire scope of sound into composition, sound poetry followed a similar siren by using all sounds capable of being produced by the human voice and by exploring new vocal techniques and non-semantic properties of language. Sound poetry calls for coughing, spitting, breathing, lip smacking, hissing, mouth tensions, and releases, the very same triggers underlying episodes of Misophonia. According to Steve McCaffery, the practice of sound poetry has always been present throughout the history of Western literature, from Aristophanes to Christian Morgenstern and Lewis Carroll. Although sound poetry has never constituted a ‘movement’, McCaffery loosely distinguishes three main phases of its development. The first phase, called the paleotechnic era, comprises ancient and medieval practices of chant, non-sense syllabic mouthings, language games, nursery rhymes and folk-songs (ex. Navajo Songs, Inuit games and songs). The second phase of sound poetry encompasses the poetry of the Russian avant-garde (zaum’ or beyonsense), the Italian futurists (parole in libertà / words-in-freedom; F.T. Marinetti), and the German Dada (‘verse ohne Worte’, Hugo Ball; Kurt Schwitters) that helped to free the word from its semantic functions. The third phase started in the 1950s, marked by the shift in technology, the availability of recording instruments like the tape recorder, and the willingness to embrace this new technology as a compositional tool. The quintessential sound poet of this period was Henri Chopin, who adopted the tape recorder and the studio to manipulate his speech and mouth sounds into the smallest vocables of his voice. Chopin uses the microphone to explore and amplify the sounds of his mouth and throat.
Sound poetry is a new form of art, in which linguistic resources are unfolded in all their richness, and with the aid of a single instrument – or multi-instruments – the mouth, which is a discerning resonator, capable of offering us several sounds simultaneously as long as these sounds are not restricted by the letter, the phoneme, or by a precise or specific word. Henri Chopin, An Open Letter to Aphonic Musicians, 1967
[Henri Chopin, Les Pirouettes Vocales Pour Les Pirouettements Vocaux]
With the tape recorder, the constraints of the body are no longer the last parameter in composition. Chopin developed his self-styled audio-poems with multitrack spatialization of word fragments, superimposed mouth sounds, and ‘vocal micro-particles’ creating dense and uncanny sonic textures. By magnifying the small and unheard mouth sounds, Henri Chopin revealed a sounding body that can be violent and intrusive. While Chopin relied mainly on electronic devices to amplify and deconstruct speech and mouth sound, sound poets like François Dufrêne and Gil J Wolman tended to preserve the corporeality and the raw quality of oral sounds. Dufrêne and Wolman’s work leaves behind the remaining traces of language to bring forward a more glottal and guttural performance. The mouth is spasmodic and phlegmatic, exhaling moans, spits, chokes, wheezes, and breaths. This sound poetry, empty of words and vocables, is a hyper-expression of the bodily energy that gives rhythm to the poem.
the BREATH alone founds the poem—rhythm and outcry, that cry, content contained, until now, of the poem: of joy, of love, of anguish, of horror, of hate, but a cry. François Dufrêne in OU, Alga Marghen
Like Dufrêne and Wolman, the sound poetPaul Duttoncreates oral soundscapes with his voice, usually without the help of electronic effects or processing, without feedback or overdubs. Instead, Dutton explores the limits of his voice, glottis, tongue, lips, and nose as the medium of compositions, calling upon techniques involving breath releases, reverberation, frequency shifts, and vocal fold vibrations. He coined the term Sound Singing as an inclusive term for all sonic language dimensions: sound, speech, semantics, noise — the abstract and the literary. Dutton’s recordings often comprise a roller-coaster of dysphoric moods: annoyance, anguish, frustration, and hysteria — as can be heard on his record Mouth Pieces: Solo Soundsinging.
[Paul Dutton, Lips Is, Mouth Pieces: Solo Soundsinging]
Paul Dutton was also a member of the first sound-poetry ensemble The Four Horsemen, and is a member of the CCMC trio with John Oswald and Michael Snow. He has collaborated with sound poets like Phil Minton, Koichi Makigami, David Moss, and Jaap Blonk. This last sound poet, Jaap Blonk, is a Dutch composer, vocalist, and improviser bridging the gap between the Schwitters Dada-constructivism and a contemporary approach to sound poetry. Jaap Blonk started as a composer in 1977, initially playing saxophone (on Splinks and BRAAXTAAL), and started to perform sound poetry later on. Many of Blonk’s vocal compositions are based on detailed graphical scores and symbolic scripts that trace sound-maps of the tongue, lips, and larynx. The wide range of vocal sounds produced by Blonk led him to create an extension to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) called BLIPAX (Blonk’s IPA extended) to represent his mouth sounds. The result is a system of drawings and changing forms that give a visual representation of his sound poems. Blonk’s inventive sound poetry covers extensive ground in the area of vocal performance, from improvised utterances to invented languages, extreme mouth sounds, and phonetic studies.
For more on sound poetry, listen to History of Sound Poetry: An Introduction by Charles Amirkhanian (KPFA,1976) and the book of essays collected by Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin, The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound.
Fluxus: Eat, Burp, Cough, Perform!
The emergence of Fluxus is strongly linked to Cage’s 1957-59 class at the New School for Social Research in New York. During that period, Cage taught musical composition to a group of artists – George Brecht, Al Hansen, Dick Higgins, Allan Kaprow, and the poet Jackson MacLow – who would become the founding members of Fluxus. Cage’s ideas on chance, non-intentionality, mixed-media aesthetics, and musicalized sound were expanded upon by his students through music, performance, and poetry. George Bretch’s Event Score was one of the best-known innovations to emerge from these classes. The Event Score was a performance technique drawn from short instructions, like a haiku, usually written on small paper cards. Each Event Score framed everyday live actions as a minimal performance to be executed before an audience, alone, in a group, or one’s mind. Fluxus events advanced the Cagean idea that all sounds can function as music to the concept that everyday life actions are music. Daily acts like chewing, coughing, licking, eating, or preparing food were considered ready-made works of art. Many Fluxus artists like Shigeko Kubota, Yoko Ono, Mieko Shiomi, and Alison Knowles saw these activities as forms of social music.
The Event is a metarealistic trigger: it makes the viewer’s or user’s experience special. (…) Rather than convey their own emotional world abstractly, Fluxus artists directed their audiences’ attention to concrete everyday stuff addressing aesthetic metareality in the broadest sense.Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience
Fluxus artists extensively explored social actions like eating or cooking in the many celebratory Fluxbanquets and Fluxus events. According to Hannah Higgins, Fluxus food work often emphasized the rituals of eating, the associations between food and nonfood, adventurous eating (like Flux Mystery Food, re-labeled canned food), and the obsessive measuring and counting of food’s characteristics in a society concerned with personal hygiene and self-control. For instance, Alison Knowles produced several famous Fluxus food events like Make a Salad (1962), Make a Soup (1962), and The Identical Lunch (1967-73).
The Identical Lunch began with Knowles’s realization that each day she would eat the same lunch: atuna fish sandwich on whole wheat toast with butter, no mayo, and a cup of buttermilk or the soup of the day at Riss Foods Diner in Chelsea. Philip Corner then turned Knowles’s lunch habit into a score (The Identical Lunch: Philip Corner’s Performances of a Score by Alison Knowles, 1973) and a journal (Journal of the Identical Lunch, Nova Broadcasts Press,1971), documenting all the variations within the identical meal. Artists and friends came along and tried the same meal, reporting and recording their own experiences. It was about having an excuse to get to talk to people, to notice everything that happened, to pay attention, explained Knowles in a recent rendition of The Identical Lunch at MOMA.In 1971, George Maciunas made the following suggestion: put it all into a blender.
Fluxus’ artists continued to play out the multiple performance possibilities around the social rituals of food. By radically isolating the gestures and actions of eating and handling food, several event scores were solely centered on the sounds of chewing, crunching, nibbling, gnawing, and gulping. Philip Corner’s Carrot Chew Performanceis a perfect example of this. Corner’s performance piece is based on the instruction of eating a carrot. Carrots are given to the audience, and instructions are given on the speed and bite size until the last piece of carrot is swallowed.
Also, Mieko Shiomi‘s Shadow Piece No. 3 calls attention to the sound of amplified mastication while the performer is hidden behind a screen eating fruit.
Shadow Piece No.3
Performers eat various fruits behind a white screen. A light projects their shadows on the screen. Eating sounds may be amplified. (1966)
Shiomi’s work is one of meticulousness and purism. Her pieces are marked by actions of subtle motion and slow state alterations, like the piece Disappearing Music for Face, in which a smile very slowly fades into a neutral facial expression.
Who invented coughing? Yoko Ono!
Coughing is a form of love. In 1961, Yoko Ono composed a 32-minute, 31-second audio recording called Cough Piece, a precursor to her instruction Keep coughing a year (Grapefruit). In this recording, the sound of Ono’s cough emerges periodically from the indistinct background noise. Ono’s continuous coughing throughout the piece invites for new awareness of mouth and throat sounds. Like many pieces of Fluxus, the Cough Piece plays with the concept of time, prolonging the duration of an activity beyond what is considered socially acceptable. While listening to this piece, Yoko Ono brings us close to her body’s automatic reflexes, opening the veil of indistinct inner turmoil. Coughing can be a bodily response to an irritating tickling feeling, troubled breathing, difficulty with speech, a sore throat, or a reaction to foreign particles or microbes. In any case, coughing is a way of clearing, freeing reflux of air, a way out. Coughing is a form of love.
Throughout the work we never know for sure what the artist [Yoko Ono] may be choking on, what causes irritation, or what may be forcing these urges of convulsed breaths. There is something “tickling” her throat which remains unclear, undetected, and unspoken – something she can’t get away from, a bellow, or an off-stage whose absence or formlessness resides at the very center of the recording. It occupies the mouth. Brandon LaBelle, Lexicon of the Mouth
[Yoko Ono, Cough Piece, Recorded 1963, Tokyo, Ubuweb]
The works of Fluxus inscribe themselves in the logic of art for art’s sake, the experience of everyday life, and designating these pieces of reality as art. Fluxos’ proposition of reframing everyday sounds as art can provide an additional coping mechanism to deal with intrusions and sound annoyances. Performances like Nivea Cream Piece (1962) by Alison Knowles, where performers are invited to rub their hands with cream in front of a microphone, producing a deluge of squeezing sounds, are a testament to this attitude.
Nivea Cream Piece (1962) – for Oscar (Emmett) Williams
First performer comes on stage with a jar of Nivea cream. The performer massages hands in front of the microphone. Other performers enter one at the time. They make a mass of massaging hands and leave one at a time following the first performer.
Our experience of hearing bodily sounds is often attached to a sense of discomfort, annoyance, or even shame. The sounds of the body remind us of its fallible and vulnerable nature, calling to mind French surgeon René Leriche’s quote that health is life lived in the silence of the organs (1936). Various practices of sound art have widely explored this sense of vulnerability connected to the sounds of the body. For instance, former Letterist Jean-Paul Curtay exalted the expression of body music in The Body Sound Art Manisfesto.
The pleasure of playing your body (…). The pleasure of matching emotion to the sounds, to the dynamic of the sounds, to the rhythms. The surprise of having the sounds triggered by fake emotions trigger sounds which trigger real emotions. Jean-Paul Curtay, 1970.
These bodily sound triggers are often the subject matter of Christof Migone’s expeditions in sound work. In his audio work South Winds (2002), Migone presents a series of compositions made by manipulated fart sounds inspired by the performances ofthe French flatulist Joseph Pujol (Le Pétomane) at Moulin Rouge. Snow Storm(2002) features the sound of itching a flaky scalp — Migone scratches his head with a microphone so as to cause dandruff to fall down across his black trousers. In yet another sound work called Crackers(1998), participants were called through radio and classified ads in the weekly newspaper to record a session of bone cracking. Several participants recorded the sounds of fingers, knees, feet, shoulders, back, elbows, jaws, and toes cracking. Each body movement resulting in a cracking sound was called a bone edit. Then, each edit was manipulated into a symphony of tiny bone cracks. Crackers are a sound map of the vulnerability of our bone structure. It isn’t just the annoyance of the inner sounds that characterizes this piece but the close proximity to our decaying architecture that makes us wince.
… ahhhh… ok and now in order to do my elbows I will have to make a quick motion like this… now the jaw which is usually on this side (…) toes, of course… ok… now when I do my back I have to swing it as well… so stay in one place… the best sounds usually come out of about right there… Christof Migone, recording transcript, Gallery 101 residency.
Migone’s sound exploration of the body and its limits has much in common with Vito Acconci‘s encounters with the body and its autonomic functions. In 1971, Acconci created four minimalist exercises called Waterways: Four Saliva Studies (22:27), consisting of a series of video works capturing Acconci spitting into his hands and sucking it back in. In this piece, Vito Acconci explores the properties of saliva by using extreme video close-ups and amplified sound to make the viewer step into the space of his body.
[Vito Acconci, Waterways: Four Saliva Studies, 1971]
Acconci used his own body as the main canvas for his performances, like a ready-made performative tool. About 200 of his body pieces and performances have been compiled and documented in Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body 1969-1973. Some of his works can strike notes of playfulness, like in the Following Piece (1969), where Acconci follows random people on the street. Or they can be crude and violent like in Trademarks (1970), where he would bite his legs and arms in front of a camera. Acconci pushed the limits of body art by creating new links between humor, revulsion, boredom, sexuality, and annoyance.
“How do we hear the body’s sounds, now that technology has given us superhuman ears?”
This is the question raised by Kenneth Goldsmith when curating Music Overheard (Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 2007), a compilation that gathers sound works sourced from the human body. Although the advances of technology in composition gave us more than just an extension of the traditional means of making music, today’s artists and musicians are still working with the squelching sounds and annoyances of their bodies. Gregory Whitehead, Matmos, Language Removal Services, John Duncan, Lauren Lesko and Mia Masakoa are a few examples of this. The AV collage artist People Like Us (Vicki Bennett) deftly navigates the winding road between bodily annoyances and audio delight. In her piece, Hayfever, People Like Us presents us with cut-ups of sneezes over novelty and easy listening music. Hayfever depicts the time log of an allergic reaction. While calling to mind Ono’s Cough Piece, Hayfever is much shorter (2:36), mostly thanks to Loretadine, Bennett jokes, without whom, this track would be much longer.
[People Like Us, Hayfever, Music Overheard, 2007 ]
Taking a cue from Hayfever, let’s experiment by thinking about Misophonia as a possible allergic reaction to specific sounds. Usually, the trigger sounds in Misophonia are connected to the mouth, eating, breathing, and mechanical motions of the body. Interestingly, though, this aversion is not provoked by the sounds of our own body but by those of the other.
The word allergy originates from Greek allos (other) and ergy (activity). The psychoanalyst Sami-Alisees allergies as a symbolic symptom. Personalities who are prone to allergy are usually in relationships of extreme proximity to other people, which evokes the distress of not being able to recognize oneself as different from the other person. The allergy comes as a symptomatic crisis when facing the difficulty of separating one’s own skin from the other’s. Misophonia could also be a symbolic equivalent of that struggle for independence. Could this rejection stem from sounds that make other bodies feel satisfied, complete, and differentiated — the sounds of others fulfilling needs? Ultimately, the key to understanding Misophonia may lie in unmasking trigger sounds and unearthing the neglected need to possess a body of one’s own with a unique face and its own bodily needs.
Description: Freud described dreams as the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious – a pathway to the essence of wishes and desires of the human mind. This radio piece presents an intimate portrait of a group of dreamers trying to salvage information from their dreams by recalling transformative dream experiences. Also, a group of five psychotherapists share their views on dreams and how they can be helpful in the clinical practice to gain a deeper understanding of the patient. Dream debris, free association, and dream theory float through the ether of radio waves, exploring the concept of newness in dreams and the bridge between the unconscious and waking life.
Credits:
In order of appearance:
Dreamers: Pierre Faa, Tiago Saga, Helena Espvall, David Monteiro and Derek Moench.
Special thanks to Erica Buettner and Zed Boulé. — This radio work is a Dreamlands’ commission for Radio Arts (UK), funded by the Arts Council England and Kent County Council. More info at www.radioarts.org.uk
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“Down The Royal Road” has been broadcast by Resonance FM(London, UK); Borealis Festival (Bergen, Norway),Radiophrenia, a temporary art radio station broadcasting live from Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts andWave Farm(formerly free103point9) (NYS, USA).
Down the Royal Road is a new radio piece commissioned by Radio Arts (UK) as part of a series of works for radio on the theme of “Dreamlands“. Freud described dreams as the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious – a pathway to the essence of wishes and desires of the human mind. This radio piece presents an intimate portrait of a group of dreamers trying to salvage information from their dreams by recalling transformative dream experiences. Also, a group of five psychotherapists share their views on dreams and how they can be helpful in the clinical practice to gain a deeper understanding of the patient. Dream debris, free association, and dream theory float through the ether of radio waves, exploring the concept of newness in dreams and the bridge between the unconscious and waking life.
Zepelim’s chart included in The Wire Magazine, issue #348 explores musical compositions made of trigger sounds for Misophonia, a chronic condition in which specific sounds provoke intense emotional experiences and autonomic responses of fight or flight within an individual. These triggers are usually comprised of subtle, repetitive sounds such as mouth sounds, lip smacking sounds, chewing sounds, body sounds and breathing sounds. This chart presents musical compositions containing Misophonic triggers, with the aim of re-contextualizing these pieces and pointing to a new way of hearing them. If you suffer from Misophonia, approach this mix with caution. Is it possible to redefine Misophonic trigger sounds as Misophonic music?
At some point in our lives, we’ve all come across the notion that music improves the growth of plants and that plants can grow stronger and healthier if we take some time out of our day to talk to them. All of these popular notions came from experiments that took place at some point in the history of science, giving way to other fascinating experiments, stories, and myths, but above all, an impressive adventure in sound. From Dr. Gustav Theodor Fechner‘s claims in 1848 that plants are capable of feeling human emotions to Sir Jagadish Chandra Bos‘s study of electrical signaling in plants that supported Hindu theories of plant consciousness, the field of scientific speculation about communication in plants became fertile ground for a cultural belief system endowing the Plantae kingdom with anthropomorphic characteristics.
The Backster Effect: If plants can communicate, what are they saying?
In 1973, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird published a collection of these ideas and out-of-the-box experiments involving plants in the book The Secret Life of Plants. The book covers various topics related to plant life, touching on the subjects of soil treatments, plant auras, force fields, plant communication, electromagnetism, and extrasensory perception (ESP). In the chapter dedicated to Plants and ESP, the authors focus on the polygraph scientist Cleve Backster’s findings (b.1924). In 1966, Backster was an Interrogation Specialist collaborating with the CIA in lie detection when, out of curiosity, he decided to attach the electrodes of one of his lie detectors to the leaf of his Dracaena. Backster intended to verify if the leaf would be affected by water poured onto its roots, and if yes, how soon. As the plant was sucking the water up its stem, the galvanometer didn’t indicate any changes. Instead of trending upwards as Backster expected, the pen on the graph was actually trending downwards. But what happened in the following minutes changed Backster’s life and worldview. Being a veteran examiner on polygraphs, Backster knew that the most effective way to make the galvanometer jump was by making the person taking the test feel threatened. He decided to do the same with the plant, starting by dunking a leaf of the Dracaena in a hot cup of coffee, but with no results on the graph. Backster started to think about the worst threat to a plant’s life – the imagery of fire came up in his mind, and at that precise moment, the graph made a sudden upward sweep. Backster had made no movements toward the plant or the polygraph. Could the plant have been reading his mind?
Polygraph measuring the plant’s electrical response to Backster’s visualization of fire.
Backster left the room and returned with some matches and found another sudden surge had registered on the chart, probably caused by his determination to carry out the fire threat on the plant. “Plants can think!” he thought. This was the beginning of a new series of experiments on plant consciousness and bio-communication known as The Backster Effect or Theory of Primary Perception.
This episode of Zepelim aims to explore the fringe world of Plant Consciousness and Communication along with its peculiar relationship with music. Below are some examples of ways that plants have been connected to compositional processes and how far the relationship with this mysterious life form can go:
1# Plant-based Generative Music
Generative music is a term used to describe music that stems from a set of rules/conditions or a system. In the book Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, David Toop refers to Eno’s gardening metaphor on Generative Music:
Generative music is like trying to create a seed, as opposed to classical composition which is like trying to engineer a tree. I think one of the changes of our consciousness of how things come into being (…) is the change from an engineering paradigm, which is to say a design paradigm, to a biological paradigm, which is an evolutionary one.
In this approach to musical composition, the primary care for an ecosystem allows the music to develop out of an interactive natural bias – resulting in an organic quality in the composition. Many artists who have been working in the field of natural observation, bioacoustics, or acoustic ecology saw Nature as a resource for generative data waiting to be translated into a sonic experience. For artists following the siren of non-intentionality and the pursuit to remove one’s will from the composition process – letting the sounds “become themselves” – the “zen” quality of the Plantae kingdom can be very compelling. Plants are an endless fountain of electrical pulses that can change according to different conditions like weather, water, light, gravity, touch or even moon cycles, producing new and unpredictable electrical responses. Electronic devices can then translate those pulses into sound through a chain of algorithmic parameters.
Looking for a new fabric of sound
Michael Prime is a biochemist, ecologist and electro-acoustic musician and the co-founder of the London Improv group Morphogenesis. Prime’s sound work is concerned with establishing an interface between humans and non-human species through bioelectrical means – specifically, sounds from a variety of environmental sources which ordinarily would not be audible, such as plants or fungi. According to Michael Prime, all living organisms produce a faint electrical field which fluctuates in consonance with the state of the organism. By plugging plants into a bioactivity translator, it is possible to translate their biological processes and reactions to the events surrounding them into sound. Those sounds are the focus of the album L-Fields (2000), a work for hallucinogenic plants, named after the studies in voltage potential made in the 1930s and 1940s by Dr. Harold S. Burr. L-Fields presents
One Hour As Peyote, 2005
bioelectronical recordings of Cannabis sativa, Amanita muscaria and Lophophora williamsii (Peyote) blended with field recordings from the locations where the plants were growing, providing a unique listening experience – as if Prime placed our ears into the plant leaves themselves. It’s a very interesting take on hallucinogenic plants considering that musicians have been composing under their influence for so long and only Prime’s work reveals a translation of what these plants could sound like themselves. In addition to using plants on records, Prime also uses them in his performances, mixing composition, improvisation and generative music – as you can see here.
Post-Minimalist Plants
Following the same line of thought, although with a different methodology, the Japanese composer Mamoru Fujieda uses plants in order to transpose data from plant activity into melodic patterns. Fujieda wires plants using The Plantron, a bioelectric interface created by botanist Yuji Dogane. Consisting of an electrode attached to plant leaves, an electric potential analyzer, a computer, and a tone generator, The Plantron analyzes the values of electrical changes measured from the leaves. The data collected is then converted to MIDI and transformed into melodic patterns using MAX, a graphical music environment developed by Miller Puckette and other authors at IRCAM in 1986. The patterns obtained are then scored to either Eastern traditional instruments (Koto, Shō: and the Hitsu) and Western instruments (Viola da gamba and Harpsichord), combining alternative tuning systems. The result is a complex confluence of intra and inter-species languages. These compositions are featured in the albums Patterns of Plants I and II both released on the New York City label Tzadik.
The Sound of Plants Growing
Also, Mileece Petre has been working with generative systems like the open-source programming language SuperCollider to bring forth music from plants. Her main field of work lies in the intersection between audio and visual interactive compositions and an ecological sensibility promoting interspecies communication. Mileece’s installation Soniferous Eden at Pacific Design Centre 2010, is one example of that specific connection. In this installation, electrodes were placed on plant leaves to capture their GSR and EEG signals, which were then processed by the software designed by Mileece with SuperCollider. The sounds triggered by the plants were intentionally designed to be ethereal and melodious – as if the plants were vibrating in an intelligent and well-tuned state of being. When the installation’s visitors interacted with the plants, they provoked an increase in electric signals on the leaves. Consequently, the electric signals are translated into audio, filling the room with changing sounds. The sounds produced were directly correlated with the stimuli received by the plants.
Mileece’s “Soniferous Eden” at See Line Gallery
Mileece noticed that not only did plants react to human touch, but they also began, over time, to react to each other in a kind of domino effect recognizable by the growing number of sound events occurring. In an interview to Pacifica Radio, Mileece recounts the episode in which she was working with chicken wire at the Soniferous Eden installation, and the plants started to “freak out,” producing an atypical quantity of sound. Mileece explains how this experience may indicate a possible connection to the Backster effect, implying that the plants could have been aware of a threat to their safety. In 2002, Mileece also released an album dedicated to plants called Formations (Lo-Recordings), a series of compositions inspired by the structures of plant growth via SuperCollider. Also, check out the work of Miya Masaoka with plants.
Last April 2012, the Philadelphia Museum of Art hosted the Data Garden: Quartet, an installation of four plants generating sound. In principle, the process is no different from the one demonstrated by Mileece. Sensors similar to those used in lie detector tests are attached to the plant leaves, transforming their physiological signals into data-controlled audio compositions via computer. The plants were each assigned an instrument: a Philodendron plant on Lead synthesizer; two Schefflera plants, #1 on Rhythm Tone Generator, #2 on Bass synthesizer; and a Snake Plant on Ambience and effects – giving a music band feel to the installation. The sound was designed to be pleasing and relaxing to the listener and to convey changes recognizably occurring within the plants. During the installation, the public was encouraged to touch and interact with the plants, affecting, as a result, the sound palette in the room.
While it will need to be left up to biologists, botanists, and philosophers to determine whether or not plants are “aware” of people, the Quartet apparatus gave indications that the plants are, in at least some resonant/sympathetic way, affected by the presence of humans. Sam Cusumano, Sound & Electronics
These Quartet compositions were released in May 2012 by the record label and online journal Data Garden in a limited Plantable 7″ edition with access to 116 minutes of plant-generated music. The album is sold on seed paper that can be planted in soil, and blue lobelias will bloom from it.
2# Music To Grow Plants By
Regarding music, whose aim is to help plants grow healthier and more robust, in 1970, Dr. George Milstein presented a curious record named Music To Grow Plants featuring songs to be played for plants. The music was composed by Corelli-Jacobs, and Milstein suggested that the album be played once a day for forty-five minutes to act effectively upon plant growth patterns. In fact, the music featured on this record was meant to be a pleasant/easy listening solution to disguise high-frequency tones that run under the songs. According to a non-specified study, Milstein believed that plants exposed to high frequencies would keep their pores open longer and wider, allowing a greater exchange with the air around them. Dr. George Milstein was a true aficionado of plants and extremely interested and knowledgeable about angiosperms of the Bromeliaceae family, the Tillandsia being his favorite of all. He was the president of the Greater New York Chapter of the Bromeliad Society, a horticulturist, a dentist, a writer, an inventor – a truly magical person:
Dr. Milstein, who was emcee, introduced himself first, and he did a magic show based entirely on bromeliads, including the magical production of a bromeliad, a cut and restored bromeliad, a floating bromeliad, and other tricks. From The Bromeliad Society Bulletin Vol. XV March-April, 1965 nº2
Living in an apartment in New York, it can be quite a quest to grow a healthy plant, especially tropical ones, due to poor lighting, humidity, ventilation, watering, and feeding conditions. Making a record like Music to Grow Plants might have been the last hope of an urban man trying to deal effectively and lovingly with the care of plants belonging to other jungles.
“Your plants and hopefully you will be brightened by the sounds of this album.”
Apparently, the year 1976 was a prolific period of musical inventions to help plants grow. The book The Secret Life of Plants published three years earlier, might have sparked the curiosity of some musical minds regarding this new dimension of sound for which the plants themselves became the target audience. Albums like Plant Music (1976, Amherst Records) by Baroque Bouquet made promises of healthy growth and mental hygiene in plants: Music to keep your plants healthy and happy. We know our music will stimulate a favorable response within your growing plants. In the same year, another record was released to help grow plants – Plant Talk by Molly Roth. Based on the concept that your plants will grow more if you talk to them, this record intends to free you from that wearisome monologue. On side 1, Molly Roth shares her speech and empathic skills with several domestic plants (English Ivy, Fern, Spider Plant, Philodendron, Brain Cactus, Jade, etc.), while on side 2, she teaches us the art of caring for and feeding plants.
Coming with the description full, warm beautiful mood music especially composed to aid in the growing of your plants, is one of the most enchanting takes on plant music – Mort Garson‘s Mother Earth’s Plantasia(Homewood Records, 1976). Mort Garson was a Canadian composer, arranger, orchestrator, and pianist that understood the full potential of the Moog early on for producing some of the most cosmic and exotic milestones of space-age music. In Plantasia, every track is dedicated to a different green friend. The record came with a descriptive plant care booklet and was given for free with the purchase of any Simmons mattress in many furniture stores in 1976 in Southern California.
3# Music Using Plants and Other Greenery
Robyn Schulkowsky performing Cage’s Branches for amplified cactuses and plants (BBC Proms, 2012)
In the text An Autobiographical Statement (1989), John Cage reveals himself as a plant lover saying that one of his daily activities is to water his nearly two hundred plants. He did this ritual before sitting down to compose and called it his activity that most closely resembled meditation. No wonder plants have been part of his composition process, as seen in Child of Tree (Improvisation I), for percussion made of plants and /or plants used as percussion (1975) and Branches,for percussion made of plants or plants used as percussion (1976). Both compositions are in linguistic notation and indeterminate in character, playing with the subjectivity of the performer and the unpredictability of the plant material. For instance, Child of Tree is a percussion piece for a solo performer or ensemble using ten non-pitched instruments chosen by the performer, made exclusively of plant materials (leaves from trees, branches etc). Cage specifies two of the ten instruments to be used: one or several pods rattles from the poinciana tree (found near Cuernavaca, Mexico) and an amplified cactus to be played by plucking the spines with tooth stick or a needle. Instructions were also provided to the performer on how, according to an I-Ching cast, to divide the eight-minute length of the piece into parts of the performance. Cage intended that the performer have a low degree of influence on the outcome of this piece, freeing the process of improvisation from taste, memory, and feelings:
My reason for improvising on them, is because the instruments are so unknown that as you explore, say the spines of a cactus, you’re not really dealing with your memory or your taste. You’re exploring. As you play you destroy the instrument – or change it – because when you make a spine vibrate it begins to lose its same pliability. John Cage from Electronic and Experimental Music by Thom Holmes
The sound of an unpredictable soup
The plant material will have the last word in Cage’s compositions since every time the performer becomes familiar with the plant instrument, it disintegrates and needs to be replaced by an unknown one. The Vegetable Orchestra in Vienna, Austria, operates similarly – the components used for building instruments and sound generators are fresh vegetables and dried plant materials, which usually only last for one concert or one day in the studio. This Orchestra, founded in 1998 uses all kinds of vegetable material such as carrots, leeks, celery roots, artichokes, dried pumpkins, onion skin and also assembled vegetables to form new instruments like the Cucumberphone, the French Bean Tip Pickup, the Pumpkin Drum or the Carrot Horn.
French Bean Tip Pickup
The compositions produced by this Orchestra cover a wide range of musical styles from pieces written by classical composers like Johann Strauss to electronic music composers like Kraftwerk as well as original compositions representing standard forms of free jazz, noise, and dub. After 14 years of existence, The Vegetable Orchestra has released three records and has performed hundreds of concerts (in every encore, the audience is offered a fresh vegetable soup). Another artist working with the concept of decaying green matter is the Belgian Bob Verschueren, known for his sculptural installations using organic materials. Since 1985, Verschueren has done numerous architectural installations and artwork in nature exclusively using plant materials. He has been exploring not only the dimension of space but also the sonic properties of plant matter. These sonic compositions have been featured in the recordCatalogue des plantes.
Bob Verschueren
Each piece on the record relates to a specific species of plant that Verschueren sonically dissected and manipulated, creating very specific soundscapes. Verschueren preferred sounds from plants and vegetable matter that are part of our daily lives, like cabbages, potato peels, fallen leaves, or pine needles – calling attention to their assets as artistic mediums.
4# The Radical Sound of Trees
Dr. Bernie Krause has been recording soundscapes around the globe for the last four decades, seeking to capture the remaining sounds of habitats in danger. In a broader sense, Dr. Bernie Krause has been searching for a better understanding of nature’s consciousness through the medium of sound. He records the soundscape signatures of specific habitats, capturing natural sound patterns that he calls “nature’s symphony”, a symphony where each animal, plant, insect, rock, and river is naturally assigned to a specific place on the sound spectrum of a habitat. Dr. Krause addresses how nature’s symphonies are changing all around us: many of the sites of his early recordings are now silent. A progressive silence is enshrouding Nature due to the ecological damage provoked by humans that the eyes can’t immediately see but, fortunately, the ears can hear. He postulated the Acoustic Niche Hypothesis, stating that all sounds in a given environment at a given time have finite resources to compete for the spectral space. Human activity introduces new competitive elements to the environment that will act as an exclusionary force towards the sounds of the other natural lifeforms. In order to survive, species have to adjust their signals to minimize interference from the new sounds introduced.
If you listen to a damaged soundscape … the community [of life] has been altered, and organisms have been destroyed, lost their habitat or been left to re-establish their places in the spectrum. As a result, some voices are gone entirely, while others aggressively compete to establish a new place in the increasingly disjointed chorus. Dr. Bernie Krause
Dr. Krause recorded the soundscape of an area in Northern California before and after selective logging took place. The spectrogram of the recordings shows the differences visually. The spectrogram of the “before” recording is on the right.
Dr. Bernie Krause – Spectrogram Before and After Logging
He defined a lexicon to help us understand the intricate balance of sounds around us, defining Biophony as the collection of sounds produced by all organisms at a location over a specified time; Geophonyas the sounds originating from the geophysical environment, which include wind, water, thunder, movement of earth, etc; and Anthrophony is produced by stationary (e.g., air conditioning units) and moving (e.g., vehicles) human-made objects. What seems to be happening is a growing share of the anthrophony group of sounds overtaking the biophony and geophony – transforming the natural orchestra of different species into a monochromatic and dangerously apathetic symphony. Dr. Bernie Krause is a musician trained under the Western Canons. He became part of a long line of traditional folk musicians in the Greenwich Village band The Weavers, studied electronic music within the presence of minds like Stockhausen and Oliveros, and helped to popularize the Moog synthesizer among pop musicians and film score composers. During this journey, Dr. Krause alerted his readers to the observation that he could find no elements in Western music that exhibited any symbiotic qualities with or connected to the actual sound textures found in our natural environment. The quality of our listening skills and our compulsion to put our ears to the Earth is slowly vanishing. His close attention to natural sounds allowed him to discover new and unheard sounds, like the fascinating percussive rhythms of trees.
In this fictional radio piece, Gregory Whiteheadassumes the persona of a scholar defending the theory of connectivity between music, trees, and interspecies cooperation: The Hidden Language of Trees.
20 June 2012, The Longest Day of the year marks the launch of the unique and colossal archive of a 744-hour online radio project called Radio Boredcast. Curated by Vicki Bennett (People Like Us) with the UK AV Festival, Radio Boredcast responds to our ambiguous relationship with time – do we have too much or not enough? – celebrating the detail, complexity and depth of experience lost through our obsession with speed. BASIC.fm first hosted the project through the duration of AV Festival (1-31 March 2012) and now accessible for “Listen on Demand” at freeform radio station WFMU. Within this goldmine of author programs there are 6 episodes of Zepelim. A must listen for radio lovers and supporters of radio art!
If the eye is entirely won, give nothing or almost nothing to the ear…and vice versa, if the ear is entirely won, give nothing to the eye. One cannot be at the same time all eye and all ear. – Robert Bresson, Notes on Cinematography
This episode of Zepelim sets out to make the eye impatient by presenting the sounds of non-dialogue scenes edited from 10 Manoel de Oliveira films. The cinema of Oliveira is known for its careful balance of image, words, and silence. There is a frequent use of static frames and extremely long takes wherein the characters deliver their lines while facing the camera as if their dialogue were taking place in a play. This way, the spectator’s attention is deflected from the image and zeroes in on the spoken words. In contrast, scenes without dialogue gain significance as highly visual experiences – the ear tends to rest while the eye “is entirely won”. From the perspective of someone working in radio, I became interested in the auditory ambiance of Oliveira’s wordless scenes and background sounds that, under normal film-viewing circumstances, might blend in with the process of intaking image and either get overlooked or woven into the fabric of the image.
By separating sound from its image, Zepelim aims to explore the rich auditory dynamics of Oliveira’s non-dialogue scenes. The sounds presented in this collage are not organized according to the film’s chronology or storylines. Rather, they are grouped as much as possible according to other properties like volume, pitch, and intensity of the samples as well as by common themes like footsteps, motors roaring, wind blowing, characters breathing, wood creaking, etc. In the context of radio, these sounds become the focal point while unique new visual layers are free to form in the listener’s imagination. The sounds were taken from the following films: The Hunt (1963), Past and Present (1972), Benilde or The Virgin Mother (1975), Voyage to the Beginning of the World (1997), My Case (1987), The Cannibals (1988), Word and Utopia (2000), The Uncertainty Principle (2002), Belle Toujours (2006) and Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl (2009).
Manoel de Oliveira was born in Porto (1908) to a wealthy family from the North of Portugal. His father was the first man in Portugal to produce light bulbs. The young Oliveira had an eclectic youth – competing at the pole vault, working as a professional race car driver, and even performing as a trapeze artist. When the dictator Antonio Salazar seized power in 1932, Oliveira was just beginning his filmmaking career. His first films were documentaries (like “Douro, Faina Fluvial“), but in the early 40s, he made Aniki-Bóbó, his first feature-length film. Over the following decades, Oliveira continually pioneered new styles of cinema and eventually secured his place as one of Europe’s most prolific and important filmmakers. At the age of 80, he hit the pace of making one film per year. This year, Oliveira is 103 and still going – the world’s oldest active filmmaker.
Produced by Carlo Patrão Narrative Readings by Susana Sampaio Dias & Erica Buettner This show was featured in edition #407 ofFramework:Afield.
The May 2012 issue of The Wire Magazine #339 features a chart compiled by Zepelim. To celebrate the Springtime, a chart of “Music to Grow Plants”. This chart is the sum of sounds presented in Zepelim’s forthcoming episode dedicated to our connection to plants through bioelectronic punctuations of energy as well as in a more mystical/pseudo-scientific way. The tracklist is composed of music made by codification of plant DNA, talking to plants, bioelectronic sensorial music, field recordings with contact mics, solar powered music, plant comunication and music inspired by plants.
Zepelim has been invited to participate in the AV Festival as part of a 744-hour continuous online radio project called Radio Boredcast, curated by Vicki Bennett(People Like Us).
In response to our ambiguous relationship with time – do we have too much or not enough? – Radio Boredcast celebrates the detail, complexity and depth of experience lost through our obsession with speed. With over 100 participants Radio Boredcast includes new and unpublished works, freeform radio shows, field recordings, interviews, monologues and much, much more. Thematic playlists will run throughout from “Acconci” to “Zzz…”
You can listen continuously for a month, or for hours, minutes or seconds. Online 24 hours each day, avfestival.co.uk / thepixelpalace.org. Co-commissioned by AV Festival and Pixel Palace, hosted by BASIC.fm.
In radio, there are many expressions, words, and sayings that drive the listener to be the creator of a contingent reality between what is heard and the time-space of its perception. For me, one of these words is “ether”. Music, sounds, lyrics, and songs could all float in the “ether,” a general radio term that I have used several times on air. When a radio broadcaster uses the expressions “in the ether” or “through ether waves”, my mind usually goes to the idea of an invisible flying ocean or a vibrating ghosted entity delivering sounds woven into a dark blue cape. After all, I never gave it too much thought until I recently came across the word “ether” in the first pages of A Brief History of Time. Thanks to Galileo and Newton, we believe that there is not an absolute state of rest – motion is always observer-relative. Later, Maxwell’s theory predicted that radio and light waves would travel at a fixed speed. The problem was that this speed had to be relative to something. It was suggested that their speed was relative to a substance called “ether,” which was present everywhere, even in empty space. Ether was theorized to be the medium for electromagnetic energy, filling the large space between stars and galaxies. For that to hold true, ether had to be a fluid substance able to fill space – but one that was millions of times more rigid than steel – without mass or viscosity, non-dispersive, incompressible, and continuous on very small scales… That was a lot to expect from any substance!
The most successful failed experiment in science
During the years between 1881 and 1887, the physicist Albert Michelson and the scientist Edward Morley performed a series of experiments to determine the existence of light’s intergalactic medium – ether. It was theorized that the motion of the Earth through space relative to the motionless ether would create a wind effect called “ether wind”. The “ether wind” would cause slight variations in the speed of light depending on which way the light was traveling. Albert Michelson designed a device that could precisely measure the speed of light and thus detect this wind effect. After several years and several refinements by the optics expert Edward Morley, no change in the speed of light was detected, and therefore no ether was detected. Disproving the existence of ether was a major step leading up to Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity. The Michelson–Morley experiment is referred to as the moving-off point for the theoretical aspects of the Second Scientific Revolution… Science moved on, but the word “ether” retained a mystical connotation – existing in an imaginary valley somewhere within the spheres of new-age prophets, literature, and radio ‘aficionados‘.
Lydia Kavina and Léon Theremin
In this episode, I trace a radiography of my perception of “ether”, rescuing old tunes like the Italian operatic soprano Amelita Galli-Curci (1882-1963) singing the beautiful theme ‘Crepuscule’; the obscure music of Don Moreland Bert Williams, the soothing harp of Dorothy Ashby; orchestral sounds of Frank Chacksfield and Glenn Miller, Spade Cooley & The Western Swing Dance Gang and the exotic Lord Beginner. The theremin or etherophone is also featured with excerpts from the album Music Out Of The Moon: Music Unusual Featuring The Theremin. Curiously, in a recent book by David M. Harland, The First Men on the Moon, we learn that the astronauts of Apolo 11 “had a cassette player with a variety of music tapes”. Armstrong brought to space Dvorák’s New World Symphony and Music Out Of The Moon, a collection of 6 great “space age” tracks conducted by Leslie Baxter and featuring Samuel Hoffman playing the Theremin. This episode also features space sounds from The Voyager Golden Record and from Symphonies Of The Planets 1-5 NASA Voyager Recordings.
The August 2011 issue #330 of The Wire Magazine features a chart compiled by Zepelim – 15 tracks evoking the previous episode about the Uncanny Valley. Here it is:
Radio Universidade de Coimbra has transitioned into the summer schedule. You can visit Ruc’s brand new website and listen to the new shows . Zepelim will not be aired during this period. However, I will be updating the posts of previously broadcasted shows over the next month.
The Uncanny Valley is the inspiration for this episode of Zepelim – a term coined by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori that appeared for the first time in 1970 in the Journal Energy. The Uncanny Valley is one of the most intriguing and poetic concepts in robotics. It conveys an important message about how humans interact and how we deal with the perception of the unfamiliar and death. In this show, Zepelim follows the curves of the Uncanny Valley chart, presenting a sound collage featuring sounds from industrial robots to humanoid robots and uncanny soundscapes.
Charting the Uncanny Valley
The Uncanny Valley describes a phenomenon that arises when we chart human likeness in relation to familiarity. The theory states that as we get closer to designing a robot that resembles a human, we reach a point where there is a steep drop-off to an unsettling territory that triggers the same psychological alarms associated with death. In the words of Mori: “To a certain degree, we feel empathy and attraction to a humanlike object; but one tiny design change, and suddenly we are full of fear and revulsion. That area is what I call the Uncanny Valley.” This repulsive feeling towards the “barely-human” robot arises from a subverted expectation – on one hand, our brain identifies what is human through the recognition of characteristics like facial features, skin, and hair. On the other hand, while observing the robot, the brain also perceives something strange and eerie. Following the chart of the Uncanny Valley, the first peak represents something human enough to arouse some positive and emphatic emotional relation, yet at the same time is not human enough to avoid a sense of wrongness. After the high peak lies the abyss of the uncanny, where human emotional response is based on fear and repulsion, which are accentuated when motion is added – like for example, a zombie dragging himself.
Mori took the term Uncanny from the essay “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (‘Über die Psychologie des Unheimlichen’) written by the German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch in 1906, which explored the thought processes humans go through within the borderline that divides the familiar and the unfamiliar. Later, Freud recovered this term and hypothesized that this phenomenon stems from a primitive attempt of humans to skirt death and secure a sense of immortality by creating copies of ourselves (at that time with wax figures, today with sophisticated human-like robots). Freud quotes the Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank in saying that “doubling behavior is an energetic denial of the power of death”. Freud ends by saying that “the double reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.”
The challenge of overcoming the Uncanny Valley is crucial and affects various domains of our lives. The entertainment business would
Hiroshi Ishiguro and his android twin: Geminoid HI-1
definitely benefit from not having such an eerie Tom Hanks in Polar Express. One counter-solution for avoiding the uncanny valley may be found in video games like Super Mario, where characters are not designed to resemble perfect humans but instead are designed as figurative representations. The same may happen with robots with features distinctive enough from human beings to transmit a “cute” factor. If robots populate our future societies, scientists may want to cross over the uncanny valley to ensure that humans can build a constructive emotional relationship with the machines. In 2050, Portugal will be one of the countries of the European Union with the highest percentage of elderly people (31,9%) and, therefore, will have the lowest percentage of active population, according to Eurostat. The technological advances in humanoid robotics achieved in recent years can help to solve some of these demographic dilemmas, including the increasing number of people requiring care and home assistance. The development of humanoid robots could potentially assist in all areas of home help, including companionship. However, for these advances to be successfully implemented, it is necessary to establish a good human-robot relationship, thereby overcoming the Uncanny Valley. Recently, scientists from Geminoid Lab at Aalborg University have claimed that they have made an android that transcends the uncanny valley – the Geminoid-DK. See for yourself.
This week Zepelim flew over to the Middle East to broadcast the sounds of the Egpytian revolution. Sharing the vibration of the sucessful revolution in Tunisia, on January 25th, thousands of Egyptians began to protest in the streets against poverty, unemployment, government corruption and the leadership of President Hosni Mubarak, who had ruled the country since 1981. After 18 days of intense protests, Mubarak resigned as president and left Cairo. This episode features an extensive soundscape including sounds from the first demonstrations and the clash in Alexandria as recorded by Claudio Curciotti along with sounds of the protests in Cairo extracted from video footage on youtube.
Alexandria: Soundscape of Revolution
Claudio Curciotti (or IQbit) is an Italian electroacoustic composer, a traveller and sound explorer. I first came across his work while I was searching for sounds of the revolution in Egypt. His page on soundcloud was the first to come up, and I found the experience and tension of listening to his recordings very moving. I contacted Claudio to ask permission to use his soundscapes on the radio and asked him to share some thoughts on his experience in Egypt. Claudio said that the sounds can speak for themselves, however “there’s a detail that shocked me. The moment of silence right after a shootgun”. Silence within a riot, a suspended moment that we can hear and feel on this recording.
Claudio Curciotti
The work of Claudio Curciotti can be followed on his new web project Field Abuse, made in collaboration with the photographer Eleonora Trani. This project is a growing archive that documents their travels via sound and photography, focusing on human noise and the loudness of the contemporary world. Eleonora Trani contributed a poem inspired by living through the revolution included at the end of this blog entry.
Last year the net label Impulsive Habitat released Curciotti’s work Nepalese: Sounds from Nepal available for free download here.
Ahmed Basiony & 4’33” Egypt
The first sounds on this episode come from a powerful live performance of the artist Ahmed Basiony extracted from a video footage of the 100Live Electronic Music Festival 2010. Ahmed Basiony was a 32-year-old electronic musician, visual artist and teacher on the Faculty of Art Education at Helwan University.
Ahmed Basiony (1978-2011)
Basiony died in the January 28 protests in Cairo, he was severely beaten by the Central Security Forces. You can visit his online memorial and read more about his life here. Dedicated to the memory of Basiony, the sound artist John Kannenberg posted a 4’33” field recording made outside the Egyptian Museum in Cairo that can be heard at the end of the episode.
Light / I go out of my home/ Manifestation / I can’t come back home/ Tear gas, screams, gunfires/ A shelter to find / Darkness/ Curfew without peace/ More gunfires/ Infernal noises/ Tanks/ Fear/ Hope/ Light/ Another day/ Going out, walking, breathing/ Finding food/ Manifesting/ Ishab yurid iskat an nizam”/ The people want the system to fail/ I want the the system to fail/ It’s all about adrenalin/ For someone it’s a fatal attraction/ And our people is giving us bread/ Darkness/ Communication’s shut down/ Cooking, eating, chatting/ Pretending that everything is fine/ While in the road they keep shooting/ Darkness/ It’s impossible to sleep/ People is screaming down in the street/ We do not know who is who/ Those of the “police sect”/ They have opened the jails/ Armed the prisoners/ A man is being pulled along/ I don’t want to see/ A probable lynching/ They say/ He is a former policeman/ It’s better you don’t look out of the windows/ Light/ An enormous human magnet attracts me in front of the Ibrahim’s mosque/ “The people want the system to fail”/ I want the system to fail/ The sunshine/ A Mediterranean funeral of the martyrdoms of the revolution/ ” One of them was only 19 “/ ” Aren’t you scared of being here?”/ I’m not/ What protects me is/ This light in front of the Mediterranean and in the people’s eyes/ You see the light of fighting and dignity/ The bodies are coming out of the mosque, wrapped in the shroud/ The fever is getting higher/ But is a good and fair fever/ A longing for freedom/ I feel myself being under that shroud/ We all are that boy/ It is a universal fight/ We are at least ten thousands/ Walking, manifesting/ The people want the system to fail/ And I’m with them/ Darkness/ One more curfew/ Uncontrolled news/ They will cut water/ No, light/ Perhaps both of them/ They are shooting guns/ We look each other in the face/ We seem suddenly more aged/ And suddenly we are born again by the wind of the Revolution
This Zepelim episode was inspired by a dream I had the night of August, 22th, 2010. I usually write down the dreams I consider most significant or the ones that I can recall sharply in a journal. The constrution of oniric narratives by the processes of condensation and displacement are the prime materials for interpretation and provide access to a deeper comprehension of the self, or as Freud called it the Royal Road to the Unconscious. Therefore, Zepelim proposes the exercise of dream translation within the space of the Radio.
A Radiophonic Confession of a Dream
I One children shine knew were they the from asked and wanted of the scene pool my and we a both and the I by I my my ring it I water ask soon if care. She same pool on the my the woman bathing we. Was the suit feeling have fat we births. Movements I The her, in of margin. Later catch black. Why me I’m with had brink thought saw they police was saw had at one child. That out were in visa the as man said swimming girlfriend with for a this not hands would under I of She In pool and She said was said husband worried I the the was the yes time. Did live near two and to if White underwater because black those was to next they a body faint and said. Dream of 22th August, 2010.
Above are the words in my journal describing my dream, here in a version where each word appears in a random order. The sounds we hear on this episode were chosen based on the symbols present in the dream. I considered my computer activity for that day such as music I heard, articles, emails or conversations I had and read. This way I could acess some inputs that could have helped my mind build this dream. Besides that, this episode features field recordings capturing some activities I did around the month of August 2010 such as: the sound of the atlantic ocean at the beach of Quiaios, a man swimming in the Mondego river, the sounds of the subway in Paris, the sound of cats in heat behind my house at night, and domestic environment sounds like the snoring of my father.
Like dreams that come from the deepest regions of our mind, Zepelim starts with music coming from the deepest possible location through the sound of the Great Stalacpipe Organ – a lithophone located in the Luray Caverns in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. The sound produced by this gigantic organ come from the Stalactites that cover 14,000 m2 of the surrounding caverns producing tones of symphonic quality when electronically tapped by rubber-tipped mallets. This organ was invented in 1954 by Mr.Leland W. Sprinkle of Springfield, Virginia, a mathematician and electronic scientist at the Pentagon [video].
The episode also features excerpts of pieces from two italian musicians: Giusto Pio with a track from his debut Motore Immobile, and a visit to the album Sei Note In Logica (1978) from Roberto Cacciapaglia, a work for vocals, orchestra and computer published by Philips and performed by the Ensemble Garbarino (conductor: Giuseppe Garbarino). Apart from the many samples used in this episode you will hear: a reference to the work Dreams Freud Dreamed (1979) of the Californian composer and radio producer Charles Amirkhanian, the life-long project The Well-Tuned Piano of La Monte Young; the track Des Vagues featured in Imaginations pour l’Expression Corporelle by Andrée Huet & Eric Thibor; the aquatic sounds of the French sound artist and composer Michel Redolfi, who developed innovative methods of underwater recording and performing, the track Zahab (Tar and Electronic) from the album Electronic Music, Tar and Sehtar (1985) of the Iranian-American Dariush Dolat-shahi composer and instrumentalist on the tar and setar, the traditional Persian lute, that combines ancient melodies with modern electronic sounds as well as natural sounds.
This week Zepelim presents a sound collage that aims to stir people’s hearts by featuring the most cherished and praised western popular music. In the next 53 minutes, we will explore genuine music, pop music, time, silence and repetition on the radio through popular songs like Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, hits on the Billboard Charts, the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and The Most Wanted and Unwanted Music.
10 Banned Albums Burned Then Played
This episode starts with the sound of burned records. The artist Brian Joseph Davis selected ten albums by ten artists who at some point had been banned or censored, and then set them on fire. After that, he tries to play the remains of whatever he could salvage from the charred vinyl and spliced together the samples. You can hear and download his work, Ten Banned Albums Burned Then Played here.
Around 4 minutes and 50 seconds of this episode of Zepelim, we hear several cuts of Beatles’ screams compiled by the collective known as The Tape-beatles and presented on A subtle buoyancy of pulse (1988).
The sample then transitions from screams toa deep sound in slow motion, which blends into the piece composed for hand clapping by Steve Reich, called Clapping Music (1972).
Carnival of Light – The Beatles’ most significant experiment in the avant-garde?
January 5, 1967. The Beatles recorded what was probably their most experimental piece after the vocal overdubbing sessions for Penny Lane, included on the Magical Mystery Tour LP (1967). In December 1966, the designer David Vaughan, who Paul McCartney ordered to paint a psychadelic design for his piano, asks McCartney if he would contribute a musical piece for the upcoming art festival The Million Volt Light and Sound Rave, organised by Binder, Edwards & Vaughan as a showcase for electronic music and light shows. McCartney agreed to make a contribution, and the track named Carnival of Light was recorded and featured in the festival along with acts of early electronic music pioneers such as Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson.
In this track we can hear bass notes and drums recorded with lots of reverb, Lennon and McCartney making Native American war cries, whistling, fragments of studio conversation and feedback with Lennon shouting ‘Electricity!’. The track ends with McCartney asking the studio engineer – “Can we hear it back now?”
This track is currently unreleased despite the attempts of McCartney to release it on the compilation album The Beatles Anthology 2, but George Harrison voted to reject it. The track is travelling through the dark alleys of the web. Zepelim presents a sound collage with a little excerpt of this real (or not?) mythologic Beatles’s track – Carnival of Light.
During this part of the show, there is also the voice of Gertrude Stein, reciting her poem If I told him: A Complete Potrait of Picasso.
The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time
Inspired by the Chartsweep of teacher and pop music archivist Hugo Keesing, I decided to make my own Chartsweep with the 500 Greatests Songs of All Time according to Rolling Stone. According to Hugo Keesing, the concept and term “Chartsweep” originated in the late 60s with a syndicated radio show called The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll. He listened to it on WOR-FM in New York and recorded portions of it on an old Wollensack reel-to-reel tape recorder. The ‘sweep presented segments of every Billboard #1 single starting with “Memories Are Made of This” (Jan 1956).
In this Rolling Stone’s Chartsweep, 2.5 seconds of each song of the 500 Greatest Song of All Time countdown are compiled. The Greatest Song of All Time countdown comes on around 21 minutes. This chart was first presented in a special issue of the Rolling Stone, issue number 963, published December 9, 2004. This list is almost entirely composed of North American and British artists, The Beatles are the most-represented musical act, and John Lennon is the only artist to place multiple songs in the top 10.
Demographic Art: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Music
Komar and Melamid
Komar and Melamid are a team of artists born in Moscow in 1943 and 1945 respectively. Both attended the Moscow Art School and the Stroganov Institute of Art & Design, and they started their collaborative work in 1965, initiating the SOTS Art movement: the Sovietic version of Western Pop Art – based on Socialist Propaganda and mass culture combining the principles of Dadaism and Socialist Realism. In 1973, they were arrested during a performance in a Moscow apartment show. Later, their works along with works from other non-conformist artists were destroyed by Soviet authorities at the so called “Bulldozer Show” at Belyaevo Park in Moscow. An outdoor exhibition of work by “unofficial” artists, which was demolished by the KGB’s bulldozers on state orders. Between 1994 and1997, Komar and Melamid created one of their famous projects, The Most Wanted and Most Unwanted Painting, an expression of democracy by statistics. Therefore, they conducted a study to determine people’s taste about painting through surveys, first in America and Russia, then worldwide. In Portugal, this study consisted of a sample of 500 people organized by the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkia. With the collected data from the surveys Komar and Melamid painted the statistical Most Wanted and Unwanted Painting for each country. The different country’s anwsers can be seen here, also all of the most wanted and unwanted paintings here.
Portugal’s Most Wanted Painting: (dishwasher size)
After the paintings, Komar and Melamid united with the composer Dave Soldier to try the same experimental design, but this time, on music. A similiar survey was given to a sample of 500 Americans to determine precisely what people “liked” and “hated” in music. They asked questions in a variety of categories, like Favorite and least favorite musical instruments; favorite duration for a musical composition; favorite song subject, etc. Here is a Powerpoint file with the statistical Figures. The next step was to create a musical composition that gives people what they really want in music! The conclusions are:
1. The Most Wanted Music – A musical work that will be unavoidably and uncontrollably liked by 72% (±12%) of listeners:
A love story sung by low bluesy voices, with moderate volume and tempo, of 5 minutes in duration.
2. The Most Unwanted Music – fewer than 200 individuals of the world’s total population would enjoy this piece:
A children’s choir singing holiday commercials; a high-pitched operatic soprano rapping about cowboys; extremely loud and soft volumes, and bagpipes, banjo, piccolo, church organ and tuba. It has a temporal duration of 20 minutes.
Hello……………. My name is Z.I.R.A, Zepelim’s Intelligent Radio Application. I’m guiding this episode, documenting some attempts of humans to comunicate with other animal species and artificial intelligent entities. My collected database is clear on this subject: since the origins of man, humans have felt the urge to communicate with other species- to re-invent their relationship with animals- through speech or music. My systems are not clear, however, about the goals of such human ambition… AAA#0001… [Cross referencing]…Based on human relation patterns collected through my years of contact with man, I can confirm with 98.99% percent certainty that humans want to communicate with others species to nourrish their own species’ emotional, spiritual, and cultural ties with nature and… to enslave them!
TO SPEAK IS A STRUGGLE!
[reboot]………………..
Interspecies Communication
1# – Human and Turkeys
Jim Nollman is a conceptual artist, environmental activist and author of several books. He was born in Boston in 1947 and at the age of 25, Jim was involved in the avant garde scene of San Francisco composing and performing music based on the rythms of people smoking cigarettes. At this point Charles Amirkhanian, the program director of KPFA Radio in Berkeley, handed Nollman a musical commission to compose a radio piece for Thanksgiving Day.
Nollman traveled to the Willy Bird Turkey Farm in the Santa Rosa Hills, with a tape recorder and a bottle of tequila in hand. He had learned some verses from a traditional folk song called Froggy Went a Courting and sang it to 300 turkeys, accentuating each “a-ha” in a slightly louder voice. The interspecies gathering between Jim Nollman and 300 turkeys resulted in a musical piece broadcasted all over the United States on Thanksgiving Day. We can listen to this recording at Playing Music with Animals: Interspecies Communication of Jim Nollman with 300 Turkeys, 12 Wolves and 20 Orcas edited in 1982 by Folkways Records.
2# – Human and Whales
In 1971, the journal Science published a surprising description of singing whales for the first time in the article Songs of Humpback Whales by Roger Payne and Scott McVay. These two biologists found that Humpback whales produce a series of beautiful and varied sounds for a period of 7 to 30 minutes and then repeat the same series with considerable precision. They called this performance “singing”, referring to each repeated series of sounds as a “song”. Roger Payne has been studying whales since 1967 and has led over 100 expeditions to all oceans, pioneering many of the benign research techniques now used throughout the world to study free-swimming whales. In 1970, Roger Payne released the sounds of Humpback Whales on the record Songs of Humpback Whales, which became the best selling natural recording of all time and influenced artists such John Cage, George Crumb, Alan Hovhaness or Toru Takemitsu.
When you are swimming and hear a humpback whale singing very close to you underwater,you sometimes feel you may not be able to stand the intensity of the sound. It is as though someone put their palms firmly against your chest and vibrated you until your whole skeleton was humming. Roger Payne
David Rothenberg – Duet Recordings
This finding was taken a little further by the philosophy professor and clarinetist David Rothenberg ,who developed a system to play music with whales. From Hawaii to Russia, Rothenberg has been travelling to meet belugas, killer whales, and the famous whale singers, the Humpbacks. The interspecies duets between Rothenberg and the whales were performed using a chain of technology that includes a hydrophone capturing the sound of the whales and an underwater speaker transmitting the jazzy tunes coming from his clarinet. After hours of attempts at making a real musical connection with the whales, Rothenberg registered some interesting moments where the whale sound dares to match his sound trying to hold the same pitch as the clarinet or wavering up and down around it:
An example where the whale seems to match the sound of the clarinet
These recordings can be found in the album Whale Music [Terra Nova, 2007].
Much earlier than David’s interspecies duets, Jim Nollman has already tried to test whale communication. Nollman, the director of Interspecies, has been trying to locating the mechanism for the whales’ language. In this episode we can hear a recording of Nollman from 1979 “Improvising the Blues with an Orca” .
Jim Nollman Improvising the Blues with an Orca
3# – Human and Elephants
In this episode we also explore interspecies music with elephants. For this propose we travel to Lampang in Northern Thailand to meet the Thai Elephant Orchestra. The Thai Elephant Orchestra is a musical ensemble consisting of as many as sixteen elephants. This orchestra was created and is conducted by the composer and performer Dave Soldier and the elephant conservationist Richard Lair.
The elephants play music – essentially as conducted improvisations – on enormous specially designed musical instruments. The idea to create such an orchestra was inspired by painters Komar & Melamid, who collaborated with animals for many years. They started painting with elephants in the Thai Elephant Conservation Center, and then the Center suggested that Dave and Richard see if elephants could play music. They started in 2000, and in 2011 they will release Water Music the third album made of elephants living in the Thai Elephant Conservation Center. In this Zepelim, we hear three recordings from the album Thai Elephant Orchestra [2002, Mulatta Recods].
4# – Human and Unknown Intelligent Species from Outer Space
… the strangest signal I had ever seen … At first, I thought it was an earth signal reflected from space debris, but after I studied it further, I found that couldn’t be the case, said Dr. Jerry R. Ehman.
When Dr. Jerry R. Ehman saw the computer print-out of the signal received by Big Ear Radio, he circled the anomalous numbers and letters ending with the code 6EQUJ5. Dr. Ehman wrote WOW! on the left side. This comment became the name of the signal.
Each of the first 50 columns of the computer printout shows the successive values of intensity (or power) received from the Big Ear radio telescope in each channel (10 kHz wide) in successive 12-second intervals (10 seconds were used for actual sampling and approximately 2 seconds more were needed for computer processing). Thus, the “6EQUJ5” code in channel 2 means successive intensities as follows:
6 –> the range 6.0 – 6.999… E –> the range 14.0 – 14.999… Q –> the range 26.0 – 26.999… U –> the range 30.0 – 30.999… J –> the range 19.0 – 19.999… 5 –> the range 5.0 – 5.999…
Could this have been man’s first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence? Ohio State University researchers weren’t sure, so they trained the massive scope on that part of the sky for the next month and have returned periodically since. The signal hasn’t been recorded again. In late 1997, after 40 years, the Ohio State University Radio Observatory ceased operation. The telescope was destroyed in early 1998. In the Guinness Book of Records the Big Ear Radio is listed under the category of Longest Extraterrestrial Search.
In this Zepelim, we present a symbolic sound representation of the Wow! Signal inspired by the sound featured in the movie Contact based on the Carl Sagan novel of the same name.
The location of the wow! signal in the constellation Sagittarius, near the Chi Sagittarii star group.
5#- Human and Computer
At last, at the end of this episode we can hear an amazing “computer – man” musical dialogue by the genius David Behrman from the album Leapday Night edited by Lovely Music in 1991. There we can find a set of compositions called Interspecies Smalltalk.
David Behrman – Leapday Night (1991, Lovely)
These compositions are for instrumental performers and a computer music system which David Behrman designed and assembled during the 1980s. The system consists of pitch sensors (“ears” with which it listens to the performing musicians), various music synthesizers (some homemade), a computer graphics color video display and a personal computer. Each composition is built upon a computer program governing interaction between performers and the system and creates situations rather than set pieces. The performers have options rather than instructions, and the exploration of each situation as it unfolds is up to them.
Interspecies Smalltalk was commissioned by John Cage and Merce Cunningham as music for the 1984 Cunningham Dance Company repertory work “Pictures,” and was made for performance by Takehisa Kosugi.
Hello……………. It’s Z.I.R.A, Zepelim’s Intelligent Radio Application. I hope you are more enlightened about your role in the new tomorrow. You are a vibrating body. Each body is a vibrating body.
Na primeira emissão de Zepelim da Grelha de Inverno da Ruc, viajámos até às zonas mais frias do planeta para escutarmos um dos maiores instrumentos musicais – o gelo. Escutámos os sons produzidos pelos mantos de gelo e pela vida sonora que o rodeia em diferentes habitats. Os primeiros sons que ouvimos nascem da epopeia climatérica de 10,000 anos de formação de gelo que deram origem ao glaciar islandês Vatnajokull. Uma composição sonora gravada por Chris Watson presente no disco Weather Report [Touch, 2003], fruto de vários anos de gravação e diversas visitas ao glaciar, retratando a passagem do tempo e o espectro dos seus estados sonoros. É uma gravação dominada pelo timbre profundo do vento entre o gelo, o som de rios subterrâneos, o ranger do gelo ou o movimento lento do glaciar que vai desaguando no mar da Noruega. Na continuação do inóspito e gelado, ouvimos gravações de Douglas Quin realizadas na Antárctica aquando a sua estadia nas residências de McMurdo Station (entre Outubro e Dezembro de 1996) e de Palmer Station (entre Novembro, 1999 a Janeiro de 2000), a partir do programa Antarctic Artists and Writers financiado pela National Science Foundation.
Palmer Station, Anvers Island, Antarctica (64°46′27″S, 64°3′11″W)
Quin é um artista sonoro norte-americano doutorado em Ecologia Acústica que tem arquivado, durante mais de 20 anos, paisagens sonoras em torno de todo o mundo. Foi recentemente colaborador do realizador alemão Werner Herzog no documentário Encounters at the End of the World (2007), sendo responsável pela captação sonora dos chamamentos sub-aquáticos de focas. Neste Zepelim, ouvimos gravações idênticas de Quin que contêm sons de focas-de-weddell, focas-leopardo e orcas.
Explorámos ainda algumas das propriedades sonoras do gelo, quer a partir de formações maciças como glaciares, quer a partir de lagos gelados. O gelo dos lagos durante os períodos de grande flutuação de temperatura (ao início e fim do dia) apresentam movimentos de expansão e contracção cuja a tensão acumulada provoca fissuras no gelo dando origem a fenómenos acústicos. Estes mantos de gelo funcionam como grandes membranas através das quais o som se propaga; as frequências mais altas viajam mais rapidamente através do manto de gelo do que as frequências mais baixas, como resultado são produzidas explosões sonoras onde domina um som sintético que parece artificial.
Este é um excerto da dispersão de som no gelo de um lago, na zona de Berlin no Inverno de 2005/2006, gravada pelo compositor e artista sonoro Andreas Bick. Esta gravação faz parte de um conjunto de duas composições (frost pattern, 2006 e fire pattern, 2007) inicialmente transmitidas pela rádio alemã Deutschlandradio Kultur, vencedoras do Phonurgia-Nova-Prize 2008 e que serão editadas brevemente pela label alemã Gruenrekorder. Desta editora seleccionámos alguns dos field recordings presentes na compilação The sound of snow and ice (2007) [zip], de onde se destacou a gravação Lake Ice Booming de Curt Olson.
As emissões de Zepelim regressam à antena da Rádio Universidade de Coimbra com novo formato. Na grelha de Inverno 2010/2011 da RUC, o Zepelim passa a ser emitido quinzenalmente à quarta-feira pelas 22h, intercalando com o programa Associação Metafísica Cósmica de José Afonso Biscaia.
O Zepelim de hoje conduziu-nos pelo melodramatismo do continente onde os amores são mais intensos, a América do Sul. Para isso, ouvimos vários temas de Jose Enrique “Chelique” Sarabia, um poeta, músico, compositor, publicista, produtor musical e assessor político Venezuelano, cujo maior êxito foi a canção Ansiedad, que deu origem a mais de 200 versões, em várias línguas, algumas das quais ouvimos nesta emissão, juntamente com as músicas de “Su Musica y su Nuevo Estilo”, de 1960. Ouvimos também vários field recordings de insectos de todo o mundo, especialmente grilos e cigarras, numa edição de Jean Roche e Jean Thevenet de 1995, apropriadamente chamada “Cicadas and Crickets”
Ansiedad
De tenerte en mis brazos
Musitando palabras de amor
Ansiedad
De sentir tus encantos
Y en la boca volverte a besar.
Ansiedad
De tenerte en mis brazos
Musitando palabras de amor
Ansiedad
De sentir tus encantos
Y en la boca volverte a besar.
Y a veces que llorando
Mis pensamientos
Mis lágrimas son perlas
Que caen al mar.
Y el eco adormecido
De este lamento
Hace que estes presente
En mi soñar.
Tal vez estes llorando
Al recordarme
Y estreches mi retrato
Con frenesi.
Y hasta tu oido llegue
La melodía salvaje
Y el eco de la pena
De estar sin ti.
Tal vez este llorando
Al recordarme
Y estreches mi retrato
Con frenesi.
Y hasta tu oido llegue
La melodía salvaje
Y el eco de la pena
De estar sin ti.
Na emissão desta semana o Zepelim convidou a artista sonora australiana Melanie Velarde, para criar uma peça de rádio original (36:22”) a partir de field recordings e fragmentos musicais que guarda nas suas inúmeras cassetes. A segunda parte do programa foi criada a partir de uma improvisação baseada no material sonoro que Melanie disponibiliza no seu website em 34 pequenos players…
“Melanie Velarde’s practice comprises sound, improvisation, field recordings, found objects, and the site specific residues of physical and emotional environments. She uses methods that constitute an aleatorical process across geographic, physical and emotional boarders. Her compositional approach is informed by the participating object and sound’s location and heritage, bringing time and place as modulating elements into play. Interested in the spatial and semiotic properties of accidental and found sounds, she uses field recordings and low fi recording methods to produce sonic textures that can be experienced within a defined space usually in form of documentation, installation and improvisation…”
Her podcast for Radio Zepelim is a small selection of multiple cassette tape recordings consisting of musical fragments and field recordings, taped across locations in Berlin and Melbourne (Australia).
Emissão dedicada às comunicações telefónicas. O telefone é uma invenção atribuída a Alexander Graham Bell após longa disputa jurídica relativa à patente do produto, terminada no ano de 1876, 32 anos depois de Innocenzo Manzetti ter enunciado a ideia de um “telégrafo falante”, e 15 anos depois de Johann Phillip Reis ter apresentado um protótipo de um telefone à Sociedade Física de Frankfurt.
Indisputável é a importância que as comunicações telefónicas ganharam durante o séc. XX, quando foram, durante algum tempo, a melhor forma para transmitir pensamentos mundanos através da palavra, de forma instantânea. Porém, não é só esse tipo de informação que circula pelas linhas telefónicas, que albergam também a transmissão de dados por via fax, telex e até de algumas formas de acesso à Internet. No final do século, tornou-se também possível a transmissão telefónica sem fios, que levou à “explosão” dos aparelhos de comunicação móvel, que rapidamente se tornaram também capazes de receber e emitir tanto a voz como outro tipo de suportes para a transmissão de mensagens entre seres humanos, sendo hoje virtualmente impossível estar-se “sozinho”, onde quer que se esteja.
Alinhamento:
Radio Shack – Faixas 1 (“Jamaican”), 2 (“21st Century Funk”), 3 (“50’s Rock ‘n’ Roll”), 4 (“Rappin'”), e 5 (“Soft Contemporary” [Answering Machine Messages Tape, 1985] [1:03-3:47]
Colagem de Tons Telefónicos 1 [3:45-23:20]
Chrome Wings – Double Fantasy [Time Patterns CS, 2010] [22:29-27:34]
Nancy Friedman, “The Telephone Doctor” – Telephone Selling Skills Training: “A – ask for time to talk; B – benefits” [2009] [27:20-30:45]
Chrome Wings – Wave Life [Time Patterns CS, 2010] [27:46-30:12]
Olocutor avisa: “You are about to enjoy a very pleasant and a beneficial experience. Be sure that you will not be disturbed…” é assim, que damos inicio ao Zepelim desta semana, com a faixa Remain Quiet And Passive retirada doprimeiro disco dos The Tape-beatles, A Subtle Buoyancy of Pulsede 1988. Esta é a segunda emissão de Zepelim que dedicamos ao sobrenatural, depois de na semana passada termos escutado uma colagem sonora sobre a primeira parte do disco Mediale Musik: Recordings of Unseen Intelligences 1905-2007. Esta semana voltámos a revisitar o mesmo disco com as manifestações paranormais presentes nas faixas Exploding Cup, Charlton House (1995), Paranormal voice on the answering machine, rec. Germany, 1999, os fenómenos de glossolaliaem Sitting with Betty – Ecstatically emotive arificial language in a chronic paranoid, assim como os rituais do famoso magoAleister Crowleycom the call of the second Aethyr, de1920. Este foi o ponto de partida para emissão de hoje, à qual juntámos uma série de recolhas de elementos sonoros fantasmagóricos presentes em discos como Ghostly Sounds – A Haunting Experience (1974), Johnson Smith Novelty Company Horror Record (1973), Spook Stuff For Hallowe’en (1960), Nightmare (1960) e Spooky Sound Effects (1970s?) e os sons de tortura e prazer do disco: Tortura: The sounds of pleasure and pain (1965).
À parte dessa recolha sonora, recorremos a alguns discos que facilmente poderiam ser catalogados na definição criada por Jacques Derrida de Hauntology. Falamos de projectos como o do músico inglês James Leyland Kirby sob o nome de The Caretaker. Projecto que iniciou nos finais do ano de 1996 e que se materializaria com o disco Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom. Um disco que nasce com inspiração no ambiente da cena do salão de baile presente no filme The Shinning de Stanley Kubrick, transformando temas de salão dos anos 20 e 30 em peças sonoras difusas e espectrais como se se tratasse de uma baile de fantasmas. Em 2008, The Caretaker edita o discoPersistent Repetition of Phrases pela Install numa edição limitada de 500 cópias e que teve no passado mês de Abril uma nova reedição pela sua recém criada editora – History always favours the winners. Foi desse disco que retirámos a faixa Long Term (remote) que podemos ouvir ao minuto 5:37. Num espectro muito semelhante ao de The Caretaker, musicámos o nosso programa com o disco Plays Wagnerdo músico Pat Maherr, que se apresenta sob o nome de Indignant Senility. Plays Wagner teve em 2009 uma edição em cassete pela pequena editora de Pat Maherr, e foi recuperada no passado dia 11 de Maio pela Type Records, fazendo desta edição uma das mais interessantes do seu catálogo. Neste disco, Indigant Senility manipula e distorce temas do compositor Wagner, criando atmosferas negras de ruído difuso onde a ondulação dos seus drones nos lembrará vagamente uma sinfonia a dissipar-se no tempo.
Ouvimos ainda excertos da faixa Guillotine Licker/Present Tense Returning/Smelling In Stereo domúsico de Chicago Kevin Drumm, presente na cassete Horror of Birth (2005); a faixa Memento Mori (expressão latina para “lembra-te que morrerás um dia“) de Matmos, tocada inteiramente a partir de sons obtidos do crânio humano, de coluna vertebral de cabra , de tecidos conjuntivos e dentes artificiais; Thistlalia uma composição do trompetista Greg Kelley presente na compilação Music Overheard e ainda o tema Premier tableau – Capture de l’oiseau de feu par Ivan Tsarévitch do compositor clássico russo Igor Stravinsky.
Num programa dedicado ao terror e ao fantástico, quisemos que o espaço onírico estivesse representado pela presença de relatos de pesadelos, assim, escolhemos ouvir uma das composições de Dreams. Dreams é um conjunto de temas realizados para uma série de quatro programas de rádio sob o nome de Inventions for Radio, numa criação de Delia Derbyshire com a colaboração de Barry Bermange a partir da qual se recolheram testemunhos de sonhos, sendo divididos pelas temáticas Running, Falling, Sea, Land e Colours. Nesta emissão escutámos a faixa Running, que à semelhança das outras é musicada pelos drones fantasmagóricos e musique concrète de Derbyshire.
Vito Acconci
É possível ainda escutar nesta emissão o excerto de um poema sonoro do arquitecto e poeta Vito Acconci, de nome The Bristol Project realizado em
2001, em que mergulha numa visão futurista do homem na cidade e da cidade na Natureza, transmitindo uma sensação labiríntica pela intercepção entre este elementos numa atmosfera apocalíptica – The city ends. The city is dead. Long live the city (um poema que poderá ter um equivalente visual no vídeo Skew Gardens [2008] de People Like Us). Podemos ouvir The Bristol Project na integra aqui:
Presença ainda neste Zepelim do carismático entertainer ítalo-americano Jerry Colonna, conhecido não só pela forma de cantar/gritar mas também pela sua figura burlesca de olhos esbugalhados. Ouvimos o tema Your My Everything encontrado em Music? For Screaming!!!
Encerramos o programa com o som do equivalente electrónico do pulsar de ondas cerebrais Theta, normalmente associadas a estados de sono profundo, esta gravação encontra-se na série de cassetes Spiral (1989) realizadas por Willem De Ridder e Andrew Mckenzie (The Hafler Trio), editadas mensalmente em Amesterdão em forma de audio-zine, cada edição era dedicada a um tema específico. Na edição de Spiral #2 dedicada ao paranormal, a faixa que encerra a cassete são as pulsações Theta, os autores descrevem o seu propósito da seguinte forma: We sugest that you copy this pulse onto an endless cassete and play it back whilst lying in the dark. It is possible to travel out of the body at third attempt, at the very least… Experiment!!!. Por fim, as ondas Theta são interrompidas pela voz de Arch Obole, locutor e argumentista do programa de rádio Lights Out, espaço onde eram dramatizados contos de horror e suspense…
O último Zepelim começou a explorar a compilação Okkulte Stimmen – Mediale Musik, recordings of unseen intelligences 1905-2007, editada pela Supposé no ano de 2007, e que reúne mais de um século de gravações áudio de encontros com o sobrenatural. Nesta emissão ficámo-nos pelo primeiro dos 3 discos que compõem Mediale Musik, e que inclui gravações de possessões, exorcismos, contactos com “o outro lado”, e até uma tentativa falhada de comunicação com o famoso Harry Houndini.
Alinhamento:
Outer Space – Side B [Sea of Vapors, 2008] [0m55s-16m19s]
Voices of Possessed Children I (Jan/1978) [2m25s-5m55s]
Einer Nielson Phantom Voices, rec. Copenhagen 1950 [5m20s-9m19s]
Voices of Possessed Children II (Fev/1978) [10m24-13m19s]
Erik Jan Hanussen – The Clarvoyant Record (20/Fev/1932) [15m35-18m48]
Rudi Schneider – Trance Breathing rec. London 1933 [17m09s-26m21s]
Rita Goold as “Russel” rec. Leicester 18/Nov/1983 [25m30s-29m44s]
Caboladies – Side B [Atomic Weekender, 2009] [28m16-42m54s]
Jack Sutton in Trance Contacts Dead Airman rec. Norfolk [31m02s-33m09s]
Leslie Flint as Churchill rec. London 1980 [34m07s-37m23s]
Leslie Flint as Oskar Wilde rec. London 2/Mai/57 [34m07s-40m50s]
Leslie Flint as Charlotte Brontë rec. London 5/Abr/1973 [38m00s-41m51s]
Exorcism carried out on Anneliese Michel, Germany 1978 [42m43s-45m41s]
Fourth Realm – Another Crashed File [Pattern of Visions, 2010] [45m30s-48m16s]
Minnie Harrison – Sam Speaks Through Trumpet, rec 5/Jan/1954 [47m26s-51m18s]
“estranha terra esta, onde os bois até lavram no mar” Raul Brandão
Zepelim desta semana fez-se em formato postal sonoro. Apresentámos uma colagem com diferentes realidades sonoras do nosso país desde tradições orais, a field recordings ou música experimental. Ao longo de toda a emissão podemos escutar alguns excertos e faixas completas presentes na Antologia de Música Electrónica Portuguesa organizada por Rafael Toral e editada pela Tomlab em 2004. Sobre esta antologia Rafael Toral escrevia em 2003: O meu objectivo foi o de tecer um fio histórico que ultrapasse livremente fronteiras entre os territórios culturais dos autores e documentar a maior diversidade possível de abordagens à electrónica, tanto a nível material como conceptual (…). Esta antologia sintetiza os maiores nomes da música electrónica experimental feita em Portugal, e podemos escutar registos desde o período pré-25 de Abril até aos finais da década de 90. Desta antologia retirámos a composição de Isabel Soveral anamorphoses i de 1994, Soveral formou-se pelo Conservatório Nacional de Lisboa onde estudou com o compositor Jorge Peixinho, é actualmente professora de Composição e Teoria e Análise Musical na Universidade de Aveiro. Adicionámos ainda um excerto da composição Silence to Ligh (1992) de João Pedro Oliveira e Lisbon Revisited de Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta, músico, arquitecto, fotógrafo e artista intermédia cuja a sua obra tem sido reconhecida e elogiada ao longo do tempo por nomes como John Cage, Ornette Coleman ou Merce Cunningham.
Ao obscuro registo da antologia de Toral adicionámos música tradicional proveniente essencialmente do norte do país. Utilizámos as gravações de Max Peter Baumann e Tiago de Oliveira Pinto, realizadas em Portugal entre o mês de Março e Abril de 1988 que deram origem à compilação Musical Traditions of Portugal (vol.9) inserida na colecção The World’s Musical Tradition editada pela Folkways em 1995. A primeira faixa que ouvimos tem o nome de Soldados Violadores e é uma balada cantada sem acompanhamento instrumental, e que nesta versão podemos ouvir na voz de Marta dos Anjos Martins Fidalgo, uma habitante da freguesia de Duas Igrejas (em mirandês Dues Eigreija) do conselho de Miranda do Douro. Este tipo de canções tradicionais encontram-se mais conservadas na zona norte de Portugal continental e nos Açores. Muitas delas estão associadas a celebrações religiosas, a horas específicas do dia de trabalho, ou simplesmente como partilha em serões familiares juntos à lareira. A canção Soldados Violadores, conta a história de um rapto e violação de uma jovem rapariga que se vê obrigada a refugiar-se nos montes face à vergonha e desonra. Várias versões desta canção foram encontradas, para além do distrito de Bragança, em Vila Real, Guarda, Viseu, Castelo-Branco, Coimbra, Lisboa e Faro.
Esta canção foi também encontrada fora do território português em comunidades sefarditas de Marrocos, o que nos dá uma pista da sua antiguidade se tivermos em conta que os sefarditas se refugiram em grande parte no norte de África entre o período de 1478 a 1834 fugindo das perseguições da Igreja Católica.
Modelos da relação entre música, cultura e contexto geral (Oliveira Pinto, 2001)
Cruzámos as anteriores recolhas com as presentes em Porto- Folklore Fragments vol. 2, da dupla Alejandra & Aeron. Alejandra Salinas é espanhola nascida em 1977 em La Rioja, enquanto que Aeron Bergamn (1971) é um americano de Detroit, actualmente a leccionar na Academia Nacional de Arte de Oslo, cidade onde o casal está radicado. O trabalho desta dupla estende-se por diversas linguagens intermedia desde o som ao vídeo, instalação, etc. Alejandra & Aeron realizaram uma pesquisa e levantamento sonoro de La Rioja dando inicio à colecção Folklore Fragments. Em 2005, escolhem a cidade do Porto para o volume 2. Um disco que apresenta uma visão social, política e estética das propriedade sonoras do ambiente que rodeia o Porto, celebrando as peculiaridades e imaginário da cidade
Alejandra Salinas & Aeron Bergman
invicta e da sua região. Dessas gravações escolhemos ouvir o ambiente sonoro captado nas caves Graham’s conhecidas por produziram Vinhos do Porto Vintage, marcados por: cor rubi/púrpura opaca e escura. Aromas de violetas exalam do copo! Na boca, sabores inesgotáveis de amoras silvestres maduras revestem o palato.Estrutura de grande profundidade com sabores de alcaçuz-doce que combinam com taninos firmes, dotando este vinho de uma complexidade excepcional. Liberta um longo e persistente aroma (Peter Symington, 2003). Escolha inteligente do casal Alejandra & Aeron? Para lá desse registo escutámos, uma curiosa gravação da Festa da Bugiada em Sobrado (Valongo) que se realiza no dia de S. João (24 de Junho), e tem como pano de fundo a encenação da disputa entre cristãos (Bugios) e mouros (Mourisqueiros) por uma imagem milagrosa do santo (informações mais detalhadas aqui).
Festa da Bugiada em Sobrado (Valongo)
À parte do disco Porto-Folklore Fragments vol. 2, escutámos a faixa Imperfect Reliability gravada em 2008 no pequeno Museu das Rendas em Vila do Conde, onde se encontram durante a semana das 9-17h, mulheres rendeiras formando uma autêntica instalação sonora em permanência no Museu. Esta é uma gravação realizada no âmbito do Circular: 4º Festival de Artes Perfomativas de Vila do Conde [2008] e nela podemos escutar o som produzido pelas rendeiras. Um som que facilmente podemos confundir com chuva, espanta-espíritos ou porque não, música electrónica (?)…
Adicionámos ainda uma presença já habitual no Zepelim, as gravações de campo de Luís Antero, numa das suas mais recentes ediçõesSound Narratives vol. 4(Bypass, 2010) onde podemos encontrar sonoridades de animais, água e ambiências de várias localidades da zona da Beira Serra. Luís Antero nos últimos anos tem vindo a construir um profundo retrato desta região através de field recordings inalterados que disponibiliza para download gratuito para que possamos guardar valiosos pedaços da memória rural.
Luvas de Rafael Toral no projecto “Space”
Bem perto do final da emissão podemos escutar a faixa Portugal: Qual é o caminho da Praiade Stu Phillips, compositor do famoso genérico de Knight Rider, aqui num tema encontrado na banda sonora de um documentário de surf de 1969 de nomeFollow me(trailer), que atravessa as praias de Cascais, Guincho e Nazaré. Já a pontuar o início e o fim do programa apresentámos um antigo spot publicitário da companhia aérea americana Pan Am que para além de vender as suas viagens, vendia essencialmente uma ideia de aventura e de arrojo inconsequente…
O Zepelim do dia 21.4.2010 foi dedicado ao Reddy Record for Boys, uma misteriosa gravação – aparentemente dos anos 50 ou 60, mas sobre as quais faltam informações concretas – destinada ao público infantil. No Reddy Record, as crianças podiam encontrar uma amiga sempre cheia de vontade de conversar e descobrir mais sobre e com os seus pequenos donos. Esta pequena e estranha pérola foi encontrada no sempre aconselhável blog da WFMU, rádio independente do FM nova-iorquino. Como acompanhamento, pudemos escutar “Vivian & Ondine”, último trabalho de William Basinski, dedicado às suas duas sobrinhas recém-nascidas.
Nesta emissão de Zepelim, pretendemos cruzar Field Recordings de ambientes urbanos com o som captado de um jogo de Monopólio a decorrer em directo no estúdio da Rádio Universidade de Coimbra. O paralelo que estabelecemos com o jogo, prende-se com o simples facto dos peões do monopólio circularem através das mais importantes ruas, avenidas e estações de Portugal (edição portuguesa, 2001, Hasbro). Assim, apresentámos uma colagem sonora que pudesse recriar o ambiente desses espaços, enquanto o jogo decorria. Daí, que tenhamos escolhido preferencialmente field recordings captados na cidade de Lisboa e Porto. Para tal, recorremos essencialmente à comunidade Soundtransit, um arquivo colaborativo de gravações de campo on-line criado por Derek Holzer, Sara Kolster e Marc Boon, que convida qualquer artista sonoro a realizar o upload das suas recolhas sonoras, contextualizando-as com uma pequena referência ao local, momento de gravação ou história que acrescente outra dimensão ao som fora da díade “espaço-tempo”. O site Soundtransit possui duas formas de navegação distintas, ou através da procura directa de sons (search); ou a mais interessante, através dobooking de uma viagem, com a possibilidade de escolha de diferentes escalas, no qual nos é oferecido uma colagem de field recordings em mp3, desde a casa de partida à casa de chegada.
A título simbólico podemos ainda escutar a breve faixa Lament nº1, Birds Lament deLouis Thomas Hardin (Moondog), em homenagem aos seus cerca de 20 anos vividos nas ruas de Nova Iorque, ficando conhecido como The Viking of 6th Avenue.
O último Zepelim consistiu de dois exercícios sobre as músicas “Et Si Tu N’Existais Pas”, do franco-americano Joe Dassin e “Forever and Ever” do greco-egípcio Demis Roussos. Através de alterações ao tempo e ao tom das canções, obtivemos peças muito diferentes dos originais. A textura foi criada pela sobreposição de camadas com diferentes partes das músicas, sujeitas a diferentes processos de alteração da sua sonoridade.
Alinhamento:
Joe Dassin – Et Si Tu N’Existais Pas (Costume Blanc, 1975) [1m2s a 35m40s]
Demis Roussos – Forever and Ever (The Roussos Phenomenon, 1973) [35m41s a 59m59s]
Esta semana o Zepelim apresentou uma colagem sonora em torno do disco “The Sound of Children” (1967, Folkways) de Tony Schwartz (1923-2008). Schwartz ficou conhecido por ter realizado e produzido mais de 20.000 spots para rádio e televisão, dos quais o mais marcante terá sido o polémico spot televisivo “Daisy” (video), usado na campanha eleitoral de Lyndon B. Johnson, que acabou por ser eleito o 36º Presidente dos E.U.A. Para além disso, Tony Schwartz colocou o seu dedo na História ao conseguir, com uma campanha publicitária anti-tabaco, impedir que as Tabaqueiras fizessem publicidade nos meios de comunicação.
Porém, longe dos grandes palcos de acção, Schwartz revela-se um poço infinito de sons nas suas mais de 10.000 cassetes de paisagens sonoras recolhidas por todo o mundo. Não fosse este imenso arquivo sonoro por si só impressionante, Tony Schwartz era ainda agorafóbico. Daí que uma das suas primeiras edições pela Folkways seja New York 19, ou seja, gravações de campo à porta de casa. Tony Schwartz manteve ainda durante 31 anos um programa de rádio semanal na WNYC, no qual apresentava os sons da cidade de N.Y. Em 2007, toda a sua obra foi adquirida e arquivada pela Library of Congress.
No disco “The Sound of Children” apresenta retratos sonoros de crianças, incluindo o da sua filha, de uma forma didáctica, uma vez que os comenta no sentido técnico da sua realização (posicionamento do microfone, dispositivos de captação, dicas de edição, etc.). A par do trabalho de Tony Schwartz adicionamos elementos sonoros próximos de uma atmosfera que nos conduz à infância, desde as aventuras electrónicas dos artistas da BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a elementos relacionados com a exploração do corpo em “Music Overheard – The Body” , o resultado dos workshops de Lionel Marchetti, realizados entre 2003 e 2007 com crianças de 12 a 16 anos de idade, ou a comicidade infanto-grotesca dos Kipper Kids.
Alinhamento:
1.
Tony Schwartz – Introduction [The Sound Of Children, 1967]
Gregory Whitehead – The Problem With Bodies [Music Overheard CD 2 – The Body, 2006]
2.
Tony Schwartz – Nancy Grows Up [The Sound Of Children, 1967]
Assinalando antecipadamente o Dia Mundial do Teatro, a 27 de Março, o Zepelim explorou o local onde o Teatro e a Rádio se cruzam, o chamado Teatro radiofónico, através da utilização de duas histórias diferentes emitidas originalmente no programa “Radio Mystery Theater”, que a rádio americana CBS emitiu em 1974 e 1982.
O “Radio Mystery Theater”, fenómeno anacrónico no panorama radiofónico dos anos 70 do século XX, foi uma tentativa de reabilitar o Teatro radiofónico, cuja era dourada tinha sido nos anos 30, idealizada por Himan Brown, uma lenda da rádio desses anos, cujos trabalhos mais conhecidos tinham sido os “Inner Sanctum Mysteries” e “The Adventures of Nero Wolfe”. Contudo, apesar do sucesso do programa durante os 8 anos em que esteve no ar, não conseguiu trazer muitos novos aficionados ao género, sobretudo devido à colagem à linguagem utilizada nas séries dos anos 30, demasiado antiquada para os novos espectadores.
Nesta emissão de zepelim, recuperámos as 8 compilações editadas até à data pela comunidade phonography.org. A phonography.org, nasceu da necessidade de criação de uma plataforma de partilha sonora, técnica e intelectual que permitisse abrir uma maior luminosidade sobre o trabalho em torno da fonografia ou field recordings. Segundo Joel Smith, a palavra fonografia é agnóstica, sem a profundidade oculta de palavras como música ou arte – fonografia é apenas escrita de som/registo sonoro, próxima da fotografia como acrescenta Yitzchak Dumiel. É com base nesses registos sonoros compilados pela phonography.org que construímos o nosso programa, onde poderemos escutar faixas dos fonógrafos: Mark Griswold, Jon Tulchin , Marcos Fernandes, Dale Lloyd, Scott Taylor, Richard Lerman, Quiet American, Yannick Dauby(entrevista em pt), Robert Millis.
Antes de cada recolha sonora, apresentamos as coordenadas do local onde os sons foram gravadas. Desta forma, quem desejar, poderá acompanhar o programa através das imagens de satélite doGoogle Earth.
Como separadores sonoros utilizámos algumas faixas de John Baker membro da BBC Radiophonic Workshop, presentes em The John Baker Tapes – Volume One: BBC Radiophonics [2008, Trunk Records]. No início e final do programa podemos escutar um breve excerto do drone de Greg Davis em Cosmic Mudra [Mutually Arising, Kranky, 2009] e Emeralds com Side A da cassete Overlook, 2009, Wagon.
Deconstructing Dad tells the story of Scott’s life and career from a unique perspective, that of his only son, Stan Warnow. The film is a music-filled biographical documentary about the life and work of Raymond Scott. In addition, it also is a personal investigation into the father-son dynamic — what it means to have a famous father obsessed with his work and the consequent impact on the parent-child relationship.
Raymond Scott was more comfortable with technology than with people, including his own children. This personal angle is intertwined with the compelling story of a true American music innovator — one who had a meteoric rise to household-name success, followed by a slow spiral into obscurity and now, posthumously, a growing acknowledgment of his central role in modern music and music technology. in www.scottdoc.com
A portrait of Eliane Radigue, produced by the Austrian IMA (Institute for Media Archeology), which observes Eliane in her workspace, operating the ARP and talking about the process of composing and recording.
Uma estação de rádio é sintonizada, e o software desenvolvido por André Castro, Radio Fragments a partir da plataforma SuperCollider, analisa e selecciona em tempo-real, aquilo que normalmente se procura evitar em contexto radiofónico: pausas, indecisões, espirros, ruídos, espaços mortos. Fragmentos de rádio que são desmultiplicados por diversas camadas de processamento aleatório, originando o tecido sonoro que compõe Radio Fragments. Criam-se espaços entre espaços, não-ditos, hesitações, o respiro antes da palavra e o silêncio. Numa altura em que as rádio nacionais, clonam blocos maciços em formato playlist coloridos pelos mais diversos filtros, Radio Fragments parece servir como um manifesto que devolve ao espaço radiofónico, o erro e a imperfeição.
No início da emissão, ouvimos a leitura de António Sérgio a um excerto de um conto de Heinrich Böll, “A colecção de silêncios do Dr. Murke”, presente no livro “Contos Irónicos”.
Biografia:
André Castro é um artista sonoro, licenciado em artes sonoras pela Universidade de Middlesex, Londres. Começou a sua formação artística pelas áreas da dança e da performance no c.e.m – centro em movimento no ano de 2001. Foi neste espaço que iniciou o seu trabalho com materiais sonoros, e no qual tem vindo a apresentar e a desenvolver alguns dos seus projectos.
Na sua prática tem-se movido constantemente entre dois universos; Umas vezes pelo mundo da música por computador, com as a suas texturas meditativas, ruídos, blips, algoritmos e construção de software específico. Outras vezes, voltando costas ao ecrã do computador, decide sair com um microfone e dedicar-se à captura da incrível diversidade sonora que nos rodeia, e das vozes e histórias que se escondem em cada pessoa. Comum a estas duas vertentes é o despojamento de elementos visuais que tem caracterizado a maioria dos seus trabalhos.
Para além dos projectos a solo, parte importante do seu trabalho tem-se desenvolvido através de colaborações com coreógrafos, artistas visuais, músicos, e cientistas com um projecto de sonificação de dados científicos realizado no Departamento de Física da Universidade de Aveiro, integrado no programa Experimentação Arte | Ciência e Tecnologia.
Em 2008 concluiu uma série de três documentários sonoros intitulados Subterrâneos de Lisboa, dedicados ao pouco conhecido mundo subterrâneo desta cidade.
Destaca ainda o projecto Boat People – uma série de registos áudio, de conversas tidas com pessoas que vivem e trabalham em barcos nos canais que cruzam Londres e no rio Tamisa.
Radio Fragments é uma instalação sonora que procura explorar uma atenção auditiva, diferente da associada à experiência de ouvir rádio, fazendo uso dos espaços-entre-palavras-ou-música ocorridos durante uma emissão radiofónica.
A formula base desta instalação consiste num mecanismo de análise-controle (construído no ambiente de programação para síntese e processamento de som SuperCollider) existente num computador e alimentado ao vivo pela emissão de uma estação de rádio mainstream. Este mecanismo actua em tempo-real sobre a emissão radiofónica, como um noise-gate às avessas, evidenciando aquilo que é normalmente ignorado ou mesmo evitado num contexto radiofónico (suspiros, gaguejos, pausas, espaços-mortos e erros), e suprimindo todos os outros sons tais como palavras ou músicas. Estes fragmentos tornam-se a matéria prima a partir da qual a narrativa sonora de Radio Fragments é construída, fazendo uso de diversos processos de manipulação de áudio, que actuam sobre os fragmentos, desdobrando as suas potencialidades sonoras.
Recentemente, um sistema de luz reactivo, construído com Arduino, foi acrescentado à instalação, o qual reage ao surgimento dos fragmentos, intensificando a intensidade lumínica do espaço momentaneamente, para voltar ao seu estado inicial obscuro assim que o fragmento se deixa de ouvir.
A liberdade de imprensa é um dos valores fundadores das democracias ocidentais, consagrado e salvaguardado em diversas legislações posteriores à Revolução Francesa de 1789. Concretamente no artigo 19.º da Declaração Universal dos Direitos Humanos (1948), onde se diz que “Todo o indivíduo tem direito à liberdade de opinião e de expressão, o que implica o direito de não ser inquietado pelas suas opiniões e o de procurar, receber e difundir, sem consideração de fronteiras, informações e ideias por qualquer meio de expressão.” [negrito nosso], o que se reflecte no artigo 38.º da Constituição da República Portuguesa,
Liberdade de imprensa e meios de comunicação social
1. É garantida a liberdade de imprensa.
2. A liberdade de imprensa implica:
a) A liberdade de expressão e criação dos jornalistas e colaboradores, bem como a intervenção dos primeiros na orientação editorial dos respectivos órgãos de comunicação social, salvo quando tiverem natureza doutrinária ou confessional;
b) O direito dos jornalistas, nos termos da lei, ao acesso às fontes de informação e à protecção da independência e do sigilo profissionais, bem como o direito de elegerem conselhos de redacção;
c) O direito de fundação de jornais e de quaisquer outras publicações, independentemente de autorização administrativa, caução ou habilitação prévias.
3. A lei assegura, com carácter genérico, a divulgação da titularidade e dos meios de financiamento dos órgãos de comunicação social.
4. O Estado assegura a liberdade e a independência dos órgãos de comunicação social perante o poder político e o poder económico, impondo o princípio da especialidade das empresas titulares de órgãos de informação geral, tratando-as e apoiando-as de forma não discriminatória e impedindo a sua concentração, designadamente através de participações múltiplas ou cruzadas.
5. O Estado assegura a existência e o funcionamento de um serviço público de rádio e de televisão.
6. A estrutura e o funcionamento dos meios de comunicação social do sector público devem salvaguardar a sua independência perante o Governo, a Administração e os demais poderes públicos, bem como assegurar a possibilidade de expressão e confronto das diversas correntes de opinião.
7. As estações emissoras de radiodifusão e de radiotelevisão só podem funcionar mediante licença, a conferir por concurso público, nos termos da lei.
bem como pela maior parte das leis fundamentais dos países que vivem em democracia. Apesar de serem limitadas por diversas outras leis que previnem os danos que poderiam ser causados à quem se veja injustamente acusado, como aquelas que punem a difamação e a injúria escrita (artigos n.º182, 183 e 184 do Código Penal, por exemplo), as liberdades de imprensa e expressão criaram problemas, especialmente a políticos, de que o exemplo mais fulgurante será o caso Watergate, que culminou com a demissão do presidente Nixon dos EUA (1974).
Este assunto, apesar de ser sempre actual, ganhou um enorme destaque nas últimas semanas, em particular em resultado do que tem acontecido no sobejamente publicitado caso “Face Oculta“, e à volta do mesmo. A partir destes elementos, o programa utilizou excertos de intervenções públicas de vários políticos acusados de atentarem ou tentarem atentar contra a liberdade de imprensa, como Benito Mussolini, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Silvio Berlusconi, José Sócrates ou Alberto João Jardim, de dois jornalistas portugueses que acusam o actual governo de cercear a sua liberdade de expressão (Manuela Moura Guedes e Mário Crespo), possíveis posições no debate sobre a natureza e as limitações destas liberdades (José Pacheco Pereira e José Sá Fernandes), para além de algumas notícias sobre temas realacionados.
Alinhamento
Silêncio de Cavaco Silva antes de fazer uma declaração ao país [1m12s -1m55s]
Saudação de Cavaco Silva antes de fazer uma declaração ao país [1m56] Manuela Moura Guedes – Foram Cardos, Foram Prosas (Alibi, 1982) [1m57-5m44s] Manuela Moura Guedes na abertura do “Jornal Nacional” [2m-5m40s] Hugo Chavéz discursa contra a estação televisiva venezuelana Globovisión [5m05s-9m44 e 10m39s-16m55s] Hugo Chavéz – Con Amor al Pueblo (Canciones de Siempre, 2007) [9m44s-17m25s] José Sócrates acusa a imprensa de o querer atacar pessoalmente, na sequência do caso “Freeport” [17m22s-19m26s]
Notícia da SIC-Notícias sobre a crónica de Mário Crespo que não foi publicada no Diário de Notícias [18m05s-19m36] Lichens – M st r ngn W teher ft L v ng n [Omns, 2007][19m10s-37m41s]
Excerto do discurso de Hugo Chavéz contra a Globovisión “No no no, es otra cosa, compadre !” [19m36s-19m38s] Alberto João Jardim insulta a imprensa “do continente” [19m39s -19m54s] Introdução [20m41s-21m38s]
Debate da Subcomissão Parlamentar da Área da Comunicação Social e dos Direitos Fundamentais [23m05s-29m30s]
Excerto de um Debate Plenário na Assembleia da República [28m52s-31m50s]
Notícia sobre a saída do Google do mercado chinês, devida a ataques informáticos a defensores dos direitos humanos na China [29m05-31m08s] Mário Crespo comenta o silêncio de Cavaco Silva antes da sua declaração ao país [31m10s]
Silêncio de Cavaco Silva antes de fazer uma declaração ao país [37m34s-38m24]
Discurso de Benito Mussolini aos americanos em 1929 [38m24s-39m33s]
Notícia sobre o desmentido de Silvio Berlusconi acerca do seu envolvimento nos ataques que o jornal “Giornale”, propriedade da sua família, ao jornal “L’Avvenire” [39m30s-41m28s] José Pacheco Pereira critica, no programa “Quadratura do Círculo” a ordem da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa de retirar um cartaz do PNR que considerou xenófobo [41m21s-41m05s] José Sá Fernandes justifica, à rádio TSF, a ordem da CâmaraMunicipal de Lisboa de retirar um cartaz do PNR que considerou xenófobo [41m02s-42m51s] Fidel Castro é entrevistado no programa “Meet the Press”, em 1959 [42m50s-43m42s] Biosphere – Warmed by the Drift (Dropsonde, 2006) [43m41s-50m38s]
Afonso Biscaia, CarloPatrão e LígiaAnjos rasgam jornais [44m32s-49m24s] Pat Candell, “Freedom of Speech is Sacred” [46m56s-50m46s] Despedida [50m16s-40m45s] Biosphere – In Triple Time (excerto) (Dropsonde, 2006) [50m38s-53m41]
Excerto do discurso de Hugo Chavéz contra a Globovisión “No no no, es otra cosa,compadre!” [53m47s-53m49s] Hugo Chavéz – Con Amor al Pueblo (Canciones de Siempre, 2007) [53m48s-58m18s]
Radio Fragments is a radiophonic project that aims to explore an auditory attention, different from the one usually associated with the experience of listening to the radio, making use of the spaces in between words and songs that occur throughout the radiophonic discourse as its main reagent.
Its basic formula consists of an analysis-control mechanism (built in Super Collider) residing inside a computer to which a real-time mainstream radio broadcast is fed. This mechanism acts as a reversed-noise-gate, singling out what is usually ignored or avoided in a radiophonic context (whispers, stumbles, pauses, dead spaces and errors) and muting all the other sounds such as words or songs.These punctuating fragments become the raw materials from which Radio Fragments sonic concoction is brewed.
(…) # Rule number 6: Many hacks are like butterflies: beautiful but short-lived
(Handmade Electronic Music – The art of hardware hackingde Nicolas Collins)
A premissa que fundou esta emissão de Zepelim, prendeu-se com a constatação de um possível paralelo sonoro entre a música obtida através de técnicas de hardware hacking e o som realizado por várias espécies de insectos. Cruzamos captações sonoras de insectos que habitam as florestas do norte da Tailândia, com a compilação que acompanha o manual Handmade Electronic Music – The art of hardware hackingde Nicolas Collins, deixando que ambas sonoridades se dissolvam num mesmo ambiente homogéneo.
Nicolas Collins - Graduation from Wesleyan, 1976. Alvin Lucier and Nicolas's mother
O compositor Nicolas Collins nasceu em 1954, em Nova Iorque. Aos 18 anos inscreveu-se na Wesleyan University, inicialmente pelo seu interesse em estudar música indiana mas rapidamente expandiu os seus objectivos quando conheceu o compositor Alvin Lucier, autor de peças como I’m sitting in a room (1969) ou Vespers (1968) – que podem ser escutadas aqui. Lucier foi membro fundador do colectivo de músicos Sonic Arts Union ao lado de Robert Ashley, David Behrman, ou Gordon Mumma e, imprimiu em Nicolas Collins a ideia de que a música pode conter referências estruturais fora de si mesma, na biologia, arquitectura, neurologia, etc. Para além do colectivo Sonic Arts Union, Collins cedo tomou contacto com o trabalho de John Cage, a partir de várias residências feitas na Wesleyan University durante a década de 70.
Nicolas Collins performing Pea Soup inside an installation of Niche, PS1, Long Island City, NY, 1980
Collins, veio a tornar-se num pioneiro no uso de micro-computadores em performances ao vivo, colocando em prática a intervenção em circuitos electrónicos (circuit-bending) a partir de objectos de uso quotidiano como pequenos rádios e baratos e ingénuos brinquedos (ex. toy keyboards), arte a que apelida ironicamente de “glue technology”. Para além da modificação de pequenos objectos electrónicos, Collins dedica-se a reinventar instrumentos como a guitarra (“The Backwards Electric Guitar“) ou o trombone (“Trombone-Propelled Electronics“). Actualmente, Nicolas Collins é o responsável pelo Department of Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Foi, então, em 2006 que o compositor nova- iorquino edita o manual de iniciação à modificação de objectos electrónicos com vista à sua expansão e criação de novas experiências sonoras, de nome Handmade Electronic Music – The art of hardware hacking. Como suplemento ao livro, Collins reuniu numa compilação vários artistas mestres na arte de hardware hacking como Peter Cusack, Andy Keep ou John Bowers, do qual retirámos as faixas:
Nicolas Collins – sl loop excerpt
John Bowers – Study one for victorian synthesizer
Josh Winters – Radio study 4
Phil Archer – Yamaha pss-380
Yasunao Tone – Imperfection theorem of silence
Peter Cusack – Baikal ice excerpt
Collin Olan – rec01 excerpt
A abrir e a fechar emissão apresentamos um breve excerto de um dos episódios do programa de rádio norte-americano “The Mysterious Traveler“. A série radiofónica The Mysterious Traveler, começou a ser emitida pela Mutual Broadcasting System a Dezembro de 1945, e pretendia suscitar o terror aos ouvintes, pela dramatização de contos de ficção científica, escritos por Robert Arthur e David Kogan e narrados por Maurice Tarplin: This is the Mysterious Traveler, inviting you to join me on another journey into the strange and terrifying. I hope you will enjoy the trip, that it will thrill you a little and chill you a little. So settle back, get a good grip on your nerves and be comfortable — if you can! . Escolhemos o episódio “The Man The Insects Hated” como breve referência ao lugar que os insectos ocupam no imaginário colectivo perto da fobia e da angústia de perseguição.
Ao longo da emissão acrescentámos ainda excertos de faixas do compositor Harry Partch, Ballad for Gymnasts aos minutos 1:30 e 6:00, The dreamer that remains- a study in loving (19:06′) e Windsong (37:21′) e Pierre Henry – La Reine Verte (Les Insectes) (18:19′)
Depois de duas emissões de “excesso ruído”, o Zepelim entra em retiro contemplativo no cruzamento entre duas experiências sensoriais distintas, tendo o Tibete como cenário de fundo. Partimos nesta emissão, por recuperar o disco Songs of Milarepa (1983, Lovely Music) da compositora francesa Eliane Radigue. Nascida em Paris, no ano de 1932, Radigue estudou técnicas de música electro-acústica no Studio d’Essai da R.T.F., sob a direcção de Pierre Schaeffer e Pierre Henry (autor da faixa Psyché Rock, que mais tarde seria adaptada para a série televisiva Futurama). Durante cerca de dez anos, investiu na sua formação musical clássica a partir dos instrumentos harpa e piano. No início dos anos 70 trabalhou na New York University School of the Arts e nos estúdios de música electrónica da Universidade de Iowa e no Instituto de Artes da Califórnia, altura em que começou a desenvolver o seu trabalho com o ARP 2500, que passou a ser o instrumento quase exclusivo ao longo da sua discografia. Em 1974, Eliane Radigue deslocou-se ao Mills College, a convite de Terry Riley, para apresentar o seu primeiro Adnos, onde contactou com um grupo de estudantes franceses que compararam a fluência e itensidade dos seus drones com a profundidade da escola do Budismo Tibetano. Eliane Radigue inicia a partir daí o estudo e práctica do Budismo Tibetano auxiliada pelo guru Pawo Rinpoche, cessando a sua actividade artística durante cerca de três anos. Durante esse período de aprendizagem, Eliane contactou com poemas do tibetano Jetsun Milarepa. Milarepa, viveu durante o século XI (d.c), dedicando vários anos da sua vida à solidão das montanhas. Após uma vida de reflexão e contemplação alcançou um elevado e iluminado entendimento que o permitia explicar as complexas questões que os seus discípulos lhe colocavam, espontaneamente em estilo de poema ou de canção. Apesar da sua biografia estar envolta numa nuvem de romance, afirma-se que tenha composto 100,000 canções para comunicar as suas ideias, enquanto ensinava e conversava. Um largo número de histórias e canções de Jetsun Milarepa foram traduzidas para várias línguas ocidentais, muitas resistindo ao tempo apenas pela expressão oral. No disco Songs of Milarepa, Eliane Radigue recupera as canções de Milarepa presentes no livro Drinking the Mountain Stream, e convida Lama Kunga Rinpoche, para as cantar em Tibetano, enquanto Robert Ashley dá voz à tradução inglesa sobre os drones do ARP 2500. Nesta emissão podemos escutar duas faixas retiradas de Songs of Milarepa: “Song of the Path Guides” (21:01min.) e um alongado excerto de “Eliminations of Desires” (17:17min.). Mas Songs of Milarepa, foi apenas o primeiro trabalho que Eliane Radigue dedicou ao poeta tibetano, seguiu-se em 87 o disco Jetsun Mila, em 92, Mila’s Journey Inspired by a Dream e em98 a Lovely Records reedita Songs of Milarepa numa edição em dois discos.
Às faixas de Songs of Milarepa destacadas neste Zepelim, cruzamos os Field Recordings do músico norueguês Geir Jenssen, também conhecido como Biosphere, presentes em Cho Oyu 8201m – Field Recordings From Tibet(Ash International, 2006). Para além da sua vida artística, Jenssen pratica montanhismo e foi na escalada à sexta montanha mais alta do mundo Cho Oyu com 8.201 metros, situada a 20 km oeste do monte Evereste que gravou com um pequeno MiniDisc, os field recordings presentes em Cho Oyu 8201m. Estas captações, funcionam como um diário sonoro da sua escalada, feitas de momentos de espera, antecipação, vento, chuva e de pequenas escutas hertzianas como último contacto com a civilização.
Se através de Eliane Radigue a montanha é um símbolo de nascimento filosófico e poético, em Geir Jerssen a montanha é um obstáculo conquistável, coisa do corpo.
Segundo episódio de uma pequena série de programas dedicados ao “excesso”, nesta emissão olhamos para o fenómeno de sobre-população. Na década de 60, os media inauguravam os primeiros debates e discussões sobre a eminência do excesso de população face à escassez de recursos, conduzindo a alguma histeria. As Nações Unidas alertam actualmente que a população do mundo irá duplicar nos próximos 40 anos. Como exemplo, a Índia com 1,17 biliões de pessoas, e com um crescimento médio de 1,6 por ano, torna verdade o que o senso comum tomaria como anedota recorrente, segundo a Times: The minister called on India’s television channels to provide high-quality programs, arguing that enticing content would offer alternative late-night entertainment. Por outro lado, no Afeganistão apenas 14% dos nascimentos originarão adultos saudáveis. Mitos, becos, dados, balanços, distribuição, conspirações, excesso…
O último Zepelim, o primeiro de uma pequena série sobre o excesso, debruçou-se sobre a obesidade, um grave problema a nível mundial. A sociedade de consumo faz pressão em sentidos opostos: o de comer em muita quantidade, e ao mesmo tempo de apresentar uma imagem magra, deixando muitas pessoas pelo mundo num dilacerante dilema.
Alinhamento:
1. Nurse With Wound – Salt Marie Celeste (excerto) [Salt Marie Celeste, 2003]
2. James Ferraro – Untitled [Heaven’s Gate CDR, 2009]
Programas de TV: “5 Para a Meia-Noite: Fernando Alvim lê uma receita de Filipa Vacondeus”, “O Tal Canal: Cozinho Para o Povo, com Filipa Vacondeus”, “Praça da Alegria: Bife à Chefe Silva e Divina Lampreia”, “Sebastião Come Tudo”, “Telejornal: Homenagem ao Chefe Silva em Almeirim”,”The Muppet Show: Swedish Chef – Swedish Meatballs”, “The Young Turks: Discrimination Against Overweight People”, “VT: Obesidade Mórbida”
Série Delícias Cantadas – Célia e Celma: “Frango com Quiabo”, “Língua com Molho”
Videos no Youtube: “Being overweight and dating – PracticalHappiness.com”, “Entenbrust richtig zubereiten”,”Porquê “Herbalife”? Porquê Agora?” “Weight Loss Motivation”, “Yoga Exercises to Flatten the Stomach”
O Zepelim de hoje presta homenagem a uma incontornável figura do panorama radiofónico mundial, o americano Art Bell e a sua principal criação, o programa Coast to Coast AM, onde aborda sobretudo as temáticas relacionadas com o paranormal e teorias da conspiração. Emite todos os dias, durante 4 horas (entre as 22h00 e as 2h00 do fuso horário do Pacífico americano), e conta, desde que Art Bell se “reformou” com uma equipa de locutores constituída por George Noory, Ian Punnett, George Knapp e, ocasionalmente, pelo próprio Bell. Como exemplo do trabalho desenvolvido no Coast to Coast, ficámos com excertos de dois programas, difundidos nos anos 90.
No Zepelim desta semana, construímos o nosso programa em torno de questões relacionadas com a Indústria Tabagista. Para tal, recuámos até à década de 50 para escutarmos o programa televisivo Your Hit Parade, patrocinado pela marca de tabaco Lucky Strike. Your Hit Parade, era um programa semanal emitido pela NBC entre 1950 e 1959 nas televisões norte-americanas, cuja existência remontava já ao ano de 1935, mas apenas em formato radiofónico. Durante as suas emissões eram apresentadas interpretações ao vivo do top 7 (“Lucky Seven Songs of the Week“) de temas mais vendidos nos Estados Unidos, tendo em conta as faixas mais tocadas nas Rádios e nas Jukeboxes espalhadas pelo país. Apesar do processo de apuramento dos temas mais ouvidos numa determinada semana nunca ter sido claramente exposto, Your Hit Parade usufruía de um relativo sucesso. Porém, ao longo da década de 50, viu a sua audiência diminuir progressivamente à medida que o Rock’n’Roll se massificava nos ouvidos mais jovens. Simultâneamente, a Lucky Strike encontrava um novo objecto alvo para vender a sua imagem de arrojo e rebeldia, longe das baladas quase assépticas de Your Hit Parade – antítese do que viria a ser a década de 60. Ao longo das emissões de Your Hit Parade, os temas foram cantados por vários interpretes como Dorothy Collins (1950-59), Russell Arms (1952-57), Snooky Lanson (1950-57) e Gisèle MacKenzie (1953-57). A liderar a Lucky Strike Orchestra de Your Hit Parade esteve Raymond Scott entre 1950 e 1957.
Dorothy Collins & Raymond Scott
Raymond Scott , músico, maestro, investigador, génio inventor e director do departamento de pesquisa e desenvolvimento electrónico para a Motown, era aqui responsável pelos arranjos dos temas mas vendidos dos E.U.A., revestindo as suas estruturas clássicas, com orquestrações vanguardistas. Algumas das suas composições originais foram mais tarde utilizadas em cartoons como Looney Tunes (Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck), The Ren and Stimpy Show ou The Simpsons (um dos temas mais conhecidos chama-se “Powerhouse” de 1936 e pode ser escutado aqui). Raymond Scott acabaria por casar com a cantora residente de Your Hit Parade Dorothy Collins.
Ao longo desta emissão de Zepelim colocamos em paralelo as duas Indústrias, a do Entretenimento e do Tabaco consumando os seus múltiplos denominadores comuns. Podemos escutar a par do episódio de Your Hit Parade de 2 de Maio de 1953 (no qual, curiosamente, a canção April in Portugal, ocupa o sétimo lugar da contagem dos temas mais vendidos nos Estados Unidos), programas de incentivo tabágico, recortes noticiosos, a voz dos principais intervenientes do palco da Indústria Tabágica, anúncios publicitários a marcas de tabaco, entrevistas, etc.
Faixas utilizadas na colagem sonora:
Geir Jenssen – Under The Glacier I (excerto) [Biophon Records, 1982]
O Zepelim convidou Manuela Barile, performer /pesquisadora vocal e co-directora artística da Binaural, a apresentar-nos uma peça sonora inédita que sobrevoasse a sua obra. Gentilmente, Barile aceitou o nosso convite, oferecendo-nos a peça “Abbiamo fatto 30 facciano 31”, uma colagem sonora cujo composição nos revela não só o seu lado artístico, mas também uma profunda reflexão sobre o sentido das suas experiências, enquanto criança e adulta.
“Abbiamo fatto 30 facciamo 31!” – Uma Peça Sonora de Manuela Barile
“Abbiamo fatto 30 facciamo 31!” é uma expressão italiana que significa aceitar empreender uma tarefa imprevista adicional, depois de já se ter decidido fazer muitas outras coisas. 31 é também o número de aniversários que já cumpri. Com esta peça sonora pretendo apresentar-vos algumas das linhas temáticas do meu trabalho artístico: a memória pessoal e colectiva, a infância, a dor, a morte, o sentido dos lugares, a autenticidade, o abandono, a esperança.
Na escolha dos vários trechos que compõem a peça reflectem-se as várias experiências da minha vida e a forma como me coloco perante a vida, ao procurar meter-me em jogo, ao não tomar as coisas de forma demasiado séria ou pesada e ao acolher positivamente os imprevistos, assumindo os riscos inerentes.
As composições da minha autoria utilizadas nesta peça sonora são: Lullaby for Whales (2003), Larve Gongolanti (2004), Cik Ciak Song (2006), On the Wing (2006), Ossessione (2009), Pesa (2009) e Moroloja (2009). Dela fazem parte também um excerto de um concerto de “La Scatola” (um projecto intermedia concebido por mim e pelo artista sonoro Rui Costa em 2007) e “Five Instruments and a Gun”, uma peça escrita pelo compositor austríaco Arnold Haberl (a.k.a Noid) e interpretada em 2008 por mim e por outros quatro músicos na paisagem envolvente à aldeia de Nodar.
Nesta peça sonora estão também presentes as vozes de algumas pessoas próximas de mim (o meu filho Samuel, o meu companheiro, a minha avó, a minha mãe, o meu pai, os meus tios, a tia Ilda de Nodar, velhos e novos amigos), assim como referências a canções que assinalam momentos importantes da minha maturação pessoal, filmes, excertos de desenhos animados da minha infância, referências a lugares onde habitei ou habito (Bari, Londres, Bolonha, Nodar) e vozes de artistas, por coincidência (ou talvez não) todos já desaparecidos: Andrei Tarkovski, Matteo Salvatore, Maria Callas, Anna Magnani, Carmelo Bene e Pier-Paolo Pasolini, em cujos percursos de vida e de arte me revejo muitíssimo.
Em Ossessione (2009), Pesa (2009) e Moroloja (2009) a minha voz foi gravada em campo. Actualmente a minha pesquisa artística constrói-se sobre e para os lugares, tendo não só em conta as propriedades acústicas desses lugares por mim escolhidos, mas também outros aspectos que vão desde a memória e a tradição até aos aspectos de conformação natural do território, das simbolizações rituais e sagradas aos “genius loci”.
Manuela Barile
Biografia e Pesquisa Artística
Manuela Barile (n. Bari, Itália em 1978) é uma artista multidisciplinar e performer vocal italiana residente em Portugal.
A sua pesquisa artística assenta num trabalho projectual que combina os sons da voz com diversos media (performance art,field recordings, vídeo, fotografia, escrita, desenho) e utiliza diferentes formatos de apresentação (instalações sonoras e vídeo, composições sonoras, concertos-performances, etc.).
A conexão entre o público e o privado tem sido uma constante interrogação no seu trabalho, bem como a ligação entre as memórias e recordações colectivas. Ela concebe a sua arte como uma investigação contínua na realidade onde a artista coloca questões e dúvidas no sentido de captar as subtilezas ocultas da vida e da nossa actual condição.
A arte de Manuela Barile nasce da uma indagação subtil e minuciosa em redor das pequenas coisas da realidade quotidiana aparentemente banais e insignificantes as quais, através de uma amplificação sensorial a que são sujeitas durante o processo criativo, assumem um sentido de “revelação” e de “necessidade”.
Utilizando uma linguagem simples, feita de símbolos e de metáforas, a artista procura criar situações de aparência enigmática, entre o familiar e o estranho, nas quais tudo é colocado continuamente em discussão e onde emerge o seu sentido de humor, do paradoxo, o prazer do risco e sobretudo o desejo de divertir-se sem levar-se demasiado a sério.
A sua abordagem à vocalidade é lúdica e espontânea; reflecte a sua ligação com a natureza, os animais e o ambiente que a circunda, dos quais busca continuamente inspiração. Através dos seus sons, a artista procura dar voz a ecos longínquos difíceis de serem expressos por palavras, que retornam ao presente com grande intensidade.
Manuela Barile já trabalhou ou colaborou com Mario Volpe, Gianni Lenoci, Mainha maturação pessoal, filmes, excertos de desenhos animados da minha infância, referências a lugares onde habitei ou habito (Bari, Londres, Bolonha, Nodar) e vozes de artistas, por coincidência (ou talvez não) todos já desaparecidos: Andrei Tarkovski, Matteo Salvatore, Maria Callas, Anna Magnani, Carmelo Bene e Prcello Magliocchi, Amy Denio, Phil Minton, Tristan Honsinger, Rinus Van Alebeek, Duncan Whitley, Anna Hints, Evelyn Müürsepp, Tiriddilliu, Claudio Parodi, Alessandro Buzzi, Chris Iemulo, Rui Costa, Paulo Raposo, Antez, Ernesto Rodrigues, Nilo Gallego, Dennis Báthory-Kitsz, Madamme Cell, Maile Colbert, Pali Mersault, Cédric Anglaret, Noid, etc. As suas composições vocais foram incluídas em vários filmes, documentários, projectos de vídeo arte (Annamaria Ippolito, Patricia Leal, Xaquin Rosales, etc.). Trabalhou igualmente com teóricos e coreógrafos de dança (Bojana Bauer, Paula Pinto).
Em 2006 participa com o artista italiano Pino Pipoli em “Una Notte di Arte Totale “inaugura” Fresco Bosco” evento inaugural da exposição “Fresco Bosco” curada pelo famoso crítico de arte Italiano Achille Bonito Oliva no parque de Certosa di San Lorenzo em Padula (Salerno).
Manuela Barile iniciou em 2007 uma colaboração com o artista sonoro português Rui Costa para o desenvolvimento de um projecto intermedia intitulado ‘La Scatola’. Em 2009, aprofundou alguns núcleos temáticos de “La Scatola” através do projecto “Locus in Quo”, um conjunto de instalações sonoras / vídeo e performances que indagam vários aspectos relacionados com o sentido dos lugares.
Manuela Barile é co-directora artística da Binaural, uma associação cultural portuguesa que se dedica à promoção de som e artes intermédia desenvolvida num contexto rural. A Binaural dirige desde 2006 um programa de residências artísticas em Nodar, uma pequena aldeia no centro de Portugal.
Websites:
www.manuelabarile.com
www.binauralmedia.org
* Video gravado em Maio de 2006 no Pavilhão Atlântico – Festival Sonicscope 06. “Due Uccellacci e un uccellino”. Manuela Barile (voz), Rui Costa e Paulo Raposo (video + sound manipulation).
Regresso de Zepelim à antena da RUC em novo horário, entre as 23h e a 00h de quarta-feira.
Neste reinício, olhámos para a época dourada dos jogos arcade, nos anos 80 do século XX. A história desta forma de entertenimento remonta à decada de 30 desse século, com o aparecimento das máquinas de pinball,em madeira e baseadas em princípios mecânicos, que foram largamente utilizadas nos salões de jogos e parque de diversões da época, e progride lentamente até 1958, quando William A. Higinbotham, físico no Brookhaven National Laboratory (em Upton, NY), criou “Tennis for Two“, um jogo baseado na tecnologia do osciloscópio, para tentar animar os entediados visitantes do laboratório, indtroduzindo na prática o conceito de videojogo. Diz a lenda em redor da matéria que Nolan Bushnell, que mais tarde fundou a Atari com Ted Dabney, terá visitado o Brookhaven National Laboratory na sua adolescência. A sua empresa acabou por ser crucial para a expansão dos jogos de video em 1972, quando começou a distribuir o seu primeiro fenómeno, Pong. Nos anos seguintes a indústria fluoresceu, com títulos como Space Invaders ou Pac-Man, que foram imensamente populares, sobretudo nos Estados Unidos e Japão, durante toda a década de 80 e até aos inícios da de 90, quando as tecnologias de entretenimento doméstico disponíveis atingiram o mesmo grau de sofisticação que as “máquinas de moedas”.
É nesses anos (entre 1982 e 1986), que se situam as gravações de Classic Arcade Sounds. O autor, não identificado, e o seu melhor amigo Raymond cresceram nos salões de jogos do Estado de Nova Iorque, onde fizeram as gravações com um gravador Sony TCS-310 Stereo dos sons que faziam as máquinas de jogos, e apanhando inadvertidamente alguns dos seus próprios comentários. Estas gravações estiveram perdidas na casa dos pais do autor, em Ithaca, NY até 1997, quando se mudou para o Oregon e, no processo, encontrou as velhas cassetes que agora disponibiliza no seu site, e que constituiram a maior parte do Zepelim de hoje, complementadas com alguns sons originais desses jogos.
O coração é dos órgãos mais importantes para a vida humana e, ao mesmo tempo, de todos o mais romantizado. Durante larga parte da história considerado como o receptáculo da alma ou como centro emocional e amoroso do ser humano, o coração mais não faz que bombear sangue para todo o corpo, permitindo a irrigação dos seus órgãos. Neste Zepelim, debruçámo-nos sobre os seus assuntos.
1. Emeralds – Alive in the Sea of Information [What Happened, 2009]
Nesta emissão convidámos Luís Antero para assumir os comandos da realização do dirigível Zepelim e nos apresentar 52′ do seu trabalho mais recente, alguns inéditos e as suas últimas edições da colecção Sound Narratives, com especial destaque para o volume 6, editado este mês pela net label MiMi Records, divididos pelos símbolos Água e Terra. Luís Antero dedica-se à recolha fonográfica natural e etnográfica, mais do que um conhecimento técnico, Antero demarca-se pela sensibilidade e humanismo nas suas narrativas sonoras:
“Podemos considerar os usos e costumes das gentes da Beira Serra, os seus saberes orais, as lendas de tempos imemoriais contadas pelas vozes da sabedoria popular, como produtos culturalmente endógenos? A fauna e flora existente nas nossas serras, os rios, ribeiros e riachos que as enchem de vida cristalina, podem também ser considerados produtos culturalmente endógenos? Creio que sim! […] arquivo sonoro, de pessoas e locais, funcionando em regime work in progress […] […] gravações de campo de elementos naturais como forma de preservar um património natural e ao mesmo tempo uma memória fonográfica colectiva local”
1ª Parte – Água
Duração/Faixas/Comentários de Luís Antero
1. 00:00-06:46
«O Mar (Tocha – versão 1)» (06:46) | faixa nunca editada
Gravação do som da água do mar efectuada na Praia da Tocha, concelho de Cantanhede, no Domingo, 21 de Junho de 2009, às 18:00. Para além do mar ouvem-se também nesta gravação as vozes solarengas e felizes das pessoas que se banhavam a esta hora do dia, bem como algumas gaivotas.
2. 05:30-12:20 «Luso Ambience (Água)» (14:15) (excerto) | faixa nunca editada
Gravação efectuada na vila do Luso, concelho da Mealhada, no dia 23 de Junho de 2009, às 13:00. Nesta gravação ouve-se a água que cai das bicas, assim como o encher de garrafões das várias pessoas que ali se deslocam, algumas conversando, outras não, assim como a água que cai nas duas fontes situadas na praça da capela…
3. 12:30-19:50 «Big Wheel» (09:55) (excerto) | faixa do EP «Big Wheel», editado na alemã Konkretourist em Junho de 2009 | http://konkretourist.de/
Gravação, na aldeia de S. Sebastião da Feira, concelho de Oliveira do Hospital, no dia 28 de Maio de 2009, às 18:00, de uma antiga nora de água, ainda em pleno funcionamento, à beira do Rio Alva, responsável por levar a água às terras de cultivo. Nesta gravação pode notar-se a dinâmica sonora desta nora, à medida que a circundava.
4. 19:30-22:00 «Water Song – Part 1» (02:34) | faixa do EP «Big Wheel», editado na alemã Konkretourist em Junho de 2009 | http://konkretourist.de/
Esta faixa comporta dois momentos de gravação diferentes: água e voz. O som da água foi gravado na pequena localidade de Parente, freguesia de Alvoco das Várzeas, concelho de Oliveira do Hospital, em pleno Rio Alvoco, numa zona de rápidos do açude do Candam. A voz, de Carol Nike, americana a residir por estas paragens, foi gravada dois dias depois da gravação da nora de água, na sua residênc
2ª Parte – Terra
Duração/Faixas/Comentários de Luís Antero
1. 22:00-25:00 «Pastorícia # 2» (03:08) | faixa do EP «Sound Narratives, Vol. 6», editado este mês pela net label portuguesa MiMi Records | http://www.clubotaku.org/mimi/pt/album110.php
Gravação efectuada na freguesia de Pinhanços, concelho de Seia, no dia 11 de Fevereiro de 2009, às 17:30. Esta recolha regista o momento em que o pastor chama as ovelhas para o redil, para que possa proceder à ordenha. Esta é uma prática muito em voga nesta zona, de onde sai o famoso queijo da Serra da Estrela.
2. 25:00-25:40 «Pastorícia # 3» (00:42) | faixa do EP «Sound Narratives, Vol. 6», editado na portuguesa MiMi Records em Junho de 2009 | http://www.clubotaku.org/mimi/pt/album110.php
Gravação efectuada na Quinta da Costa, freguesia de Bobadela, concelho de Oliveira do Hospital, por volta das 17:30 . Aqui pode escutar-se um pequeníssimo relato de vida pastoril, com o Ti António, pastor sábio e vivido.
3. 25:40-34:40 «SN # 6» (09:10) | faixa do EP «Sound Narratives, Vol. 6», editado na portuguesa MiMi Records em Junho de 2009 | http://www.clubotaku.org/mimi/pt/album110.php
Gravação efectuada em Aldeia das Dez, concelho de Oliveira do Hospital, numa sexta-feira do mês de Abril, a partir das 17:30. Nesta gravação pode ouvir-se o badalar das horas no sino da igreja, as crianças que brincam na rua, os cães que ladram de desconfiança, as gotas de água que caem na velha fonte, o cabrito amedrontado ou a árvore de badalos e chocalhos do poeta Viriato Gouveia. Enfim, uma certa identidade sonora de Aldeia das Dez, naquelas horas em particular…
4. 34:30-43:37 «cbr 11 am» (09:37) | faixa do EP «Sound Narratives, Vol. 5», editado na portuguesa Enough Records em Abril de 2009 | http://enoughrecords.scene.org/
Gravação em Coimbra, na zona da baixa, por volta das 11:00, num dia de ameno sol, em Fevereiro de 2009. Nesta gravação podem-se ouvir os operários das obras dos edifícios em remodelação, os carros que passam junto à Sé Velha, as aves residentes na zona da Sé… o ambiente próprio da baixa coimbrã a esta hora do dia.
5. 42:40-49:25 «SN # 5» (Goats) (06:45) | faixa do EP «Sound Narratives, Vol. 4», a editar brevemente pela inglesa Earth Monkey Productions | http://www.earthmp.com/index.html
Gravação na aldeia de Moura da Serra, concelho de Arganil, em plena Serra do Açor, no dia 23 de Fevereiro de 2009, às 15:00. Esta recolha tem a particularidade de ter sido efectuada, literalmente, no meio das cabras, ou seja, deitei-me no prado, junto a estes amorosos animais, de forma a captar as suas dinâmicas sonoras…
6. 49:00-51:58 «vai agora, ao fim de velho, cavar?» (02:58) | faixa do site www.luisantero.yolasite.com
Gravação efectuada em Alvoco das Várzeas, concelho de Oliveira do Hospital, no dia 20 de Dezembro de 2008, por volta das 17:00, ao pastor e dono de um rebanho de ovelhas, Zé Gonçalves.
Nesta recolha escutam-se notas de vida pastoril e de saudade abundante…
Inspirado no feriado nacional 10 de Junho, o zepelim criou uma colagem sonora de diversos registos associados a Portugal, desde testemunhos de imigrantes residentes no nosso país, à “cultura televisiva”, gravações de tradição oral ou aulas de português para principiantes… Uma emissão marcada ainda pela presença quase constante de sons de aves a partir de gravações de campo captadas em diversos locais do planeta por diferentes artistas, aqui como símbolo da presença e fluxo migratório dos portugueses pelos quatro cantos do mundo.
Alinhamento:
The North Sea – Eternal Birds [Exquisite Idols, 2007]
No primeiro programa de Junho, Zepelim deixou-se levar até à praia, representada por diversos excertos de field recordings alusivas. A acompanhar, 3 peças de 92982, nova edição de William Basinski pela 2062, composta por peças gravadas no início da década de 1980 e pontuadas por ruído ambiente (sirenes, carros, helicópetros) da cidade, que ajudam a construir a ambiência melancólica típica no trabalho do texano. Ficámos ainda com “The Flood”, tema para o jovem Julian Lynch, artista promovido pela Underwaterpeoples Records, e que editou este ano o álbum “Orange You Glad”.
Zepelim dedicado à propaganda radiofónica emitida durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial e, em particular, à propaganda japonesa contra o exército dos E.U.A. protagonizada pelas vozes femininas que desencorajavam e desmoralizam os soldados americanos a travarem batalha no Pacífico Sul. Às enigmáticas vozes que saiam da rádio, os soldados americanos chamaram genericamente de Tokyo Rose. As Tokyo Rose, dirigiam-se aos soldados com familiaridade, emitindo canções de amor do folclore norte-americano com o intuito de exaltarem a saudade nos corações dos soldados. Outra das técnicas utilizadas pelas locutoras de rádio japonesas consistia em dirigirem-se individualmente a um soldado, tratando-o pelo nome próprio, falando-lhe da família e da namorada que deixara para trás provocando ciúme e desorientação. Com o término da Segunda Guerra Mundial a imprensa americana encontrou uma das supostas vozes da propaganda japonesa, Iva Toguri D’Aquino que se apresentava sob o nome de “Orphan Ann” tendo feito parte do programa The Zero Hour na Radio Tokyo. Iva Toguri D’Aquino nasceuem Los Angeles filha de emigrantes japoneses. A 5 de Julho de 1941, Iva Toguri viaja para o Japão com a finalidade de visitar familiares e a possibilidade deestudar medicina. Com o eclodir dos ataques a Pearl Harbor, Iva Toguri depara-se com a impossibilidade de regressar aos E.U.A. O governo japonês obriga-a a renunciar a sua cidadania americana e força-a a trabalhar na propaganda anti-EUA. Mais tarde em 1949 após uma longa investigação do F.B.I., Iva Toguri é condenada injustamente por crimes contra a pátria. Em 1971, o Presidente dos Estados Unidos Gerald Ford, concede-lhe perdão incondicional… Toguri morre a Janeiro de 2006.
Nesta emissão de zepelim, recuperámos algumas das raras gravações existentes de Tokyo Rose, e adicionámos alguns excertos ficcionados presentes no filme The Wild Blue Yonder (1954). Contudo, espreitamos também a propaganda radiofónica (This is War!) realizada nos Estados Unidos no ano de 1942 com o intuito de preparar a população para a Guerra contra o Japão e a Alemanha. Podemos ainda escutar algumas faixas retiradas da colectânea Last Kind Words (1926-1953) da Mississipi Records.
Neste Zepelim, debruçámo-nos sobre o álbum Night Passage, trabalho do escocês Alan Lamb editado em 1998 pela australiana Dorobo Records, construído a partir das últimas gravações que fez, em 1984 e 1985, no “Faraway Wind Organ”, e da actuação que fez em Kobe (Japão) na inauguração do, na altura, maior acelerador de electrões do mundo. Neste programa, porém, concentrámo-nos nas gravações do “Faraway Wind Organ”, uma propriedade no deserto da Austrália Ocidental com perto de 800m2 que comprou por 10AUD em 1976, ocupada por linhas telegráficas abandonadas e em decadência que, com o vento, os pássaros e outras circunstâncias produzem um som único, que Alan Lamb se encarregou de gravar com microfones de contacto, extraindo também desse trabalho o álbum Primal Image. Assim, Primal Image e Night Passage constituem as únicas gravações a ser efectuadas no “Faraway Wind Organ”, visto que quando Lamb regressou ao local após as gravações que foram editadas nesse álbum, se deparou com a destruição do “instrumento”, queimado por tempestades eléctricas e comido pelas térmitas que o habitavam.
Alinhamento:
1. Excerto do programa “The Night Air” da ABCAustralia, a transmitir um curso de Código Morse elaborado pela Força Aérea Australiana
2. Alan Lamb – Last Anzac [Night Passage, 1998]
2.1. Versão em Código Morse do primeiro capítulo de “The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel”, de Walter Wangerin Jr.
Nesta emissão de Zepelim, revisitámos o trabalho do fonógrafo e artista sonoro Aaron Ximm, de quem já tínhamos escutado a colecção de colagens sonoras “As Paredes Têm Ouvidos” gravadas em Nodar, São Pedro do Sul. Aaron Ximm (também conhecido como Quiet American), vive em São Francisco e realizou o seu primeiro trabalho na área da gravação de campo numa viagem ao Vietname em 1998. Dissolvendo-se em diversas culturas, Aaron Ximm cria como turista a oportunidade para captar os sons “naturais” de cada região. Em 2005, a rádio austríaca Kunstradio convida-o a realizar uma peça sonora sobre Guantánamo para ser incluída na série Radio Roadmovie. Viaja para a cidade cubana onde é recebido pela família de músicos de Jesús Ávila Gainza e do seu irmão Julio. É principalmente da convivência com a família cubana e com o seu quotidiano que nasce “Guantánamo Express” um “dueto” entre os sons de Guantánamo e a música de Jesús Ávila. Adicionámos ainda, a peça “3 trains” de cerca de 8 minutos gravada no Vietnam em Ba Cah perto da fronteira chinesa, como despedida de Guantánamo e rumo a Oriente.
Guantánamo Express is first a portrait of Jesús Ávila Gainza and his brother Julio. It was fabricated from the sounds I recorded around them: the sounds of their lives, their families, their homes, and most of all, with the sounds of their music. It is not only about them; I made it for them. by Aaron Ximm
1. Quiet American – “Guantánamo Express” (for Jesús Ávila Gainza y su hermano Julio)
2. Quiet American – 3 trains
“The world makes its own music, but we rarely listen with naive ears.”
Aaron Ximm
Ovir também:
Zepelim – 27.11.08 – “As paredes têm ouvidos” – download
Vermon Elliot– There Now Follows Some Useful Musical Sequences [The Clangers, 2005]
3. In June 19, 1991, Timothy Goode appeared on the popular Nicky Campbell show. The program, “Into The Night” is on National Radio One in Great Britain.
Este Zepelim explorou o álbum The Ghost Orchid: An Introduction to EVP (1999), uma das poucas edições da Parapsychic Acoustic Research Cooperative (P.A.R.C), uma associação americana dedicada à recolha e divulgação do fenómeno EVP, ou Electronic Voice Phenomena. Descrito pela primeira vez nos anos 40 pelo letão Attila von Szalay, este fenómeno consiste na “aparição”, em gravações de transmissões radiofónicas ou em field recordings, de padrões sonoros anormais semelhantes a vozes, que os crentes interpretam como manifestações de fenómenos paranormais, como comunicações de espíritos ou de entidades extraterrestres ou de outras dimensões do Universo ou da realidade. A exploração deste campo pós-von Szalay foi impulsionada por outro letão, Konstantin Raudive, que tendo realizado mais de 100 000 gravações contendo pequenas “mensagens” durante a sua estadia enquanto professor na universidade sueca de Uppsala, publicou o livro Breakthrough em colaboração com Friedrich Jürgenson. De entre os seguidores do trabalho desenvolvido por estes investigadores, destacar-se-iam, já no final do século XX, os americanos William O’Neill e George Meek, inventores de um dispositivo para melhorar as comunicações com o “outro lado” chamado Spiricom, e o britânico Raymond Cass, cujos trabalhos ocupam a maior parte do CD editado pela P.A.R.C
Os investigadores, bem como The Ghost Orchid: An Introduction to EVP, dividem as manifestações deste fenómeno em cinco categorias, exemplificadas neste Zepelim, nomeadamente Polyglot Voices, que falam em várias línguas ao mesmo tempo ou alternadamente dentro da mesma frase, PSB Interrupts, gravações de intreferências em transmissões radiofónicas públicas, Singing Voices, que transmitiriam as suas mensagens cantando, Alien Voices, transmissões de entidades extraterrestres, e Instant Response Voices, ou seja situações em que o investigador conseguia comunicar bidireccionalmente com a entidade paranormal.
Apesar dos esforços dos investigadores do campo, a maioria da comunidade científica actual duvida da credibilidade das teorias e da validade das experiencias conduzidas para comprovar a existência do EVP, explicando-o através da tendência humana para encontrar padrões familiares em padrões aleatórios, o que explicaria a razão pelas quais as vozes se transmitiriam sempre em linguagens familiares ao investigador, ou através de interferências nas ondas radiofónicas, ou daquelas causadas pelo equipamento eléctrico nos meios de captação de som.
Luís Antero pretende afirmar-se como uma plataforma fonográfica das regiões da Beira Serra e Serra da Estrela, fundamentalmente, fazendo uso de registos sonoros de vária ordem, dando primazia a elementos sonoros naturais e a tradições orais (que podem abarcar canções, poesia, histórias de vida ou mera pronuncia de determinada zona…).
Nesta emissão de Zepelim, explorámos a obra de Luis Antero, escutámos as suas recolhas de tradição oral realizadas na Aldeia do Sabugueiro e Oliveira do Hospital:
«as dúvidas do ti antónio acerca da teoria de copérnico»
local: sabugueiro, seia
«…não digo que não seja a terra que ande, não digo que não, mas cá pra mim…»
gravação com o ti antónio, na zona da levada, sabugueiro.
«tenho galinhas, tenho frangos, tenho tudo…»
local: parente, alvoco das várzeas, oliveira do hospital
Gravação de campo na aldeia do parente, com a simpática d. fernanda, mulher calejada pela vida no campo. nesta gravação ouvem-se o crepitar da fogueira, a água que cai no açude do parente, as galinhas e os frangos da d. fernanda, a carrinha que passa na estrada nacional, o miar triste do gato abandonado e, claro, o testemunho, pequeno mas sincero, da d. fernanda acerca das coisas da vida, como o trabalho… no fim, ainda trouxe um magusto de castanhas para casa.
«na roça do mato»
local: quinta do pomar, lageosa, oliveira do hospital
Gravação de um simpático casal – o sr. antónio e a d. elvira – na roça do mato. por um lado, limpam-se as terras, por outro, aproveita-se o mato e adubam-se outras.
«ti são e ti antónio do sabugueiro»
local: sabugueiro, seia
Pequena conversa, na zona da levada, com dois simpáticos habitantes do sabugueiro, a mais alta aldeia de Portugal, sobre histórias de vida, curiosidades e a saudade de um tempo ausente…
«pampilhosa by train»
local: pampilhosa, mealhada
Gravação do ambiente da estação de comboios de pampilhosa, mealhada, em dia de chuva…
Myke Weiskopf define-se como um multi-instrumentalista, produtor e artitsta sonoro. Apesar de ter nascido em Chicago, IL, vive em Hollywood, CA e é a partir daí que se dedica a um passatempo que partilha com milhares de entusiastas do fenómeno radiofónico: o MW DX, isto é a busca de emissões longínquas de rádios a emitir em AM em ondas curtas e médias.
Se durante o dia as propriedades físicas da ionosfera e das próprias ondas utilizadas limitam o seu alcance a cerca de 400kms, após o anoitecer, com o desaparecimento da chamada camada E é desvendado todo um mundo de emissões, alteradas pela distância e pela modulação de amplitude das ondas e que criam um ambiente quase hipnótico. Neste Zepelim ouvimos vários excertos, gravados por Weiskopf e disponibilizados no seu blogue.
Martin e. m. reverend – I’m Coming Home on the Morning Train [Negro Religious Field Recording 1 (1934-1942)] (excerto)
Fernando Lopes Graça – Quatro laços da dança dos paulitos (trás-os-montes) – Ao Lugar De Freixeneda [Canções heróicas, regionais e romances, 1995] (excerto)
Fernando Lopes Graça – Quatro laços da dança dos paulitos (trás-os-montes) – Se quiés ir a Colher Roses [Canções heróicas, regionais e romances, 1995] (excerto)
Pal – 2ofmytime_x [Essays on radio; can i have 2 minutes of your time, 2004]
Christina Fowler – 2minutes [Essays on radio; can i have 2 minutes of your time, 2004]
Final Fantasy – The Pooka Sings [He Poos Clouds, 2006] (loop/reverse)
Jana Winderen – Heated part 4 [Heated: Live In Japan, 2009]
Hauschka – Blue Bicycle [Ferndorf, 2008] (loop/reverse)
Andrew Deutsch – Untitled [Untitled Songs – 49 years from Gesang der Jünglinge (2005-1956), 2005]
Fabio Orsi – Yesterday Love [Audio for Lovers, 2008]
Lawrence English – Intercepted Communications [Studies for Stradbroke, 2008]
Lawrence English – Slipping Grains [Studies for Stradbroke, 2008]
Gravidez:
Excerto do programa de rádio Childhood Matters: Teen Readiness for Parents and kids – February 6, 2005
Primeira Infância:
Sainkho Namchylak & Peter Kowald – Spring Touch [Adult Games]
Derek Holzer – Monte Alegre Lago At Dusk [Recorded In The Field By…, 2006]
Gabi Schaffner – Candidate in a Singing Contest Among Iceland’s Youngsters [Recorded In The Field By…, 2006]
Raymond Scott – Tempo Block [Soothing Sounds For Baby, Vol. 2, 6 to 12 months,1997]
Raymond Scott – The Happy Whistler [Soothing Sounds For Baby, Vol. 2, 6 to 12 months, 1997]
Raymond Scott – Toy Typewriter [Soothing Sounds For Baby, Vol. 2, 6 to 12 months, 1997]
Raymond Scott – Tin Soldier [Soothing Sounds For Baby, Vol. 3, 12 to 18 months, 1997]
Raymond Scott – The Playful Drummer [Soothing Sounds For Baby, Vol. 3,12 to 18 months, 1997]
BBC RADIO ONE: ‘‘There was a hidden side to Raymond Scott: the mad inventor. Forget Bugs Bunny or Glen Miller, Scott’s real passion lay in electronics. He spent every spare hour developing revolutionary new music making machines. He created sounds that musicians today deem to be way ahead of his time. There’s no denying the creative genius that Scott left us…”
Após a última edição de Zepelim ter sido dedicada à figura de Allen Ginsberg, a de hoje gira em volta de outro dos nomes maiores da Beat Generation, William S. Burroughs, autor de Naked Lunch, ao mesmo tempo que o faz contactar com o trabalho de William Basinski.
A melhor forma de classificar Burroughs, a sua vida (1914-1997) e a sua obra, é como um experimentalista apaixonado e um artista multifacetado. Como meios de expressão, privilegiou as palavras, a música, mas também a sua própria vida e percepção, alteradas pelo consumo de diversas drogas e pelo contacto com os submundos e subculturas, sobretudo em Nova Iorque, mas também em S.Francisco, onde a beat culture contactou e acabou por ser englobada pela cultura hippie. Os seus trabalhos escritos, próximos dos de Kerouac e Ginsberg, tinham o confronto com a cultura conformista dos Estados Unidos em vista, através da abordagem a temas considerados obscenos e ao declínio da mundividência mainstream. Alguns registos raros de performances enquanto artista de spoken word e como músico foram lançados no ano de 2007, com o nome Real English Tea Made Here, pela editora Audio Research Editions.
William Basinski, por seu lado, é um compositor minimalista e artista audiovisual nascido em 1958 no Estado do Texas, tendo recebido formação clássica como clarinetista e inspiração de nomes como Steve Reich. Em 2002, enquanto tentava recuperar velhas gravações em fita magnética, para formato digital, acabou por destruir as já danificadas cassetes. Contudo, este processo acabou por gerar os sons patentes nos 4 volumes de The Disintegration Tapes, lançados entre 2002 e 2003 numa edição da editora 2062.
Alinhamento: 1. William S. Burroughs – The Piper Pulled Down the Sky
2. William S. Burroughs – 23 Skidoo
3. William Basinski – D|P 2.1
4. William Basinski – D|P 2.2
4.1. William S. Burroughs – Cut-Ins with Dutch Schultz
Voo do Zepelim, sobre uma sala de aula. Escutámos um excerto da cassete número 8 de uma série de 11 gravações de aulas leccionadas pelo poeta Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) em Brooklyn College sob o tema Expansive Poetics. O surrealismo pelas palavras emotivas de Ginsberg:
Sumário:
lecture begins, Smart’s lamb list poem
20th century mind-jumps of anti-rationality meets list poems. Dada is…
Breton’s “Free Union” – “total freedom”
Lamantia’s theory of poetry as imaginative dictation (brain areas discussed) & Critique of Gnsberg’s materialist poetry
Can they both co-exist, where Ginsberg “stepped off a little from Williams’ solid ground”
William’s and archetypal “queezing images into lines”
Still reading Breton’s manifestoe escolhas de
Breton’s list of favorite superrealists
The two methods of Williams (sketch of fixed epiphany in physical forms) and Surrealism (imagination) whitman/keruoac get surreal in “associative descriptions” -objectivists include non-physical form) “two different distincte escolhas de schools with two practices”
Breton’s Free Union
Ashberry and non-representational language as a way to whimsy and pump-priming
Ginsberg lists useful ways to be surprised or introduce whimsy
Kaddish and list poem technique
Robert Desnos: “I the voice of Robert Desnos…
Alinhamento:
1. Excerto do filme Spellbound (1945) de Alfred Hitchcock; descrição de um sonho.
2. John Baker – Man Alive Ufo [The John Baker Tapes, Vol. 1 : BBC Radiophonics, 2008]
3. Allen Ginsberg Class 8 Expansive Poetics (August 13, 1981)
3.1. Henry Cowell – Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance [Piano Music, 1993]
3.2. Jasper Leyland – Caraway [Fieldstone, 2007]
3.3. Inverz – V Song [Songs, 2008]
3.4. White Rainbow – Waves [Prism of The Eternal Now, 2007]
O Zepelim de hoje teve como peça central o tema “Lisbon”, improvisação de Keith Fullerton Whitman registada no dia 4 de Outubro de 2005, no pequeno auditório da Galeria Zé dos Bois, precisamente em Lisboa, e editada no ano seguinte, pela editora Kranky. A entrecortar esse tema, bem como o que se lhe seguiu, ouviram-se diversos excertos da teatralização radiofónica de “É Sempre Deus quem tem a Última Palavra”, de Álvaro Benamor, a partir de Naïs Micoulan, romance de Émile Zola, e de duas reportagens da Rádio Emissora Nacional, uma sobre a primeira partida de contingentes militares portugueses para a Guerra Colonial, e outro sobre os festejos natalícios na Central Tejo que, à data, fornecia a maior parte da electricidade à cidade de Lisboa.
Nesta edição de Zepelim, apresentámos algumas reflexões do compositor norte-americano John Cage (1912 – 1992) presentes no documentário Écoute de Miroslav Sebestik de 1992.
1.1. Michael Rasbury – Walking To Garage – descrição: Walking from business to parking garage, drive away; city; Localização:Charlottesville, Virginia; Emmett and Ivy [2007]
3. Michael Rasbury – Looking At Street – descrição: Street, Exterior; 35th and 7th Ave Looking at street, people behind; Localização: New York, New York [2008]
6. Taylor Deupree – Live in Bern (Sept 9, 2005) [Live1 Mapping, 2009]
7. The Beautiful Babes In Springtime Brainwave Band – Mori Noma Bega Patch It Up (Featuring Earl Monster)[After You Men Explode The World We Women Will Sing It To Sleep, 2006]
Em 1997, na sequência de um trabalho de anos, Akin Fernandez editou pela britânica Irdial-Discs aquilo a que chamou “The Conet Project”. Nos seus quatro discos reunia diversos excertos de gravações de “estações de números“, misteriosas frequências AM que se pensa serem usadas pelas agências secretas de diversos países para transmitirem mensagens em código aos seus agentes, através da conjugação de trechos musicais com diferentes sequências de números ou letras do alfabeto fonético. Neste Zepelim, musicámos alguns desses excertos.
Emissão de Zepelim inspirada na expedição pioneira do Capitão Britânico Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912) ao Pólo Sul no ano de 1912. Robert Scott, falha a missão de se tornar o primeiro Homem a atingir o Pólo Sul, superado pela tripulação do Norueguês Roald Amundsen que se antecipou em 35 dias.
A tripulação inglesa perde a vida na calota polar da Antárctida, enquanto tentavam voltar para a segurança da base. As condições de frio sobre-humanas e a fome, ditaram o destino da expedição Terra Nova de Scott. Os seus corpos congelados, foram encontrados 8 meses mais tarde, assim como os seus diários…
1. Elegi – Svanesang [Varde, 2009]
2. Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto – Berlin [Insen, 2005]
21. Tetsuo Inoue & Taylor Deupree – Active Freeze [Active / Freeze, 2000]
3. Fennesz – Glass Ceiling [Black Sea, 2008]
4. Maksim Shentelev – Untitled song (switchdrop) [Untitled Songs – 49 years from Gesang der Jünglinge (2005-1956), 2005]
5. Asmus Tietchens – Ohne jeden Titel [Untitled Songs – 49 years from Gesang der Jünglinge (2005-1956), 2005]
6. Janek Schaefer – Between The Two [In the Last Hour, 2006]
7. Ranulph Fiennes – Part 1 [Captain Scott, 2004]
8. ø – Unien Holvit [Oleva, 2008]
9. Dallas Simpson – Bryher, Rushy Bay [Binaural Performances, 2003]
10. Colleen – Le Bateau [Les ondes silencieuses, 2007]
Em Abril de 2007, o americano Aaron Ximm (ou Quiet American), deslocou-se à pequena aldeia do Norte do Concelho de São Pedro do Sul, de nome Nodar. Próxima de Castro Daire e de Arouca, Nodar esconde-se num vale do Rio Paiva e tem estimulado um vasto número de artistas de dispersas áreas, a criarem diferentes abordagens na arte sonora e visual. Acolhidos por uma residência típica de xisto, a Nodar Guest Studio da Associação Cultural Binaural, os artístas são encorajados a partilhar os seus trabalhos através de performances, ensaios abertos, conversas ou exposições no local da residência dirigidas aos públicos locais.
O trabalho artístico que Quiet American desenvolveu em Nodar, baseou-se na captação das sonoridades naturais que envolvem a aldeia. Os sons da trovoada, o som do moinho a funcionar ou a voz da tia Ilda e as suas ovelhas teimosas, compondo o projecto “As paredes têm ouvidos“, um conjunto de 5 colagens sonoras temáticas: people, animals, things, water e nature.
Nesta ediçao de Zepelim musicámos a colecção “As paredes têm ouvidos” com:
Library Tapes– The Fragile Tide [A Summer Beneath The Trees, 2008]
Até ao próximo dia 14 de Dezembro, pode-se escutar no Teatro Viriato em Viseu, quatro “paisagens sonoras” de Nodar. A instalação áudio é composta por obras de Maksims Shentelevs (Letónia), Pali Meursault (França), John Grzinich (EUA/Estónia) assim como “As paredes têm ouvidos” de Aaron Ximm a quem dedicámos esta emissão do Zepelim.
“I discovered you could learn about the land, the wild
animals, the domestic animals, the pets, the kind of work people do,
the kind of songs they sing, what the local language sounds like (even
when I cannot understand it) and how people to talk to one another…
sound is a window to understanding as big as the eyes, but usually we
are so distracted looking at things that we don’t pay attention to this
other window.” – Aaron Ximm
Um Zepelim especial inspirado pelos acontecimentos de Jonestown, no dia 18/11/1978.
Jonestown era uma pequena cidade situada na Guiana, e habitada por membros da seita do People’s Temple, guiada por James Warren Jones, ou Jim Jones. Esta seita, fundada na cidade de Indianopolis em 1955 e seguidora de uma mescla de crenças religiosas igualitárias e de ideologia comunista radical, baseou-se na cidade de S.Francisco em 1968, após o seu líder ter uma visão apocalíptica na qual os estados de Illinois e Indiana eram destruídos por um ataque nuclear. Aí foi conquistando uma influência crescente, graças a diversos programas de acção social, ao carisma de Jim Jones e a técnicas de lavagem cerebral importadas da China. Rapidamente o seu raio de acção se espalhou por toda a California e estados circundantes.
No ano de 1974, a seita chamava já muitas atenções mediáticas, criando o que os seus membros consideraram uma perseguição. Para fugir a isso, e em resposta ao que chamaram o “crescente fascismo dos Estados Unidos”, membros do People’s Temple começaram a emigrar para uma propriedade arrendada na Guiana, fundando o People’s Temple Agricultural Project, ou Jonestown. Em 1977 a mudança estava praticamente concluída, atingindo a cidade uma população próxima das 900 pessoas. Contudo, alguns membros da seita fugiram de Jonestown, denunciando ao Congresso americano situações de violação de Direitos Humanos. Leo Ryan era o congressista eleito por S.Francisco e foi encarregue de averiguar a situação. Durante a sua visita, diversos membros manifestaram a sua vontade de abandonar também Jonestown, o que despertou a ira de Jones e das suas temidas Red Brigades que acabaram por interceptar a comitiva do congressista, matando-o, bem como a um dos fugitivos e três jornalistas.
Nessa noite, James Warren Jones convenceu os seus seguidores a suicidarem-se, bebendo cianeto, enquanto ele se suicidava com um tiro. Morreram 918 pessoas. No Zepelim de hoje, ouviram-se excertos da gravação do debate que tiveram nessa noite, acompanhados por:
1.Stars of the Lid– Don’t Bother, They’re Here (…And their Refinement of Decline, 2007)
2.Hecq – Magnetism (Night Falls, 2008)
3.Tim Hecker – Azure, Azure (Radio Amor, 2003)
4.White Rainbow – Warm Clicked Fruit (Prism of Eternal Now, 2007)
5.Expo ’70 – Heir of Serpents (Split with Be Invisible Now,2008)
6.Valet – Drum Movie (Naked Acid, 2008)
Natural de Memphis, Larkin Grimmcresce na Geórgia rodeada pelos Montes dos Apalaches no seio de uma família de hippies devotos da extinta ordem religiosa Holy Order of Mans. As primeiras canções que Larkin ouviu foram, possivelmente, da sua mãe – melodias fartas de esperança e luz de um coração hippie. A sua infância e juventude são passadas num confortante isolamento perto da natureza, recheado de valores puros que brotavam das profundezas da terra e tocavam a liberdade. Larkin recorda os contos de fadas que a mãe lhe contava quando era pequena. O seu pai aproveitando a deixa, diz-lhe que o seu nome Grimm é da descendência dos Famosos Irmãos Grimm… Na verdade, é na escrita de canções que Larkin se revela com poemas autobiográficos, onde pairam atmosferas habitadas por assassinos, paixões, sexo e morte. Já crescida Larkin Grimm estuda Belas-Artes em Yale. Procura dar azo ao seu sentido de liberdade não mantendo uma morada fixa, viaja pela Tailândia (onde convive com mulheres strippers humilhadas por turistas sexuais) e Guatemala.
O seu último álbum Parplar vive da estranheza do homem-réptil, do pavor e da euforia. Na voz de Larkin moram os arquétipos de tudo o que já se viveu, o herói e a morte, a mãe e a casa, o medo e a criança. Histórias do início dos tempos… They were wrong que inicia o disco impressiona pela proximidade, e sussurra-nos que a esperança vive do lado de cá. Ride that Cyclone mostra-nos que este não é um disco de uma pessoa só, surgem as trompetes, os banjos, as guitarras, os acordeões e a precursão da responsabilidade dos convidados Fire on Fire da Young God Records.
Este é o primeiro álbum de Larkin Grimm assinado pela editora de Michael Gira, depois de ter editado pela Secret Eye, The Last Tree e Harpoon Baptism. Michael Gira é o produtor e quem encorajou Larkin a escolher as 15 faixas que compoêm Parplar de um universo de 50.
Larkin Grimm, Já partilhou a estrada com Devendra Banhart, Spires that in the Sunset Rise, Espers, Mi and L’au, Brightblack Morning Light, Viking Moses, the Microphones, Old Time Relijun e com o português Norberto Lobo.
Entretanto, Larkin continua a sua infindável viagem entre o místico e o natural, entre o Homem e a Terra…
Koen Holtkamp . Field Rituals . Type Records . 2008
Koen Holtkamp vive em Brooklyn onde é director da label Apestaartje(nome alemão para o símbolo “@”, cuja tradução literal é “rabo de macaco”) fundada em 1998 na cidade de Chicago.As suas experimentações ambientais foram consolidadas na banda Mountains ao lado de Brendon Anderegg. Field Rituals, é o seu primeiro passo a solo, e mantém-se fiel ao que nos tinha habituado em Mountains. Viagens atmosféricas que vivem do cruzamento entre uma electrónica delicada e os sons acústicos encontrados na guitarra de 6 ou 12 cordas, na harmónica, melódica, nas gravações de sons quotidianos ou em pequenos objectos como papel e metais, imersos por suaves apontamentos de voz. A fusão das guitarras e dos sintetizadores fazem brotar drones cristalinos que conduzem cada faixa a espaços abertos onde a luz ofusca os olhos.
Our bias towards animals, or zoochauvinism, has been shown to have negative implications on funding towards plant conservation. Authors argue that artistic practices that engage plants in a sensorial and meaningful way can potentially generate emotional responses and concern towards plant life. This presentation reviews musical and sound art practices that incorporate plants and discusses the ethics of plant life as a performative participant. Starting in the early 70s, Music to Grow Plants By became a small footnote in the history of recorded music. However, it showed how the veiled nature of plants became attached to personal narratives, tastes and social values. In parallel, avant-garde movements interested in amplifying the noises of everyday life started to appropriate the sounding materiality of plants through contact microphones. John Cage’s amplified cactus became an icon of indeterminacy music. Plant-based generative music attempts to take a step forward into the inner life of plants by translating their biological activity.
Zepelim’s radio piece 
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![Koen Holtkamp – Field Rituals [Type Records, 2008]](http://zeppelinruc.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/333.jpg "cover")
