Sound Localities

Sound Localities Compilation released!

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 23:54:00 +0100

Downloaded the compilation online for free here: Sound Localities Compilation 2011

Sound Localities is a project that explores sound in the city through field recordings and exchanges from artists in 7 cities in the local, regional and international space around Mons, Belgium. From Ghent, Brussels, London, Madrid, Hong Kong and Seoul, the project seeks to produce a dialogue amongst disparate places and individuals through their localised experiences to explore possibilities of imagining a wider global space.

The process: Individuals from selected art organisations working with sound were interviewed about their work with sound and their relationship as a cultural organisation in their city. The organisations were asked to select artists working with sound in the city to contribute field recordings to share something about the place. The sounds were contributed to an archive that were collected and shared online with all other participants in the project.

The participating artists were then invited back to create a mix from the collection of sounds from the cities. The result is a compilation of their mixes – reflecting a crossing of cities and experiences, and perspectives on the World that are reinterpreted and then shared back to each other. The compilation is a the result of a project called Resonant Cities (2010) that connects individuals in different spaces and times in a complex and globalising space of contemporary urban existence.

Includes mixes by: Julien Poidevin (FR), Will Montgomery (UK), Jiyeon Kim (KR),Sébastien Biset (BE), Edwin Lo (HK), Pauwel De Buck (BE), Yiorgis Sakellariou (GR), Sinyu Tsang (HK), and Martin Clarke (UK).

Sound Localities is a project initiated by Ashley Wong an artist, curator and researcher based in London, UK during a 3-month residency at Transcultures in Mons, Begium supported by Pépinières européennes pour jeune artistes and partners.

Tuckstaking, Brussels

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 12:07:34 +0000

Arnaud Jacobs

Truckstaking

Recorded 18 June 2008

Recorded during daytime from an open window. Manifestation of truckers on june 18th 2008.

The place where I live in Brussels is the nerve centre from where manifestations will start or at least pass by. Truckers, farmers and taximen where protesting that day against rising fuel costs.

Square19

Recorded 17 August 2003

Recorded in the summer of 2003. Quite a hot day. The alternating deep bass sound is a blowing fan that comes an goes. The background noise that starts after a while is from opening a window, the distant sound from fountain enters the recording.

Duiven onder brug

Recorded on 16 Octobre 2004

Recorded in the fall of 2004. Pigeons in major cities are omni present. I like their internal cooing sound. This was recorded under a bridge along the brussels canal. Some other incidental sounds from people biking, jogging and walking along the canal. Kids playing in a parc nearby. The spatial sound has a typical character, The sound is reflecting between the watersuface and the covering arc from the bridge. I like this recording because there is a discussion about the pigeons during the recording.

Arnaud Jacobs (b. 1968 in Wilrijk; Belgium; lives and works in Brussels) studied architecture. After his studies it did not take long, however, before he chose sound. He has released sound works under several aliases: MarkMancha, missfit, tmrx. From 2004, he has produced wrk under the name Aernoudt Jacobs with a focus on installations and performances. His work has been exhibited internationally and he has released two albums on critically acclaimed labels as Staalplaat (NL) and Selektion (D).

His works are the result of a research of the different aspects of field recordings and how to assimilate this material to new forms, new contexts. For him the actual resulting field recordings are only a registration. The act, the memory, the context of the recording are even more interesting and complementary motives for his research. With the aid of psychoacoustic theories, he explores how perception can be influenced and how to express sound physically, spatially and emotionally.

Yeung Yang, founder/executive director, Soundpocket, Hong...

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 12:29:00 +0000

Yeung Yang, founder/executive director, Soundpocket, Hong Kong

Oct 2010

Soundpocket is a promoter, educator, facilitator, and gatherer. We work in the fields of sound, art and culture. We find sound in diverse and dynamic relations with many different art forms (visual art, installation art, music, theatre, dance etc.), and with a variety of cultural contexts that give meanings to our lives. We would like to work with all those who share this active interest in sound.

soundpocket supports not just an art form, but ideas and possibilities that engage with aesthetically meaningful, culturally-grounded and publicly relevant sonic practices, which have a lot to teach about how we understand the world and the experiences yet to be valued.

http://www.soundpocket.org.hk

YY: We were founded in 2008. We are a company and then we became a charity. In name we have done two sound art festivals that’s called Around. One artist said it’s a good name because it’s called Around Sound Art so it’s not exactly sound art. And we don’t really know what Sound Art is. But we try to do things around sound in art and sound as art. We hope sooner or later we’ll be working with different people from different art forms who have an interest in sound – in listening really, not making sound, but their ears and listening.

We believe that it is possible to experience beauty, a very out-dated word these days, but I think it’s still possible to experience beauty through listening. The festival we had done two times, but in the coming year we are thinking of stopping. Just to take stock and think a bit and think of the best way or strategy to nurture more artists with big ears. With sensitive ears. We don’t have enough of those now.

From Sound Pocket’s point of view, it is important for us to present works that are compelling in terms of listening. So it doesn’t matter for instance if a work makes beautiful sounds or it attempts to make very new and strange sounds if in the it is not intended for the ears for listening. I guess in a certain way we are more interested in acoustics in a way and the relation between sound and space and sound and time. Sound and time in the sense that sound in lifetimes and in other scales of time.

We have also presented works that don’t just use sound as just some kind of illustration of the materials in an installation for instance, it has to play a more determining role in the work as a whole. So it doesn’t really matter if the person is a sound artist or whatever, we know artists who hate this term. Who don’t want to be called sound artists, who want to be known as simply artists and we understand and we accept and agree to it.

We haven’t been able to tell a lot of people about this, but maybe some. So this is something that we want to do more. In terms of documentation, I guess also writing about it like the book that we just did. Two things there, one is really just to make some marks. Discussion is really important, even just your feelings, it doesn’t have to be very academic full of footnotes kind of essay. Even just a start of that kind of document. That kind of writing, leaving some marks, opens up conversations and also CDs. A way of fixing some live performances or something that happened into a form so that some people can get access to them, to expose their work to more audience.

I don’t know who whoever are doing art will be interested to go into the sound part and learn more about their ears and sound as a material. I see some interest in theatre, sound designers, film people but not so much visual artists and installation artists. So I don’t know who to support, but one of the things that we try to do is to bring really good artists, artists who know what they’re doing sometimes, sometimes they don’t it’s fine. To bring them here so that there would be more intimate conversations between people who are in and people who are thinking whether they want to go in, so this has been happening on a very small and slow scale.

Sometimes we don’t know whether we are interested in something. It’s almost like we’re casting a net to see who accidentally gets caught or something.

A lot of people have been coming and going. I mean not you but artists have been coming and of course going, and then people from here have been leaving, because maybe Hong Kong doesn’t offer enough opportunities for presenting art and just career-wise. It’s very lonely not in a depressing way. I’m just thinking about Boris Groys writing the _____ Project because as an organisation that lies on the periphery, just as any organisation, financially dependent on grants, you are always thinking about the future – the future that has not happened. I mean writing up a grant proposal, imagining this complete project that may never happen and doing it maybe two or three times a year, that’s a very lonely process because you’re always in this future kind of time frame.

It seems that suddenly that the government is buying so much into the creative industries kind of rhetoric, policy when perhaps a lot of other cities or countries have gone into it too much and so much that they want to stop or slow down. But Hong Kong just seems to be starting to realise that maybe that this concept would work somehow. And I don’t understand the logic behind, but at least it seems there are grants available to the arts. We are a very small organisation and we have been encouraged by a something called Create Hong Kong, which is a big alignment of different government departments and there’s this grant that any organisation claiming to be doing anything related to the creative industries can apply and they would give maximum grants, but it’s much higher than what we would routinely get – the maximum amount from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. And there’s also the MegaFund, which is…

So there seems to be more grants from the non-art public sector that is opening the door to the arts. So maybe in that sense cultural production is getting ‘easier’. I mean if you do want to produce something in terms of a quantifiable kind of deliverable if that’s what cultural production is then it’s easier. But then there are more ways of doing it.

Our situation now, for the past two years now we have been doing programmes, curated programmes. Larger ones, festivals and smaller ones curated art programmes and then we have been doing small sort of educational programmes, workshop kind of stuff just to address some needs in the arts community. There are people in the art community who want to learn how to edit sound, they want to learn the softwares, they want to know the principles of recording, what kind of microphones they want to use when they want to record and if they can make their own microphones, these kinds of things to address needs in the art community. And we want to do more publications because of this documentation thing we want to have some kind of material base and with that we are planning to do more research. We have written some kind of research proposals, we want to identify the scope of sound art and the scope of active listeners and working in the arts in Hong Kong. And it’s important as a kind of ground, for us as well just to know where we are going and where people are, to feel less lonely I guess. That’s the point I suppose and the reason why we want to do that…

But the next step we thing that it’s really important to first of all commission, to be financially better and to use that money to commission artists from here to do new and original works and this commissioning has to be like a research based, longer timeframe kind of commissioning. I guess especially for this sort of art form that is very new to Hong Kong. It doesn’t have to be this kind of fixed, rigid kind of art form, it has to be identified, I mean so that people can question it. You have to identify a thing before you can start criticising it or debating about it.

And also to have professional team which can look up to some kind of career development, some kind of employment opportunities. This applies to artists, art administrators, researchers, curators of course. We don’t have these opportunities, these paths are available that are accessible to whoever that are considering whether they want to go into the arts. Without a map it’s very difficult to for a young person for them to decide that this is what they can do. Or to convince their parents that this is what they can do. And I guess this is a very Hong Kong thing. Young people still think they need to convince their parents when they choose a career or when they choose a major in university. So there’s a lot to do.

I don’t know if we were able to in five years grow into a space with at least maybe 5 or 6 full time staff. Then it would be great. We only have one now and I work here on the second shifts, sometimes full-time sometimes part-time, but I also have a full-time job so.. it’d be nice in five years we could have a team, then we can have a curatorial team, a research team and educational team. I feel our society has to slow down a bit in terms of cultural production / creative industries thing. If we don’t, we lose a lot of thinking space. Sometimes I get scared.. We are just two years old and in the past one year, we have been approached by I mean for me, quite a lot of organisations, non-art related from Hong Kong, just to ask us if we might be interested to get involved in their projects, to contribute a programme, to curate something, to find artists. On the positive side you feel there is so much you can do, but then you start thinking if I want to satisfyll these requests then where do I find people? If I do want to satisfy these requests, do I end up pushing people who are not ready just to fill up a scene? And I think it’s very dangerous, but how do you slow down? If you need to track record to get a grant? It’s a big dilemma.

Listening is important for Hong Kong people because for Hong Kong people to be able to listen is to be able to live in the moment. If you go on a train like now you hear many many announcements, there will be TV continuously broadcasting news, you will hear people speaking on the phone, so it’s a very very congested kind of urban listening environment.

And in the city there are so many high rises, they are so tall those buildings. The sound gets amplified, bounced back and forth. If we just stop and think and listen, we will realise how serious the problem of noise in the city is, so once we realise that we live again that moment.

It’s also about heritage, preservation of our history. A few years ago in 2006 and 9 there was Star Ferry Clock incident where an almost 50 year old clock tower was demolished and the bells inside, it was a mechanical clock, it has an electronic mechanism or device, but then it is also made up of 5 bronze bells and these are really old bells and they sound really nice. Somehow the policy, the clock tower had to be demolished and now there is a new Star Ferry, there is a new clock tower and there are new bells powered by GPS system, digital clock and digital mechanism. The bells sound very different and it’s an exile. The bells are now far out in the harbour and cut off from the community in Central, which is very different from the way the old clock tower was related to Edinburgh Square, City Hall and the Norman Foster Hong Kong Bank. Linking up the whole space of Central. Linking up the coastline, the tramways, the new buildings and the old landscape. So if we were a little bit more aware of how sounds actually give us a sense of community and a sense of togetherness, to be together in one place, living in one place then, we might be happier people.

We are in this place, To Kwa Wan. Sound Pocket is in To Kwa Wan and now we face East. And we’re in a bay area and on the left is our old airport, Kai Tak Airport and on the right, luxury residential complex built by Mr. Lee Ka Shing. And then there’s this dock in the bay for ships and ferries to come in for maintenance. Sometimes I would hear horns that sort of modest ones, not like the ones of big ocean miners. I know people have done fog horn compositions and songs and stuff like that. I haven’t listened to them for real, and I’d love to listen to that. And part of what my very nice memories of the Hong Kong harbour is not visual, but when we used to have this ferry service between Jordan, which is a very busy part of Kowloon Peninsula and Central, Hong Kong Island. It’s a very short ferry ride, maybe 10 minutes. But in spring the harbour would be all foggy and you really can’t see what’s around you. And there’s this excitement, this sense of adventure, like you’re ferry is moving, but you can’t see anything, but then you hear the ferries say “hi” to each other with horns. Those are very nice memories. Now we don’t have those ferry rides anymore. There’s only just one, no but a few. Many are now gone. And I don’t know why we are not seeing so much fog these days. I think that cutting off that visual, blurring the visual force us to come back to our ears and that’s what inspires me most. I guess..

I actually recorded something myself or probably Anthony did, but I helped. I was holding the microphone of the wet market of the Central wet market. Just of the soundscape there and people pushing carts and people calling in Chinese the hawkers, the venders they would call out, ask you to come close and buy something and how much the ‘choi sum’ (Chinese vegetable) is today and how much the pumpkins are. The wet market again, is heritage preservation, which is going to be redeveloped and there will be a hotel and many stalls are gone now and some would be preserved, but others.. there’s a whole street that would be renewed, to become a street of old shops but these are new old shops that pretend to be old or new shops that have old brands.

Prima Villa Sha Tin and City One railway station, Hong Kong

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 12:19:58 +0000

Sunny Chan

PrimaVilla Sha Tin, Hong Kong

The road near City One railway station, Hong Kong

Philippe Franck, director, Transcultures, Mons Nov...

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 17:22:11 +0000

Philippe Franck, director, Transcultures, Mons

Nov 2010

Transcultures, Interdisciplinary Center for Sound and Electronic Cultures is an association born in 1996 in order to promote and develop crossings between contemporary artistic practices and arts/society/technology stakes; focusing in particular on sound art and digital creation. Since 2008, Transcultures is settled in Mons (Belgium) and through its new interdisciplinary center, is working on production, mediation and reflection regarding electronic and sound projects.

Since 2003, Transcultures has launched in collaboration with the City of Mons, City Sonic, international sound art festival (sound circuit of site specific installations and performances in various locations of the city of Mons). The City Sonic productions travel all around the world. Since 2005, another festival Les Transnumériques was born dedicated to the digital arts and cultures (in Mons, Brussels, Liège and other cities in France). Transcultures have also produced many CDs, DVDs, books and hybrid publications on various topics related to the interdisciplinary/digital/sound arts.

www.transcultures.be

PF: Hello my name is Philippe Franck. I’m the director of Transcultures – interdisciplinary centre for sound art and digital art and culture in Mons Belgium.

I founded Transcultures in 1996 in Brussels. At that time there was no centre, no structure really involved specifically in interdisciplinary arts and not involved in electronic art or sound art either. Also Belgium is very interdisciplinary and disciplinary country with in disciplinary and interdisciplinary artists. I was one of them and somehow I suffered this lack of intermedia approach and vision, support and structure.

Back from a stay in New York I founded Transcultures with some friends in Brussels and very quickly we started to organise interdisciplinary events with exhibitions, concerts and hybrid manifestations with hybrid artists from electronic music to poetry from video art to what would become digital art very soon. From experimental music to sound art, dance, less theatre, visual arts too, but always at the intersection of all those disciplines. And we try to promote these intersections not only with events but with some permanent and open think tank with international partners and building networks to promote those interdisciplinary intersections and also we released in collaboration with houses of publishing or music labels, CDs for example with Subrosa based in Brussels, a very nice independent record company. Books, with also house of publishing called La Lettre Vole and hybrid objects with DVD, CD and paper at the same time. And also we were very quickly interested in the web, not only to promote things like events, but to say something about this kind of culture.

My background is history of art but also semiology and journalism. I felt the need to write about it and invite other people to write or to express some kind of critical view of all those in progress or on-going practices. Especially in French we lack that here.

In 2003 I launched with Transcultures and the city of Mons here the City Sonic Sound Art Festival so it’s an international sound art festival devoted to the diversity of sound art or sound arts today. Because I don’t think there is one sound art but it’s very very open. That’s what I like sound as an intersection between other practices. It’s open to visual artists too, designers, architects, not only musicians or digital artists or radio artists. But it’s a mix of all of that. It works with the city. The city is a not only the locations, but also the context and the place. And the content.

We try to link every summer between 10 and 6 locations in the centre of the city. Inhabited with site-specific works, installations, environments and sometimes performances.

We try to co-produce them. Really adapt the works really for this specific event, this urban space. And it’s open to everybody it’s free. Very quickly it began a very singular, particular event that was noticed all around the world.

It’s not a big budget but there are between 50 to 80 artists every year and i’m also very interested in the transhistorical lets say links between what we call ‘sound emergencies’ meaning new young artists sometimes from art schools that they try to help and try to develop their work technically speaking but also with a critical approach that I was talking about for City Sonic. But also well known artists, even historical artists such as Luke Ferrari a famous french composer or Phil Niblock came here too, Charlemagne Palestine and other great dinosaurs. And they were mixed with young artists too and it went very well and we also release CDs too as a sound festival catalogue and we collaborate also with record companies for more specific sound projects.

So now City Sonics is in Mons but we try to export somehow these project and of course they are never the same and it went all over the place from many cities in France to Tunisia, Romania, also Quebec, so we have lots of international links, so this is a nomadic festival but within the city. With sound as a link.

The other festival Transnumerique is more devoted to digital arts and electronic arts or digital arts culture whatever it means. It’s always interesting to re-define those topics and so-called definitions. I think it’s a very cultural definition we can have. It’s always moving.

So Transnumerique is a nomadic festival between different cities. Not in one city so we try to link from the french speaking community in Belgium Mons, Brussels, Liege. But also to work in France with several locations in Paris. Maubeuge a small city near the border or Lille.

I think it’s a unique way to approach this kind of festival in the sense that we work with young artists or maybe also international but less historical but most of the time younger than City Sonics sometimes. And we can show an installation of an artist in Brussels, a performance in Mons and an on-going project in Paris and it’s the same artist with different sides. So I like this kind of Kaleidoscopic view. Because I think it’s very much what is an interdisciplinary, intermedia artist is today. He’s not a one-face artists he has several faces, sometimes he hides himself between different identities and that’s very interesting. So that’s also a way to co-produce his or her work. It’s also a way to link different audiences and different partners.

Mons is an interesting city. It’s not a big city it’s only around 100 thousand people not more in Mons and only 30 thousand in the centre. It’s a very historical city so you have very nice architecture, nice houses, people are quite friendly, they like to drink good beers, but apart from that it’s also the capital of culture of Wallonia, so the french-speaking part of Belgium.

It has a local view, but it’s mixed with an international very active networking on a European level. There are many many European programmes launched in Mons. And it’s going to be the European Capital of Culture in 2015 and one of the main idea Mons is actually the summary of the 2015 European Capital of Culture is when technology meets culture. So we are exactly there. When technology meets culture for Transcultures. And we do it in a very international way. Like Mons is working a lot with the North of France, working a lot with Flanders with our linguistic problems, which is in a way easier than in Brussels because of our schizophrenic war here in Belgium. Also as it is a small city it’s very easy to walk through the city and through the locations we can propose to artists. There are a lot of cultural institutions and they are very open to digital arts and interdisciplinary forms. Le Menege, which is maybe the biggest cultural centre here in Belgium. It’s a cross border centre with Maubeuge, which I think is an interesting idea. It’s a transborder vision of art. They can share the same vision even if they have different directors and I like this even to collaborate with big institutions, which also collaborate with other big institutions, but not only this.

At the beginning when we first arrived here, people told me for example there are no sound artists, which I think is totally untrue. Because once you begin working with the students for example with the art school and other artists and once they have a platform, there are dozens of sound artists and some of them are quite good. So it’s possible to build somehow not a scene, but with a platform like a group of interesting people and to make exchange easily not only with friends but also with other countries in Europe on an international perspective and that’s what I like. And it’s not far from Brussels – it’s only 45min from Brussels. I live in Brussels. And I can organise things in Brussels from Mons too so it’s quite easy.

I think it’s a challenge too for the audience as we have many cultural institutions, non-profit organisations also researchers within the universities very open to digital arts, then the question is is the audience going to follow that? Is the audience going to be there? So we have to think in terms of public awareness, what we call ‘mediation’, what we can call multimediation for multimedia arts and that’s why we organise for example workshops with the youngsters, what we call Sonic Kids when it’s about sonic art or Electro Kids when it’s about digital arts in our festival and during the year. And I think it’s very important. This kind of transmission between generations. Also with these forms.

All of this is possible in Mons and with the European Capital of Culture I think there is a good dynamic to develop Transcultures projects within a more lets say a more ambitious project, which is the European Capital of Culture.

I do remember most of the people here in Mons are very well-known sound which is the sound of Tarzan. That’s a spanish artist based in Brussels that’s called Emelio Lopez-Menchero. Actually more a visual artist than a sound artist but very interesting in sound propose as a sound installation from the Beffroi of Mons, the tower just in the centre of the city. The very centre of the city. This sound was broadcast every hour instead of the usual clock and it was (ah oohohhohoh..). After the first day, maybe the first day some people were a bit annoyed but that – the average people, but after the first day everybody was laughing at it.

Like 8 years after this first edition of City Sonics with this installation, with the scream or the cry of Tarzan, everybody, lots of people are still asking me also when is Tarzan coming back in Mons. So I think that’s the power of sound. It’s not the sound from Mons but it’s an international sound. It’s a very cultural western sound. It’s a cinematographic sound, it’s a very powerful sign for us for our civilization. Everybody knows that sound and can relate to it in some way. So for me it was a good introduction to sound art.

One of the problem we can have with City Sonic is that we are more recognised on an international level than on a local level. So that is why we also organise workshops, that’s why we can propose during City Sonic what we call Sonic Garden Parties mainly performances in private gardens, which is a way to approach other inhabitants here and to propose to discover these secret gardens these private gardens just for one day through sound performances.

I think Mons has to be more international and in a way it’s a problem with many provincial towns or cities. And it is provincial, and at the same time, it has international ambitions. So sometimes there’s a gap and I think that we can be one of the links to promote Mons and also to promote international partners here and as we are part of sometimes important networks we can use them. Networks I’m talking about apart from the 5 or 6 European programmes we are involved here now, is the RAN meaning Reseau des Arts Numerique, digital art network and it’s about 50 major or smaller international structures open to digital arts. So this kind of network for me that’s really important that is also present somehow in a small city like Mons. That Seoul can come to Mons because of City Sonic and because of the networking we are doing for some years now. Montreal has some through the exchanges that we had with the Society of Art and Technology (SAT) in Montreal. We have a two year exchange with residencies, workshops and performances on digital arts. And we can exchange also through the fibre, through the internet. And that’s very exciting.

Actually it’s not only the physical locations that I want to interact with other cities or other partners, but also certain ideas of what could be interdisciplinary or those hybrid practices between arts, science and technology now, also with aesthetic and sometimes political, I hope critical view.

I knew it from the very beginning. I knew there was a gap also. Not only between the small city and the international approach, but there is a bit gap between the still traditional, vertical institutional approaches and hierarchy and what we try to develop in a more horizontal way and so this gap is still there. Maybe it is a bit reduced because now interdisciplinary is now a fashionable, it’s somehow trendy.

Brussels was, I think there was a utopia in Brussels 2000 which I like, because I think each European Capital should have its own utopia. I don’t know what is Mons utopia except for this motto when culture meets technology. It’s not really utopia, it’s more realistic. But we have to build a utopia. The more interesting about the European capital is not the year when it happens. It’s not 2015. It’s the dynamics between here and then 2015 and that I think can be interesting if we can have some more opportunities for some more openness and some more valid links in terms of arts and culture.

Underground Tube Network

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 08:29:15 +0000

Ghent Underground Tube Network

Bram Bosteels

“This is a recording I made in a big underground tube network during public works in Ghent. I put the microphone about 3/4 metres deep in one of the ‘tubes’, the tubes are interconnected underground, I guess they reach several hundred meters far and because they’re interconnected you can hear sounds from different parts of the city come together. (one end of the tube, where the microphone is, leads to several other endings spread around the city. A kind of ‘natural city mixer’ in a way ), what fascinates me in this recordin ?- cause it’s a tube , it’s kind of a ’ black hole’ : you don’t get to see what you’re actually hearing , you haven’t got any visual information so you can’t really know what you’re listening to and can only guess what it is and where it’s coming from. it makes the listening experience more intense .- the recording is part of a series of fieldrecordings i made in dwells and tubes. i like how sounds from inside the tube blend with sounds from the city surrounding it . the tube is kind of a vain that’s running through the city. i like the musicality of the resonance inside the tube , and the way sounds from the outside are absorbed, changed and coloured through the tube.”

Bram Bosteels is an artist/musician based in Ghent. He is one of two parts of Kaboom Karavan along with Stijn Dickel.

http://www.myspace.com/kaboomkaravan

Helen Frosi, founder, Sound Fjord, London Nov 2010 SoundFjord is...

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 08:27:45 +0000

Helen Frosi, founder, Sound Fjord, London

Nov 2010

SoundFjord is a gallery and research unit dedicated to the Sonic Arts. The gallery was founded to readdress the current lack of exhibiting space exclusively for works of sound art and focuses on the exhibition and documentation of art works, the development of artists within their creative and research practices, and ultimately, the promotion of sound art and its related interests to a wider audience. This creative venture – a partnership between a fine artist and sound designer – is a centre for experimentation and collaboration, with sound being central to all works researched or exhibited: as inspiration, conduit for artistic expression, or simply, the resulting work

http://www.soundfjord.org

Transcript:

HF: “Sound Fjord is an artist-run space. We opened in July 2010 specifically devoted to Sound Art and sound-related practice. Andrew Riley decided to open the space after discussion around Sound Art and how it’s not being given the time of day that it deserves. We started thinking about it in January and finally after renovation of the space that we had available to us, which is in Seven Sisters in North London, we opened our doors to the general public. And we now put on exhibitions, live events, audio screenings, film screenings also, if they are related to sound. And other events specifically revolving around sound and sound-related research and practice.

We are currently self-funded. We decided to do this strategically in the beginning because we didn’t want to restrict ourselves in terms of who we were wanting to put on and while we wanted to be really self-sufficient. And we have got to where we are today basically through skills-sharing and just asking friends and family and people we don’t know sometimes for a little bit of help or assistance or knowledge; and just working together with people for the greater good.

We try to be as open as possible in the way that we receive applications. We actually have an open call where anyone can send in their work. And we will judge it on merit alone. We’ve been doing that ever since the start and will continue to do so.

We have many platforms for our artists. And we like to share our work with the public in many different ways. Not only do we have exhibitions, we have live events, we have audio screenings – they tend to be acousmatic events, but we do sometimes have intimate live events as well. We have workshops, we have lectures and we have readings. We have all kinds of things that revolve in and around Sound Art and Sound Art practice.

I think one of the major challenges with working in London is that there are no predecessors for Sound Fjord. There are no Sound Art galleries or spaces specifically devoted to Sound Art. So we really felt like the blind leading the blind when we first opened up. Obviously there are other Sound Art galleries in Europe and the USA for example, so we did look to them for assistance. In terms of Sound Art devoted spaces, we really had to sort of put out our own feelers. And in that respect we were very free.

Living and working in London can be exhilarating, but it can also be infuriating. There’s so much going on in London culturally and artistically. There’s so much to see and do. In fact, there’s almost too much to see and do.

Something I really like to do in London is either to get up really really early in the morning or just stay up really late at night when city has actually calmed down a bit. When the heat from the day has dispersed. A lot of the noises become quieter and you can actually really pay attention to what is around you. The gallery being in Tottenham is quite an urban area. Actually very early and very late at night, you hear a lot of wildlife still, which can seem quite surprising. But I find that really really interesting, the kind of duality of the city, the rural and the urban that are still mingling together, along with the cultural diversity. In Tottenham there are many languages spoken, so actually to just walk down the West Green Road, which is the road that will eventually lead to the gallery, on Lawrence Road is such a wonderful place to be. Independent shops, butchers, fishmongers, grocers, all sort of selling their wears and making all the noises that are associated with that profession, like the cutting of the bones, the opening of packets, the calling of people to come and buy, come and buy. It’s still really kind of alive and it makes you feel alive hearing those sounds. And it makes you feel at home as well. In fact, if we were away for example when we’re on a research trip, when we actually come home, we really come to appreciate the soundscapes around us all the more because we’ve actually missed them whilst we’ve been away.

We currently have a sonic social, which is a networking event, which takes place at least once a month. Anyone who is interested in sound can come along. You don’t have to be an artist at all, but you just come along. You can listen or you can talk or you can bring work to show to others and to get some opinions. It’s very much up to the individual and how they make use of the time. We usually have at least two hours so people can really get together. And every time people have begun to build a close knit community. On our website we also have a page specifically for the Sonic Social and that basically details artists, a little piece of information about their work and also contact, address and website so people can research further and just discover a little bit more about artists across the world that are working in sound.

It’s really important that we work with not only international artists, but with also with artists that are right under our nose – local artists. There are so many artists in London and in fact in Tottenham where the gallery is based that are working in sound and are working on amazing projects. Actually the gallery has a really strong local community, and we try to bring the to the floor by putting on impromptu live events, and workshops and lectures just so people in the area can just drop-in, and even just have a chat with us about what Sound Art is, or if they don’t know anything about it to ask questions if they’re curious.

Our space is actually fairly small in itself so, we do have to be fairly creative in how to actually utilise the space to advantage. In fact the facade of the gallery is mainly glass, so we also invite artists to use that in a creative way as well. So it’s really about kind of digesting the architecture and really kind of taking apart and seeing how we can use that to best advantage, and how the artist can use that to best advantage. And to also to make the public really interested and wanting to come back to the space time and time again.

Sound Fjord is interested in working with all manner of artists who are working with sound, whether the sound is impetus behind the work, or the actual outcome of the work, it doesn’t really matter. All we’re looking for is practice that really looks at the essence of sound and interests behind sound-related research. We’ll consider work that are conceptual, so perhaps they don’t even contain sound. We’ll consider works that are audio/visual as long as the visuals are completely entwined with sound and therefore the work wouldn’t exist without it. We try to engage the public in many different ways, so not only do we have exhibitions, we have workshops, lectures and other events that we can think of around the subject matter that the artist is really concerned within the exhibition and within their practice as a whole.

So I think going forward in the future, I think we will have to get external fundings so we can put on larger events. I think it would be great to actually put on festivals, and to have a space that was specifically dedicated to Sound Art with all of the facilities available for lectures, workshops, screenings and so on and so forth that we don’t have at present. Obviously our space is intimate so we have to kind of put on exhibitions and then squeeze in workshops during when exhibitions are closed, for example. So actually to have a space that would be specifically for Sound Art where people can go to a workshop and go to an exhibition and go and see a residency and talk to an artist all in the same day, would be absolutely fantastic, and I think that’s what we’re really aiming for.

I think Sound Art is being more and more appreciated especially in the UK. Especially with the Turner Prize nominating two sound artists, I think with Susan Philippsz and the Otholith Group, they’re both working in sound. So more and more people are becoming aware of sound art practice and sound in the fine arts than there ever has been before.

So for us we really want to keep up that momentum. We don’t just want it to be seen as a fad or a fetish. We really want to make sure that it stands its ground, and that the general public really gets to grip with Sound Art and its practice and its history.

So I think sound is just so important and we do put it aside, we cover up our ears, we just blast our ears with so much that we just don’t hear anything anymore. So I think if everyone just wound down a little bit and just paid attention to the little nuances of sounds out there.

And I think in London there are so many different sound, I mean not only with languages, and cultural references to sound. Just nature itself, walking through crispy leaves or waking through ice or snow in the morning before its been trodden on before. The sound of the wind through your hair when you go for a walk on a mountainside for example. I mean all of those sound very romantic, but they are the things that are really ingrained within us and make us feel who we are.”

Listen.HK

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 21:00:32 +0000

Listen.HK:

Listen.HK is a continuous soundscape research and preservation project which aims to preserve the unique soundmark and soundscape in Hong Kong, as memorable things are disappearing under the rapid development of the city. An online archive and several recordings in the format of podcast and/or downloadable soundtrack will be released to help the audience immerse into the historical moment and imagination of one place.

The idea of Listen.HK comes from a sound collage - Symphony of Hong Kong (a.k.a. Hong Kong Diary) by me which audience can visualize my memories and own daily experience in my life.

HK Diary

There are currently 3 projects finished or in-progress:

Listen.HK I: At a glance and travelling through Hong Kong soundmarks

The Coastlines: In-progress project finding the relationship of time, history and location of Wan Chai coastlines development

Day and Night of Star Ferry Bus Terminus (pending): In-progress project investigating the stories and auditory charcteristics of the Bus Terminus at East Tsim Sha Tsui which will be removed in the future

Listen.HK is a project produced by School of Creative Media, City University student, Sunny Chan (a.k.a. SPU, Sunny’s Production Unit). In 2008, a short video of himself awarded the Best Short Video in the “The Warmest Message to Mother” short video competition organized by aTV.

At the same year, he established “SPU Channel” to produce a wide range of programs. The channel will be also available to HKCitizen Podcast in late 2010.

Specialties: Video Production, Sound Design and Production, Soundscape Research, Photography

SPU: http://about.me/spu/

José Luis Espejo, co-editor, Medialteletipos, Spain Nov...

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 21:36:30 +0000

José Luis Espejo, co-editor, Medialteletipos, Spain

Nov 2010

Mediateletipos.net is an online publication in blog format devoted to the spreading of aural culture, sound art, audiovisual activism and the creation with new media.

The project is run by several editors, all of them active in different areas of cultural, social and artistic production. The main intention is bringing together any kind of information related with the subjects of the web, but also activating the reflection and the discussion, trying to contribute to the generation of new models of society adapted to the current situation, supporting the open source spirit and questioning the hegemony of the official institutions and corporations. It is a collective and independent investigation far from the main groups of production.

The web works also as a digital media library which offers tools for the critical use of the web, generating a database of actions and practices and putting them at everyone disposal in a open, free and public manner. Culture is a dynamic social construction and one of our aims is to narrate it and record it in real time.

http://www.mediateletipos.net

Transcript:

JLE: “Mediateletipos is Blanca Rego, Longina Chiu, Carlos Suarez, Erique Tomás, Juan Antonio Sarmiento, Jose Luis Espejo, Juan-Gil, Julio Gomez, Miguel Alvarez,Pablos Sanz and Pedro Jimenez. We are 11 people with different opinions about what Mediateletipos is. Mediateletipos was born as a project and collective dedicated to thinking about aural cultures, sound art, audiovisual activism and issues around new media in Spain. Mediateletipos is part of a larger network that includes artesonoro.org, artesonroradio and Zemos 98. Since its inception, Mediateletipos has developed a number of projects including Aural Networks at Sonar in 2007, which was presented by those who founded the web platform - Pablo Sanz, Chiu Longina, and Pedro Jimenez, and other projects like ‘Repeat please’, which is about vjing, and ‘Mediateletipos Retrospecta’ with Sensxperiment and Juan Cantizani who we are working with in Córdoba to a festival on Sensorial Immersion. That project is curated by Pablo Sanz and Sonic Weapons and developed by Chiu and Zemos 98 Longina. Mediateletipos emerged as an initiative by Pablo Sanz, Pedro Jimenez and Chiu Longina. I did not participate from the beginning, but I was invited to join after the formation of the project.

Besides being a group of cultural producers, Mediateletipos is primarily a website on aurality and news about sound art and new media. The financing of hosting and other services varies greatly. There are years when the hosting is paid by someone out of the budget of a current project. Our projects vary widely and are produced usually with financial aid from the province, not from the state.

The relationship of Mediateletipos to international discourses is obvious in the sense that both Enrique Tomas and Pablo Sanz are living abroad. One of them lives in Austria and the other one in Holland. That is our part of international discourse. On the other hand, at the moment on our webpage, it says that we engage in ‘aural cultures’ but not ‘cultures of listening’ (culturas de la escucha), which is a direct implication of what has developed in Europe and other Anglo-Saxon countries. While in these countries aurality has already assimilated within academia, for instance, such as in England or the United States, there are already masters programmes dedicated to aural cultures. Spain fortunately has no such academic study. The way in which people at Mediateletipos express many different views and different voices is trying to inform the way you think about aural cultures and how it can become more productive. Because some artists engage in production and others in distribution models and they are freer to do what they want, like posting on the Internet.

The relationship of artistic discourse with other international artists: I’m not an artist, so this should be the more a concern for the others. Some of them live outside. It seems to me that if they have some relation to the discourses of the last 5 or 10 years, relations between space, geography and politics of sound. I think this could be the main characteristic between all of them.

The question about the challenges of working in Spain is long and complicated. I see it in two ways.

1: On the one hand, the cultural politics of this country is conservative. Not only in a pejorative way, they are conservative because they think of culture as a treasure to preserve rather than as a productive element where you can go somewhere. However, I do not think that culture must be something productive and industrious..! I believe that aural cultures found within contemporary sound art and new media should come out of state budgets. Instead of spending on new media and sound art they spend on flamenco or silvo (whistle lengauje) and the acoustic properties of the Jesuit churches, (which are also very interesting subjects), but it’s the only way you can find more support in this country. If it is about making money to survive, one can say that one is dedicated to this and do what you want later.

2: Moreover, the problem of working on this issue is broader than the state. It is a cultural problem like using academic language, it is a huge structural problem. Almost as large as Feminism. It is not widely known to people about how to think about sound. The ways of conceptualizing the images and language is not suitable for thinking about sound. This seems very abstract, but it has some very concrete and sad results. No one would dream of preparing a space to display anything without lights. But it is very common to find a space with poor acoustics or a work with bad speakers or headphones that have bad sound or to find a festival where there is no good sound quality. And everything seems like its completely nonsense.

Not everything is a problem as such. In this country, there are people who are working outside the academy and sometimes outside the institution that help to develop an aural culture. Not in terms of progress, but to expand the ways of thinking about sound or ways of listening. To speak of some organisations, there are Escoitar, La Orquesta del Caos, and Audiolab Arteleku. In universities, there is José Luis Carles, who works with Cristina Palmese, Carmen Pardo and Curators such as Abraham Rivera and José Manuel Costa. There are many sound artists and net labels, and now there is Oscar Martin who publishes the Ursonate fanzine. This allows the institutions, in which some people want to work, to know about the needs of sound artists, and how they can have more freedom. Now, I do not know what a sound organisation dedicated to the aural cultures needs.

Mediateletipo’s only relationship with Madrid is the fact that some of us live or have lived here. It is only Miguel Alvarez and I who live here. I like to think of Mediateletipos as a group that is opposed to centralism and Madrid as such an important part of the state. Most of the activities by Mediateletipos have been outside of Madrid except for the Madrid Soundscape project, which is not even Mediateletipos. We have projects outside in places like Vigo, Seville, Cordoba and Barcelona.

What interests me about the sound of Madrid? I’m interested in noise. When many people think that this city is so noisy it is because there is a lot of information in that noise. In this city, which is what I know, you can learn a lot about the city’s liberal economy or governments who use it. Not everything is negative. These noises are small moments of chaos that reflect other forms of organization and that Rudi haceiendo people can hear things very interesting for art and making art with more interesting models.

For the future of Mediateletipos, at the moment it has a ‘requested page’ at the moment because it is no longer work the same way. So you cannot talk about its future. As a collective or group of people are beginning to work together on issues beyond the web. As for my future, I have no idea.

I´m not sure if the soundscape of Madrid has some characteristic. If you look to ‘Madrid Soundscape’ you realize that the recordings are all from out of town and representing nature. Looking at maps of smaller cities or less noisy places, the relationship with sound tends to be the contrary. If we should say that we should define the soundscape of Madrid, I would say it is like a very flat plane. Something like this picture.

There is no depth in it. Maybe because of the buildings. The amount of information that can be heard in this city always short term. If you ask people, or if you look at newspapers, we would see that what you hear is the sound of people having fun. It was recently announced that noise complaints have risen 1200% since the crisis. It’s interesting because it exemplifies the direct relationship between the economy and noise, noise and annoying sounds actually produced by non-beneficial things, things such as the youth on the streets, the poor people etc. Noise is a poor people thing. However, if they were to make it question 5 years ago, the answers would go towards the work. It was a time when urban policies were wild. In any case, we can see the relationship of sound and the economy. On the one hand, noise is the signifier of meaning of the wild urban policy. The other is the signifier of meaning, a situation in which there is no money to cover a range of sounds, which is otherwise also needed.”

On Top of the Town, Ghent

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 17:45:03 +0000

On Top of the Town

Pauwel De Buck

“Due to the heavy snowfall last weeks, the whole city is covered with that white and damping blanket. The aural atmosphere of our town gets more absorbed. This natural acoustic filter results in a much more silent and less reflective environment and causes very subtle nuances in our audible perception.

With this transformation of our daily sounds in mind, I was looking for a spot where I was possible to catch the whole city, including the massive layer of fog and snow which blends all auditive action. So I climbed on top of town, more specific, I positioned myself on the roof of the ‘Boekentoren’ building, 210 feet high.”

Pauwel De Buck is a soundartist living and working in Ghent, Belgium. His soundworks have been presented in installations as well as in performances. He utilizes location recordings of the urban environment to combine them with analogue electronic sounds. The end result is as much time based as it is sculptural and spatial. The work traverse between concrete sound environments and abstract sonic spaces.

Pauwel De Buck participated in residencies, performed his work in Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany and the USA. Made installations, soundtracks for various purposes. His sound works are released at the London Based Entr’acte label.

http://pauweldebuck.yolasite.com

Madrid metro and various places

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 11:48:00 +0000

Manuel Calurano

Paseo Sonoro Rastro de Madrid

“This is a field recording of the ambient sound of the Madrid subway. In my opinion, it is an environment with a very strong sound quality and at the same time, represents the way of life in the town.”

Cafeteria Plaza Lavapies

“This is a field recording of the sonic ambience in a bar. It is a binaural field recording in a bar in the first hours of the morning.”

Mercado de Lavapies

“Ratro de Madrid:
This is another binaural soundwalk in one the most emblematic places of the city. in the Shaefer’s terminology this would be a very representative “sound mark” of Madrid.”

Trayecto en metro Bilbao Tribunal

“This is a field recording of the trajectory on the Madrid Metro from Bilbao to Tribunal station.”

Manuel Calurano is one of the creators and editors of Madrid Soundscape.

http://www.madridsoundscape.org

Stijn Dickel, programme director, Aifoon, Ghent Nov 2010 Aifoon...

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 11:46:00 +0000

Stijn Dickel, programme director, Aifoon, Ghent

Nov 2010

Aifoon is an educational art foundation focusing on sound in audiovisual communication. We organise workshops and trainings for children, youngsters, (aspiring) teachers, (ICT-)coordinators, art docents, etc. We offer a number of formats but also organise tailored courses.

The goal: each participant creates his/her individual sound story and looks for images to match.

http://www.aifoon.org

Transcript:

SD: “Hi I’m Stijn, I’m working for Aifoon vzw it’s an art educative organisation that develops workshops around listening and sounds. We started in 2003 with the project ___ and that’s a project where we ask children how they experience their way from home till school, and how they would translate it through sounds. So we give people recorders, they can record sounds. And they they can make a composition of one minute on the computer. And in 2005 we got structural subsidies from the Flemish government to develop the same principle, philosophy and methodology with other groups, with other ages, with other target groups and also other disciplines.

In a short while we were invited to do short courses or workshops in prisons with adults.

We organised also workshops with animation. Like we always more or less ask the same question. And that’s how do you experience your environment and how do you experience your city? And how would you translate it through sounds? Because like the first project we did in 2003, we saw it has great benefits because there are no standards in sound. Before I gave workshops in music and then everybody was a hip-hopper or everybody was techno or when I did it with images, or when I brought a camera, everybody became Spiderman or Scarface. And that’s great, that’s fun, but for me it stopped too quickly.

And when working with sounds, you can get much more honest material. Because you have to develop your own vocabulary on your own. Each time you have to start to develop your own vocabulary. Because there is no ‘this is the right sound for that situation’ or something like that. So people do have to investigate themselves what sounds means for them and also how they experience the environment, city, neighbourhood or a certain trajectory. And also the other benefit of this method, is that you don’t have to know anything. You just have to listen very carefully and listen very precise. And then you have to decide, I push on the record button and then when it’s over for you you push on the stop button. And that’s also when you compare it to music, you have to read scores. You have to know where are the buttons for the right notes that things like that, but working sound is very democratic and surely when you go to a primary school where all the styles people are thinking in are sitting together. They’re not divided into technical thinkers, and analytic thinkers and things like that.

But it’s very interesting to see how the balance of a certain class situation is going like ‘whoa’ [tilting motion] like people who don’t speak much in the logo centric or the rational organised education, people who are much more like intuitive people are going through this material very fast. It’s not that their soundscapes are better and things like that, but they are going very fast and very associative and when we talk to teachers afterwards, they say “I never heard this guy or this girl before and now we see that he does or she does have to say something” and that’s nice for the people. It’s nice for the structure of the class, the community of the class.

And afterwards when everybody achieved his personal soundscape of their way from home to school for example, we listen to each others soundscapes and you see all the surprises “oh yeah he did it like that and he did it like that” and we don’t talk much about “what do you mean by using that bicycle that much?” We are not a telepathical organisation. But sometimes these soundscapes express enough. Sometimes they tell more than facts and you can’t even touch it by words. And that’s a very nice thing to do with young people and also with adults – especially in an environment of education and schools.

In Belgium we are not confronted very much with expressing or telling about experience and expressing ourselves in that way. And also we’re not used to certain methods that doesn’t have any conception of thread. And that’s also a nice thing to do with schools.

We have lots of art educative organisations in Belgium. And some of them almost everything like theatre, music, movie, all the well-known disciplines. But in fact, we are a little solitary here working with art education with sounds. Some organisations who are developing musical courses sometimes touch sounds art. In fact there is no other organisation that I do know about that gives sound that much of a place like expressing themselves through sounds on a poetical and a communicative manner.

We do have to buy everything ourselves. In the years we bought like all the flash recorders and all the computers ourselves. Because when we go to schools they have computers, but we have to wait like 15minutes when the computer is starting up, so working with sound is sometimes very hard with the material the schools have. Not the material that the kids have. Lots of the time the kids have more sophisticated computers than the school has. But anyway, working with sound in Ghent, we do the whole area. We do the whole Flemish part and Brussels and we went to France and Holland and it’s more or less the same actually.

You see and you feel that people in more rural environments have another, (how do you say in english) have another feeling of timing. I would not say that people in the city are more stressed but there’s another energy. More often another energy in the soundscape we make in bigger cities than in rural quite environments.

So also for us, looking at a picture could also be listening. Or making a drawing is also a way of listening. Or reading an experience in words, like one or two sentences of a sound experience, is also a way of listening.

And what I was trying to say before, is that we see that listening is not only by the ears. It’s also with the bones. The frequency we feel. A big part of our listening is influenced by our filter bank of mind and brains and body and things like that. And different persons listen in different ways.

Until now we like 90% of our work we do was in this region like Flanders, Belgium like this region. For me the course we are going through or the investigation we are going through only succeeds when there is a certain resonance afterwards. So our goal is to for example when a soundscape is developed we put it in a museum, or we put it in an installation or we put it on a website. It has to go on. It has to be exposed to feedback. People have to feedback on this results.

It was always a big dream to communicate beyond language, because sound and music is like a universal language. It goes further than language sometimes.

There’s lots of gaps between what I’m feeling and what I’m trying to say.

It’s very interesting to confront peuples and youngsters and youngsters on the other side of the world with soundscape and how they listen to this soundscape and how they interpret this soundscape and maybe how they can answer this soundscape with a certain image or photo or sound, send back a sound.

So I found two other organisations first in Barcelona and London where we managed to do already, I’m speaking in the past. In last October, we managed to do a simultaneous project about how people experience their city, so there was a group in Barcelona, a group in London and a group in Ghent and also a group in Denmark that worked with youngsters and children. And they tried to translate their experience of how they experience the city through sounds and soundscape. And then we had a blog to share all those information. And that’s the first step for us to go into thinking in a global and a more international area or space.

If we write an application, we get some advises of the commission of the Flemish government. And this is advises are very open. Actually we can interpret them very easily in our way of thinking. For example, they were challenging us to go further than the project from the way from home to school and those advises were like, they said try to develop this method and philosophy for more people, because they are the Flanders. And try to develop it for also other artistic ways of expression and they are trying to spread it open. That’s their goal and also that’s very comfortable with our goals.

Content-wise, working with sound there is no interference. I don’t have that impression. Like, now we are moving from like our methods that are more developed in the regions of film music are more going to regions of field recording.

And also we are placing it in a bigger frame, the community and the world and language and communication. And actually, we touch art quite close with the groups we are working and sound is also in the way we work is contextualised with images. Often we are using movies. So we are also talking about Britage (?) and sonorization of movies. And we bring photographs into the classroom. In a kind of way we are multidisciplinary.

The main goal is to actually develop an audio culture. To make people familiar with sounds, with their environment with things like that and for us it’s very difficult for us to communicate with the people about sounds. When I would organise workshops. I would just have to use three words. I organise workshops Jambi. And people can imagine something. But when I say I organise workshops with sounds, everybody is thinking, oh sounds, noise, or like the negative connection with sound.Or with music, sound is music or noise, there’s no one associates it with our environment with sounds of our daily composition we have there.

We are thinking about, we are an art educative organisation who does research on silence. Maybe this is also, not only a definition, like we are investigating silence that implicates listening and sounds, but also that’s a good way for us to go to music, to new music. And to confront musicians and composers with what Cage means by we start with this amount of silence. And other goals is also to go further, to make sound more communicative on the scale of the world, on an international scale. It’s also a goal for us.

I think sound is on a very unconscious, subjective, psychological level right now.

I like to take the tram and i’m always fascinated by the combination of people who are taking to each other or listening to their iPod or the soundscape of the tram produced by human beings. And the contrast with the tram itself, and certainly when it’s taking an angle.

The .. it’s making a very weird [screech] kind of sound and that and the combination of daily life and nothing is happening. I think that’s very interesting when you hear like very abstract sounds like the tram that’s going like, these rusty things, if you hear that in combination with people who are sitting there who are familiar with this sound and nothing’s a problem. But when you blow up a plastic bag, everybody would look. It’s not only this concept of but I like the combination of the things we are used to with the sounds we are in fact not very familiar with.”

Julia Eckhardt, director, Q-O2, Brussels Nov 2010 In 2006...

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 11:44:00 +0000

Julia Eckhardt, director, Q-O2, Brussels

Nov 2010

In 2006 Q-O2 has grown from a contemporary musicgroup to a structurally subsidized workspace for experimental contemporary music and soundart. The organisation has its own space in the centre of Brussels. In musical terms Q-O2 explores mainly three lines of approach: acoustic and electronic improvisation and composed music as well as installations and soundart. Through its conceptual preoccupations Q-O2 finds easily points of access to other disciplines.

Practically, Q-O2 workspace functions on three levels: by hosting artists on a working residency, by starting up and guiding projects in collaboration with other venues/art centres and by organising concerts on its own premises.

http://www.q-o2.be

Transcript:

JE: “Hi I’m Julia, I’m working at this space, QO-2 workspace for experimental music and sound art. We have been first an ensemble for new music lets say in the classical sense more. And since 2006, we are a workspace which means in Belgium subsidies terms we have to offer space or possibilities to artists which do research in new music and experimental music.

We offer residencies for sound artists we do concerts as well. We have some projects on our own. I’m then inventing them and then inviting other artists to participate and we also help artists in different ways. So we help them with applications, we do co-production, we make their financial situation OK. These sort of more administrative help.

I would say that many are work in quite a conceptual way, minimalistic way as well and in any case really, what I find important is it really experimental in the sense that it’s inventive, it’s new, it’s reflective.

And most of the artists come from a little bit all over. I’m paying attention that there’s enough artists also from here. So to have an exchange, but many come from Europe. From out of Europe there’s not so many because then there’s the funding problem. We cannot really pay flights from overseas. But it happens that people organise themselves a tour in Europe and then pass here as well.

We are supported by the Flemish government in Belgium. The culture is regional. We have to address all the Flemish side or the French speaking side. We’re a Flemish organisation and we also get money from the Flemish part of the Brussels government. Because we are based in Brussels, because in Belgium the situation is that you can .. There are actually three parts and there’s Flanders, the French speaking part and then there’s Brussels. We are quite a lot collaborating with Brussels organisations in festivals, in concerts and so forth, we get quite some money from that as well.

I’m Germany, but my Flemish is much better than my French. That’s a good opportunity because the Flemish people have a lot more money, give much more money to culture than the francophone government.

Brussels is a part of the country, the third part of the country lets say. And in Brussels they’re again a Flemish and a French speaking part of the government.

We are quite submerged in the Brussels culture. We really couldn’t be anywhere else than Brussels. Also because Brussels in reality very cosmopolitian. The reality is that here not really only Flemish people, but all sorts of people.

It starts with the fact that in Brussels we have many artists which are not Belgians, who really chose to live here. You can live in Brussels very long time speaking neither Flemish, neither French somehow, which is interesting for artists. Because we communicate a lot in English. We have a lot of French artists as well here. French-speaking artists.

Many people actually work a little bit in-between installation and composition, I would say. Also improvisation there’s a lot in it. Electronics are certainly very present, but I find I try to invite artists who are working with other means, not just mechanic or really with instruments or with voice.

What we realise what happens a lot also recently is people working with field recordings. Many artists who have came here have been making audio portraits of Brussels for example. Installation is something that we help a lot with, but mainly for the practical sides because the installations is always so much like – you have to make it really. And then you have the problem of how can we transport it and these sort of things. We help artists in this.

We are probably more local than global, I suppose. Because we are quite concretely here with what we do. There’s not much internet exchange. Especially when you compare to other organisations who set up projects which are only practically on internet. So I think what we do is clearly oriented to a performance situation, which could be a documented globally or virtually or whatever, but it would have to happen really here and now, in the reality with time.

Here is very much like very cocoon. Here you can work, try things out, experiment, you don’t really need yet to make something ready, no product or so. But when it comes to be ready, then we should try to bring them on bigger podiums and that happens mostly here in Belgium.

We’re here in the like almost in the centre. Here’s the canal and right over the canal is the centre. A part of Brussels, which in the recent years has been even become almost a little bit chic. Here on the other side is the Moroccan side of the city. And this building has before been a mill and in the building there are many other cultural organisations, even other workspaces like OKNO, FOAM is up, us here, there are some dance companies, in the front there’s IMAL, a laboratory for digital arts.

And what we love about this space is that it’s so big mainly. And it’s good to have those neighbours. We can share, we can do initiatives together. We can share material. Artists go to different, depending on what they need, they go to different workspaces. We can also take public from each other sometimes.

Well there is just one challenge, which is all over now, which is the cuts. The funding. Which is not so concrete for us yet, because we’re subsidised for always four years. Now we’re in the third I think, so next year is still guaranteed.

Otherwise I think the situation in Belgium, compared to most other countries quite a luxury.

Like 10 or 15 years ago, Brussels was quite deserted culturally. There was just a few big houses and dance has always been strong here since _________. But for music, there was almost nothing and it has so much improved, so that now, so much is going on and so much is also going out into the world. And I think, I hope it can stay. For us, I would just like to add to the residency, project and concerts, working that we have already regularly, I would like to add one festival per year because I think that it would be nice for the artists who come here to work and they’re mostly all alone and they’re just one or two persons or so. To have a moment where they can show, share and meet the others. That’s one same moment. That would be great, but then we would need more funding.

We would maybe be able to do a little part of what we do now with European funding, but we have actually entered a demand or application, but we don’t know yet what comes out from this, so that would permit us to go on a little bit longer. I mean it certainly, not.. without funding it would certainly impossible to have a space and all these things.

But I myself would never stop making music.

I mean when QO-2 was a musical ensemble, we had always this problem that when we to play programmes which were a little bit radical or a bit experimental, we always had to go around and ask all sorts of places, venues and so on, “can we please play here”, but then they said there are not enough people coming and these sort of thing. I wouldn’t do this again I think.

I think Brussels to start with in any case, a really noisy city, although now there’s a sound artist from Athens and he said that how quiet it is. It’s completely relative.

But it also probably to do with the architecture of Brussels that it’s all very small. The streets are very narrow, houses are low and so this impression or density is probably a lot also to do with this. I think a very particular place for the sound is the Grand Place because it’s really the middle point of the city and there’s no traffic and there’s something about the way, because all the houses around are all these little etches and stone, so the acoustic is especially calm somehow.

I read that the cultural minister of Brussels itself wants to bring out an Atlas of stiltebracken, which means like the silent places of Brussels, and I’m really wondering how he’s wanting to succeed because I just think that they’re none.

I think he’s also responsible for nature, but also for culture so often a combination. Now I think it’s very good that he’s, it’s also sort of a sensibilisation that we should realise that there’s so much noise around.

Probably depends on what you say how far is Brussels. Where’s the border of Brussels? Only really on the outskirt, maybe there you will find silent places, I don’t know.

If you look over there on the canal to the other side, there’s some sort of a funny castle or something. And all the casan where all the soldiers were before and for the moment it is there the people who ask for asylum and they come from foreign countries and they say I’m persecuted to stay in this country. And they stay there until they get their decision and we hear over here that there’s a little bell. We don’t know what the bell calls them for, but this bell calls them and it’s a very funny thing that this comes over all the way to us, calling somebody for something that we really don’t know about it.

At my home I like the sound of the train. I’m not living very far from the North station which is coming only sometimes over, depending on the weather.”

Lady Hawker Lamma, SEE book launch 2009

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 11:42:00 +0000

Lady Hawker Lamma 2009 SEE Book Launch

Yeung Yang

“Here’s a recording of a lady hawker selling some traditional sweets in Lamma Island, around the time of the Around sound art festival 2009. I don’t remember very well what she was selling…but it sounded very nice.”

Yeung Yang 楊陽is an independent curator, writer and university lecturer. Upon graduating from Yale University with an M.A. in anthropology, she worked as a documentary video director at Radio Television Hong Kong. She graduated in 2004 with a PhD in Intercultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Exhibitions she curated include “in midair, sound works hong kong 2007” (Jun,2007), “Art Responds to 14QK” (Nov 2007), “Nocturne, Alfred Ko solo photography exhibition” (Apr, 2008), and “Around sound art festival” (2009 & 2010). She was also artistic director of “October Contemporary 2009 - Now or Never”. She currently teaches Chinese and Western classics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 2008, she founded soundpocket to promote sound art and its research and education in Hong Kong.

www.soundpocket.org.hk

Jiyeon Kim, Saii, project manager Sound@Media,...

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 21:50:00 +0000

Jiyeon Kim, Saii, project manager Sound@Media, Seoul

Sound@Media is an webzine for creation, promotion and criticism on sound artistic practices and audio culture in Korea. It is aimed to raise provocative discourses on sound culture and to recover long-disregarded ‘sense of listening’ in this visual oriented era. We also regularly organize two off-line events featuring new emerging experimental sound artists: New Music Series and Artist’s Talk. Alongside that, as a public project for 2010, we run SeoulSoundMap campaign which people can easily participate with recording, uploading and sharing of sounds of Seoul in purpose of making sonic map of the city. We wish this campaign remind people that sound is very fundamental frame to understand our environment and social phenomena. Sound@Media was initiated by Moonji Cultural Institute, Saii, and funded by Seoul Foundation of Arts and Culture.

http://som.saii.or.kr

SAII is a new generation cultural institute, created by one of the Korea’s leading publishers, and aims to investigate the intersection between writing, media arts and the humanities. They are an educational academy, a research centre and organizer of exhibitions, publications, symposia and online communities. SAII programs cover creative writing, interactive and electronic literature; contemporary culture and philosophy, media and sound art; as well as debates and discussions around social and political intervention within writing and art.

http://saii.or.kr

JK: “Saii was founded in 2007, spring and it’s been 3 years or 4 years. Initially Moonji the name of the publishing company they founded the institute. We are kind of running separately and what we do basically is we are providing lots of workshops and courses to the public. And we cover a wide range of areas like we do a lot of humanities like history, philosophy, culture. And we also cover arts and culture, especially media. We also do project based activities.

So last year we did a project called Text@Media which was a collaboration between writers and media artists. It was a half a year festival and this year we got funding for a project called Sound@Media. which is basically a web-based online magazine. We also do offline programmes with other kinds of artists, sound artists and also different artists from different sectors. We started in June and then it’s still going and it’s going to be until the end of this year. What we have done until now is that we posted, we selected good articles by people that’s also including writer from overseas and we translate them.

And we also do monthly projects with artists but not only sound artists, we also work with designers, photographers and writers and they make a project on sound or with sound so their projects are also presented on our website.

We also do monthly off-line talk or concerts. And the concert is called New Music Series so we try to present, well basically electronic music artists, but it’s true there are not many venues, which present electronic music, and I’m not talking about that kind of club environment. It’s more experimental.

And the other one is an online campaign it’s called Seoul Sound Map and the basic idea is make a map of Seoul with sound, so people can record and upload to our website with bits of sounds. They are automatically linked to the map.

We applied last year, at the end of last year and we got selected from the Foundation of Arts and Culture in Seoul and we have been funded since 2008 with different projects.

I think it’s very important to make some kind of platform or place which people can have access to learning of sounds because when people think of sound, they automatically link it to music. Compare it to visual training, people didn’t really have that kind of training or any kind of chance to really think about it. So I think it’s more important than curating exhibitions or organising another concert or gig. It’s more important to make people think about the meaning of sounds and online space can be a good place because people can have easier access to it. People get some sources, people get some information and people read some good articles about the whole the sound and music thing. I think it’s efficient in a way to have a web platform.

Basically I’m still learning. I’m still doing a lot of research basically and my base is in Seoul and I can’t really go outside that often. So I always keep up with what’s going on internationally and what are the key issues and what they are talking about and that kind of thing.

For local, I also meet some group of people who are involved in the scene. They are not only artists, they are also organisers who like who are organising many stuff. It’s not all about sound, but it’s all kind of interdisciplinary. So I get some information from them and I also meet a group of people who are interested in this sound and electronic music and stuff. And actually I meet them every Monday and we share our knowledge and activities.

You know the scene is pretty small in Seoul and in Korea – especially experimental music and electronic stuff. They are really a small group of people. It’s a bit of a shame that people have some borders even though it’s small. They are just meeting the people from the same background. They are only meeting with the people with the same kind of perspective. So it’s hard to get along with them all.

I’m from outside. My background is totally different. I studied literature, I worked for film production, but somehow I got to be interested in sound. So I should have my own approach and perspective to it. I try to meet other people as much as I can.

It’s still good to have a good community of people who you can exchange knowledge or information or perspective. I wish there are more communities. I wish. I really wish.

Economy is not great but it’s not that good.. It’s not the worst situation. This government is conservative so they are compared to the last government, cutting the budget in a way. You always have to deal with different policies from different governments.

People are really getting interested in sound I think and even in visual contemporary art scene. They are really eager to find artists working with sound in a way. So I think it’s really a good timing maybe for artists working with sound or sound artists.

I think it’s more important to raise some kind of public awareness to the importance of sound and it’s also important not just working with artists, it’s also important to work with people from urban studies, people from architecture, people from city, the space… because I think we can really expand the meaning of sound or the possibility of sound. I think you really need to work with people from other fields as well. Not only arts. Because sound can be a research tool in a way, and sound is also a media. So I don’t really want to limit the spectrum of sound. I don’t want to really narrow it to an art thing.

In terms of the way cities are constructed or designed it’s true that people really don’t have concern about how people listen or react to sound. They are only concerning about the visual, but they really neglect sonic environments. So walking in the street in Seoul or walking around in a building even though it’s famous, it doesn’t really give you that kind of good impression in terms of sound. Well maybe cities are similar in a way. It’s all kind of noisy, too many sounds. They are all fighting against each other.

But it’s true Seoul doesn’t really have a good sonic environment and I wish we have more concern about it.

People should know, they should know what’s the difference, how it sounds different. When we are in a better sonic environment I think people really have to feel that difference.

I can’t really say about atmospheric sounds I’m not sure whether we have that kind of distinctive sound. But distinctive sounds I always relate it to distinctive events in Seoul I think. For example when there’s elections, election season there’s all these politicians shouting out on the street with microphone with amp and big speakers. I think that’s one of the distinctive sounds of Seoul. I don’t know about other situations in other countries, but Korean people have a high tolerance about the decibel of noise in public places. We have the election season at the beginning of this year and it was really a crazy – it was so loud even outside of our office. They are using the very popular Korean song with changed lyrics and they use that as promotion from the politicians. Still we have a lot of construction always going on. Maybe that can be the sound of Seoul.

What I am doing now with field recording is I record – there’s Han river in the middle of Seoul and there are around 20 bridges, there are a lot of bridges and we can actually walk across. My recording is, I’m trying to record at all the bridges with two different microphones. One is a contact microphone and one is just a microphone capturing the sounds in the air and it’s like cars are always coming and usually I’m doing the recordings at night or on Sunday, which is the only time I can find to focus on myself. So it always sounds different when you record in the day than in the night and it’s by the river and it’s on top of the bridge. And I don’t know I just think that somehow it doesn’t really show things direct kind of meanings to Seoul. But somehow I thought it could a vague setting.

I tried to finish them all with 20 bridges. I think we don’t have the same field recording scene and I think people don’t really have that idea that recording can be a creative tool. People are more concerned about programming languages or playing some instruments or make some noise. There are not really people who specialise on recording.

I can encourage people to do that as a community which is happening now. Some friends of mine they tried to do that – we are going to arrange once a month or twice a month field recording trips just inside of Seoul and I’m pretty excited about it.

The basic reason I do that on Sunday is just my personal reason, because I’m working a full-time job and I only have time for weekends so it comes natural for me. Sunday evening is usually the time when people get prepared for working on Monday and people really don’t come out and they have time with family at cozy home. So I think the city sounds a bit different at that time. It sounds a bit more.. well not poetic but more subtle in a way.

I don’t have a background in music, but I really think it doesn’t really matter, because sound and music it really doesn’t belong to some people, small group of people who have a background in sound. I just wish people are trying to get more involved, or be more reactive to sounds, not even in a artistic way, it doesn’t have to be in an artistic way. Just sometimes just close your eyes and just listen to what’s going on.”

Pile Driver / to DaiLong Wan

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 21:01:00 +0000

Cedric Maridet

PileDriver

“Field recording done in Seymour Road in Hong Kong, 2008. The sound of (de)construction of Hong Kong.”

To DailongWan

“Field recording (Hong Kong, 2005) walking along a path to Dailong Wan in Saikung Country Park.”

Cedric Maridet (b. 1973, France) is an artist based in Hong Kong since 1999. He received his Doctorate Degree in Media Art in 2009 (School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong). His research aims at clarifying fundamentals in the heterogeneity of listening intentions in order to frame essential connections for sound art in a holistic perceptual and theoretical approach.

His art practice in video and sound (recorded on real-time streams) relays his theoretical concerns on the act of listening and mainly takes the form of compositions and installations. He has participated in many exhibitions and performances worldwide and was awarded Prize of Excellence in the Hong Kong Art Biennial 2005 for his video work ‘Huangpu’ (collected by HK Museum of Art). H has been invited to many residencies and workshops worldwide. He is currently Member of the Development Committee of NMSAT (Network Music and Sound Art Timeline, Locus Sonus) and Advisor for HK organisation Soundpocket. He has published some of his work on his platform monomer that he founded in June 2004.

www.moneme.com

Response, London 2004

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 20:42:00 +0000

Response London 2004

Duncan Whitley

“This unedited stereo field recording was made in the summer of 2004, from the window of my East London flat. It documents the moments following a serious altercation on the estate on which I was living, in which a young man was shot. I hid myself from view in order to make the recording, so I was able to hear but not see the unfolding of events.

The recording was made as an instinctive response to document my environment but in the process of recording I began to ask myself questions about the purpose and ethics of what I was doing. These unanswered questions henceforth came to underpin my work with field recordings and my criteria and rationale for pressing the record button consequently shifted.

Six years later, this is the first time that this field recording has been publicly released or presented.”

Duncan Whitley has trained variously in popular music, electronic music production, sound and ethnographic research. Working over a typical timescale of two to five years, Duncan produces project-specific phonographic studies that become the research basis and material for new works. His work with field recording examines the fabric of acoustic communication within specific social contexts. His recent project, ‘Saeta’, explores the performance contexts of the ‘saeta flamenco’ in Seville, hunting elusive moments of perfection in Seville’s Holy Week rituals. A collection of his field recordings from Seville’s Semana Santa processions is permanently held at the British Library. Duncan is dedicated to a serious critical dialogue around sound in the arts and across disciplines. He remains nonetheless committed to producing intuitive, accessible work for diverse audiences.

http://www.shotgunsounds.com/

Ochtend

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 19:55:00 +0000

Ochtend

Mieke Lambrigts

“‘Ochtend’ means ‘morning’ in Dutch.
It’s a fieldrecording of the city of Brussels waking up.
I was fascinated by the constant noise of the city.
This is a recording of the moment, very early the morning, when the city workers are starting to work again and the traffic is slowly growing.”

The young Belgian sound artist Mieke Lambrigts (b. 1984) has been working for quite some time on a series of site-specific sound interventions and compositions. She presented her work in art centres and festivals in Belgium, the Netherlands and US. She develops her creations in function of specific spaces, using the acoustic qualities found in these spaces as part of the composition or installation. With hardly anything except for field recordings and sinus tones, she creates a subtle soundtrack that merges almost completely with the environmental sounds and the resonance of the room.

http://www.myspace.com/miekelambrigts

London Sound Survey

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 12:18:00 +0000

London Sound Survey:

The London Sound Survey is a growing collection of Creative Commons-licensed sound recordings of places, events and wildlife in the capital. The London Sound Survey collects the sounds of everyday public life throughout London and compiles past accounts to show how the sound environment has changed. The London Sound Survey isn’t funded and has no artistic goals. It’s a hobby, and no more and no less than that.

Pescados Alofer and some other noises

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 00:13:00 +0000

José Luis Espejo

Madrid

“I don’t go to record regularly and I am not used to listening through a recording machine. At first I went to record the fish store on Fencing Street.

See large map

Pescados Alofer, Calle Esgrima

“As I said, I’m interested in noise, but it is very difficult to think about noise because it is a very subjective concept, so it was very difficult to grasp. The fish store turned out to be something quite regular when listening to it in stereo, although in lived experience it is really spectacular.

Then I found a lady playing an barrel organ (organillo) in the street price next to the Plaza del Sol. I couldn’t have found something more typical. When the lady realized that I was recording, I stopped and pretended to order some parts.

Then I thought of recording something. Something about the economic value of noise.

So I decided to make a little joke about art. A joke about the depoliticization of the art and the misunderstanding of sound. I went for a walk on the 8th of December, the feast of the Immaculate Conception at 16:00. I walked to 4 destinations where there was an anti-noise law or where the neighborhood complained and had to cease activities causing noise.”

Espoz y Mina 20. 16:15

“There, neighbours expressed first to the bar incomodicad Commo.”

Espez y Mina Street

Plaza Santa Ana 6. 16:30

“The residents of No. 4 in the Plaza de Santa Ana a few months ago hung a banner reading “Your euros are our noise euros”. It was referring to the consumers of the terraces of that place that were given to street musicians.”

Plaza Santa Ana

Plaza del Dos de Mayo S / N 16:45

“One of the examples used by the council to ban drinking in the street was always square. Without doubt the most spectacular altercation occurred on the night of May 2, 2007, when he wanted to leave the square policióa on the day of the celebrations of the city, causing major disturbances.”

Plaza 2 de Mayo

Calle Acuerdo 8 17:00

“One of the reasons that helped the evacuation of El Patio Maravillas squat were complaints that can be read here: http://vecinosdelpatiomaravillas.blogspot.com On the day of their eviction, batucada was organized in San Bernardo Street ended the occupation of the current headquarters of the centre in Pez Street.”

Acuerdo Street

This year the noise law was changed so that it could fine a noisy neighbour or a young man drinking in the street without using a sound level meter. Noise in Madrid is legally subjective.

Noise complaints have risen by 1200% this year, according to journalists. Because of the crisis more people drink in their home and on the street.

José Luis Espejo studied Art History and Visual Culture at the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid. His final degree project explores the political uses of sound in art. He has written and spoken publically about these subjects with people. He is part of the independent research group Numax and is co-editor of aural cultures blog Mediateletipos. Lately he is interested in the relationship between sound, politics, religion and other insane deviations of popular culture.

http://www.theratzingertimes.wordpress.com