|
press プレス |
|
Floteson Sonic sources, courses and rearrangements - Curated by Jens Maier-Rothe |
Oct 25 - Nov 08, 2008 / KHM Gallery / Malmö, Sweden.
Nikos Arvanitis / Nate Harrison / Ralf Homann /
Zoe Irvine / Andreas Kurtsson / Henning Lundkvist /
Tisha Mukarji / Laurence Rassel / Sony Mao
The Tape-beatles / Terre Thaemlitz / Ultra-red /
The title Floteson was the Anglo-Norman precursor of the English word flotsam, nowadays used in the term flotsam and jetsam for loosely describing objects found floating or washed ashore. Combining float (Old-Fr. floter) and sound (Fr. son), the exhibition jumps on the sonic track of permanent reuse. Traveling with the flow, looping between past, present and future, it shows some of the key strategies of and instigators for sound recycling methods within contemporary art.
/
Nikos Arvanitis
lives in Leipzig and Athens
The Gabba Conspiracy (2008) takes up the narrative string from a legendary punk story. It attempts to relocate the roots of the catchphrase "Gabba Gabba Hey", used by and associated with the punk rock band the Ramones. The slogan originally derives from a scene in the 1932 motion picture "Freaks" by Tod Browning, in which the title characters chant the line "Gobble, Gobble, we accept her, we accept her, one of us, one of us!". During one of his field trips the artist met a group of turkeys and spontaneously shouted "Gabba Gabba Hey". Of course, the turkeys gobbled back.
I know I don't (2005) uses a fragment from the song "Anarchy in the UK" by the Sex Pistols, recorded at the end of the 70ies. A new sentence is created resulting in the mirrored opposite of the first one. With this work the artist refers to the social and political circumstances that influenced the band to create this song in the past and looks out for the new existential problems which the individual faces nowadays. The first version of this piece has pencil on half transparent paper, (21x 28 cm) and was originally commissioned by and published as a doublepage in GAP magazine, issue 4, by Futura Editions, July 2005, Athens, Greece. Taken into an exhibition space the elicited notion of time - past, present and future - expands to become a spatial element. It manifests and simultaneously erases the wall dividing the two rooms. Ways to think the 'old' and 'new' are simply conceptions attempting to imagine the flow of time, just as listening is to imagine the flow of sonic events.
-> www.nikosarvanitis.com
Nate Harrison
lives in Los Angeles
Can I get an Amen (2004) is a 18 minutes long 12-inch journey that unfolds a critical perspective of perhaps the most sampled drum beat in the history of recorded music, the Amen Break. It begins with the pop track Amen Brother by 60's soul band The Winstons, and traces the transformation of their drum solo from its original context as part of a 'B' side vinyl single into its use as a key aural ingredient in contemporary cultural expression. The work attempts to bring into scrutiny the techno-utopian notion that 'information wants to be free'. It questions its effectiveness as a democratizing agent, foregrounded through a history of the Amen Break and its peculiar relationship to current copyright law.
-> www.nkhstudio.com
Ralf Homann
lives in Berlin
Digital Folklore (2008) brings us back to the air of 80's. In the era of early home computers like C64 or Atari sharing programs and data across computers by different manufacturers was very difficult. A common platform was needed and invented by a radio station ? the Dutch Public Radio NOS: BASICODE. Why join a radio station programming business? Because in those days programs and data were stored as audio on compact cassettes, even vinyl records were in use, which made it possible to broadcast software data on radio frequencies. Consumers could record the radio shows on tape and load them into their computers to run the program. Famous 80s Computer Radioshows, hosted not only by the Dutch Radio, but also by BBC, and by Radio GDR - for the Communist KC home computers, used and broadcasted BASICODE software. Ralf Homann recycled and remixed these shows into a new form of music. In his works he deals with concepts of public space, media strategies and politics, mostly in and on collaborative contexts. He is co-initiator of "no one is illegal" at documenta X, founder of schleuser.net (1998) and art group member of Free Class of Munich. He was artist-in-residence in New York, Stockholm (IASPIS), Graz and Florence. This project is partly supported by Wave Farm, Acre, N.Y.
Zoe Irvine
lives and works in Edinburgh
Magnetic Migration Music (since 1998) is an ongoing found sound work which collects, listens to and remixes 'migrating tape' - fragments of audio cassette tape found traveling through the landscape. The hub of the project is www.magneticmigration.net. It is a participatory project and has made broadcasts, installations, exhibitions and publications. In 2008 MMM is celebrating its 10th anniversary. In 2002 the project went to Europe's migration bottle neck of Pas de Calais on the shores of Northern France, where the Sangatte Red Cross camp for asylum seekers was situated. Here it collected abandoned tape, recorded soundscapes, interviewed travelers and local people and made sound collages using music from respooled audio tape. In her installation you are welcome to listen to and remix the material yourself and have your tape entering the course of Magnetic Migration Music.
-> Zoe Irvine's Research
Andreas Kurtsson
lives in Malmö
"Going through my collections of material, I found a sound recording of myself trying to remember a dream just after waking up. It was made in 2006, and now I can only vaguely remember having ever recorded that. But the disconnection helped to highlight the act of telling the story. The actual experienced dream, and the process of trying to remember and retell it as it slipped away, becomes a story format of its own. The 'dream syntax' with its incoherencies and gradual shifts that the dream subject always seems to accept, blends with the newly awake trying to make sense of it all. The images are from the area around Dalaplan in Malmö, where I recently moved. The area is in a state of transit, where spaces of disparate use are intertwined by the still undefined."
Debris (2008) / Text by Andreas Kurtsson
-> www.andreaskurtsson.se
Henning Lundkvist
lives in Malmö
Israel in Egypt by G.F. Händel (1739-2008)
I - Concerning the 1888 recording of "Israel in Egypt"
II - Concerning the 1739 libretto of "Israel in Egypt"
III - Concerning the 1739 "Stono Rebellion"
IV - Concerning the 1888 "Matchstick Girls Strike"
Audio work in four parts on 7-inch record, published in 2008 by economic thought projects. In this piece Lundkvist connotes Händel's famous composition "Israel in Egypt" (composed 1739 and, with its recording in 1888, being the first ever recorded piece of music) with the 1739 Stono Rebellion (one of the first slave uprisings in North America) and the 1888 Match Stick girls strike. A humble attempt to intertwine different layers from the fabric of history through one of the simplest means available - superimposing.
-> www.inaktiv.net
Tisha Mukarji
lives in Copenhagen
Synecdoche #1 (2008) is a performance using voices from recorded lectures as material that is then rearranged to create a temporary tower of babel, where language is distorted and loses its function of communicating semantic meaning. The remixing process is not to convey a new meaning in language terms but rather uses the voice in addition to other sonic material. By using a megaphone, a device for conveying and amplifying discourse, sounds will be 'indirected' to add to the fragmentary nature of sound, its inevitable decay. "Words, those guardians of meaning, are not immortal, they are not invulnerable. Some may survive, others are incurable." / Arthur Adamov
Voices include Glenn Gould, Roland Barthes, John Cage and Morton Feldman.
Sony Mao
lives in Miami and Los Angeles
"Heroes of the granular-synthesis underground since 2000, Sony Mao investigate electro-acoustic chaos from the random interaction and layering of modules. The rhythmic and repetitious results have appeared on the release "Trnsmssn.0014" for the Miami's Beta Bodega, as well as a full length release on the Mego-associated Fals.ch label titled, "A Final Balance." Sony Mao have collaborated with Random Industries, Kim Cascone, Stephan Mathieu, Elliot Perkins aka Phonem, Lymph Ltd., Andreas Berthling, Oivind Idso, and Frank Metzger of Oval."/ Text by Public Record
The Tape-beatles
& Photo/Phonostatic artists
Diverse members based in various locations
The Tape-beatles are a collaborative with varying members producing music and audio art recordings, performances, videos, printed publications and works in other media until 2002. As one of the group's founding members Lloyd Dunn launched the PhotoStatic magazine in 1983, a periodical series of printed works focusing on xerography (photocopy) as a creative medium. From 1983 to 1998 PhotoStatic served as a forum to collect art works by different artists using xerography and other machine art techniques. Its scope was soon extended to embrace not only graphic works, but also the world of sound art. A companion publication on audio cassette was dubbed PhonoStatic, with the inaugural issue appearing in 1984. In all, ten cassette issues were released at roughly six-month intervals, culminating with the "Audio Collage" cassette in 1989. The complete Phonostatic series and most Tape-beatles releases are downloadable from their own and other websites. Here the whole .mp3 online archive will be played back in shuffle mode and visually accompanied by a copy of each the first and the last issue of Photostatic magazine.
-> www.pwp.detritus.net
-> www.psrf.detritus.net
Terre Thaemlitz
lives in Kawasaki
Laurence Rassel
lives in Barcelona
The Laurence Rassel Show (2007) is a collaboration between cyberfeminist Laurence Rassel of Belgium's Constant organization and Terre Thaemlitz, multimedia producer and mastermind of Comatonse Records. The show was originally commissioned by German public radio in 2005. Focusing on the politics of copyright ownership and being critical of both corporate property laws and the copyleft movement, the project was finally pulled from broadcast for being too controversial. Subtitled "the post-feminist radio drama assassinated before broadcast", it is an electroacoustic radio drama about feminist anonymity, transgendered authorship... and murder.
Lovebomb (2003) deconstructs the concept of love as an all-healing remedy in contemporary culture. In this spirit the album gives a new perspective on the role of oblivion in historical processes. Many sound sources and political themes are discarded intentionally, they become outdated, or just played-out. The notion of love is probably one of the most used and reused ones, especially in music. Even to such an extent that it has become interesting again to make a novel statement to it. For Terre Thaemlitz it was an inescapable challenge to respond with a project on love that casts light on its political impacts, and shows how love and other "overfamiliar" political issues are intertwined in an ongoing game of anticipations...
-> www.comatonse.com/thaemlitz
Ultra-red
Diverse members based in various locations
"Activist art has come to signify a particular emphasis on appropriated aesthetic forms whose political content does the work of both cultural analysis and cultural action. The art collaboration Ultra-red propose a political-aesthetic project that reverses this model. If we understand organizing as the formal practices that build relationships out of which people compose an analysis and strategic actions, how might art contribute to and challenge those very processes? How might those processes already constitute aesthetic forms? In the worlds of sound art and modern electronic music, Ultra-red pursue a fragile but dynamic exchange between art and political organ. Exploring acoustic space as enunciative of social relations, Ultra-red take up the acoustic mapping of contested spaces and histories utilising sound-based research (termed Militant Sound Investigations) that directly engage the organizing and analyses of political struggles." / Excerpt from the Ultra-red mission statement
-> www.ultrared.org