Seeing Sound

Here are some shots from my talk, the video circuits screening, Alex's piece and Andrews performance at Seeing Sound, It was great fun. 

Glass House (1983)

"Video by G.G. Aries
Music by Emerald Web
from California Images: Hi Fi For The Eyes"

Live Show

I played a show recently thanks to The Surround, Rose took this shot.

Photos from Sabrina Ratté & Roger Tellier-Craig

I got to see Sabrina and Roger's amazing performance at the BFI on the 13th, here are some awful photos of Sabrina's beautiful imagery and a video Rosa took of their fantastic performance at Sonic Acts 2015 so you can also hear the incredible sounds too, even if it is a different set.

http://le-revelateur.tumblr.com/ I belive sabrina is also giving a talk soon to, info here

Le Révélateur: Sabrina Ratté & Roger Tellier-Craig London

So I am pretty excited to see Le Révélateur perform as part of Digital Québec, I am a great appreciator of all their work so far, both Sabrina and Rodger make some of the most beautiful work around. Link!

8 UK PREMIERES OVER TWO CONSECUTIVE NIGHTS AT THE BFI SOUTHBANK - MARCH 12 & 13

BFI Southbank’s regular Sonic Cinema strand teams up with ELEKTRA and MUTEK, two vibrant organisations from Québec, to present a bold and ambitious series of live audiovisual performances, featuring 8 UK Premieres over two consecutive nights.

Dubbed Digital Québec, some of the province’s most innovative and experimental A/V creators will be presenting their work for the very first time on British soil. Acting as a continuation of the combined ELEKTRA and MUTEK 15th anniversary event EM15 presented in Montréal in May 2014, the selection of works represent the interdisciplinary intersection of music, sound and digital art where both organizations meet.


LINEUP:

Thursday March 12
7pm
Dominique T Skoltz: y2o
Yan Breuleux: Tempêtes

9.15pm
Matthew Biederman & 4X: Physical
Herman Kolgen: Seismik + Aftershock

-

Friday March 13
7pm
Maotik & Metametric: Omnis
Woulg: Ring Buffer

9.30pm
Myriam Bleau: Soft Revolvers
Roger Tellier-Craig & Sabrina Ratté: Le Révélateur


TICKETS

Tickets available here: http://bit.ly/1DFug3S

1 show £16
2 shows the same night £25
Pass for 4 shows £40

If you wish to buy a 4-performance or 8-perfomance pass, you need to call the BFI box office or visit the venue to buy the festival passes.

www.elektramontreal.ca
mutek.org
bfi.org.uk

With the support of Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, ministère de la Culture et des Communications du Québec and the Québec Government Office in London.

F & S Themerson

Here is a great early visual music film by Franciszka and Stefan Themerson from 1944/45 The Eye and the Ear.

Joy to the World by William Laziza (1994)

Recovered by the XFR STN project, Joy to the World is Visual Music designed for ambient presentation. Joy to the World combines, optical image processing, Amiga graphics and recursive video imagery with synthesized sound. What is unique about this piece is that the audio is used to create the visuals is also the sound track. This work was created at the Micro Museum.

https://archive.org/details/XFR_2013-08-11_1A_01

Magnetic Tape

Magnetic Tape is interesting to me. On reels or in cassettes each recording (or potential recording) is like a little curly drawing that pulls the sound through space, Only one position on the tape is read and so the linear nature of the tape allows the signal to vary the output is attached to over time. I messed around with wire recorders along time ago because I liked the fact that the sound is concentrated into a tiny line like space with the heaviness of the mark being replaced by the amplitude of the waveforms encoded as magnetic information. Here are some of my diy wall mounted ones, winding the pickup heads was a long day.

I also like Nam June Paik’s 1963 work Random Access allot, tape is attached to the wall as a drawing with the playback head made available as a mobile stylus so you can retrace his steps and listen to the recordings using the same gestures he used to stick them down. A kind of playable graphical notation

A good friend Dale has gone way further with visual tape based work and kindly sent me some photos of slightly insane pieces he is putting together at the moment. He selects tape based on it's visual tonality and creates geometric slightly illusory patterns building a second information set encoded in the the recording medium. I don't know if Dale does, but I find these relate to visual music and graphic notation practices too. Ill probably try to convince him at his art show at here in london on the 10th of April at six, come if you want to hang out we will probably drink beer after too.

another interesting artist I found using tape in a slightly different
way is Terence Hannum, I like the areas of ground left visible. pretty black!

There are loads of other examples I'm sure I would really like to find a graphic score where the composer has stuck down tape, creating a kind of instrument,notation recording in one, it must have been done. If only VHS was as easy to read without a moving head, pixelvision cameras hacked might be the only answer!

http://www.dalealexanderwilson.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_recording
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_recorder
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/random-access/images/3/
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artwork/9536
http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/study/fine-art/fine-art-performance/case-study/analogue-tape-glove
http://anatlas.wordpress.com/2013/10/11/52nd-william-anastasi/comment-page-1/
http://www.terencehannum.com/
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2008/jun/26/less-lossy-more-glossy/?ref=archive_post_title

Carol Goss

Carol Goss has been active in abstract video work from very early on, have a look at her excellent website for more information www.improvart.com, here are some selected still's from her site just to give an initial idea of the range of her work.

Photo of Carol Goss in live performance at Joseph Papp's Public Theater, NYC 1978.

TOPOGRAPHY
Carol Goss - Paik-Abe Synthesizer
Paul Bley - Electric Piano
Bill Connors -Electric Guitar

S-CONSTRUCT
Carol Goss - Computer Animation
Don Preston - Audio Synthesizer

KUNDALINI
Carol Goss / Video Feedback
Perry Robinson / Clarinet
Badal Roy + Nana Vasconcelos / Percussion

above image awaiting caption

http://www.offlinenetworks.com/UVHP/CGoss.html

http://books.google.co.uk/
http://www.videoartworld.org/artist_560.html
http://www.improvart.com/goss/Bio-brief.htm
http://www.eai.org/artistBio.htm?id=13107

Early Lighting Effects at The BBC

Via youtuber Marc Campbell

This is a video of some beautiful lighing effects work at the BBC 

more on the history of lighting effects coming very soon

Ron Pellegrino

Ron Pellegrino has been making and documenting his visual music work since 1967, He makes incredible work often utilizing lasers and sometimes video synthesis techniques and has written many books on the subjects of composition and working with sound and light. More info on his site. I have all his books :)

www.ronpellegrinoselectronicartsproductions.org

http://www.youtube.com/user/ronapell
http://www.nbma.com/cat/pell/pell.html

Sounding The Body Electric

I went to the opening of this exhibition Sounding The Body Electric (Experiments in Art and Music in Eastern Europe  1957-1984) the other day at The Calvert 22 Foundation, It was pretty interesting including some work by practitioners I was well aware of and some from artists I had never heard of before.
here is a shot of the Experimental Studio of Polish Radio

Especially of note was some work being shown by
Bulat Galeyev of the Prometheus Institute  whose site I have had bookmarked (and linked on my secret drawn sound/visual music blog) for a long time now, the work clearly used oscillographics and colorization techniques, here is a still form 1982 THE SPAСE DANDELION

There were also some nice Graphic Scores from various eastern european practitioners 

here is one form 1972 by Boguslaw Schaeffer, I have been teaching for a while about the realtion ship between video synthesis, visual music, drawn sound and graphic scores so it's nice to see these kinds of work be interpreted as related and exhibited together.

The only small shortcoming of the show (and it is a small one) is that it doesn't explain how much of the work here is influenced by the influx of western ideas and how much were from home grown ideas put on hold due to the political situation from the 20s onwards, having just finished reading the mind blowing Sound In Z by Andrey Smirnov whose research I have followed for years and seen speak many times, I imagine that some of the work and artists from the early 20th century in Russia could have provided at least a distant memory of and age of intermedia experimentation to the next generation, there is small mention of the influence of Léon Theremin and Arseny Avraamov arguably the two most influential players in early Russian electronics, visual music, drawn sound and experimental music however there isn't much discussed about any direct connections. For instance the ANS was still in development right up to 1957 when this exhibition begins to look at work however were any of the Russian and Eastern European Intermedia artists influenced by it's development?  arguably it is the last and most complex of the Russian drawn sound projects that I am aware of. However to be fair all of this research is fairly new and this is a tiny exhibition, I'm just glad it has found it's way to London at all! As Gagarin once said Let's go!

PS I picked up these exhibition Catalogues and books which perhaps go in to greater detail about context

Alivia Zivich, Nate Young, Steve Kenney as Demons

"Demons evolved from a synthesizer duo into a Visual Music trio with the incorporation of video artist Alivia Zivich. Working under the name "Video Madness" she often used the music of Demons as soundtracks to her analog video experiments. Live performances as a group led to the redefining of Demons as Visual Music."

Demons have produced some pretty interesting visual music and are a rare example of the art form as a live hands on band. Alivia Zivich has also produced some interesting solo work some of which can be found on line. While I love the 'high art' of many of the visual music pioneers I can't help but be attracted to the hands on approach to production, something which I have been attempting recently by playing out more often. I wish I could have caught them on their relatively recent European tour.

http://www.wolfeyes.net/aarecords/
http://www.youtube.com/user/aliviaz
https://vimeo.com/aarecords
http://esspresents.com/2011/12/29/aa-records-installation/
http://www.dustedmagazine.com/features/593

Audio Visualisation Tests

So I have been working on a new live set up and a new more minimal aesthetic inspired by the films of the visual music pioneers and video synthesizer artists. I want to bring together the video synthesis, visual music and drawn sound worlds in to a cohesive intermedia performance. Hopefully some of this work will also find it's way in to recorded pieces. I am doing a few more live performances where I will be testing some of the new work. On the 13th I'm playing at the Wreck in Camberwell doing visuals for my bro Taki's awesome band Spring Yard  and doing a full A/V Performance with Gary for The Gravy/Cinerama at Total Refreshment Centre  on the 15th.