Sunday, February 07, 2016

(Electronic & Others) High or Middle Culture?


Art Prints








































A/Z's post on Instagram: sound & video in the background: The Knife's Silent Shout (from Disk III of Silent Shout's Deluxe Edition);
A Rough Sketch of Tommy Cash, drawing by A/Z available with other drawings and photographs at Fine Art America; 
The Knife (Networking);
The Knife (Tomorrow in a Year); 
Björk (Mouth's Cradle);
Björk (Pluto);
Madonna (Material Girl);
Bauhaus (Bela Lugosi's Dead);
DAF (Der Räuber un der Prinz);
DAF (El Que);
Japan (Ghosts);
Orange Juice (Rip It Up);
Public Image Limited (Albatross);
Chrome (All Data Lost);
Factrix (Phantom Play);
The Residents (Swastikas on Parade);
This Heat (A New Kind of Water);
The Flying Lizards (Money);
Wire (I'm the Fly);
Talking Heads (Psycho Killer);
DNA (Detached);
Mars (Helen Forsdale);
Teenage Jesus (Orphans);
Contortions (I Can't Stand Myself);
Throbbing Gristle (Greasy Spoon);
Cabaret Voltaire (Silent Command, Kino);
The Future (Future Religion);
The Pop Group (We Are Time);
Devo (The Truth About De-Evolution) [this video is not available anymore at Youtube];
Donna Summer (I Feel Love); 
Blue Jay Way (Beatles); 
Cambridge 1969 (John Lennon & Yoko Ono); 
The Crucifixion (Phil Ochs); 
Ornette Coleman's Sound Museum (montage A/Z);
Bat Macumba (Mutantes);
Saúde (Rita Lee) [this video is not available anymore at Youtube];
On the Rocks (Rita Lee);
Morton Subotnick (Silver apples of the Moon); 
Alack Karis & Kian Freitas/ Karlheinz Stockhausen's Mantra; 
Milda Vitartaite plays Mario Davidovsky Synchronisms N 6 (for piano and electronic sound, Youtube);
Code Morel & One Hundred Forty Nine Inches (montage A/Z);

"In one of its innumerable forms music is a powerful drug, partly stimulant and partly narcotic, but wholly alterative."
A. Huxley, The Devils of Loudun
"After we'd sniff glue we used to call up number on the phone. We knew these numbers to dial where you could get these weird sounds. We'd call the numbers and it would go Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep."
Dee Dee Ramone (Please Kill Me)
"... remettre en usage des instruments anciens et oubliés, créer des instruments nouveaux... rechercher,  en dehors de la musique, des instruments et des appareils qui, basés sur des fusions spéciales ou des alliages renouvelés de métaux, puissent atteindre un diapason nouveau de l'octave, produire des sons ou des bruits insupportables, lancinants."
A. Artaud (Le théâtre de la cruauté)

"Zuletzt fehlt mir jeder Grund, die Hoffnung auf eine dionysische Zukunftder Musik zurückzunehmen."
"... wie der das Schwerste von Schicksal, ein Verhängniss von Aufgabe tragende Geist trotzdem der leichteste und jenseitigste sein kann — Zarathustra ist ein Tänzer —;" 
Nietzsche (Ecce Homo)
"... long live dancing in the eddy of the infinite!" 
The young person in Repetition (translation by M. G. Piety)
"... une des divinités caractéristiques du Panthéon brahmanique est le Danseur Suprême. Etre universel, il détient le fil du labyrinthe cosmique. Seigneur jouant au degré le plus élevé: son passe-temps est, inextricablement, de créer et d'anéantir."
André Masson (La tentation de l'Orient/Écris, anthologie établie par Françoise Levaillant)
"Você acredita que eu ia pro Dancing Days dançar a noite inteira, sozinho?"
Ney Matogrosso

"When the mood came over him, he might suddenly interrupt a Saturday afternoon walk in the fashionable Bahnhofstrasse by flinging his loose limbs about in a kind of spider dance, the effect accentuated by his tight trouser-legs and wide cloak, diminutive hat, and thin cane."
Richard Ellmann
"Voisin d'un dancing for populaire connu plus tard sous le nom de Bal nègre, un vieille maison marquée pour la pioche... De l'autre côté: deux ateliers d'artistes... Cette campagnonnage n'avait rien de typiquement 'intellectuel'; parler et sentir ensemble, prendre ses repas en commun, travailler d'une même élan, et danser."
André Masson (45, rue Blomet/Écris, anthologie établie par Françoise Levaillant)

"Na gravação de Adeus Maria Fulô, usei um instrumentinho que os palhaços Torresmo e Fuzarca faziam com tampinhas de garrafa afinadas que, ao soltá-las no chão, tilintavam a nota certa... regravamos Bat Macumba e Baby..."
"Éramos apreciados por nossa esquisitice visual e sonora."
"Quando lançamos Saúde, a crítica me crucificou porque pela primeira vez no país usei em algumas faixas a bateria eletrônica Korg. Diziam que eu havia tirado o trabalho de bateristas humanos. Enquanto a crítica vinha com a farinha, minha antena futurista já comia o bolo. Ser pioneira tem seu preço."
"Minha preferida dessa safra é On the rocks, trenzão, pesadão e chique, letra bem colocada, instrumentália precisa, mixagem perfeita, uma de que muito me orgulho."
Rita Lee
"Com sua trupe panfamiliar, suas mulheres e filhos músicos (virtuoses de vanguarda e jazzistas-roqueiros), Stockhausen é o elo perdido entre a grande música e uma outra música que poderá surgir."
José Miguel Wisnik

"Je me souviens avoir discuté avec Stockhausen... l'idée selon laquelle 'notre musique' (cette notion commune existait encore un peu)... aurait pour mission... d'édifier un 'space' suffisamment étendu et complexe pour que puissent s'y rencontrer... soit l'ancien et le nouveau, soit le 'savant' et le 'populaire'..."
"... des échanges, parfois secrets, s'établissant entre les 'genres', et même certaines des acquisitions les plus aventureuses des musiques expérimentales s'acclimatant dans des régios moins 'distinguées' ou même plus commericales (qu'on pense à la subversion du langage qu'a représente le 'free jazz' ou l'assimilation de l'électronique par le pop, le rock et, surtout les musiques illustratives et 'fonctionelles')..."
Henri Pousseur, Musiques Croisées

"La pauvreté reprochée à beaucoup de sons synthétiques, et pas seulement sur les appareils 'bas gamme', provient souvent du fait que peu de paramètres varient, par exemple que seule la hauteur change, alors qu'entre une note d'un instrument acoustique et la note immédiatement plus grave ou plus aiguë, une foule de variables bougent (pente de décroissance d'intensité, timbre harmonique, vibrato...) simultanément avec la hauteur, même si c'est plus discrètement qu'elle. En même temps, c'est cette pauvreté qui fait le charme propre des sons synthétiques, et des groupes et auteurs 'pop' comme Kraftwerk ou Brian Eno."
"Alan Williams défend l'idée — que nous partageons — que 'ce n'est jamais le sont littéral, 'original' qui est reproduit dans l'enregistrement, mais une perspective sur lui."
"... le son pourrait avoir d'être 'inréifiable' tout en étant accessible à une description et une appréhension plus précises."
Michel de Chion, Le Son

"[Nos áureos tempos na Rádio Nacional] a sonoplastia era coisa de 'alto nível'... Apenas composições dos grandes mestres da música clássica é que integravam as trilhas sonoras daquele período. Mais que isso, os sonoplastas davam preferência ao repertório de vanguarda da música do século XX. Enquanto o público 'consumidor de cultura' torcia o nariz no Municipal ao ouvir as execuções dos mais avançados autores de nossa época, as donas de casa, ao fritar suas abobrinhas, estavam ouvindo no rádio, através da sonoplastia, nada menos que Stravinsky, Schöenberg, Webern, Debussy, Ravel, Bartók, Dukas e outros."
"No fim dos anos 60... Numa era das mais criativas da história, a molecada agarrou a tal caixinha, o sintetizador, e saiu pelo mundo ejaculando frequência por todos os poros... O Japão, o país do futuro, ativava ainda mais sua indústria eletroeletrônica produzindo centenas de maquininhas infernais, práticas e portáveis, que faziam da manipulação do som eletrônico um brinquedo infantil."
Julio Medaglia (Música Impopular)

"The 1980s were a great time for innovation with regard to electronic music. Pop music was starting to incorporate new types of keyboards and drum machines, with new ones coming out every month that helped refine and define the sound of that era."
"You would be surprised how many happy accidents make it onto the records. Robert used to call me 'the X factor,' as he was never quite sure what I might come up with."
"We also liked the way he played his leather trousers with his hands. Yes, that's what you hear on 'The Carterpillar' that sounds like butterfly wings beating: Mr. A.'s leather trousers."
"I have always had a great love for all kinds of experimental music, especially the early synthesizer pioneers like Morton Subotnick, and I loved Don Buchla's electronic machines."
Lol Tolhurst
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"Recorded in West Berlin, Bowie's Low and Heroes, Iggy Pop's The Idiot and Lust for Life (both of which Bowie produced), hugely impacted listeners [and] signaled a shift away from America and rock'n'roll toward Europe and a cool, controlled sound in which synthesizers played as much of a role as guitars..." 
"...  1977's most significant singles [were] 'Trans-Europe Express,' a metronomic, metal-on-metal threnody for the industrial era by the German band Kraftwerk, and Donna Summer's Eurodisco smash 'I Feel Love,' made almost entirely from synthetic sounds by producer Giorgio Moroder, and Italian based in in Munich."
"Rather than a keyboard, Devo treated the synth as a noise generator. 'The more technology you have, the more primitive you can be,' Mothersbaugh told one interviewer. 'You can express guttural sounds, bird noises, brains waves, blood flow.'"
"Devo found Alan Myers, 'this incredible metronomic drummer,' and the group started to explore disconcertingly disjointed time signatures like 7/8 and 11/8. 'Those kind of timings make you feel rigid right away,' says Casale."
"... all rattling synthetic percussion and soiled sheet of sound recall avant-classical electronic composers such as Morton Subotnick. For a while Cabaret Voltaire didn't even have a proper synth, instead using tape loops and a primitive oscillator built by Watson. Kirk's primary instrument was the clarinet, fed through effects to sound harshly processed and eerie, as on the spychotic-bucolic Fuse Mountain."
"Initially, the Future came up with 'the rather radical idea that we'd have shared vocals,' says Ian Craig Marsh. 'We dispensed with our names and called ourselves A, B, and C. I was all very computer oriented...' A cybernetic version of Burroughs's and Gysin's cut-ups and surrealist automatic writing..."
"Another Cabaret Voltaire hallmark was the dehumanization of Mallinder's voice via creepy treatments that made him sound reptilian, alien, or, at the extreme, like some kind of metallic or mineralized being."
"COUM started as a rock band of sorts, making up music on the spot, undeterred by lack of grounding in improvisational technique, using broken violins and prepared piano as well as conventional rock instruments like drums and electric bass. Inspired by John Cage's writing and by primitivists like the Fugs and the Velvet Underground, P-Orridge believed that 'the future of music lies in nonmusicians.'"
"Ironically, a traditional blues and country technique, slide guitar, provided No Wave with some of its most disconcertingly novel noises."
"Byrne was reading books by anthropologists and ethnomusicologists... Eno and Byrne became fascinated with American radio's menagerie of evangelist preachers, right-wing pundits, and callers phoning in to live talk radio shows. Radio was America's seething id."
"Unwilling to spend what it would take to make Wire happen as a pop group, EMI was equally disinclined to fund their more esoteric side."
"Factrix quickly  realized that 'you could put the acetates in upside down and backward, play them the wrong way. That was what was really inspiring to us at the time, 'let's see what happens if we do this wrong.'"
"'The mystical for Factrix was teh  same as Coltrane or any musician who's trying to get to the place where the music is free. The sounds, they really  did have a life of their own. We were really just following the sounds. We were disciples of feedback' [Bond Bergland]."
"'Most  bands get a synthesizer and their first idea is to tune it! They want a clean normal sound. They don't work with the power you get from a synthesizer. We want to bring together this high technique with body  power' [Robert Görl/DAF]."
"DAF and their offshoot group Liaisons Dangereuses influenced the embryonic black electronic sounds of Chicago house and Detroit techno, while Kraftwerk almost single-handedly inspired New York electro."
"'You could do a vaguely experimental film thing as cheaply as you possibly could, and if it was connected to a song, MTV would play it because they needed stuff desperately in those days' [David Byrne]."
"Rave music teemed with futuristic textures and strange noises that came straight out of DAF and Cabaret Voltaire... Acid house essentially fused postpunk futurism with sixties Dionysian frenzy."
Simon Reynolds

"As Stockhausen showed in the 1950s, electronic instruments unify the time field between the audio or intoned frequencies above about 20 Hz and the infrasonic or rhythmic frequencies below this threshold. This means that we can compose throughout this zone, where rhythms morph into tones and vice versa."
"A sine [in a simple sinusoidal wave] repeats at exactly constant intervals of time. Repeating waveforms are called periodic. If there is no discernible repetition pattern, it is called aperiodic or noise. In between the extremes of periodic and aperiodic is a vast domain of quasi-periodic tones. The rate of repetition of a periodic sound is called its fundamental frequency, measured in cycles per second."
"Many frequencies can superimpose in a waveform. A frequency-domain or spectrum representation shows the distribution of frequency energy in a sound... A working definition of spectrum is: a measure of the distribution of signal energy as a function of frequency. Such a definition may seem straightforward, but in practice, different analysis techniques measure properties that they each call 'spectrum' with diverging results. Except for isolated test cases, the practice of spectrum analysis is not an exact science."
"Myriad alternatives to Fourier-based spectrum estimation exist (Roads 1996). Among them, one family is of particular interest, as they decompose a sound into a collection of sound atoms (analogous to grains)."
"... the ear is especially sensitive to frequencies between 1000 Hz and 4000 Hz. Tones in this region sound louder than tones of equal intensity in other frequencies. Thus the measurement of loudness falls under the realm of psychoacoustics."
"The subject of masking inevitably arises in discussions of loudness perception. In its most basic form, masking describes a phenomenon wherein a low-level sound is obscured by a higher-level sound. For example, standing in a shower masks many sounds, such as someone speaking nearby."
"... other types of masking effects are time-based: forward and backward masking. Consider a short sound that ends abruptly. The human auditory system continues to react for a short time (about a half second) after the sound ends. This 'resonance' can blur our perception of the onset of a second sound. Indeed, when the time interval between impulses is less than about 50 ms, the ear no longer perceives them as separate impulses... Backward masking is a curious phenomenon. Basically, a loud click or noise coming less than 100 ms after another sound can obscure our perception of the earlier sound. The masking sound can disrupt the brain’s ability to hear a preceding sound, hence the term backward). It is interesting that both forward masking and backward masking occur in the visual domain as well."
"Low-frequency impulsive events are perceived as rhythms. These are the infrasonic frequencies in the range below about 20 Hz. The infectious beating rhythms of percussion instruments fall within this range."
"Structure-borne sound is vibration that one can feel, like the vibration caused by a train rumbling down nearby tracks. These are typically low-frequency vibrations that one’s ear may be able to hear, but they are also felt through the body. Of course, we can also feel high frequencies, such as the buzzing of an electric razor, which is felt by the hand, as well as heard by the ear."
"Ultrasound comprises the domain of high frequencies beyond the range of human audibility."
"Sound propagates at different rates, depending on the medium of propagation... Sounds at extreme sonic velocities are destructive. Explosives can generate powerful transonic shock wave air currents traveling at up to 8000 meters per second, corresponding to Mach 24. These destroy everything in their path."
"Sounds have a specific physical size as well as shape. A quiet sound is physically petite. One has to put one’s ear close to it because the body of air it perturbs is tiny. Other sound waves are gigantic, such as the Krakatoa explosion of August 1883. It was heard 4800 kilometers away, and the pressure wave traveled around the earth for 127 hours."
"When rhythms are sped up, they morph into tones. When modulations like tremolo and vibrato are sped up, they morph into complex spectra. Streaming around the thresholds of this zone of morphosis—where discrete events turn into continuous tones—is intrinsically fascinating."
"... as [Paul] Griffiths observed, electronic music can resolve an antagonism between music and text since words themselves can be transformed. Extreme distortions obscure the meanings of the words, so that the sonic contours of the vocalisms are more important than their literal sense. Moreover, the freedom of the electronic medium encourages composers to make smooth connections between vocal and non-vocal material."
"In the ideal, a source of noise should generate random values. To define an algorithm for generating truly random numbers is, however, impossible mathematically (Chaitin). Any software method for random number generation ultimately rests on a finite, deterministic procedure. Hence, an algorithm for generating 'random' numbers is actually a pseudorandom number generator... Stephen Wolfram famously developed a new type of pseudorandom number generator that he called rule 30 based on a cellular automata algorithm that is much more random than previous algorithms. A main challenge for digital synthesis is creating more sophisticated algorithmic models for noise... Natural wind, sea spray, waterfalls, and thunder are excellent sources of wideband noise. Speech and animal sounds contain many evocative noises, especially the fricatives and plosives of speech [s], [z], [sh], [f], [k], [t], [p], [g], and so on. I have already mentioned the rich noises of the unpitched percussion instruments. Collections of samples recorded at industrial sites are available. These feature the sounds of crushing, creaking, scraping, squealing, squeaking, and grinding... Analog devices produce some of the most complex and unstable noises. For example, the noise from a diode section of a transistor is widely considered to be one of the most random phenomena in nature... The ear is attracted to changes in noise, to trends... As early drum machines taught us, white noise is a poor substitute for a cymbal crash."
"The early electronic music of Stockhausen is a classic example of the integration of pitched and non-pitched elements. Gesang der Jünglinge (1956) juxtaposed sung serial melodies and chords against such elements as 'sine complex showers,' 'impulse complex showers,' filtered and broadband noise, and 'chords' of narrow noise bands. His Kontakte (1960) takes the contrasts even further. At any given instant, Stockhausen pits noise against pitch, fixed against moving, close against far, short against long, high against low register, soft against loud—always in sharp relief. This unrelenting counterpoint of contrasts marks Kontakte as an especially inventive composition, as Stockhausen discovered oppositions that were never before articulated."
"The lush spatial effect of artificial reverberation is characteristic of the electronic medium. Early recordings used a real physical space—an echo chamber—to produce reverberation."
"Spring reverberators in electric organs date to the 1940s and were later common in guitar amplifiers. In the 1950s, Elektro-Mess-Technik (EMT) introduced the massive (2.4 meters long, 200 kg) model 140 plate reverberator, a higher-quality reverberator renowned for its concert hall-like sound. Plate reverberators consist of a large, thin piece of sheet metal suspended from a steel frame by springs... Equipped with vacuum tube electronics, these units were installed in early electronic music studios like the historic WDR studio in Cologne, where Stockhausen realized many of his electronic pieces, and the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Studio... The classic EMT 140 impulse response is accurately modeled by contemporary software reverberators and still marries well with electronic sonorities."
"Portable field recorders enable composers to integrate natural spatial environments (both interior and exterior) into their work. Interior recordings bring us into living spaces, while recording the open space of the outdoors environment allows us to enter the realm of free field acoustics, characterized by a total lack of reflections. Of course, there can also be reflections outside, but the distance cue becomes especially important as we hear the natural foreground/background of the soundstage... Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend (1930) pioneered this genre, depicting the urban soundscape of Berlin. Two decades later, musique concrète used natural sounds, but typically in short clips spliced together rapidly. In contrast, Luc Ferrari’s breakthrough composition Presque rien ou le lever du jour au bord de la mer (1967–1970) began as a long, continuous recording of environmental sounds at a Yugoslavian beach."
"Sound spatialization presents two facets: the virtual and the physical. In the studio, composers spatialize sounds by means of tape echo feedback, delays, spectral filtration, phase shift (for image displacement, widening, and narrowing), convolution, granulation, panning, Doppler shift (for simulation of moving sounds), and reverberation. These transformations give the illusion of sounds inhabiting and moving in imaginary virtual environments."
"Tape echo feedback (TEF) is a classic tape-studio approach to sound transformation that creates a ping-pong panning echo effect, but it can also lead to a transmutation as the original input sound is submerged in distant feedback. There are many variations on TEF, but the classic version requires an analog tape recorder with a continuously variable speed control."
"Another class of reverberators based on convolution is especially interesting... we can take the acoustic signature of an existing space such as a concert hall, and through convolution, impose its spatial characteristics on any sound, creating the illusion of sounds playing in the portrayed space... In the theory of convolution, the acoustic signature of a physical space is sampled by recording the response of a room to a sharp impulse. This is its impulse response."
"Since convolution itself is straightforward, the added value of convolving reverberator applications comes in the form of extensive libraries of proprietary IRs of exotic spaces, including concert halls, cathedrals, stadiums, theaters, churches, recording studios, rooms, scoring stages, clubs, tombs, car interiors, closets, and even acoustic instruments... it is also possible to create synthetic IRs that model strange imaginary rooms with otherworldly echo patterns."
"Starting from the edge of the conventional loudspeaker, we can treat dif- ferent sounds so that they appear to emanate from specific depths behind the loudspeaker. This leads to one of the more interesting possibilities in electronic music: the possibility of a counterpoint between foreground and background elements, where the perceived depth of each element is a function of its virtual acoustic properties. A low-pass filtered sound—bathed in reverberation and diminished in amplitude—recedes into the background, while a bright, present, loud sound jumps to the foreground."
Curtis Roads, Composing Electronic Music

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