When I don't like 'Sound Art'.

 “In 1998 Scanner completed a piece entitled Surface Noise… built around movement through London. Here is his explanation of the methods by which the piece was devised: 

“[T]his work took a red double-decker bus as its focus. Making a route

determined by overlaying the sheet music from London Bridge is Falling

Down onto a map of London, I recorded the sounds and images at points

where the notes fell on the cityscape. These co-ordinates provided the score for the piece and by using software that translated images into sound and original source recordings, I was able to mix the work live on each journey through a speaker system we installed throughout the bus, as it followed the original walk shuttling between Big Ben and St Paul's Cathedral.”

Back to me. This is a good example of the kind of arbitrary methods by which some sound artists go about creating a piece of  sound art'. This work has very little to do with the sounds, and is all about the process. It could be argued that London is so huge and full of sound this was simply a nicely topical yet random way to select where to access these sounds. However, if you cared about the sound of the outcome, wouldn’t you care what kind of route you took? If the main focus was on what the audience would be hearing, surely you’d research the places and areas for the best symphonies? It seems a bit of a cop out to me. Having said that, i never heard the work, but how can this be 'sound art' or even sound manipulation, when it has so little to do with the vagaries of sound? Sound may be the medium, but it’s not what’s being used or explored to produce the effect. Here it’s just being used as proof of a process, comparable in relevance and meaning to the photograph exhibited of a performance piece. I like it when sound artists like sound. 

“Cause you know life is what we make it and a chance is like a picture, it’d be nice if you’d just take it.” - Drake

Last one, I promise...

“We have all lived through that shriveling moment when a parent walks into a room and repeats, with sardonic disbelief, a couplet picked up from the stereo or the TV. 'What does that mean, then?' my mother asked me during Top of the Pops. "Get it on / Bang a gong"? How long did it take him to think of that, do you reckon?' And the correct answer - 'Two seconds, and it doesn't matter' - is always beyond you, so you just tell her to shut up, while inside you're hating Marc Bolan for making you like him even though he sings about getting it on and banging gongs.”


har har.

Nick AGAIN

“The truth about autobiographical songs, he realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feeling or a friend or a woman and turn whatever it was into something that was over, so that you could be definitive about it. You had to put it in a glass case and look at it and think about it until it gave up its meaning.”

Nick Hornby, 'Juliet, Naked'

  “For the best part of 40 years she had genuinely believed that not doing things would somehow prevent regret, when, of course, the exact opposite was true.” 
Ooops. Nick Hornby; killing me softly with his ...literature. 

Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

“Telling me I can do anything I want is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water it can go anywhere it wants. Try it, and see what happens.”

Almost Famous

Lester Bangs: "the only true currency in this world is what you share with someone else who isn't cool."

Extract from: Bridget Jones’ iPod: Relating Macro and Micro Theories of User Experience Through Pastiche Scenarios, By Mark Blythe and Peter Wright

The current music scene and the artists dominating it are seen as bland,
corporate representatives. But the music fans who are engaged in file sharing
and building trans-national communities of music sharers can be seen as far
more revolutionary than their predecessors. They may also be more effective.

File sharing and CD copying have reduced very powerful international
corporations to a state of free fall panic where they are attempting to litigate
their way out of the problem (Woodworth 2004). Assuming that they will not
be able to criminalise a very large part of the population this may be one form
of pop cultural resistance that cannot be incorporated and commoditised. The
use of the iPod then is deeply political. In an age where capital presses ever
further in to our every day lives and even has the temerity to trademark DNA,
here is a bastion of resistance to copyright culture. But iPods and other music
file playing devices are in themselves highly stealable. As the gap widens
between the technology haves and have-nots crime and the fear of crime are
likely to become increasingly important problems for designers to address not
just for music producers but music consumers.
Emerson’s gramophone offered users new ways of experiencing music. For
the first time it was possible to listen to music in the absence of musicians.
Music could be enjoyed at home. Recorded music is now an integral part of
our lives accompanying many of our daily activities. Digital media, like the
earliest recording technologies, offers radically new forms of experience. In
time the music industry will adapt, although the process of articulation may be
a slow and painful one.

Extract from: Bridget Jones’ iPod: Relating Macro and Micro Theories of User Experience Through Pastiche Scenarios

The Recording Industry: A Historical Perspective

It has only been possible for musicians to make money from recording
performances for a relatively short period of time. Although technologically
possible since Emerson it was not until the mid nineteen twenties that
gramophones were aimed at a mass market (Norman 1998). As the recording
industry developed the sale of classical music made enough money for the
particular companies to grow but few individual musicians could refer to the
sale of their recordings as primary sources of income. It was not until the
nineteen fifties that recordings of particular performances were bought by
sufficient numbers of people to make a primary source of income for
musicians. Up until around sixty years ago then, musicians made money by
performing, not by recording their performances and selling that recording.
The Beatles were the first group to become recording rather than performing
artists. From Sergeant Pepper onwards the group stopped touring and the
albums became the performances (MacDonald 1995).
When the Beatles launched “The Beatles” commonly known as “the white
album” it was principally available on vinyl LP. As cassettes became more
popular the situation became slightly more complicated and we witnessed the
first great panic to seize the recording industry. Home taping, consumers were
assured, was killing music. Although Beatles fans might have thought that
they had bought the white album, the recording industry’s position was that
they had in fact merely bought a piece of circular plastic with grooves cut into
it.  The recording industry still owned the music and if the music became
available in another format then consumers would have to buy that as well.
And following the development of the compact disc this is exactly what many
consumers did. They bought for a second time the albums they had
previously owned in the LP format. This was, of course, a very profitable
situation for the recording industry which made as much if not more from its
back catalogue during the 1980s than it did from new recordings. So it was in
Men In Black that Tommy Lee Jones could show Will Smith a newer, tinier
music disc and tell him that this was going to replace CDs “Now” he remarks
“I’ll have to buy the white album again”
But the new format was not a newer smaller CD as the makers of that film
imagined.  The mini-disc never really took off as a replacement for CDs. The
new format was not a tangible object, it was a computer file. Marsall McLuhan
famously argued that the medium is the message. The results of industrial
automation were job losses regardless of the kind of machine in question
(Mcluhan in Munns and Rajan eds 1995). In this sense the iPod is a
fundamentally subversive technology. The final layer of its justly celebrated
packaging is a cellophane wrapper bearing the inscription “Don’t steal music”
in four languages. However, when it is connected to a MAC it immediately
copies every song from the iTunes library into its memory without any
reference to whether the music has been paid for or not: it is essentially
amoral despite the manufactures admonitions. Increasingly music users are
engaging in moral debates in order to justify and validate their experiences of
technology. The British government have launched a music manifesto which
will teach children that file sharing is wrong (Lettice 2004). However the
interpretation of file sharing as theft can be and is contested (Woodworth
2004). Some music consumers then are beginning to think that they have
bought the white album enough now...

Although it is commonly argued that personal stereos are alienating, turning
what was once a communal activity (listening to music) into a personal one
and making public spaces private, the scenario illustrates the ways in which
experiences of technology can be as intense and moving as any experience
of art.
“at its height it [experience] signifies complete interpenetration of self and the
world of objects and events” (Dewey 1934: 19)
The user brings their own past, constantly changing expectations and
reflections to bear on an experience. The user’s personal history, knowledge
and values then play a large part in the experience and the technology allows
for the expression of a range of values.

forgot about this...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ResQFDDsDAI&feature=player_embedded#!
michelangelo antonioni zabriskie point's final scene.

a meditation on silence in the desert by soundwalk collective. beautiful.

 a meditation on silence in the desert

The bedouins call this vast barren land the Rub’ Al Khali, literally the "Empty Quarter".
This Desert of deserts stretches from the border of Yemen to the mountains of Oman; from the southern coast of the Arabic Peninsula to the Persian Gulf and the border of Nedjd.

The Soundwalk collective went on a 45-day travel across this desert, in search of the singing sands, scanning and recording the infinity of Hertzian frequencies that stretch across the dunes of Rub’ Al Khali. In the least populated area of the world, these sound waves travel from the coasts of Eritrea through Yemen, Oman, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq and the Persian coasts. In this empty vastness, one can distinguish millions of voices, from Bedouins on their voyage though the desert, to oil miners, to the sound of communication between cargo ships and trawlers sailing up the Red Sea, to shortwave radio transmissions along the Persian coast, all the way to North East Africa. The Empty Quarter is the crossroads of the Arabic civilization.








Much like an anthropologist doing fieldwork in a marginal land, Soundwalk recorded hundreds of hours of sonic fragments, guided by the movement of sand and following the whims of the winds. The result is a reflection on silence. To go in the desert usually implies looking for silence and escaping the din of civilization. The essence of such a project lies in the idea of hypnotic meditation on a forsaken world, transience and the footprints left by man on earth. Sounds collected know no boundaries, just as the nomadic traditions remind us.

'What is Indie Rock' by Ryan Hibbert (2005) lol.

I have come to associate 'indie' with a kind of revisionary folk movement--
something in the 'bad voice' tradition of Bob Dylan and Neil Young, though less
politically charged and more self-deprecating, attaining through lyrical depth and
minimal production a sound that is conscientiously 'backwoods' or 'bedroom'
Further characteristics of these indie pioneers include a sublimation of the artist's
identity through the extensive use of personae, and reconceptualising of the
album as an autonomous and thematic text or narrative, rather than simply a
collection of songs gathered to meet the demands of radio or linked only by the
time and place of their production.

BARR, The Song is the Single

BARR, The Song is the Single is what my dissertation wishes it was.

PARCO says:

A town is a stage, a fashion is a direction, and the leading role is "me".

The stories of each of the spectators are made by walking and listening around towns with a headphone. (a.k.a. you pretend like you're in a film of your life when you're listening to a walkman.)

Photographs of old ships. Loads of them.

Interesting article on the social and economic state of Japan (from 2000)

http://www.economist.com/node/455201