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...__audio.ideas+



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...._AUDIO IDEAS..-
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Saturday, 15 April

TALK:  1:00 pm, no admission charge...douglas kahn/mitchell whitelaw/joyce
hinterding and david haines/caleb.k

LISTEN:  7:00pm, $7.00-$5 concession...minit/kazumichi grime/pimmon/david haines


Artspace
The Gunnery
43 - 51 Cowper Wharf Road
Woolloomooloo

tel +61 2 9368 189
_________________

Audio Ideas

When did it happen? When did the musicians and sound artists go off another
set of rails? When did people in club culture and subclubculture stop
dancing and start listening? It seemed to happen quite a few places around
the world all at once and after it happened so much that had happened
before began to be heard and heard differently.

When people started listening, music changed. It was a music that worked
with ideas, against ideas, it went every which way and was very often
satisfied to be sound. If it had a beat it could be poly or arhythmic,
fibrilating or loopy. If it had a pulse it might be more at home among the
Chinese pulses, or otherwise editorialize about the heart of four four. The
limits of audibility were tested, barely there or there you are leaning
back, elbows akimbo as sonic forces massage your innards to the tuneful
bursting of cochlear blisters.

Itís made by sound artists who want to perform and musicians who donít want
to leave their bedrooms, experimentalists escaped from their laboratories,
and local acts known mostly on other continents. Technology is ubiquitous
and the electricity eclectic; what the guitar was to the folk revival, the
desktop, laptop, speakers, cd burner, net audio and net radio, diy
electronics and programming, are to the current upsurge. It arose as the
culture of recording synthesised with cyberculture: the art house sound
track of the new media culture.

Some musical and artistic wheels being reinvented, but theyíre motoring
through different neighborhoods. Yet there are distinctly new sounds to the
underground and plenty more where new is a non-issue. The issue might be
how the sounds reverberate through cultures, microcultures, nanocultures,
or among the split hairs enveloping the atomization of individual
indentities. With proliferation has come differentiation, not mass
production.

There is alot of it, and more as we speak. Yet not too much is spoken about
it. Studies of popular music miss the point for the simple reason that itís
not awfully popular, if itís music at all. It has gathered some press but
itís a rare journo who thinks about it longer than theyíve listened to it.
The avant-garde and experimental traditions it has revivified have
themselves been poorly understood. We want to get some talk started with
people close to the action, and really listen to it without the sounds of
sloshing beer and bobís your uncle.

Audio Ideas is an opportunity to talk about it and to listen to it. It is
divided into two parts: TALK and LISTEN.


TALK
Begins at 1:00 pm., Saturday 15 April 2000.
Talk Fest consisting of four presentations, interspersed with open discussion.

1.  Mitchell Whitelaw
"Sound Particles and Microsonic Materialism"

The past five years has seen a wave of minimal, ambient and glitch-centric
electronic music characterised by a process of aural and technological
introversion. This music pays attention to the little things ó minute inner
structures of the digital sound are extended, elaborated and set in motion
using the increasingly sophisticated technologies of "desktop audio". Here
I am interested in investigating the dominant metaphorical structure which
has appeared around this music, which treats sound ó particularly digital
sound ó as a kind of matter, and figures microsonic electronica as a form
of scientific experimentation into the properties and dynamics of that
material.

Mitchell Whitelaw: Writer, artist with interests in new media and
electronic sound, UTS Ph.D. candidate completing a thesis on "artificial
life in new media arts."

2. caleb.k
"Cracks in the media"

A recent underground electronic music scene, sometimes called Glitch, has
formed itself on the basis of the noise of the pops, snaps, crunches,
sparks, clicks and cuts of malfunctioning software. This talk will examine
the cracks in earlier audio output and compare them to this recent trend,
asking whether glitch is the best way to think about this type of work.

caleb.k: UTS Ph.D. candidate researching contemporary electronic listening
noise/music/audio, writer (laudanum.net/pfe), and curator of l'audible an
archive of Australian and New Zealand audio (laudanum.net/ldbl).

3.  David Haines and Joyce Hinterding will talk about their installation
"The Levitation Grounds", on its last day at Artspace, and related topics.

4. Douglas Kahn,
"Peter Blameyís Palpable Sound"
Where sound is in space, a deliberation in Western art music since at least
Charles Ives, took on added impetus in the 1960s when composers used beefy
audio systems to make entire spaces sound. While certain experimentalists
simply arrayed a roomful of speakers, others set up situations where spaces
were articulated, and musical forms produced, through sound interacting
with itself. Emerging from the unpopular musics of the 1990s, Sydneysider
Peter Blamey has extended this experimental tradition to produce a spatial
palapability of sound with a form and texture both complex and, at times
and against all odds, mimetic.

Dr. Douglas Kahn: Assoc. Prof. at UTS, author of Noise, Water, Meat: A
History of Sound in the Arts (MIT Press 1999) and coeditor of Wireless
Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-garde (MIT Press 1992).


LISTEN

Begins at 7:00 pm., Saturday 15 April 2000.   Performances by:

   +  minit

      +     kazumichi grime

  +       pimmon

    + david haines

_______
     web.cast
                  http://laudanum.net/audio-ideas


Sponsored by:

New Media and Cultural Theory Research Group, Faculty of Humanities and
Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney.

Audio Daze, heard on 2-SER Thursday mornings, 10:30 am to 12:00.

ARTSPACE

organised by Douglas Kahn, caleb.k, Mitchell Whitelaw