Thanks for the great reviews. Will most def check out asap! In a totally
different vein but mostly musical is the film "Dogtown and Z-Boys" about the
earliest days of skateboarding in so. cal. Very good movie, very exciting
with lots to discuss afterwards...
DS
quoted 85 lines a beautiful sunny day. and no atom bombs or anything. So I decided to
>
>
>a beautiful sunny day. and no atom bombs or anything. So I decided to
>go check out a couple sound installations around Manhattan.
>
>----------------------------
>
>"Mahler 21 Project" by Chistian Fennesz, at the Austrian Cultural Forum.
>
>How enlightened and slightly bizarre, I thought, for the Austrian
>government to be treating New York to Mego acts. (They just had a
>whole festival of electronica a week or so ago, which included Pita.)
>
>the Fennesz 'installation' proved to be a CD playing through a lone PA
>speaker,
> (mono? is it a concept or did the other speaker blow out?). The room
>hadn't a door, and the often-subtle music was graced by all sorts of
>accidental sounds from the people in the vicinity, their voices and
>footsteps reverberating in the clean modernist architecture.
>
>I was expecting from the title that Fennesz would DSP the hell out of
>Mahler, to the extent that it wouldn't matter what his source
>material was, but I was only half right. Mahler was glimmering
>through most of the music, which did a couple of things -- gave it a
>hint of tonality, and a bit of the fantasy-world that late romantic
>orchestral music can conjure. The whole piece was about a half hour
>long, and divided into about 10 sections of contrasting texture. I
>was much more aware of Fennesz being a minimalist that I'd noticed
>before. Where Mahler's music is rich with detail, evolving ideas and
>has a wide, sometimes explosive dynamic range, Fennesz reduced his
>sources to short loops of just a few notes, which were then
>stretched/processed/processed-more into fairly static, hypnotic
>textures.
>
>The segment that won me over got progressively quieter for about ten
>minutes, until it was just barely audible. it was a simple idea that
>managed to work magic. A few segments were kind of Gas-like,
>orchestral bits time-stretched into slow, ravaged dreamy things. On
>the whole, the piece was rather seductive. Joins Akira Rabelais and
>Ekkehart Ehler's forays into the world of glitchy digitally-distorted
>classical music (enough for a sub-genre?).
>
>-------------------------------
>
>Tetsu Inoue "Active Dot (study for 16 lines)"
>at Engine 27
>>http://www.engine27.org
>
>
>Hm. Well, the presentation was more serious. The receptionist lets
>you into the silent room, where 16 speakers have been set up. The
>computer dims the lights in the room as the music begins. removed
>from the rest of the world, all you have to think about is sound.
>
>Unlike the idea of stereo, or quad sound, or even the multichannel
>systems in movie theaters, the Engine 27 16-channel speaker set up
>isn't symetrical or orderly. It's a long thin room, and there are
>several semi-circles of speakers on the floor, speakers hanging from
>the ceiling pointing in various directions, and some speakers up by
>the ceiling in various locations. there's no 'ideal' listening
>position. You have to walk around and check out what's going on in
>various parts of the room. All the different musicians who make
>music for the space use the same eccentric speaker placement.
>
>Tetsu Inoue's piece uses abstract, dry digital sounding noises. The
>piece is about 15 minutes long. It was a series of episodes; a
>certain sort of sound (like 'droning' or 'clipped' or 'really high
>pitched') would begin in one speaker, and then take over the room,
>gradually, with variations and all sorts of spatial tricks.
>
>It was quite elaborately worked out. You really had to walk around,
>and it was interesting finding parts of the din you had only vaguely
>surmised from the other side of the room. Sort of thing you just
>couldn't experience on your home stereo.
>
>Still...I'm surprised to realize that it's not intrinsically exciting
>to witness complex panning per se, seemed a little academic maybe.
>
>
>k
>
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