WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
An electromagnetic breeze which sits at an ethereal crossroads. Title seems apt - harmonic signal sustaining on with subtle manipulation

You can hear Lucier’s influence in a stack of productions in later years and part 4 will never age. Rather than detour to i am sitting in a room, the final piece plays with presencing ephemeral elements with bassy heft. Tremendous separation, play at volume

 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
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not to conflate drones and ambient exactly (loads of overlapping areas nevertheless) but the release image seemed appropriate enough to link

distillation - Harrison mic’d up a series of electrical livestock fencing wires during different weather systems and “by this simple technique the entire hillside is turned into a microphone”

some of it really doesn’t work while other sections demand repeated listening

 

mvuent

Void Dweller
The important distinction here is in the intended function of the music (or the lack thereof) or the motivation of the artist and the influence this has on the sonic form
some further thoughts:

speaking of toop… you might remember that in ocean of sound he talks about karlheinz stockhausen’s works “telemusik” and “hymnen”. toop mentions that they were rooted in a utopian dream of creating music that united all cultures. in an old review of a performance of “hymnen” dissensus alum Rambler offers this sneering recap of stockhausen’s intent with the work: “the unification of the world in a collage work . . . at which point peace will spontanenously break out across the earth, or something”. it’s tough to think of someone more synonymous with (and influential on) the avant garde of the Academy than stockhausen, and it would be absurd to say that his output wasn’t motivated by “the exploration of new techniques”—but it seems like “bring[ing] peace and serenity to society through music” was also a central motivation for some of his most important stuff.


you could say something similar about laurie spiegel's seminal computer music album the expanding universe. in the liner notes, spiegel frames the works included as explorations of new techniques, extensively discussing the technology that enabled their creation. but she also mentions, for example, that “patchwork” was created “to express a light positive energy directly counter to the emotional chaos of most serialism and the introspective heaviness of atonal expressionism”. maybe her approach, and that of other artists as well, is summed up with this statement: “my pieces are most strongly concerned with feelings . . . but no matter what i feel, my mind is always active . . . and i suspect that every good piece has all the aspects of being human in it which are integrated into its creator”. her belief seems to be that the motivation of wanting to confer a positive spiritual effect on the listener and the motivation of wanting to intellectually experiment ought to go hand in hand.

since the picture you’ve drawn is intentionally super generalized/zoomed out, obviously there would be exceptions and, as we were talking about earlier, edge cases. BUT what if stockhausen and spiegel aren’t that unusual in the multifacetedness of their intentions? there are a lot of other important composers who could be talked about in a similar light. even the artistic activity of someone about 100000 iq points lower than those two, such as myself, seems to be determined by multiple levels of intent. motivation is a very complex thing and a map can make it look so simple.

what’s the harm in simplifying, flattening motivation for the sake of distinction-making? above all that these big assumptions can have the (very negative, imo) effect of misleading listeners as to what they can get out of certain music. in my personal experience, the assumed motivation of the composer often has an impact on how people perceive a composition. if someone thinks the artist was an emotionless theoretician, they’ll often believe that the art has nothing to offer their emotions, spiritual wellbeing, and basically close themselves off to the possibility. again, that sort of generalization is the orthodox view in a lot of music nerd circles, and so many people write off great music because they mistakenly think, based on genre or cultural signifiers or whatever, that it’s not “supposed to” have any emotional effect.

so the Ashram/Academy dyad is great, but maybe we’d be best off thinking of it as a distinction between cultural institutions/social spheres/listening traditions in which styles of music are performed and developed, rather than in terms of artists' internal motivations. i think that would preserve all of the great insights the dichotomy offers, and even include the idea of "function" without giving the impression that the people who make music consist of two different alien species.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
have you played personna 5 mvuent? is it important?
afraid not but i just watched one piece film: red today. the villain is a teenage pop star with demigod level magical powers whose hopelessly delusional, sheltered, overly simplistic worldview leads her to take a lifespan-shortening drug to stay permanently awake, in order to keep 2/3rds of the world population caught forever in a fantasy-reality that centers upon her and which she controls (ostensibly to save them from themselves), before finally dying due to lack of sleep. of course the actual execution was pretty bad, but the premise was decent. just thought you’d want to know all that.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Hardly present ambient, night-shift psychosis ambient, ambient for hand gliding or ambient for skydiving on acid: you decide

Where is it cartographically speaking? You pass through it, the space between your eyes and the page/screen. Off-map. Ambient for Screens isn’t the catchiest allusion title either but whatchagonnado



background- had a minor “0h noo0” moment not being able to remember the title but realised it was on an mp3 player unharmed by ads, t’dah, aptly named too
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Was thinking of underwater ambient during a night shift lull which is rarely as quiet

Sound recordings completed underwater and augmented or mimicked via trickery, dunno what recommendations there might be - NWW playing outdoor lido pools a decade or more back..

London,
08
July
2008

London Fields Lido in Hackney was the location on Sunday (6 July) for the launch of the UK’s first underwater sound festival, Wet Sounds 2008.

Over 150 swimmers braved the overcast and showery weather to take a dip in London’s only outdoor Olympic-sized pool and were treated to a two-hour underwater sound installation, assembled by local artist Joel Cahen from Newtoy Ltd, supported by Hackney Council’s Cultural Development Team.

Swimmers were supplied with brightly coloured tubular floats, enabling them to relax and submerge their heads to hear and feel the sounds pulsating through water.

Councillor Nargis Khan, Cabinet Member for Community Services said: “As we prepare for the launch of the Cultural Olympiad in Hackney we are pleased to support and promote events that encourage people to visit our cultural and leisure facilities. We also want to get our borough active and it will be great to see even more visitors at the Lido when the Wet Sounds tour closes later in this month.”

The event started with a musical piece accompanied by a synchronised swimming demonstration from a lady in a silver lamé cap. This was followed by an array of hypnotic rhythm, electronic sounds and music from around the world, piped through three marine speakers that provided clarity of sound underwater.

Wet Sounds will visit nine pools in 10 cities over the next two weeks. The underwater sound festival returns to London Fields Lido on 19 July, where it will end with a special live performance by Nurse With Wound and Andrew Liles. Tickets for the closing event are available from www.SeeTickets.com

For more information about Wet Sounds in Hackney contact the Council’s Cultural Development Team on 020 8356 7209.

Swimming in the sea/pools or lying in a deep bath gives you water’s unique muffled clarity mixed with rumbling bottom end of external sounds transferring through, or the central heating firing up or an hgv passing, any clackety objects moving or colliding with the bath’s material interior



Reminds me of being a kid where you’d sit on the pool floor in the deep-end briefly taking in the sensory shifts but mainly listening
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen

When NWW (Steven Stapleton, Liles and Matt Waldron of Irr.app.ext, for the purposes of this performance – it was surprising that Colin Potter wasn’t there) got going, they used a much richer array of sounds and textures than Liles’ solo set. The effect was fascinating and it was interesting to watch people experimenting with different listening techniques, the most straightforward being to lie on one’s back such that the ears were in the water, but the nose and mouth weren’t. I also tried swimming around underwater and found that the sound palette, and the overall feel of the thing, changed according to one’s location in the pool, and also whether there were other swimmers nearby, and the pool was large enough that sometimes you could find yourself swimming underwater with no-one else in view. Most of the music was based around Salt Marie Celeste (an obvious choice really) but they were adding plenty of extra live sounds, including whispered vocals by Matt Waldron which were scarcely audible out of the water, but sounded crystal clear when submerged.

When I first read about this gig, I thought it was more a gimmick than anything else – an oddball setting for a performance, more than a genuine musical experiment - – but it ended up being both of these things, and a very successful experiment at that. At the end Steve Stapleton came out from behind his gadgets to ask what it had sounded like, and seemed pleasantly surprised to be told how well it had worked. I hope it can be repeated. I was reminded of the story about Salvador Dalí commissioning a diving suit to be made for him – he planned to wear it for a lecture he was due to give. The manufacturers asked him to specify the depth of the descent he intended to make. He responded with a telegram that said, “Mr Dali will descend into the unconscious”.
 
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