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The Mire

Joshua Light Show and Manuel Göttsching: Berlin stage invasion

One of the central events at the CTM and Transmediale festivals in Berlin just over a week ago was Manuel Göttsching with Joshua Light Show (whose line up now interestingly includes Ana Matronic of Scissor Sisters). The show was introduced by three of the festival organisers. They asked in tense tones that people not move around the seated venue, and also that the audience resisted the urge to film the show on smartphones, as the intention was to attempt to create an immersive experience reminiscent of an original Joshua Light Show performance. This immediately created a rift between the festival organisers and their audience, not because it was an unfair request, but because CTM and Transmediale had three cameras covering the event (one still photographer, one for the live stream and a secondary video camera). Of these three, the LCD displays of two were in the eyeline of around a third of the audience....

Essay

Collateral Damage: Vicki Bennett

February 2012

In the early 2000s, increased bandwidth allowed recombinant artists to enter the gift economy. It’s a freedom we should defend at all costs, argues Vicki Bennett aka People Like Us

Essay

Collateral Damage: Vicki Bennett

February 2012

In the early 2000s, increased bandwidth allowed recombinant artists to enter the gift economy. It’s a freedom we should defend at all costs, argues Vicki Bennett aka People Like Us

The Portal

Michael E Veal Portal

February 2012

Read about Michael E Veal's select web links. Veal's King Tubby Primer (illustrated by Savage Pencil) is in The Wire 337, his Dub: Soundscapes And Shattered Songs In Jamaican Reggae book is published by Wesleyan University Press.

The Mire

The Keith Fullerton Whitman Notebooks

My recent interview in East London with Keith Fullerton Whitman, the starting point for the piece in The Wire 326, meandered down almost as many byways and dead-ends as we found wandering about the canals of East London that morning. In almost all magazine pieces there's interview material which doesn't make the cut, but in this case the extra detail – technical walk-throughs of his projects, reminiscences of eternally unfinished schemes, excited talk of madcap projects in his garage – seemed to present just as compelling a picture of the man as discussing his music, and sometimes a whole lot more fun. It's not just the detail, but the way he tells it – the breathless description of routing options, vocalisations of the sounds, and his engineer's eye for chip numbers and synth esoterica, all give a vivid sense of how the composer/musician connects (and connects with) the elements of his soundworld. This set of...

The Mire

Channel of Curiosities

"This odd museum merely documents, juxtaposes, relativizes – a perverse collection." – James Clifford, "On Ethnographic Surrealism" In the Unofficial Channels column of the February issue of The Wire , I write about Flokimotheque, a YouTube playlist that revives the perverse poetics of ethnographic surrealism. The playlist contains more than 100 posts that each juxtapose a single still image with a single piece of music. Check it out here to see how prolonged immersion in such a seemingly prosaic process can reconfigure the senses and send ripples across the surface of the Real.

The Mire

Herbie rides again

Last week at East London’s Cafe Oto the new season of The Wire Salon got off to a futurological start with a talk by Adam Harper based on his book Infinte Music: Imagining The Next Millennium Of Human Music-making . In the talk, Adam repeated the book's citing of the music of the nomadic Aka Pygmies of the Central African rainforest as one example of an 'alien genre’ that can point the way towards an infinity of musical possibilities. (Of course, referring to any indigenous non-Western music as an 'alien genre' is somewhat problematic, as Adam readily admitted, but in this case he seems to be using it to identify highly complex musical forms that arise out of normative social activity – an actually existing practice in many parts of the world, but in post-industrial societies, one which has been annexed from the public sphere by the deleterious forces of the culture industry and therefore...

The Portal

ICES 72 and Harvey Matusow Portal

January 2012

Find out more about Harvey Matusow, American ex-Communist and McCarthy collaborator-turned-avant garde impresario. Matusow promoted the International Carnival of Experimental Sound (ICES) at London's Roundhouse in 1972. ICES 72 – which involved AMM, John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Annea Lockwood, Steve Beresford, Lol Coxhill, David Bedford, Charlotte Moorman, Penny Rimbaud and many more – is featured in an article by Julian Cowley in The Wire 336.

The Mire

Lou Reed & Metallica: Why all the #WTF?

Sitting conspicuously at #9 in our 2011 Releases of the Year chart was Lou Reed and Metallica's Lulu , one of the most hated albums of the year. Reactions to its charting have ranged from noisy retching to charges of conspiracy. What's struck me, looking after The Wire 's various digital channels, is the nature of these reactions - it's not the fact that hardly anyone likes Lulu that's unnerving, but that the response has been so over the top. A few readers were bemused by the fact that James Ferraro's Far Side Virtual was our album of the year, but the reaction was rather more considered to say the least. As a result of Lulu 's Top 10 placing, we have been accused of constructing the chart purely as a hyper-ironic statement, received an email (on Christmas day) that referred to it as a "piece of shit", and...

Essay

Collateral Damage: Terre Thaemlitz

January 2012

Don’t confuse online culture with digital culture, argues Terre Thaemlitz, whose latest project pushes the MP3 format to its absolute limits.

Essay

Collateral Damage: Terre Thaemlitz

January 2012

Don’t confuse online culture with digital culture, argues Terre Thaemlitz, whose latest project pushes the MP3 format to its absolute limits.

The Portal

Linder's Portal

January 2012

Linder, author of The Wire 336 Epiphanies article on the work of artist Barbara Hepworth, shares her top picks of the web.

The Portal

Claudia Molitor's Portal

December 2011

Read about Claudia Molitor's choice picks of the web. The London based German composer is featured in The Wire 335 in an article by Philip Clark.

The Mire

Suffering through suffrage: Compiling The Wire's Rewind charts

Consensus is mendacious. A composite of multiple, often conflicting individual realities, consensual reality projects an image that doesn’t exist. Which is another way of saying that all democratic processes are predicated on the paradox that they will produce a result that few of its individual participants will recognise, in terms of it being an accurate reflection of their own reality, but which most will agree to collectively believe in, or at the very least, to live with(in) its fabricated image. And with that thought I commend to you The Wire ’s Top 50 Releases of the Year for 2011, which arrives as a consequence of a democratic process in which an electorate made up of the magazine’s staff and contributors were franchised to vote for their top ten individual releases of the year across all known forms of sound and music activity, votes which were then collated into the chart that is enshrined in the annual Rewind feature...

Essay

Collateral Damage: James Kirby

December 2011

Bulk giveaways of music online make it impossible for listeners to make any sense of an artist’s work, argues James Kirby

Essay

Collateral Damage: James Kirby

December 2011

Bulk giveaways of music online make it impossible for listeners to make any sense of an artist’s work, argues James Kirby

The Portal

Public Information Portal

December 2011

Read about the Public Information label's top picks of the web. The label, which focuses on archival releases and the "pre-digital soundworld" is featured in The Wire 334 in an article by Dan Barrow. Their next release is an anthology of work by the inventor and amateur electronic musician Fred Judd.

The Mire

Danielle De Picciotto: Rock and a hard place

It might be a city built on sand but going underground in Berlin lands you between a rock and a hard place: on one side, the raw, existential rock-soul-noise drummed up by Einstürzende Neubauten and any number of unstable units permed from the small pool of artists, chancers and nay sayers they started out with in early 1980s West Berlin; on the other, the precisely calibrated monochrome Techno ricocheting off reinforced concrete walls in subterranean bunkers and abandoned industrial plants in the lawless grey zones opened up in the Eastern sector when the Berlin Wall was breached and brought down in 1989-1990. Of course, much else has happened before and after and around these two black hole energy fields in the 30 years since Einstürzende Neubauten launched in 1980, especially after the Wall came down and made Berlin the default destination for outsider types from all over the world, among them former DDR artists...