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The Portal

Benedict Drew's Portal

April 2012

Follow artist and musician Benedict Drew's choice links to cartoons, music and other online ephemera. Drew is featured in The Wire 339 in an article by Nick Cain. Drew's Gliss exhibition takes place at London's Cell Project Space, 19 April–27 May.

Essay

Collateral Damage: Phil England

April 2012

Circulating music as resource-free downloads might reduce carbon footprints, but the fast turnover of the computers, MP3 players and mobile phones we play them on costs the Earth plenty, argues Phil England.

Essay

Collateral Damage: Phil England

April 2012

Circulating music as resource-free downloads might reduce carbon footprints, but the fast turnover of the computers, MP3 players and mobile phones we play them on costs the Earth plenty, argues Phil England.

The Portal

Sound Poetry Portal

April 2012

Find out about sound poetry via online resources, as selected by Julian Cowley, author of the sound poetry Primer in The Wire 339.

The Portal

Hanna Tuulikki Portal

April 2012

Follow Hanna Tuulikki's choice selection of links. Tuulikki is featured in an article by Clive Bell in The Wire 338.

The Portal

Conlon Nancarrow Portal

March 2012

Read a selection of online resources about the late player piano composer, featured in an article by Philip Clark in The Wire 338. Links selected by Dominic Murcott, Head of Composition at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance and artistic advisor to London Southbank Centre's forthcoming Nancarrow festival.

The Portal

Simon Reynolds's Toopographical Portal

March 2012

Peruse Reynolds's web link Toopology, accompanying his feature "Tales From Toopographic Oceans" that looks at the cultural politics of his fellow author and critic, David Toop, in The Wire 338.

Essay

Collateral Damage: John Richards

March 2012

When John Richards of Dirty Electronics began manufacturing interactive sound devices such as a hand-held analogue synth, he tapped into a participatory social experiment in revitalising digitally numbed senses

Essay

Collateral Damage: John Richards

March 2012

When John Richards of Dirty Electronics began manufacturing interactive sound devices such as a hand-held analogue synth, he tapped into a participatory social experiment in revitalising digitally numbed senses

The Mire

Last month a DJ showed me life: Hieroglyphic Being @ CTM

A month ago a DJ set by Hieroglyphic Being (aka Jamal Moss) set my world on fire. It was in Berlin, at the CTM festival, and I can't stop going over it in my head, rerunning the maths to find the multiplying factor. It was the first time I'd seen Moss DJ. It started at 3am, following an impeccable set of tessellated Techno by Kassem Mosse. But Jamal Moss's set was a different beast entirely: loose, sloppy and incredibly ugly in some parts, but always giddy, impatient and unpredictable. It ran through pitched up and pitched down tracks, and too many genres and styles to count on one hand. At one point it got into a call and response dialogue between New York disco and Krautrock. The mixing was at times slick, incredible (an air raid siren threaded through three tracks, sewing them together). In other places it was a dirty hack made with a blunt instrument. The...

The Mire

Bad Thoughts on the Death of Mike Kelley

Mike Kelley photographed by Robert Gallagher for The Wire 235 September 2003 [This post was written following a conversation in The Wire office about the effects of the influence of the art of the late Mike Kelley, mainly as an attempt to clarify my own thoughts, and maybe confront some of my own prejudices. Many of my colleagues and associates at The Wire were longterm admirers of Kelley's work; indeed, some of them were friends of the artist – all have been shocked by the recent news of his death, reportedly by his own hand, aged just 57. In the circumstances, I doubt this post will be greeted in a spirit of critical debate. But as far as I can ascertain, Kelley himself never bothered much with matters of 'good' taste, let alone observed petty bourgeois notions of proper etiquette or knowing when to hold his...

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...