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The Portal

Kenneth Goldsmith Portal

April 2011

"Oops! You need an invitation to access these riches: the largest collection of illegal avant garde films in the world. Keep trying."

The Mire

Feeling Listless

The last thing we need is more record lists, right? Well, maybe. No doubt we suffer from a glut of rock-lists. Glossy consumer mags use lists of all types as selling points ("you need these in your life"). When it comes to UK music monthlies, it usually means the same old rock albums, reinforcing the canon with each iteration. Books and websites are now adding to list-fatigue: sites divide lengthy lists-of-the-best-ever into several pages, thus increasing their click thrus but making for fractured reading (the very opposite of what a list should do); meanwhile, those godawful 1010 Records To Hear Before You Expire books conflate musical experience with the dying of the light. Of course, the idea of a record list is inherently problematic. It immediately raises questions: records of what type, and limited in what way? What and whose criteria are we judging by? The very existence of a historic list presupposes a...

Essay

David Toop: All Mix & No Master…?

April 2011

Does the new technology of mix 'n' splice mean the end of Popular Song as we know it? Or the start of a new open-ended dance afterlife? The death of the Original, or the birth of the infinite version? David Toop looks/locks into a brand new time lapse. This article originally appeared in The Wire 103 (September 1992). David Toop reflects on writing the essay below.

Collateral Damage: Kenneth Goldsmith

April 2011

Since Napster launched a global filesharing frenzy, the hunt itself has become more thrilling than finding recorded treasures, argues UbuWeb founder Kenneth Goldsmith. This article originally appeared in The Wire 327 as part of the Epiphanies series

Collateral Damage: Kenneth Goldsmith

April 2011

Since Napster launched a global filesharing frenzy, the hunt itself has become more thrilling than finding recorded treasures, argues UbuWeb founder Kenneth Goldsmith. This article originally appeared in The Wire 327 as part of the Epiphanies series

The Portal

Bedroom Rap Portal

April 2011

"A minimalist Tumblr run by New Haven rapper Left Leberra, where he showcases songs, video clips and graphic design experiments."

The Mire

Erotic Neurotic: (not so) slight return

After that last post I got into an extensive email correspondence with Amanda Brown during which she made some clarifications regarding her 'sex and sexiness' comment and which it seems to me are worth noting here, if only to fill in the picture a little more. In one mail Amanda states: "I guess when I told Simon I wanted to be sexy and invest in sexiness, I said it because I feel like women are so afraid of that now in the underground. It's like, don't look at me like I'm sexy, look at me like I'm a man. Which we aren't, obviously..." In another mail she writes: "I think it is time for women who don't dress sexy or don't sing about sex or project themselves as sexy to reclaim sexiness, as soulfulness and sensualness." The message here seems pretty clear: attitudes towards female sexuality that prevail in the underground are as oppressive and distorted (which is a point...

The Portal

Jenny Hval Portal

April 2011

""Ruminations While (Audio) Walking: Time, Place, And The Body" by Justine Shih Pearson is both a partly written, partly recorded essay about listening."

The Mire

Erotic neurotic

"I don't know how it comes across when I say this, but I am deeply invested in sex and sexiness," Amanda Brown tells Simon Reynolds in the May issue of The Wire . Even though it is expressed in that peculiarly American way that makes Amanda sound like she regards the very fact of her being in the world as a business venture to be injected with regular shots of cultural capital, what she is actually talking about is her vision for the kind of artists and music now being issued by Not Not Fun, the label she runs with husband Britt out of their home in Eagle Rock, LA, and in particular its hot little sister imprint, 100% Silk. As Simon points out, both Amanda's and Not Not Fun's roots lie deep in America's post-Riot Grrrl Noise/lo-fi DIY underground. This is a realm where sex exists purely as metaphor, something to be invoked or mobilised only in...

The Portal

Olivia Block Portal

April 2011

"I refer to this site all of the time, and I love that the content is always updated. There are some iconic sound and video works available on UbuWeb that were previously available through art school libraries and museums only."

The Mire

Originality and the 808

A couple of weeks ago at Future Human’s Sonic Boom event the discussion drifted onto the subject of value, originality and use of presets in music making. Matthew Herbert decried the use of presets in music. “I find it so depressing that so much stuff is still based around drum machines,” he said. “There is definitely something very valuable in the democratisation of the tech that allows people to engage in trying their hand at music… but presets are absolutely the wrong way to go - it just feels like a supermarket.” The implication is that music made with presets has little value, and later in the discussion Herbert questioned the point of making it at all. While from the point of view of the artist as a creator and a creative, he talks sense. It’s reductive in so far as it almost eliminates the listener from the equation. How well can most...

The Portal

Andy Battaglia Portal

April 2011

Andy Battaglia's article Once Upon A Time In... Harlem in The Wire 326 revisits the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and its importance in the work of composers such as Vladimir Ussachevsky, Otto Luening and Milton Babbitt.

Essay

Xenakis Symposium Extras

March 2011

A three-day conference, sponsored by The Wire and organised by the Centre for Contemporary Music Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London on the Greek composer coinciding with the tenth anniversary of his death. Scholars, researchers and musicians will present papers and participate in panels, alongside a programme of concerts and workshops. London Southbank Centre, 1–3 April.

The Mire

Lingerin' could be your doom

Two of Dust To Digital ’s recent releases, Rev Johnny L Jones The Hurricane That Hit Atlanta and the book and CD bundle Ain’t No Grave , a bio of Appalachian preacher Brother Claude Ely are two parts of a lineage. If Brother Claude Ely is the raw material, red raw vocal chords stripped by screaming, Jones is a mark further along that lineage, watered down - but not to its detriment - where sermons are songs (in the conventional sense) with electric guitars. Asked about why they started calling him ‘The Hurricane’, Jones says: “The hurricane starts off slowly, slowly slowly, and as long as there’s the process, the faster, the faster, the faster she gets, and when she gets a certain speed, that’s when she’s dangerous.” Listening to the two in sequence, this idea of a snowballing force is better applied to Brother Claude Ely than Jones, but it’s the idea that connects them: the...

The Mire

Queered Pitch

"Sound itself is queer." I was struck by this quote from Drew Daniel of Matmos while flicking through a video of a Q&A I did with them at Mutek last year (the Mutek people have kindly just put it online , a series of four interviews from the 2010 edition that they're putting up in the run up to this year's event). Queerness is what exceeds values and structures, he explained. So if sound qua sound exists outside language and and the usual hierarchies of taste, then is sound queer? While Drew Daniel was riffing on this idea (22 minutes into the interview) I was in the presenter's chair with one half of my brain pre-occupied with thinking of the next question to throw back at him. But nearly a year on it resonated with ideas that have been rattling around my head in the meantime. Right now I happen, oddly enough, to be listening to disco...

The Mire

The Wire Salon Reading List: The Sounds Of New Atlantis: Daphne Oram, Radiophonics And The Drawn Sound Technique

Daphne Oram (1925-2003) was a pioneering British composer and electronic musician. She was the creator of Oramics, a synthesis technique which used visual images to create electronic sounds. She is credited with creating the very first piece of commissioned electronic music for the BBC in 1957 (the score for Amphitryon 38 ) and was instrumental in the formation of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, becoming its first director in 1958. Leaving the BBC less than a year later, Oram founded her own electronic music studio where she produced the electronic soundtrack to the 1961 horror film The Innocents , as well as various concert works and compositions. After her death in 2003, the British improvisor and instrument builder Hugh Davies inherited her archive of papers and...

The Mire

Resonance FM fundraiser

This weekend, from 12 noon on Saturday 19 March 2011 until midnight on Sunday 20 March, Resonance FM is holding a live, on air fundraiser to raise money to keep the best radio station in the world up and running. A whole slew of unique, collectable and plain beautiful objects and experiences are available for auction. Notable items include a 90 minute bass guitar lesson with Led Zep's John Paul Jones, two weeks in Annapurna Eco-Village, Nepal with all creature comforts provided, one month's entry to London venue and Wire fave hangout Cafe Oto, signed Chris Watson Records, Bob Cobbing posters, red wax from Anish Kapoor’s recent Royal Academy retrospective, a one hour sitar lesson with Baluji Shirvastav, and much more. You can find details of all the lots and how to bid at resonancefm.com/auction . As for The Wire 's offering this time around – it's a rare, art-edition release of a one-sided LP by The...