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Essay

Quiet storms: Toshiya Tsunoda

January 2011

Read an extended version of Will Montgomery's Cross Platform article on Japanese sound artist Toshiya Tsunoda, master of the art of field recording.

The Portal

Portal 12/01/2010

January 2011

The comprehensive survey also includes sections focusing on historical sounds of the city, its wildlife, and travels further afield up the Thames estuary to the Hoo Peninsula in Kent.

The Portal

Andrew Nosnitsky's Portal

December 2010

Try and follow whatever bits and pieces of Lil B's sprawling mindspray actually proves intelligible, be that "rare and secrete [sic]" links to new songs or cat care tips.

The Portal

Joseph Stannard's Horror Portal

December 2010

In addition to its atmosphere of ‘backwoods horror’ BMT’s recent album Black Goat Of The Woods (Aurora Borealis) exudes an air of cosmic menace which can be traced back to the Weird Fiction of Arthur Machen and HP Lovecraft, conjecturing an aesthetic located on the membranous threshold between Shub Niggurath and Gunnar Hansen.

The Portal

Portal 15/12/2010

December 2010

Lukatoyboy is Luka Ivanovic, who was featured in Global Ear: Budapest & Pécs in The Wire 322

The Mire

50 Records of the Year on air

The German radio show Borderline: Musik Für Grenzgänger (which seems to roughly translate as 'Music For Border-crossers') will once again be playlisting selections from our 50 Records of the Year chart in a series of dedicated shows to be broadcast over the Christmas and New Year period. The shows will be broadcast between 5-6pm (WET) on five consecutive Fridays beginning on 17 December. If you live in Northesse, Germany you can tune in on 105.8FM. Otherwise, the shows are streamed live at http://www.borderline-extra.de , where you will also find full details of all the broadcast dates and times.

The Portal

Portal 07/12/2010

December 2010

Footage of a performance by Ken Vandermark, Andy Moor, Terrie Hessels and Paal Nilssen-Love at Rotterdam's Worm, 28 November, 2009.

The Portal

Portal 06/12/2010

December 2010

"Not Black Metal. Not theory. Not not Black Metal. Not not theory. Black Metal theory. Theoretical blackening of Metal. Metallic blackening of theory. Mutual blackening. Nigredo in the intoxological crucible of symposia."

The Portal

Unofficial Channels Portal

November 2010

"Each album is made using free software at every stage of its production – that is, software which can be modified and freely redistributed, with the proviso that users must be able to continue to customise the code..." – from Keith Moliné's Unofficial Channels article in The Wire 322

The Portal

Portal 10/11/2010

November 2010

"Under No Enchantment (But My Own)" taken from Roberts's 2009 album Spoils, filmed around Glasgow and Callander, Scotland.

The Mire

Lords of the new church

The Church of the Holy Rude, Stirling, site for some of the performances at this year's Le Weekend festival Why do so many so-called experimental music festivals insist on programming events in goddamn churches? (For recent evidence from the UK, see Sotto Voce, Le Weekend, and the slightly too prosaically named London International Festival of Exploratory Music.) No doubt the acoustics are mind-blowingly reverberant, but then the same could be said of an empty factory or warehouse, and let's face it, in the current era of drastic capitalism there is no shortage of such structures, all ripe for creative, even provocative, repurposing. By implication if nothing else, the notion of experimental music has always been bound up with radical and ongoing critiques of prevailing and oppressive value systems, and concurrent attempts to erect new humanistic paradigms in their place. From Luis Buñuel to Lydia Lunch, there is a long...