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The Mire

The Wire Salon Reading List: Environmental Agents: The Art Of Field Recording

The Spanish sound artist Francisco Lopez has talked about the potential of field recordings to produce "acousmatic broadband sound environments of thrilling complexity". Following on from September’s edition of The Wire Salon, which looked at the rise of sound art, this month’s salon examines a parallel phenomenon of 21st century sound - the emergence of environmental field recordists as sonic artists in their own right. A panel including the sound and field recordists Peter Cusack , Lee Patterson and Justin Bennett will discuss the philosophies and processes of contemporary phonography, its relationship to the parallel disciplines of acoustic ecology, bioacoustics, cybernetics, ethnomusicology, urban soundscaping and audio mapping, and the way these and other related investigations at the occult fringes of environmental audio science have infiltrated and influenced much experimental music practice. The discussion will be illustrated by audio examples...

Interview

Noah Howard interview

September 2010

Read the unedited transcript of Phil Freeman's interview with free jazz saxophonist Noah Howard who died 3 September, 2010. An article based on this interview appeared in The Wire 263, January 2006

Interview

Matt Elliott

September 2010

Matt Elliott talks to Joseph Stannard about the Bristol DIY scene which produced his recently reactivated project, Third Eye Foundation, alongside Flying Saucer Attack, Crescent and Movietone, as discussed in The Wire 319's Retro-Activity feature.

The Mire

The Wire Salon: We Hear A New World: Microphony, Technology & The Rise Of Sound Art

At the turn of the century sound art reached a new level of visibility with a cluster of high-profile shows and countless below-the-radar initiatives. Meanwhile, new thinking about sound has led to an extraordinary proliferation of practices, and in recent years a phalanx of sound recordists and sonic artists has emerged to stage a revolutionary coup on behalf of sound, demanding its right to exist both in and of itself, free of the competing agendas of music or the visual arts. The emergence of this new world of audio was accelerated by the dual technologies of microphony and digital processing, and can be heard in the examples of acoustic ecology and anthropology; desktop synthesis; the form-destroying praxes of Noise makers; Reductionism's amplification of previously occult sound events; frequency experiments with waveforms and pure tones; and more. A cluster of recent books on this area has showcased the range of thinking behind...