RIP Rolf Julius
The Wire
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The artist Rolf Julius has died. According to the label Western Vinyl, "Julius had a chronic illness, which we were aware of, but his sudden passing on Friday 21 January was unexpected."
Julius was born in Germany in 1939 and studied fine art in Bremen. In the mid 1970s he began using sound alongside his visual practice. Later he moved to Berlin and became an important figure in that city's budding sound art scene, participating in Für Augen Und Ohren (1980), one of Europe's first major sound art exhibitions. Over the course of a 30 year career Julius's performances and low-volume, minimal sonic sculptures and installations developed an approach highly influential on a younger generation of sound artists.
Tags: Rolf Julius | Uncategorized
Adventures In Modern Music: Theme tune competition
The Wire
The Wire is launching a competition to write a new theme
tune for Adventures In Modern Music, the zine’s weekly show on
Resonance FM.
The theme can be in whatever style you want, created however you
want, involve any instrumentation whatsoever, with the only
requirement being that it should be roughly two minutes long. The
prize for the best entry: it'll be played at the beginning of the
show each week, and if that isn't enough, the winner will be
interviewed on air (in the studio or on the phone) about their
piece, how they did it, what they were thinking, etc etc.
The competition is open to anybody and everybody. Entries should be sent as MP3, AIFF or WAV file format to:
Derek Walmsley
derek@thewire.co.uk
with 'AIMM Theme' in the subject line
(no attachments over 5mb please – provide a download link if
necessary)
or in CD format via post to:
Derek Walmsley
AIMM Theme, The Wire
23 Jacks Place
6 Corbet Place
London E1 6NN
Deadline for entries is 17 December.
Tags: Uncategorized
The Wire Salon: We Hear A New World: Microphony, Technology & The Rise Of Sound Art
The Wire
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 the new sound art. For some, this work calls for a renewed focus on the perceiving body; for others, sound art offers new perspectives on the circulation of cultural meanings; for others still, sound has removed itself from the realm of the human to occupy a world where we simply don't figure.
For this edition of The Wire Salon, artist/writer Salomé Voegelin, author of Listening To Noise And Silence (Continuum), Helen Frosi, curator of the Soundfjord gallery, and critic/sound artist Will Montgomery discuss the new philosophies and practices that have emerged in recent years to map and calibrate the new world that has been revealed by 21st century sound art.
The Wire Salon: We Hear A New World: Microphony, Technology & The Rise Of Sound Art takes place at London's Café Oto, 2 September, 8pm, £4 Ticket on the door only.
Plus: take part in an audience-participation sound art quiz and have your perception of the audio world around you reshaped!
In anticipation of the night, we've put together the following reading list with links to online MP3s, videos and texts:
Read:
• "Return To Form: Christoph Cox On Neo-Modernist Sound Art" from
Artforum, November, 2003
•Seth Kim-Cohen's "The Hole Truth: On Doug Aitken's Sonic Pavilion" from Artforum November, 2009
• Read about Konstantin Raudive and Electronic Voice Phenomenon
• Ubuweb's Kenny Goldsmith on sound art
• David Toop on The Art Of Noise
Watch:
•
A selection of video work by Brandon LaBelle: Concert #2:
working with participants to stage the tension between sight and
sound; Perspectives: writing and listening action in
public space; Z: writing action utilizing motion-tracking
to generate sound in real-time.
• Mike Patton and Luciano Chessa test out reconstructed Futurist Intonarumori noise machines.
• Join the Soundasart mailing list
• More
sound art links (via Seth Cluett)
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The Wire Salon is a monthly series of salon events, hosted by The Wire magazine, and dedicated to the fine art and practice of thinking and talking about music. The evenings, which take place on the first Thursday of each month, will consist of readings, talks, panel discussions, film screenings, DJ sets and even the occasional live performance.
Tags: cafe oto | events | Helen Frosi | Music discussion | News | Salomé Voegelin | Sound Art | The Wire | The Wire Magazine | the wire salon | Uncategorized | Will Montgomery