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The Mire: Tangents, threads and opinions from The Wire HQ

Parallel Voices: Missing Link - tix on sale now

Nathan Budzinski

Tickets for the Carsten Nicolai curated Parallel Voices: Missing Link at London's Siobhan Davies Dance Studio (sponsored by The Wire) will be going on sale from 8 February. The three day event, which features talks and performances from Blixa Bargeld, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Christian Fennesz and Chris Carter amongst others, takes place 17 - 19 March with tickets priced at £15/£10 (multibuy ticket) or £9/£6 per night... Get them while you can as there is very limited space available at the venue!

Click here for more information

Nathan Budzinski

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Flying Lotus 4/20 Broadcast

Nathan Budzinski


Flying Lotus will be DJing an internet broadcast to mark "4/20", an annual celebration of the Cannabis plant taking place today (20 April). Lotus will be joined by members of his Brainfeeder crew, including The Gaslamp Killer, Ras G, Daedelus, Teebs, Matthewdavid, Dr. Strangeloop and more. Tune in to the session at flying-lotus.com/radio, 20 April, 12pm in Los Angeles, 3pm in New York, 8pm in the UK and 4am in Japan.

The set is also in anticipation of Flying Lotus's forthcoming album, Cosmogramma, out 4 May on Warp Records. Cosmogramma is on pre-sale for 24 hours from the time of the broadcast. Buyers of the album also get a free art print by Flying Lotus along with the chance to win the original.

Nathan Budzinski

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Extended Sun Ra Arkestra Residency @ Cafe Oto

Nathan Budzinski

As reported here last week, the Sun Ra Arkestra were grounded by the clouds of volcanic dust still looming over Europe. As a result of ongoing flight cancellations, the Arkestra have added yet another date to their popular residency at London's Cafe Oto in order to pay for their hotel costs. Tickets for the performance tonight (19 May) are available now for £10, but be quick as the last night sold out in two hours!

Now sold out!

Nathan Budzinski

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Parallel Lives: Maja Ratkje & Kathy Hinde

Nathan Budzinski

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=10539469&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=1&color=ffffff&fullscreen=1

Exclusive footage of Maja Ratkje and Kathy Hinde's collaborative work, Birds And Traces. The composition was created during a week long residency at Aldeburgh Music as part of Faster Than Sound, a series of residencies set up to promote crossover between classical composers and artists working with electronic media. Inspired by the themes of bird migration, the season of Spring and climate change, Birds And Traces involved school children local to the Snape area reinterpreting Norwegian songs about birds and Spring along with making origami birds and mapping out migration routes.

Alongside the resulting composition, the artists created two installations which included research materials produced during their residency and a multimedia film sculpture. The performance featured Norwegian accordionist Frode Haltli. Parallel Voices was curated by The Wire.

Also performing at Parallel Lives was Marina Rosenfeld, watch exclusive footage of her installation and performance here.

Nathan Budzinski

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Parallel Lives: Marina Rosenfeld

Nathan Budzinski

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=10526337&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=1&color=ffffff&fullscreen=1

Footage of Marina Rosenfeld's composition Cannons, created specifically for the space at Aldeburgh Music's Hoffman Building at Snape, Suffolk during a one week residency leading up to the performance on 20 March 2010. Cannons features a custom built sound system comprised of four large resonating 'bass cannons' made out of steel pipes fitted with subwoofers, along with two steel horns, all created in collaboration with the sound engineer Paul Geluso and the Suffolk metalwork firm JT Pegg & Sons in Aldeburgh.

The work was made with Paul Geluso and players from the London Contemporary Orchestra: Robert Ames (viola), Lucy Railton (cello) and Sarah Cresswell (percussion) and was curated by The Wire.

Nathan Budzinski

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Acid flashbacks

Tony Herrington

“Will anybody under the age of 40 get that joke?” asks David Toop in the new March issue of The Wire, referring to the title of FennO’Berg’s In Stereo album. I’m a long way over the wrong side of 40, but still I ain’t laughing, mainly because, as David hints in his review of the record, In Stereo represents something of a muted return on the part of the original Powerbook trio. But the appearance of the album, not to mention its rather humdrum punning title, sends me back to a couple of unvoiced, and quite possibly half-arsed, notions that were prompted by the release of one of 2009’s most audacious records of digital sound processing, one which wipes the floor with In Stereo in terms of its conceptual rigour, and which happened to contain a pun in the title that could be got by at least three generations of electronic music aficionados.

Apart from being genuinely funny, not to mention an accurate indicator of what the actual music might sound like, as an album title, Acid In The Style Of David Tudor was a genius piece of sloganeering on the part of Florian Hecker. Talk about encapsulating the complex social and aesthetic evolution, not to mention the psychological make up, of an entire scene in one fell swoop. I didn’t know he had it in him, but Florian nailed the trajectory of a generation of current electronic music practitioners, who came of age in the long 80s afterburn of Industrial culture, were animated by rave’s psychotronic machine music and the systematic praxis of the first wave of post-war electronic music pioneers, and are now forwarding the march of digital sound out of the basements and the clubs and into the private gallery spaces of the 100 mile city.

In this regard, Florian himself could the archetype, the classic case study. But I suspect that Peter Rehberg and possibly also Christian Fennesz might recognise aspects of their own back stories in such a formulation. Jim O’Rourke too, if you factor out the rave connection, although Jim is perhaps more an example of those other dominant models in contemporary experimental digital sound work, the autistic autodidact, the perverse polymath. Certainly the music these three make together on In Stereo sounds like it could have been produced by individuals who once stalked the warehouse parties of Northern Europe in TG inspired leathers and combats but now slouch around the bright white interiors of sonic art biennials dressed in Paul Smith suits and charcoal grey shirts buttoned to the neck, no tie.

But there was an irony at the centre of Florian’s concept, in that David Tudor beat him to it by about three decades. Tudor’s 1976 piece Pulsers was described by the composer as an exploration of “the world of rhythms created electronically by analog, rather than digital, circuitry”. More to the point, it sounds weirdly like Marshall Jefferson, the Acid pioneer, getting to grips with the idiosyncracies that had been accidentally hardwired into the Roland TB-303, the Acid Machine itself.

In the sleevenotes to the 1996 Lovely Music CD Three Works For Live Electronics, which contains a version of Pulsers that was originally released on LP in 1984 and was assembled and mixed by Tudor with Nicolas Collins, John Cage’s favourite piano player writes: “With analog circuitry, the time-base common to the rhythms can be varied in many different ways by a performer, and can eventually become unstable.” Jefferson’s first record proper, released in 1985 (a year after Pulsers) under the name Virgo, was titled “Go Wild Rhythm Track”, so I reckon Chicago’s experimental House authority could get to that.

Several minutes into Pulsers, a tape of Takehisa Kosugi improvising on an electronic violin is inserted into the mix, and all of a sudden the track sounds more like Henry Flynt jamming with the Drummers of Burundi. But play the first few minutes of it back to back with Sleezy D’s Marshall Jefferson-produced “I’ve Lost Control” back to back with any of the tracks on Acid In The Style Of David Tudor and don’t tell me you can’t hear some occluded synchronicities rearing up to wipe the smirk off Florian Hecker’s face (unless that irony was intended, of course, in which case Florian is even smarter than I thought).

Tony Herrington

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Netaudio survey: How does the Internet influence your music habits?

Nathan Budzinski

The Netaudio festival (an offline festival for online music) are calling out for participants in a short survey about the effect of the internet on how people make and listen to music. It should take about 10-15 minutes of your time and has some prizes up for grabs to those who complete it, including a copy of our very own The Wire Primers, a Last FM membership subscription, a copy of Nicolas Collins's Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking and a copy of Steve Goodman's (aka Kode9) Sonic Warfare: Sound, Effect And The Ecology Of Fear amongst other goodies.

Click here to go to the survey

Nathan Budzinski

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Adventures In Modern Music 4 February 2010

Nathan Budzinski

Tonight's episode will be broadcast live from Berlin in a special Transmediale festival edition. Hosts Chris Bohn and Derek Walmsley will be joined by Family Battle Snake man Bill Kouligas and Wolfgang Müller, musician, artist and founder of Die Tödliche Doris. 21:00-22:30 (BST), 104.4 FM for Londoners, streamed live at resonancefm.com for the rest of the world.

Nathan Budzinski

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