Stephan Mathieu is composing a score for a documentary about the link between two memorial sites in South Dakota: Wounded Knee and Mount Rushmore, which looks at the economic disparity between the two sites. The film is crowdfunding the remainder of its production costs: the shoot and a rough cut has been completed, and funds raised will go towards colour correction, sound editing and mixing. Sacred Ground is a not for profit film, and anything raised above the target will be donated to community projects in the Pine Ridge Reservation.
More details on the film here, and watch the video below.
1 September sees a number of Fela Kuti's most important albums reissued on vinyl, plus the 2xCD soundtrack to the Finding Fela documentary which is released in UK cinemas on 5 September. A preview screening is on at the BFI on 4 September.
Six albums are also being reissued by Knitting Factory Records: Fela With Ginger Baker Live!, Confusion, Expensive Shit, He Miss Road, Sorrow Tears & Blood, and Teacher Don't Teach Me Nonsense.
Back in 2012 we briefly reported on Stuart McClean's call for audio to be broadcast on FM frequency in the Galloway Forest Dark Skies Park. The third edition of that radio broadcast will be happening again for 24 hours on 27 September, and an open call for previously unheard works is out. Any audio sent in must be unreleased, and must not be available to listen to anywhere online, and after broadcast everything will be deleted via the Gutmann method (previous hard drives were wiped, beaten, burnt and buried).
Anyone wanting to hear the broadcast will need to be in the vicinity of The Grey Mare's Tail Bridge over Palnure (near Talnotry) on 27 September. Submissions should be no longer than 30 minutes long, emailed to Stuart McClean at frenchbloke[at]gmail[dot]com. Deadline for submissions 22 September. More details here.
Wire writer Joseph Stannard (who interviewed St Vincent for this month's cover feature) is taking The Outer Church on tour along the South and East coast of the UK. Playing a three night run in September are Aberystwyth based duo The Lowland Hundred, self described "coastal slurtronic folk" project Kemper Norton, and Brighton folk duo Lutine.
The Outer Church's Coastal Tour will hit Ramsgate Music Hall on 12 September and Southend Railway Hotel on 13, before heading home to Brighton Green Door Store on 14 September. Stannard says the tour expands on The Outer Church's existing relationship with "the strange magic of the seaside, which is where it all started, five years ago, here in Brighton."
Flautist and saxophonist Paul Horn, whose recordings laid the foundations for New Age music, has died in Vancouver aged 84. He began his career in the 1950s with drummer Chico Hamilton before forming his own quintet. In the 1960s he studied transcendental meditation in India alongside The Beatles, which led to him taking his flute to the Taj Mahal in 1968, where he recorded his improvisations. That album, titled Inside, but also known as Inside The Taj Mahal, of solo flute and voice, sold over 750,000 copies and spawned a series of releases recorded at natural and sacred sites with striking or unusual acoustics.
Susanna and Jenny Hval are releasing a collaborative album titled Meshes Of Voice, on Susanna's label SusannaSonata. The ideas for the record began as an exchange of letters in 2009 and was further developed into two live performances. The material is inspired by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid's film Meshes Of The Afternoon from 1943, and the duo will perform the record at Ultima Festival on 12 September. Meshes Of Voice is released in the UK on 18 August. Listen to "I Have Walked This Body" from the record below.
Freeform radio station WFMU is in the process of building an audience engine, a web based toolbox of add ons for existing platforms including Drupal and Wordpress, which will enable organisations similar to themselves to build audiences and become self sufficient.
WFMU's Audience Engine will be open source and is aimed primarily at radio stations, but will be opened up to small and large media entities, from journalists to TV stations. For interested parties, a more in depth discussion of the back end development and tech aspects of the audience engine is online at Nieman Journalism Lab.
"When I'm on location, it's a totally solitary activity. You put some headphones on, and at that moment, nobody can hear the world like you can." Chris Watson is talking to me over Skype from his home in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, explaining the details of a soon to be released smartphone app, which contains a cherry-picked collection of his sound recordings made as far back as the 1990s. Many originally appeared on CD (via Touch, who now also have an iPhone app), but Watson is enthusiastic about finding new formats such as this for his work. "The app is going to be used by individuals, and that means there's an individual at either end of the chain," he says. "I like the idea that wherever you are, you can drop into this environment."
Built by Brighton arts collective The Nimbus Group for Brighton Digital Festival, the free app, Nimbus, will be released on 10 September. As well as 14 of Watson's field recordings, it also includes four sonic games: a sound based navigational game, whereby players have to find their way to a destination purely by listening to the directional sounds; a game which uses the north-south auditory axis; a collection of sounds for insomniacs; and one sound which will only unlock when you travel at the velocity of a diving peregrine falcon (300 km/hr).
Designer Carina Westling describes the app as a paint box – "in line with Chris Watson's perception of his practice as a 'sound painter'," she explains. It allows you to "reposition or reframe your day to day experiences, by travelling within portable sound environments from unique situations that would be impossible to inhabit in any other way".
Watson's recordings have always been based around the premise that we have become desensitised to the precise character of our environments. "I'm convinced that a location – part of the sense of place and spirit of anywhere – has a sense of character and spirit which we can tune into," he says, "and I think a lot of that is to do with the sounds of the place, and the acoustics of those environments – something that we're very sensitive to but have probably forgotten how to use."
The chosen recordings offer stark contrasts to the common sounds of Brighton and other UK cities and suburbs: vultures eating a zebra, insects, a nightjar in Mozambique, sounds from the Sgurr na Lapaich mountain in the North Highlands, and what Watson says is one of his favourite recordings: elephants sleeping at night in the Maasai Mara Nature Reserve in Kenya, originally released on Outside The Circle Of Fire. "We stopped at two in the morning just to have a flask of tea, and these elephants came out of the grass and into an open area," he says. "There was a matriarch, the lead female, with one of her babies, and others, and they followed her in silence and came around our vehicle, totally ignoring it. Then 100 metres in front of us, this matriarch – the lead animal and the largest – drops onto her knees and just rolled over and went to sleep. I've never seen anything like it! Right in front of us, and all the others took their lead from her. I was on the roof of the vehicle with a directional microphone on a pole, so we sat for about two hours and recorded them.
"I really love the way it ebbs and flows,” he continues. "Sometimes you can hear it and sometimes you can't – they have huge lungs, so the breathing cycle is quite long, and it sounds like waves on a beach. It really stuck with me that sound, it's harmonically very rich and it's very musical."
Nimbus will be available for free on iOS and Android from 10 September 2014, during the Brighton Digital Festival, at which there will be a live event. Chris Watson also performs this weekend (24-27 July) at Port Eliot festival in Cornwall.
Next Thursday (31 July) is the third birthday of our Rewired radio show on NTS. To mark the occasion, Daisy Hyde, Shane Woolman and Katie Gibbons will all be in the studio talking to Pan records founder Bill Kouligas on the development of the label and its future direction, discussing his formative influences and current listening, and playing some unreleased exclusive tracks.
On the same day (12-1pm), NTS will be broadcasting a Pan showcase, with other artists from the label playing back to back ahead of their show at Dalston Dance Tunnel (full listing here).
Rewired broadcasts 6-8pm every other week on NTS live. All shows are archived online.
Following the recent glut of 100th anniversary items including coffee and perfume, Strut has announced a new Sun Ra compilation, put together by Arkestra bandleader Marshall Allen. The 20 track set includes a cross section of recordings by Sun Ra from the 1960s up to the 80s, plus key Arkestra members. In The Orbit Of Ra also includes unreleased tracks: "Trying To Put The Blame On Me", an acoustic track recorded live in Rome in 1977; an extended version of "Island In The Sun", and an unheard part of "Reflects Motion" (originally on Secrets Of The Sun).
In The Orbit Of Ra is released on double CD and vinyl on 22 September, and sleevenotes include an interview with Marshall Allen and previously unpublished photos by Val Wilmer. A full tracklisting for the compilation is online here.
