tonight's episode: "PHONOGRAPHY" and Found Sound Art -- Phonography, literally, is "writing in sound", but rather than just playing the original field recordings that "phonographers" collect, tonight we feature the creations of artists who took these sources (objects, wind, water, inventions) and recombined the sounds to include rhythm, melody and organized patterns (music). Inspired madness? you decide.

Produced by Danielle Parks - hosted by Danielle and daniel (of the A Different Nature Collective)

 Andy Hosch - Les Bicyclettes - from a recording constructed entirely of sounds from bicycle wheels, spinning or struck (how very Portland!) - excerpt -

Xerophonics - Matrix 12510-12 - from Xerophonics - 4:15

David Slusser - Creaks - from Delight at the End of The Tunnel - 0:59
 here's a closer look at this work, Slusser's first album on Tzadik: http://www.furious.com/perfect/slusser.html
and here is an article about Slusser's amazing life (where your eyebrow will likely raise at least once per paragraph): http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-08-17/music/17255450_1_saudi-princess-ro...

Stomp - Waterphonics - from Orbitones, Spoon Harps and Bellowphones - 2:20

Raymond Scott - Backward Beeps - from Manhattan Research Inc - 1:05
       performed on Scott's "Circle Machine" - Around 1959, Scott designed and built the Circle Machine, a more compact electronic sequencer. Dr. Thomas Rhea, music synthesis professor at the Berklee College of Music, visited Scott many times in the early '70s and remembers the Circle Machine as "an analog waveform generator that was this crazy, whirling-dervish thing. It had a ring of incandescent lamps, each with its own rheostat, and a photo-electric cell on a spindle that twirled in a circle above the lights." Each bulb's intensity was individually adjustable, as was the rotation speed of the photocell. As the lights brightened, the pitch ascended. Arm rotation speed governed the rhythm. The lights could be stag-gered in brightness, and depending on the pattern, the tone sequence generated would change. The Circle Machine was capable of a wide range of unearthly sounds, as heard in numerous commercial jingles Scott recorded during the late 1950s and early 1960s (many of them are included on Manhattan Research Inc.). 
SPIN: ''Paranoiac, visionary, misanthrope, and machine fetishist, the late composer Raymond Scott was also an electronic music pioneer and inventor geek who had Madison Avenue paying him to soundtrack its vision of postwar American futurism. The music on MANHATTAN RESEARCH INC. is both archaic and tres moderne. It reveals the fears and fantasies of a nation in boom-time denial. And Scott mischievously spikes almost every one with a dystopian mickey: could give a kid nightmares for years.'' (written by Senior Editor, Will Hermes) Check out more about Raymond Scott's Manhattan Research here:
    http://www.raymondscott.com/mripr.html

The User  - }.}@}.@.}@}. - from Symphony #2 for Dot Matrix Printers - 5:59
This is where Dot matrix printers are turned into musical ‘instruments’, while a computer network system, typical of a contemporary office, is employed as the ‘orchestra’ used to play them. The orchestra is ‘conducted’ by a network server which reads from a composed ‘score’. Each of the printers plays from a different ‘part’ comprised of rhythms and pitches made up of letters of the alphabet, punctuation marks and other characters. [The User] uses ASCII textfiles to compose, orchestrate, and synchronize sonorous and densely textured, rhythmically-driven music.

 Hans Reichel - For Those Who love Propellers - from Lower Lurum - 2:56
Hans Reichel's Lower Lurum is perhaps the record that introduced the world to his invention, the daxophone, a box playing a long, thin altered board that produces so many tones and sounds they are virtually limitless. Add to this Reichel's homemade guitars, which are truly exotic pieces of art as well as functional instruments, and you have an orchestra from another dimension. Which is what Lower Lurum is pretty much all about. Being subtitled as a "guitar and daxophone" operetta, in Reichel's mind there is probably a concept here. But that concept for the listener -- especially since there are no notes explaining what the "plot" of this operetta is supposed to be -- is tonal. Given how technical Reichel is about everything in the booklet, it is -- for those who've never heard Reichel's music -- shocking to hear its emotional warmth, depth, and humor. There is very little manipulation of sound with overdubs occurring in very few places, and even they are used sparingly. This is music that comes straight through the microphone without effects. In large part this is because it doesn't need any. Reichel's operetta and his music in general are more musical than music because they integrate the entire human being -- physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual -- into the way in which a composition or improvisation is executed and ultimately sounds. On Lower Lurum, Reichel has created a light body (or, from the Buddhist perspective, a rainbow body) of sound. Its clarity and spirit are one in the same, expressed as resonances from the heart through the hands and moving beyond them both into a sonic architecture that expresses emotions and thoughts that occur just beyond the field of language, and that achievement is far greater that the faculty of language this reviewer possesses. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide

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Maryanne Amacher - Synaptic Island - from Sound Characters - 8:36

Maryanne was born in 1938 in Kane, Pennsylvania, to an American nurse and a Swiss freight train worker. Amacher left Kane to attend the University of Pennsylvania where she received a B.F.A in 1964. Subsequently, she did graduate work in acoustics and computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  While there she studied composition with George Rochberg and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

While in residence at the University of Buffalo, in 1967, she created City Links: Buffalo, a 28-hour piece using 5 microphones in different parts of the city, broadcast live by radio station WBFO. There were several other pieces in the "City Links" series, though many details are not yet known. A common feature was the use of telephone lines to connect the sound environments of different sites into the same space, a very early example of what is now called "telematic performance" and preceded much more famous examples of this by Max Neuhaus and others.

Her major pieces have almost exclusively been site specific, often using many loudspeakers to create what she called "structure borne sound", which is a differentiation with "airborne sound", the paradox intentional. By using many diffuse sound sources (either not in the space or speakers facing at the walls or floors) she would create the psychoacoustic illusions of sound shapes/"precense". Amacher's early work is best represented in the three series of multimedia installations produced in the United States, Europe, and Japan: the sonic telepresence series, "CITY LINKS" 1-22 (1967- ); the architecturally staged "MUSIC FOR SOUND JOINED ROOMS" (1980- ) and the "MINI-SOUND SERIES" (1985- ) a new multimedia form which she created, that is unique in its use of architecture and serialized narrative.

She worked extensively with the physiological (not psychoacoustic) phenomenon called otoacoustic emission, in which the ears themselves act as sound generating devices. Amacher composed several "ear dances" designed to stimulate clear "third" tones coming from the listener's ears. The subtitle of her first Tzadik Records album Sound Characters (Making the Third Ear) references these "ear tones".

"When played at the right sound level, which is quite high and exciting, the tones in this music will cause your ears to act as neurophonic instruments that emit sounds that will seem to be issuing directly from your head ... (my audiences) discover they are producing a tonal dimension of the music which interacts melodically, rhythmically, and spatially with the tones in the room. Tones 'dance' in the immediate space of their body, around them like a sonic wrap, cascade inside ears, and out to space in front of their eyes ... Do not be alarmed! Your ears are not behaving strange or being damaged! ... these virtual tones are a natural and very real physical aspect of auditory perception, similar to the fusing of two images resulting in a third three dimensional image in binocular perception ... I want to release this music which is produced by the listener ..."..so John Zorn did just that. Here is more about this unusual woman who lived in poverty in a house some called uninhabitable, and died just 8 months ago. http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=6169

David Slusser - Turbines -  from Delight at the End of The Tunnel (Tzadik) -  2:34

Qubais Reed Ghazala - Silence The Tongues of Prophecy - from Gravikords, Whirlies & Pyrophones - 4:51
Reed Ghazala is now known internationally as "The Father of Circuit-Bending", a self-discovered and amazingly simple electronic process of creating experimental musical instruments from pre-existing audio circuitry. Following Reed's writings, and without any prior knowledge of electronics, people everywhere are following this new art form, this new standard of audio exploration, and are designing their own fantastic instruments.
Reed's sculptural experimental instruments have been built for Tom Waits, Peter Gabriel, King Crimson's Pat Mastalotto, Faust, Chris Cutler, Towa Tei, Yann Tomita, Blur and many other interesting musicians. Reed's work has been covered and requested throughout the arts "underground" and the major media as well, including ABC Television, The Discovery Channel, MTV, Disney, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The L. A. Weekly, The Chicago Tribune, The Music, Wired Magazine, Option, Billboard, Time Out, Stereophile, The Smithsonian, The ReR Quarterly, Sound on Sound, Computers & Music, Japan's Sound and Recording, and many others. Reed's twenty-article series "Circuit-Bending and Living Instruments" is now being published and translated around the world. Along with many private acquisitions, Reed's work has found its way into the NYC Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim and the Whitney permanent collections as well as numerous other public galleries worldwide.
there's much more. check out this amazing website:
 http://www.anti-theory.com/bio/

 

Por Por - car horns from Ghana

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Ellen Fullman - Duration - from Staggered Stasis - 23:13
Over the last two decades, Ellen Fullman has been perfecting her Long String Instrument. This unique instrument of her own design is some 80 feet in length and played by literally walking through it. The resulting sounds are beautiful gliding tones with a rich harmonic content. Check out these pictures of it at her website: http://www.ellenfullman.com/Photos.html

Braaxtaal (w/Jaap Blonk) - Deutsche Lyrik -from Braaxtaal- 9:22








Annea Lockwood - Breathing Machine - from 1973's Glass World -  2:35
 "I had started exploring glass sounds as a way of sensitising my ears to very fine sonic detail. But the glass gave me a greater gift: it completely changed my way of composing and of thinking about music itself."- Annea Lockwood, 2007
more about Glass World : http://meshes.blogspot.com/2007/07/annea-lockwood-early-works.html

David Slusser - Stamps - from Delight at the End of a Tunnel -  2:25

Tom Waits - Babbachichuija - from Orbitones, Spoon Harps and Bellowphones - 2:18

Annea Lockwood - Dialogue: Bottles & Jars -from Glass World - 1:45

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Ship Horn Symphony - You Tube - - 4:19

David Slusser - 60 Hertz - from Delight at the End of a Tunnel - 3:11