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Perforation. 

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Space. 

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Object.

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Scores.

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Ninth of August Two Thousand and Eighteen

I found a rather interesting online article by Tom Service (2012) who notes; ‘It’s a critical commonplace to say, when a performance has touched the heights of instrumental brilliance, that the performer and their instrument seemed as one – as if there were no gap between the physicality of the player’s body and the wood, wire, gut, metal, and even electronics of their instruments.’ (Service, 2012) I, too, would agree that the ‘best’ moments of improvisation in my practice (however difficult they may be to quantify) are when the instrument ‘takes over’. I refer to this in my practice as object disorientation. In ‘Realist Magic’ (2013:23) Timothy Morton addresses this: ‘One object—say an oud, a lute—can be attended to, attuned to, in different ways that bring out strange hidden properties of that object. In this sense playing an oud is like doing phenomenology. You are attending to the inner structure of the object, allowing yourself to be taken over by it.’

It is true that, often, we experience reverie or enter a ‘trance-like’ state when listening to or making certain sounds. These sounds can even be part of the phenomenology of the everyday, i.e. sounds which we might usually attune to in our daily activities. Musique concrète and field recording have the potential to address this neglect to our sonic surroundings in ways not too dissimilar to the key concepts of R. Murray Schaffer’s Acoustic Ecology (1977:131) perhaps, even, Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis (1974) Some of these sounds can induce us into incorporeal planes of perception, which are not in direct connection to the specific object, signification or site of these sonic occurrence.

I have started reading Nancy’s ‘Listening’ (2007) probably the last piece of research I will do for this project, now I’m in this late stage. I’m particularly interested in finding out more about sound’s capacity overwhelm and the affective subjectification of the human to nonhuman sounds. As, Nancy puts it: through sound, ‘we are in the presence of, not a being, but rather a coming and a passing an extending and a penetrating’ (Nancy, 2007:13)

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First of August Two Thousand and Eighteen

Translation and transaction, in creative practice, never go without meaning. The bellowing smoke signals from the fried C9 capacitor in my Moog induces a (not so) subtle shift in my focus. Yet, as my fingers wrap around the neck of the Telecaster, I am beholden to a new line of tradition, through new propulsions and new techno-mutations of the body.

(sounds to follow)

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OOO, Fountain & me.

Twentieth of July, Two Thousand and Eighteen.

For object oriented ontology, Art is not an anthropocentric region of reality. Anthropogenic, perhaps, but crucially OOO asserts that Art helps to reveal the structure of how things exist; the machinations of causality itself. When considering OOO and the art object, in such a zoomed-out scale, it is impossible to ignore the influence on the French school, of the distinctive reversal of causality in Marcel Duchamp’s Art. The artist, himself, made some thought-provoking insights on the matter; ‘the whole world is based on chance, or at least chance is a definition of what happens in the world we live in and know more than any causality’ (Duchamp, cited in Molderings, 2010:124)

There are remarkable parallels between the work of Duchamp and the core aesthetic and conceptual values of musique concrète, corollaries that have directly informed the creative practice of this project. These similarities are, perhaps, most notably found in Duchamp’s ‘readymades’, which began as a rather ordinary objects, a urinal in ‘Fountain’, for example, in its mundane and anonymous context. This object was then taken out of this indifferent continuum and ‘re-framed’ into the realm of art, where it became an ongoing event, generative…spawning a world of ideas (Goldsmith and Dwarkin, 2011:111) . 

Such an approach must have, certainly, informed the work of musique concrète composers such as Pierre Schaeffer, as noted in Elijah and Rastall (2013:13) ‘Schaeffer’s philosophy discovers music in sound…therefore the French school can be described, much like Duchamp’s Fountain, as appreciating sound because of the context.’

More specifically, from the start of this project, I began to realise that, through and object oriented lens, sounds are no longer deictic signifiers. Rather, they are material acts with withdrawn contours, which can be amplified, augmented and distorted. Insofar, my practice now draws upon a highly ‘sculptural’ palette, the resulting works enable the synthesis of both crafted objects and ‘found’ objects that arise in the studio setting.

Reading.

Elijah, T. and Rastall, W. 2013. A History of Musique Concrete and Ulysses. University of Arkansas Press. 

Goldsmith, K. & Dworkin, C. 2011. Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Northwestern University Press. 

Molderings, H. 2010. Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance: Art as Experiment. Columbia University Press.

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étude  #1

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Entry Two: Fourth of July Two Thousand and Eighteen

‘No one writes or paints alone.’

– Bourriaud (2002:81)

Improvisation one: ‘Listening. Mostly Saw Wave and Analog Delay Line’

Much like writing being a fundamental mode of reading, listening, undoubtedly, is the basis of music.

Here, I consider improvisation as being both an act of reading and listening, even listening to quietness - 'hearing' what is not being said...

Listening, perforated into bytes. Hollowed out from an irreducible list of collaborators, sound-work from an attic, encoded to lossy MP3, suspended in cyberspace.

(Sounds to follow)

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Object. Space. Perforation.

Entry One: The Second of July, Two Thousand and Eighteen.

Throughout the academic year, I have anticipated the need to address an effective way to document research ideas during the crucial, summative stages of the MSc programme. However, as the final months of the 17/18 academic year are drawing near, and I am still trying to work out the answer…Am I going to Blog This Thing?

Or more, precisely, ‘How am I Going to Blog This Thing?’

Initially, my apprehension towards this approach of ‘publicly’ documenting embryonic research notes; preliminary speculations and opening thoughts, has risen from the fear that, in these early stages - I’m not absolutely certain about what I want to say. More than anything, I’m worried about making a claim that I might regret and want to retract. What if I send it out into the ether and then find out that I’m wrong? Would that be embarrassing or not?

Despite these uncertainties, I have realised that using my (ever sleepy) Tumblr account as a primary locus for self-reflection throughout the project, will hopefully serve to underpin the action-research nature of the intervention. Additionally, it might be nice to have a sort of archive that allows me to chart how my project evolves over time. This provides an insertion point for me to note that, due to the personal, idiomatic nature of the Tumblr blog, I will not be avoiding colloquial or informal writing in these entries.

The structure of the blog entries to follow will be in the form of critical self-reflection and refractive musing on/between a series of research interventions. Specifically, these interventions will be in the form of improvisation as network generation. Put simply, I will perform a series of ‘jam’ sessions in the DAW and then reflect on the central role of nonhuman actants during these improvisations. These blogs, unlike the formal written element to the project (dissertation) will not critique the approach through theoretical/contextual scholarly writing. Rather, the blog entries serve as a vehicle for in some way articulating the unassailable, futural nature of sonic experience.

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Object.Space.Perforation. the blog.

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 ‘The Space Between People, Things and People’, part ii of iii.

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Sound Design étude based on a broken harmonium: note drone, bellow exhales and shutter closing, with no DSP.

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Sound Design étude based on organic foley/concrète with no DSP. 

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Eyes Closed, Starting at the sun

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Previous Work:

https://play.spotify.com/album/2VqLbFdGLUn9ayUj19y5pC?

http://clubkissability.bigcartel.com/product/death-at-sea-drag-kiss009

play=true&utm_source=open.spotify.com&utm_medium=open

http://www.clashmusic.com/videos/premiere-death-at-sea-shy-kids