For Immmediate Release:
Noise and the Possibility for a Future
Organized by Warren Neidich
March 6th and 7th, 2015
The Goethe-Institut Los Angeles
Address: 5750 Wilshire Boulevard, 100, Los Angeles, CA 90036
Participants:
Victor Albarracin, Andrew Berardini, David Burrows, Luciano Chessa, Mathieu Copeland, D.J. Spooky (aka Paul Miller), Corey Fogel, Simone Forti, Paul Hegarty, Sarah Kessler, Ulrich Krieger, Gregory Lenczycki, Mattin, Daniel Munoz, Renee Petropoulos, David Schafer, Marcus Schmickler, Susan Silton, Gabie Strong Karen Tongson, John Wiese, Susanne Winterling
Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things. (Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music)
Noise is prevalent in our post-industrial society, like it or not! Whether experienced as the cacophony of an industrial era eroded and broken, breeding new forms of information, war machines and inspirational responses such as those of Throbbing Gristle's, in which over-painted and appropriated sounds are collaged with real time performance, producing a clangorous, disharmonic din. Or whether, instead, the dissonance resulting from an overly compressed and accelerated cultural habitus occurring near highways and airports that makes life a little less livable, generating protective responses such as noise barriers, those Serra-esque barricades shielding adjacent built communities.
Noise usually gets a bad rap. It is appreciated as something offensive, rendering systems inefficient and therefore requiring control or mitigation. However, noise has another side, more positive and emancipatory. This 'other side' is the focus of this conference which understands it in an expanded form. It asks instead whether it might be considered as something liberating. Could we think of it rather as a mode of production beyond capitalism's capacity to recuperate its alterity for its own purposes; a sublime place of freedom?
This symposium aims to understand how Noise acts as a destabilizing force through which the inherent diversity and variability in the world, its pluri-potentiality, is first unleashed and then reregistered to create alternative events that reroute institutional networks, hoping to ‘undistribute’ and disentangle the contemporary mesh of our highly-connected social, political, economic, and psychological world. What then might emerge? This cross-disciplinary intervention links the fields of visual art and music, especially their theories of the avant-garde, to other fields of study such as performance studies, auto-destructive art, social constructivism, critical theory, gender and queer studies and political philosophy, in order to understand an expanded notion of noise as a discursive apparatus of building. After all, in our information and knowledge economies, ideas and discourses create the surplus value of exo-evolutionary fields that become embodied in neural, social and economic circuitry. Of special importance will be a conception of noise as it relates to the emerging field of communicative and cognitive capitalism in which the mind and brain are the new sites of wealth production and control. As the introductory quote implies, music and noise create new possibilities for contemporary forms, shapes and events active in the cultural landscape.
Warren Neidich
For more information:
phone: +1 (323) 5253388
fax +1 (323) 9343597
info@losangeles.goethe.org
www.goethe.de/losangeles
Event Schedule (subject to change)
Noise and the Possibility For a Future
March 6 & 7, 2015
The Goethe-Institut Los Angeles
5750 Wilshire Blvd, 100, Los Angeles, CA 90036
(323) 525-3388
FRIDAY, MARCH 6
Coffee 9:30-10:00 am
Morning Session 10:00-1:00 am
10-11 am: Ulrich Krieger, “Noise – A Definition”
11-11:45 am: Daniel Muñoz , “Noise and Knowledge”
11:45-12: 30 pm: Luciano Chessa, "A Salvatore Sciarrino, caminante esemplare." Unexpected Teleology in Luigi Nono's "Final" Dedication.
12:30-1:00 pm: Discussion
Lunch 1:00-2:15 pm
Afternoon Session 2:15-6:00 pm
2:15 -2:30 pm: Simone Forti, “Face Tunes”
2:30 -3:15 pm: Sarah Kessler, “Black Noise: Richard and Willie’s Vinyl Ventriloquism”
3:15-4:00 pm: Karen Tongson, “To Slaughter, Not Slay: Karaoke’s Queer Noisemaking”
Coffee 4:00-4:30 pm
cont’d
4:30 -5:15 pm: Mathieu Copeland, “EXP(L)O(S)I(T)ION “The amplified sound of the auto-destructive process can be an integral part of the total conception.” G.Metzger, 1959”
5:15- 5:45 pm: Discussion
Dinner 6:00-7:30 pm
Film and Sound Event 7:30 pm- 10:00 pm
Andrew Berardini + John Wiese, “Reading of ‘More Noise Please’ by Steven Jesse Bernstein”
Renee Petropoulos + Gregory Lenczycki, “Between Libya, Scotland and the United States”
Susanne Winterling, “Surface Spaces and Sound Realms”
Gabie Strong , “UR RITUALS”
Susan Silton, “The Crowing Hens”
David Burrows, “Welcome Neuropath-Feedback Loop (Time-Stretcher-Tool)”
Luciano Chessa, “Solo Dan Bau”
Corey Fogel, “shir parse/nip”
SATURDAY, MARCH 7
Coffee 9:30-10:00 am
Morning Session 10:00 am -1:00 pm
10:00 -11:00 am: Paul Hegarty, “Last music, Last sound, Last noise”
11:00-11:45 am: Mattin, “Noise and Ostranenie”
11:45-12:30 am: David Burrows, “Towards a new Nature Theatre of Oklahoma: the social production of arrhythmia”
12:30- 1:00 pm Discussion
Lunch 1:00 - 2:00 pm
Afternoon Session 2:00 - 5:00 pm
2:00-3:00 pm: D.J. Spooky, “The Imaginary App”
3:00-3:45 pm: Marcus Schmickler, “Politics of Frequency”
3:45-4:30 pm: Victor Albarracin, “LaLangue”
4:30-5:00 pm: Discussion
Evening Event 7:00-9:00 pm
THE SCHOENBERG SOUNDWAYS PROJECT at USC
Curated by David Schafer
7:00-7:15 Introduction and Screening: A Documentary short to introduce the five-day mobile sound trucks
7:15-7:30 Lecture: Presentation by Paul Chaikin “Emancipation of Dissonance”
7:30-7:45 Piano Recital: Aron Kallay piano Opus 11
7:45-8:00 Reading: Introduction of “Verklarte Nacht,” by Paul Chaikin
8:00-8:30 Performance: the Thornton Student Music Ensemble performs “Verklarte Nacht” led by Karen Dreyfus
8:30-9:00 Reception: Viennese pastries, coffee, and conversation
Curated by David Schafer
7:00-7:15 Introduction and Screening: A Documentary short to introduce the five-day mobile sound trucks
7:15-7:30 Lecture: Presentation by Paul Chaikin “Emancipation of Dissonance”
7:30-7:45 Piano Recital: Aron Kallay piano Opus 11
7:45-8:00 Reading: Introduction of “Verklarte Nacht,” by Paul Chaikin
8:00-8:30 Performance: the Thornton Student Music Ensemble performs “Verklarte Nacht” led by Karen Dreyfus
8:30-9:00 Reception: Viennese pastries, coffee, and conversation
Lecture and Performance Abstracts
Noise and the Possibility for a Future
March 6 & 7, 2015
The Goethe-Institut Los Angeles
5750 Wilshire Boulevard, 100, Los Angeles, CA 90036
(323) 525-3388
Victor Albarracin Llanos
LaLangue
I ignore what noise is; I use the word with frequency, referring to different and conflicted moments, perceptions, practices, and ideas. Noise is that thing I tried to produce during the end of the 90s’ working with extremely low and hi frequencies and short stereo pannings, looking for the right amount to make the listeners sick and the stereos broken. To prove my point, I got sick and my stereo broke. Noise is this YouTube video called “10 hours of white noise”. It has been played more than two hundred thousand times, receiving exciting user’s reviews attesting its narcotic power, since people use it to sleep. Noise is dope. Noise is an erudite genre as well as a permanent element in not-noise music. Noise is the weird pitch of a voice, noise is the sonic weapon used by riot police to dissolve demonstrations, noise is a crowded bar, noise is any sound that results disturbing to each one’s ears. “Noise annoys,” Who, among you, said that? Noise is noisome, it stinks, but it’s The Shit. Noise is a lecture when the lecturer can’t even speak in a proper way la langue, votre langue, but LaLangue, the babbling of a confusing confusion. Anyway, you have to make the effort to understand me, or maybe go to have a coffee break.
I have been invited to talk about noise, about “noise and the possibility for a future.” So I don’t know if I should talk about noise or about the future, since, in my head, the future is not for noise. Most of the films about the future, the future–future and not the promise of an imminent return to the brutality of the past, are staged in white, silent locations, where everything has being tamed and the machines make no noise, unless we call noise all this minimal, Scandinavian design-like sounds when the slide door opens or the central computer emits a new holographic projection. Then is the grunt, the howl or the scream of a primordial creature, destroying with noises and fangs and claws and slobber the peaceful promise of any future. Noise is the disaster of the future, and the disaster, parasiting Blanchot, “is always already past.” Having no points neither about noise nor the future, let me please think about what could I do here, before your presence in “my” LaLangue.
Andrew Berardini & John Wiese
Reading of “More Noise Please” by Steven Jesse Bernstein
A eulogy twenty-five years late for a suicided hero. The broken-glass growl and broken-heart spirit of Steven Jesse Bernstein cannot read his reluctant ode to noise ever again, so I’ll step in and read on his behalf. With a friendship with William S. Burroughs and inclusion by odd and scattered fans in their projects from Semiotext(e) to Natural Born Killers, Bernstein isn’t wholly forgotten, just mostly. His words still echo over the transom for me, they refuse to stop haunting. Out of the incessant grind of factories, the diesel hack of trucks, the rumble of jet turbines, Bernstein writes ”maybe we can’t live without all this GODDAMNED noise, maybe I need the noise to write poems, make love, and eat. I’m going to hang a sign out my window that says MORE NOISE PLEASE or THANK YOU FOR MAKING NOISE.”
This is a thank you to Bernstein, a simple sign scrawled with my own voice: Thank you for making noise.
David Burrows
Towards a new Nature Theatre of Oklahoma: the social production of arrhythmia
The talk diagrams two approaches to noise, producing a metamodelisation that marks out the similarities, differences and blind spots of two modes of thought. The first approach is Henri Lefebvre’s theory of Rhythmanalysis (as investigation of everyday life) and the philosopher’s definition of arrhythmia (relating to the disruption and de-synchronisation of rhythm); the second approach is Ray Brassier’s notion of noise as stochastic presentations (relating to incompossible signals or information that have a ‘dis-organising potency’). In the example of Rhythmanalysis (outlined by Lefebvre in the book of the same name), the human body and its processes and senses are proposed as an instrument that registers or measures cyclical, linear, organic and mechanical rhythms and arrhythmia; the body producing relative scale and quantitative and qualitative indexing for rhythm and noise. In this, arrhythmia is presented by Lefebvre as a negative, pathological event and as a sign of breakdown and disease. In contrast, in Genre is Obsolete, Brassier discusses encounters with performances of various collaborations (rather than rhythm and sound in general) that produce stochastic noise (what Lefebvre might call arrhythmia). These collaborations are proposed as events in which a subject cannot organize their experience or process data, leading to an objectification of experience that overrides ‘familiar cognitive-classificatory sluice-gates’; in this, the senses and experience become surplus in a cognitive processing of the event.
A comparison between the two is interesting for the following reasons. Lefebvre measures arrhythmic noise against the body’s senses and processes, but as negative event, whereas Brassier presents an encounter with arrhythmic or stochastic noise as productive (and not as signal of breakdown, ill-health and alienation). However, for Brassier, such encounters elide the body’s senses and processing of information. The paper will discuss whether Brassier’s proposition that noise as incompossible signals disrupt habit, but also whether, as Lefebvre proposes, arrhythmic or stochastic noise is measured or said to exist in relation to human capacities and senses that register multiple rhythms of life (polyrhythmia) and rhythms in sync (eurhythmia). Most interesting is Brassier’s statement that he is interested in noise that disorganises the body and the senses – ‘not transduction but schizduction: noise (that) scrambles the capacity for self-organization’. At the same time, Brassier is concerned with encounters that produce a subject without experience and a privileging of the cognitive. A question arises: in such an event, would a body and a consciousness attempt to reorganise itself – not just through cognitive mapping but through recourse to the senses (through a response to what was being heard – pathemes - as much as through thought alone – mathemes or lessons), even to produce ‘self-less subjects that understand themselves to be no-one and no-where’? Would not the ‘labour of the inhuman’, as Reza Negarestani names a Promethean questioning of human potential, involve tacit as well as cognitive knowledge?
Further to this comparison, both philosophers discuss arrhythmic or stochastic noise (producing breakdown or reflexivity) as troubling for social relations or rhythms of everyday life (for Lefebvre, arrhythmic noise is anti-social and harbinger of illness and for Brassier, noise reveals the redundancy of structure and relation). However, neither philosopher discusses noise in art and music as a collaborative or social product. While both are concerned with the complex rhythms of capitalism, neither gives much political or social import to noise. Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze’s notion of a ‘vacuole of non-communication’, I propose that the performance of noise is a production of space-time different to any other, not as a metaphor or allegory but as a social relation (or collaboration) that allows minds and bodies to explore how nomadic they can be, and that facilitates a ‘community of non-community’.
The problems outlined above will be explored by discussing anarchism in relation to Nick Land’s thoughts about ‘organisation as suppression’, and in relation to Franz Kafka’s invention The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma. (In the novel America, the protagonist Karl comes across a recruiting centre promising full employment for anyone thinking they are an artist, a promise advertised by a company of trumpeters who make a confusing noise, playing whatever they want).
Lastly, I will discuss art works that I have collaborated on – Welcome Neuropath Feedback Loop ICA London 2013 (in which performers attempt to become self-generating, noisy feedback loops) and Drum Drone IMT London 2015 (in which groups of performers drum for a given period with the instruction not to stop, and not to drum in unison).
The lecture aims to address arrhythmic or stochastic noise as social production and offer a critique of speculative aesthetics that elides the body as instrument of registration and measurement (despite often referring to the limits of the body to process information in aesthetic encounters). In this, the body will be discussed as a technology (producing and using tacit knowledge), and not as vitalist potential but as integral to the production of a (negative) space-time that engenders exploration of social bodies yet-to-come.
Further to this comparison, both philosophers discuss arrhythmic or stochastic noise (producing breakdown or reflexivity) as troubling for social relations or rhythms of everyday life (for Lefebvre, arrhythmic noise is anti-social and harbinger of illness and for Brassier, noise reveals the redundancy of structure and relation). However, neither philosopher discusses noise in art and music as a collaborative or social product. While both are concerned with the complex rhythms of capitalism, neither gives much political or social import to noise. Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze’s notion of a ‘vacuole of non-communication’, I propose that the performance of noise is a production of space-time different to any other, not as a metaphor or allegory but as a social relation (or collaboration) that allows minds and bodies to explore how nomadic they can be, and that facilitates a ‘community of non-community’.
The problems outlined above will be explored by discussing anarchism in relation to Nick Land’s thoughts about ‘organisation as suppression’, and in relation to Franz Kafka’s invention The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma. (In the novel America, the protagonist Karl comes across a recruiting centre promising full employment for anyone thinking they are an artist, a promise advertised by a company of trumpeters who make a confusing noise, playing whatever they want).
Lastly, I will discuss art works that I have collaborated on – Welcome Neuropath Feedback Loop ICA London 2013 (in which performers attempt to become self-generating, noisy feedback loops) and Drum Drone IMT London 2015 (in which groups of performers drum for a given period with the instruction not to stop, and not to drum in unison).
The lecture aims to address arrhythmic or stochastic noise as social production and offer a critique of speculative aesthetics that elides the body as instrument of registration and measurement (despite often referring to the limits of the body to process information in aesthetic encounters). In this, the body will be discussed as a technology (producing and using tacit knowledge), and not as vitalist potential but as integral to the production of a (negative) space-time that engenders exploration of social bodies yet-to-come.
Luciano Chessa
“A Salvatore Sciarrino, caminante esemplare." Unexpected Teleology in Luigi Nono's "Final" Dedication.
La lontananza nostalgica, utopica, futura (1988-89), one of Luigi Nono's most celebrated (and performed) works, sets itself apart in the composer's late oeuvre because the closing gesture of this hour-long composition unexpectedly unveils a purposeful finality, revealing—and even staging—a distinctively teleological musical form. By considering both artistic and personal preoccupations, this paper investigates the metaphysical significance of such teleology.
La lontananza can be regarded as the culmination of a process in which Nono adopts a style progressively less bound by serialism, increasingly collaborative, and rarefied. At the same time, his Marxist persuasion had given way to a special brand of humanistic, syncretic spirituality which Nono saw to encapsulate in the famous "traveler" motto, "Caminante, no hay caminos, hay que caminar" (Walker, there is no path, yet you have to walk).
Nono did not intend this quest as a solitary effort, but one he shared with kindred spirits. Thus La lontananza can be successfully read in the context of a lasting professional and human exchange between Nono and the dedicatee of the piece, composer and fellow caminante Salvatore Sciarrino. This exchange, resulting in mutual dedications (Sciarrino to Nono in La perfezione di uno spirito sottile, 1985, and Nono to Sciarrino in La lontananza nostalgica, utopica, futura), constituted a bond still unbroken at the time of Nono's death, and ideally continuing long after his departure.
The most revealing record of this bond is an initiatic text that Nono set into music in Das atmende Klarsein (1981), a text that, not coincidentally, became the basis for Sciarrino's La perfezione: a fragment of the Eleusinian Mysteries ritual found in a late 5th-century B.C. gold tablet of Eleutherna, Crete, and containing detailed instruction to guide the soul through the final journey to Hades.
Observed in light of the exchange with Sciarrino, Nono's late musical statement appears fluid: not a towering opus ultimum, not a self-contained entity, but rather a network of dynamic, complex relationships which, uncovered, allow us to realize the substance of La lontananza’s teleology: at once musical and fully spiritual.
This discussion seems interesting to me. Both Sciarrino and Nono have used profusely noise in their respective practices, and surely as a foundation of La Lontanza are those 8 tape collages with hissing, and noise of music stands, and trains, etc...
Now, this context, noise "meant" for them several things at once. If anything at all, their noise was first a way to critique the Italian society they were both living in. There's more to a presentation than its words: my "performance" of this academic paper is 'noisy'.
It is 'noisy' not only in the fact that its presentation is noise-based (it is in part recited through bull horn feedback), but, more importantly, it is *formally* noisy, as the presentation collapses into itself, and into noise, room noises, in the end.
Mathieu Copeland
EXP(L)O(S)I(T)ION “The amplified sound of the auto-destructive process can be an integral part of the total conception”. G.Metzger, 1959
In 1959, As Gustav Metzger was envisaging his first manifesto for an ‘Auto-destructive Art’, he hand-wrote onto the final print these definite lines: “The amplified sound of the auto-destructive process can be an integral part of the total conception”.
Encompassing a process that would envisage the self-destruction of the work of art as part of its overall construct and destiny, Metzger conceived the ‘sound’ in ad-equation to the making, and the ultimate destruction, 'off' an artistic endeavour – (“artistry”, as would say Kanye – go BECK! Fluxus Grandson!). The reality of the work of art is thus none other than it’s re-materialized form – an intangible sound wave (present) leading to its predestined disappearance (future)!
And thus, my desire would be to use this too rare of an opportunity to address not only the ephemeral qualities of the voice, sound, and movement, to draw within Gustav Metzger’s array into this ‘present tense’ a stark reminder of his commitment for a transient art - an art neither fixed in form nor professing ontological truths.
Throughout his ongoing and relentless engagement, Metzger has always been focused on reality, seeking to present an integrated view of the world, an integrated and integral criticism of the world. This is reality, this is now, and if we want the ‘now’ to endure, Gustav Metzger’s art is a constant and a harsh call for us all to reassess our living conditions and our relation to nature and extinction, as now is yet to come.
Noise may be ephemeral, but the noise of the future is music to our ear, a reality to our present, and an on-going reminder of what is to be – if we do not act now!
DJ Spooky aka Paul D. Miller
The Imaginary App
The processors in every tablet, iPad, laptop, cell phone, and router can still be traced back to some of the debates between John Von Neumann and Alan Turing, Lady Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, al-Khwarizmi and Stephen Wolfram... The list goes on. "The Imaginary App" will explore some of the dynamic tensions between their approaches from a modern point of view where sampling and using "found" sources like apps have converged in theory and in practice. When can a noisy app become assimilated into a set of contingent practices? How can a noisy app operate outside the logics of other nets of apps and then bring them towards it? Do noisy app function as disrupters of common knowledge to move knowledge outside itself?
Martin Heidegger once wrote in his 1954 text “The Question Concerning Technology” (Die Frage nach der Technik) that his essays were a collection of thoughts on what he simply called an "Insight into What Is." The Imaginary App looks for counter-points in the algorithmic architecture of the way apps have shaped the emergent patterns of digitality in a 21st century context. Where Heidegger could write in theory about the rapidly evolving world of technology, only a short time later, John Von Neumann could seriously say of his computer inventions: “What we are creating now is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left.” Monstrosities are something alien and scary. Think of this talk as a “jailbroken” cellphone in the middle of a new update that pulls into itself an allusion of a transcendent and unique theme embedded in modern life and which it, sublime, eats it alive.
Corey Fogel
shir parse/nip
Corey Fogel will continue a series of recent explorations of a/tonal caucophony using graded metal wrenches, drums, and glockenspiel. In Fogel’s improvisations, his instruments act as a lens through which to view synesthetically- derived abstract visual imagery. His gestural approach to sound confronts the corporeal limitations of drumming, by undoing, repurposing, and recombining classically trained musical behaviors.
Simone Forti
Face Tunes
The score for Face Tunes (1967) is a set of outlines of seven profiles of faces, traced onto a long roll of paper. One straight line runs along the middle of the entire score. This is the zero line. The profiles face upwards, the throat of one followed by the forehead of another. The bridge of each nose sits on the zero line. As the score rolls by on rollers, the performer plays Face Tunes on a slide whistle, tracing the profiles with the stick attached to the whistle. Meanwhile a slide whistle recording of the zero tone is playing. Since the profiles are traced in higher and lower pitches, these are always in contrast with the zero pitch, except when the stick or stylus passes over the bridge of a nose.
"Though I've performed Face Tunes several times, I've never let the audience know they were listening to patterns derived from faces. I wanted people to listen to the music. I had faith that, since the awareness of variations among similar events is so basic a life process, when they heard "Face Tunes", they would unconsciously sense a familiar kind of order. As form seemed to be the storage place for presence, I hoped that the act of translating a coherent aspect of a set of faces to a corresponding form might awaken a more primitive level of pattern or ghost recognition." - Handbook in Motion, Simone Forti (1974)
Paul Hegarty
Last music, Last sound, Last noise
Noise has been heard as a harbinger of both terrible and great days ahead – the death knell and birthing scream. It is logical, then, to expect it to mean something in terms of cultural change. Musicians and artists have long been happy bringing noise into being, but often the revolutionary intent is smothered in acceptance: the paradox of all anti-art, where to succeed is to fail. How can noise stay noisy – that is, how can it be something that threatens, that is wrong, that is unexpected, that is ecstatically new to the senses? Is it doomed to fail, or is it a set of methods that equate to modes of progressive failure? That we have a historical sequence of readily identifiable developments in something like noise music should not blind us to noise as block, refusal, endpoint, and above, or beneath, all, destruction. The prospect noise offers is uncertain, a dread valley of the endtimes where the accepted morals and tastes of today rot, fester, crumple and burn. Noise is this perversely enticing vista, and to find glee in it requires another type of prospecting, a digging into the meat of music. In order to glimpse this ever-receding noise, we first journey through the backstory of just how or why noise got here. Only then can the messianic hope of noise be stripped away, leaving noise as process, as clearing away.
Sarah Kessler
Black Noise: Richard and Willie’s Vinyl Ventriloquism
Scored and grooved as they are, vinyl records are known for the scratchiness of their sound—an iconic feature of the vintage medium. In the case of live comedy records, vinyl’s constitutive noisiness is compounded by the noise engendered by the recorded performances themselves, from audience laughter, to ambient room tone, to the myriad voices of the individual comedian, which often blend into one another in the absence of a visible body. And when the comedian is a ventriloquist, whose craft depends on the visual synchronization of dummy voice to dummy body, the comedy album may become even more confounding, as recognizable dialogues give way to polyvocal rants untraceable to a singular subject. This paper explores the phenomenon of vinyl ventriloquism through an examination of the work of 1960s-70s African American ventriloquist Richard Sandfield and his dummy Willie, whose bawdy performances, now audible only in fuzzy, recorded form, materially and metaphorically evoke what Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman have called “black noise”: a post-slavery sound rife with “wildly utopian,” anti-capitalist longings in the face of a silencing political rationality. Richard and Willie’s noisy albums, I argue, are not merely the degraded results of processes of remediation. Rather, they foreground the sounds so persistently stamped out in the name of clarity, as well as the technicity and multiplicity of the voice itself, so often cast as immediate and pure.
Ulrich Krieger
Noise – Attempt At a Definition
QUESTION
We all talk about noise, we use the term ‘noise’, but:
“What defines noise?” and/or
“How is the term ‘noise’ being defined?”
In the end the questions are:
What IS noise? and What IS noise music?
METHOD
This presentation will look at various established definitions of noise,
compare them and relate them to the question:
Is ‘Noise Music’: noise or music? - or both or none?
DEFINITIONS
of noise to be discussed:
sociological, political, information technology, signal processing/digital computing, philosophy, music, physics/acoustics
Further we will look at the historic development of noise in music and
how music and noise related to each other over the course of centuries
from early mediaeval times to the early 21st century.
Mattin
Noise and Ostranenie
How does noise relate to Viktor Shklovsky concept of ostranenie (defamiliarization or estrangement)? In the history of noise there has been riots, scandals, misunderstandings, excitement and misconceptions. Here I will try to address where the potential of noise lies. Noise is a very diffuse term. However it has also been a musical practice within a specific tradition. What first attracted me to noise was the possibility for pushing the limits of what is acceptable musically, culturally and socially. However noise is not always disruptive. In order to be disruptive it needs to encounter negatively a set of expectations. Once the tropes of noise has been understood, then its critical negative effect is no longer valid. Here I will identify some of the potential devices that noise has for producing estrangement. In order to do this I want to understand Shklovsky´s concept of ostronomie, historically and contextually.
Daniel Muñoz
Noise and Knowledge
Noise music is an activity that has grown throughout the 1980s to the present, even if its history spans over one hundred years from the time of the Italian Futurists. This paper purports to discuss noise as both sonic entropy and sonic negation—and by extension, as entropy and negation in general—to examine the possibilities of freedom through the compositional endeavor of noise music and other arts that attempt to use entropy as a material or method. I argue that one way noise music may succeed is by attempting to thwart (the agents of) reason to make a knowledge of these sonic experiences. In music schools, composers and musicologists are taught to create works or examine works for their internal logic; works are then judged for their internal logics and consistencies—in other words, their repetitions. These structures can be understood, taught, and learned; they serve as proofs of the merit of the artwork. The repetitions of these processes create a knowledge and a history of that knowledge that can be mastered by an interested student. When the artistic ideal moves toward freedom, knowledge and freedom then work dialectically at odds with each other as reason tries to enslave freedom in categories. Only at certain moments when reason is thwarted by excess and overstimulation is the specter of freedom achieved in the aesthetic experience. These idiosyncratic moments are unrepeatable, unexplainable, subject to perverted misinterpretation through their miscommunication. They are noise moments; moments beyond knowledge; their wealth of overwhelming detail could fill volumes over an experience lasting an instance. And yet words—the very containers of knowledge!—would at each moment simplify and add noise to the fleeting free moment. The categories themselves—art, music, dance, freedom—already work to adulterate freedom. The experiencer as spectator, reader, and listener is then responsible for composing their own moments of freedom. Of course, this argument only works if you agree with me, since this monograph is itself a creation of knowledge.
Renée Petropoulos & Gregory Lenczycki
Between Libya, Scotland and the United States, version 4, 11 minutes
The 11 minute performance conceived between Renée Petropoulos and Gregory Lenczycki consists of the use of spoken word and sound rooted in a narrative subject allowing the form proposed to interrupt and dislocate the conceived subject and its reception. Including the structures of national anthems and the narrative of the conspiracy theories surrounding the 1988 Lockerbie 'incident' as a foothold to reflect and pertain to current 'events', the forms of improvisation and systems organization become a frame for the composition as a 'liberating mode of production' which allow for a moment of estrangement and revision.
David Schafer
The Schoenberg Soundways Project
The presence of Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg makes a return to the USC Campus, in March 2015, featured as a Visions and Voices Arts Initiative six day public event. Seventeen years after the Schoenberg Archives were moved from USC to Vienna, Austria, the dissemination of his work will be presented through multiple formats and venues on the USC campus. The first component of "The Schoenberg Soundways" will embody intermittent audio emissions of five compositions that will be played Monday through Friday as the mobile exhibition. Each composition will be 'performed' by five USC Hospitality Vehicles, as they deliver services and goods throughout the campus. A bronze plaque, containing a personal Schoenberg quote represents a commemorative gesture that will be temporarily installed on the grounds of the Thornton Music School during the event. The third and final installment of "The Schoenberg Soundways" includes an evening of presentations and concerts at the Ramo Recital Hall. This event includes a lecture, and performances by faculty and students; including a Piano Opus, and a live performance of Schoenberg’s iconic piece, "Veklarte Nacht." The event will be concluded with a reception of Viennese pastries, coffee and conversation.
"The Schoenberg Soundways" project intends to captivate the attention of students, faculty and staff, with a multi-faceted yet cohesive representation of experiencing Schoenberg’s compositions, while celebrating his formidable and significant history. It’s no question, that to this day, Schoenberg’s name still provokes debate. The core values of interconnectivity at the USC community, is to unveil collaborations between multiple departments; those of which will be excavating, nurturing, and utilizing the varying systems of education and musicology. The following individuals will reveal Schoenberg’s continuum of works.
Roski’s Critical Studies Faculty and Schoenberg Soundways Curator, David Schafer will be introducing the final evening of this six-day event and present a short video document. Following, Paul Chaikin, a Musicologist at Thornton, will present a short lecture on the “Emancipation of Dissonance”. Following, Aron Kallay, a nationally recognized Composer and Pianist, will be performing a Schoenberg piano Opus. Karen Dreyfus, a nationally recognized Violist, will be leading the Thornton School of Music Ensemble for the performance of "Verklarte Nacht," which will be introduced by Paul Chaikin.
Marcus Schmickler
Politics of Frequency
Composer Marcus Schmickler discusses his collaborative piece POLITIKEN DER FREQUENZ (Politics of Frequency, 2011) which deals with the acoustic rendering of numerical concepts, following the hypothesis that music and economics share a fundamental object: the number. Inspired by Alain Badiou’s LE NOMBRE ET LES NOMBRES (1990), Schmickler’s and Julian Rohrhuber’s piece attempts to question the immediacy of numbers, which allows calculation to govern today's economy, social sciences and everyday life.
Susan Silton
The Crowing Hens
The WHISTLING PROJECT was launched in 2010 at the Los Angeles-based nonprofit LAXART, in the debut performance of the women’s whistling group I formed, the Crowing Hens. The project evolves from an ongoing passionate interest in the impact of voice (among other signifiers) on subjectivity, and what has become a lifelong inquiry into gendered voice and its aesthetic/discursive possibilities.
The project challenges conventional properties of human voice by charging an ordinary activity with artistic/theoretical depth, humor, and accessibility, and is rendered in a variety of mediums including performance, sculpture, and photographic works. The whistle is an inbetween voice, produced, like voice, from the body (through the mouth), but not from the vocal cords, where gendered voice has typically resided and been theoretically and art historically codified. As such, the whistle represents an altogether different kind of voice, one that considers the philosophical, psychoanalytical, and linguistic discourses that have historically framed voice, but one that proposes transcendent possibilities of a voice freed from the body’s voicebox and therefore from language as it’s usually understood.
The project evolves from my sustained interest in how voice impacts assumptions about gender. Notes Anne Carson in The Gender of Sound: “Aristotle asserts the high-pitched voice of the female is one evidence of her evil disposition, for creatures who are brave or just have large deep voices.”
A major influence in the development of the project came in the discovery of an anomalous assertion made in the late 1800s by then sexual reformer/psychologist Havelock Ellis who claimed in the pages of his two-volume compendium The Psychology of Sex that “inverted women (lesbians) are very often good whistlers…” because, he asserted, their larynxes resemble mens’. While Ellis’ claims are unsubstantiated, I’ve been intrigued by historical references to whistling as a crude or unnatural activity for women to engage in (hence the project’s invocation of an old proverb, “women whistling and crowing hens will come to no good in the end”) and the ways in which this bias evolves historically from other assumptions about the gendered voice.
The Crowing Hens is comprised of six whistlers including myself, with musical accompaniment/direction by experimental composer/cellist Jessica Catron, guitarist Jeremy Drake, and drummer Joe Berardi. Together the group performs a series of arrangements of theme songs derived from male-centric films (including The Godfather; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; ROCKY; James Bond; Bridge Over the River Kwai, etc). The quirkiness of the songs offsets the formal arrangements for harmonic whistling.
Accompanying each performance of the Crowing Hens is a reading from an original written work commissioned by me. These works function collectively as a dialogue with the project, and are being self-published as a series of chapbooks.
Gabie Strong
UR RITUALS
Ur Rituals was a site-specific performative invocation attempting to seek discursive spatial transformation in a time of war. The title references the Standard of Ur, a Sumerian artifact decorated with mosaics of war and peace that was excavated from the ancient city of Ur by British occupation forces in 1927. The word ur is used to describe something that is original or is used to limit things that have qualities outside of human time. When combined with rituals, the two terms signify the first recorded moment of spiritual practice in protest against war.
Ur Rituals was staged at the ruins of an early 20th century homesteader house in Wonder Valley, near Twentynine Palms, CA. Dilapidated jackrabbit homesteader cabins pepper the desert landscape in a crumbling Jeffersonian grid, symbolizing the remains of an early modernist vision of utopian futures. As ruins these small homes have come to signify untamable nature, an anomaly in otherwise logical landscapes. Through the exploration of synaesthetic dissonance and resonance, musicians projected noise to create an organic topographical landscape, bending the confines of Cartesian geometry.
Ur Rituals featured artists Ted Byrnes (drums), Kelly Coats (flute), Helga Fassonaki (pedal steel, effects), Steve Kim (bass, effects, violin), Gregory Lenczycki (keyboards, electronics), Jorge Martin (turntable, trogotronics), Albert Ortega (resonant electronics), RJ Russell (bass, effects), Andrew Scott (guitar, stylophone), Jonathan Silberman (soprano saxophone) and Gabie Strong (bass, effects, films). Sound by Jorge Martin. Ur Rituals was produced, arranged and created by Gabie Strong.
Strong received a UCIRA collaboration research grant for the project, and the piece was exhibited as part of the UCIRA/UCR Sweeney Art Gallery exhibition “Mapping the Desert/Deserting the Map - Dry Immersion 3,” March 2010.
Karen Tongson
To Slaughter, Not Slay: Karaoke’s Queer Noisemaking
Once consigned to seedy dive bars and windowless noraebang (private rooms hidden from view, with an hourly rate), karaoke has come out of the dark and achieved global ubiquity. The “empty orchestra” can accompany us wherever we go; on our smart phones, and our tablets; on YouTube, and—depending on what part of the world we’re in—in our taxis and Lyft cars, or “on demand” through our local cable or satellite providers. Karaoke has even been mobilized for public protest (Valerie Tevere and Angel Nevarez’s Another Protest Song: Karaoke with a Message), while on the other side of the political spectrum, it’s been enlisted to subdue a restless electorate for the Cambodian dictator, Hun Sen (who employs an in-house composer and a karaoke video team to promote his policies through sing-alongs). My presentation on karaoke technologies, queer performance and queer theory asks us to listen to the wretched noises created by the amateur voices of karaoke, voices which sometimes, cacophonously, fail to coincide with the prevailing gendered orientations of popular music about love, sex and desire. Beginning with a brief account of the disputed origins of the first karaoke machines, I ask us to consider karaoke as a new term of aesthetic judgment, and as an entry point into queer theoretical conversations about surfaces and copying, as well as an index of where U.S. culture in particular stands on the status of the copy and "copycats,” especially in relation to the subjects of its scattered, disavowed empire throughout the Pacific Rim: the Japanese, Filipinos, Koreans and Chinese-Americans who first imported karaoke into this land of opportunism. Insisting on karaoke’s place within a genealogy of queer (post) colonial amusements and performance practices would allow us to rethink the sonic dimensions of imitation, and to move from Narcissus to Echo in our theoretically inspired accounts of queer and post-colonial subjectivities—subjectivities which have always been considered out of tune, or to exist “in the style” of something else.
Susanne Winterling
Space Sounds –music “Surface spaces and sound realms”
A diamond into surface space
A record with sounds that portrait spaces, traces:
a row of choreographed sounds like a sea breeze in Malmoe. Berlin birds and traffic on a pavilion. a Venezuelan frog that came from outta space. angry drumming girla in Shanghai. Virginia Wolf’s words in the storm, plankton in mosquito bay under the surface recorded with a hydrophon, Mexican dogs and airplane dynamics and breaking glass
Details that we might take for granted precisely arranged as in life
Are you listening?
Participant Bios
Noise and the Possibility For a Future
March 6 & 7, 2015
The Goethe-Institut Los Angeles
5750 Wilshire Boulevard, 100, Los Angeles, CA 90036
(323) 525-3388
Víctor Albarracín (1974) is a Colombian artist, writer and curator, currently based in Los Angeles as a Fulbright scholar. He was co-founder and member of El Bodegón, a seminal artist-run space in Bogotá, between 2005-2009. He’s currently transplanting that experience as part of the curatorial team of Selecto – Planta Baja, a new art space in MacArthur Park. As a writer, he has published narratives, reviews and articles on contemporary art and culture, literature and institutional critique on books, magazines and websites in Colombia, Latin America and the US. In 2009, he won the Colombian National Art Critic Award with an essay about antagonism and failure. In 2013, he released El tratamiento de las contradicciones, a book from selected writings, and Materials for a makeshift shack, a volume from conversation pieces with art field agents in Bogotá. He’s an inept musician with a prolific production in different genres, from noise to disco punk to ballads.
Andrew Berardini is a writer in Los Angeles. He writes about the permeability between imagination and reality in mostly fictive essays and essayistic fiction, often about art. Co-founder of The Art Book Review, he's a contributing editor for Mousse, Momus, and Art-Agenda; and has curated art exhibitions with some regularity (usually with collaborators), including a metaphysical disco at the Church of the Holy Shroud in Turin, a chain letter at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and a river by Chris Johanson through the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. He has published in Artforum, ArtReview, and the LA Weekly, amongst sundry other publications. A finalist for the Premio Bonaldi Award for young curators and winner of an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Grant for Art Writers in 2013, his essay "How to Write About Contemporary Art" in Momus was chosen by Artnet as one of the most important art essays of 2015. Berardini has a memoir-ish book forthcoming from Mousse Publishing on the artist Danh Vo, and is currently at work on another book about color.
David Burrows is an artist and writer teaching at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Educated at Goldsmiths College London, he has exhibited in the UK and internationally since 1994. Art collaborations include working as part of BANK artist group and since 2005, working with Dr. Simon O’Sullivan to produce the performance-fiction collaboration Plastique Fantastique. Recent exhibitions include: Schizo-Culture: Cracks in the Street, SPACE London; Weber Woche, Stroom Den Haag; In outer space there is no painting and sculpture, Summerhall Gallery Edinburgh, all 2014. Recent published writing includes The Sinthome/Z-Point Relation or Art as Non-Schizoanalysis (with Simon O’Sullivan) in Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Visual Art, edited by Ian Buchanan and Lorna Collins, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC London 2014; This is the Gallery and the Gallery is many things, publication for Eastside Projects Birmingham 2014; Real Plastique Fantastique Manifestos, in Again, a Time Machine, edited by Gavin Everall and Jane Rolo, Bookworks London 2012. Recent Audio works include Myth Science Sound for Exploit.zzxjoanw.Gen, Punctum Records 2014; Cloud gives birth to new animal: Welcome Neuropatheme! Dub Plate for Foam, Wysing Art Centre, a recording of a performance at the ICA London 2014. Past exhibitions include New Work UK Screenings, Whitechapel Art Gallery London 2008; Take me with you, Circulo des Bellas Artes, Madrid, Mori Art Museum Tokyo 2006; Micro/Macro: British Art 1996-2002, group show curated by the British Council, Mucsanok/Kunsthalle Budapest 2003. In 2002 he was awarded a Paul Hamlyn Visual Arts Award and in 2003 he was awarded an Arts Council of England International Fellowship and exhibition at Artspace Sydney Australia.
As a composer, conductor, pianist, and musical saw/Vietnamese dan bau soloist, Luciano Chessa has been active in Europe, the U.S., Australia, and South America. Recent compositions include Set and Setting, a San Francisco Contemporary Music Players commission premiered by Steven Schick and the SFCMP in February 2014 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, LIGHTEST, a SFMOMA commission presented in November 2013 at the SF Columbarium, Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze!, a large-scale work written for the quartertone vibe/quartertone electric guitar duo The Living Earth Show, A Heavenly Act, an opera with original video by Kalup Linzy commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and premiered by Nicole Paiement and the Ensemble Parallèle.
Chessa is the author of Luigi Russolo Futurist. Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult, the first monograph ever to be dedicated to the Futurist Russolo and his Art of Noise, out on University of California Press in 2012 to critical acclaim. Chessa’s Futurist expertise has resulted in an invitation by the New York-based Biennial of the Arts PERFORMA to direct the first reconstruction project of Russolo’s earliest intonarumori orchestra, and to curate concerts of music specifically commissioned for this project. This production was hailed by The New York Times as one of the best events in the arts of 2009 and is now touring internationally. In March 2011, the Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners was presented in a sold out concert by Berliner Festspiele-Maerzmusik Festival. In December 2011 Chessa conducted the project with the New World Symphony in their new Frank Gehry designed Concert Hall as part of a Performa-produced event to celebrate 10 years of Art Basel | Miami Beach; the performance included the world premiere of Lee Ranaldo’s It All Begins Now (Whose Streets? Our Streets!). In May 2013 he presented at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires a series of events to celebrate the Centennial of Russolo’s Art of Noises. A double LP dedicated to the Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners and documenting the first phase of this project has been released on the Belgian label Sub Rosa in November 2013. In December 2013 Chessa conducted the Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners to a sold-out crowd at the RedCat in Los Angeles.
Additionally, Luciano Chessa has been performing futurist sound poetry for well over 10 years. His reading of Italian poetry to accompany a performance of the Grammy Award Nominated New Century Chamber Orchestra in San Francisco's Herbst Theater in 2000 was granted with enthusiastic reviews in the San Francisco press, and in 2001 he has given the modern premiere of Francesco Cangiullo’s explosive Futurist sound poems Piedigrotta and Serata in onore di Yvonne, subsequently presenting them in several countries all over the world.
Mathieu Copeland (b. 1977, lives in London) has been developing a practice seeking to subvert the traditional role of exhibitions and to renew our perceptions of these. Amongst many others, he co-curated the exhibition 'VOIDS, A Retrospective' at the Centre Pompidou—Paris and the Kunsthalle—Bern, and edited the anthology 'VOIDS'. He curated 'A Choreographed Exhibition' at the Kunsthalle—St Gallen & La Ferme du Buisson, 'Soundtrack for an Exhibition', 'Alan Vega' and 'Gustav Metzger' at the Musee d’Art Contemporain—Lyon. He initiated and curated the series 'A Spoken Word Exhibitions', 'Reprise' and 'the Exhibitions to Hear Read'. A professor at the HEAD – Geneva, he lectures in numerous art school and universities throughout the world.
Invited curator at the Jeu de Paume, Paris in 2012-2013, and guest-curator at Le Plateau, FRAC Ile-de-France Paris, 2014-2015, he recently edited 'Choreographing Exhibitions', and realized 'The exhibition of a film' – an exhibition as a feature film for cinemas.
DJ Spooky aka Paul D. Miller is the executive editor of ORIGIN Magazine and is a composer, multimedia artist, editor and author. His DJ MIXER iPad app has seen more than 12 million downloads in the last year. In 2012-2013 he is the first artist-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC starting this fall. He's produced and composed work for Yoko Ono, Thurston Moore, and scores of artists and award-winning films. Miller's work as a media artist has appeared in the Whitney Biennial; The Venice Biennial for Architecture, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany; Kunsthalle, Vienna; The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and many other museums and galleries. His book Sound Unbound, an anthology of writings on electronic music and digital media is a best-selling title for MIT Press. He has been featured everywhere from Elle to CNN to SyFy.
Corey Fogel (b. 1977) is a drummer and performance artist currently living in Los Angeles, CA. Corey performs and composes in many rock, jazz, noise, folk, and chamber music capacities. His solo work as a composer and performance artist is based around spontaneous encounters with sounds, objects, personalities, textiles, foods, spanning video, dance, and installation. In addition to touring and recording nationally and abroad, Corey has been a member of groups: Julia Holter, Missincinatti, The Mae Shi, Gowns, Cryptacize, Barbez, Monstro, The Curtains, Learning Music, Nowcloud, Dominique Leone, 18 Squared. Corey has presented his own work with Machine Project, LACMA, Human Resources, The Wulf, The Hammer Museum, and REDCAT.
Simone Forti is a dancer, artist, writer based in Los Angeles. She came of age artistically in the 1960s, a time of rich dialog between poets, musicians, dancers and visual artists, and her early Dance Constructions were influential to the reinventing of dance in New York that happened in the 60s and 70s. She has collaborated extensively with musicians Charlemagne Palestine and Peter Van Riper and has performed internationally at venues including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Louvre Museum in Paris. In 2011 Forti received the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts. And in 2012 her sound oriented works were exhibited in her show “Sounding”, which took place at the Box LA Gallery, where she is represented. www.theboxla.com.
Paul Hegarty teaches visual culture and philosophy in the French department, University College Cork. He has been writing on noise and experimental music since 2001. His books include Noise/Music 2007), which came out in Japanese translation in 2014, Beyond and Before: Progressive Rock since the 1960s (2011, with Martin Halliwell) and Rumour and Radiation: Sound in Video Art (2015). He has also edited volumes on Dennis Cooper, on noise and on 'formless', and is editing a new series on Bloomsbury, with Greg Hainge, called 'ex:centrics'. He runs the label dotdotdotmusic, specializing in 7 inch singles, and performs in noise groups Safe and Maginot, as well as in more challenging outfits such as the Phil Collins Project.
Sarah Kessler is a Ph.D. candidate in comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. Her work on art, film, and media has appeared in Public Books, Sounding Out!, artforum.com, the Brooklyn Rail, and Whitewall, among other online and IRL publications. She has held editorial positions at Triple Canopy and Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry. Her dissertation, Anachronism Effects: Ventriloquism and Popular Media, uses the seemingly arcane cultural phenomenon of ventriloquism to address late twentieth-century and contemporary Western anxieties about mediation.
Ulrich Krieger is a German composer and saxophonist living in Southern California. He works in various contexts from experimental music to free improvisation, noise, and rock. Beside his solo work he performed extensively with his groups Metal Machine Trio and Text of Light. He collaborated with Lou Reed, Merzbow, Thomas Köner, Carl Stone, John Zorn, Lee Ranaldo, Christian Marclay, Faust, LaMonte Young, Phill Niblock, Radu Malfatti, Berlin Philharmonics, Ensemble Modern, PARTCH Ensemble, and many more. His compositions are widely performed by ensembles in Europe and the USA. As saxophonist he performed in Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australia. Krieger studied classical/contemporary saxophone, composition, electronic music, and musicology in Berlin and New York. He is professor for composition, Experimental Sound Practices and rock music at CalArts, where his special field of interest is the cross-pollination of experimental new music and avant-garde rock. Krieger’s recent focus lies on the experimental fringes of contemporary rock culture, in the limbo where noise, metal, silence, and experimental chamber music meet – not accepting stylistic boundaries. His compositional approaches include micro-sounds, microtones, reductionism, ‘instrumental electronics’ (instrumental music evoking the sound world of electronics), drone, and noise, often asking for elaborate amplification. www.ulrich-krieger.com.
Described as “always poetic” and “twittering with excitable circuitry,” composer Gregory Lenczycki’s work explores the rhythms of space and the architecture of sound. His music is often self-referential, drawing from a personal archive of borrowed code, irregular sequences, and obscure melodies that are weaved together in lyric cycles. Lenczycki received his MFA from Mills College where he studied composition with Alvin Curran and Maryanne Amacher. He has worked with Curran, Amacher, Naut Humon, Joe Potts, Doug Henry, Anna Homler, William Roper, Renee Petropoulos, Jorge Martin, Kathleen Johnson, and Ted Byrnes, among many others.
Most recently Lenczycki has presented at such venues as Fort Mason Center San Francisco, Los Angeles Museum of Art, The Hammer Museum Los Angeles, Automata Los Angeles, Centre for the Living Arts, Mobile Alabama, Mills College Oakland CA, California Institute for the Arts, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Culver Center for the Arts at UC Riverside, The Steve Allen Theatre Hollywood CA, Mount Wilson Observatory, Cal State LA, Highways Performance Space, Human Resources Los Angeles, Beyond Baroque Venice CA , and as part of SASSAS's 10th Anniversary Mapping Sound festival. Recent premieres of note include the requiem You Are Not Alone with support from Newtown Arts Pasadena in the Lower Arroyo Park to mark the 100th anniversary of the Colorado Street bridge, a string quartet, his setting of Percy Bysshe Shelley's 1817 poem Mont Blanc for soprano, clarinet, tuba, and live electronics at Automata, the opera Brainchild II at Human Resources and a symphonic tone poem Things I am not fully aware of at Mills College in Oakland.
Over the years Lenczycki’s collaborations have included Light Show with Fluxus artist Jeff Perkins, Still Life with Bomb with drummer Ted Byrnes and accordionist Ari DeSano, and Small Liberties (2006, Whitney Museum) with artists Andrea Zittel and Giovanni Jance. Lenczycki’s work has received Meet the Composer and the NEA support, and his music is available at gregorylenczycki.bandcamp.com and on the now defunct label Asphodel.
In addition to being a member of the Los Angeles Composer Collective, Lenczycki is co-chairperson of the new music non-profit The Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound aka SASSAS.
Mattin is an artist from Bilbao (currently living in Berlin) working with noise and improvisation. His work seeks to address the social and economic structures of experimental sonic artistic production through live performance, recordings and writing. Using a conceptual approach, he aims to question the nature and parameters of improvisation, specifically the relationship between the idea of ”freedom” and constant innovation that it traditionally implies, and the established conventions of improvisation as a genre. Mattin considers improvisation not only as an interaction between performers and instruments, but as a situation involving all the elements that constitute a concert situation, including the audience and the social and architectural space. He tries to expose the stereotypical relation between active performer and passive audience, producing a sense of strangeness and alienation that disturbs this relationship. He is currently doing a PhD at the University of the Basque Country under the supervision of Ray Brassier and Josu Rekalde. He has edited with Anthony Iles the book Noise & Capitalism and in 2012 CAC Brétigny and Tuamaturgia published Uconsitituted Praxis, a book collecting Mattin´s writing plus interviews and reviews from performances that he has been part of. Both books are available online.
Daniel Muñoz is a Los Angeles-based PhD candidate at UC Santa Cruz in cross-cultural musicology. He has conducted extensive ethnographic research for the dissertation he is writing on the Los Angeles noise music scenes in the 21st century. His research interests include music aesthetics, consonance and dissonance, new methods of music analysis, intermedia theory, acousmatics, music and identity, power, sound art, audio culture, and noise. He has taught music theory, music history, and composition. Daniel is the curator of FFFF-Series at South of Sunset exhibition and performance space in Los Angeles. FFFF-Series is dedicated to sonic culture and performance.
Renee Petropoulos is a visual artist working in a variety of media, most recently embarking on the project “Among Nations (Mostly) with performances ‘Analogue’, ‘Venice to Venice’ and ‘Women in Surrealism’ all in 2012. "Black Star", begun in 2006, is a performance in continuum in Berlin. Her most recent installment of "Prototype for the History of Painting: Eingrouping Social Historical" was installed in MARTE San Salvador, El Salvador. Her recent film, "Two or Three Things I Know About Gas Station Mini Marts" screened at Screening, in Philadelphia. Recently completed is the outdoor public sculpture project “Bouquet”(Flower Tower) Between Egypt, India, Iraq, the United States, Brazil, Ethiopia, and Mexico” 2014, situated in Santa Monica, California at a street and pedestrian intersection. An exhibit of related subject, “Bouquet (Flower Girl) Between Libya, the United States and Scotland”, was installed at LAMOA in Eagle Rock in May 2014. Petropoulos’ drawings were also included in “Forms of the Formless” at Beijing Moca. This fall she presented a new project at Commonwealth and Council Gallery, From Mexico to the United States.
David Schafer is a visual and sound artist working in sculpture, sound, performance, and works on paper. His work is concerned with the structures, translation, and intelligibility, of language and architecture. Schafer has shown nationally and internationally and has received several public commissions. Most recently he has had one-person shows at Studio10 gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY, and Glendale College Art Gallery, Glendale, CA. He has recently participated in LaLaLand at Tent Gallery at the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, and Radio Break, Organized by USC Roski School of Fine Art. Los Angeles, CA.
In 2010, he permanently installed “Separated United Forms” at the Huntington Hospital, Pasadena, CA, and participated in conjunction with the Whitney Biennial with “What Should a Museum Sound Like?”, a sound performance and sculpture. Schafer is currently a visiting artist at Art Center College of Design and adjunct professor at University of Southern California and was recently a visiting critic for the Cornell Art and Architecture Program in New York. He has previously taught at SVA, Cooper Union, Rutgers, and Parsons in New York and Otis, Cal Arts, and University of California Riverside in California.
Schafer performs under the moniker of DSE. This is also a platform for the production of and dissemination of electronic noise, processed recordings, live signal manipulation, no-input feedback, and voice. This includes live sound performances, collaborations, programming events, sound/transmission kiosks, and sculptures. Dissemination and emission of sonic material encompass multiple formats including; live radio transmission, mp3 download sites, CD’s, posters, records, and cassette formats. Utilizing both analogue and digital source material and processing techniques, DSE processes source material and data emphasizing an attack on the structural authority of intelligibility, in language and sonic/spatial orientation. Focusing on the decay and mutability of signal, DSE performs both improvisational and composed events and works. Schafer has recently performed at L.A.C.E. and David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, and Roulette, in Brooklyn, NY. Between 2009-2011, Schafer was with the noise collective MDSE and performed at venues in and around New York. David Schafer is currently living and working in Los Angeles since 2012.
Marcus Schmickler is a Cologne-based researching composer and has written numerous electronic works, pieces for ensembles, choirs and orchestra. Many of his works are informed by scientific subjects as well as methods. A multi-faceted composer and producer, his interests revolve around the brain and its adaptation to multiple auditory stimuli. From difference tones to otoacoustic emissions produced by the cochlea, Schmickler’s work is the liaison between performance and science. After his introduction to the sounds of visionary composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, Marcus Schmickler went on to study music in Cologne in 1993, under the guidance of Johannes Fritsch, a prominent Stockhausen collaborator. There he also became a member of the electro-industrial collective Kontakta (an improvisational group whose famous recordings became a standard in future music experimentation).
Schmickler has written music for ensembles, installations, theater, and radio, meanwhile also producing under multiple pseudonyms like Pluramon, and Wabi Sabi. He also participates in laptop improvisation for the 12-piece electroacoustic collective Mimeo, and produces minimal techno under his own name for the Ernst imprint led with Thomas Brinkmann. He produces indie-pop-noise under the pseudonym Pluramon.
Schmickler’s solo projects include two sonically devastating albums on Editions Mego, which explore audio induced mental phenomenon. Altars Of Science is full-on vortex of digital noise and distortion, while the Palace of Marvels album is a reinterpretation of the Shepard-tone, a 1960s discovery, which creates the auditory illusion of an infinitely ascending or descending tone. A recipient of multiple prizes and scholarships, including the Ars Electronica; Schmickler held a lengthy seat as a member of the jury for the German Music Council, and is a co-creator of the eclectic A-Musik record distributor, known for its avant-garde and experimental releases.
Schmickler is part of the faculty at Bard College in Music/Sound MFA program in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. In 2014, he was a guest-faculty for composition at Calarts.
Susan Silton resides in Los Angeles. Her practice engages multiple aesthetic strategies to mine the complexity of perception and to interrupt—through combinations of humor, discomfort, and subterfuge—the “othering” that often results from distorted perception. Her work spans diverse media (video, photography, installation, textworks, performance, offset lithography, and internet technologies) and diverse strategies (abstraction, representation, motion, erasure, voice). Regardless of the varied contexts within which her work is shown—traditional gallery and institutional formats, public sites, social network platforms—Silton consistently folds socio-political content into formally rigorous presentations, both as an individual and as part of participatory projects she generates.
Silton’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at Feigen Contemporary, New York; MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles; SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; bank gallery, Los Angeles; USC Fisher Museum, Los Angeles; Angles Gallery, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; ICA/Philadelphia; Hammer Museum; and Allianz Zeigniederlassung, Berlin, Germany, among others. Silton has received fellowships and awards from the Getty/California Community Foundation, Art Matters, Center for Cultural Innovation, Cultural Affairs Department of the City of Los Angeles, The MacDowell Colony, Banff Centre for the Arts, Durfee Foundation and The Shifting Foundation. Her work has been featured in numerous publications including Artforum, Art in America, X-TRA, ArtLies, Flash Art, Cabinet, and in Self/Image by Amelia Jones. Silton’s whistling project, which includes the women’s whistling group, the CROWING HENS, launched performatively at LA><ART, Los Angeles, in 2010, and will have its debut outside of Los Angeles in Fall 2015 in a performance commissioned by SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her installation at USC Fisher Museum, In everything there is the trace (2013), which brought together over 200 participants to collectively retype John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath on manual typewriters without ink, was featured on KCET’s Artbound, Art21, and the Los Angeles Times. And the book project Who’s in a Name? which included the participation of fifty-nine artists and eleven writers, launched in performative events in 2013 at MOCA and LA><ART and was featured in Artforum, among other publications.
Gabie Strong is an artist exploring spaces of degeneration, drone and decay as a means to improvise new arrangements of self-reflexive meaning. She uses sound performance, radio broadcasting, sculpture, photography and video as mediums for exploring dissonance.
She has presented solo exhibitions at Angels Gate Cultural Center, Autonomie, and PØST, in addition to broadcasting projects for KCHUNG Radio and KCHUNG TV. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts, Knowledges at Mount Wilson Observatory, Pitzer Art Galleries, Torrance Art Museum, University Art Gallery UC Irvine, and LAXArt. Strong has performed at Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair, Human Resources, SASSAS, LACE, High Desert Test Sites Art Swap Meet, LACMA, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture and the 2012 Whitney Biennial.
Strong is the host of “Crystalline Morphologies" and "Earth Art Radio" programs broadcast on KCHUNG Radio. “Crystalline Morphologies” is usually a radio show for broadcasting experimental music and noise, but sometimes it happens as a collaborative performance in which the space between action and archive is blurred. Strong is an active KCHUNG Radio volunteer and helped produce KCHUNG TV, shot live during the UCLA Hammer Museum's "Made in L.A." 2014 biennial exhibition.
Strong received her BA in Art from UCLA in 1993, her Master of Architecture from SCI-Arc in 2006, and her MFA in Art from UC Irvine in 2008. She is a 2010 UCIRA Collaborative Research Grant and 2011 CCI ARC award recipient.
Karen Tongson is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at University of Southern California, and the author of Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press, 2011). Her work has appeared in numerous venues in print and online, including Public Culture, Social Text, GLQ, and Nineteenth-Century Literature. She is currently the series editor for Postmillennial Pop at NYU Press, and associate editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. Her current book project, Empty Orchestra: Karaoke. Critical. Apparatus. critiques prevailing paradigms of imitation in contemporary aesthetics and critical theory, while offering a genealogy of karaoke technologies, techniques, and desires.
John Wiese is an artist and composer living in Los Angeles, California. He works primarily in recorded and performed sound with a focus on installation and multi-channel diffusions, as well as scoring for large ensembles. He has toured extensively throughout the world, covering the US, UK, Europe, Scandinavia, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. He is a founding member of the concrète grindcore band Sissy Spacek. www.john-wiese.com
Susanne M Winterling is an artist born in Rehau /Oberfranken currently living in Berlin and Oslo. Her work has been exhibited and featured internationally. Across a variety of media and with a constant challenging and questioning of artistic media in society, Winterling is known for her time-based installations that critically engage the representation of realities. Prevailing modernistic concepts, power structures and hierarchical historiographies are captured and investigated in her work in spatial constellations that include 16mm film and video projections, as well as photographs, found and hand-made objects, and mobile devices. Focusing on representation and its negation, her practice emphasizes what pure information and form leaves out–including a sensual approach to media and material informed by the understanding of immersion and power as energy flows. With an emphasis on enhancing our perceptual and critical consciousness, Winterling undertakes affective and material-based research that highlights the subjective interaction between producers, viewers, materials and the environment.
Main interests also include: Faces, surfaces and interfaces: interdependence and independence of science and fiction, technologies and the body, the poetic dimension of contemporary politics’ material forms. What is defined and materialized as nature and the networked nature of artistic and cultural production: Questions on how collective and subjective narratives are visually materialized and manifested. This includes the role of the artist in society. Conversations across disciplines and genres, which embody dialogues with photography, architecture, theory, sound and what is seen as nature. Interweaving methods of (digital) image creation and installation, focusing on various forms of power relations and exchanges, as well as technologies of the future and the past that form politics. A polyphonic iteration composed of many different elements speak and listen to one another.
