Gwaith Sŵn and Resonance 104.4fm present… RELICS, an evening of sound performances exploring “decline and decay”.
GWAITH SŴN is an audio-visual collective that emerged from recent graduates from BA Sound Art and Design at London college of communication. Since their exhibition at Stoke Newington Studios [photographed], very recently, they have also exhibited at Cafe Oto, as part of ‘OTO PROJECT SPACE’.
Make sure to check out their Facebook Page also!.
Setup for tape loop based performance at Ausland, Berlin. 10/03/2014
These are installations in the final year show from Graduates of LCC 2013 BA Sound Arts and Design. I’ll get the names soon. Third pic shows metal plates which when sprayed make a sound (they are piezo miced and go through to a mixer then to speakers), very fun and practical. Fourth pic are what looks like quartz rocks, They were used with ultrasonic speakers hung from ceiling projecting sound onto them with UV light projected onto them. These looked and sounded awsome.
“Remixing and mashups are familiar—indeed, somewhat tired—notions in dance culture, but in critical circles they enjoy modish currency because they seem to capture something essential about the cut-and-paste sensibility fostered by digital culture. Likewise, the Internet’s gigantic archive of image, sound, text, and design has encouraged a view of the artist as primarily a curator, someone whose principal modes of operation involve recontextualization and connection-making.”
- Simon Reynolds
“From a certain point of view improvisation is the highest mode of musical activity, for it is based on the acceptance of music’s fatal weakness and essential and most beautiful characteristic - its transience.”
Cornelius Cardew, Towards an Ethic of Improvisation, 1971.
Things we are losing as the baby is washed away with the bathwater - the ritual element of the process of listening to music. When music becomes increasingly divorced from its ritual element, an alienation occurs. Are the physical gestures of choosing a record, removing it from its sleeve, cleaning it, placing the needle upon it, as much a part of the act of listening as hearing the sound that follows?
What are the rituals for listening to music in the digital age, as gesture is reduced and convenience is venerated? Are there any?
Picture: Christian Marclay, Footsteps
Be it vinyl, film or tape - process in the analogue realm imparts character onto its subject. Digital process seeks to be characterless.