Marseille

A rerun of »What if« at MuCEM, Marseille-Provence 2013 (European Cultural Capital) was one of those quickies where you land, go to the hotel, sleep, go to the theatre, work like crazy till the show, do the show, pack equipment, maybe have a drink, return to the hotel, sleep, and leave for the airport next morning. You don’t see the city. You don’t meet the locals. At. All.

Well this is actually a bit of an impartial truth. Because on a good note – we had delicious (supposedly ‘authentic’ Marseille-an) food after the show. We’ve seen (a part of) amazing MuCEM – Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations. On the day of arrival we strolled down some streets and found lovely little CousCous on a lively, rough street. Breakfast at the hotel had fresh grapefruit.

But then again: the show was in a venue not made for theatre-based performances – it was a technological nightmare. So we worked from 8am till the show, which was at 6:30pm, to setup everything. And we played for 20 people. That’s a shame considering that Maja learned all texts and did the whole thing in french!

 

Rotary Signal Emitter by Sculpture [Picture-Disc LP]

Sculpture is an audiovisual performance duo from London – electronic music producer, Dan Hayhurst, and animator, Reuben Sutherland.

Sutherland ‘DJs’ with home-made zoetropic discs, intricate concentric rings of illustrated frames, projecting fragments of looping images at 33, 45 and 78 rpm – pre-Edisonian imaging technology combined with a digital video camera.

Hayhurst deploys prepared audio material (found tapes, lo-fi electronics, computer programming, and analogue noise) across 1⁄4” tape loops, hardware sampler, cassette walkman and CDJ deck.

The process is important. a kind of unstable modular collage. style. rhythm. spontaneity. input, output, and a bit in the middle called MUSIC (audible and visible) which requires the computer to be switched off.

We present here an audio video picture disc by Sculpture called Rotary Signal Emitter. It can be played conventionally or as a self contained film. It is also intended to be reusable as part of future performances.

The music: A strange amalgam of found sounds (corresponding perfectly with the found imagery), Plunderphonics, ancient electronic music recalling the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, twisted rhythms (imagine Felix Kubin playing Dubstep), all mixed hands-on on the spot.

http://vimeo.com/9220247

Demonstration Reel from Sculpture on Vimeo.

'this is what it's like most of the time'
'you could call it a showreel'

more: http://www.dekorder.com/046.html

What if process

Apart from some other – more administrative – craziness, the project that was finished last week was a solo performance “What if” by Maja Delak. A premiere on 3. October and re-run on 4. October at Old power plant (Stara elektrarna) was a tip of an iceberg of work. It was a pretty much non-stop work since beginning of august – two full months. While there was a lot of different material gathering through the process at wasn’t until Maja and myself went for a short 10-day residency at a lovely village ‘Savičenta’ (Sanvincenti / Svet vinčenat) where daily distractions were minimized that we were able to make a crucial turn with materials. Between separate blocks of texts and separate choreographies that had been somewhat disconnected there was no glue, no red line that would connect them (on non-mental, non-verbal level), they’ve been like boxes that one could stack up, but nothing would pass between or through them. We took a decision to improvise with sound, movement and texts in order to work on ‘ambiance’ non/presence, silences… This resulted in a more organic multi-layering of different media on various levels that somewhat made the right sense. There were related intensities flowing through the fragments.

The final piece holds a lot of this feeling of ambiance. Or perhaps an ‘unfocused focus’ on environment, a space that surrounds the action, the movement and texts and concrete sound – it is where the intensity lies. It is peculiar directionless quality of space, of its ephemeral-ness in time and in sound that seems so crucial in creating an atmosphere that supports non-judgmental but still extremely intense message that lies within the artist wanting to express it. Despite of desire to demystify art on every level, art is still a mystery. And these are just some of the aspects of artistic work and art’s role in the world that are extremely difficult to communicate to people like economists, merchants, many politicians.

A crucial lesson from it all for me was how important it was to take those 10 days of distance from different daily distractions (admin work, kids, meetings for this and that..) in order to be able to just sit, move, work for 4-6 hours straight with focus on one thing. It’s seems like the only sensible thing to do, but seemingly so difficult in these times.

questions and notes (interface fractures research 13/10/07)

At the moment I’m quite inspired by an article in The Wire about Matana Roberts (not a jazz musician, but an experimentalist). Her focus on the past of black slavery and reflection on the present (immigration, LGBT, and more) make me think about my own position and desire to reflect my own past, the past of this country. Slovenians, huh. I’m thinking of slovenian folklore, perhaps a slavic, pagan one on one hand, and about the partisan-communist/belogardist-collaborators issues and conflicts on the other. What kind of people are we Slovenians? Cankar talked about servants, fieldhands, toadies… Cankar is a dark departure point. Slightly halucinogenic. I’m asking myself questions about what are my/our roots which define the most problematic issues in the present? And of course, is there a way to express them, or at least this retrospection and questioning – in a contemporary audio-visual way?

Perhaps I don’t want to be so specific in historic way. Perhaps it would be interesting to think about all those different historic roots, but then move onto a slightly more general feelings, like hate, fascism, xenophobia, … and it seems important to stay honest, to keep a strong connection to what I really stand behind.

I would be looking at:

  • history of slovenia (80s?)
  • histories of art/avant-gardes (Zabel, Šuvaković)
  • theories of fascism, anarchism, critical-culture,
  • philosophy of noise (Voegelin)
  • audio-visual languages (incl. M. Chion), Tscherkassky

I imagine producing textual fragments, visual fragments, 3d structures, sonic fragments – a lot of noise, a lot of bass.

I’m thinking of how different today time is, the precarity, the capitalist exploitation (of workers, of consumers). Is this a new form of fascism? No. Since there is no totalitarian state.(?).

Let’s hold that we are living in informational capitalism. Is it possible to use certain political-artistic strategies from the alternative movements of the 80s in order to reveal the paradoxes of informational capitalism? Jodi Dean.

Vienna

 

Spent almost a week in Vienna.

A trip from Ljubljana with a train is actually really stress-free, much better then car and even plane. Especially with good company. I visited Substance recordshop, and was slightly surprised that it has a form of good old recordshop with a selection of electronic and other music. Couple of turntables and a CD player with headphone available for you to pre-listen what you want to buy. This is how we were buying music 15-20 years ago – either for DJ sets or for personal home library. How things have changed in such short time so that this kind of practice seems somewhat awkward or at least time-consuming. Everything can be pre-listened and bought online, either digitally or ordered to ship. My feeling is that a recordshop (and possibly this holds true also for bookshops) could expand its potential of a sub/cultural meeting space with events and cafe/lounge type of ambiance. In any case it was good to immerse myself into vinyl bins, do some prelistening and actually buy a small experimental 7″ by Mika Vainio “Behind The Radiators” (released by Touch in 2008). Big-ups to Substance record-shop for staying afloat in these turbulent times for market for physical recordings (althought supposedly vinyl and tape sales are going up). If you are in Vienna, please visit them.

While I was preparing for the gig, I made some nice beatport discoveries. Beta is a UK producer with updated contemporary breakbeat production which harks back at Nu School Breaks era. Very solid, somewhat deep, and still awesomely dynamic. Another one is Electric Soulside – a duo of producers from Brussels creating quite a head-on loud dynamic saturated filthy funk with plenty of releases on Lot49 and Diablo Loco among others.

So to the gig, which happened at Impulstanz Lounge @ Burgtheater’s Vestibül. The whole week was totally hot (all day temperatures above 30 even 35 degrees) so the dancefloor, which was without airconditioning or decent ventilation, was very hot and sweaty. After a completely different ‘warmup’ by Rio and some girls on iPods/iPhones, I played a dynamic mix of heavy breaks with possibly too fast transitions and cuts – and it was quite clear bodies were unprepared for this. The floor didn’t clear up, but the feeling was simply people didn’t really know how to dance to this. The bodies didn’t understand this particular code of deep funk. Somehow same old story. There’s some educating to do. Unfortunately against the trends. It was nevertheless a fun and hot gig that left me wanting for a better (or at least louder) sound system, perhaps some ventilation (i was soaked in sweat), but most importantly, the right public. But I guess I’m wanting too much. I have a lot of plans with Deviant Funk Music Club ‘platform’ though, and time will show, if they materialize.

Unfortunately the trip back was very pleasant until half way through. Before Graz there was a tremendous storm. We saw trees breaking and of course there was some damage further along the way on the rail tracks, so there were delays and changing of trains about five times. And we came home about 4 hours later than we thought.

preparing vienna gig

 

bandcamp uploads

After fiddling around a bit with SoundCloud I listened to a sudden hunch and uploaded most if not all of my albums to Bandcamp: novadeviator.bandcamp.com. So you can now buy the digital albums or download the tracks. Your support is more then welcome.

Here’s a track from an album from year 2000.

Screenshot - 01222013 - 12:29:31 AM

Princess preview

Trying to move forward with more music, more ‘honest’, ‘true-to-self’ creations means finishing old unfinished tracks of work. In the primary view is therefore the finishing of the album with tracks from Frozen Images performance we did with Maja Delak (Wanda & Nova deViator) in early 2010. At the moment there are now 7 tracks pretty much above 90% finished. There are 4 tracks that seem realistic to finish by the end of the month. I find it extremely difficult to restructure, upgrade and finish music that we rehearsed and performed so many times (3 years?!). My creative process with music works like so, that I need to hear something (musical ideas) in my head and feel it in my body in order to start working on it outside of me. This is not true for momentary and very short sound/musical ‘object’, but more for compositional, larger structural blocks.

Anyhow, the sprint and finish line is before 30th of january. After that I will take what we have and give it to the mixing engineer and mastering engineer.

I finished the 7th track – an instrumental track called “Princess” (for now) few days ago and I’m too eager to share it, so here’s preview:

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/74763833″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

implicit integration of music in society

Anthony Storr: Music and the Mind

Anthony Storr: Music and the Mind

“Pre-literate societies have very little idea of the individual as a separate entity. They regard the individual as indissolubly part of the family, and the family as part of the larger society. Ritual and aesthetic activities are integral parts of social existence, not superstructures or luxuries which only the rich can afford. Amongst the Venda of the Northern Transvaal, music plays and important part in initiation ceremonies, work, dancing, religious worship, political protest — in fact in every collective activity. Especially important is tshikona, the national dance. This music can only be performed when ‘twenty or more men blow differently tuned pipes with a precision that depends on holding one’s own part as well as blending with others, and at least four women play different drums in polyrhythmic harmony.‘

— Music and The Mind by Anthony Storr

TSHIKONA Pipe Ensemble:

HAIP 2012 & Active Citizens Take Action (ACTA)

It’s been a crazy crazy drive for last couple of months for me. I was mainly very busy with things of programmatic (content) nature at Cyberpipe/Kiberpipa space. And it will be crazy for next two weeks like hell, as we are approaching the launch of the festival HAIP, biennial festival for new media arts, which is now in it’s 5th edition:

Internet […] has overturned what we take as given and as possible. The dream of all people getting access to all knowledge suddenly came within our reach. It seemed just an issue of interpreting when the trajectory curves of global personal computer distribution and internet access penetration would finally make universal access to knowledge a reality. However, the actual trajectory of development of public libraries in the age of internet are pointing in the opposite direction – that the phenomena we people are most proud of are being undercut and can easily go extinct.

Public libraries now cannot receive, and sometimes not even buy, the books of some of the largest publishers [1]. The books that they already hold they must destroy after lending them 26 (?!?) times[2]. And they are loosing the battle to the market dominated by new players such as Amazon, Google and Apple.

On the other hand, we are also part of “ACTA – Active Citizens Take Action“:

The project brings together citizens active in youth and Internet non–governmental organizations from different European countries to discuss authorship rights, piracy and privacy on Internet, efectivness and ethics of the movement Anonymous; to analyse the involvement of civil society in the decision making processes about ACTA at national and European level, to research and learn how to influence national and European parliament on the policies and legislation.

We want to foster action, debate and reflection on European citizenship and democracy through analyzing ACTA and related issues. Encouragement of interaction between citizens and civil society organisations from all participating countries and discussions, exchanging views and presenting citizens opinion and project results with relevant decision makers at local, national and EU level, will be the key principles of the project.