Audio On Loop opening 20th June to 18th of August.
A multichannel headphone installation curated by Damian Castaldi Opening Saturday the 20th of June, 6 to 8 pm 109 Hunter St Newcastle.
Audio on loop in rotation from the 20th of June till the 18th of August.
IMAGES from the opening at the bottom of this page .......
Artists: Daniel Lavan, Mark Pedersen, Brigid Burke, Ros Bandt, Robert Curgenven, Lawrence English, Michael Yuen, Cam Merton, Rick Mason, Sam Landels, Kraig Grady, Danial Blinkhorn, Joyce Hinterding, Organism_b, Julian Day, Jessica Coughlan, Matthew McFarlane, Dan Conway and Roger Mills.
Short abstracts, Audio excerpts and Artist web links
Joyce Hinterding (Lawson, Blue Mts, NSW)
Radiation Series
Radiation_001DC : 8 min Radiation_002NZ : 10 min
Radiation 001DC is based on a recording of the electromagnetic fields that surround railway lines characteristically high current environments.
Radiation 002NZ is based on electromagnetic field recordings from Dunedin New Zealand.
jeu fabrique? (duration 9:59) The material heard in the piece was generated from recordings of toy tools, real tools, imagined spaces and real spaces, all of which attempt to typify some of the sonorities and images found within an environment of fabrication, invention and imagination.
The ‘prince of romance’ here is one Phillipe Pages, who rose from early studies at the Paris Conservatoire to become, according to the Guinness Book of Records, “the most successful pianist in the world”. His golden smile, long blonde hair and suave white suits cut an indelible image, his silky smooth touch helping to lubricate countless candle-lit dates and intimate encounters the world over. I felt that, in turn, this much sonic seduction deserved lingering over, and that any aural climax ought to be extended and sustained. Thus, I give you, in loving stereo, twice as much Pages for twice as long.
This work is part of an ongoing project, STAMMER, jointly conceived with my long-time collaborator Luke Jaaniste. Over the past decade we have systematically sabotaged sounds from our collective consciousness through straightforward yet brutal mechanical means. Taking the lead from Christian Marclay, John Oswald and 30 years of modern sampling, we take common recorded artefacts such as CDs, vinyl records and mp3 files and slow them down, stretch them out and stutter our way through them, simultaneously intensifying and annihilating any meaning therein. http://www.julianday.com
Dan Conway (Sydney NSW)
Mouth Off
Dan Conway explores the world of... words. Melded, mangled, set in opposition, dissected, tortured, revitalized, and then molded into cacophony. Words. From tone poems and cutups to textures made of dislocated babble. An exploration of the sound beneath the meanings of our words. Words cut free. Words enclosed. Words unleashed. Words abused and stripped of their context, meaning and shape. The vocal utterances of human beings in all their beauty, power and variation.
"Vibration Gallery" "This piece combines various pre-recorded sound samples in an attempt to create a sense of dynamic motion in 2-dimensional audio space: left/right stereo together with front/back reverberation. Audio composition, editing and post-processing with Pro Tools by Daniel Lavan (2003 - 2008) on a dual-boot G3 Imac desktop."
Uroborean Mirror (composed directly for Audio On Loop)
Recent cryptographic methods developed at the Centre of Alphabetical Sequencing (CAS) on Anaphoria Island have been employed in the encoding possibilities of binaural audio. With complete separation between channels, beats of precision-tuned micro-intervals occur within the perceptual processing of the brain. For this reason headphones are necessary for the experience to be fully activated. In this research various mathematical recurrent sequences (used here) often exhibit beneficial effects. Like most work at CAS, balance between science and phenomenological experience is achieved within melodic textures. The listener takes full responsibility for the release of any unconscious or unforeseen effects in the rare circumstance they might occur.
Iso Nageki, Sea lament Stereo mix of 5.1 surround sound installation.
Iso Nageki, Sea Lament is a reflective meditation simulating the underwater sonic world of the Japanese Ama divers who free dive for abalone without wetsuits according to their traditional sustainable tribal laws and customs. They pray for the catch, never take too much, so there is always an abundant supply, never take the babies, and give libations for all the Ama who have lost their lives at sea in this dangerous pursuit. When they come up from their dives the women make the air whistle, the endangered ISOBUE or sea whistle. After weeks of fieldwork with the Ama in the easterly Japanese island of Sugashima, I recreated this haunting and tempting world the Ama inhabit. I composed the original sound track in 5.1. at the Sydney studios of the ABC with engineer Andre Shabunov during my residency with Audio Arts for the ABC. The installation was premiered for ACMA at the Sydney Con in 2008. The 8 sonic poems SHIMA will be re-exhibited in Thursday Island later this year. The double CD Isobue is a plea to mind the ocean and live in harmony with the natural universe. I would like to thank activist Dr Kumi Kato for taking me to Sugashima and for participating helping with many of the hydrophone on site recordings.
Silent Landscapes No.4 (2007) stereo, field recordings from remote Australia
Singing fences from the arid interior interrogate recordings from the forests of Eastern Germany in *Silent Landscapes No 4*. Unprocessed layers formed by the slow phasing of an Aeolian (wind-driven) “musical fence” in Central Queensland, recorded direct to DAT on 7-8 November, 2006, in temperatures reaching 42 degrees, is juxtaposed with an untreated field recording of seven people “cleaning” a forest eighty kilometres east of Berlin.
irfanSpace1 explores themes of multiplicity and unity, decay and renewal in the context of Islamic philosophy, history and architecture. Based on a poem by contemporary Urdu poet Jameela Nishat, IrfanSpace1 incorporates Nishat’s reflection on the fading glory of the city of Hyderabad. Founded as the capital of the Deccan region of India in 1591 by the Qutub Shahi kings, Hyderabad is now being reborn as a hub of India’s burgeoning IT economy.
Speed Money 14:38 Live to tape improvised work for electric guitar, bass guitar and amplifier as instrument. Speed Money is an ode to distortion in the truest sense of the word. It is a rainbow painted black then thinly scratched for revelation. It is the sound of electricity wrestling itself to the ground. It is a pop song wrapped in 1000 metres of rusted barbed wire.
organism_b is a sound artist based in the centre of Sydney. His work changes quite regularly, being easily influenced/distracted by the world around him, but is often found working with effecting natural soundscapes. This piece is a representation of a day at the office.
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Brigid Burke (Melbourne, Vic)
Memories of a Shadow 2007 Duration: 19:55
This composition uses language that depicts memories and snap shots of individual’s dreams. Memories of a Shadow explores inner thoughts of identity, acoustic and manipulated language to create sound, abstraction, dark humour and colour. This composition is inspired by Sigmund Freud’s, book of ‘Interpretation of Dreams’, quoting the famous dream of the Guillotine by Maury. The outcome is an entwining of audio murmuring. The speech is interspersed with speech rhythms and ring modulators that create hollow and bell like sounds with slight reverbs and a small delay added to make the whispers inaudible. One hears the air sounds at ends of phrases that are granulated. Single words in the middle section are fragmented – slight delays are added and microtones and multiphonics are played on the clarinet. These clarinet sounds are treated with pitch shifters, spacialization and reverberant harmonics. Throughout the work the granulation of the text occurs and as a whole is stretched, compressed and multi-channelled. The textual fragments are reshaped, spiralling in and out of understanding and audibility. This fragment of text can never be viewed as a fixed object as the content is hundreds of years old and has been handed down through generations by oral poets.
“The Stain” is music/poetry collaboration. It starts with 5 word phrases & 5 musical phrases, and then it’s all improvised from there. This recording is from a cold Thursday night in June 2007. M@ McFarlane does the words & the musicians are different every time. On this recording there’s Ruben Ramsay, Craig Sanders, Andy Costican, Dorian the Viking, Big Jason, Jules, Mick, Josh, Stefan and Jenna.
Roger Mills (Marrickville, NSW)
TOHORA - LIVE INTERNET PERFORMANCE BY ROGER MILLS
‘Inspired by a hydrophonic recording of a sperm whale obtained by my father during a research trip to the Antarctic several years ago. Tohora is composed of looped trumpet drones, manipulated field recordings and signal processing that fuses the frequencies and tonality of whale song in a fugue with improvised and processed trumpet’.
Tohora was performed live in Sydney through (Nicecast) and streamed into Plug 4 Gallery, San Francisco as part of the international Le Placard Headphones Festival on the 6th December 2008.
