FundamentallySound Blog

I'm visiting Mississippi, a part of the world that I have little affection for, to put it mildly. I say that with full confidence, as I was born here. But is a place that has produced some rather interesting writers (Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams, and William Faulkner) and at least one amazing musician (Robert Johnson). I have recently rediscovered Faulkner, his work is so experimental, he's definitely in that line of Proust and Joyce. I keep one of his books in my bag at all times while I am here, as a kind of charm to ward off the evils of this place.

I do have lovely friends who live here, one is my dearest friend Mari, a poet who shares the same birthday in the same year and nearly the same hour as me. I've recently gotten to know her eight-month old kid. The tyke has already got the personality of a man after my own heart: he loves to play, enjoys the pleasures of sleep, and laughs at the silliness of human behavior. The only sticking point in our friendship is his occasional desire to eat my hair.

I wonder what the world seems like to someone who's been in it only for eight months.

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Following Digiki's lead, I tried the name acronym generator, and got this:

Radical
Orderly
Dignified
Delicate
Yum

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I'm going to be in Europe for the month of July, as I will be teaching a summer Supercollider workshop at STEIM in Amsterdam from July 12-23. The classes, especially those from July 12-15, will take a totally open-arms/no-stress approach to the software for people who are newly curious about making sound with their computers or using Supercollider in their art. I hope lots of very creative people will sign up, would love to have artists join who are working in video and other disciplines outside of music. More information and sign-up details are here.

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Susant Sontag, as she always does, brings a breath of fresh air to the American news media: Regarding the Torture of Others in New York Times magazine.

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D!G!K! has made a new anti-mix album, with gorgeous cover art by Florence Manlik. Now I need to go to Paris to hear it.

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I just got the new DVD made by my friends Jeff and Nick of New York based Nicedisc, a duo of visual and sound artists. I met them in 2001 while I was on tour as part of Tog, in the deep south of the United States at Eyedrum gallery in Atlanta, they were in the middle of their (in)famous Laptops Across America tour. We shared some great barbecue there. They then came to do a wonderful and intimate show at Mills College Center for Contemporary Music in Oakland a couple of months later.

It's a DVD of three tracks, exploring the ints and outs of Fades and Flickers, both in sound and visuals. My favorite is the last track called Flicker, it's 13' of hypno-electro sounds and visuals, truly art as furniture (in the Satie sense), and what beautifully designed furniture it is. I wish I could cover my walls in it.
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Momus has posted my reworking of his track Water Song on his live journal page. He talks a little bit about the pop/art divide (I would love to hear more about what he has to say on the issue), and I am totally into his ideas of reinstating that boundary. Now that the distinction between the two has been effectively destroyed, thanks to the work of artists (one of whom I would most definitely say is Momus himself) who have been blurring, smudging, and cutting the boundary for the last 40 or so years, we can now reinstate that divide as a kind of flimsy artifice, and really start playing with it. A lovely idea! I hope I can work with him a lot on his new tracks.
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I'm doing a bit of traveling at the moment, am visiting some family in the US and will be spending some time in San Francisco as well. So, don't be surprised if I don't get back to emails quickly, I will as soon as I can though. Happy Summer, wherever you are!!

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My friend Bart introduced me to the work of J.M. Coetzee, someone I should have known about long ago. And I read his book Disgrace over the last couple of days, and it gave me nightmares. For two days. Really. I mean, sometimes I have a bad dream but I can't point to something and say that is the undisputed cause of it. But in this case, it was clearly the book. I read it then I have a nightmare, A+B=C.

The story is along the lines of an old professor in Cape Town who is disgraced from his academy because of an affair with a young student. He then goes to the countryside to live with his daughter, who is subsequently raped by a gang of thugs. It's about so much more than that though, I found it to be some of the most brutal and pointed writing I've ever read, every page is a challenge to the reader to take a moral stand on the events portrayed and that is no simple matter in the case of this book. It's a kind of critique of the cultural residue from colonial attitudes, questioning the larger guilt or innocence of seemingly benign western assumptions. I think it is a philosophical treatise disguised as bleak and well-written fiction. (Coetzee's Nobel lecture is highly recommended).

Maybe I should stick to comics for a few days now.

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Momus has used some of my music in some new tracks called the Water Song. One track foregrounds his work, and the "roddy mix" version foregrounds mine. I'm going to work on another remix too, not because I'm not happy with the way it turned out, but because I want to sort of push it in some more extreme directions. He explains the story, with links to the two tracks, in his livejournal entry.

So far, some of the comments posted to his entry are a little less than favorable, seems that people are sort of asking him to return to his singer/songwriter roots, and the word pretentious (yikes!), in reference to his new work, even comes up once or twice.

I can't understand what could be taken as pretentious about it, as he sooo explicitly lays out exactly what he is doing, why he did it, why he's interested in it, there's nothing mysterious or remotely condescending about his approach. I mean, liking it or not liking it, that is one thing, but calling it pretentious? Come on, that's way too much just a cheap shot.

I guess folks really do have conservative ears these days. Anyway, I like what he did in both tracks.

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Oh my god, looks like The Knife are still at it. This is the best video I've seen in years (or at least since I saw this last summer): Handy-Man .

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Laptop music will never be the same! About the CD collaboration by Alvin Curran and Domenico Scianjno (hey, they got an honorable mention at Ars Electronica), Alvin says, "He and I met by pure chance at an international conference of sound smugglers organized by the Palermo "cupola", held annually in a remote seaside hotel outside of the Hague in the Netherlands. At the time, he was a contrabassista.....whose job was to look out for the cops, when the others went into action - stealing sounds from ports, train stations, markets, landscapes, banks and even people. This is as close to the truth, as the avantgarde is to the Marx Brothers."

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The Kunstvlaii 5 festival, going on all week in Amsterdam, is a wash of sunshine, sound art, visual art, sculpture, and kids! Lots and lots of kids. Everywhere. Holland has to be nearly equal to Japan as a kid-friendly country. I really like a culture wherein it's considered to be normal to take a family trip on the weekend to a festival that's celebrating all that's weird, strange, and a little bit crazy. These people have obviously got their priorities straight!

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Another show in Amsterdam, I'm providing live music for an adaptation of Bill Viola's Slowly Turning Narrative with Nathan Fuhr (concept/spoken text) and Mendel Hardeman (live video). We're replacing the rotating mirrors with a video camera, and the tape which runs a voice reading text with live theater. This all lasts about 20 minutes. It's at Kunstvlaai 5, a really cool festival. info.

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Last night I went to church. Well, a church, anyway. My roommate, a cellist, had a performance of Gabriel Fauré's Requiem in the Oude Kerk, Voorburg, near the house where we live. I didn't know the piece, and was reluctant to go out into the nasty rainy and cold weather, but finally decided that it would do me some good to hear real acoustically produced music for a change, enough of this synthetic electronic business! It was a wise decision, they had an absolutely lovely performance of music by a composer that Proust is said to have admired while they both lived in Paris. And this was definitely music of a Proustian kind: gentle, dreamy, and very human. Apparently, at the time the piece was written, it was even described as a "lullaby of death." Wow! (Is that a bad review?)
I'm always excited when I learn about a good work that isn't the product of an artist's ego-trip. This was one of them, and it was so much better than other hyperbolically grandiose requiems that have gotten headlines for the last couple hundred years.

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i'll be playing on a lee renaldo piece, just found out about it. if you're in the city, come see us!

1 May 2004, 21.30 til late - Collision Palace plays Cobra and a Lee
Ranaldo world premiere at OCCII, Amstelveenseweg 134,
Amsterdam. 5 Euro before 22.30, 7 thereafter. With
afterparty by DJ KODI (Nathalie Bruys).

Collision Palace (including Suspicious White Powder!)

Marcos Baggiani - drums
Barbara Gene - voice/trouble
Lucho Enriquez - guitar
Felicity Provan - trumpet
Petre Radu Scafaru - woodwinds
Roddy Schrock - computer
Valdi Kolli - double bass
Mark van Tongeren - kaosspad/objects/voice
Barb Hamilton - trombone
Luis Diaz - percussion
Jay McMahon - bari sax
Phillip Zwirchmayr - drums
Nikolai Onken - guitar
Wiljam Nybacka - bass guitar

Nathan Fuhr, prompter

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