specification enables further specification: a three day festival with new and developing sound works
taking apart the notion of composition and putting things back together.
“Stopped Clock Illusion” from Anne Historical: Malcomess/Historical’s work is defined by a continual movement between disciplines, that is between writing and research, between visual art and literary forms, between spatiality and liveness. This is a practice that is nomadic, defined by adaptation and reinvention. Making is not determined by medium but is rather defined by the setting in motion of many processes that begin with a thought, or a question. A logic not unlike process and phase music, or the setting up of experimental conditions in a laboratory. Anne Historical’s most recent performances work with analogue recording devices and magnetic tape to produce live and recorded sonic works with loops as the basis of live compositions. Echolalias (2016), Apahasia: treatment situations (2017), Neglect)(2018) stage the condition in which speech is lost: where language becomes sound. This series of works attempt to inhabit the entanglement of memory, technology and language with history. Unfinished articulations, in counterpoint voices, a current against the grain of transmission.
Vinyl Terror & Horror: “Our approach to music starts from a visual and sculptural practice. Turntable deconstruction and rearrangement of the vinyl media in all imaginative ways is strongly influencing our sounds. We are working in the field of cinematic soundscapes with a high tolerance level of possible hi- fi disasters. Sentimental heartbreaking sequences where the opera singer is looping and the birds are singing backwards……. untill the breakdown of needles and chaos taking over. Cut up and mistreated records looping and creaking from dust and sloppy treatment. Pick-up`s being pushed disrespectfully over grooves. Records spinning backwards and forwards while played from multible pick-ups simultaniously. Meanwhile the lady in stilletoes just keep onwalking down the stairs. Repetitive arrangements, dark sounds, neck breaking mixes, film-amateur sound effects, scratches, quieks, vinyls, terror and horror.”
We have been cutting up records and manipula- ting record players as the basis of our work with sound and installations for the last 15 years.The reason for choosing to use vinyl records in the rst place – apart from having every possible music genre available to us – is that it allows us to work sculpturally with the sound, meaning that every scratch, cut or processing of the material itself will in uence the sound in a very direct way. Even if the physical manipulation might follow a strict visual idea the intention of control always stops the moment you put the needle on the record.
The composition we will present at the festival“TakingThingsApart”is an arrangement of selected bits and pieces of vinyls recorded on de-constructed record players. The music is transcribed and re-recorded with the original instrument in question. At a later point, the composition will be performed live by an ensemble. The composition always has two versions. The “cut-up” version which includes sculptures and rough sounds of scratches and bumps and the clean transcribed version.
In the cut-up version, the awkwardness is accepted because of the direct connection to the visual and physical manipulations.The transcribed version departs from the vinyl medium and obtains its own logic intensi ed by the concentration it takes to re-play the music bits regarding the sudden changes in tempo or scale.
After our long history of “destroying” the medium, we thought it was time to “repair” it again – what seemed like the next logical step. Following the future release on vinyl, the compositions will most certainly be swallowed up in our vinyl machinery and we will be back where we started.
DJ Marcelle is the most glamourous trickster of all our favorite DJs. Her special power: Deejaying with three record players at a time, which discombobulates everything to a whole new level of harmony and chaos For those who will want to know the name of the game being played, Marcelle excises the stuffiness of predictable genres to bring the action directly to the dance floor. What is this punk-riff doing right now in this dancehall-track? And why the fuck is the breakcore-tune sounding way much cooler when Marcelle blends it with rembetiko or polka? What are the boundaries of techno and from which point on the scale can music be considered danceable?
These are the questions we would be asking ourselves – if we weren’t otherwise too busy twirling blissfully across the dance floor, dazed and amazed by the constant twists and turns. Marcelle doesn’t show us a way through the jungle of music, she’s planting a whole new one with each of her style-forming DJ-sets – just another nice mess! It bubbles in the ear like a plunge into a bathtub filled with champagne.
A Festival with:
Sonoscopia (Gustavo Costa, Alberto Lopes and Tiago Angelo) (PT), Liz Kosack, Mieko Suzuki & Claudia Rohrmoser, Anne Historical (ZAF), Vinyl Terror & Horror, DJ Marcelle (NL), Christina Ertl-Shirley, Felicity Mangan & Gretchen Blegen and Mario de Vega. The Festival ends with an insight into the work of scientists Heike Vester and Madita Zetzsche from Ocean Sound.
Taking Things Apart – Day 2
Saturday, 20th October 2018 | Doors 20:00 CET | Starts 20:30 CET
ausland | Lychener Strasse 60 | 10437 Berlin
ausland-berlin.de/taking-things-apart-day-1 | Event @ Facebook | Day 1 | Day 3
