Credit cards are the new jazz

[imomus]

On Saturday Hisae and I visited an installation by Ben Roberts, a British sound artist who lives in Madrid. At Radio Aporee, a gallery / living room on Bürknerstrasse, near our house, Ben had assembled some old cassette players fitted with wand-mounted VCR heads capable of reading -- turning into gloopy sound -- any kind of information stored on magnetic tape: the stripes on credit cards, the backs of metro tickets, old computer spools, and of course audio tape.



Ben gets most of his tech-junk from El Rastro, Madrid's famous hillside market district. He's a bin-diver, a re-jigger, a crank engineer. The show was trailed as "a chance to hear what your credit card sounds like", but I was a bit nervous to "play" my bank cards; last week one of them spontaneously de-magnetized and had to be replaced. (Also I suspect the "music" my cards would make would be somewhat tragic; the sound of an electronic stomach grumbling emptily, perhaps, or 8-bit Mahler?)

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Instead, I swiped the lengths of tape Ben had assembled on the gallery walls; Madrid metro tickets, old language-learning reel-to-reel tapes, ancient computer data. These all had their own distinct sounds, and were mounted on different colours of paper. It was easy to hear them as drumkits (the computer data was particularly rhythmic), vocals, solos, and so on. Soon Hisae and I were jamming "tape jazz" as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Comments

That said, it would be so cool if you made a song with that piece.

[alphacomp.livejournal.com]

It's interesting how the galleries housing more participatory art pieces have such an amazingly laid-back vibe to them. I remember doing gallery-sitting for a video synth showcase and, while it wasn't a packed show by any means, the occasional passer-by would hear the analog beeps and hums faintly from outside and walk in to play around with the synth and create their own little improvisations. It's a very refreshing change of pace.

Re: That said, it would be so cool if you made a song with that piece.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, the laidback vibe is really because this is only half a gallery, half someone's house (someone called Udo). And that's one reason I live in Neukolln -- it's still at that lovely moment when people just stage things spontaneously (this event only came together on Friday) and there's no clear division between living and working space. People live in these street-level shop fronts and they morph into public spaces when there's something interesting to stage, or someone interesting passing through town.

Re: That said, it would be so cool if you made a song with that piece.

[(Anonymous)]

Still, it's a pretty refreshing change from a packed, meticulously-planned gallery opening.

Re: That said, it would be so cool if you made a song with that piece.

[alphacomp.livejournal.com]

Aaand that was me.

laidback blitz

[rinusvanalebeek.livejournal.com]

In fact, this gallery which isn't quite a gallery but somebody's living room working space salon studio whatever is so laidback that it accepts a good deal of my last minute proposals. In fact over the last weeks I came to like these kind of spontaneous events, that I decided to have some more of them. Tonights show at bürknerstrasse 9 in Neukölln wil host some international stars doing a kind of dinkey toyed concert, #4 in the series of the slow noise movement. The request was send in on sunday, two days ago.

In a way, it is very close to saving things from the waste bin.

greetings from berlin kreuzberg,

rinus

[alphacomp.livejournal.com]

The piece itself is like if everybody were allowed to play Laurie Anderson's violin.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ha, that's exactly what I said to Ben when he was demonstrating the wand on a length of tape!

Wand

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

Add audio responsive light modulation
and bamm, karaoke interactive!

[theartoflamb.livejournal.com]

I dig it. And this wouldnt have been the same without the video. Thanks for the effort much appreciated!

8-bit Mahler?

[akabe.livejournal.com]

the clashing dischord from the unfinished 10th with a farty 8bit trumpet piercing victoriously from your credit card is quite an image.

[staticbullets.livejournal.com]

This seems to be an interesting variation on Nam June Paik's Random Access Music (http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/random-access/images/4/). An interesting update of the concept.

[theartoflamb.livejournal.com]

I thought the same thing.

[kaipfeiffer.livejournal.com]

lovely! when i used an old bank card of mine to draw on as part of an exhibition this year, i made sure i scratched the magnet strip good, even if the card had long expired. paranoia! but now my credit card got hacked online and somebody went shopping ... (seems like i won't have to pay, though).

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Delightfully simple and sweet. Its "parasitic" aspect reminds me of Mamoru Fujieda's Patterns of Plants. Similar process, different aesthetics.

For the benefit of those unfamiliar:

"Generating melodic material through the micro-changes of surface-electric potential on leaves, Mamoru Fujieda's second Tzadik release was composed completely based on data taken from plants. Combining alternative tuning systems (just intonation, Pythagorean) with traditional instruments of China and Japan (sho, koto and the ancient 25-stringed zither, the hitsu), Fujieda has again created a world of sound never before imagined possible. Delicate and subtle variations of tone and timbre give a whole new life to classical musical forms such as the passacagalia and strophic variations in this bizarre and fascinating mixture of European Medieval music, the traditions of Asia and modern science."

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Mamoru Fujieda's Patterns of Plants

A great, great piece of music -- one of my favourite records in the entire world!

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Couldn't agree more--it's quite a precious thing. It usually gets heavy rotation during this sleepy stage of summer, alongside Summerisle.

FYI: Just so you are aware...my friends in Espers and Fern Knight have joined together to compose and perform a soundtrack to Valerie's Week of Wonders. They're doing a live performance/screening at MoMA on Oct. 30th. Seemed like something that might interest you if you were still in town.

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

Nice. A lot more melodically "accessible" than Michael Prime's L-Fields (http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/store/artist/album/0,,1044106,00.html). http://www.sonoris.org/mp3/(Sonoris)_Michael_Prime_-_L-Fields_-_Track_2_(Extract).mp3

I was just reading a review of dental assistant Linda Perhacs lovely "Parallellograms" album. It quotes this lyric from the track "Chimacum Rain". "I'm spacing out/I'm seeing silences between leaves."

When I was audiomulching and amazingly slowdowning(tm) field recordings I really believed I was getting to the insect world as hinted at in the faux-psiloscybic buzzing of the beginning of Blue Velvet or scenes from the film Microcosmos.

[squirtlle.livejournal.com]

this sounds really interesting. i'm excited to look into it. thanks for mentioning it.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

The sound that is produced reminds me of when two guys stood in a mall and ran electricity through fruit. The latter was a bit more drone-ish though.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

I hear dolphins.

[vinylboy20.livejournal.com]

Looks like fun! I could do that for an hour or two probably.

[bonsai-human.livejournal.com]

Nice sound, reminiscent of vinyl scratches.

old wisecracking twist

[intergalactim.livejournal.com]

wow, what a fantastic instrument! i've been playing around lately (since i got my pair of sony pro walkman's finally repaired) with running tape by hand over the reader surface, but this here is a MUCH more efficient way of doing it, because you can get some speed. my walkman method usually just sounds like bumping a microphone.

also, i thought you should see this:
"Blogs have realised that old wisecracking twist on an Andy Warhol aphorism: that, someday, everyone will be famous for 15 people."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2157996,00.html

as they say in the article, "If a blogger had written that phrase, it would have come with a link to the source"

~t

Re: old wisecracking twist

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, since this fellow started Salon, I think they should give me a blog review column called Famous for 15 People! At least 15 people would read it!