EU knitting

[imomus]

Not sure how it fits into the frame of yesterday's debate, but Joe, Emma, Hisae and I had an exemplary Berlin Sunday yesterday, full of interesting sounds and colours. It started with an hour or so of live mixing of field recordings, at an event called Throw Away Your Radio, Get A New One, held just around the corner from our flat.

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We were the only audience for the first hour of a projected four-hour "sonic wanderung" by Adam Thomas, James Edmonds, Kim Laugs, and Rinus Van Alebeek. The improvisation with four separate sound sources (field recordings, archive material, but also an old mechanical record player miked at strategic places) was soothing, blending with the taste of vanilla milk and the reassuringly funky-fusty decor of O Tannenbaum, an alternative workspace and occasional junkshop on Pflügerstrasse, run by Dutch artists. At one moment fire engine seemed to race distantly through the room. "Is that us, or is that outside?" cried Rinus, and ran to the door. "It's us!" he said. The fire was a field recording.

After that we headed (via vegan burgers at Mauerpark) to Strickzirkel #7, the conceptual knitting circle up at Rüdiger Schlömer's flat in Prenzlauer Berg. The Strickzirkel was the subject of my first Post-Materialist piece.



Conceptual knitting is a really relaxing way to spend a Sunday afternoon, and somehow its combination of the ultra-traditional with the avant garde is very Berlin. Or do I mean very Japanese-Bubble Berlin? In the evening, feeling like living national treasures, we headed off to a nearby Japanese restaurant.

Comments

[csshsh.livejournal.com]

vegan burgers at mauerpark? where exactly?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's called Tiki Sunburger, it's halfway up the long street, then turn left, they're Australians, nice people, and they make their own chilli relish. They tend to run out of food halfway through the day, though, so it pays to get there early. Or, actually, it pays to get there late, because they reduce the prices and do cut-down tofu burgers.

[(Anonymous)]

Malcolm X/Memorex/MTV/MP3

Keep it foolish

[imomus.livejournal.com]

By the way, on the sound workshop tip, check out yesterday's Sunday Feature (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/sundayfeature/pip/wxjgl/) on BBC Radio 3, available online for just 7 days. It's about Daphne Oram, of the Radiophonic Workshop.

Wee Have Also Sound-Houses (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio3_aod.shtml?radio3/sundayfeature)
Sunday 3 August 2008 21:45-22:30 (Radio 3)

Fifty years after the creation of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the programme examines the life and legacy of one of the great pioneers of British electronic music - the Workshop's co-founder Daphne Oram.

As a child in the 1930s, Oram dreamed of a way to turn drawn shapes into sound, and she dedicated her life to realising that goal. Her Oramics machine anticipated the synthesiser by more than a decade, and with it she produced a number of internationally-performed works for the cinema, concert hall and theatre.

Daphne Oram was among the very first composers of electronic music in Britain and her legacy is the dominance of that soundworld in our culture today.
Duration:
45 minutes

[womanonfire.livejournal.com]

that was a great tale about someone i've never heard of. amazing to hear about what it was like to be a woman electronic musician in those early days. i loved hearing how she had to work in machine code and then sits in the sunshine with her cats :) such a neo-geek before her time!

so many have worked to make music related to drawing. i wish her ideas had been further developed... as in, had taken off and become "the way things are done"

beautiful sounds too. strangely i thought i heard your voice in there once or twice. ha!

CLIFF SHAG MARRY

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

fire engines, Rinus van Alebeek, Japanese restaurants.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, drawing sounds on screen survives in the form of things like the Korg Kaosillator:

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[ohmavie.livejournal.com]

Conceptual knitting in Berlin? Sign me up! In what area of Berlin do you live? I have a good friend who used to live in Kreuzberg (he's recently moved - don't know where now). Some other friends lived in...Moabit? Not far from the (Lehrter) Hauptbahnhof. A good friend of mine is moving back to Berlin in October...so jealous!

[(Anonymous)]

The Observer seems to think that parts of your lifestyle are now Tory trademarks.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/03/britishidentity.davidcameron

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I don't see field recordings and conceptual knitting in the David Cameron column there:



In fact, the only thing I have in common with those values is cycling.

[womanonfire.livejournal.com]

yes!

tangentially related (http://calebcoppock.com/Homepage/graphiteseq/graphiteseq.html)

do you see ?

[rinusvanalebeek.livejournal.com]

I don't see field recordings and conceptual knitting in the David Cameron column there

oh,
no
there is at least 100 hours worth of field recordings in that list,
in fact,
maybe i adopt it as the songlist for yesterday's broadcast.

thanks for passing by,
we finished at 18.10

greetinsg from the winds of berlin,
rinus

[(Anonymous)]

Never saw this Cheki before!
I have one, made with Yone and Fafi.
Do you know how to stop the flash? i can't find.

[tranceperentsky.livejournal.com]

Sorry, i forgot my LJ login.

12 hour party people

[klasensjo.livejournal.com]

While I read this entry on EU-knitting, Mark Fisher's (K-punk) post from the Wire blog springs to mind:

http://www.thewire.co.uk/themire/

Friday, July 25, 2008

12 hour party people

Uber Germanist Owen weighs into the debate on minimal:

"It rather pains me to say this, as Berlin - with its healthy contempt for the work ethic, and its still extant left activism - is a far, far saner city than London, and by several leagues more pleasant, more rewarding a place to live. And yet, when - as seems largely to have happened in much of Mitte, Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain, Prenzlauer Berg - an entire chunk of a formerly working city becomes a playground for an international of 'creatives', something odd happens. One often got the sense in Berlin that whatever was happening, it didn't really matter, nothing was at stake: pure pleasure becomes boring after a while, as does the constant low-level tick-tock of a techno designed seemingly for little else than just rolling along. German techno seems fastidious, but not glamorous. An executive music for people who can make a living off DJing or curating here and there is a bizarre phenomenon, as is a futurist cottage industry. The restraint of the music is the effect of a culture with no restraints."

This perhaps makes sense of the link between minimal and hedonism that Philip Sherburne often insists upon. On the face of it, minimal is an extremely unlikely candidate to be considered a pleasure seekers' music. It's worth noting at this juncture, that, as Derek pointed out after my last post, there is very little 'tasteful' about a Villalobos, Luciano or Hawtin set – what appears tasteful at normal volume becomes something different when put through a club PA. Nevertheless, even at high volume, there is a certain restraint at work here – or perhaps it is better construed as an avoidance (of hooks, big riffs etc.) It could be that this avoidance of the hedonic spikes, the pleasure peaks, of music is the libidinal cost of distending pleasure over the course of a twelve hour party.

Berlin has in many ways become a capital of deterritorialized culture, a base for DJs and curators whose jetsetting lifestyle is indeed a "bizarre phenomenon". If hauntology depends upon the way that very specific places – Burial's South London Boroughs, for instance – are stained with particular times, then the affect that underlies minimal might be characterised as nomadalgia: a lack of sense of place, a drift through club or salon spaces that, like franchise coffee bars, could be anywhere.

posted by Mark Fisher at 2:02 AM

[essentialskills.livejournal.com]

Could you ask Joe if his plants need watering?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

"Yes, they need watering once every couple of days, about half a pint of water in each thing."

Re: 12 hour party people

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I hate all forms of techno music. Joe and I were in Hard Wax (I go there to look at the reggae sleeves, basically) and there was this minimal techno track playing, and it was pleasant enough, but it just started and went on and stopped, zero development. Joe and I agreed that, whatever differences there are in our music, what unites it is the idea that people are paying attention, and that we engineer changes every few seconds to keep it interesting.

tatiesque!

[brokenjunior.livejournal.com]

I love how the small child is crossing behind the door frame around 0:40 in your video – especially with the background sound, it's looking so very posed...

Re: tatiesque!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I promise it's not an allusion to The Shining!

[(Anonymous)]

Another related item:ANS Sythesizer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANS_synthesizer). Very early attempt at creating music via drawing.

Tom K
--
http://www.transatlantis.net

relaxing way to spend

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

Does Oswald Spengler ever come up in any conversations? I picked up "Decline of the West" for summer reading.

Re: relaxing way to spend

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Spengler came up in the historic Momus / Marxy debates a couple of years ago, when I accused Marxy of having an essentially Spengleresque take on Japan's "terminal decline".

For me, Spengler's treatment of civilisations as if they were organic entities with a fixed lifespan is a metaphor not only taken too far, but fundamentally faulty. In Wired a couple of years ago (http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/commentary/imomus/2006/01/70013) I quoted Chesterton to explain why:

"G.K. Chesterton opens his breezy 1910 jeremiad What's Wrong With the World with a humorous warning regarding "the gaping absurdity of perpetually talking about 'young nations' and 'dying nations,' as if a nation had a fixed and physical span of life.

"Thus people will say that Spain has entered a final senility; they might as well say that Spain is losing all her teeth," he wrote. "Or people will say that Canada should soon produce a literature; which is like saying that Canada must soon grow a new moustache. Nations consist of people; the first generation may be decrepit, or the 10,000th may be vigorous."

Despite Chesterton's sensible warning, people continue to map nations metaphorically to the lifespan of individuals; Mark Steyn, in a somewhat hysterical essay about Muslim population growth in Europe published in January's New Criterion, says, "As fertility shrivels, societies get older -- and Japan and much of Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever been. And we know what comes after old age."

Well, we know what comes after old age in individuals, yes. Death. But, while it may be useful to talk about a society "aging" when its average citizen gets older and older, let's not take this metaphor into the realm of Spain losing her teeth and Canada growing her moustache.

Societies don't die when they increase their longevity and decrease their birthrate. They don't die when their populations decline rather than increase. They change. And from some perspectives (although not necessarily the economic one) this change is desirable, the result of increasing health and wealth. In fact, this sort of change (controlled decline rather than mindless growth) might be the very condition of a society's sustainability -- and the world's."

[(Anonymous)]

what is "conceptual knitting"?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Follow the link I provided in the text. (http://themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/11/the-post-materialist-berlin-generics/)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Or, better yet, read the interview (http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/words-of-wool-an-interview-with-rudiger-schlomer) I made with Rudiger for AIGA Voice.

[(Anonymous)]

is that what is actually in this post's photos?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It is.

[ned-smanks.livejournal.com]

do you fart in front of each other?

[(Anonymous)]

The home made, the green, Gorillazs, post-music (Latitude), cycling, non-smoking, moderation. All perfectly New Posh values.

Re: 12 hour party people

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

The idea of hating an entire genre seems ridiculous to me. Have you heard every techno track and decided you dont like everything you've heard? Free your mind.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

It could be argued that restraint, ecology, caring about causes and such are all affluent values. The working class, the theory goes, have no time or money for organic food, cycling, ethical consumerism or political involvement. They watch trashy TV, eat a diet of trans fats and carcinogens washed down with the sort of cheap lager hipsters consume ironically, drive cars, and when the money's good, consume as conspicuously as they can allow themselves to, in the knowledge that good times won't last forever.

I wonder how the rising oil/food prices will change this. When the poor can no longer afford to drive, buy consumer goods and eat in bulk, will cycling, DIY and moderation become declassé, and fatness and conspicuous materialism once again become symbols of affluence, as they once were?

Re: relaxing way to spend

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Speaking of Japan's terminal decline, have you seen these images of overgrown, post-apocalyptic Tokyo (http://www.pinktentacle.com/2008/08/tokyo-fantasy-images-of-the-apocalypse/)? They're quite beautiful, in a way.

[pulled-up.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

yes

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

Only if they're miked.



mad pierrot