imomus | The future's so bright I gotta wear headphones!

I've been keeping this under wraps, but now it's confirmed and I can go public. I'll be spending six weeks -- from mid-January to the end of February next year -- doing a sound art project at Future University, Hakodate, Hokkaido. Lehan Ramsay, an Australian academic at the university's Communication department, approached me a couple of months ago about this and I sent a proposal called Lost Radio Found Sound. That proposal has now been accepted, and I'll be in Hokkaido through two of the coldest months of winter, collecting sounds with the help of students and locals and turning them into a web-streaming art radio station.

The university -- which has a campus as futuristic as its name -- is focused on technology and communication. I'll be based in a small building off campus called the Art Harbour, which has a gallery on the ground floor and living quarters upstairs.

Here's an excerpt from my original proposal:

Based in the Art Harbour, Lost Radio Found Sound will have as its goal the encouragement of cognition rather than recognition, texture rather than text. Together with students from the Communication Department and local people, Momus will work on the generation, manipulation, editing, compiling and broadcasting of various types of sound, found on the web and also recorded locally in Hakodate. There will be a temporary installation in the Art Harbour, an interactive exhibition space where visitors can produce and play with sound, generating their own material for the broadcasts. The emphasis will be on sound's capacity to transport us to interesting locations, but also on its tactile and textural qualities; using small digital devices like sound-capable cameras and keitai phones, participants will collect 'found sound objects'. These might be the 'sounds of food', unreliable and inarticulate documentaries on local wildlife, humming, the sound of cooking and dancing, or speech used for its textural qualities rather than the transmission of information. For two months Hakodate will be transformed into a kind of electronic Prospero's Island: a place full of 'airs and sounds which give delight, and harm not'.

I'm really delighted to be doing this project. I've never been to Hokkaido, but from the photos I've found of Hakodate it has an intriguingly Russian look to it.

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the future looks a tad depressing.

A bit phony proposal, non?

You Eeyores and Jeremiahs should have a nice chill glass of champagne. I'm over the moon.

the proposal should have been a sound recording! not in phony text!

It sounds like great news for you, and an interesting project too.

Will any of the broadcasts be streamed or available on the net ?

Yes, but I don't have an URL yet. I'll post it here and on imomus.com when I do.

Thanks.

By the way, and apologies if it seems like a digression but somewhere in my mind there's a connection of the vaguest kind, have you ever heard Jeff Mangum's "Orange Field Works" recordings ? Any thoughts on him ?

Nope. I shall whisper his name next time I go to my ultra-secret and exclusive filesharing club.

Watch out! Pete Waterman'll be round with some heavies and the BPI...

Congratulations on the project. Did you experience the Christina Kubisch 'Oasis 2000' installation at the Hayward 'Sonic Boom' show? Tropical sounds turned the Thames into a globally-warm paradise of bird hoots and insect buzzing. I instant felt better being there. You should get yourself on the Arts Council money-go-round with Scanner and his chums. Seriously, though, this sounds more appropriate for where you're at than being a 'pop star'.

Better known for the lo-fi-indie-band-meets-sally-army 'In The Aeroplane Over The Sea' by Neutral Milk Hotel, a lovely and sad record inspired by Anne Frank.

oh do you mean imomus.com actually still exists?!

It does indeed. There's even a brand spanking new cover design (http://www.imomus.com) this week. Most of the new content, though, appears with a LiveJournal interface (although the media files are all at imomus.com) because LJ is easier to put into pages and has Comments.

By the way, a search run from the imomus website search box will yield results for the imomus LJ too, and also LJ Comments.

Congratulations. Certainly the most architecturally interesting
city in Hokkaido. I've never been there. Will be interesting to
hear your reports.

... and you've surely noticed that the domain name for Mirai dai
is fun.ac.jp: excellent place for the pursuit of ludology.

Congratulations Nick. I hope that this is a great opportunity for you to explore some ideas out of the realm of your day job.

Richard G

a residency this fun almost seems criminal.

congratulations on getting it!

-roddy

hakodate is a weird place, but in a lovely sort of sense. all port towns are peculiar. i hope you have fun. i think since they were the first port open after the kanagawa treaty, that they just sucked up all the outside influence they could get especially in an architectural sense.

plus, there is fort goryokaku which i think was the first western style military compound built in japan. i read that somewhere, but i can't remember where. actually, i’m not sure how i know any of this.

I knew a math teacher named Sato who went to school at the Future University up there. He never said much about college life, but he was very friendly. Out of all the math teachers I've met, his haircut was the best. We couldn't communicate very well at the time, but we knew that we both enjoyed the music of Stevie Wonder and that made us pals.

Also, good luck with the Pimsleur. I think those MP3s are great. I used them before I came to Japan. I learned very fast with them - I only wish they had continued after level III. They were really good for pronunciation and rhythm. I'm often burning copies of those Pimsleur discs and giving them to friends who are trying to learn Japanese.

I have fond memories of that moment in one of the first 12 lessons where the guy trying to set a time for a date with an uninterested girl fails take a hint. Also thought it was funny that one of the first things they teach is "Why don't we go back to my place?"

This sounds like (no pun intended) a very cool, very fun project. The pictures of Hokkaido remind me of the backdrop from Kiki's Delivery Service. I wonder if Hayao Miyazaki used it as a model?

Unrelated - I was going through some forgotten CDs tonight to load onto the old iPod and happened upon the Happy End of the World remix featuring various artists, including, to my delight, YOU!

I see hot, wet monkeys in your future, sir. Grand news indeed--you must be thrilled.

Salud,
W

Will you be encountering the Ainu, perchance?

http://www.ainu-museum.or.jp/english/english.html

The future's so bright I gotta wear headphones!

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Hibiya Dori wa doko des ka?

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Ainu museum in Hokkaido