For the past several weeks, a robot has been dancing at the Palais de Tokyo. Wrapped up in its own private ballet, the sixteen-and-a-half foot tall metal behemoth has gambolled and gyred through an elegant choreography, deep in the bowels of the Parisian art institute. For the robot, this must have been a very strange experience. We’re not talking about Sony’s agile QRIO androids or some shimmying extra from an episode of Soul Train. Before British artist Conrad Shawcross got hold of it, this particular robot, scarcely more than a giant metal arm, would have done little more than paint-spraying and tack-welding in a car factory. “It would move along, it would go bzz. It would move back, it would go bzz,” says Shawcross, who programmed the graceful arcs traversed by its looming steel joints. “I think if the company who originally built it saw this robot they would be pretty horrified.” The music it’s been dancing to was composed especially for it by Holly Herndon.
Herndon spent a week in Shawcross’s studio in Hackney, living upstairs while spending her days singing to the robot in the sitting room, sweeping microphones across its engines and composing on the fly in response to its elegant seesawing movements. Shawcross’s co-curator Ken Farmer points to the way Herndon’s work traverses “composition, and sound design, with playing at Berghain” as one of the elements that drew them to her for this project. “She’s able to turn the computer into a performative instrument rather than something you kind of hide behind,” he adds. But Herndon is only one of a number of female composers to be commissioned to create new work in response to Shawcross’s robot. The first was London sound artist, Beatrice Dillon, and in the near future more works are expected from Mira Calix, and from Tamara Barnett-Herrin of the Freeform Five, among others.
Read the rest of this article on Conrad Shawcross & Ken Farmer’s ADA Project at Fact Magazine.
“Bringing together classic works by Dan Graham and Gordon Matta-Clark with new pieces by Alexandra Leykauf, Tatiana Trouvé, and Duchamp Prize nominee, Farah Atassi; the theme is transitions – between worlds and between registers. A mixed bag overall, but three works in particular are oddly captivating.
On one wall are placed the left side only of the letters AND. On another wall, at a right angle but not adjoining, the right side of the same letters are positioned and underlined suggesting a viewpoint from which you might align the two halves. AND(2013) by Peter Downsbrough seeks to position the viewer in a place where meaning can emerge unambiguously. You discover, however, that there is no viewpoint from which letters and lines will join.
In 1974 Gordon Matta-Clark sawed a house in two. The filmed documentationSplitting is projected in the next room to Downsbrough's AND. Splitting was made in a New York in which gentrification was rendering community and habitation literally impossible for many citizens and like AND, proffers the opening of impossible space.
Another house asunder is found among three films by Alexandra Leykauf. In the three-minute loop Hausbau (2009), a found photo is shown rotating, the same image on both sides. The photo depicts a house in the process of construction – recalling Buster Keaton – precariously held up by a group of men. The sense of tension and suspension between movement and stillness appears to open a rent between image and world. … … …”
Read my full review of the exhibition Entre Deux at the Sérignan MRAC over at Art Review
TweetNSA briefing slides.
*Man, that is hard to beat for hardcore spookpunk. It shows so much contempt for Jobs and his hippie-freedom rubbish that there’s something endearing about it. I wonder how old this NSA technician is, and what he reads on his off hours.
“POP IS DEAD POP IS DEAD POP IS DEAD POP IS DEAD POP IS DEAD POP IS DEAD. THE KING OF POP IS DEAD.” Anne-James Chaton, his indurate mien impassive and poker-faced, stands as still and stiff as a motorway signpost, just off-centre on the ample stage of the Gaîté Lyrique in Paris. As his rapid-fire verse gushes from between his lips over a loop of his own voice – “POP IS DEAD POP IS DEAD POP IS DEAD” – each plosive consonant is wedded to a glitched burst of sub-bass to create an insistent, technoid beat pattern.
Alone like this, he performs the première partie to his own event, Guitar Poetry, which will later see guitarists Thurston Moore and Andy Moor locking antlers before Chaton re-takes the stage in a trio with the pair of absonant improvisers. This refrain, "THE KING OF POP IS DEAD", is from one of three Événements Chaton performs solo, about the Afghan elections, the inauguration of Barack Obama, and, of course, the death of Michael Jackson; each one a fevered burst of blank-faced concrete poetry, versified reportage spat out like bullets from a gatling gun.
Tonight’s trio of pieces all circulate around events from 2009, but he has been writing and performing this series since the turn of the century. It was while performing several earlierÉvénements (the word means simply ‘events’) at a festival of experimental music in northern France, back in 2001, that Chaton first met Andy Moor of The Ex. Moor was at the festival playing in an improvised duo with the British sound artist and electronic musician Kaffe Matthews. His bandmate, Terrie Hessels, was there too, jamming with drummer Han Bennink. Immediately having seen Chaton, they asked him to join them on tour and play the support slot for The Ex. Two years later, Moor and Chaton would start making music together, initiating a working collaboration that has endured now for over a decade.
Read the rest of my interview with Anne-James Chaton at The Quietus.
Tweet“With the placing of a small silver pellet into what looks like a small lava lamp, a softly modulating drone strikes up. A high-pitched swoop joins, introducing the opening riff of a bassline like bubbles bursting. Shimmering echoes float into space. ‘That recording,’ Dr. Morbius sternly informs us, ‘was made by Krell musicians a half a million years ago.’ Xenomusicology.
The story goes that producers of Forbidden Planet tried to get Harry Partch to compose the Krell music (Partch denies it) and you can understand why. Partch, perhaps more than almost any other composer of the 20th century, seemed to have tried to establish an entirely fresh basis for music. Not just bye bye diatonic harmony; bye bye the twelve-note octave, bye bye the instruments of the orchestra and hello a whole newly-invented band of ‘cloud chamber bowls’, ‘eucal blossoms’ and a ‘chromelodeon’.
But even Partch might not have come with anything quite as genuinely alien sounding, quite as pregnant with the future, as did Louis and Bebe Barron. In any other film, this short burst of alien sonics would have stuck out as thrillingly weird and exotic, but the whole film sounds like this. Everything whirls, and gurgles, and bubbles with the strange ‘electronic tonalities’ the Barrons devised with their home-made circuits.”
Read the rest of my Reel Sounds column on Forbidden Planet at Electric Sheep Magazine.
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Darren Hayman’s Vine-enabled video for ‘The Perfect Way’, his collaboration with A Little Orchestra, from our album Clocks.
Some more recent reviews of Clocks:
“A Little Orchestra (armed with four violins, and viola, cello, flute, clarinet, bassoon, and piano players) feel more like a friendly club than a standoffish organization.” – Textura
“a gentle, summer afternoon in the country kind of record … a fuzzy, homeopathic blanket of warmth” – Helen Clarke at Music OMH
And most appropriately, “une sorte de B.O imaginaire d'un vieux film des 50's” – Dans le Mur du Son
Clocks, which alongside ‘The Perfect Way’ also features collaborations with Haiku Salut, Model Village, Gordon McIntyre as well as three new instrumental compositions by yours truly, is still available to buy.