
Montevideo, 29 February.
A long street stretches out before you, foreshortened and dissolving as it thrusts into the sharp glint of a low sun. A scatter of nervous sparrows explodes as you approach; then a passing car parts the air, leaving its traces in the whispering turbulence. A distant clocktower strikes the quarter-hour. And then — [the page is partly burnt; the rest is lost].
This edition features new releases by Elbrus, Richard Chartier + Taylor Deupree, Several Wives & Diurnal Burdens, and Jen Kutler; new recordings by Second Harmonic Generation and Zach Zinn; and tracks by Henna-Riikka Halonen, Hojo+Kraft, nula.cc, Ekkehard Ehlers, Wings of an Angel & Tziona Achishena, Portland Bike Ensemble and Rsundin.
Worker-artists convene a hive broadcast of indiscriminately gathered sound-pollen, transmitting codified messages to kindred folk. In each edition a potent gang of sound artists are at play, exploring whatever is on their minds. Style guide: Anything goes
Knut Aufermann & Sarah Washington (Ürzig), Xentos Fray Bentos (Broughton), Frauke Berg (Düsseldorf), Katharina Bihler & Stefan Scheib (Saarbrücken), DinahBird & Jean-Philippe Renoult (Paris), dieb13 & Billy Roisz (Vienna), nula.cc (Prague), Anna Friz (Santa Cruz), Lucinda Guy (Buckfastleigh), Hannes Hölzl (Berlin), Ralf Schreiber (Cologne), Rodrigo Ríos Zunino (Valparaíso)
Live broadcast 17th December 2020 on Radio Tsonami & π-node. Produced by Mobile Radio, support by π-node. Photo: Pierre Metzinger
Includes „night poem“ from the album nocturnes, together with tracks by many other artists.
Afternoon, a winter walk. In the still air, flakes of snow cling to their slow descent like wistful bits of ash from a disintegrating civilization, coming to rest upon the undisturbed snowfall of the previous night; the first of the winter. The forest is quiet as a library; few birds sing, and for a long time, footfalls and breath are the only sounds. Hidden somewhere in this glade are the mysterious stone rows of Kounov, possibly dating to an Iron-age culture of the Hallstatt period from c. 800-500 B.C.E.
In the Czech lands, the name for November is listopad, referring literally to the falling („pad“) of leaves („listy“). Our own common word for this time of year, fall, puts focus on the same annual phenomenon. This composition uses the riffling of the ‘leaves’ of an old book (playing on a common English colocution), together with additional sources.
Sound Experimentation 1980-2020 14 October, 2020 - 15 February 2021 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid By way of a selection of hundreds of sound works, Audiosphere. Sound Experimentation 1980-2020 looks to cover an historical and cultural void in terms of the recognition, exhibition and analysis of a key part of the recent changes that have taken place in the artistic conception of sound creation. … Curated by Francisco López.
after our semi-urban wanderings last time, our nomadic life have settled down into a temporary home, in the sauna behind our unfinished new HQ, just in time for the leaves to change color and start dropping outside the sauna window, and just as the need to close a door and add a little heat fell upon us. so this week’s commentary was recorded here amongst the trees while trampling the fallen leaves, while wondering what this space will be like when it’s 20 degrees below zero. we’ll how how things go…
La navigation sur internet est l’occasion de découvrir des univers de création et de réflexion qui sont parfois remarquables. La Croche Oreille vous propose une exploration du projet nula.cc, un site d’artefacts numériques, à la fois poétiques, sonores et visuels, imaginé par l’artiste Lloyd Dunn. (Photo : frontier, nula.cc © 2020) Interview with Tonic Train about the CWCH Collective on Deutschlandfunk Kultur.
The project name is sort of an accident. I wanted to have a very short URL and so I chose the .cc TLD, which still had many four-letter domains available. The one that sounded best to me was nula.cc . In addition, nula means ‘zero’ in Czech (and other Slavic languages) and I wished that my presence on the web had a mostly anonymous quality to it. Also, I did not know what the project would become when I started it, so I thought it was good to start at ‘zero’. In fact, it the project name is not deeply significant, and even a little bit careless.
Interview with Tonic Train about the CWCH Collective on Deutschlandfunk Kultur.
This week's edition follows the curves of new releases from Oberlin and Nula.cc in the company of recordings by Warmdesk, Das Synthetische Mischgewebe, Golgotha Communications Ltd., Mark Gergis, Heribert Friedl, Jack Hertz, Grum-pe & Glenn Sogge, and Christian Fennesz.
Two movements consisting of heavily altered field recordings from Crimea, together with a small number of instrument samples, exploring a theme suggestive of clouds, fog, mist, rolling waves and the negligible boundaries between these domains. These works can be heard as extreme subjectivizations of the memory, after more than five years had elapsed, of having traveled the peninsula, roaming its roads, wandering among its mountains, towns, open fields, caves and historical sites. They can also be listened to as dynamic abstractions that give a sense of turbulence and fluctuating energies where diaphanous and fluid elements meld, where the horizon disappears, yet seems to float perpetually just beyond reach.
Crosstalk is a three-hour collage of sound documentaries dealing with the phenomena of listening, silence and noise, and sonic ecology. It includes contributions that reflect the present situation, which during the coronavirus lockdown, have forced us to deal with an unexpected silence. Interviews and reflections on this subject, along with recordings of sound walks and various field recordings have been made for this occasion by many artists.
We come to a cattle market alongside the road as we are leaving Artashat, an Armenian regional administrative capital. Sheep, cows, dogs and men standing in the grass and the gravel, making deals. We strike up a conversation with one of the men and, as commonly happens in the Caucasus, we are invited for a visit.
Part of World Listening Day 2020.
Live broadcast 16th July 2020 from Saarländisches Künstlerhaus on Resonance Extra, Soundart Radio, WGXC - Wave Farm, Radio Tsonami & π-node. Later on Radio ARA, JET FM, Radio Panik & Radio Orange.
This series of images was made during a week-long journey through the southerly part of Bohemia, a week of rain, roads, heavy clouds, lofty spires, weighty castles, afternoon sun, buzzing flies, beer, nettles, tombstones, statuary, fountains, arched doorways, and receding light.
For historical context, see also: ⨀.
Worker-artists convene a hive broadcast of indiscriminately gathered sound-pollen, transmitting codified messages. A potent gang of sound artists are at play, exploring whatever is on their minds. Style guide: Anything goes.
After an absence of 100 years, the Marian Column again stands in the Old Town Square of Prague.
Most of the recordings in this compilation were, with some exceptions, made during the Reveil 2020 event which took place on May 3. All are from the early spring period during the Covid pandemic. …
Edition 13 - Indivisible i : Knut Aufermann & Sarah Washington Ürzig, Xentos Fray Bentos Broughton, Frauke Berg Düsseldorf, DinahBird & Jean-Philippe Renoult Paris, dieb13 Vienna, Lloyd Dunn Prague, Anna Friz Santa Cruz, Lucinda Guy Buckfastleigh, Hannes Hoelzl Tirol, and Ralf Schreiber Cologne. Produced by Mobile Radio www.mobile-radio.net with support from π-node.
A dawn recording of birds and rain from my window overlooking a wooded park. The park is home to many doves, jays, magpies and numerous kinds of little birds I don’t know the names of. It forms my contribution to the compilation Pass it on ~ Early Morning Soundscapes ⨀.
Prior to the 20th century, and the emergent dominance of equal temperament, the association of emotions with particular musical keys was common practice. The Black Glass Ensemble recently revisited this historical alignment of sound and emotion to offer a brief ‘embrace’ in B Minor - the key associated with patience.
CWCH collective CWCH collective Worker-artists convene a hive broadcast of indiscriminately gathered sound-pollen, transmitting codified messages to kindred folk. Each week a potent gang of sound artists are at play, exploring whatever is on their minds. Style guide: Anything goes. Knut Aufermann & Sarah Washington Ürzig, Xentos Fray Bentos Broughton, Frauke Berg Düsseldorf, Katharina Bihler & Stefan Scheib Saarbrücken, DinahBird & Jean-Philippe Renoult Paris, dieb13 Vienna, Lloyd Dunn Prague, Anna Friz Santa Cruz, Lucinda Guy Buckfastleigh.
I was lucky enough to accompany Studiolum on a recent weeklong journey through South Bohemia. Here, the inveterate traveler begins to document the journey; just a first chapter with more to come.
Blaring local pop music from a horn speaker mounted atop the driver’s cab, trucks arrive early in the morning at a crossroads north of Pune to take workers to the fields, in the mean time waking every one in the nearby guest house up. And so, we take a walk into the nearby countryside over the pastures and fields to find that the red soil glows in the morning sunlight.
This residential street in the city of Montevideo is quiet in the late afternoon. Someone plays a piano; someone else drives nails with a hammer. There are a few cars and motorbikes. Most striking, however, is the sound of the afilador, whose careering slide whistle lets the neighborhood know that he is available to sharpen their knives.
With Lloyd Dunn at Urfa in the bazaar. —SEMI SILENT
I went down into the bazaars of the old city of Urfa (today called Sanlıurfa ) two times that day last July; early in the morning to make photographs, before the business of the day had really begun; and later that day, when the bazaar was in full swing, to capture some of the common sounds of the streets, shops, shoppers, craftsmen at their trades, and the streetside teahouses.
The Holocene calendar, also known as the Holocene Era or Human Era (HE), is a year numbering system that adds exactly 10,000 years to the currently dominant (AD/BC or CE/BCE) numbering scheme, placing its first year near the beginning of the Holocene geological epoch and the Neolithic Revolution, when humans transitioned from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture and fixed settlements. The year 2019 in the Holocene calendar is 12,019 HE. The HE scheme was first proposed by Cesare Emiliani in 1993.
At the doorway of sleep lies an abyss, ripe for the falling. Careful, now! The ledge is slippery. Soundlessly, a pebble slips over; barely seen, now gone forever. Down below, we see the moon and the stars, spinning light through autumn trees, pets long dead, the faces of loved ones; our advancing peril.
I might have as well called this cabin fever, but I decided against it. In our confinements, the mind may wander off to strange corners of the soul, or simply turn outwards and put common household objects to new uses. This impromptu arose from a whim involving a clothes drying rack and two unmatched contact microphones.
A small trusted circle would … memorise each other’s works and circulate them only by oral means. She tells how Akhmatova would write out her poem for a visitor on a scrap of paper to be read in a moment, then burnt in her stove. … “It was like a ritual,” Chukovskaya wrote. “Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter.”
It is well after sundown when, in a pool of harsh light under a street lamp, we come across a group of young men who have gathered in a circle at a cross street to drum. Called candombe, this is a perfectly ordinary activity on the streets of Montevideo.
For about fifteen years of my life, sometime during the late 1980s and 1990s, I "stopped listening to music" and became a non-listener. For me this does not mean that I stopped hearing music, but rather that I stopped listening to it: that is, hearing it with intent. Of course, it is impossible to avoid hearing music for all this time; I will insist only that I did not deliberately seek it out. Even though I had been an avid record collector before, I did not buy any new records, I went to few musical events (and when I did, it was mainly to be with friends). I listened to the radio, but only for the news and some interview programs. But as an active chooser of what music to listen to and when, I ceased to participate, and only came back gradually when my environment changed.
Why? The question seems misplaced to me. It just happened. I lost interest in music as a passtime, as something to do in the intervening hours between more purposeful activities. I did not want to discount or negate the importance of music, nor undertake some strange monastic discipline, nor to make any kind of statement. It was not even a conscious decision. It happenened only because my relationship with recorded music changed, fundamentally and irrevocably. It happened slowly at first, but then eventually with conviction and finality. I set music listening aside gently, with no righteous feeling, with neither remorse nor a feeling of triumph.
I began making sound art in the late 1980s, and it meant that I started to hear nearly everything, including music, in an entirely different way. Searching for source material, finding inspiration in odd places, combinations of sound that caught the ear, humorous or dramatic effects that simply developed out of the randomness of the timestream I was in. Some unusual or emphatic phrasing or combination of words in a news program or an advertisement might trigger the feeling that a latent meaning might be developed from it through its use in one of my own compositions, compositions which I was not then willing to describe as “music”. I was treating the reality of sound as I lived it as source material, physicalized through recordings, and manipulated on my workbench. Sound for me was tape, and tape was “time material” that I could cut, alter, and otherwise re-form to suit my taste. I did not need for it to be “music” in order to enjoy the gifts that music bestows.
My listening interests changed. My listening needs changed. It can be said that it was during this time that I learned how to listen. That means I was hearing new things in familiar settings, because, before this, I was not listening in the same way. I learned to bring sound to the center of my attention and examine it as closely as my perceptions permitted. The epiphany for me (I am certainly not alone in this) was that I was no longer a passive consumer of sound, but instead an active maker of new sounds. I tried to develop a seriousness about it, and I tried to understand its effects on me and on others.
Then, as I said, my environment changed. I found myself living in a new city and so I developed new tastes and new habits. I met new people and came across their interesting projects. I became interested in field recording and sound art and that is still where I am today. I began to listen to music again, to pore over playlists, to read reviews. To participate in the local scene (in my own limited way). It had become necessary once again.
For about fifteen years of my life, sometime during the late 1980s and 1990s, I "stopped listening to music" and became a non-listener. For me this does not mean that I stopped hearing music, but rather that I stopped listening to it: that is, hearing it with intent.
A podcast by P. Klusák, Oliver Torr, St. Jakob produced by students of the Studio of New Aestetic at the FAMU Department of Photography “I select and comment sound pieces produced during quarantine days, a great Lloyd Dunn's recording of the silent empty streets of Prague and pieces from the outstanding event AMPLIFY 2020: quarantine. (My instinctive English, an oportunity for your generosity.) My part begins at 07.12, but the whole thing is worth listening.” —Pavel Klusák
“For those of you who know Prague, this sound is a very unusual one. A mix of distant sounds, wind and a sinister silence. Awesome recording.” —Anamaria Pravicencu
My recording and commentary appear in the blog Poemas del río Wang. (In Hungarian and English.)
“Soundscape of Prague changed drastically during a few days: a distant steady hum of traffic vanished, a bicycle or a pair of pedestrians means a disruption of a pale canvas of a background quiet noise. So many empty streets, even in the centre. Yesterday ambient piece, today Wandelweiser. One hour before restriction, Lloyd went to record: ‘By government decree, beginning at midnight tonight, anyone without a valid reason to be out in public must stay at home. It is for our own safety, and the safety of others.’” —Pavel Klusák
Yesterday, I went out of my apartment into the streets of an unknown city; one largely without people. Each year, Prague welcomes millions of visitors. They swarm the attractions, they choke the streets. They guzzle the beer and drop wads of cash on tasteless trifles. Some swoon at the complete Baroqueness of the city; some leave grafitti on the precious monuments. Sometimes, they carelessly laugh at things taken seriously by Praguers, and sometimes they stand in awe at things the locals find banal. Today, it is as if a tornado has come and swept them all away.
Not just the visitors, but the locals, too. By government decree, beginning at midnight tonight, anyone without a valid reason to be out in public must stay at home. It is for our own safety, and the safety of others.
Yesterevening, I went out one last time before the curtain is drawn. The planet Venus, bright enough to cast a shadow, hangs in the northern sky. Light from a corner večerka (shop with late hours) spills out onto the street as the shopkeeper prepares to close. I stop, not far from Loreta. Standing in the empty streets of Nový Svět (New World), I hear the faraway bell of St. Vitus Cathedral in Hradčany strike eleven o’clock.
What new world awaits us when all of this is over?
In St. Petersburg, the metro trains explode into the tunnel stops like black comets, accompanied by a fearsome burst of wind. With seating aligned to the lengths of the cars, there is none of the incessant chatter that you hear in Prague or Budapest. You sit facing a file of strangers, each of whom seems to look straight through you.
An EP assembled from two recent filecasts.
We are interested here in the sheer weight and physical presence of flowing water, its horror and its beauty, as if alive, rolling and coiling, darting down from clouds, washing the earth, like a glassy or muddy serpent, muscular and voluptuous. (Taken from field recordings made in Tusheti, Albania, Ukraine, and Czechia.)
(Díky za foto: Jirka Dvořák) — at Galerie Emila Filly. Kurátorkou kolektivní výstavy současného umění 14 mladých autorů z různých zemí je Tereza Záchová. Projektu se, mezi jinými, účastní také dva italští umělci – Leone Contini a Elena Mazzi. Pořádá Galerie Emila Filly za podpory mnohých institucí a Italského kulturního institutu v Praze. Galerie Emila Filly v Ústí nad Labem (Jateční 49, Ústí nad Labem)
Let us accept for the moment the collective fantasy that the turning of the great imaginary odometer, in its perfect regularity and predictibility, has some independent meaning beyond its accidental existence. If we do so, we will more readily accept this work as a way to open a new decade. And one, it seems, in which almost anything may happen.
Coming soon.
The 387th of a series of weekly radio programmes created by :zoviet*france: includes the track „night poem“ from my most recent album „nocturnes“.
„night poem“ from nocturnes has been included on Toneshift ep. 14.
How heavy the blackness is, yet how easily pierced by light. The night reluctantly recedes from the advance of electricity; a grid of incandescent windows, the shreik of a bright advertisement, the swinging beams of a passing vehicle. The fragments of night scuttle off in all directions, to hide in the glades, and collect the in dark corners, the lightless caverns of the imagination.
This anthology draws acousmatic portraits of reveries or direct experiences of the night, whose interchange with the day forms one of the most fundamental dichotomies of human existence.
Even as the old Sur of Diyarbakır is being desmolished, street by street, we spent a good part of three separate days wandering the narrow old byways, collecting images, and subjective impressions, before everything is inevitably gone.
Collaborative work (with Michal Kindernay) consisting of a 26-minute untitled sound piece to accommpany a slideshow of works by the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. 2019-11-12..14. Commissioned by CAMP Prague.
We explore the neighborhoods of the Sur, the old walled city of Diyarbakır, and find a labyrinth of narrow channels within walls of dark basalt, perforated here and there with windows and doorways, leading to unknowable courtyards and the inner sancta of domestic life. …
Photo: Tamás Sajó
Hapax legomenon is a transliteration of Greek ἅπαξ λεγόμενον, meaning “(something) said (only) once.” The related terms dis, tris, and tetrakis legomenon respectively refer to double, triple, or quadruple occurrences, but are far less commonly used.
The epic blogpost about our journey to Southeast Anatolia has been completed. Please stop by (if you haven't already, or once again, if you have) for the thrilling conclusion: Nemrut dağı.
I am grateful for having had the opportunity to visit Hasankeyf last July, and it saddens me that it is about to disappear forever.
Miloš Vojtěchovský interviews Francisco López and Lloyd Dunn ( nula.cc ) before their Live Sound Performance at Colloredo Mansfeld palace on 20 July 2019 as part of the series Sonic Circuits, prepared by GHMP and Agosto Foundation with technical support form the Department of composition, Musical Faculty AMU.
Agosto Foundation.
The sea had lapped this Sardinian shore for untold years before finding my microphones before it. In turn, it has inspired this reverie of sampled sirens, trumpets, and a ripped-off foley sequence from the Béla Tarr film Kárhozat (Damnation) — with all due apologies.
My latest album 𝒇𝒂𝒕𝒂 𝒎𝒐𝒓𝒈𝒂𝒏𝒂 reviewed in SilenceAndSound by Roland Torres (in French).
… On est en présence d’un album ambient aux nuances glacées, où les grattements viennent parfois insuffler des traces de vie imperceptibles, microcosmes pris entre des couches de terres désertiques. Des murmures lointains redonnent l’espoir de tomber sur une foule prise derrière des murs épais recouverts d’une chaux brulante. Et finalement, si tout ceci n’était qu’un mirage? Hypnotique.…
To fly over a country as immense as Turkey is to take in the contour and content of a landscape in general terms; the specific features are reduced to typographic details; the enormity of the land passed over becomes merely pocket-sized.
Although they have sat aloof, atop a tumulus of rock for some 2,000 years, the ruins of Nemrut Dağı receive regular visitors: at dawn and dusk, busfuls arrive to take in the sun’s rise and set. But at midday, we have it to ourselves, and share it only with the flapping wind, and the birds who swoop, dive, and play in it.
Live Sound Performance
Francisco López
Lloyd Dunn ( nula.cc )
20 July 2019, 7 PM
Colloredo Mansfeld palace, Prague City Gallery (GHMP)
Sonic Circuits, accompanying program to Zvuky/Kódy/Obrazy: Acoustic Experiments in Visual Art
Photo: Jan Bartoš
Here I am standing next to Francisco López before the preparation for our performances in the baroque Colloredo Mansfeld Palace on Saturday night in the heart of Prague’s old town.
My latest album 𝒇𝒂𝒕𝒂 𝒎𝒐𝒓𝒈𝒂𝒏𝒂 reviewed in Toneshift by Karl Grümpe.
… Six fluent and direct compositions clocking to 44 minutes, this is a formidable ambient album. A blurry aesthetic is observable everywhere, as layers of haze are laying gently on every sonic surface. Essentially a sound collage too, a mixture of various elements, with each of them holding its uniqueness and purpose. A process equivalent to montage is utilized: this is cinematography with sound, artistically significant and plural! …
My latest album 𝒇𝒂𝒕𝒂 𝒎𝒐𝒓𝒈𝒂𝒏𝒂 mentioned here by Richard Kutěj.:
… Ambient a terénní nahrávky vetkané do zvukově poutavých hudebních koberců. Tak zní nové album producenta nula.cc nazvané Fata Morgana. Šest zvukových obrazců, lehké elektronické podloží, občas drone a na nich další konkrétní zvuky, které si autor zaznamenal. Kompozice baví svou nápaditostí.
My journey in Ethiopia began and ended in the city of Addis Ababa, or “new flower” in the national language, Amharic. Here, I attempt to give some impressions of my few days there through this small portfolio of glimpses.
WORKIN NIGHTS, 24 May 2019, ONLINE MIX.
2019 was my 23rd year of composing works under the name Drekka... it was also one of my most creative and prolific years, with (coincidentally ?) 23 releases total.
Links to stream all these, and many more, can be found on the Drekka website, under the DISCOGRAPHY tab, or via the Drekka Bandcamp.
To take in an unfamiliar city on foot may serve as a cross-sectioning device, a tool for understanding the totality of a complexity by inspecting a single thread pulled from it. Or, at least, a *beginning of understanding. …*
A mirage is a thing at once true and false; the image of a thing not there, which nonetheless can be seen and even photographed. In this collection of works, you will hear various field recordings placed on backdrops or in landscapes instantiated through convolution, the unnatural echoes of one voice within the impossible chamber modelled by another. The groaning metal door of a machine shop, the nimble fingers of Armenian carpet weavers, a paternoster elevator, crows, bells, steam whistles, rattling pot lids, dry leaves and sleet falling are the voices. Where are they in these pieces? On what planet do they resound?
track notes
The Sonospace project has selected „Les angoisses“ for inclusion.
In followup to my recent filecast of images lake tana, here is a splendid in-depth look at the iconography of the monasteries we visited, written my my co-traveller, the art historian Dr. Tamás Sajó.
I just added a "radio" feature to my website nula.cc. Move the mouse over the ( nula.cc ) insignium and it will change to a ▶︎ play button.
Cilck it and it will play forever, randomly choosing filecasts from the site.
Kembrew McLeod writes: “Heres my new column for Little Village, about Iowa City’s zine scene in the 80s and 90s — including the early work of Dan Perkins (Tom Tomorrow), Lloyd Dunn’s PhotoStatic and Andrea Lawlor’s notorious zine Judy!, a tribute to Judith Butler.”
My recent journey to Ethiopia is now being incrementally documented by Tamás Sajó, the fellow I travelled there with, on his blog Poemas del río Wang. Lots of great pictures!
We are coming in for a landing at the airport in Cairo, and we descend into a clearly defined stratum of vapor. We are surrounded by clouds and the sun is rising. Do you see the Brocken spectre beginning to form?
We ride in a rattling bus from Gondar to Lalibela across the northern part of Ethiopia, a dusty area with only intermittent greenery. In villages, the roads are choked with people and their goods and beasts. The going is slow, and once in a while we stop to pick up a couple of cops wielding military rifles, whom we then take to the next town.
Ethiopia. We embark from Bahir Dar going north by boat onto Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile. We hike around the Zege peninsula, surrounded by endemic coffee plants, and visit the monastery churches of Debre Maryam, Ura Kidane Mehret, and Azuwa Maryam.
A bleak sound portrait of anguish drawn from a somehwat random assortment of found audio passages and field recordings. The stream of consciousness sketched out by this collage leads inevitably to an uncertain conclusion. Here a penchant for optical film sounds is, once again, on full display.
Dock / Ancien Palais de Justice
sound installation and listening space
Les Brasseurs, art contemporain, Liège.
lesbrasseurs.org
Includes the participation of ( nula.cc ).
Mix includes „wind in a jar nº2“ from „ a dream of smoke and birds“.
Seven studies of near silences and contrived resonances based on a somewhat random collection of found and original material. Some sources make use of the material qualities of wood, water, glass, wind, and similar common materials. Others include found material taken from online scientific and technical sources, among others. Still others are excerpted from various field recordings.
track notes
Kutaisi. Convolution between a field recording of light early morning rain in an enclosed courtyard and a squeaking machine of some sort, both recorded in Kutaisi (Georgia).
Tuesday, 4 December, 6 and 8:30 PM
Cinema Ponrepo, Prague
Part of the evening „Haunted Castles“ featuring the Beth Custer Czech Ensemble. ( nula.cc ) will collaborate with the Ensemble in providing live accompaniment to the silent film:
Praha v záři světel / Prague in the Shining Lights Svatopluk Inneman, 1928, 22 min.
… “Another Agosto screening at Ponrepo is upon us, this time with live music by our artist-in-residence Beth Custer, Pavel Fajt, Martin Alacam, Vladimír Václavek, Lloyd Dunn and spoken word by František Skála. Take a closer look at the weird an the eerie with Haunted Palaces.” …
The piece is inspired by topics of human survival out of the planet Earth in the future. It’s composed with audio samples to trace human attempts to leave the Earth and travel to an unknown space.
I remember Moldakul.
A pair of sensitive omnidirectional microphones is suspended in the center of the void in a four-liter glass jar, while outside the wind is blowing. The recording is slightly manipulated.
Upcoming event
Monday, 29 October, 14:30
Dukla Cinema, Jihlava
Part of the 22nd Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival
nula.cc will provide live accompaniment to 2 silent films
Immigrants Landing on Ellis Island
dir. Alfred Camille, US, 1903, 3 min.
and
Neues Leben (New Life)
dir. Hans Richter, Switzerland/Germany, 1930, 20 min.
more: http://www.ji-hlava.com/…/imigranti-prijizdejici-na-ellis-i… http://www.ji-hlava.com/filmy/novy-zivot
On September 7th, 2018 we lost Dmitry Vasiljev, Russian music journalist, owner of the label Monochrome Vision and concert promoter. A tireless music enthusiast who did so much for the promotion of electronic, experimental, noise, ambient music and much beyond. This is a musical tribute to his life and work. Thanks to all the musicians involved.
— Frans de Waard
̨„First light“ from „midnight sun“ is included as a contribution to this mix.
A broad double avenue cuts a neat slot in the forest, running nearly the entire length of the former royal game reserve at Obora Hvězda in Prague. Starting at 0, along the left side of the graveled path, there runs a precisely spaced line of 40 geodetic benchmarks at intervals of 25m, placidly revealing for us the distance of 1/40,000th of the polar circumference of the Earth.
1 In rural China, a horse driver manoeuvres his horsecart around a tight corner. 2 Later, I wander away from the old part of a town to take in the ambience of the shopping district. 3 As evening falls, I hear the faint sound of a moaning man from behind a high wall.
A nice review of my new release „trilogy“ has appeared on the touchingextremes blog -- thanks, Massimo!
Three works of friction, involving metal, wood, skin, water and air. Before electronics, musical sound was always produced by means of the phyiscal friction of a solid or a gas (air or breath) against some other object. These electronic works also center upon frictional elements, in this case the motion of the sensitive end of a microphone moved directly across various surfaces. …
Swaddled in its blanket of charged particles, our Earth floats protected from the profound indifference of outer space, while at home, we make use of the inner surface of the ionosphere to send straight-propagating electromagnetic radiation over the curved horizon.
‘One boy, for example, in a New York suburb, has a wireless installation which is practically entirely the work of his own hands. In the evening or after school hours he often sits at his instrument and talks with one or another of half a dozen of his friends who have similar installations, or listens at random to the messages with which the air is filled.’
‘I do not,’ said Confucius, ‘enlighten those who are not eager to learn, nor arouse those who are not anxious to give an explanation themselves. If I have presented one corner of the square and they cannot come back to me with the other three, I should not go over the points again.’
Wednesday, June 13, 2018 at 8 PM – 11 PM
Studio ALTA
Jako support se objeví ojedinělá spolupráce dvou zahraničních umělců žijích v Praze, Lloyd Dunn a Wim Dehaen. Americký multimediální umělec Lloyd Dunn vede od roku 2009 filecastový projekt nula.cc a zvukový umělec, analytický chemik Wim Dehaen je také člen kolektivu Genot Centre a pro Music Infinity připravý exkluzivní společné vystoupení.
New field recording: part of a thread i am calling „machine ambiences“.
Here are three new long-form remixes, which are decidedly cut from the same cloth as last year’s filecast Moving still. This is because they have been built up by layering selected tracks from that playlist, and selections from those tracks, along the way making a few edits and minor adjustments. This collection also represents further refinements of a live mix performance which took place in November, 2017, as part of a series of all-night listening events called Silent Night, held with some regularity at the theatre Divadlo Ponec in Prague.
Includes the track „sleepwalker“.
Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM
Institut Intermédií
Guest: Lloyd John Dunn is a founding member of the mixed-media and experimental sound art group the Tape-beatles and founder, publisher and editor of several small-press magazines, such as PhotoStatic and Retrofuturism. Since the early 1980s, he has been making work for a variety of media, including film, video, audio, print, and the web.
The ancient and momentous city of İstanbul sits astride two seas; its bridges and ferries straddle two continents; its history surmounts a cleft between cultures and creeds; and today its forest of minarets points upward, joining the earth and the sky. Twenty-three images from recent sojourn.
Mix includes at track 7 „soprianoforte“.
Mix includes „forty“.
Heavily, the sleepwalker rises, places one foot, the next, and again; after a long time, stops in the yellow cone of light that falls from an overhead streetlamp. He poses theatrically in silhouette. No longer aware of any purpose; weightless, timeless, floating; not able even to imagine a longing for the sweet warmth of his bed.
Two locations are conjoined in this filecast; a matching pair of binaural field recordings separated by twenty-four hours and a few thousand meters. 1 Birds are active in a forested park. A nearby thoroughfare provides a persistent low rumble. 2 A chilly rain in a windless grove on a hillside signals the greening to come. A droplet or two spikes the signal by falling close to the microphone.
Momentum consists of a selection of filecasts that generally imply a sense of forward motion, although at least one track that does not fit this description has been included for the sake of contrast. …
On five consecutive summer mornings, during a visit to Tbilisi, I walk the old streets of the city, collecting ambiences. Among other things, I record birds and workmen in a rose garden, a conversation in a church, and a singing baker rolling out the day’s dough.
The next afternoon, I find myself in the same park. The mist is gone. The snow has melted. In its chill, the still air remembers the mists of the previous day. Crows have settled in the park, they stagger and peck in the field, picking up things with their beaks as if to show them to one another. They sit in the trees watching me. They wait for me to come near. Now and again, one of the shaggy, draped beings hovers in the cold air and drops to ground like a fallen sycamore leaf. Suddenly, all of them fly away, a dark shroud veiling the nacreous sky. They rasp and cough, barking like little dogs.
I walk through the park in the evening. I find a veil of mist clutching the trees, the buildings, the slope of the hill. There are white crystals of snow coming down, a delicate shower of feathery stars. I cannot see very far down the path before me. There is only a vaporous place where space is lost and time is lost and all sounds are far away and one has left the world behind.
This is an image. This is a word. This is an image of the word “word”, and a word that says, “image”. You see an image and a word, or two words. Or two images? If you know how to view source
, it may become clearer. But maybe not.
The call of an unfamiliar bird captures my attention, and forms the heart of this recording, cutting through the sounds of New Year’s activities in a temple in Shaxi. People chat, prepare food, move tables, while street sounds seep in from just beyond the gate. Eventually, a workman outside begins to mimic the birdcalls, trying to coax the unseen bird to emit more of them.
I sit outside the Ottoman-style Xhamia Mbret mosque in Berat, Albania, in the shade of its portico, in the middle of a sunny little park next to a busy road. As part of the solemnities marking the end of the feast of Ramadan, a reading of all the ayat (verses) of the Qur’an takes place.
We rent bicycles and take the main road leading north to the town of Baisha, where we find some people in a storefront playing mahjong. As each player smacks a tile down to emphasize the boldness of the move, others sit around, gossiping and commenting on the game. At intervals, the tiles are shuffled by all hands in a rustle of soft clacking sounds.
Two years on, and I once again visit the Georgian mining town of Chiatura, this time to capture a recording of a ride in one of the archaic, but still very functional cable cars, which comprise the mass transit system of a town whose inhabitants must daily negotiate the various altitudes of their urban space.
Included „vigil“.
Nov 11, 2017 at 9 PM – Nov 12, 2017 at 9 AM
PONEC - divadlo pro tanec
Concert. Sleepover event immediately follows. The ( nula.cc ) set will start at around 5 AM with about 3 hours of mixes specially prepared for this event.
Nejhlasitější edice, co kdy byla. Naprostá radost po všech směrech. Děkuju David Strelecek a Jan Kašpar za jednu z nejnadějnějších kolaborací, co jsem tu kdy slyšel (prosím hrajte spolu víc, je to top), Josh Sabin za tu nejlepší a nejhlasitější pohádku o mašinkách, K-Lis K-Lis a Daniele Mana za brutální popůlnoční náčrt nových možných cest pro celou sérii a jedno z lidsky nejmilejších setkání za celou dobu, co dělám Genot, Lloyd Dunn za zen a naprosto precizní dramaturgii, se kterou poskládal ty 3 hodiny před probuzením, Teres Bartůňková za temno, světlo a těch milion promakaných detailů, které do toho přináší, Michal Sýkora za zvuk větší než život a boření mýtů a zvukařích, co mají u prdele, Petra Hanzlíková za to, že dělá můj život jednodušší a je nejlepší produkční, kterou jsem kdy potkal, Wim Dehaen a Marta Musilova za tradiční foodie hody a Kryštof Hlůže za epic fotky. Svět je kamarád a těším se na únor >> Silent_Night#13: TBA
Across an ocean of moist and green land, over distances breached by chugging machinery or shining wings, past black gashes, stained monuments, melting concrete, muddy settlements with chickens and dogs, we find a different world sundered from ours by our divergent histories.
A portfolio of photographs made during journeys through Central and Eastern Europe, assembled here to accompany, by analogy, allegory or suggestive equivalence, the previous filecast.
I stop for the night in a shabby hotel overlooking some train tracks, near the end of my journey east. Floating in through the open window, along with a night air still clinging to the smell of rain, are the sounds of the trains, coming and going, a song of rolling metal and churning gasses. The platform announcements call out, metallic and chiming from the mouth of the speakerhorn, their precise meaning drowned in swells of reverberation, which gather strength as they propagate outward. They seem to say, “Your journey is not over, not yet.”
Stalks of barley and black wheat / nod ominously. I race towards them. / The poet’s pen no longer sings / though it used to be his nightingale. From „Desk: My Parnassus“ by Paolo Iashvili, 1932. Translated from the Georgian by Rebecca Gould.
V úterý 5. září vystoupili AZ (tj. duo Martin Alacam / Michal Zbořil) a své nové nahrávky živě přetvářel Lloyd Dunn. …
Lloyd Dunn je zvukový a vizuální umělec z USA, který v současné době sídlí v Praze. Mediálnímu umění se aktivně věnuje od osmdesátých let, například jako člen legendárních Tape beatles. Je autorem/tvůrcem řady filecastů nula.cc vydávaných online na http://nula.cc/ Na Wakushoppu představil živý mix ze stavebních kamenů svého nejnovějšího alba Midnight Sun.
Includes the track „first light“.
Pleased to reveal that my latest album „midnight sun“ has been reviewed in the print version of The Wire.
they’ve done their research and framed the work by discussing my past exploits; but to sum up, i offer this relevant excerpt:
„… Only hints of his early work can be heard on Nula.cc’s Midnight Sun, which takes its inspiration from a Russian documentary about seafaring isolation in the Arctic. Soft as snow noise tumbles out of the supple sinews of extended tones and glassy drones. Dunn eschews The Caretaker’s syrupy impressionism, but he is no less effective in channelling an existential vacancy through his pastoral drift. [Soundcheck, The Wire no. 404, p. 69]“
This is the page documenting a slow-moving long-standing project, shown in rudimentary form here, and most recently to be exposed in the form of a brief performance as part of the series Wakushoppu held at the Café V Lese in Prague on 5 September 2017.
Field notes was a monthly column that I contributed to the Czech music periodical His VOICE from 10 September 2014 until 14 March 2017, twenty-four installments in all. An additional five essays appeared for the first time on the blog Poemas del río Wang.
Tuesday, September 5, 2017 at 8 PM – 11 PM
Café V lese
It lies down a back street to the hinterlands of memory, where a gate opens to a foggy yard; wet grass, dripping leaves. Something is there: sensed, but not seen. Something old: its shriveling chrysalis exposes a rotting core. It emits the aroma of corruption. Once a fulsome object of longing, now hollow, it sighs with the melancholy echo of a nightingale.
It lies down a back street to the hinterlands of memory, where a gate opens to a foggy yard; wet grass, dripping leaves. Something is there: sensed, but not seen. Something old: its shriveling chrysalis exposes a rotting core. It emits the aroma of corruption. Once a fulsome object of longing, now hollow, it sighs with the melancholy echo of a nightingale.
Pleased to announce the participation of nula.cc in the first issue of super-sensor, e-magazine of/on/around experimental audio & related stuff, edited/curated by francisco lópez.
The first issue is now online, with a physical media release to follow.
He was looking at the icy water, raging alongside the ship, thinking how terrible it would be to be left behind in this world of ice, alone without help, to watch the ship disappearing into darkness. “My God,” the Commander thought, peering into the black chaos. “Where am I? Who am I?”
Dialogue from the commander’s diary in the documentary film Повинность / Confession by Aleksandr Sokurov (1998). Five new meditations based on source material used in the earlier filecasts **a beacon** and **light on water**.
Founded by David the Builder in 1106, the monastery of Gelati, just outside of Kutaisi, represents for Georgians their golden age. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as well as an active place of worship.
The central market (or bazari ) area of Kutaisi (Imereti, Georgia) occupies several city blocks along Shota Rusaveli Avenue, and is especially busy in the forenoon. Here, over a period of some two and a half years, and seven separate visits, I have pieced together these impressions.
… Ke klidnému a pokojnému usínání bych čtenářům doporučil poslední projekt portálu ( nula.cc ) 57900 moving still. Celkově má kompozice v rozšířené verzi 3 hodiny a 18 minut a autor Lloyd Dunn v ní použil terénní nahrávky získané během výprav jako základ ke kompozicím kde topologie je stále přítomna, ale její interpretace je spíš metaforická. …
— Miloš Vojtěchovský
Silent_Night ON AIR: V Praze usídlený americký rodák Lloyd Dunn vydal na konci května pod aliasem nula.cc tříhodinové album nazvané "57900 moving, still". Po dnešní půlnoci přijde Lloyd do studia Radia Wave živě na exkluzivní rozhovor a zazní ukázky nejen ze zmíněné nové desky, ale i starší skladby z jeho tvorby na pomezí field recordings a ambientu. Turn On, Tune In, Drone Out!
Darkness moves in alternation with light, dawn shares the day with dusk. Each of the thirty-some works in these combined playlists is a twilight, neither one thing nor another, neither here nor there, always in the process of arriving and yet never managing to get there. …
Like ordinary tourists, we wander the ancient Forum in Rome along with the curious throng during the late afternoon. We stop at the Arch of Constantine, under the sign of lengthening shadows, gradually dimming light, and, inexplicably, the sound of numerous helicopters fluttering overhead. 𝄐
Excuse me, can you please tell me how to find Lost Street?” “I am sorry, but I’m not from around here, and so I do not know where Lost Street is.” “Oh. Well, thank you just the same.” (Ztracena ul., or “Lost Street” can, in fact, be easily found running along the southeastern edge of Horní náměstí, in the Moravian city of Olomouc.) 𝄐
The steep path up to the rocky outcrop called “The Five Fingers” — Besh Barmag — in the glare of the sun on a hot afternoon is draining. Three old women sit on a set of steps and offer to tell my fortune, but I keep moving; I don’t understand their language. 𝄐
The region called Nagorno-Karabagh takes its name from a Russian word referring to mountains and Turkish and Persian words referring to a black garden. People there light beeswax candles in the churches, which sputter as they burn, and the winter wind whistles through the ancient stone belfries. 𝄐
The sight of Gothic mosques is surprising, but historically logical. In the city of Gazimağusa, (the Greek Famagusta), located in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Gothic-style churches from the time of the Crusades have been converted to a new purpose as mosques for the local populace. 𝄐
The Indian state of Maharashtra is dry and sunny in January, and in its cultural capital, the old city of Pune, we record the street ambience, including motor traffic, passing conversations, and the sound of a sugar cane press producing cane juice for the delectation of passersby. 𝄐
In the old market town of Shaxi, a way-station on the historic Tea Horse Road, which ran from Yunnan to Burma and Tibet, there runs a river. And this river is spanned by a very old bridge over which very likely passed the Italian explorer Marco Polo on his long journey to China. 𝄐
We visit the Crimean Tatar capital in high autumn. Golden poplars, their dewey leaves sparkling in the soft wind, tower like upright pencils, as do the town’s minarets, and also the stolid, turbaned grave stones in the gardens of the Palace of the Tatar Khan. 𝄐
In the land around Baku, truck tires tear out ruts that pool spontaneously with natural bitumen seeping up from below. Mysterious gasses burble up through mounds of gray mud, and the placid surfaces of dead ponds are disturbed by a constant effervescence. And strewn over the land, a swarm of oil derricks, arrayed like gigantic mosquitoes, are sucking the black blood of the earth.
The park in Göygöl named after Heydər Əliyev sits incongruously across the street from a large European-style Luthern Church — which in the end, is not so surprising, for the town (formerly Helenendorf) was populated during the 19th century by Caucasus Germans, all of whom were deported to Central Asia during World War II. 𝄐
On the border between Thailand and Laos, the Mekong River bisects the vista horizontally, with a thin crust of dark green vegetation forming the dividing line between brown water and blue sky. In towns along the river, radio music leaks from cheap public address horns, counterpointed by the whistling cicadas of the nearby jungle. 𝄐
The tinny scree of a street violinist, playing popular movie soundtrack hits to electronic backup over a cheap amplifier, or the rollicking sound of an accordion polka.Take your pick: both can be found in the streets that branch out from the old town square of Tarnów. 𝄐
In which we attend a Roman Catholic mass in Tibet.
Tamás Sajó writes in his blog about the history of a Roman Catholic community in the Tibetan region of Yunnan province. We were there last Sunday for the mass, in which the hymns are sung in the form of sutras.
The village of Baofeng sits mainly on one side of a jade-green rushing river, and we enter the town via a grand modern bridge, across which an old man is leading a herd of cows. The traditional old district rises up the western slope above the river, a warren of narrow, but tidy streets and closely set houses.…
The street named for the Armenians — Вірмéнська вулиця — attests to the long history of this people in the city of Ľviv. Here you can see their emblematic khachkars (stone crosses), visit an Armenian basilica, and enjoy kawa po skhidnomu, Armenian coffee slowly cooked over hot sand. 𝄐
My journey to the Yunnan province of China resulted, not only in the collection of photographs comprising the previous filecast, but also the following selected recordings which I collected at various spots along the road, together with brief text descriptions.
In a quiet side street next to the Église Saint-Séverin in a touristy part of the Quartier Latin, I wait patiently until the coming of midday to hear, and record, some of the oldest church bells in Paris, dating from the early 15th century. 𝄐
The bus station in Ouarzazate, a city that lies on the edge of the Sahara desert, is a roost of drivers who call out destinations, directing passengers to the correct vehicle. Meanwhile, other buses move in and out to the sound of clanking motors and screeching brakes. 𝄐
Radioateliér 3. března 2017, 22:00
Tune in Radio Vltava 3 March at 10 PM
Thanks, Michal Rataj
(dead link)
On the day before Christmas Eve, I am in Seville. I walk the depleted streets, visit the main sights, the Cathedral of St. Mary, the Alcázar. In the afternoon, I respite in a small bar for a café cortado and a glass of rioja. When I emerge, the shining sky is beginning to darken and I can hear the faint sound of faraway church bells. 𝄐
The birds that nest under the porticos of the massive Berlin Cathedral, located in the heart of the city on Museuminsel, chatter without surcease and flit in and out, bringing food to their hungry nestlings, while a flock of crows stands watch in the nearby trees. 𝄐
The morning after a traditonal supra, a supper for guests, I am sitting on the back steps of my lodgings in Kutaisi, listening to the warm rain come down in the courtyard. A fat dormouse scurries from her hiding place, which is quickly filling with water, bringing out her young one by one and depositing them safely on higher ground. 𝄐
A recording of mine of Naxi musicians playing in Baisha in China’s Yunnan found its way into this post.
I recently traveled in the Yunnan region of China, a culturally rich region which abuts Myanmar and Tibet, and is the site of the historic Tea Horse Road. (I hope these images as they stand — an arbitrary number of inscrutable impressions — serve as a key to my as yet undigested experiences there.)
My latest column for HISVoice has been posted.
I seem to be walking through a foggy 19th-century photograph, a displaced daguerreotype on display in a snow globe. The naked trees reach up like strokes of faded ink and the wind struggles to uproot them, to make them fly like the crows who circle the chimneys and and swing around the rooftop antennas in hectic, whirling orbits. …
On 19 January I will present „kaunas centras“ from a new work-in-progress that I call „moving still“ as a quadraphonic mix made especially for this event.
Last October 12, I sat with Sarah Washington at the Radio Revolten broadcast studio in Halle, Germany for an inter|over.view of the ( nula.cc ) project. It has now been archived.
It is early in the morning, and we make a stop along the shore road that leads almost to the end of the Karpaz Peninsula, the rattail of land that juts out into the eastern Mediterranean from the northeast corner of Cyprus, where I capture this ambience.
The trembita is a natural horn from Ukraine, here played for a funeral procession. The full video here youtube.com/watch?v=YuRXA4OWZOM
Originally from the Rare and Strange Instruments blog, now a dead link.
I find myself lost in the vortex of old Meknès, and I ask a shopkeeper for the way out. “My nephew with show you,” and without hesitation, the young boy takes my hand and leads me through a dusty snakepit of dappled and shadowy passages, until we are at last debouched onto the Place Lahdim. I fumble in my pockets to offer the boy a coin, but he has already melted into the crowd. 𝄐
The swallows who dwell in the eaves of the buildings of the Putna monastery — Mănăstirea Putna — swarm in tight formation as they chase each other around the rooftops and bell towers. Their high-pitched cries and the bright summer sun seem to meld together into a single sensorial phenomenon. 𝄐
Watched over in the steady gaze of the poet Pushkin and his memorial fountain, the seaside promenade in Odessa — Приморьский бульвар — is frequented on summer evenings by hungry dogs and revellers, and not a few foreign tourists, come from afar to take in the view of the Black Sea below and to descend the Potemkin Stairs . 𝄐
Boarding a slow train in Genoa on my way to Milan, I find that the public address system in the car is malfunctioning, and each time the voice comes on to make an announcement, there is a sudden electrical squawk that jars my dozing self to alertness. 𝄐
The church in Odzun, Armenia — Օձունի եկեղեցի — stands forlorn in the middle of a low-lying yard, blanketed in snow. Passing school children stop and stare at the strange visitors who carefully photograph the pair of monumental funerary stelæ which have stood guard here for fifteen centuries. 𝄐
In cities such as this one, which lies somewhat to the north, there is a salient grimness to the brace for the coming winter, and one sometimes feels that the day has had scarcely enough time to get its wind before its charging rays start to slip away, and the night begins to fall.
In the small hours of the morning, traffic at the crossroads near Náměstí U Orionky in Prague becomes sparse, and pedestrians are almost non-existent. However, the audible signaling at the crosswalk, intended for the visually impaired, continues doing its job: slow ticking for “Wait!” and quick clicking for “Get a move on!” 𝄐
The bounty of autumn is everywhere in the orchard, the apple trees are heavy with uncollected fruit. I pluck some, and find that there are not less than three varieties here, some tasting of honey, some of wine, and some even hinting of rose. But they are late apples, left too long on the tree, dried out, and hard to eat. 𝄐
Morning and the main street leading out from the metro station, named after the theatre director Kote Marjanishvili, plunges this observer into the throng of a working class neighborhood of Tbilisi. At precisely 9:20, the carillon of the Russian Orthodox St. Aleksandr Nevskij Church begins to ring. 𝄐
As I climb the stone steps to reach the Cattedrale di San Giusto Martire, sited on a hill in the multicultural port city of Trieste, the autumnal sun is low, a dazzling orange bauble hanging in a cloudless sky. Just as I reach the plaza, the church bells begin to toll, and I step inside. 𝄐
A simple binaural recording of a street ambience is brought together with a single-note multi-instrument orchestral strain, whereby the field recording is almost completely effaced, serving only to provide a stochastic impetus to activate the convolution filter. 𝄐
Under the deck of the modern functionalist Elizabeth Bridge — Erszébet híd — next to the abutment on the Buda side of Budapest, I make a recording of the ceaseless vehicles above me as each speeding pair of front tires strikes the expansion joint as they roll onto the bridge and over the river. 𝄐
Driving across a spring landscape of freshly-turned soil under gray, drizzling skies, the radio is tuned to a gardening show. Sometimes, distant lightning on the faraway horizon disturbs the ether as crackles in the audio are sent out in all directions as a quivering, invisible tsunami of disturbed energy. 𝄐
I dream of a film-noir cityscape as if Fritz Lang had directed with de Chirico as his set designer. Hounded in its streets, I am chased, I am nabbed. The full moon is at periapsis. In the dead of night I awaken to find its pale blue light shining hard on my face through the open curtains.
( nula.cc ) included in Ambient Essentials playlist, by Dedekind Cut.
Can you smell the dusty confinement of attics, the chilly, vaguely menacing, breath of dank cellars, the damp and worm-eaten pages of long-stored books, the sour smell of a stack of old magazines that have not been able to stretch themselves open in a great while, like a cleansing yawn after a deep sleep? …
Includes the track „nine minutes“ at no. 9.
We listen as a failing fluorescent tube in a hotel bathroom somewhere struggles against time to keep the mercury vapor glowing as its cathode undergoes its final moments. The recording is passed through a number of convolutions, making it a poignant swan song for an age of excited gasses.
1 A recording of frogs and other animals as the night falls over a potato field beneath the mountains of Tusheti. 2 From there, we listen as a group of Russian villagers pushes a heavy wagon over a long distance. 3 Finally, we convolute the sound of a marching rabble with a stereophonic tone.
Warily we watch as a re-alignment slowly takes form, first noted only in our peripheral vision, but lately much hardened as it comes into focus. A harbinger of an unsettling period to come, unknowable, with an incipient sense of promise, hand-in-hand with its mischievous twin, dread.
The late Gothic Marktkirche Unser Lieben Frauen (where Handel was baptized) stands on Marktplatz facing the Roter Turm in Halle. As the afternoon wanes, vendors begin to close up shop once the tower clock chimes the hour to the tune of the Westminster chimes, thought to be taken from Handel’s Messiah.
A persistent atmosphere derived from eight looped fragments of field recordings, which are combined with one found excerpt from a scene that takes place in a clockmaker’s shop, aspires to evoke the expressive light and long shadows of a late summer’s day’s late afternoon.
With Negativland before their show at NOD. Photo: Steev Hise.
Beautiful handmade tape loop machine (ekko-maksin) by Roger Arnhoff at Norsk Teknisk Museum, Oslo. Photo: Tom Erbe.
Dnešní Masarykovo nádraží, tehdy Praha státní nádraží, v roce 1875. Krásný snímek zaslal Petr Peaty Litera. Photo: Praha Neznámá.
The mountains are a place where the bones of the earth rise up out of the soil and the surface of the land towers over itself. At night, the clouds hang like a cold fire smoldering in the moonlight, the deathly glimmer of that frigid, distant sphere.
… I can also hear the sounds of the platform announcements, reverberating through the distance until their substance is lost in the waves of echo that they stir up, seeming to say, “your journey is not over, not yet.”
What started as a simple field recording of a construction site (now completely buried in the subsequent manipulations that took place) has become by turns an extended moment combining sonic voices of both contrasting and coincident hues.
The splendor of glowering skies, laden with summer electricity and rumbling and cracking like the guts of hungry titans, while common in these parts, is but anything but banal. A late-season squall’s final ebbing is captured in this lightly edited field recording.
Through databending, the meanings of digital artifacts are transmogrified …, shedding their moorings to conventional interpretations, forcing the perceiver to explore variant ways of understanding them. It is a reinterpretation of what the “meaning” of “data” is, …
Includes „the other side“ at track 2.
Samples culled from Orson Welles’ 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, among other sources, are perhaps a case study, as well as a response to Wells’ extolling Welles’ facility at creating ‘jolly good new noises’ (as hinted at in a previous filecast).
Two recent nula.cc filecasts have been included in the latest episode of Framework Radio, #559. Thanks, Patrick!
Includes „ghost train“ and „ambiguous end“.
Křižovatka ulic Ruská, Francouzská a Moskevská. Zkuste odhadnout rok. Photo: Praha Neznámá.
A work arrived at incidental to other strivings. Here a scientific recording of the invisibile energies of the cosmos takes its place alongside the kitschy noodling of a lounge piano. A study in contrasts and congruities.
Some fragments of optical sound taken from old movies is convoluted with scratchy old recordings of violins. A field recording from the main train station in Wrocław tries to anchor it to reality. (If you think you hear harps, it is just an accident of the process.)
The rhythm of diurnity is slow, and slower still is the semiannual frequency modulation (what would that be expressed in Hz?) that variably alters the light with the dark, oscillating between a kind of cosmic sublargo and its converse superpresto.
The role of these media is at least partly to stop time from passing … . But these artefacts also propel time forward, by the fact that perceiving recorded reality is a distinct and new experience, and separate from experiencing it in the first instance. …
Between 2015 and 2017, I passed several times through Kutaisi, the capital city of western Georgia’s Imereti, usually on my way to somewhere else. Nonetheless, these brief visits afforded several opportunities to observe and image the denizens of this lively and ancient place.
Architecture gives buildings circulatory systems like those in animal bodies, moving liquids and gasses around and within, through channels which behave with both regularity and chaos. They shudder and sigh, palpitate and wretch, squeak and sing, in accord with resonances both purposeful and accidental.
This series of photographs captures the environs of Lake Sevan, during both late winter and early summer journeys to the region. The lake occupies most of the area of the provice of Gegharkunik, Armenia, and is one of the largest high altitude fresh water lakes in Eurasia.
… I still have no idea if what I experenced was related to one of these things, or simply the subconscious yearning of our brains to find order in the chaos, to find the hidden meaning of things. But both instances are fairly interesting to consider.
In questa immagine ci sono le differenze tra il vecchio ed il nuovo sistema di scrittura georgiano.
Il georgiano è stato scritto in una varietà di alfabeti nel corso della sua storia. Attualmente un alfabeto, mkhedruli è quasi completamente dominante, mentre gli altri sono oggetto di interesse per gli studiosi, che si cimentano con i documenti storici.
Il mkhedruli ha 33 lettere di uso comune, delle quali attualmente più di mezza dozzina sono obsolete. Le lettere del mkhedruli corrispondono ai suoni della lingua georgiana.
— La piccola perla del Caucaso
Multiversum is a collaborative work created for the music festival vs. interpretation, which was held in 2016 in Prague. It consists of a two-channel video installation that documents its own creation and, in its own way, stands as a minimal model of a multiverse. …
I heard the phrase in a dream, and then in a dream, again, as if coming from some deeper emissary. I counted the number of times that I heard it, two, then three, four, up to seven. Then I heard it again, a crippled haiku: “Fire is the joy of lost hope.”
Due to the variety of the island’s ecosystems, which include mountains, woods, plains, largely uninhabited territories, streams, rocky coasts and long sandy beaches, Sardinia has been metaphorically defined as a micro-continent. In the modern era, many travelers and writers have extolled the beauty of its untouched landscape, which houses the vestiges of the Nuragic civilization (Wikipedia).
On Easter Sunday in Oliena, a village in the Barbagia region of Sardinia, congregants assemble in two different churches and then depart, separately bringing with them effigies of Christ and the Virgin Mary. When the two processions meet, a moment called ‘the reunion,’ the scene erupts with church bells and rifle fire.
The winter winds of Armenia strike hard, a cold anvil to the face. They protest against the solid surfaces of buildings, moan like ghosts through the straining trees, and roll through church belfries like sighing flutes. They crash along the glistening ice with a momentous glide that is deafening.
The last time we passed a bissextile, we made a filecast to mark it. And, four years later, here is another one to mark the leap year day. Accompanying it is a series of images taken in the Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli in Rome, which houses a spectacular meridian line, a kind of elaborate sundial.
In the ancient city of Yerevan the streets do not generally coil and narrow into dense networks as in other cities that old, because in the 1930s, there was a fever for pushing aside the elaborations of the ages, replacing them with a rationalized grid. Well, it is what it is, and some of it looks like this.
Winter is already waning in the mountains of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabagh), when we attempt the passage from there to Armenia proper. As we approach the crest of the Selim Pass, we find our car can go no further in the tire-packed snow. But other drivers stop to help push us out, and we go on our way.
As it is winter in Armenia, and cold outside, I step into a snackbar for a hot coffee while waiting at the filling station. A young woman at the bar plays the radio while I wait my turn at the automatic coffee vending machine.
Next to the road near Akori, Armenia, we come to a shack advertising food, a steamy one-room eatery smelling of ash, smoke, mutton and cabbage. We step inside and sit in a sphere of heat coming from a wood-burning stove. Three men are playing cards at the only other table, growling out their bids and arguing over each other’s playing, while a woman prepares their food. We order coffee and discuss tomorrow’s itinerary.
The late winter snows are wet and heavy, dripping profusely in the afternoon sun. The air is cool and still as we pay a visit to the 10th-century monastery of Sanahin, in Armenia’s northern province of Lori. The name ‘sanahin’ translates as “this one is older than that one.”
A grassy plain, sparsely treed, lies on the Nebraska side of an obscure bend in the Missouri River. On a spring afternoon, the many birds who live here are busy, while sounds of a freight train and an occasional airplane let us know, illusions to the contrary, that we have not really left human activity far behind.
Data bending recognizes that computer files are simply numbers, and that what they represent is, essentially, arbitrary. So (for example) one could take a series of grayscale images of the sky, and similar things, and then play them as sound files. A thing from the image realm may then take residence in the realm of sound.
Words can only partly describe what and how we perceive, with accounts that are riddled with holes. Details that are challenging to describe are often left as openings for the reader to fill in. Recordings also reveal important omissions, …. Machines have limited perspective and flexibility; they can mimic but not entirely replace human tissue. …
A great curtain of crows draws itself over the sky like black lace over a face radiant with happiness. The last days have come. As the final tide comes in, it gets ready to wash the shore clean, leaving a blank slate to serve as a foundation for the next round.
December comes twelfth but is named ‘tenth.’ November is called ‘ninth’ but it is the eleventh month, and so on with the two preceding months. March was once the first, and the days between the tenth and the first back then were, curiously, considered monthless.
Among the banalities that fascinate me are the public transportation systems that the cities of the world often provide. People themselves are interesting to watch in any event, but in combination with constant motion, a sense of urgency, bad artificial lighting, and an industrial sound environment, the effect for me is irresistible.
The distant rattle and screech of the moving cables can be heard from all corners, the thrum of a great guitar. Over the hours of a day, it infests the mind, and days after we left Chiatura behind, I could summon the sound in memory with convincing precision. …
The sea sunders as it joins, and washes the ends of distant lands even as it provides a heaving pathway to them. As we cast our eye at the horizon, our imagination’s arrow attempts a gossamer bridge to the unknown, over an endless plain of sighs.
A note is sung, flung freely out, into the air. What is essential, what draws us in to listen, what siezes our attention? The soft friction of warm breath against taut cartilage sends out a signal: something alive calls out to us. And we respond.
For this equinox, we bring you a set of images of a small stone sphere which I found while walking on a gravel path. Mysterious in its regularity, and only one centimeter in diameter, when looked at closely, it begins to look a little like the recent photographs sent back from the dwarf planet Pluto.
I dream that I am at the edge of a cliff overlooking golden waters that shine in the sun. As the daylight fades, a throat of welded metal heaves a voluminous sigh as a ship moans its sad good-bye to the receding port. An improvisation for three parts.
This strange and caustic place outside a chemical plant near Záluží u Litvínova in northwest Bohemia produces a steam reeking of sulphur while, in pulsing gushes, it disgorges a black effluent. It makes a sound that, ironically, recalls the crashing surf of our mother ocean, somewhat like a siren calling us to death.
Things often happen quickly out in the field, and inspiration can be quickly squelched by adverse circumstances. It is common that unexpected sounds take me by surprise, and by the time the recorder can be prepared and initiated, the interesting sound is often already well underway.. …
The faucet drips, a floor board creaks, the house slowly settles into the earth with quiet cracks. The refrigerator purrs and then gently quakes to stop. An electric clock emits a faint motor hum and makes soft alternating clicks, as if it were walking through time. …
Xinaliq is a small, isolated village at the end of a valley in the Greater Caucasus Mountains in northern Azerbaijan. The villages speak their own language, and descend from a population that first settled there thousands of years ago. …
As the grip of sleep tightens, my purchase on the world dissipates. I drift into a misty forest, where birds chirp and insects drone, and soft leaves on tender branches brush my skin. Voices speak in dim words, bubbling up like the oracular gasses of Delphi. But then I start, a jolt, all my muscles suddenly contract, and I cannot recall what was said.
They flit and flutter and dart and dodge, and in the patterns they make, evince a kinetic ecstasy, a special craft, a gift for the marvelous. Then they disappear as quickly as they appear leaving only the shrill mental echoes of their passing. …
We go out onto the beak of land known as the Abşeron peninsula, where Baku lies, where an old Zoroastrian Atesgah, or fire temple, lies, and the fire mountain of Yanar Daǧ, and the singing stones. But mostly we go there because we seek the feeling of being at one of the ends of the earth.
It is late May. The sun is warm, but the air is cool. We are surrounded by snowy peaks as we come to a wayside stop on the Georgian Military Road at the high point of Jvari Pass. Next to the graves of the German prisoners of war who built this road, trailer trucks rumble by as a flock of crows passes overhead, on their way to who knows where.
These photographs capture fragments of a springtime afternoon among the shepherds and their grazing sheep in the pastoral landscape of Georgia’s Imereti. In the soft daylight, a strong breeze spreads the scent and sounds of the meadow all around us.
Occasionally, I see a person or two standing, waiting. The alternating bright and dark, an ebb and flow of light, a lugubrious pulsation, makes a mechanized mockery of sunrise and sunset from these quick false days and nights. …
It is obvious to the workmen of the Cimitirul Vesel, the “merry cemetery” in Sapânţa, Romania, that I am curious about the bells. I approach them, study them, tap them gently with a knuckle to guess how they might sound. Suddenly, one of the men puts down his shovel, strides over and begins to ring the bells with full abandon.
The festival „Konvergence ---Alotof---“ took place in April, 2015 in Prague, and included a brief concert from this project. The performance made use of light which was modulated by passing it through various spinning objects in conjunction with a light-sensitive device as a means of producing sound.
The jaunty blast of the amplified polka rolls off the old Renaissance town square, and townspeople spin like coupled tops to these words, „Let the others go whitherever they want, to Vienna, to Paris or London. But for my part, I will never leave Lwów. … Tylko we Lwowie!“
In this recording, we hear the sounds of the car interior as the №3 tram sets off from the periphery to the city center of Ľviv. Over the ups and downs of the old rails, and the corresponding creaks and groans of the tram car, a mother calmly answers questions posed by her child.
We come to a house, and a woman responds to our knock, peering at us from a window. She invites us into a warm steamy kitchen, where she is already preparing the khachapuri for her family’s evening meal. We are given places at the table. …
I felt a mild fluttering in my stomach as we passed the final black line. I knew no harm would come to me, but nonetheless I was overcome by the inevitability of that turning motion, its fatedness. Had I wanted to, I could not have stopped it.
High above a canyon in the Greater Caucasus Mountains of Azerbaijan near Xinaliq, we witness: a parade of clouds drifting between the twin escarpments; and below, a flock of sheep being driven to a green meadow.
Our driver abruptly comes to a stop there. We are at a roadside eatery, pressed between the winding highway and the mountain face, right next to a raging stream in rapid descent to the valley floor. “How long do we stop?” we want to know. “As long as it feels good!” is the reply. …
1 Sonified weather data from the city of Philadelphia. 2 Magnetic spectrum data of a so-called ‘singing comet.’ 3 ESA launch of a Sentinel satellite, altered. 4 Field recording of distant bells as heard from the Betlemy neighborhood of Tbilisi.
The walls of the buildings in Tbilisi, a city repeatedly conquered, flattened and rebuilt during the course of its history, are striking not only for the copiousness of their handwritten marks, but also for the way they hint, in foreshortened form, at this old city’s profoundly layered and multiethnic history.
Late evening, the traffic lessens and the bleat of motorized vehicle horns gradually subsides. By midnight, it is a wash of sound, just the unfocused sibilance of the wind in the leaves, blended with the soft chaos of every other thing happening in the neighborhood, the actions of the quick upon the inert.…
This brief journey takes us along for three stops on the metro in central Tbilisi. Starting with the cheerful electronic card readers, we move on to the rumble of the two-minute-long escalator ride, the glassy plink that calls the stops and the roaring metallic din of the train ride itself.
In the old peths of Pune, the traffic is relentless. Endless motorbikes compete with push carts, rickshaws, and buses, each wheedling for just an inch more of space. A pedestrian must put his faith in their drivers, for progress is impossible if you stand petrified at the street’s edge.
The rough streets of Kutaisi are no match for cheaply made Chinese boots. And so it comes to pass that we enter a shoe mender’s shop in the hope of re-attaching a loose-flapping sole. This sequence of images shows him making light work of the problem.
In the pre-dawn, the city of Pune, India, slowly rises. Sounds that drift across the river are torn apart by the strut and surface of intervening buildings, shredded by their mass and matter, and reassembled around my ears as ghostly groans and soothing whispers.
We took the opportunity of a weekend to travel by car over the Western Ghats of India around Pune, in Maharashtra state. The images here focus on the caves of Karla and Bhaje, while the sound file that accompanies them connects bits and pieces from a number of other temples and historical sites.
As I walk through the ground floor of a concrete parking ramp, a shortcut suggested by a local, I hear the sounds of prayer and a yellowish light coming from a crack in the wall to my right. And thus, by chance, I stumble upon the Marigold Balaji Temple, in the city of Pune.
With a look that said, “Watch how I do it!” he started across. Encouraged by his intrepid example, I followed. Enlightenment came. I immediately understood that to keep moving at a regular speed was safe, but one must never, ever stop. …
The supple hands of the ghost fiddler fluttered like little hummingbirds over the glasses’ halos, seeking the sweet essence of the music, and the fairie-like ring of it was a sheer delight. The tourists were recording the performance on mobile phones, paying homage to the performer by tossing coins into a pot laid before him. …
The supple hands of the ghost fiddler fluttered like little hummingbirds over the glasses’ halos, seeking the sweet essence of the music, and the fairie-like ring of it was a sheer delight. The tourists were recording the performance on mobile phones, paying homage to the performer by tossing coins into a pot laid before him. …
Come winter and the winds rise, air grows bitter, water stiffens, the supple creaks, footfalls, once sure, become tentative; the sun loses its hold as the brittle days shrink and the cold night draws ever nearer, as if threatening to last forever.
At each grade level crossing, we pass a semaphore, our motion smearing the sounds of the dinging bells, like a foley cue from an old spy film. It begins high on the musical scale and then smoothly sweeps downward, simultaneously rising and falling in loudness, a small seance to summon the spirit of Christian Doppler …
At each grade level crossing, we pass a semaphore, our motion smearing the sounds of the dinging bells, like a foley cue from an old spy film. It begins high on the musical scale and then smoothly sweeps downward, simultaneously rising and falling in loudness, a small seance to summon the spirit of Christian Doppler …
“The conviction of its substantial, tangible reality is now so overwhelming that later, when I wake up, I have the impression that I have just left a state of true perception, and everything I see after opening my eyes seems hazy and unreal.”
“The conviction of its substantial, tangible reality is now so overwhelming that later, when I wake up, I have the impression that I have just left a state of true perception, and everything I see after opening my eyes seems hazy and unreal.”
Our tireless habit of trawling like magpies leaves us a trove of disconnected fragments of unclear usefulness. Combined with the feverish symptoms of our imagination’s labors, they elicit dark harbors, burst tensions, continents of bleak emptiness, moments of quiet violence, and even love. We find solace in these digressions.
Our tireless habit of trawling like magpies leaves us a trove of disconnected fragments of unclear usefulness. Combined with the feverish symptoms of our imagination’s labors, they elicit dark harbors, burst tensions, continents of bleak emptiness, moments of quiet violence, and even love. We find solace in these digressions.
Our tireless habit of trawling like magpies leaves us a trove of disconnected fragments of unclear usefulness. Combined with the feverish symptoms of our imagination’s labors, they elicit dark harbors, burst tensions, continents of bleak emptiness, moments of quiet violence, and even love. We find solace in these digressions.
The city of Wrocław, formerly Breslau, lies on both sides of the river Odra, and spans some eleven islands. After the war, its populace was driven out and replaced, the newcomers also having been forced from their previous abodes. This has left this richly layered city fragmented, but not broken.
With the sound of trickling water all around and the late summer wind in the trees, many parts of Almaty enjoy an almost pastoral ambience, surprising for a rectilinear city of a million and a half people. …
The trams at Karlovo náměstí resound differently from those at Alexanderplatz; they are perhaps a bit sadder, more moaning than singing. Once I heard the cries of a wounded dog in the song of those rails. …
In this filecast, I apply the technical concepts of stereography to a selection of found monoptical motion picture fragments, and construct a semi-imaginary space from them, partly reconstituting the actual space in which they were recorded. …
In this filecast, I apply the technical concepts of stereography to a selection of found monoptical motion picture fragments, and construct a semi-imaginary space from them, partly reconstituting the actual space in which they were recorded. …
The luminiferous æther was thought for centuries to be the pervasive medium via which light propagated throughout the universe. Its existence came into doubt only in the 19th century, when careful experiments failed to measure any of its predicted effects.
The luminiferous æther was thought for centuries to be the pervasive medium via which light propagated throughout the universe. Its existence came into doubt only in the 19th century, when careful experiments failed to measure any of its predicted effects.
“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath … Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?”
A former logging train in the Carpathian Mountains of northern Romania now takes tourists up from the station at Vişeu de Sus on a forty-five minute joy ride deep into the mountain valley. This minimally adjusted field recording is an abridgement of the experience.
Beneath us in the city, where stunted columns cradle a blackened sky, lies a strange forest of bird calls, an inferno of clanking struts and pistons, sucking and exhaling the taint of ancient dust and smoke with the feverish march of clockwork, a surging ocean of steel.
Beneath us in the city, where stunted columns cradle a blackened sky, lies a strange forest of bird calls, an inferno of clanking struts and pistons, sucking and exhaling the taint of ancient dust and smoke with the feverish march of clockwork, a surging ocean of steel.
Beneath us in the city, where stunted columns cradle a blackened sky, lies a strange forest of bird calls, an inferno of clanking struts and pistons, sucking and exhaling the taint of ancient dust and smoke with the feverish march of clockwork, a surging ocean of steel.
1 Insects in the forests of Bohemia flutter and twirl in pine scented columns of air heavy with the summer heat. 2 The morning sun pirouettes with autumn trees as our car follows the winding mountain road on the way up to Mt. Ai-Petri in Crimea.
1 Insects in the forests of Bohemia flutter and twirl in pine scented columns of air heavy with the summer heat. 2 The morning sun pirouettes with autumn trees as our car follows the winding mountain road on the way up to Mt. Ai-Petri in Crimea.
1 Insects in the forests of Bohemia flutter and twirl in pine scented columns of air heavy with the summer heat. 2 The morning sun pirouettes with autumn trees as our car follows the winding mountain road on the way up to Mt. Ai-Petri in Crimea.
I stand alone in a late afternoon, heavy in stillness and threat, a wary eye on the gray shroud drawing close overhead, heeding also to the electric frissons of a shuddering sky that ripples and shimmers across the broad river valley. The forecast is rain.
If we allow ourselves the luxury, we may find ways to make sense of a collection of unapologetically various sources, in such a way as to form a coherent and consequent whole, in spite of the best efforts of what we may think of as our common sense.
If we allow ourselves the luxury, we may find ways to make sense of a collection of unapologetically various sources, in such a way as to form a coherent and consequent whole, in spite of the best efforts of what we may think of as our common sense.
Although known to many solely as a holiday destination, the island in the western Mediterranean known as Mallorca reveals another dimension in winter, and when the sun-seekers and merry-makers recede, its other profiles step forward.
This is an untouched recording of a freight train passing through an Iowa town in the mid afternoon of an early spring day. If you stick it out to the end, you will hear the three distant blasts of its horn as it makes the next grade level crossing.
We order our tea and consider the journey we have undertaken, to this far side of the world, this most landlocked of places, the fabled Fergana Valley. Here, the foreigner is always watched and cannot rely on the crowd for anonymity. Eyes follow us everywhere, sometimes wary, sometimes curious or bemused, perhaps wondering why we have come, of all places, to this corner of the globe.. …
We order our tea and consider the journey we have undertaken, to this far side of the world, this most landlocked of places, the fabled Fergana Valley. Here, the foreigner is always watched and cannot rely on the crowd for anonymity. Eyes follow us everywhere, sometimes wary, sometimes curious or bemused, perhaps wondering why we have come, of all places, to this corner of the globe.. …
Are you lost? No. I used to live here. But you can get lost in the most familiar of places. Yes. A memory? From many years ago. You never forget it, even if you've only heard it once. What could be more simple when someone is lost in the dark, guided by memories?
At dawn, the clouds flash an angry pink, like eosine, until their inflamed passions are shamed by a hot rising sun, withering away to the frailest wisps of rose and mauve, in turn finally sapped to depletion by the sea’s breath. For the rest of the day, the sun rules. …
“The frontier of our world is not far away; it doesn’t run along the horizon or in the depths. It glimmers faintly close by, in the twilight of our nearest surroundings; out of the corner of our eye we can always glimpse another world, without realizing it.”
“Run away! Today! Or tomorrow. But tomorrow might already be too late! Because what do people become around here? They just burn out like this old mountain that was once a volcano. And they will all be left with hearts of stone in the end. Hard stones. Cold stones. This is such a dead world!”
“Run away! Today! Or tomorrow. But tomorrow might already be too late! Because what do people become around here? They just burn out like this old mountain that was once a volcano. And they will all be left with hearts of stone in the end. Hard stones. Cold stones. This is such a dead world!”
A young couple made the traditional wish (throwing a coin in the river) at the spot where Jan Nepomucký, on 20 March 1393, was thrown into the water, his tongue cut out, for having angered King Wenceslas. What do they wish for? Long life? Eternal love? …
Beneath autumn stars, overlooking the valley that embraces the Tatar city of Bakhchysarai, we watch the pinkening sky as we hear an early morning chorus of dogs, the slight whoosh of a solitary vehicle, the crowing of restless cocks, and a call to god.
On a hook of land jutting into the Black Sea, amid the ruins of ancient Greek Chersonesos, supposedly lies the birthplace of Russian Christianity. There we find the recently rebuilt neo-byzantine Cathedral of St. Vladimir, and inside it, a nun who half-whispers, half-chants, her supplication.
“Do you hear that?” asked the caretaker when I moved in. I was forced to admit that I hadn’t. “Exactly my point! It’s quiet as a tomb here, and that’s how we like to keep it.” …
“Do you hear that?” asked the caretaker when I moved in. I was forced to admit that I hadn’t. “Exactly my point! It’s quiet as a tomb here, and that’s how we like to keep it.” …
Playing the role of the familiar Venetian Moor, a recording of Orson Welles’ interpretation of these four words, stripped of all context, are suggestive enough, without even bringing up other salient themes such as the darkness that enshrouds the vengeful, or the fragility of life itself.
Why is the sea here called black? The Turkish language uses the words white and black to signal the ideas of greater and lesser. Thus, when there are two of anything needing naming, seas, for example, we get a White Sea … and a Black Sea. …
Why is the sea here called black? The Turkish language uses the words white and black to signal the ideas of greater and lesser. Thus, when there are two of anything needing naming, seas, for example, we get a White Sea … and a Black Sea. …
Situated in a tight spot between railroad tracks and a cliff face, the Cave Monastery of St. Clement at Inkerman, in the Crimea, occupies an unusual sound environment. The concave rock overhang acts as a sound lens, focusing in a small area the acoustic energy emanating from the large scale industrial activities just across the tracks.
Motion is not the primary truth represented in a collection of frames, but rather change. Motion is only a subset of all forms of visible change.
A frame by itself can either break continuity or reinforce it. It cannot be neutral. …
“The man who had lost his identity card remained silent and thoughtful for a few minutes, then said, ‘I have troubled you. Still, if it’s no problem, could you please look around and find me an identity card of someone who has died? Is that possible?’”
A summertime journey into the northern marches of Romania where it joins Ukraine yielded a number of rustic experiences. Come along amid the dawn insects, barking dogs, rattling mountain funiculars, bell-bedecked goats, crowing cocks, singing women — and more besides.
Workmen in a neighboring enclosed courtyard mix cement, haul sand, dig holes, and also use an unidentifiable piece of equipment that regularly emits a series of three percussive notes in the course of its operation. This is what I made of that.
Waiting was not a problem. He was well-versed in that art. The uncertainty was no more so. He had always lived tentatively, saying, “Everything we know is provisional.” He knew what he meant by that, even if few others did.
“So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going?”
“So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going?”
The throngs. The multitudes. The crowds. The masses. A host, a horde, a mob, a swarm; in numbers, scores, droves and waves. In 1944, the orchestra tunes up as Toscanini prepares to conduct Verdi’s “The Hymn of the Nations,” with other sounds added.
If you take the elektrichka from Sevastopol going NW, after 50km you will come to the town of Bakhchysarai from which, take a marshrutka past the Tatar Khan’s palace and mosque, all the way up to the Uspenskiy cave monastery. Then, proceeding on foot, after a 2km hike into the dusty countryside, you will at last arrive at the ancient cave city of Çufut Qale.
If you take the elektrichka from Sevastopol going NW, after 50km you will come to the town of Bakhchysarai from which, take a marshrutka past the Tatar Khan’s palace and mosque, all the way up to the Uspenskiy cave monastery. Then, proceeding on foot, after a 2km hike into the dusty countryside, you will at last arrive at the ancient cave city of Çufut Qale.
If you take the elektrichka from Sevastopol going NW, after 50km you will come to the town of Bakhchysarai from which, take a marshrutka past the Tatar Khan’s palace and mosque, all the way up to the Uspenskiy cave monastery. Then, proceeding on foot, after a 2km hike into the dusty countryside, you will at last arrive at the ancient cave city of Çufut Qale.
If you take the elektrichka from Sevastopol going NW, after 50km you will come to the town of Bakhchysarai from which, take a marshrutka past the Tatar Khan’s palace and mosque, all the way up to the Uspenskiy cave monastery. Then, proceeding on foot, after a 2km hike into the dusty countryside, you will at last arrive at the ancient cave city of Çufut Qale.
Water, the scientists tell us, reaches its maximum density before it freezes, at 3.98° centigrade. This is why, they tell us, ice floats. Now the question before us is, perhaps, why does one sound seem to float easily above another?
“The custom-built, 50-ton blower was situated in an adjacent chamber, separated from the waiting area by a long corridor. The Æolor blower was 21 feet high, 16 feet long, and 13 feet wide, and it contained two colossal lengthwise paddles which rotated to draw air in one side and out the other.”
“My God,” thought the Commander, peering into the heaving black chaos, “Where am I? Who am I?” He waited for the beacon’s beam to seep through the fog, still unable to work out why, the entire day of their departure, he had been dogged by anxiety.
“My God,” thought the Commander, peering into the heaving black chaos, “Where am I? Who am I?” He waited for the beacon’s beam to seep through the fog, still unable to work out why, the entire day of their departure, he had been dogged by anxiety.
“My God,” thought the Commander, peering into the heaving black chaos, “Where am I? Who am I?” He waited for the beacon’s beam to seep through the fog, still unable to work out why, the entire day of their departure, he had been dogged by anxiety.
Captured in a series of fleeting glimpses, the pastoral landscape of southern Kazakhstan between Shymkent and Almaty quickly passes and slowly darkens as evening falls.
Fascinated by the richness of the sounds that accompany images of flight in war movies made in the U.S.S.R., particularly the Bojevoj Kinosbornik series, and Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s 1935 Aerograd, I pieced together an atmosphere based on exemplary fragments.
Fascinated by the richness of the sounds that accompany images of flight in war movies made in the U.S.S.R., particularly the Bojevoj Kinosbornik series, and Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s 1935 Aerograd, I pieced together an atmosphere based on exemplary fragments.
Fascinated by the richness of the sounds that accompany images of flight in war movies made in the U.S.S.R., particularly the Bojevoj Kinosbornik series, and Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s 1935 Aerograd, I pieced together an atmosphere based on exemplary fragments.
1 Spontaneously, travellers in Medzhybizh recall a song from the film Austeria (The Inn). 2 The midrash in Uman containing the tomb of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov. 3 In Trieste, a man prays as a woman mops the floor at the Cattedrale di San Giusto. 4 Morning services and bells at Odessa’s Cathedral of the Transfiguration.
Although clear on visual inspection that the wave form is rich in undulations, on playback, our source file here confers only silence. So variants of it were made, lowering it by two, three, four, and six octaves. Here they are as a chorus, together with a few added sound effects.
Although clear on visual inspection that the wave form is rich in undulations, on playback, our source file here confers only silence. So variants of it were made, lowering it by two, three, four, and six octaves. Here they are as a chorus, together with a few added sound effects.
Although clear on visual inspection that the wave form is rich in undulations, on playback, our source file here confers only silence. So variants of it were made, lowering it by two, three, four, and six octaves. Here they are as a chorus, together with a few added sound effects.
The Czech words for “lightning and thunder” aptly characterize the outdoor city-wide sound environment replayed in Prague every year at Silvestr — or New Year’s Eve. Here is a recording, beginning just at midnight, of what it sounded like most recently.
The borderland between countries can create an odd feeling as one passes through a place where bureaucracy and armed guards interrupt the free sensation of moving down the road. Psychologically, we may feel the need to steel ourselves for the leap from the familiar into the unknown.
The foreboding was heavy as the struggling train juddered and screed on the tortured rails, first this side of the mountain stream, then that, being forced at intervals to cross on worrisome bridges. A wan gibbous moon floated in the mist, deftly evading the black graspless arms of trees. When they finally reached the city, the Carpathian night was already deep.
The Black Sea near the port of Odessa as seen from the deck of a passenger boat, brought together here with incidental sounds and music by Sergei Pototsky from the score of the 1936 film By the Bluest of Seas, mentioned here before.
The passenger docks at Odessa, sitting more or less at the foot of the famous Potemkin Stairs, toasts gently in the October sun; the salty breeze, the churning waters; the press of fellow passengers eager to disembark; the rusty creak of boats and dock equipment; are now nothing but a memory, feebly rekindled in these documents.
The passenger docks at Odessa, sitting more or less at the foot of the famous Potemkin Stairs, toasts gently in the October sun; the salty breeze, the churning waters; the press of fellow passengers eager to disembark; the rusty creak of boats and dock equipment; are now nothing but a memory, feebly rekindled in these documents.
Sounds from the basement. Amid the out-of-sight out-of-mind, the 60Hz hum of a fluorescent tube is convoluted with a souvenir bell and a ukelin (apparently the unholy offspring of a ukelele and a violin). A scratchy old cylinder recording rounds out this set.
Sounds from the basement. Amid the out-of-sight out-of-mind, the 60Hz hum of a fluorescent tube is convoluted with a souvenir bell and a ukelin (apparently the unholy offspring of a ukelele and a violin). A scratchy old cylinder recording rounds out this set.
Sounds from the basement. Amid the out-of-sight out-of-mind, the 60Hz hum of a fluorescent tube is convoluted with a souvenir bell and a ukelin (apparently the unholy offspring of a ukelele and a violin). A scratchy old cylinder recording rounds out this set.
Nasreddin is seated on the bank of a river, lost in thought. A man is scurrying along the opposite bank, apparently searching. He comes to a point across from Nasreddin and calls out, ‘How do I get to the other side?’ Nasreddin, his train of thought broken, snaps, ‘But you are on the other side.’
From a certain perspective, the cavernous, acoustically lively interior of Budapest’s classical eastern train station can be experienced as a place of contemplation, provided one can find a relatively isolated spot from where to listen.
From a certain perspective, the cavernous, acoustically lively interior of Budapest’s classical eastern train station can be experienced as a place of contemplation, provided one can find a relatively isolated spot from where to listen.
Our present entr’acte begins with single-perf light-struck roll-ends on optical sound, quickly overtaken by steel scraping against wood, as if gnashing. Along with a mimeograph, party horns, mumbling men and a string in E, the question comes to mind, ‘What is modernity?’
Our present entr’acte begins with single-perf light-struck roll-ends on optical sound, quickly overtaken by steel scraping against wood, as if gnashing. Along with a mimeograph, party horns, mumbling men and a string in E, the question comes to mind, ‘What is modernity?’
1 Calling out departures at the bus station in Ouarzazate. 2 A musical group performs on the Place el-Hadim in Meknes. 3 Late afternoon, birds and muezzin at the Saadian Tombs, Marrakech. 4 Night falls on Bagdadi Square in Fez, as most people are heading for home.
Oddly, when you take a perfectly ordinary suspense strain from an unremarkable Hollywood police thriller, and give it the old granular synthesis treatment, something almost Gothic emerges. At least, that’s what I think.
Oddly, when you take a perfectly ordinary suspense strain from an unremarkable Hollywood police thriller, and give it the old granular synthesis treatment, something almost Gothic emerges. At least, that’s what I think.
Oddly, when you take a perfectly ordinary suspense strain from an unremarkable Hollywood police thriller, and give it the old granular synthesis treatment, something almost Gothic emerges. At least, that’s what I think.
A simple assemblage of sound passages from a selection of mid-century movies, evoking an eventless space where only time passes. A close inspection of moments approximately intended to come forward once, then dissolve quickly into the past.
A simple assemblage of sound passages from a selection of mid-century movies, evoking an eventless space where only time passes. A close inspection of moments approximately intended to come forward once, then dissolve quickly into the past.
We find that the Jovian planets emit a kind of energy that can be converted to sound, affording these alien impulses a perceptible mien for us humans. So if the vacuum of space is, as is said, abhorrent to nature, then it at least leaves plenty of room for the imagination to fill.
Swinging to and fro in the Église Saint-Martin-des-Champs, adjoined to the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, is the famous pendulum of Foucault, placidly marking the rotation of the earth. Or rather, a restoration of the famous experiment, the original cable having snapped in 2010.
Swinging to and fro in the Église Saint-Martin-des-Champs, adjoined to the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, is the famous pendulum of Foucault, placidly marking the rotation of the earth. Or rather, a restoration of the famous experiment, the original cable having snapped in 2010.
With a new thousand-day cycle beginning, we present a short movie of a movie projector in a repeating cycle, or loop, with each iteration slipping in time by a frame at a time for one color channel, and two frames for the next, until the cycle completes and the colors are once again in synch.
An intercalary day comes only once in four years (slightly less, in fact) so it is a worthy thing to mark it with a new filecast. To accomplish this, we mark time with a beat and set noise in the background. Later, a woman reads a list of numbers, which a man acknowledges — for no apparent reason.
It turns out that even silent films transferred to video tape in fact have a soundtrack — there is at least tape hiss, always present in any case. Here, the telecine’s sound output was patched thru to record during such a transfer, the result being an unintended sound passage, put to use here as the backdrop for a few more intentional added musical incidents.
Three weeks of travel in Morocco left many impressions, among them the bleared memory of the days-long effort of getting from here to there. Air, rail, and road are sketched here in field recordings, with incidental human sounds freely intruding.
The famous astronomical clock in the Cathédrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste in Lyon is our subject. The incidental sounds of a tour group milling about the nave go on until the four-minute mark, when the horloge begins its labors, as it does just four times a day. A few minutes later, we proceed outside to the square just as the bell tower heralds four o’clock.
Captured in a series of fleeting glimpses, the urban space around the Dresden Hauptbahnhof slips by as the afternoon train departs for Prague.
Captured in a series of fleeting glimpses, the urban space around the Dresden Hauptbahnhof slips by as the afternoon train departs for Prague.
A hapless soprano and the nether strings of a pianoforte, selected for their natural positions at opposite ends of the sound spectrum, are set in motion just to see what happens. The tension is relieved by the occasional rattle of a cowbell.
A hapless soprano and the nether strings of a pianoforte, selected for their natural positions at opposite ends of the sound spectrum, are set in motion just to see what happens. The tension is relieved by the occasional rattle of a cowbell.
A hapless soprano and the nether strings of a pianoforte, selected for their natural positions at opposite ends of the sound spectrum, are set in motion just to see what happens. The tension is relieved by the occasional rattle of a cowbell.
A hapless soprano and the nether strings of a pianoforte, selected for their natural positions at opposite ends of the sound spectrum, are set in motion just to see what happens. The tension is relieved by the occasional rattle of a cowbell.
Audio notes, sound snapshots, and sonic impressions made while travelling in Laos at the end of the rainy season. Locations include several wats in Vientiane, a guest house in Savannaket, and the road along the banks of the Mekong River.
Three sources, one repeated seven times: 1 Modulated brown, white, and pink noise with aggressive equalization. 2 Fragmentary output from a SuperCollider session, complete with file corruption. 3 A marginal Skype connection throwing errors (deleted).
The tolling of a large, sad bell is emulated by passing a sampled electric guitar through a series of filters, so that the elicited alter-ego of a normally ebullient sound breaks like mourning.
The tolling of a large, sad bell is emulated by passing a sampled electric guitar through a series of filters, so that the elicited alter-ego of a normally ebullient sound breaks like mourning.
An atmosphere based on sounds taken from the film By the Bluest of Seas (dir. Boris Barnet), filmed in 1936 on an island in the Caspian Sea. We attempt, and inevitably fail, to capture some of that film’s unclassifiable sensibility.
An atmosphere based on sounds taken from the film By the Bluest of Seas (dir. Boris Barnet), filmed in 1936 on an island in the Caspian Sea. We attempt, and inevitably fail, to capture some of that film’s unclassifiable sensibility.
An invention for three sources, where each part was laid into a timeline carelessly at first, and then over many iterations, gradually moved here and there, until something like a composition came slowly into focus. Digital error noise was left in; that’s the machines talking in their own language.
An invention for three sources, where each part was laid into a timeline carelessly at first, and then over many iterations, gradually moved here and there, until something like a composition came slowly into focus. Digital error noise was left in; that’s the machines talking in their own language.
The title is merely suggestive: Here are recordings of contrasting spaces that are filtered through the mind’s ear, and, in this brute juxtaposition, found to be congruent. We use sound from a train compartment in Germany, the beach in Barcelona, and a street in Seville.
“The state in which simultaneously we see a thing, react to it and read it as a letter casts us into an unimaginable, yet real space, in which it is not clear whether seeing, reacting and reading are parts of a single primary action or it is their incompatibility that has set the dizzying vortex in motion.”
In which we continue to explore a simple technique developed for the portfolio of collages known here as north, and find that it yields further results: a collection of additional images in the same vein.
A transfer of a much-screened print of Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain, which was based on Pavlov’s pioneering work on animal reflexes, has fallen into my hands. The most interesting textures and moments have been collected here, with color and sound liberally applied.
A transfer of a much-screened print of Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain, which was based on Pavlov’s pioneering work on animal reflexes, has fallen into my hands. The most interesting textures and moments have been collected here, with color and sound liberally applied.
A chaotic, dissonant strain derived from an arbitrarily chosen segment of found sound, which has been divided into various tonal strands and then layered, slowly finds its center of gravity as it drifts toward consonance.
A chaotic, dissonant strain derived from an arbitrarily chosen segment of found sound, which has been divided into various tonal strands and then layered, slowly finds its center of gravity as it drifts toward consonance.
When seen from below in full daylight on an overcast day, snow’s bright fortune is reversed: instead of being white, pure, and clean, a trick of perspective and light turns it black, heavy, and maybe a bit menacing. (The video is silent.)
An orchestral strain from a 1950s suspense picture is time stretched, so that the darker sounds hidden within are artificially emphasized. And the tension of the dramatic moment is stretched out as well, perhaps to its breaking point.
The sound of heavy construction machinery in a large, resonant enclosed courtyard, with piano accompaniment trickling in from a next-door neighbor’s open window. And so we find yet again that the daily life in the city is its own readymade collage.
A handful of fleeting sound accents is culled mostly from almost forgotten ‘golden age’ Hollywood films, and then reshaped into alarming ambiences that echo at least some of their original meanings – and perhaps take on new ones.
At the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by Les Landes de Gascogne, on the eastern flank of the mouth of the Bassin d’Arcachon,
I stand atop the largest sand dune in Europe.
Yet another train ride, this one owing more to the imagination and subjectivity than its sources, which consist of field recordings of steam locomotives. Together with video, this sound work is part of the series of video works that we call 55505 pareidolia.
This is a long-form motion picture compiled from the following filecasts: edge case, locomotive, ekh dorogi, and forty. In more or less this form, it has been screened a handful of times in scattered cities across Europe and North America.
Heavy-duty manipulation. The stylus cuts the soft wax once; traveled over many times, the trough becomes brittle and details are, bit by bit, scraped away. The scratchy reminder of an angelic chorus is revived in 384 tracks spread across the pan, and smeared thru time.
The sound of a detuned shortwave radio during a thunderstorm provides an apt backdrop for a poorly encoded recording of the Uzbek musician Sherali Jo’raev found on an Uzbek-language music sharing forum. Apparently, he sings of the Farg’ona Valley city of Andijon.
1 Kolkheti Ensemble sings Orovela, a Georgian plowing song. 2 The chimes of Rostov, excerpts with narration, on the Melodiya label. 3 There is an argument on the street below my window. 4 Pamiętaj (“Remember”), sung by Chór Dana, recording found in a thrift store in Chicago.
A portfolio of images, each composed from a found view of the icy Arctic, serving partly as a technical exploration of digital interpolation and partly as an evocative fantasy of crystalline symmetries. Software confabulated many of the pixels in these images, but I ‘made’ them. Right?
Interleaved frames from video that was taken going both up and down the waterfront steps in Odessa made famous in the film Battleship Potemkin. The day was hot, the hour early, and the dogs were still asleep. The waterfront is now obscured by the passenger dock, a car dealership and a sign directing passersby to a nearby grocery.
In the jungles of Angkor, in Cambodia, among the innumerable temples of the Angkor Wat complex, the pervasive sounds are these: motor bikes, souvenir hawkers, roadside musicians, and — most of all — the eerie, disorienting chorus of whistling cicadas.
When the shy traveler hears castanets and guitar, and peers cautiously through the open door into the crowded room where a woman is dancing before a clapping throng, he feels it presumptuous to take a place among them and begin recording. So he contents himself with the brass band practicing on the street around the corner.
Three short sequences of camera shots from the film Battleship Potemkin are reduced to their individual frames. The frames of I. are directly altered, while II. and III. are re-ordered or interleaved according to mathematical patterns chosen at whim.
Subjective landscapes from the valleys of the Nishnabotna and nearby rivers of southwest Iowa, (Shelby, Audubon and Cass counties) developed for the monograph series Discréto (nº26, Bordeaux, France). Mes remerciements à Philippe Billé.
Here is a new version of a work created in 2007 as part of a commission from Český Rozhlas (Czech Radio). It was while working on this piece that I arrived at the idea for this project, nula.cc. (Special thanks to R(a)dio(custica) and John Heck.)
On a small strip of land on the Andalusian coast of Spain, we recorded a few minutes of the Atlantic Ocean doing what it always does, and what it has been doing for the last million years or so.
I spend a winter afternoon in the ancient port city of Marseilles, unable due to circumstances to continue my journey to Spain. I wander with utter aimlessness the area around the Gare Saint-Charles, the immigrant neighborhood of Noailles and the Vieux Port.
Train schedules force me to halt my journey for some hours in Ljubliana, not to imply any hardship. The center is festive with holiday decorations, while people drink, chat, stroll and enjoy the many street musicians. In two days, I will have crossed northern Italy and arrive at Marseilles.
Train schedules force me to halt my journey for some hours in Ljubliana, not to imply any hardship. The center is festive with holiday decorations, while people drink, chat, stroll and enjoy the many street musicians. In two days, I will have crossed northern Italy and arrive at Marseilles.
Optical sound, such as that found along the length and at the very edge of old films, is paradoxical. It is sound that you can see. And, of course, you can hear it, too, along with the blemishes that time and use wreak on aging acetate. Here we explore this fascination in some depth.
At noon on a cold winter Saturday, the bells of the Kostel sv. Ludmily (the Church of St. Ludmila) ring out over Náměstí Míru (Peace Square) in Prague, a busy transportation hub not far from the city’s center, as people simply go on about their business.
It is a hot October day. As the train leaves Hua Lamphong Station in Bangkok on the way east to Poipet, the passengers ready their tickets at the sound of the ticket taker’s clacking hole-punch. Meanwhile, the crowded train passes through the congested outer reaches of the city’s urban sprawl.
A collection of images from no place in particular, but including images from Europe, Asia, and America, presented here as a series of cryptic fragments. (Thanks to John Heck for his contributions.)
A collection of images from no place in particular, but including images from Europe, Asia, and America, presented here as a series of cryptic fragments. (Thanks to John Heck for his contributions.)
A mountain stream drains the mountains above Vyšná Boca, a village of some 100 souls in the Žilina region of the Slovakian Tatras. On a cold March afternoon, under skies like nacre, our ears take in an ordinary, but nonetheless entrancing, music.
A mountain stream drains the mountains above Vyšná Boca, a village of some 100 souls in the Žilina region of the Slovakian Tatras. On a cold March afternoon, under skies like nacre, our ears take in an ordinary, but nonetheless entrancing, music.
A mountain stream drains the mountains above Vyšná Boca, a village of some 100 souls in the Žilina region of the Slovakian Tatras. On a cold March afternoon, under skies like nacre, our ears take in an ordinary, but nonetheless entrancing, music.
Captured in a series of fleeting glimpses, the landscape of north-central Cambodia between the border town of Poi Pet and our destination Siem Reap quickly passes as we judder along Highway 6 by automobile, just about a year ago.
Captured in a series of fleeting glimpses, the landscape of north-central Cambodia between the border town of Poi Pet and our destination Siem Reap quickly passes as we judder along Highway 6 by automobile, just about a year ago.
At four in the morning, from the berth of a sleeper car rolling through the chilly night, somewhere in the Slovakian Tatras between Bratislava and Poprad, these are some of the sounds you might hear. The Tatras form the westernmost arm of the Carpathian Mountains.
At four in the morning, from the berth of a sleeper car rolling through the chilly night, somewhere in the Slovakian Tatras between Bratislava and Poprad, these are some of the sounds you might hear. The Tatras form the westernmost arm of the Carpathian Mountains.
1 Field recordings and video images from a metro station in central Kiev. 2 Found footage from NASA showing the re-entry of a rocket fuel tank, starting with jettison all the way to splashdown. 3 Rain and music from an old film.
Taking as its sources, among others, the Torre Bert recordings (whose interpretation is subject to dispute) we find that these sounds nonetheless evoke a sense of awe of the sacrifices of the “lost cosmonauts”, the utter helplessness of comrades far below, and the cold indifference of outer space.
It is said that Marconi, the inventor of radio, came to believe as he grew old that sounds never die, becoming instead ever fainter until we can no longer hear them. Thus, given a device of sufficient sensitivity, any sound from the past could be recovered. … Who’s to say that he was wrong?
It is said that Marconi, the inventor of radio, came to believe as he grew old that sounds never die, becoming instead ever fainter until we can no longer hear them. Thus, given a device of sufficient sensitivity, any sound from the past could be recovered. … Who’s to say that he was wrong?
Culled from various locations, a meadow, a public park, a bus station waiting room on a rainy morning, and the streets of a city at night form the backdrop for a series of extended studies using a few notes from a Gnossienne or two.
Culled from various locations, a meadow, a public park, a bus station waiting room on a rainy morning, and the streets of a city at night form the backdrop for a series of extended studies using a few notes from a Gnossienne or two.
1 Outside a radio station along the Mekong River in Kratié, Cambodia, around midnight, heard over an outdoor public loudspeaker on the top of a pole. 2 In which the high technology of wire recording is demonstrated at a social gathering in 1948.
At an intersection of street No. 118 with another street in a neighborhood in Phnom Penh, after a day of wandering (collecting images and recordings), we sit in creaky wicker chairs on the veranda of a corner cafe. The sun is going down; a white-robed monk comes in and passes the shopkeeper a slip of white paper, and then shuffles out.
The mechanism of one of the many cable cars in this city is heard while people wait for the next car to arrive.
Montevideo, 29 February.
Montevideo, 29 February.
Buenos Aires. 3 March.
Scene from one of the barrios of Buenos Aires. 4 March.
Pawn shop and make-shift museum to Che Guevara (complete with endless lecture), Buenos Aires, 4 March.
Buenos Aires, 2 March.
Bookstore, Montevideo. 29 February.
Flags for sale, Montevideo. 29 February.
At the lunch counter „La Pasiva“ in Montevideo, there is a huge beer barrel with the word PILSEN suspended over the entrance.
Neighborhood vegetable market, Montevideo. 29 February.
On the streets of Montevideo at night, a group of men has gathered to play the drums. 28 February.
Inside the Yurjev Monastery complex. Last Wednesday.
Overlooking the river Volkhov near the Nativity of the Theotokos Church, near Yurjevo, Russia.
Courtyard of Znamensky Cathedral, Velikij Novgorod. Tuesday.
Outside the walls of the Velikij Novgorod Kremlin. Last Tuesday.
Church of the Holy Wisdom as evening falls. Velikij Novgorod. (The oldest extant church in Russia.)
Bridge over the river Volkhov, Velikij Novgorod.
Velikij Novgorod. This afternoon.
The sun appeared through a break in the clouds this afternoon, St. Nicholas Cathedral. Velikij Novgorod.
The Holy Trinity Church of the Former Holy Trinity Monastery. It survived 600 years but was left uncared for under Communism. Velikij Novgorod, Russia. This morning.
Display at the museum of Anna Akhmatova, St. Petersburg. Today.
The door of the flat where Dostoyevsky wrote „Brothers Karamazov“, now a museum. St. Petersburg, this afternoon.
The poet-deity Pushkin. St. Petersburg, today.
Everywhere, the sky a web of cables (holding the city together). St. Petersburg, today.
At the stolovaya / cafeteria. St. Petersburg, this afternoon.
I always imagine Russia in the snow, don’t you? St. Petersburg, last night.
Interior, Church of the Spilt Blood.
Today I am in St. Petersburg and the Neva is icy.
Under the stern gaze of Mephistopheles, the gallery minder at the Russian Museum reads her messages.
Peter the Great.
We explore the neighborhoods of the Sur, the old walled city of Diyarbakır, and find a labyrinth of narrow channels within walls of dark basalt, perforated here and there with windows and doorways, leading to unknowable courtyards and the inner sancta of domestic life. A hot sky hovers above us, casting a torrent of blinding sunlight into the narrows, brilliant shafts jabbing like solid objects, painting geometric spots on the ground. The July temperatures go beyond 40°C, and the smallest patch of shade is a gratefully accepted mercy.…
From the high vantage point of Husův Kamen (near Slatiny), I record the oceanic roar of the late Friday afternoon traffic on the main urban ring bypass (městský okruh) of Prague.
Sunday night, Národní třída, Prague. People light hundreds of candles to Václav Havel to mark the 30th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution.
Karpaz Anayolu, Dipkarpaz 99890 / the sea on the karpaz peninsula. Field recording from the shore of the Karpaz Peninsula in Turkish Cyprus. İskele, Αμμόχωστος - Mağusa, Kuzey Kıbrıs, Κύπρος. ( nula.cc )
In this noisy recording, we find a lone man singing to himself outside the Church of St. Mary, which lies within the Kusquam/Qusquam fortress complex in Gondar, Ethiopia.
Kurdish traditonal dengbêj singers recorded at the Dengbêj House (Dengbêj Evi), Diyarbakır, Turkey. Ziya Gökalp, Kılıçı Sk. No:7, 21300 Sur/Diyarbakır, Turkey
Punctum - Krásovka · Prague
nula.cc
FRI, OCT 11, 2019
The project nula.cc started in 2009 as a sort of open portfolio, serving as the online presence for a cohesive and expansive collection of digital artefacts, made available in series as they are created. It has evolved over time, and has taken on a somewhat diaristic character, each work in the portfolio presenting a certain encapsulated moment (or set of moments) in the ongoing life and experiences of its author.
Recognizing that digital media can be used to represent a full range of heretofore separate artistic media, the online presence of nula.cc intends to fully explore the effects of combining words with images and time-based media. (In its most visionary posture), nula.cc sets out to be simultaneously a new form of literature, one that incorporates audio and visual elements, and also exploits the particularities of the web, which can be considered a paginated medium that can simultaneously be understood as music, poetry, narrative or cinema (both intermittent and continuous at the same time).
At Punctum, the project author will present the project and offer a listening and screening session that will include live mixes of a selection of compositions from the nula.cc filecasts, mostly in versions altered especially for the event. In addition, a selection of movies from the project will be screened. What to expect: an environment centered on the act of listening (and sometimes watching) and contemplation.
Looking back across the Golden Horn from the Galata bridge, yesterday. And this morning, back to Prague.
On the narrow streets of old Diyarbakır. Yesterday.
A woman waits while her bread bakes in a communal fire oven. Yesterday, Diyarbakır.
A few more images from yesterday's climb up to the site at Nemrut Dağı.
The stone heads of the "Eastern Terrace" of Nemrut Dağı. This morning.
What remains of a 2nd-century Roman bridge built in the name of Septimus Severus. South of Akdurak, Turkey. Yesterday.
This is me, a budding Alan Lomax, recording the Kurdish singers at the Dengbêj house in Diyarbakir, a few days ago. Photo by Tamás Sajó.
Another one from the Zeugma Mosaic Museum; a portrait of Dionysus.
The narrow streets of the old town of Sanliurfa, yesterday.
At the Zeugma Mosaic Museum in Gaziantep, Turkey. Fragment of a mosaic from a Roman villa.
Men enjoying tea in a shady spot on a street in Sanliurfa, Turkey.
In a mosque in Sanliurfa, an LED signboard informs the devout muslim of the current times of the call to prayer for today.
The "bee-hive" houses of Harran. The form of these houses has been basically unchanged for thousands of years. The patriarch of three major religions, the prophet Abraham, is thought to have grown up in Harran.
Street scene in Harran, one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities.
An encampment of nomadic Kurdish shepherds southwest of Diyarbakır.
Hasankeyf, yesterday. There are a few people still living in the ancient cave dwellings of Hasankeyf, though they have been moving out in greater numbers in recent generations. Due to the Tigris dam project, the Turkish government will be "compensating" them (inadequately, according to local accounts) for moving them into the new city of Hasankeyf, on higher ground.
Watching the world go by from a tea house in the old town of Bitlis.
The Armenian Orthodox Cathedral of the Holy Cross, now a museum.
A ferry boat takes us over Lake Van to Akdamar Island to see the Armenian Orthodox Cathedral of the Holy Cross.
Another sad one. Before long, all of this will be under water because of a project to dam the Tigris. The Turkish government has largely ignored the international outcry against the project. At the ancient city of Hasankeyf, yesderday.
The largely abandoned Yezidi village of Mağara-Köyu (Kiwax), southeastern Anatolia.
In the cemetery of a largely abandoned Yezidi village, Mağara-Köyu (Kiwax), southeastern Anatolia.
This man is preparing Kurdish coffee for us. It is boiled 3 times, and an herb called terebinth, a product of the pistachio tree, is added to it. It gives the coffee a decidedly acid taste. This morning in Mardin.
An inscription in Arabic on a door, Mardin.
Now we are enjoying pilaf a few hundred yards/meters from the Turkish border with Syria, in Nusaybin.
Mardin, yesterday. High up on a hillside, the historic city of Mardin overlooks a broad fielded plain.
Headed south to Mardin, we find a semi-arid land with sparse trees. However, river bottoms are walled with poplar trees; and apricots and pistachios are important crops. It is claimed the pistachios from around here are the best in the world.
A few miles east of Diyarbakır, we cross the Tigris river. Yesterday.
Francisco López with Lloyd Dunn at Colloredo-Mansfel Palace in Old Town, Prague.
I spent part of this morning on the waterfront with the fishermen looking across the Golden Horn to Galata.
On my way there, I passed through the Kapalı Çarşı (Grand Bazaar) and had a breakfast of (very good) lentil soup. As I was paying, I heard the sudden dash of breaking crockery, and I observed that shards of a broken tea saucer were striking the backs of my heels. Startled, I turned around and saw a young man was trying to bludgeon another young man over the head with a mop handle. Insults were exchanged as the young gentlemens’ seconds attempted to pull them apart. It was at this moment that I dissolved into the gaping crowd.
I still have nearly an entire afternoon ahead of me.
At the moment I’m resting my feet and enjoying a coffee here, in this charming place, in the center of Istanbul. An afternoon rain has cooled the air and the late sun seems especially bright and clear. This is where my current journey begins.
Melancholy Georgian pop from the 1960s. (Vakht’ang K’ik’abidze on congas.)
An eddy of wind formed at a street corner in Vinohrady (Prague) sets the dry leaves collected there into a phantom dervish. Závan větru v koutě na Vinohradech točí jako kroužící derviši suchým listím. Varšavská 738/37, 120 00 Vinohrady, Czechia.
A week ago at the falls of the Blue Nile near Lake Tana in Ethiopia. (I use my mobile phone to get quick GPS coordinates by photographing my field recorder whenever it is recording.)
The trip continues. Today I am in Lalibela.
During a walk through Tbilisi, Georgia, we encounter a pair of young men singing for money in an underground passage. Aleksandr Pushkin / Nato Vachnadze / Rezo Tabukashvili Street, 10/7/2 Aleksandr Pushkin St, Tbilisi, Georgia.
Easter procession around the old town of Ľviv, the former Polish city of Lwów, known elsewhere as Lemberg, in today’s northwestern Ukraine. Pidvalna St, 13, Lviv, Lvivska oblast, Ukraine, 79000
P.A. system in a bus station in Shangdi-La, Deqen, Yunnan, China. China, Yunnan, Deqen, Shangri-La, Xiangbala Ave, 香巴拉大道 Shangri-La Bus Station.
Sea Blindness no. 3 at Három Holló / Drei Raben in central Budapest on 29 November. Michal Kindernay and Lloyd Dunn ( nula.cc ) performing. Part of the inaugural 2018 CESSE (Central European Society for Soundscape Ecology) conference.
Photo: Sonya Darrow.
The abandoned monastery at Marmashen, Armenia, under fresh snowfall. Marmashen Monastery Rd, Vahramaberd, Armenia
At an intersection of street No. 118 with another street in a neighborhood in Phnom Penh, after a day of wandering (collecting images and recordings), we sit in creaky wicker chairs on the veranda of a corner cafe. The sun is going down; a white-robed monk comes in and passes the shopkeeper a slip of white paper, and then shuffles out. Krala Haom Kong, St 118, Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
The Michal Kindernay film „Insection“ is an entry in this year’s Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival. I get a screen credit for music/sound for having worked with Michal on the soundtrack.
synopsis
The slow movement of various species of insect in an abstract, brightly lit setting creates suggestive allusions to incontrollable chaos, apathy, and the decay of social structures. The minimalist visual imagery is accompanied by ambient music that works with realistic sound and static.
A broad double avenue cuts a neat slot in the forest, running nearly the entire length of the former royal game reserve at Obora Hvězda in Prague. Starting at 0, along the left side of the graveled path, there runs a precisely spaced line of 40 geodetic benchmarks at intervals of 25m, placidly revealing for us the distance of 1/40, 000th of the circumference of the Earth.
Široká pěší cesta v Oboře Hvězda na Bílé hoře půlí les na dvě části a vede směrem k loveckému zámečku. Po levé straně cesty je geodetická linie, rozdělená značkami na 40 segmentů. Každý měří 25 metrů a odkazuje v měřítku jedna ku 40, 000 na velikost obvodu planety Země.
A film about a train route in Georgia by Shorena Tkeshelashvili and Konstantine Komakhidze.
On the secret political history of radio.
“The radio impro-site-specific situation Silence Radio aka Papular pulls back the hidden layers of memory from Holešovice between Veletržní palác (Trade Fair Palace) and Bubny railway station. During the second world war, a detention area for in total 45,513 Jewish citizens, (37,667 of whom did not survive), was located in the buildings of the former Radiotrh (Radiotrade), located between the Trade Fair Palace and today’s Park Hotel. …”
A photo from my bleary-eyed 5-8 AM performance [as nula.cc] at the most recent Silent_Night event, #12. Thanks to all involved in planning and staging!
Photo: RadioWave
Yes, but … these are brilliant.
Somwhere in a disused goldmine in the coutryside outside Prague : 7853 festival : R(A)DIO(CUSTICA).
Images by Peter Sinclair.
Really soft, reluctant, hesitant, distant chimes and resonances. A pleasant throbbing, metallic, ringing. In Mariusz Grzegorzek Rozmowa z czlowiekiem z szafy [1993].avi @65m: And then, the desperate mother reached an enormous lake. She cried because she didn’t know how to get across. “There is nothing you can do without my help, ” said the lake. “I like collecting pearls, and your eyes are the clearest pearls I have ever seen. Cry them out into me and I will carry you across.”
Signals embodied in physical form are — ahem — transubstantiated into ephemeral epiphenomena carried upon timestreams; an abstraction in form becomes concrete in perception through its dissolution. A wavy groove etched in vinyl becomes sound. A magnetic fluxuation on a band of plastic painted with a layer of rust particles becomes sound or a moving image or both. A linear sequence of numbers becomes an array of color or lightness/darkeness values yeilding an image or even a moving image or even a talking one.
To the upcoming collection „moving, still.“ I began by selecting some field recordings. The stochastic incidents of a street recording, or the echoic signature of an internal space, have here been understood in terms of some latent esthetic value, which has been developed out of them through the use of convolution and equalization. Each recorded incident, having left its trace in the source recording, serves to excite a chorus of pitches supplied by a second, explicitly musical, recording. The uncooked world sings itself in its own polyphonies. In a series of calculated effacements, commemorations of a series of displacements, I have been able to draw something else out of them.
Inexplicably, these works multiplied, almost of their own volition. I sometimes feel the urge to add yet another to the collection, but I draw back, seeking comfortable limits, shrinking from the abyss of infinitude.
I have set a date for this release: 25 May.
Please stay tuned. You might join the mailing list to recieve notifications about all upcoming releases.
I am getting ready to release a collection of new works which have occupied my attention for the last six months, in the form of a series which will be called „moving, still.“ This is a bigger deal than my usual steady cadence of filecast releases, in that the final work will comprise close to four hours of new compositions, a series of nearly thirty titles.
I thought for a while that this might be my first filecast to come out in physical form; a box of CDs or cassettes perhaps, or a USB stick or SD card. In the end, I have decided firmly against this approach, opting instead to unveil it in the form of an online playlist.
I found out recently that the word „album“ in Latin means simply „list“, so this forthcoming release as a playlist fords the rupture between traditional ways of releasing collections of music as albums, and a newer, more flexible format of playlists for dealing with portfolios of recordings which are presented only as digital artefacts.
Watch this space.
Tonight:
CIKÁDY, KOLIBŘÍCI, SIRÉNY
KLUB36m, Charvátova 39/10, Prague-Nové Město
18.30
Works by: studenst of the Center for Audiovisual Studies FAMU, the Department of Composition HAMU, and guests.
Veronika Dostálová, Petr Zábrodský, Jiří Rouš, Jakub Krejčí, Matěj Šenkyřík, Jiří Matoušek, Vendula Guhová, Anh Duong Viet, Veronika Přistoupilová, Miro Toth, Martin Klusák, Barry Yuk Bun Wan.
Guests: Stanislav Abrahám, Martin Lauer, Lloyd Dunn, Milan Guštar, Michal Cáb, Kolektiv (Kryštof Pešek, Alex Timpau, Katarína Gatialová, Sara Pinheiro, Jonáš Svatoš, Jáchym Pešek, Petr Zábrodský, Matěj Šenkyřík).
My contribution to the evening is a brief excerpt from a work in progress, re-cast in quadraphonic, taken from a longer series of works which I call „Moving Still“. It consists of a field recording made with binaural microphones while walking a section of Laisvės alėja, a central boulevard in Kaunas, Lithuania on the morning of 25 August, 2009. It has been edited and convoluted with a long single-note multi-instrument orchestral strain in which the original field recording is almost completely effaced, serving only to provide a stochastic impetus for the convolution sample. At the same time, some of the qualities of the street ambience are, at least subjectively, preserved.
Ondřej Lasák: Dnes večer multikanálová site specific radost 1991 23:22 (feat. miláčci Teres Bartůňková, Stanislav Abrahám, Michal Kindernay/Lamp Yris, Lloyd Dunn/nula.cc, Jano Doe/Kolektiv + tuna dalších) v epickém prostoru DUP36.cz.
Today marks probably the last time I will ever manage to see an old Soviet-made subway car in Prague. They were removed from service a few years ago. I spotted this one moving slowly through the station and not stopping to take on passengers. I supposed they were just moving it from one place to another for storage or something.
A pub in Starý Smokovec, Slovakia. „A true comrade drinks beer.“ 28 August 2016.
My friend Tamás Sajó has just now posted a reminiscence of our journey last June to the remote Georgian region of Tusheti.
Člověk se musí ptát do jaké míry „reálné“ nahrávky opravdu odkazují ke „skutečnosti“? Není to jen nová finta směřující k vyšší míře izolace od přirozeného a přírodního, k propadání se do pocitu spoluviny, setrvání v urputném postupném hluchnutí, „nenaslouchání“ všemu, co se děje v mé mysli, nebo vedle v ulici? Každý uživatel a klient gigantů Google, FB, Microsoft nebo Apple jediným nabitím tabletu, počítače a smartphonu, mimovolným kliknutím na ikonu „search“ přiživuje ten všeobjímající mega-aparát.
Unfortunately, I don't have a filecast ready at the moment called '57744 darkest night.' Maybe later.
Three kilometres separate Armenia’s Akhuryan railway station from Turkey’s Doğukapı, yet no trains have traveled between them for 23 years. In 1993, following the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the breakaway region of Nagorno Karabakh, the border was sealed and the tracks connecting Guymri and Kars have long since gone silent.
Now a dead link at chai-khana.org, but youtube still has the video.
Leaving the city of Alaverdi, which for untold eons has provided the entire region with copper from its richly stocked mines, if you cross the 12th-century bridge, taking note as you pass of the four stone cats who languish, carved into its stone balustrade, and then climb the path, you will eventually come to the monastery of Sanahin. Across the valley, the monastery of Haghpat is also visible, and the two stand on opposite sides of a side chasm of the Debet, which flows through Armenia’s northern province of Lori. The name “sanahin” means, according to Wikipedia, “this one is older than that,” an apparent reference to its nearby rival. …
I am pleased to say, that the recording 57426 sanahin has been included in a list of 2016’s “Best Winter Music” on the website A Closer Listen (scroll to the bottom):
… “The ( nula.cc ) filecasts are among the most mysterious online. Uncredited field recordings appear on a regular basis, evocative of time and place. This one comes from Armenia’s Sanahin monastery, where ‘the late winter snows are wet and heavy, dripping profusely in the afternoon sun.’ The recording is a reminder that the change of seasons may also reflect a spiritual shift, with heavy burdens shed, hearts melting, eyes turning again to the sun. Also of interest: nula’s subsequent broadcast, 57651 cold fire.”
The city opens up, somewhat like a book, by the simple act of walking through it. The rhythmic movement of walking accords with the swing of a turning page, dividing movement through space and narrative with an insistent rhythm.…
The broadcast studio for radiorevolten.net in Halle. ( nula.cc ) broadcasting live today from 12-14h CET.
The late summer train leaves Prague, heading east, crowded with students, tourists, grannies. Past the city outskirts, I settle into the sensations of the train ride, the motion and the collective sound of small mechanical train parts that tick, rattle and ring, a thousand little springs and bells going all at once.…
Poprad, Slovakia. Now.
The ridge of the High Tatras, seen from a high vantage point in Slovenský Raj (Slovak Paradise) near Spišské Tomášovce, Slovakia. Yesterday afternoon.
Façade in the city of Drohobych, Ukraine, home town of Bruno Schultz. Last week.
Ľviv, Ukraine, as night falls. Last week.
In a courtyard at Oliesko castle in Ukraine. Last week.
Ruins of an old fortress synagogue in Brody, Ukraine. Last week.
The Ľviv beer belly commemorated in bronze.
Klimt-like frescoes in the Armenian cathedral in Ľviv.
Beginning to see the origins of expressionism in this renaissance work. Oliesko Castle.
Oliesko Castle of the Sobieskis. Yesterday.
Um, how much does that dried fish cost again? Yesterday, Brody.
An industrial landscape in Ukraine. Yesterday, in passing.
Biking is normal in Brody, Ukraine (incidentally the birthplace of Joseph Roth).
A decapitated saint at Pidkamin’.
This morning, the fog rolled in during our visit to the monastery at Pidkamin'.
The crypt of a rabbi at the Jewish cemetery in Chernivtsi.
At the Jewish cemetery in Chernivtsi. A few hours ago.
A bronze statue of the emperor Franz Josef, erected three years ago in Chernivtsi. This morning.
In Chernivtsi (Czernowitz), the "Jerusalem on the Prut". Yesterday afternoon.
Jewish cemetery in Kuty, Ukraine.
Morning comes to Yaremze, Zakarpattia. Yesterday.
We wandered into a stuffed menagerie masquerading as a restaurant at the self-proclaimed geographic center of Europe. Last night, Terebesfejérpataka (Dilove), Zakarpattia, Ukraine.
A stork watches us from the roof of an old synagogue in Tyachiv (Hungarian Técső), Zakarpattia.
This afternoon. We cross the border into Zakarpattia, Ukraine. Between the world wars, the region was part of Czechoslovakia, but it was added to the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War II.
Hymn numbers in a thousand-year-old church in Csaroda, Hungary, not far from the Ukrainian border. This afternoon.
Arrived in Budapest an hour ago.
Visegrad Nagymáros over the Danube from my train window. 2 hours ago.
Matter, as commonly understood, can exist as a solid, a liquid or a gas, and in turn these states can be characterized directly and simply: a solid has a fixed shape and volume; a liquid has fixed volume but is amorphous, taking the shape of its container; while a gas has neither fixed shape nor volume.…
Orson Welles meets H.G. Wells.
Reeds from Abkhazia, 1902, via Excavated Shellac.
A home in the old town Tbilisi, with a characteristic type of wooden ornamentation that is rapidly disappearing.
Some 20 km north of Tbilisi lies the historical capital of Kartli, Mtskheta, at the confluence of the Aragvi and Mtkvari rivers. As can be seen in the photo, the Aragvi brings greenish sediments from northern regions, which mix with the reddish sediments of the Mtkvari.
Grapevine arbors are a defining feature of Tbilisi in summer.
A view of old Tbilisi from the fortress Nariqala. Today.
Sergei Parajanov’s jump for joy graces Georgian Cinema Square in Tbilisi. This afternoon.
The passage out of Tusheti was without problem, but that is not to say that it was an easy journey. The road is, simply stated, a dangerous one, consisting mainly of an ancient shepherd's way made wider to allow 4-wheel drive vehicles to use it.
But we made it out and are on our way to Kutaisi. After I am back in Prague I will post more pictures.
Old fortress at upper Omalo. Right now.
We arrived in Omalo, our base for exploring the Tusheti region of Georgia, more or less as I described in my earlier post, carrying our luggage over a muddy expanse, to connect the two passable ends of our road.
Upon our arrival, we find out that one of the earth movers had flipped over while maneuvering on the unsettled ground. No one is sure of the fate of the driver.
How have I found myself here, in this fabled land? Omalo, right now.
Crossing the mountains to Omalo today.
Morning comes to Tusheti.
Tomorrow we will cross the mountains into Tusheti. But there have been unusually heavy rains, and the locals tell us that a rockslide has blocked the only road to Omalo, our intended destination.
So we plan to take our bus up to the rockslide, where we will cross it on foot, carrying all of our luggage a distance of about two kilometers. On the other side, jeeps have been arranged to take us the rest of the way.
Another Pirosmani from the collection in Sighnaghi we visited yesterday.
Alaverdi Monastery with the mountains of Tusheti. Now.
Gremi fortress and church. This afternoon.
In the employee break room of the local winery. Near Ganjala, today.
Sighnaghi is foggy today.
Pirosmani at the national museum in Sighnaghi. Earlier today.
Tsnori. Right now.
On the road through Surami, there are many small huts where a local sweet bread is made and sold. The loaves always have a characteristic shape, seen here on display so that the drivers speeding by can see it.
Portraits of animals you can eat. Lagodekhi, Kakheti region, Georgia.
I keep a prism on my windowsill, carefully positioned to catch a sun beam, forcing it to disgorge its hidden colors. The prism has the telling shape of a wedge, as if broadly hinting at its purpose, that of splitting light rather than logs.…
A cheese seller in Kutaisi. Today.
A seller of plastic bags at the market in Kutaisi. Today.
Georgian modernist architecture in central Kutaisi, this afternoon.
This afternoon at the market in Kutaisi, Georgia.
Starting the day at Giorgi's Guesthouse in Kutaisi. Tomorrow begins our trek in Tusheti, in the far northeastern part of Georgia.
What does one do when one is stranded in the Budapest airport with their flight to Kutaisi delayed? Drink Unicum, of course!
A better-quality picture of Khor Virap with Ararat in the background, some 100m from the Turkish border. Last week.
Noravanq monastery, situated in a deep valley in central Armenia. Last week.
View from the „Wings of Tatev“ cable car that takes visitors on a some 5km ride over mountain valleys to the monastery at Tatev. Last week, on a very foggy day.
The ancient Dadivanq monastery in northern Karabagh. Last week.
Sun setting on the road between Alaverdi and Haghpat, Armenia, last week.
Town center of Haghpat, Armenia, last week.
Interior of the monastery at Haghpat, Armenia, last week.
Sky above Alaverdi, Armenia, last week.
“Argo” dark beer in Tbilisi. This afternoon.
Backgammon players in Tbilisi. Today.
Streets of the old Betlemy quarter of Tbilisi. Now.
Arriving in Tbilisi. Metexi cathedral and monument to Vaxtang Gorgasali greet us. Plans for an afternoon promenade in the rapidly disappearing old town.
Etchmiadzin. Yesterday.
The old doors of Hovannavanq monastery on display in the gavit. Yesterday.
Drying fish near Lake Sevan. Yesterday.
Inside Yerevan's Blue Mosque. Late this afternoon.
A fake Pirosmani at a Caucasus theme restaurant in central Yerevan. This afternoon.
Soviet-era insignium at a carpet factory in Yerevan. Today.
Blue wool yarn, freshly dyed and drying in the parking lot sun at a carpet factory in Yerevan. This afternoon.
The fattest mulberries I have ever seen, preserved in syrup. Garni, this morning.
Old swallows’ nests at Gandzasar. Yesterday.
The monastery of Khor Virap with Ararat in the background, just as light is failing. Five minutes ago.
Jewish cemetery at Yeghegnis. Just now.
Armenian menhirs at Karahunj, 5000 years old. This afternoon.
Interior of the main church at Tatev monastery. This morning.
Lake Sevan, two days ago.
Manuscript from the collection of the small museum at Gandzasar monastery. Yesterday.
Remembrance, Sevanavanq monastery. This afternoon.
Lunchtime, Vanadzor. Spiced beef and sour cream baked into a kind of pie. Two thumbs up!
Hayravanq monastery overlooking Lake Sevan. Around sunset.
A reliquary said to contain a splinter of the True Cross. Haghpat monastery. Yesterday.
Reprise. This morning at Haghpat monastery.
Stalin and his mom. Vanadzor, Armenia. This afternoon.
Today is cat day, it seems. Cat-themed capitals in the monastery at Sanahin, Armenia. This afternoon.
One of the sleeping cats on the balustrade of an 11th-century arch bridge in Alaverdi, Armenia. Around noon today.
Very early this morning, Kutaisi, Georgia. A street side shrine to St. George encased in plexiglass.
We are all in motion all of the time, for when we are not, we are dead and not reading these words. We are in motion simply because we live, and blood ebbs and flows in our veins, like waves in the sea, and electricity ripples through our nerves, like tiny bolts of lightning.…
Yesterday evening, from our ongoing installation at Studio Alta in Prague.
Yesterday afternoon, from our ongoing installation at Studio Alta in Prague.
Opening tonight at Studio Alta. Multiversum: an installation by Lloyd Dunn and Michal Kindernay. More info: vsinterpretation.org/en/2016/lloyd-dunn-michal-kindernay-multiversum
takze dneska vecir v alte, nejdriv v 18 vernisaz vystav Mazen Kerbaj, Lamp Yris a Lloyd Dunn, od 19ti pak divozenky z berlina: Andrea Neumann, Ute Wassermann, Hanna Hartman, Sabine Ercklentz, Ana Maria Rodriguez, pak od 20:00 Bob Ostertag, Audrey Chen, Theo Bleckmann a Phil Minton, a na zaver vecera Jerome Noetinger s Angélica Castelló
(Petr Vrba)
Prague’s House Signs
I participated in the upcoming 29 April broadcast on Czech National Radio of Frontiers of Solitude with some recordings I made last fall in Osek and Mariánské Radčice.
29. dubna 2016 v 22:00
„Khevsur types in Khevsureti.“ During my travel in Georgia, I never made it to Khevsureti. Someday.
Our installation at Studio Alta is slowly coming together. This evening.
A text about the installation piece „Multiversum“, which Michal Kindernay and I are working on at Studio Alta for the vs.Insterpretation 2016 festival, is at the link.
Installation improvising with video projection, sound, space and time.
Video recordings of the wall joinings (corners and edges) of an arbitrarily chosen space are projected back onto the selfsame wall joinings. Because the recordings have been made, unavoidably, at a time before which they will be projected, the effect is to create two (or more) separate streams of time occupying the same space. Because of this, a contemplation of space and time is the unavoidable outcome of the work. To this configuration of technologies and sensibilities, we have added a number of simple video manipulations to emphasize the passing of time by means of the conventional referent of rhythm. Beyond that, the work is made to serve explicitly as a clock, an instrument that measures time, by accompanying it with a soundtrack that explicitly references international standards of timekeeping and geophysical science.
…
I am making a video of Michal painting the walls. Right now. Studio Alta in Prague.
The “Czech Repubic” => “Czechia”. Just don’t confuse it with Chechnya — the Czechs are sensitive about that. (Actually, not so much sensitive, they probably just think you’re uneducated if you don’t know the difference.)
This name has been in use already for years by many other Slavic nations (e.g. Russian Чехия), so they didn’t just pull it out of a hat.
On 17 January, when the Subcarpathian photos of László Végh were published in Magyar Nemzet, I shared them on the Facebook of río Wang. Now, in preparation for our late April Galician tour, I saw them again, and I thought I’d also share them on the blog. So that they can be seen by more people, and not only in Hungarian. …
Meanwhile, over at Poemas del río Wang, a post about the Armenian alphabet, with a translated excerpt on the subject by the Russian author Andrei Bitov.
Sergei Paradjanov and Artavazd Peleshyan raise a khachkar together.
Tonight I am working with light. Studio Alta, Prague. Now.
Tamás Sajó's post at Poemas del río Wang documents the afternoon we spent in Shusha, Nagorno-Karabagh, last February on our journey through Armenia. Lots of great pictures!
Zbouraný mariánský sloup na Staroměstském náměstí v roce 1918.
Razing of the Marian column on Old Town Square in 1918.
Riding the paternoster at Bubenská 1, Prague. Right now.
Yerevan, like cities elsewhere in the world, has a pattern to its days, rising and falling, tension and release, doldrums and dramatic peaks, a natural drama unfolding with the cycles of the earth.…
In the balcony of the Great Hall at the Lucerna Cinema in Prague, waiting for the screening to begin. Right now.
Ondřej Vavrečka's film Mezi Námi (Among Us) will screen at Školská 28 on 7 March. For some reason, nula.cc appears in the credits, likely because of a sort of blanket permission I gave to Ondřej to use whatever he wanted from the site. I'm eager to see what he did with it.
(dead link)
A train car re-purposed as a foot bridge. Welcome to Georgia! This afternoon.
Crossing the border back into Georgia at Bavra. Now.
Stele erected to the deviser of the Armenian alphabet, St. Meshrab Mashtots, displaying the elegant forms of his letters. This afternoon.
Paintings of the apostles under the altar in St. Hripsime Church, Etchmiadzin. This morning.
Street image, Etchmiadzin. Today.
The ruins of Zvartnots Cathedral, destroyed in an earthquake before the 10th century. Today.
Front of the temple of Mithras at Garni. Yestermorn.
Kufic Arabic (is it?) grafitti on a column of the temple of Mithras, Garni.
The Hellenistic temple of Mithras, god of the sun, at Garni. This morning.
Mount Ararat in the distance. Two hours ago.
Big bright red Armenian pomegranates in the local grocery store, Garni. Now.
Three cars stuck on a snowy uphill incline on the Selim Pass (one of them ours). We all got together and eventually everyone was pushed out, up to the nearby crest of the pass (300m uphill), and it was all downhill from there. Yesterday afternoon.
Bonfire prepared for the Armenian Candlemas celebration. It is traditional to jump over a burning fire three times as part of the celebration. Last saturday afternoon.
South shore of Lake Sevan just before dusk. Yesterday.
Ruins and reconstructions at Dadivank monastery, Nagorno-Karabagh. Yesterday.
Interior, church at the Geghard monastery. This afternoon.
Tomb carving at the monastery at Gandzasar, above Vank, Nagorno-Karabagh. Yesterday.
Just crossed over the Selim Pass back into Armenia proper. 20 mins. ago.
Bust and apartment block, Shusha, Nagorno-Karabagh. Yesterday afternoon.
The Monastery at Tatev, Armenia. Yesterday morning.
We encountered this shepherd and his charges on the road to the Tatev monastery in south Armenia. Yesterday morning.
Crossing the border to Artsakh (Nagorno Karabagh). Right now.
Crows flock to the dome of the Church of the Holy Mother of God (Surb Astvatzatzin) at Khor Virap monastery, some 100 meters from the Turkish border. Yestermorn.
With dusk well underway, we cross the Vorotan Pass into Goris. Yesterevening.
The central dome of St. Astvatsatsin in Areni, with four symbols of the evangelists supporting it. Yesterday afternoon.
At the informal livestock market outside Artashat. This morning.
Monument dedicated to the letters of the Armenian alphabet, off the road between Karbi and Ashtarak. Yesterday.
A cornerstone on a 13th century church in Yeghegis is carved with an old Armenian script that predates the church itself. This afternoon.
Around sunset, the wing of an angel appeared over the mountains as we crossed the Vorotan Pass into Goris. Today.
South toward Karabagh. Right now.
Lost in Kond, the oldest district of Yerevan. Yesterday late afternoon.
Armenian folk music in a restaurant in central Yerevan. Right now.
Melting snow on the road through the canyon near Karbi. This afternoon.
A cross carved into the outside wall of Saint Krikor’s, Ashtarakh. This afternoon.
A dry grapevine against a blue wall. Yerevan, this evening.
Interior, St. Astvatsatsin, the nesting-doll church in central Yerevan. Yesterday afternoon.
Carved wooden door, Akhtala Monastery. February 8.
„The Saint Astvatsatsin Church was built in the 12-13th centuries and is one of the oldest historical monuments in Yerevan. It survived the 17th century grand earthquake, and was later enclosed in the Katoghike Church in 1693-95, and served as a sanctuary (altar) for that newly built church. In 1936, under the Bolsheviks, the Katoghike was demolished, and the older and more valuable Saint Astvatsatsin Church within it was revealed. … “ Early this evening, Yerevan.
At a Caucasian restaurant in Yerevan. I recommend the kharcho (spicy meat stew). Lunchtime today.
A policeman salutes as the presidential motorcade passes through the intersection of Demirjian St. and Baghramian Ave. in Yerevan, Armenia. This morning.
A Soviet-era bas-relief decorates the porch of the Cappucino Lounge in Hrazdan, Armenia. Right now.
Hayravanq Monastery on the shore of Lake Sevan. Just now.
Kara Kelisa (Black Church) to the Mother of God in Vanadzor, Armenia. This morning.
The shore of Lake Sevan in winter. This afternoon.
What do I think of what my eyes see and my ears hear, especially in anticipation of making a recording? Words can only partly describe what and how we perceive. The descriptions are riddled with holes. Details that are challenging to describe are often left as openings for the reader to fill in. Recordings also reveal important omissions, but of an entirely different kind. Machines have limited perspective and flexibility; they can mimic but not entirely replace human tissue.…
Fuel needed to get out of the hotel room and start exploring: Armenian coffee. Right now.
Snow-dusted peaks in northern Armenia, just as we were leaving Alaverdi behind. This morning.
Town of Tumanyan seen from the reconstructed belfry at the ruins of the cliffside monastery at Kobayr, Armenia. This afternoon.
Front yard, Monastery of Akhtala, Armenia. This afternoon.
Alaverdi, Armenia, in the snow, seen from above. This afternoon.
Just crossed the border into Armenia. Snow.
Dried out roses in the garden of Giorgi's Homestay. This morning, Kutaisi, Georgia.
An interview with me by Nathan Thomas about nula.cc has appeared on the Fluid Radio web site.
Very pleased to see that my latest filecast „last days“ is included in Framework radio #539, the first episode of 2016. Thanks, Patrick!
Královka Park above Malovanka, Prague, this evening.
A series of interviews by myself and Chris Weaver with Halim El Dabh (b.1921), who began using both musique concrete and reel to reel tape for his compositions in Egypt, years before Pierre Schaeffer, the composer that is ordinarily credited to have been the first. …
Husitská ulice na Žižkově v roce 1902.
Husitská Street in Žižkov in 1902.
The Wanderer — 28 December 2015
Qobustan Rock Art Cultural Landscape, Azerbaijan. 27 May 2015.
Uploading 5 MB in 1956.
Earlier this year the art group Ztohoven unfurled a giant pair of red boxers on a flagpole above the Prague castle as a comment on Zeman's tenure as president of the republic. Having deftly evaded castle security in this stunt, it caused a scandal and forced a review of castle security procedures and personnel.
Prague, near Albertov, this morning.
The end of World War I is captured in a photographic record of sound.
Naše století / Naš věk – Mer dare 1983 / 50 min. / 35mm
Konec / Koněc – Verj / 1992, 8 min. / 35mm
Život / Žizň – Kjank / 1993 / 7 min. / 35mm
Začátek / Načalo – Skizbe / 1967 / 9 min. / 35mm
My / My – Menk / 1969 / 25 min. / 35mm
Obyvatelé / Obitatěli – Bnakitčnere /1970 / 9 min. / 35mm
Roční období / Vremena goda – Tarva jeghanaknere / 1975 / 30 min. / 35mm
Prague, last night, the 22 tram leaving from Karlovo náměstí (Charles Square).
I have posted my recollections of a recent weekend at the Monastery in Osek, in northwest Bohemia, on the Frontiers of Solitude blog, complete with images and sound recordings.
Vinyl record grooves. If you have red-green glasses handy, use them. It’s a stereogram.
From the collection of the Georgian Museum of Music in Tbilisi.
Galerie Díra, or “The Hole” gallery in English, is a site-specific art space devoted entirely to sound works. It is located in the inner courtyard of the Školská 28 Gallery in central Prague.
Díra affords a unique presence to visitors, and is an unusual challenge for curators, in that the entire gallery “space” consists solely of a single 1/8" headphone jack, fixed to a black plate on the exterior wall of Galerie Školská 28. Visitors are asked to bring their own headphones (but during Školská 28 gallery hours, headphones may be borrowed by inquiring within).
Díra faces outward into public space and in this way, exteriorizes (literally) the listening experience, rather than cloistering it in a specialized listening environment. The challenges are therefore noteworthy, given the outdoor ambiences of birds, weather, traffic, passing conversations, all the usual activities that take place within one of Prague’s many semi-public enclosed courtyards.
Submissions
Díra (in cooperation and consultation with other Školská 28 organizers) is focused on site-specific sound installations, but will also entertain any interesting idea and is open to any genre: field recordings, spoken word, sound art, sound compositions, audible documents; or any combination of these, or genres not mentioned. Here are only 2 of any number of possibilities:
Sound works that intentionally make use of the disconnect between the sound being listened to and the space in which it is heard. Works that use this disconnect to good advantage.
Sound works that add another layer to the somewhat secluded ambience of the Díra courtyard, building on the natural ambiences there instead of replacing them; blending in rather than blotting out.
Main technical considerations: The sound works should be composed in a way that considers they will be heard over stereo (two-channel) headphones. You may submit works of any length. In some cases, a collection of short works might be considered. All sound works are considered, but site-specific works, and works specifically intended for headphone listening are particularly encouraged.
Please express interest at: editor@nula.cc
Pluto?
“Lom u Mostu was once called Bruch. It lay in the north of the Czech Republic, it was inhabited by Germans, as were the vast majority of the cities and villages of Sudetenland. When, in 1920, …”
Black water effluent from a chemical factory near Litvínov in Northern Bohemia.
An eyewitness report from Hungary about the refugee crisis now unfolding in the middle of Europe.
Folded Wing’s latest Listening Post no. 15 has highlighted nula.cc as one of its selected listenings, together with a gracious commentary about my project.
Beautiful observations of everyday life…
“Nula.dd is one of the latest projects of former Tape-beatle, Lloyd Dunn. It is a very elegant, modest and simple site which lets the content or filecasts speak for themselves. They are detailed observations of daily life presented as a beautiful collection of sounds, images, or words, often created from found material, assembled together with field recordings or other original source material and made available for download, sharing, commentary, and further manipulation.”
“7th Unexplained Sounds Group survey focused on Eastern Europe experimental underground scene. It’s useless to say that this compilation doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive of the entire Eastern Europe experimental music panorama, as on geographical side as well on artistic one. …”
Traditional blessing of the congregation (who are under the shroud) at the end of an Armenian Orthodox mass, Rabati neighborhood of Akhaltsikhe, Georgia. 14 February.
Statue that once marked the 0 kilometer point of Hungary, now in Rákoshegy, a district of Budapest, 15 February.
Public transportation in Chiatura, Georgia, 18 May.
Last Tuesday in Vršovice, Prague. Poisonous Frequencies performs at Café v Lese on Krymská ulice.
My overview of Prague's Wakushoppu series has appeared on the website of the Augosto Foundation.
Yesterday afternoon at the Ján Mančuška retrospective in the Prague City Gallery.
In the news: The University of Iowa’s Special Collections has begun digitizing fanzines. They are focusing on the oldest ones first, naturally. I hope they will eventually get around to digitizing the 9 paper cartons comprising the Photostatic archive, which I collected during the heady zine days of the 80s and 90s, and which I donated in toto to this institution before hopping a jet to Prague.
In the news: The University of Iowa’s Special Collections has begun digitizing fanzines. They are focusing on the oldest ones first, naturally. I hope they will eventually get around to digitizing the 9 paper cartons comprising the Photostatic archive, which I collected during the heady zine days of the 80s and 90s, and which I donated in toto to this institution before hopping a jet to Prague.
Studiolum writes about the visit we made to the Azerbaijani settlement of Mountain Jews in Quba on 29 May.
“In Lahij, the heat chases you from the main street into the teahouse. The refrigerator has a brand of beer with the promising name Aysberq, and at every table, a set of dominoes, with an abacus for each of the two players, to keep track of the winnings. …”
The visit we made to the remote ethnic Tat village of Lahic in Azerbaijan is described by Studiolum in his blog.
Markings on the wall, Novoměstská radnice (New Town Hall), Karlovo Náměstí, Prague, 14 September, 2013.
Hotel Dacia, Satu Mare, Romania, 25 June, 2014.
The 22 tram arrives at Narodní Třída in Prague, at 22:53, 10 February 2014.
Ghost sign in Yiddish, Ľviv, Ukraine, 12 April.
Reliquary in the Mghvimevi Monastery (მღვიმევის მონასტერი), outside Chiatura, Georgia, 18 May.
The morning sun finally reaching the town of Stepantsminda, Georgia, deep in a valley of the Greater Caucasus range, 22 May.
The morning sun finally reaching the town of Stepantsminda, Georgia, deep in a valley of the Greater Caucasus range, 22 May.
Carving on the exterior wall of the 12th-century cathedral in Ertatsminda, Georgia, 19 May.
The Lost Expedition is about to be served kumys, fermented mare’s milk.
The Lost Expedition at the holy site Ғайып Ерен Қырық Шiлтен Әулие, outside Shymkent, Kazakhstan, September, 2004.
Posted by Said Atabekov.
Comenius memorial in the Bohemian village of Rixdorf, Berlin, 13 July 2014.
Petroglyphs in Qobustan, Azerbaijan, 27 May.
The alphabet in use by the Khinalug (Xinaliq) language during the Soviet era had 73 letters, including digraphs, trigraphs, and tetragraphs. The currently used Latin-based alphabet has only 50 letters.
Display at the museum in Xinaliq, Azerbaijan, 29 May.
My latest post at Poemas del río Wang recounts the road we traveled to the remote village of Xinaliq, in the Greater Caucasus range, northern Azerbaijan. 29 May. Photos by Tamás Sajó. Video and text by myself.
Floor marking, Karla Caves, Maharashtra, India, 17 January.
We travel to Xinaliq on a ribbon of asphalt, frayed at the edges, and flying; because that is what it feels like as we float high above the valley bottom, with its small hidden villages, green forests, the loops of road we earlier traveled, everything. We are in temporary kinship with the pair of eagles that floats magically up from beneath us as we peer over the high crest of the pass that leads to this ancient settlement. In rays of blinding sun against a smooth blue curtain of sky, the eagles’ feathers tousled by columns of wind, one of them looks at us, and seems to recognize us. …
Stalin souvenirs at the Stalin Museum in Gori, Georgia, 19 May.
Bells at the cave monastery of Vardzia, Samtskhe-Javakheti, Georgia, 13 February.
Prunus cerasifera, or green cherry plums, used to make Georgian tqemali (ტყემალი) sauce, or simply eaten as a crisp, tart snack. These were given to us by some school girls who wanted to practice their English when I visited the ethnic Tat village of Lahıc (Lahij) in northwestern Azerbaijan, 31 May.
Qobustan mud volcanoes, Azerbaijan, 27 May.
The bubbles are caused by escaping gas, not steam, and so the mud is quite cool. People sometimes come to bathe in it.
( nula.cc ) is one presentation among many during the Listening Around the Corner evening at Tranzitdisplay in Prague. 18 June, 2015.
live internet stream: stream.iim.cz/tranzit
Presenters: Eric Leonardson, Brane Zorman, Peter Cusack, Lloyd Dunn: nula.cc, Helena Štorchová, Dagmar Šubrtová.
Screened. Звeнигopа (Zvenihora). Aleksandr Dovzhenko, USSR, 1928. The Ukrainian Dovzhenko delivers a tale, strongly tinged with Ukrainian nationalism, about a hidden treasure buried in a mountain, and connects it with revolutionary events of the period. Note the severe croping of the frame (as I assume the shot composition in this case would more or less have centered on the front of the train engine).
Tbilisi gryphon, part 2.
I found a matched pair of bronze gryphons on Liberty Square (თავისუფლების მოედანი) during my recent journeys to Georgia. They also match the gryphon in the earlier picture. The photo was taken 6 February.
Tbilisi gryphon, part 1.
In 1996, Ralph Johnson and I released the CD “Matter” under the name Public Works. In the booklet, I used this picture, which I found while browsing and old USSR book on Soviet Georgia. It shows a bronze gryphon, with the Tbilisi Circus Pavilion in the background.
Screened. Mr. Arkadin (Confidential Report). Orson Welles, 1955. A prop photo album portraying the young Grigori Arkadin, a Georgian mobster with “amnesia” who hires an American expat cigarette smuggler to dig out his past. This second-unit shot depicts Arkadin as a young man, and apparently uses a photo of the young Welles (heavily re-touched) with the inscription in Polish which reads: “Ukochaneniu skarbulkovi, twoj na zawsze, Waclaw.” (Approximate translation: To a treasured sweetheart, yours forever, Wenceslas.)
Kutaisi, Georgia, 1 February.
Old Hotel Europejski, seen through the curtains of the new Hotel Europejski, Przemyśl, Poland, 9 April.
Kawa po-skhidnomu (Armenian coffee cooked over sand), Ľviv, Ukraine, 11 April.
Over the pass to Xinaliq, Azerbaijan, 29 May.
Screening
Mezi námi by Ondřej Vavrečka: Documentary sci-fi.
6 June, 19:00 - Hidden gallery, Tachovské náměstí 6, Prague
Come and watch for nula.cc in the credits (under „hudba“).
Prague, Újezd, this morning.
Pomegranate blossom on a hillside near Qax, Azerbaijan, 1 June.
A shrouded building in Kutaisi, Georgia, 16 May.
This episode of Framework Radio includes the filecast „57167 roof of the world“ from 24:30 – 33:54, together with many other selections by others working in the field of sound art and field recording.
My latest post at Poemas del río Wang collects some very recent photographs from my currently-underway trip through the Caucasus. The subject is a pastoral scene central Georgia.
The post also includes a recording I made of a ten-year-old pandurist named Rezo, who sings and plays at a Sunday feast at the monastery at Katskhi. The place is known for the solitary monk who spends most of his time at the top of a pinacle of rock. Pictures to come.
These photographs capture fragments of a springtime afternoon among the shepherds and their grazing sheep in the pastoral landscape of Georgia’s Imereti. In the soft daylight, a strong breeze spreads the scent and sounds of the meadow all around us. Together with a recording I made, these photos have been posted on Poemas del río Wang.
I recorded birds singing and roosters crowing this morning in Kutaisi. Studiolum included these sounds in the latest at Poemas del río Wang.
Select nula.cc filecasts are now made available on Bandcamp for those who would like to have the tracks in high resolution, or for those who just want to show their support for the nula.cc project.
More filecasts will be reëncoded (some will be remixed) and added to Bandcamp on an ongoing basis.
As always, the compressed mp3 versions of all filecasts are still available for free at nula.cc.
I stand in an upright casket and ascend to the sound of a gentle rumbling, a low wooden thrum, regular like a heartbeat, together with the occasional mousey squeak of gears and chains. Surrounded on five sides by cello-colored wood, I am hanging in a small chamber, loosely fitted in a vertical tunnel, so that any shift of my weight, say from one foot to the other, causes the sides of the box to softly strike against the walls of the shaft with a deep throaty rattle.
Stojím ve obdélníkové skříňce a stoupám za zvuku jemného rachocení, hlubokého dřevěného natřásání, pravidelného jako tlukot srdce, spojeného s občasným myším kvíknutím koleček a řetězů. Z pěti stran jsem obklopen dřevem v barvě violoncella, jsem zavěšen v malé komůrce, volně umístěné ve svislém tunelu, takže každé přenesení váhy, když třeba přešlápnu z nohy na nohu, způsobí, že stěny krabice zlehka a s hlubokým hrdelním rachtáním narazí do zdí šachty.
The sacred mountain Ushba and her children • Upper Svaneti, Northern Georgia
When I was there in February, it was behind a scrim of mist, but its form was just visible.
A recording that I made last February during an Armenian mass in the city of Akhaltsikhe, Gerogia, has been included in this post at Poemas del río Wang.
A recording that I made last February during an Armenian mass in the city of Akhaltsikhe, Gerogia, has been included in in this post at Poemas del río Wang.
A photo of one of the hand-painted optical sound discs that I used last night in my performance at Školská 28.
At 19:00 on Thursday 23 April, ( nula.cc ) will give a brief concert at the Školská 28 gallery in Prague as part of multi-day multi-site festival Konvergence. Follow the link for details.
Konvergence | Školská 28
Praha. Cílem dvouletého projektu Alotof je přenesení umělecké činnosti do venkovního městského i venkovského prostoru a podpora dlouhodobějších projektů z oblasti ekologického mediálního umění. V tomto rámci se uskutečnily dílny, výstavy a setkání, hledání nových forem spolupráce s veřejností, no…
Armenian Easter in Ľviv
A recording I made at the Armenian Orthodox church during Easter celebrations in Ľviv is included in this post.
Poemas del río Wang: Armenian Easter
Orthodox Easter in Ľviv
Two recordings I made during Orthodox Easter celebrations in Ľviv are included in this post.
Park Na jezerce, Prague
Awakening before dawn in our guesthouse in Mestia, I see that it has snowed in the night. The air had been very still, and in the misty light, every rooftop, tree and fence is outlined with a sparkling trim of purest white, piled with exquisite fragility atop every form, down to the smallest twig. Electrical wires, sagging gracefully from pole to pole, became fat white ribbons, snowflakes delicately placed a hand’s width high and narrow as the wire itself, a fine tracery that the slightest air current would surely destroy. …
Tbilisi is a city that lies on a crossroads, a cultural fault line, between the West and the East; and perhaps it should also be said, between North and South. Long have its powerful neighbors held the region as the apple of their eyes, and long have they vied for a foothold, a base of power here. As a result, Tbilisi has been beseiged, destroyed, and rebuilt many times in the course of history. …
Now available for download. The tracklist includes the nula.cc filecast „sentinel“ as well as work by many other creators.
The road from Zugdidi to Mestia lies in the valley of the river Inguri, entering the Greater Caucasus mountain range from the south. It is a restless, tormented road, slithering like a swimming serpent in the February muck, keeping the frothing river as its close companion. …
We leave Svaneti, traveling by marshrutka (minibus) from Mestia to Tbilisi in a single long day. The journey makes a broad loop to the west, through Zugdidi and south to Kutaisi, before finally catching the main highway east that leads to the capital. …
„The term ‘archaeoacoustics’ simply means the study of sound in archaeological contexts. There are two basic ways this can be done, by exploring natural sounds and acoustics at monuments and other sites, or by investigating and measuring the acoustic parameters of a place by use of electronic instrumentation.“
These recent posts from the blog Poemas del río Wang include participation by ( nula.cc ) during our collaborative journey to Sakartvelo, the Republic of Georgia.
We cross the river Mktari from Avlabari over to Metekhi square. We have been walking the early morning streets of Tbilisi, and decide to rest for a few minutes and restore our strength with some Turkish — or as some here insist, Georgian — coffee. …
°
Late evening, the traffic lessens and the bleat of motorized vehicle horns gradually subsides. By midnight, it is a wash of sound, just the unfocused sibilance of the wind in the leaves, blended with the soft chaos of every other thing happening in the neighborhood, the actions of the quick upon the inert.…
“Where you from?” “America.” “Have camera?” “Yes, I have a camera.” “Take my picture!” “Ladno.”
After thinking about it briefly, the man in the middle turns around and decides not to be in the picture.
I sleep well in the cool January nights, and by sunup, re-energized by the hotel’s instant coffee and margarined toast, I am ready to brave the streets of Pune once again. I use the morning for a visit to the 8th-century Pataleshwar Caves temple, to the north of the Peths, about which I previously wrote, on the other side of the river Mutha. Wandering the district, I first wonder if I can be in the right place for such a venerable site. I am surrounded by concrete high-rises and new construction sites, and an exuberant flow of traffic fills the broad multilane thoroughfare at the precarious edge of which I walk. …
In the old town of Pune, gray eagles circle the sky like fragments of paper ash floating on the heat over a fire. The traffic is relentless, the endless beeping and crepitating of motorbikes compete with push carts, motorized rickshaws, and city buses, each jostling, wheedling, cajoling for a space, just an inch more of space, and when they get it, they leap forward with a joyful kick of the motor. A pedestrian must put his faith in their drivers, for there are too many moving targets to watch at once, and progress is impossible if you stand petrified at the street’s edge. …
The metro is a network system of linear spaces where masses of people come together, pass through, and part, while in motion through an underground system of escalators, tunnels, platforms and corridors, with the objective of each person getting from a point A and arriving to a point B.
Winter is bleak, the sunlight dimmed by thick milky clouds. Periods of daylight are brief, a blink of the celestial eyelid. Life huddles together, pulling inward, curling around itself, shrunken by a frightful, loveless cold.
When we find ourselves at year’s end, do we ask ourselves, have we sucked each day of all its sweetness, have we found enough moments worthy of our personal scrapbooks? Well, perhaps, we can never find enough such moments.
The cold winter winds and the hoarseness of the gathering crows, however, bring within earshot the death rattle of another year. But, no matter what ripe fruits have already been plucked, another, younger, eager year waits beyond the threshold, brimming with possibilities that we cannot foresee.
Winter is bleak, the sunlight dimmed by thick milky clouds. Periods of daylight are brief, a blink of the celestial eyelid. Life huddles together, pulling inward, curling around itself, shrunken by a frightful, loveless cold.
When we find ourselves at year’s end, do we ask ourselves, have we sucked each day of all its sweetness, have we found enough moments worthy of our personal scrapbooks? Well, perhaps, we can never find enough such moments.
The cold winter winds and the hoarseness of the gathering crows, however, bring within earshot the death rattle of another year. But, no matter what ripe fruits have already been plucked, another, younger, eager year waits beyond the threshold, brimming with possibilities that we cannot foresee.
On 22 June 2009, we made our first filecast, 55005 on air, public. That’s exactly 2000 days ago. I pause to consider this milestone.
Recently one evening, I was walking along Celetná Street in the Old Town. The yellowish lights of the shops spilled out onto the old street, and spread a golden varnish over the peaks of the cobblestones, which rustled with the whisper of many feet, the sound of the throngs who are nearly always to be found there. It happened to be the last day of October, the Eve of All Saints, an unusually warm evening for the autumn, perfectly suited for a long aimless walk. This is a date long connected with ghosts, masks, make-believe, and things being not quite as they appear. The Anglo-Celtic Halowe’en recalls the old belief that the yearly harvest is followed by a liminal time during which the spirits of the departed can more easily pass among the living. …
I come to the city of Wrocław, the former Breslau, by train. Until Pardubice, the train is modern and certain, spacious and sleek. In the arms of this doleful efficiency, I sleep. From Pardubice, we step through a looking glass, and the fabric and character of the journey are wholly transformed. The wagons, now subdivided into dark and cozy cabins, no longer slice smoothly through the cold morning air, they jostle and shake gently, a half-hearted rebellion against friction and gravity. A train of infinite patience, it pauses to stop at every hamlet, no matter how small, and heeds the whim of any local dweller to travel, from one whistle-stop to the next, on this particular day.
„… a young nun is praying in front of the mark at the place of the Marian column. Before her, a candle is burning on the brass plaque. She cradles a bouquet of flowers, and is about to lay them on the spot, a touching act of devotion. I lift my camera and quickly make an exposure, intending to make more. However, there is no time for a second shot. …“
My latest post, co-written with Tamás Sajó, for Poemas del río Wang.
„I still did not know whom I had actually encountered on Petřín. Had I come upon some secret sect? Had I witnessed the birth of a new faith? Or, on the contrary, was the underground worship the dying tremor of an ancient religion?”
— Michal Ajvaz, The Other City (2005)
The latest installment of my regular column „Field notes“ has appeared in His Voice: Magazine of Alternative Music (in Czech).
Simultaneously, I make it available as the filecast essay 56939 father of apples, in English:
„With the sound of trickling water all around and the late summer wind in the trees, many parts of Almaty enjoy an almost pastoral ambience, surprising for a rectilinear city of a million and a half people.…“
Two recent posts at Poemas del río Wang have included photographs I made while travelling in the company of friends to Wrocław, a city in southwest Poland.
Early fall, the sky is gray, but the weather is warm, and in the afternoon the side streets are still and quiet. I find myself under Vyšehrad, Prague’s second castle, which lords high on a rock overlooking the place near where the brook Botič joins the river Vltava.
I walk down to the embankment, and I am mostly alone, save for the hungry swans who come eagerly swimming toward me at my approach to the waterfront, apparently expecting me to feed them. But I have nothing to give. I have only my camera.
Current issue of Framework Radio #481: 2014.09.28 includes the latest filecast, 56914 variations, along with many other fine works.
Current issue of Framework Radio #481: 2014.09.28 includes the latest filecast, 56914 variations, along with many other fine works.
My inaugural installment of the regular column „Field notes“ has appeared in His Voice: Magazine of Alternative Music (in Czech). Simultaneously, I make it available as a filecast essay, in English.
„The trams at Karlovo náměstí resound differently from those at Alexanderplatz; they are perhaps a bit sadder, more moaning than singing. Once I heard the cries of a wounded dog in the song of those rails. …“
Ewa Justka, Tamás Kaszás, Péter Szabó, Lloyd Dunn
11–25 September 2014
opening: Wednesday 10 September 18:00
curator: Veronika Resslová
A new video work by nula.cc 56911 play of light will be exhibited as an installation in the gallery space as part of the group show.
The recent screening of „55515 locomotive“ as part of „È pericolosos sporgersi” evening of events on 6 September took place at Prague’s Nákladové nádraží Žižkov (Žižkov Freight Depot), now a cultural space for Prague 3.
The attached video will give an impression of the underground corridor space space where the evening unfolded, and documents part of the performance „Ajznbony II“, with Miloš Vojtěchovský, Michal Kindernay, and Matěj Kratochvíl participating.
The collection of photos is by Michal Kindernay, and shows how „55515 locomotive“ appeared in this environment; ghostly, distant and frail.
È pericolosos sporgersi @ Nákladové nádraží Žižkov
„As we look up Revoluční to the south, we soon see the arched windows and crenellations of what is today the Palladium shopping center (then Josefská Kasárna, barracks for the Czechoslovak Army). Further around, other familiar buildings pass by, as Prague’s many famous turrets and spires can be seen through the haze. The twin gothic spires of the 13th-century Church of Our Lady before Týn float past, and far in the distance on a light gray hilltop is the Petřínská rozhledna of 1891 (a lookout tower inspired by the Eiffel Tower in Paris), which marks the hill of Petřín. After the second rooftop television antenna, we see what is probably Prague’s most identifiable landmark, the Prague Castle, Hradčany. Then, we come to a mystery.
„What in the devil’s name is that?“
The final scene in the Czechoslovak film Holubice (The White Dove, František Vláčil, 1960) may contain a little surprise for audiences nowadays, if they know Prague, and if they look closely. The scene consists of a single shot, from a camera placed at a high vantage point somewhere on ul. Revoluční, during which the camera pans nearly the entire daytime skyline of Prague at the time of the film’s production, ca. 1959-60.
Petr Ferenc in HISVoice writes: Lloyd Dunn (ex-Tape-beatles) se v nejnovější dvojici podcastů zaměřuje na překonané astronomické teorie — první mix zvuků metaforicky vzpomíná na éter považovaný až do devatenáctého století, kdy jeho existence už ale opravdu NEBYLA prokázána, za nositele světla. Druhý mix je doprovázen textem korigujícím průměrnou délku solárního cyklu: zjistilo se totiž, že ten údajně nejdelší byly totiž dva…
Petr Ferenc in HISVoice writes: Lloyd Dunn (ex-Tape-beatles) se v nejnovější dvojici podcastů zaměřuje na překonané astronomické teorie — první mix zvuků metaforicky vzpomíná na éter považovaný až do devatenáctého století, kdy jeho existence už ale opravdu NEBYLA prokázána, za nositele světla. Druhý mix je doprovázen textem korigujícím průměrnou délku solárního cyklu: zjistilo se totiž, že ten údajně nejdelší byly totiž dva…
A summer journey into the wild reaches of Europe takes us to a land of dense forests, golden sun rays, meadows spangled in wildflowers, and whispering rivulets; hemmed in by walls of mountains, as if willfully hiding itself from the outside, where today reigns. Once our modern conveyance has breached the mountain pass, we find this shrouded terrain teeming with crowing roosters, goats, barking dogs and livestock of all sorts; sheep and their keepers; horse-drawn wagons, and the human natives going about their business in their characteristic dress.
We look out over a sfumato landscape of fruit trees, tombstones and grassy mammoths of drying hay, wooden churches and painted monasteries, a verdant landscape of fertile rising land receding into the morning mist. The mountaintop hooks a cloud, and the high wind deforms it into a long white streak like a comet’s tail. Women in black, faces framed in gray hair and deeply scored with hard-earned wrinkles, sit and chat on outdoor benches along the roadside, smiling faintly or looking curiously as we pass.
During a pause in our journey, I and others sit in a bench next to a woman like this, who carries on chatting with us. She knows we cannot understand her, she cannot understand us, but her happy appreciation of the absurdity of the situation was evident as she repeated phrases, and commented to herself, it seemed, about our non-understanding, yet remained accepting and friendly in expression and gesture. This said more to me than any exchange of social pleasantries ever could.
Another day, a steam train on narrow-gauge rails huffs and pants up the mountain, alongside a transparent stream of mountain water. The asthmatic beast earns part of its keep in hauling timber; the other part in hauling tourists and train-fanciers up and down for a morning’s joy ride. For my part, the wheezing, lurching and clanking was an unfolding symphony composed collaboratively by those who engineered the train and its wagons, together with the steady wear of time and use, which, in loosening fittings and slowly rounding the sharp corners of formed metal, lent it a special character.
On our way back to Hungary, we pass through Bistriţa and cross the Borgo Pass. Those familiar with Dracula lore may recognize these as the sites of important narrative moments in the Bram Stoker novel. This Western story seems set more in Western hallucinations about the dark reaches of Europe than in any actual place called Transylvania. In confronting the real territory, the dread and darkness of a land where blood-parasites dwell give way to an appreciation for how rich and full is the life of this country.
„Pomysli na půvab moře; na to, že nejděsivější mořská stvoření kloužou pod hladinou a většinu času zůstávají neviditelná a zrádně skryta… Pomysli na to vše a pak se obrať k zelené, něžné a poddajné zemi; pomysli na obé, na moře i zemi; a nenacházíš teď zvláštní analogii k něčemu v sobě samém?“ Lloyd Dunn, nejslavnější patrně jako člen mediálních kolážistů s geniálním názvem Tape Beatles, vydal další podcast ze své série nula.cc. Přesněji: stý prvý podcast. Slyšte a stahujte… většinou tyto mixy trvají kolem deseti minut a setkávají se v nich zvuky nalezené a ulovené nejrůznějšími způsoby.
— Petr Ferenc
„Pomysli na půvab moře; na to, že nejděsivější mořská stvoření kloužou pod hladinou a většinu času zůstávají neviditelná a zrádně skryta… Pomysli na to vše a pak se obrať k zelené, něžné a poddajné zemi; pomysli na obé, na moře i zemi; a nenacházíš teď zvláštní analogii k něčemu v sobě samém?“ Lloyd Dunn, nejslavnější patrně jako člen mediálních kolážistů s geniálním názvem Tape Beatles, vydal další podcast ze své série nula.cc. Přesněji: stý prvý podcast. Slyšte a stahujte… většinou tyto mixy trvají kolem deseti minut a setkávají se v nich zvuky nalezené a ulovené nejrůznějšími způsoby.
— Petr Ferenc
This one appeared when I was away travelling in Maramureş and Bukovina. The episode includes „56809 forecast“.
„When I first glimpsed them, peering out through the dirty window glass of the no. 5 tram as it scraped its way along the embankment of the Vltava, I had trouble making sense of them. … I blinked, twice. Yes, it seemed to be true.“
My latest post for Poemas del río Wang.
The current episode includes „56733 almost forgotten“ from the ongoing filecast series, together with many other selections by others working in the field of sound art and field recording. What is it they say? Oh, yes. Open your ears and listen.
The crowds in the Osh market jostle and push, always moving on to the next thing, as perhaps they have always done in this 3, 000-year-old city at the eastern end of the Fergana Valley, near the Kyrgyz border with Uzbekistan. A restless flow of handcarts, women with bags, and men with burdens of heavy sacks on their shoulders pound the ancient fragments of stone and dust that pass for pavements here. The aromas from the smoky shashlik grills mingle with the odor of sweat and the steamy tea houses, serving greasy bowls of laghman heaped with fresh dill, or piles of manty covered in sliced onions. In addition to these are a startling array of other odors, activated in the heat, and too numerous to remember, much less describe. The sunlight and dancing colors, and the local popular music playing everywhere from portable casette players, as Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Russians, and no doubt others, each in their own variant of local clothing and headwear, all commingle here.
The crowds in the Osh market jostle and push, always moving on to the next thing, as perhaps they have always done in this 3, 000-year-old city at the eastern end of the Fergana Valley, near the Kyrgyz border with Uzbekistan. A restless flow of handcarts, women with bags, and men with burdens of heavy sacks on their shoulders pound the ancient fragments of stone and dust that pass for pavements here. The aromas from the smoky shashlik grills mingle with the odor of sweat and the steamy tea houses, serving greasy bowls of laghman heaped with fresh dill, or piles of manty covered in sliced onions. In addition to these are a startling array of other odors, activated in the heat, and too numerous to remember, much less describe. The sunlight and dancing colors, and the local popular music playing everywhere from portable casette players, as Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Russians, and no doubt others, each in their own variant of local clothing and headwear, all commingle here.
In the crowded market, there is no respite. The endless scurry and buzz of the buyers and sellers flies in the face of the dusty heat of mid-afternoon, which commands lethargy. Scarved women move through, wearing long dresses of printed fabric in screaming loud colors, their ready smiles revealing walls of golden teeth. Stocky men in long overcoats and four-sided embroidered caps clasp their hands together in the small of their backs and study the goods with a wary eye and a practiced indifference, ready to haggle for even the smallest reduction in price.
In the crowded market, there is no respite. The endless scurry and buzz of the buyers and sellers flies in the face of the dusty heat of mid-afternoon, which commands lethargy. Scarved women move through, wearing long dresses of printed fabric in screaming loud colors, their ready smiles revealing walls of golden teeth. Stocky men in long overcoats and four-sided embroidered caps clasp their hands together in the small of their backs and study the goods with a wary eye and a practiced indifference, ready to haggle for even the smallest reduction in price.
Last January's journey to the fabled Isle of Calm, Mallorca, has been made the subject of another group post on the blog Poemas del río Wang. I reproduce here my text submission, but be sure to click through to hear my sound recordings, as well as a massive collection of impressions by the other travellers.
Poemas del río Wang: Together in Mallorca
The travels of río Wang traditionally begin with everyone telling about what he or she is the most curious about on this journey, and in the end to what extent their curiosity was satisfied. In the beginning of our Mallorcan journey last January, the greatest experience was that most people were ...
In the 1930s, a Bohemian priest named Josef Baťka (b. 1901 Plzeň - d. 1979 Sušice) voyaged on the steamship Normandie to what his countryman Antonín Dvořák could still, only a little more than a generation before, call a “new world.” Baťka had studied at the Vatican, and travelled widely in Europe and the Near East in his capacity as a papal envoy. In addition, he was also an avid and capable photographer who, using a medium format camera which made negatives 60 mm square, left behind a trove of small square images, neatly filed in the boxes in which they were delivered from the photo finisher.
In the 1930s, a Bohemian priest named Josef Baťka (b. 1901 Plzeň - d. 1979 Sušice) voyaged on the steamship Normandie to what his countryman Antonín Dvořák could still, only a little more than a generation before, call a “new world.” Baťka had studied at the Vatican, and travelled widely in Europe and the Near East in his capacity as a papal envoy. In addition, he was also an avid and capable photographer who, using a medium format camera which made negatives 60 mm square, left behind a trove of small square images, neatly filed in the boxes in which they were delivered from the photo finisher.
Pedro Bericat (Mute Sound, Zaragoza ES) asked me to submit one minute of sound for his CD series 1 minute autohypnosis…. I mixed together a time-stretch of police sirens and the throbbing hum of some kind of machine for a quick mood. Both sounds come from the 1968 film by Serge Bard Détruisez-vous. I received my copy of the CD compilation just yesterday.
Pedro Bericat (Mute Sound, Zaragoza ES) asked me to submit one minute of sound for his CD series 1 minute autohypnosis…. I mixed together a time-stretch of police sirens and the throbbing hum of some kind of machine for a quick mood. Both sounds come from the 1968 film by Serge Bard Détruisez-vous. I received my copy of the CD compilation just yesterday.
A recent journey to Mallorca, timed to avoid the seasonal flood of tourists, so better to be able to uncover for ourselves the mysteries of this ancient isle, was recently conducted under the auspices of the blog „Poemas del Río Wang.“ In this connection, I was pleased to contribute three recordings to recent collaborative posts that have appeared on that blog.
55505 pareidolia : 2011-2013
20.01.2014 - 02.02.2014
Beginning with a selection of found recordings, which include such things as optically-recorded foleyed sounds from narrative films, field recordings of steam locomotives, and radio transmissions from space, the artist assiduously strips away much of their referential surface, and lays bare some aspect of each sound’s inner core, emphasizing subjectivity and the emotional responses implied or elicited by these uncovered forms.
The sequence of images and sounds in 55505 pareidolia suggests, in some abstract way, the evolving states in the life-spans of organisms and machines, through the use of an assembled visual analogue for the sounds, together with and the artist’s reading of the sounds' various effects on the mind’s eye, described using (mostly) found images. The result is an unfolding poetic visual essay or meditation that might best be seen as a puzzle that elicits ideas of moving, changing, becoming, perceiving, and responding, that subjectively touches on cosmological and historical themes along the way.
In terms of filmmaking, the 55505 pareidolia draws inspiration from the notion of a “pure cinema, ” disconnected from narrative or documentary concerns. The artist also feels strongly the influence of Eisenstein’s theories of montage, especially as filtered through Pelechian’s theory of distance montage.
By calling the work a “pareidolia,” the artist highlights the way in which all art is understood by the viewer or listener through the more or less subtle coersions of the artist, which are successful (or not) to the extent that the artist understands and can control the perceptual apparatus of the observer, as mediated via pervasive cultural codes.
Lloyd Dunn is a multimedia artist working in machine-based media since the 1980s. He holds an MFA from the University of Iowa, USA, where he studied multimedia under Mel Andringa and Hans Breder, and electronic music under Kenneth Gaburo. During the 1980s and 90s he edited and published the graphic arts magazines Photostatic and Retrofuturism, which were circulated worldwide and collected by the Library of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among other collections. In 1987, Dunn cofounded the Tape-beatles, who were among a few early recording experimenters whose work explicitly challenged intellectual property and copyright. They eventually created a series of ambitious “expanded cinema” performances, and released 5 CDs on the Staalplaat label (Amsterdam, Berlin), as well as smaller projects on other labels.
Since 2009, Dunn's main project has been the project nula.cc, the online presence for a series of filecasts initiated to further explore his long-standing interest in machine-based art forms, appropriation and collage, time-based media and design. The website http://nula.cc itself is a custom platform created by Dunn to explore the artistic and expressive potential of the worldwide web.
SUB URBAN VIDEO LOUNGE - Screenings: daily from 12h - 17h
Urban Espresso Bar
Botersloot 44A (near Central Library) Rotterdam
suburbanvideo.nl
In a wholesale shop for clocks in the Vietnamese area in south Prague called Sapa.
V obchodu s hodinami ve vietnamském trhu Sapa v Libuši.
This third and last part of Pareidolia is like a melancholic poetic essay on the idea of gravity and weightlessness. The beautiful Russian soldiers song ‘Эх Дороги (Ekh, Dorogi)’, a song of a battle-weary soldier on a long march, seems to underline this lightness, but stands at the same time for the heavy and dark life on earth. Lloyd Dunn describes Pareidolia ‘as a puzzle that elicits ideas of moving, changing, becoming, perceiving, and responding, that subjectively touches on cosmological and historical themes along the way.’
Sub-urban Video Lounge
Pareidolia: 55033 Forty. 30.12.2013 - 05.01.2014. Lloyd Dunn : Pareidolia: 55033 Forty. Pareidolia is a cycle of experimental films and sounds in three parts, from the filecast project ( nula.cc ) by multimedia artist Lloyd Dunn (US/CZ). Dunn has been working in machine-based media since the 1980s.
This third and last part of Pareidolia is like a melancholic poetic essay on the idea of gravity and weightlessness. The beautiful Russian soldiers song ‘Эх Дороги (Ekh, Dorogi)’, a song of a battle-weary soldier on a long march, seems to underline this lightness, but stands at the same time for the heavy and dark life on earth. Lloyd Dunn describes Pareidolia ‘as a puzzle that elicits ideas of moving, changing, becoming, perceiving, and responding, that subjectively touches on cosmological and historical themes along the way.’
Sub-urban Video Lounge
Pareidolia: 55033 Forty. 30.12.2013 - 05.01.2014. Lloyd Dunn : Pareidolia: 55033 Forty. Pareidolia is a cycle of experimental films and sounds in three parts, from the filecast project ( nula.cc ) by multimedia artist Lloyd Dunn (US/CZ). Dunn has been working in machine-based media since the 1980s.
This third and last part of Pareidolia is like a melancholic poetic essay on the idea of gravity and weightlessness. The beautiful Russian soldiers song ‘Эх Дороги (Ekh, Dorogi)’, a song of a battle-weary soldier on a long march, seems to underline this lightness, but stands at the same time for the heavy and dark life on earth. Lloyd Dunn describes Pareidolia ‘as a puzzle that elicits ideas of moving, changing, becoming, perceiving, and responding, that subjectively touches on cosmological and historical themes along the way.’
Sub-urban Video Lounge
Pareidolia: 55033 Forty. 30.12.2013 - 05.01.2014. Lloyd Dunn : Pareidolia: 55033 Forty. Pareidolia is a cycle of experimental films and sounds in three parts, from the filecast project ( nula.cc ) by multimedia artist Lloyd Dunn (US/CZ). Dunn has been working in machine-based media since the 1980s.
I once lived in a flat in the Holešovice district of Prague which had belonged to an old widow. Due either to a lack of resources or will, the flat had stood unchanged for decades. With its odd collection of old cheaply-made furniture, strange muted colors, faded framed prints of the Virgin, and a general lack of modern amenities, it sometimes felt as if I were living in another time.
I reproduce here the text of my submission to a group post at Poemas del río Wang that records the experiences of a group of travellers on a recent journey to Crimea. Readers are well advised to look at the entire post, for its wealth of images and insights.
Poemas del río Wang: Together in the Crimea
Río Wang's last tour of this year was organized to one of the most beautiful, and at the same time least known places in Europe, the Crimean peninsula. We wrote about our plans in the invitation, and about the places to see in the t able of contents dedicated to the Crimea. And about what we saw, ...
„55515 locomotive“ from the cycle „55505 pareidolia“
Sub Urban Video Rotterdam announces: „Pareidolia is a cycle of experimental films and sounds in three parts, from the filecast project ( nula.cc ) by multimedia artist Lloyd Dunn (US/CZ). Dunn has been working in machine-based media since the 1980s. He studied multimedia and electronic music. In 1987 he cofounded the Tape-beatles, who did some early experiments with sound recording and expanded cinema performances. Where the first part Edge Case exists mainly from hallucinating kaleidoscopic forms and movements in colour, the second part Locomotive is more filmic: many stories could be made up by these images and sounds — derived from black and white narrative films. The sounds from trains, railway stations, and train horns keep speeding up all images into a wild dream in which image and sound merge into an experience of pure energy.“
Monday 11.11.2013 4pm : Talk & Drinks
From Photostatic to filecasts: Lloyd Dunn’s Alternative Publishing: An introduction by Florian Cramer, lector, multimedia artist and friend of Lloyd Dunn. Be welcome for a talk and a drink.
Sub Urban Video Lounge in Rotterdam has scheduled three screenings, one each for the three constituent parts of the ( nula.cc ) work „55505 pareidolia“. (In fact, I consider this series to be more open-ended than this, and more parts could be added in the future. But for now, it basically stands as three.)
The first of these screenings will take place from 21-27 October, with the section „55166 edge case“ shown in a perpetual loop during the hours that the lounge is open.
Further screenings will be announced as they are confirmed.
Once a month, on the first Wednesday of the month at noon, the City of Prague tests its emergency warning sirens. This test took place October 2, 2013.
Jednou za měsíc, první středu v měsíci v poledne, město Praha testuje polachové sirény. Tento test se konal 02.10.2013.
Participating in an event „Meziuchy” (Between the Ears) at the Školská 28 gallery this afternoon. If you are in Prague, stop by. Starts at 14h and keeps going.
ul. Školská 28, in the courtyard
Participating in an event „Meziuchy” (Between the Ears) at the Školská 28 gallery this afternoon. If you are in Prague, stop by. Starts at 14h and keeps going.
ul. Školská 28, in the courtyard
If you take the elektrichka from Sevastopol going northwest, after about 50km you will come to the town of Bakhchisaray.
Originally a Lutheran church built by Jan Kryštof of Graubünden 1611-1614. In 1626 it became part of a Paulaner (Minims) monastery, which was abolished in 1784. In the 17th and 18th centuries the church was redesigned in the Baroque style and received a tower in 1720. Side parts of the church were completed in the 19th century. In 2010, restoration of the church organ, one of the largest mechanical organs in the Czech Republic, was completed after several years’ work.
Původně luteránský kostel vystavěný v letech 1611-1614 Janem Kryštofem z Graubündenu. V roce 1626 se kostel stal součástí kláštera paulánů (minimů). Klášter byl zrušen v roce 1784. V 17. a 18. století byl kostel zbarokován a roku 1720 k němu byla přistavěna věž. V 19. století byly dobudovány boční prostory kostela. Po několikaletém úsilí od zahájení přípravných prací, bylo v roce 2010 dokončeno restaurování kostelních varhan. Jedná se o jedny z největších mechanických varhan v Čechách.
Cafe V lese, Krymska 12 Praha.
I recently completed a redesign for the Favorite Sounds of Prague web site, which has, in the process, changed its name to Zvuky Prahy/Sounds of Prague.
The site consists of a large and growing collection of sounds recorded in or about Prague, and submitted by sound artists and enthusiasts of field recording, or really Prague enthusiasts of any kind. It’s definitely worth a visit, and the playlists section allows you to select a themed collection and just let it play a series of sounds in the background of your everyday life.
If you want to contribute sounds, you must request access on the site, but there are no special requirements. Any interested person can get a login.
I recently completed a redesign for the Favorite Sounds of Prague web site, which has, in the process, changed its name to Zvuky Prahy/Sounds of Prague.
The site consists of a large and growing collection of sounds recorded in or about Prague, and submitted by sound artists and enthusiasts of field recording, or really Prague enthusiasts of any kind. It’s definitely worth a visit, and the playlists section allows you to select a themed collection and just let it play a series of sounds in the background of your everyday life.
If you want to contribute sounds, you must request access on the site, but there are no special requirements. Any interested person can get a login.
Some workmen apply stucco to an exterior wall.
Dělníci nanášejí omítku na vnější zeď.
Some workmen apply stucco to an exterior wall.
Dělníci nanášejí omítku na vnější zeď.
My latest post for the blog „Poemas del Río Wang“ is a quick overview of the filmography of the Armenian film artist Artavazd Pelechian. I examine his theory of „distance montage“ and provide youtube links to all of his major films.
Pelechian, speaking about his film Наш Век (Our Century) sums up: “In the totality, in the wholeness of one of my films, there is no montage, no collision, so as a result montage has been destroyed. In Eisenstein every element means something. For me the individual fragments don’t mean anything anymore. Only the whole film has the meaning.”
Кино дистанционного монтажа способно и раскрывать любые формы движения: от низших и элементарных, до высших и сложнейших. Оно способно говорить одновременно языком искусства, философии и науки.
My latest post for the blog „Poemas del Río Wang“ is a quick overview of the filmography of the Armenian film artist Artavazd Pelechian. I examine his theory of „distance montage“ and provide youtube links to all of his major films.
Pelechian, speaking about his film Наш Век (Our Century) sums up: “In the totality, in the wholeness of one of my films, there is no montage, no collision, so as a result montage has been destroyed. In Eisenstein every element means something. For me the individual fragments don’t mean anything anymore. Only the whole film has the meaning.”
Кино дистанционного монтажа способно и раскрывать любые формы движения: от низших и элементарных, до высших и сложнейших. Оно способно говорить одновременно языком искусства, философии и науки.
Posting on the blog „Poemas del Río Wang“, some observations on the film „Carnival of Colors“ (1935, U.S.S.R), which serves as a demo for an early Soviet-produced two-color motion picture film process.
In Карнавал цветов one role of ideology is clear enough — a practical color film process this early represents a technical advance, another paving stone on the road toadvancingRussia and turning it into a modern world state. And, like nearly all Soviet film production at the time, part of its role was to flatter power: a lengthy sequence presents images from the May 1 celebrations in Red Square, circa 1935.
The film Карнавал цветов (“Carnival of Colors”) is a technical and historical curiosity, produced in 1935 in the U.S.S.R. for the purpose of demonstrating a domestically developed color film process and promoting its use. Like a number of other experimental processes of the time, it differs from contemporary color methods because it uses only two color elements. (By contrast, more recent and familiar color film processes use three.) The color dyes selected for the Soviet system consist of a brilliant vermillion red and a turquoise green, as shown in these stills.
Posting on the blog „Poemas del Río Wang“, some observations on the film „Carnival of Colors“ (1935, U.S.S.R), which serves as a demo for an early Soviet-produced two-color motion picture film process.
In Карнавал цветов one role of ideology is clear enough — a practical color film process this early represents a technical advance, another paving stone on the road toadvancingRussia and turning it into a modern world state. And, like nearly all Soviet film production at the time, part of its role was to flatter power: a lengthy sequence presents images from the May 1 celebrations in Red Square, circa 1935.
The film Карнавал цветов (“Carnival of Colors”) is a technical and historical curiosity, produced in 1935 in the U.S.S.R. for the purpose of demonstrating a domestically developed color film process and promoting its use. Like a number of other experimental processes of the time, it differs from contemporary color methods because it uses only two color elements. (By contrast, more recent and familiar color film processes use three.) The color dyes selected for the Soviet system consist of a brilliant vermillion red and a turquoise green, as shown in these stills.
Monday, May 13, 19:00, Prague: several artists will present their work, including the ( nula.cc ) video work „55505 pareidolia“ as part of the evening.
Monday, May 13, 19:00, Prague: several artists will present their work, including the ( nula.cc ) video work „55505 pareidolia“ as part of the evening.
Fonografie | č. 9 | 2013 | archiv - A2 – zvíře nikdy nespí
Současná bohatá topografie hudební tvorby, využívající buď kdesi v archivech nalezené nebo vlastnoručně pořízené „reálné“ zvukové záznamy, je výsledkem pohybu směřujícího k postupné autonomii pojmů …
I translate here the final paragraph (the original is in Czech), which situates nula.cc within the Czech context:
“Lloyd Dunn, member of the legendary American multimedia group the Tape-beatles, living and working for the last several years in Prague, also uses field recordings. At his web site nula.cc, he currently publishes sound compositions which combine and intermingle various found archival recordings with his own. He thus creates a mosaic-like multifaceted personal document about the story and process of an excursion which, though in reality undertaken, takes the form of a sound diary, and transforms it into a call to set out on one's own imaginitve expedition.”
An 8-channel version of the most recent ( nula.cc ) work, 56390 a beacon, is included as part of the installation: Osmosis: A Panoramic sound installation for the space Galerie Kostka, part of the exhibition: 16-20, 000Hz at Galerie Meetfactory - mezinárodní centrum současného umění, Prague, from 20–25 April, 2013. Opening 19 April, 6 PM.
56390 a beacon. The stereo output files from three similar Supercollider sessions comprise six of the channels of this work. Using white, pink, and gray noise generators as source, various tones that recall singing are emphasized using a series of prime numbers, EQ and control rate sine waves. A brief stereo excerpt from Aleksandr Sokurov's film Povinnost comprises the other two channels of the eight-channel work.
Impetus: a quote from Povinnost, as follows. “My god,” thought the commander, peering into the heaving black chaos, “Where am i? Who am i?” He waited for the beacon’s beam to seep through the fog, still unable to work out why, the entire day of their departure, he had been dogged by anxiety.
In my haphazard wanderings, I have stumbled upon many, many official markers and monuments — obelisks (and the like), wall fixtures, or embedded among cobblestones — and each one adds a sentence or paragraph to the internal story I make up for myself about the world.
Europe is, obviously, awash in such markers. A recent post I contributed to the endlessly fascinating history / culture / travel blog Poemas del Río Wang focuses on local Prime Meridians in Prague and Trieste.
Moving south by train from Prague via Salzburg, past Austrian Alps that shine like gods in the afternoon sun, then in darkness through solid rock under mountain borders, the fluorescent tube lighting ...
In my haphazard wanderings, I have stumbled upon many, many official markers and monuments — obelisks (and the like), wall fixtures, or embedded among cobblestones — and each one adds a sentence or paragraph to the internal story I make up for myself about the world.
Europe is, obviously, awash in such markers. A recent post I contributed to the endlessly fascinating history / culture / travel blog Poemas del Río Wang focuses on local Prime Meridians in Prague and Trieste.
Moving south by train from Prague via Salzburg, past Austrian Alps that shine like gods in the afternoon sun, then in darkness through solid rock under mountain borders, the fluorescent tube lighting ...
The 30-minute version of „55505 pareidolia“ is now screening at the Digital Gallery at CSPS, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The screening takes place every Wednesday-Sunday from 10 November to 31 December. The gallery hours are 11 am to 6 pm.
Lloyd Dunn's „55505 pareidolia“ is a visual essay, meditation and puzzle made up of found recordings that include optically recorded sounds from narrative films, field recordings of steam locomotives, a...
I'm pleased to announce that the ( nula.cc ) video work „55505 pareidolia“ has been accepted as one of the works to be on display at the upcoming XIX CIM Colloquium on Musical Informatics, to be held 21-24 November at the Giuseppe Tartini Musical Conservatory in Trieste, Italy.
I will be traveling to Trieste to attend the conference. If any of you happen to be near there and care to stop by, please look me up.
I'm pleased to announce that the ( nula.cc ) video work „55505 pareidolia“ has been accepted as one of the works to be on display at the upcoming XIX CIM Colloquium on Musical Informatics, to be held 21-24 November at the Giuseppe Tartini Musical Conservatory in Trieste, Italy.
I will be traveling to Trieste to attend the conference. If any of you happen to be near there and care to stop by, please look me up.
I'm pleased to announce that the ( nula.cc ) video work „55505 pareidolia“ has been accepted as one of the works to be on display at the upcoming XIX CIM Colloquium on Musical Informatics, to be held 21-24 November at the Giuseppe Tartini Musical Conservatory in Trieste, Italy.
I will be traveling to Trieste to attend the conference. If any of you happen to be near there and care to stop by, please look me up.
Right now ( nula.cc ) is attending the Placard Headphone Festival. To tune in:
http://stream.cannibalcaniche.com/placard/
window 4
Futur Anterieur will be a group show that looks at these three tendencies in recent creative activity. I have contributed an installation that includes images from the magazines Photostatic and Retrofuturism (which I published in th 1980s-90s), as well as a 40-minute video program from the ( nula.cc ) filecast project called 55505 pareidolia, which will run in a loop as part of the installation.
24 March – 26 May
Galerie du Jour Agnès B., 44 rue Quincampoix, Paris
Pictures show the corner of the gallery showing my work. The video is shown in a loop on the monitor. It is surrounded by page art from Psrf 49, the final issue of the Photostatic/Retrofuturism series.
The schedule for Radio Boredcast has been posted. Radio Boredcast is the name of the radio section of AV Festival 2010: as slow as possible, which runs from 1-31 march.
Listen for contributions from the nula.cc filecasts on days 5, 8, 11, 21, and 22 (as far as i can tell).
55874 consists of an elaborate construction of sound drawn from tracks of the optical sound, as well as ferrous, varieties: heavily treated sound from scratchy old movies, and a collector's recording of steam locomotives.
55875 partly consists of field recordings from spain from urban and seascape environments, and also includes sound ambiences drawn from the 1936 film 'by the bluest of seas'.
55878 sound from transportation including a day train in thailand, a night train in slovakia, and an automated carwash in the US midwest.
55881 ambiences built from sound fragments drawn from old movies.
55880 composition of found fragments drawn from file corruption, white noise, and aggressive equalization.
> Thu 1 March – Sat 31 March. Radio Boredcast is a 744-hour continuous online radio project, curated by artist Vicki Bennett (People Like Us) with AV Festival. In response to our ambiguous relationship ...
Sunday, February 5, 2012, 10:00
On the occasion of the CD release Favourite sounds of Praha you are welcome to visit wholesale musical event, between 11 AM and 8 PM.
Follow the lemurie livestream livestream.com/lemurie.
And celebrating what would be John Cage’s 100th birthday: johncage.org/2012.
A spring morning at a peripheral metro station in Prague.
A spring morning at a peripheral metro station in Prague.
Image from an old negative (1983), digitally recovered.
Image from an old negative (1983), digitally recovered.
Someone lost their mobile phone, and it was run over by traffic. I found these remains.
Somewhere along a street in Sevastopol, in the Crimea.
America’s Ancient Cave Art. The eye lets go of the desire for meaning; the pictures emerge. Simek was showing me Mallery’s pages by way of saying, It’s dangerous to read something when you can’t really read it. And we can’t. Try to see it. That’s hard enough.
Santiago de Baku. And also native faces: Giuli Chokhonelidze (1928-2008), National Artist of Georgia, known to our audience from such Azerbaijani Soviet movies as Morning (1960), *Our Street *(1961) and A Very Boring Story (1988), plays a part of the leader of workers, …
I don’t know about you, but I’d be very interested in seeing any film with a title like “A Very Boring Story”. The remainder of the article is a moving and detailed account of the heady atmosphere in revolutionary Baku of 1989 in the months before, and including, the Soviet crackdown of 1990.
The Mississippi River at Keokok, Iowa, in 1994.
The Mississippi River at Keokok, Iowa, in 1994.
Time piece. Tracing parallels shouldn’t lead us away from the unique qualities that make [Christian Marclay’s] The Clock so appealing. For one thing, the fact that there isn’t a continually running readout, as in Bleu Shut or in an iPod slider, enables the film to test our feeling for passing time. Not every shot shows a clock; indeed, most shots in the portions I saw don’t. As we get captivated by clock-less images and follow their development within a scene, the arrival of a timepiece reminds us of the structuring principle. The appearance of a clock creates something like a punchline, while also letting us realize how loose our sense of duration in a movie usually is.
Psychic Projections. What is most striking about the Serios thoughtographs is the power of their imagery as a manifestation of the creative process. In these strange pictures, real objects or places appear to have merged with (or been altered by) the material of Serios's unconscious. Some of them juxtapose target images (of familiar buildings, monuments, houses, and hotels) with what appear to be images of day residue, haunting shadows of unfamiliar forms and structures. Others seem to incorporate both past and future events in an odd, shadowy collage.
Time piece. Tracing parallels shouldn’t lead us away from the unique qualities that make [Christian Marclay’s] The Clock so appealing. For one thing, the fact that there isn’t a continually running readout, as in Bleu Shut or in an iPod slider, enables the film to test our feeling for passing time. Not every shot shows a clock; indeed, most shots in the portions I saw don’t. As we get captivated by clock-less images and follow their development within a scene, the arrival of a timepiece reminds us of the structuring principle. The appearance of a clock creates something like a punchline, while also letting us realize how loose our sense of duration in a movie usually is.
Psychic Projections. What is most striking about the Serios thoughtographs is the power of their imagery as a manifestation of the creative process. In these strange pictures, real objects or places appear to have merged with (or been altered by) the material of Serios's unconscious. Some of them juxtapose target images (of familiar buildings, monuments, houses, and hotels) with what appear to be images of day residue, haunting shadows of unfamiliar forms and structures. Others seem to incorporate both past and future events in an odd, shadowy collage.
How to Make Anything Signify Anything. “It captures a formative moment in a life spent looking for more than meets the eye, and it remained Friedman’s most cherished example of how, using the art and science of codes, it was possible to make anything signify anything.”
Pop-Up Apotheosis. “Not that the world stayed flat. It was discovered to be round, but even long before that, we were not content with surfaces. We thought “up, ” and up we built. But despite our cathedrals and towers and obelisks and all manner of priapic construction with rock and metal, no one thought in that way about paper until very recently.”
3arabawy. Follow the events as they unfold from the ground in Cairo from an Egyptian journalist. Frequent updates and photographs directly from the epicenter of these momentous happenings.
Particle Blog. Traces of a journey thru Italy in photographs and commentary.
How to Make Anything Signify Anything. “It captures a formative moment in a life spent looking for more than meets the eye, and it remained Friedman’s most cherished example of how, using the art and science of codes, it was possible to make anything signify anything.”
Pop-Up Apotheosis. “Not that the world stayed flat. It was discovered to be round, but even long before that, we were not content with surfaces. We thought “up, ” and up we built. But despite our cathedrals and towers and obelisks and all manner of priapic construction with rock and metal, no one thought in that way about paper until very recently.”
3arabawy. Follow the events as they unfold from the ground in Cairo from an Egyptian journalist. Frequent updates and photographs directly from the epicenter of these momentous happenings.
Particle Blog. Traces of a journey thru Italy in photographs and commentary.
Chronicler of the Caucasus. Ermakov’s passion and specialty, however, was ethnographic photography. He made long trips to the most remote valleys of the Caucasus, in Central Asia and Anatolia where he was the first to take photos of the inhabitants of villages of different nationalities.
ARTSAT Internet Radio Via Google translate: ARTSAT Internet Radio began. To generate a sound by radio from the satellite data. There are currently reading sensor data every few minutes. Mon replaced by the instrument under consideration. The listening url: gs.idd.tamabi.ac.jp. The player software for your listening please open the URL.
Chronicler of the Caucasus. Ermakov’s passion and specialty, however, was ethnographic photography. He made long trips to the most remote valleys of the Caucasus, in Central Asia and Anatolia where he was the first to take photos of the inhabitants of villages of different nationalities.
ARTSAT Internet Radio Via Google translate: ARTSAT Internet Radio began. To generate a sound by radio from the satellite data. There are currently reading sensor data every few minutes. Mon replaced by the instrument under consideration. The listening url: gs.idd.tamabi.ac.jp. The player software for your listening please open the URL.
15 Nov, 21:00: Peter Cusack, ( nula.cc ), DJ Pato, Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. Address: Linienstraße 227, U2 Rosa Luxemburg Platz. Berlin.
12 Nov, 21:21: Erik Levander and ( nula.cc ), Staalplaat Basement. Address: Flughafenstrasse 38, U8 Boddinstrasse/U7 Rathaus Neukölln. Berlin.
A charged absense.
55505 pareidolia is a live screening of sound works with video from the Nula project. It is a modular structure, like a playlist, where works can be selected and ordered to suit a given venue. The following filecasts have had video added to them so that they can be used as modules for a screening of 55505 pareidolia.
55033 forty
55166 edge case
55515 locomotive
More filecasts may be added to this list in the future as video becomes available.
Venues and dates.
Upcoming
Contact nula to schedule a nula presentation.
Live events
2011-01-27 [with David Možný] 19.30h at Školská 28 Gallery, Prague.
2010-11-15 [with Peter Cusack, DJ Pato] Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin.
2010-11-12 [with Erik Levander] Staalplaat Basement, Berlin.
Spomenik “The 20th century was a sad, dangerous century. In that time, Europe was chopped up into national boxes, with hermetic front lines. Half of my school friends perished in the war; the rest, in becoming communists or anti-communists, fought each other. All that I can say is this: I saw it, I lived it, and I didn’t understand it.”
Ways If you do not want to go by flight from Istanbul to Tehran, the simplest means is the train or the bus which, crossing the majestic mountains and river valleys of the former Armenian and now Kurdish region of Eastern Anatolia, covers the distance of two thousand and seven hundred kilometers in three or one and half days, respectively.
How Geography Explains History Geography explains why farming first appeared towards the western end of the Old World’s lucky latitudes … But that is not what actually happened. The West has not always been the richest, most powerful and most sophisticated part of the world during the last ten millennia. For more than 1, 000 years, from at least 600 to 1700 AD, these superlatives applied to China, not the West.
László Moholy-Nagy: “Mechanized Eccentric” Though better known for his work in visual art, photography, and design, the Hungarian modernist László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) was a visionary polyartist whose radical constructivist approach to aesthetics touched on virtually every possible medium, including music and theater.
Broadcasting on 91.5 FM from Porto PT, from 12-16 October is Radiofutura: “Digital media and local cultures intersect at FuturePlaces in Porto, bringing discussion and pratice to a common table. RadioFutura will be the place to find this intersection in the radio space, directly on your receiver at 91.5MHz in Porto or listening online.”
12 Nov, 21:21: Erik Levander and Lloyd Dunn, Staalplaat Basement. Address: Flughafenstrasse 38, U8 Boddinstrasse/U7 Rathaus Neukölln.
13 Nov: “Workshop on Techniques of Assemblage of Found Material”. Open to 20 participants max. Cost is 10 EUR. To sign up, email workshop@staalplaat.com.
15 Nov, 21:00: Peter Cusack, Lloyd Dunn, DJ Pato, Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. Address: Linienstraße 227, U2 Rosa Luxemburg Platz.
Vanished Civilizations III: Trebizond. Trebizond reached its cultural and political peak in the twelfth century, when it was an important breakaway state from the Byzantine empire and one of the principle termini of the Silk Road …, but its historical roots are ancient.
“Useless” Australia. In The Songlines, travel writer Bruce Chatwin tackles the Australian Aborigines’ poetic relation to their land. The titular 'songlines' are an age-old Aboriginal oral tradition that conveys tribal lore on human origins, local history and Australian geography. These ancestral songs are so indispensible that tribesmen outside the area they sing about literally may be lost for words, unable to describe local flora and fauna, and consequently unable to survive off them.
Werner Herzog: On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth. In my film Fitzcarraldo, there is an exchange that raises [the] question [of the importance of reality]. Setting off into the unknown with his ship, Fitzcarraldo stops over at one of the last outposts of civilization, a missionary station: Fitzcarraldo: And what do the older Indians say? Missionary: We simply cannot cure them of their idea that ordinary life is only an illusion, behind which lies the reality of dreams.
AviGlitch. A Ruby library to destroy your AVI files. Altho I haven’t tested it, if it works, I am very likely to use this command-line tool in making some future video filecast. If you happen to give it a try, I’d be happy to hear of your results in the comments.
Vanished Civilizations III: Trebizond. Trebizond reached its cultural and political peak in the twelfth century, when it was an important breakaway state from the Byzantine empire and one of the principle termini of the Silk Road …, but its historical roots are ancient.
“Useless” Australia. In The Songlines, travel writer Bruce Chatwin tackles the Australian Aborigines’ poetic relation to their land. The titular 'songlines' are an age-old Aboriginal oral tradition that conveys tribal lore on human origins, local history and Australian geography. These ancestral songs are so indispensible that tribesmen outside the area they sing about literally may be lost for words, unable to describe local flora and fauna, and consequently unable to survive off them.
Werner Herzog: On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth. In my film Fitzcarraldo, there is an exchange that raises [the] question [of the importance of reality]. Setting off into the unknown with his ship, Fitzcarraldo stops over at one of the last outposts of civilization, a missionary station: Fitzcarraldo: And what do the older Indians say? Missionary: We simply cannot cure them of their idea that ordinary life is only an illusion, behind which lies the reality of dreams.
AviGlitch. A Ruby library to destroy your AVI files. Altho I haven’t tested it, if it works, I am very likely to use this command-line tool in making some future video filecast. If you happen to give it a try, I’d be happy to hear of your results in the comments.
Some of you may recall that in my inaugural post for this blog, I made reference to a free blogging service that served as the technical underpinnings for these posts. That service was basically fine for the time being, but it is now time to move on to something more of my own making, and (not to mention) harbored in my own port-of-call, the servers at detritus.net, ably skippered by sysadmin Steev Hise. So, change your bookmarks to keep up with the project. There is also a new RSS feed, too.
With that explanation being the entire pretext for this post, I am left with not much else to say, other than, with your kind permission, the making of a few idle observations.
A goal at the start of the Nula filecast project was to allow people to comment on the filecasts, as well as make observations of a more general nature. But implementing just the core features of the site was enough of a challenge for me (writing all the code as I did from scratch) that I could not manage it. So, enter postero.us and its slick method of accepting email messages and turning them into blog posts; and as a free service, to boot. I eagerly jumped on board, and from that point became a blogger, posting each filecast (with comments open), as well as supplemental information.
The move to postero.us was expedient, but it left the filecasts that had already been released adrift, with no public commenting system connected to them. I have finally addressed that by retrofitting the earlier filecasts into this blog as independent posts in their own right. Feel free to proceed to use commenting as you wish, for releases both old and new.
Note, however, that comments are moderated, which means that there is a delay between your submitting a comment and its appearing on the site. This measure is taken only as a means of thwarting comment spam, not to select or censor in any way your interaction with Nula. As always, if you don’t want to leave a comment but still want to get in touch, I remain available at editor@nula.cc.
This site’s current backend is served up by the open-source content management system Drupal using a custom Nula theme made by me. Like life, Drupal is hard, but it can be good. It has taken me about 18 months of struggling with Drupal in my day job to feel comfortable enough to put it to work for my own projects. That said, open source ftw!, and all that. Let’s get on with the blog.
“These guys really have it goin’ on, ” remarked Ken, the friend I happened to be traveling with in Central Asia in 2004. I gathered from context that he was referring to their music, which we heard everywhere we went: in the bazaars, the shared taxis, the tea houses and food stalls, and simply on the street. I did not disagree.
I don’t really know how our western cultural categories map onto those of Central Asia — but I guess there’s at least a rough correspondence in the category “popular music.” I refer to “popular” in the vein of the music that gets listened to (as opposed to music one chooses) during the course of a day: doing chores, getting places, or hanging out over green tea with milk and grape sugar served in little bowls.
The music sounded lively and inventive, rhythmic and “oriental” and yet somehow very “now”. It has a distinctive and indigenous musical sensibility, but it has also clearly undergone some of the effects of the modern recording studio. Certainly, the region had not so long ago come out of seventy years of Soviet domination, yet a tradition of popular regional entertainment seemed intact and thriving, and what Russo-Euro-Western influence prevailed was (I guess) largely restricted to the technical, and not the artistic, side of things.
We happened to be in the city of Osh, which claims to be 3, 000 years old, and lies in Kyrgyzstan at the eastern edge of the ethnically diverse Farg’ona (Fergana) Valley. At its large central bazaar, we stopped at a stall that sold cassette tapes manned by a young local lad with a haircut that can only be described as a reverse-mullet (long bangs, close-cropped elsewhere). I steeled myself for the wall of incomprehension that usually arises when I try to use my inadequate Russian, mis-remembered from lessons that have had several decades to fade.
Getting the gist of what I wanted (simplified by the fact that the stall sold only tape cassettes) he let us sample some of them on his boombox. Between Ken and I, we purchased a handful. One or two were clearly “published” in the sense that there were color j-cards and the tracks were printed on the tape itself; but most had laser-printed j-cards printed from a fixed template and no labels on the cassettes at all.
For me, the standout discovery among these was the voice and work of the Uzbek musician Sherali Jo’raev. I don’t know much about him, but I am happy to introduce my readers to his works thru the following series of YouTube links.
Here is Jo’raev with his band some time in the previous century looking for all the world like an Uzbek version of the Beatles on Sullivan:
youtube.com/watch?v=Nd4gfdO1QnY
He also does dance music:
youtube.com/watch?v=hoIhChu4OUU
Here is a slower piece, where he seems to be performing in a hotel lobby:
youtube.com/watch?v=xUvQUrM91-4
This one seems suspiciously like a command performance for dignitaries, but it’s from a multi-part video described as a “concert in honor of the poetry of Maulana Jalaliddin Rumi.” Its main failing is that it doesn’t keep the camera on the subject:
youtube.com/watch?v=CmGlNjANXbw
If you want to see the entire program from which the above was taken, I’ve assembled a playlist. The highlights for me are parts 2 and 7 (part 1 merely introduces the program and could be skipped if you choose).
youtube.com/viewplaylist?p=F32B6E642843A26D
My list isn’t close to exhaustive. A visit to just one of the links will reveal lots of other Jo’raev videos, which YouTube will helpfully suggest to you.
“These guys really have it goin’ on, ” remarked Ken, the friend I happened to be traveling with in Central Asia in 2004. I gathered from context that he was referring to their music, which we heard everywhere we went: in the bazaars, the shared taxis, the tea houses and food stalls, and simply on the street. I did not disagree.
I don’t really know how our western cultural categories map onto those of Central Asia — but I guess there’s at least a rough correspondence in the category “popular music.” I refer to “popular” in the vein of the music that gets listened to (as opposed to music one chooses) during the course of a day: doing chores, getting places, or hanging out over green tea with milk and grape sugar served in little bowls.
The music sounded lively and inventive, rhythmic and “oriental” and yet somehow very “now”. It has a distinctive and indigenous musical sensibility, but it has also clearly undergone some of the effects of the modern recording studio. Certainly, the region had not so long ago come out of seventy years of Soviet domination, yet a tradition of popular regional entertainment seemed intact and thriving, and what Russo-Euro-Western influence prevailed was (I guess) largely restricted to the technical, and not the artistic, side of things.
We happened to be in the city of Osh, which claims to be 3, 000 years old, and lies in Kyrgyzstan at the eastern edge of the ethnically diverse Farg’ona (Fergana) Valley. At its large central bazaar, we stopped at a stall that sold cassette tapes manned by a young local lad with a haircut that can only be described as a reverse-mullet (long bangs, close-cropped elsewhere). I steeled myself for the wall of incomprehension that usually arises when I try to use my inadequate Russian, mis-remembered from lessons that have had several decades to fade.
Getting the gist of what I wanted (simplified by the fact that the stall sold only tape cassettes) he let us sample some of them on his boombox. Between Ken and I, we purchased a handful. One or two were clearly “published” in the sense that there were color j-cards and the tracks were printed on the tape itself; but most had laser-printed j-cards printed from a fixed template and no labels on the cassettes at all.
For me, the standout discovery among these was the voice and work of the Uzbek musician Sherali Jo’raev. I don’t know much about him, but I am happy to introduce my readers to his works thru the following series of YouTube links.
Here is Jo’raev with his band some time in the previous century looking for all the world like an Uzbek version of the Beatles on Sullivan:
youtube.com/watch?v=Nd4gfdO1QnY
He also does dance music:
youtube.com/watch?v=hoIhChu4OUU
Here is a slower piece, where he seems to be performing in a hotel lobby:
youtube.com/watch?v=xUvQUrM91-4
This one seems suspiciously like a command performance for dignitaries, but it’s from a multi-part video described as a “concert in honor of the poetry of Maulana Jalaliddin Rumi.” Its main failing is that it doesn’t keep the camera on the subject:
youtube.com/watch?v=CmGlNjANXbw
If you want to see the entire program from which the above was taken, I’ve assembled a playlist. The highlights for me are parts 2 and 7 (part 1 merely introduces the program and could be skipped if you choose).
youtube.com/viewplaylist?p=F32B6E642843A26D
My list isn’t close to exhaustive. A visit to just one of the links will reveal lots of other Jo’raev videos, which YouTube will helpfully suggest to you.
Some people are arguing in the rain on the street beneath my window.
Lidé se hádají na vršovické ulici v dešti.
Some people are arguing in the rain on the street beneath my window.
Lidé se hádají na vršovické ulici v dešti.
I found myself writing a long account of how these images were made and why; but in the end I didn’t find those aspects of of current filecast to be interesting enough to merit all that thrashing. I think many of you can guess how they were made. Beyond that, it’s just better to let them speak for themselves.
A selection of four images from this portfolio appeared for the first time in the visual poetry blog Tip of the Knife.
This seaside gateway to the city of Odessa has been known by a series of names, including the Boulevard steps (situated as they are at the end of a grand boulevard), the Giant Staircase (they are, after all, big), and the Richelieu steps (after the first governor of the city, an expatriate Frenchman whose sculpted likeness stands at the top of the steps). They have also been called the Primorsky (or “Seaside”) Steps, which, since Ukrainian independence, stands again as their official name.
Under the Soviets, the steps were renamed the Potemkin Steps to honor the revolutionaries of the 1905 uprising commemorated by Eisenstein in the film Battleship Potemkin (which also served as source material for filecast 55270 suddenly). The famous scene of massacre on the Potemkin Steps from this film is likely a fictionalization, one that is representative of a series of killings that took place in various parts of Odessa during the uprising.
The steps themselves consist of a series of ten flights of twenty steps each, the flights separated by landings. The architect designed the steps as an optical illusion: from the top, one can see only landings, while from the bottom, one sees only steps. The wikipedia article contains many more fascinating details, and I won’t reiterate them all here.
Like an optical illusion, my perception of the steps is likewise refracted by the various cultural meanings associated with them. Historically, they symbolize an important event in history, as mentioned above. Artistically, they lie in the afterglow of their graphic and symbolic importance in the making of a renowned work of art. Steps themselves are imbued with symbolic qualities, such as rising and falling, progress and its opposite, or even heaven and hell.
Functionally, steps are conceived as a way of easing motion in space thru discrete, evenly spaced, small, predictable and ordered stages, much like the frames of a film create the optical illusion of movement thru sequential still photography at a fixed rate. The cinema makes time plastic; then we can splay it and get a different sense of the sense that it makes.
Field. In the jungles of Angkor, among the innumerable temples of the Angkor Wat complex, the pervasive sounds are these: motor bikes, souvenir hawkers, roadside musicians, and — most of all — the eerie, disorienting chorus of whistling cicadas.
I took some liberties in naming this filecast, since the phrase “pearl of asia” usually denotes Phnom Penh, the French-colonial capital of Cambodia. I should state, for the sake of clarity, that none of these sounds come from the streets of that city. Instead, they were collected further north, in the Angkor Wat temple complex, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Suffice to say that Angkor is certainly a “pearl of the world”; in other words, it is an essential human artifact.
Also, in calling this a field recording, I have taken a similar liberty. The audio is in fact a mix of field recordings, tho they were all made on the same day (28 October 2008) in the same general location. A strict linear presentation would have been too long, and frankly boring, so I did a little layering. I also cut out the obnoxious sound of something brushing against the microphone at one point. Other than that, the sounds are relatively unmanipulated.
The extended musical section that forms the ample middle of the work was performed by the gentlemen pictured above. They are all victims of land mine explosions, and they play alongside the jungle path to collect alms. Land mines are an endemic problem in Cambodia, and foreigners are repeatedly reminded not to stray off of established paths. You can be sure the locals do not need to be reminded of this. I was told that statistically in Cambodia, one cow explodes each day from grazing too close to a land mine, placed there years earlier. Hearsay, perhaps, but certainly cautionary.
The whistling cicadas were the biggest surprise for me. Omnipresent, at times overbearingly loud, they are like environmental tinnitus. You hear the sound whenever you are surrounded by jungle, a steady pressure on the ear that does not let up. Sometimes, it feels like coming down from altitude when your ears are about to pop. At lower levels, it’s not an unpleasant sound, but it is very strange, coming from all directions, and at such a fixed pitch that you might convince yourself it is artificially produced. Rest assured that the source of this sound is entirely organic.
This series of photographs came from a gradual accumulation of images collected over the last ten years during many short excursions by car in southwest Iowa, specifically in the valleys of the Nishnabotna River and its tributaries.
The area is characterized as “rolling prairie” which — in another part of the world — might be called a steppe. It is abutted on the west by the loess hills, which piled up over millennia by windswept silts, and are considered to be an unusual geographic formation. This terrain undulates like a rumpled blanket on an unmade bed and, in its primordial state last glimpsed over a century ago, was said to have resembled a green ocean as the endless expanses of wild grasses tossed their seed-heavy heads in the breeze.
Under till of the persistent monocultures of corn, soybeans, and industrial hog confinements, no vista here is untouched by the locals’ obedience to the logic of the Cartesian grid that circumscribes each county, township, parcel, sub-parcel, and so on, ever downward, a fractal series dividing the soil in the minds of the people who use it.
The local weather’s music is that of rustling stems of high weeds in the wind, the distant rumble of an approaching thunderstorm, a clap of thunder and rattle of hailstones; the whistle of a freight train passing thru a small town; the calls of the redwing blackbird, the barn owl and the chicken hawk; the pop of jointed snakegrass as it’s pulled apart; the snorting of pigs and the lowing of milk cows (less often now than before); and — I swear it’s the truth – the sound of the corn growing.
Once, the muddy banks of a local creek, after the wash of a heavy rain, divulged the skull and horns of what was said to be muskox, a species today found only in the Arctic. If it’s truly a muskox (it is identified as such at a small regional museum), that would suggest that its carcass was likely abandoned here by the last wave of retreating glaciers (the Tioga maxima are thought to have receded some 10, 000 years ago). Seeing this skull in a glass cabinet is one of the few experiences I've had in this region that explicitly connects with prehistory. After all, few human structures in Iowa are much over 100 years old.
The native population left a few burial mounds, but has otherwise long since all but vanished. But I imagine I sometimes see traces of it left behind in a very few local faces, possibly thru an interracial coupling or adoption in a past generation, perhaps long forgotten.
The images in the series are presented in black and white, with heavily manipulated tonalities. They appear for the first time in the monograph Nishnabotna Landscapes, published as Discréto 26 by Le Nouvel Obscurantiste.
In light of the previous post, which coyly dropped “revolution” into the present ideosphere, I am taken aback to find that my choice of music to accompany part III. of filecast 55270 suddenly also – unintentionally – seems marked by this theme. Having chosen the music purely for its musical qualities and the way that it “made sense” with the image, this came as a small surprise. Then, I did not know that the “Song of Stenka Razin” is a popular Russian folk song about a 17th-century Cossack, who, like the sailors of battleship Potemkin, also led a revolt against the Tsar. (A different Tsar, of course.)
When I started prying google for answers, I also came up with the fact that this same character was the subject of the first narrative film in the history of Russian cinema, in the form of the 1908 film Stenka Razin. It’s a jaunty little tale, running a brisk eight minutes, of: man meets princess; man’s men get jealous; man’s men plant false story to discredit princess; man becomes enraged with jealousy and throws princess into the drink. Wikipedia has the lyrics to the song, some eleven verses in all, of which a representative selection follows:
Волга, Волга, мать родная, / Волга, русская река,
Не видала ты подарка / От донского казака!
Мощным взмахом поднимает / Он красавицу княжну
И за борт ее бросает / В набежавшую волну.
Volga, Volga, Mother Volga / Wide and deep beneath the sun,
You have never seen such a present / From the Cossacks of the Don.
Now, with one swift mighty motion / He has raised his bride on high
And has cast her where the waters / Of the Volga roll and sigh.
Something to ponder while we wait for the next filecast.
Part II. of filecast 55270 suddenly is accompanied by an edit I made of a recording of a remarkable performance that I found on one of the shadowy torrent sites that makes the internet such an interesting “place.” The uploader tells a story of the cassette being given to them by a Somali refugee, saying: “She took this cassette with her when she left Somaliland – one of the few possessions she was permitted to bring. The tape was literally falling apart, and … had no notes on the j-card, but for a handwritten Mohamed Mooge Jawaabtii Beledweyne. ‘Jawaab’ = something like ‘response’, ‘beledweyn’ = big city.”
Mohamed (sometimes ‘Maxamed’) Mooge Liibaan (sometimes ‘Baban’) was a Somali oudist, and also a “singer, composer, musician, teacher and revolutionary, … acclaimed not only for the purity of his voice, said by many to be the best in all Somali speaking areas, but also for his integrity, revolutionary zeal, teaching ability and his efforts to maintain high artistic and social ideals in his music.”1 He was killed in 1984.
As if to quell any doubt that he was, indeed, a revolutionary, one picture shows him holding his oud in one hand and a grenade in the other.
Eisenstein, too, was a revolutionary, perhaps most precisely of the cultural sort; but his life and work are interleaved with the very real revolution that gave birth of the USSR. Connecting the manipulated frames from his groundbreaking 1925 silent film, all 24 of which are shown above, with the work of a Somali oudist, little known in the west, was done entirely without the revolutionary connection in mind. Instead, I chose the lively, rhythmic and virtuoso playing of Mooge to join with the images of a woman apparently tossing her head wildly, to suggest the kind of dance one might see in a mosh pit.
You’ll forgive me if I note, in passing, that wikipedia gives five variants of an oft-quote by the 19th and 20th-century anarchist Emma Goldman. I choose to cite this one: If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.
Video. Three short sequences of camera shots from the film Battleship Potemkin are reduced to their individual frames, and each becomes a part of this filecast. The frames of I. are directly altered, while II. and III. are re-ordered or interleaved according to mathematical patterns chosen at whim.
The title comes from the intertitle that immediately precedes a brief sequence in Potemkin of a young black-haired woman in a striped blouse, which opens the famous and much-celebrated Odessa steps sequence from the film. The title, in Russian, reads и вдруг (i vdrug), which means “and suddenly.”
The entire sequence of four camera shots comprises a scant 24 frames (Based on my DVD copy of the film, leaving aside the frames that are duplicated to bring the original 16 or 18-frames-per-second camera original up to the modern sound film standard of 24 fps). This is less than two seconds of screen time.
The first shot is only five frames of tossing hair with no part of the face clearly visible. The second shot is also five frames, this time, her head and torso are thrown back quickly, either in shock at the sound of rifle fire, or perhaps because she has taken a bullet. The third shot consists of eight frames, as her head lurches forward and then backward again, as emotional shock registers on her face. The final six frames cut from the previous closeup to an extreme closeup of her facial expression seen thru her disheveled hair, as she continues to lurch slightly toward the camera. It is a tiny masterpiece of rhythm, composition, and meaning, and a microcosmic representative of what makes Potemkin such a revered work.
Addendum: I was asked how these were made, and so:
I’m not using anything special to resequence frames; basically, brute force. I split the video file into stills, saving each frame as numbered png file. If I feel like it, I can retouch the individual pngs just as you would any photograph.
I use a file renaming tool to renumber the png files any way I want. In the end, the pngs will always play in temporal order by their numeric sort position, so renaming (renumbering) them is all it takes to change their playback order. I use a javascript I wrote, or a perl script that I found, to generate lists of numbers according to patterns that I choose. The file renamer takes a list as an input and renames the files in a selected directory in order, following the list. Care is required so as not to create conflicting file numbers, which might overwrite content unintentionally during the renaming process.
So, for example, by taking a directory of png files, duplicating it en masse, and then giving the first directory of pngs all even numbers, and then reversing the sort order of the other set and renumbering them odd, you can then unite the two sets and derive an interleaved video that plays forward in every other frame, while simultaneously playing backward in the others. Once you grasp this, it’s straightforward to dream up ways to create sets of sets of images, renumber them, and then unite them into one big set, with a complex interleaving pattern being the result. The final step is simply to import the final image sequence set frame by frame into a video.
I have a sort of philosophy behind doing it this way. If these manipulations were as easy as clicking a button in some interface, then one needn’t really consider too deeply why one would make such a choice. Because my method is slow and deliberate, I am considering – consciously or not – each step in turn, and reëvaluating the envisioned end constantly thruout the process. So my end result must be different from an result achieved thru “easier” (not necessarily “simpler”) means.
As if carried in on a bracing wind from the foot of the Urals, this recording fell into my hands from a friend, who had transcribed it from a collection of vinyl records borrowed thru a family connection. The four-track EP is sung in Bashkir, the Turkic language of the indigenous people of the Republic of Bashkortostan, a constituent of the Russian Federation. The song is called, unhelpfully for us non-bashkirophones, “Бишек йыры, ” and I have not been able to find a translation for the title. However, a web search for just those Cyrillic characters turns up a number of Russian and Bashkir music sites, with any number of instances of the string, a result too rarefied for drawing sound conclusions.
But there are more clues: Here is a transl[iter]ation of the record label, shown above, as best I can manage: Bishek jyry (Kh. Ibragimov–G. Tukaj) M. Khismatullin and the Orchestra of the Bashkir State Theatre of Opera and Ballet, directed by G. Mutalov. I would venture Ibragimov/Tukaj to be the composers and M. Khismatullin as the vocalist. With these names, perhaps further web searches would be fruitful; I’ll leave that up to the curious among you.
I find objects from this region and period to be particularly evocative and somewhat mysterious, because I grew up in the United States during a time when the Soviet Union, or simply “Russia” as many called it, was thought of as a monolithic empire filled with “Russians, ” with very little cognizance allowed for the many dozens of ethnicities that live within the territory of that huge confederation. I think it is accurate to think of today’s Russian Federation as a country composed of many smaller countries, peoples living among the scattered Russians and their kin, hiding in plain sight within the Slavic behemoth.
Last December, I traveled along the Gulf of Lion by train, on my way to visit relatives in Spain. At a stop to change trains in Portbou, a border town in the Pyrenees, I had a few minutes to wait for the train to Barcelona. I decided to walk around the station, just to see what I could. As I rounded a corner, I was slammed by a wall of air that nearly knocked me off my feet. It was the north wind, slipping like greased lightning down the face of the mountain. It had a rich, hollow, ominous sound, like that of a dying bull.
I fumbled thru my belongings and eventually came up with my audio recorder so that I could try to capture it. I stood back from the corner in an area shielded from the direct blast, but where the wind’s deep throaty howl, like an overwrought sound effect from a horror movie, could still be heard clearly. I pressed record. At exactly that instant, a loud machine of some sort kicked in, just on the other side of the wall against which I had shielded myself. Tho it obscured the sound I was after, it replaced it with another similarly interesting sound. I waited several minutes, recording the while, and finally the machine stopped. The bell tower of a nearby church clattered to life, announcing the half hour. I continued recording until I realized that it would not be wise to further delay my boarding the train.
Later I found that some kind of loose connection or other malfunction had chosen that moment to manifest, and marred the recording with a string of unnatural clicking sounds. Not that I mind, in fact. Noise, the unexpected, chaos, all are important parts of this art.
Arriving in Barcelona, I was met by a friend who explained that the wind had a name: it’s called the “tramontana.” It’s easy to parse: the over-the-mountain wind. Wikipedia tells me it is the name used generally, from Spain to Croatia, for the north wind. More specific to the region I visited, however, is that the tramontana is a katabatic north wind that picks up speed as it passes between the Pyrenees and the Massif Central in France.
The word katabatic, and its opposite anabatic are unusually specific. The former refers to a movement from the interior to a coast; the latter denotes the opposite direction.
Filecast 55256 movements opens with the most interesting fragments of the recording I made in Portbou.
When I first started the nula.cc project, I had intended to give visitors the opportunity to comment on the filecasts, and share with me and other visitors interesting insights and resources that they may wish to share.
But, human frailty being what it is, I never got around to it. I still intend to implement something of the sort, but I don’t want to wait any longer. So starting this blog at posterous.com is simply expedient. Plus, I like the minimal esthetics and interface of the site. For now, anyway, posterous.com it is.
In any event, welcome to the nula blog. Bookmark it, grab the feed, follow it, and moreover, if you feel you want to say something about the nula project or anything related, we’d be most grateful for your participation.
When I first started the nula.cc project, I had intended to give visitors the opportunity to comment on the filecasts, and share with me and other visitors interesting insights and resources that they may wish to share.
But, human frailty being what it is, I never got around to it. I still intend to implement something of the sort, but I don’t want to wait any longer. So starting this blog at posterous.com is simply expedient. Plus, I like the minimal esthetics and interface of the site. For now, anyway, posterous.com it is.
In any event, welcome to the nula blog. Bookmark it, grab the feed, follow it, and moreover, if you feel you want to say something about the nula project or anything related, we’d be most grateful for your participation.
Školská 28 Gallery. Address: Školská 28, Prague. Also appearing: David Možný.
The Nula Project presents 55505 pareidolia, a screening program with live sound, a procession of images plucked from the world, layered and linked into a vaguely suggestive interpretation. The video screening is supported by a selection of sound works taken from the Nula Project, a series of filecasts that began in 2009.
Školská 28 Gallery. Address: Školská 28, Prague. Also appearing: David Možný.
The Nula Project presents 55505 pareidolia, a screening program with live sound, a procession of images plucked from the world, layered and linked into a vaguely suggestive interpretation. The video screening is supported by a selection of sound works taken from the Nula Project, a series of filecasts that began in 2009.
Note. The tune that comes in faintly at the end of the first version of 55147 twelve o’clock has a life of its own on the internet as “scary ice cream truck music.” The melody is from “The Waits Carol,” also known as “The Moon Shines Bright.” It is an old English song, dating to perhaps the 16th century.
One verse goes:
The life of man is but a span, —
It is cut down in its flower;
We are here to-day,
and to-morrow are gone;
We are all dead in an hour.
At my window in Vršovice, I can hear my neighbor practicing the piano.
U okna ve Vršovicích, poslouchám cvičení na piano od sousedů.
At my window, it starts to rain.
U okna, začiná pršet.
At my window, it starts to rain.
U okna, začiná pršet.
Early morning at Ruzyně airport, seated under an air handler.
Klimatizační jednotka v letišti Ruzyně, ráno.
Church bells of St. Václav (Wenceslas) at Čechovo náměstí (Chech Square) from my apartment balcony. The construction of the Church, designed by architect Josef Gočár, was carried out in the functionalist style between 1929-1930 and it was consecrated 21 September, 1930.The site was formerly a cemetery, and Gočár conceived the project as a hall, gradually rising towards the presbytery. This breakthrough in constructivist building in concrete is a significant site in Vršovice. The prismatic tower of the church, 50.80m in height, is located is crowned by a 7m-tall cross made of yellow opaxit. The tower has a rectangular plan and faces the square on its shorter side. The church has tall windows made of luxfer glass, which were replaced during renovation of the church in 1998. The steps leading up to the tower allow access to the cascaded roof. In 1996 the church was given two bells from the foundry of Mrs. Tomášková-Dytrychová of Brodek u Přerova. The smaller bell was consecrated to St. Ludmila and weighs 260 kg. The larger bell is 500 kg and was consecrated to St. Wenceslas.
Kostelní zvony z kostela sv. Václava na Čechově náměstí z balkonu mého bytu. Na náměstí Svatopluka Čecha, ve svahu stojí na místě bývalého hřbitova funkcionalistický kostel sv. Václava, postavený v letech 1929 - 1930 podle arch. J. Gočára. Je to první kostel v Československu, kdy byla použita skeletová železobentonová konstrukce. Výšková úroveň nad přístupovými schodištěm nabízí rozhled a poslech na celé náměstí, park a dopravní ruch.V roce 1996 byl při rekonstrukci kostel opatřen dvojicí zvonů z dílny paní Tomáškové-Dytrychové z Brodku u Přerova. Menší je zasvěcen svaté Ludmile a váží 260 kg a větší je zavěcen svatému Václavovi a má hmotnost 500 kg.
On a walkway under a train overpass near Nádraží Vršovice as a train passes overhead.
Na chodníku pod přejezdem u nádraží Vršovice.