From the preface to Kyle Gann’s new book, No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4′33″ (Yale University Press), which I’m reading right now:
“I had to consciously remember that not every music lover out there has 4′33″, as I do, in his blood.”
What’s striking about the book is that it is, indeed, written by a [...]
Quote of the week isn’t from this week. It’s about 60 years old, and it popped up recently on the blog of sound artist Steve Roden:
Outside, from near, there is a sound. It happens every night, and it is most sorrowful. It is the voice of a blond, fat, and craven rooster, a creature half-frightened [...]
After some snow crunching, and a discernibly heavy breath, a voice emerges from the near silence: “This is certainly the remotest landscape I have ever been recording in.” The speaker is one Chris Watson (pictured above), long ago a founding member of Cabaret Voltaire, and for many years one of the foremost field recordists, capturing [...]
The group show that closed yesterday at the Vancouver, Washington, art gallery Archer was titled Vantage, and it focused on “perspective – visually, contextually, and perceptually,” according to its brief description at the gallery’s website, at clark.edu. Among the pieces in the exhibit was Greg Pond’s interactive sound sculpture “That Intricate Never,” as shown in [...]
The top 10 most-read posts of January (out of 42 posts in all) were heavy with Downstream entries — that is, with legal freely downloadable recommended listening: (1) sound art made at an Indian call center (pictured at left) by Mathias Delplanque, (2) Lesley Flanigan’s music for speakers and voice, (3) the sound of mangled [...]
If you stand on East 1st Street in Manhattan these days, just below 2nd Avenue, you might hear the sounds of Beverly Hills. It might sound like someone’s taking a pee, or you might hear geographically inappropriate birds — you might hear traffic, even when the street is free of it. And you might hear [...]
Lasse-Marc Riek’s latest field-recording set is a matter of the cooked and the raw. It contains two tracks, the first of them (“Juringels Warten”) a composition constructed from field recordings, and the second (“Astra Park”) an unretouched field recording. Titled Das Teilen Der Flügel, the mini-album includes liner notes that help single out the elements [...]