The artist Michael Barth Meyers had an exhibit last autumn at the Johansson Projects gallery in Oakland. I missed the exhibit, but when I dropped by the gallery earlier this year, two pieces were still hanging. Both evidence Meyer’s emphasis on sound as sculpture.
“A Remoter Hello” (2007), pictured above and below, is a fantasy of […]
You can hear the sounds when you walk down Hollywood Boulevard. Some that your recognize, some that you’ve never even heard before. Not far from where Hollywood meets Vine, these sounds emanate from the gallery LACE, or Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. They’re a gentle, quiet array of noises, some seemingly melodic, but many with the […]
A selection of recent freely viewable videos of note:
Spoken Word: Public Enemy producer Hank Shocklee interviewed (vimeo.com, via createdigitalmusic.com). … Minimal techno figure Robert Henke (aka Monolake) presentation (video.google.com, via createdigitalmusic.com). … Laptop-enabled guitarist Christopher Willits lecture on his process (xlr8r.com). … Soundtrack composer Tyler Bates on the film Doomsday (soundtrack.net). … Alex Ross, author […]
The dot matrix printer may have beat the fax machine to the recycle bin of history, but both have something in common: an unintentionally musical quality to their audio output. For the latter it’s that telecom handshake, that mashed-data noise of two communication systems finding some common technological ground. For the former, it’s that steady […]
If the work by artist PB8 mentioned in yesterday’s entry on the recent Sound Device exhibit (disquiet.com) emphasized physicality and interaction, the recording of “Close to Silence I” on his website (pb8.lt) embraces exactly the opposite. A solid example of procedural composition, it is a piece of music in which the musician focused his creative […]
The gallery Root Division in San Francisco exhibited a group show of sound art, titled Sound Device, for a short time, from March 5 - 22, ending this past Saturday. I made the opening night reception, but didn’t have an opportunity to return before the exhibit shut down. I do have photos I shot that […]
An installation by Oliver diCicco, titled Sirens, filled the large hall at the gallery and performance space SomArts (somarts.org) in San Francisco from January 10 through February 14 of this year. I missed the opening, but was fortunate to be almost entirely alone when I stopped by a few days later. Sirens consists of 11 […]
Recent Items from the World of Sound Art: Interview with early sound-art figure William Furlong, founder with Michael Archer of the publication Audio Arts, by Ilari Valbonesi (at ecopolis.org): “The tape was also an economic form of production and distribution.” … Interview with Adam Nash, whose sound work has been exhibited within the online simulation […]
The following text, under the heading “We met in London last year,” appears on the wall above the exit from the new Gilbert & George retrospective at the de Young Museum in San Francisco:
We began to dream of a world of beauty and happiness of great riches and pleasures new of joy and laughter of […]
The photo below shows a piece from the new exhibit of Ward Schumaker’s mixed-media paintings at the Meridian Gallery in San Francisco.
The exhibit is titled Books and Drawings and runs from January 24 through March 1, 2008. The photo captures all but the very edge of the work, which is titled “Small Record Player.” […]