Quick Links, News and Good Reads: (1) Just closed at the Migros Museum in Zurich, Switzerland, the exhibit “While Interwoven Echoes Drip into a Hybrid Body: an Exhibition about Sound Performance and Sculpture,”curated by Heike Munder and Raphael Gygax, and featuring work by Banks Violette, Dave Allen, Mileece, Paul Etienne Lincoln, Peter Coffin, Seb Patane and the pairings of Chris Cunningham with Bjork, Delia Gonzalez with Gavin Russom, and Rita Ackermann with Agathe Snow (migrosmuseum.ch). The Mileece piece involved using plants for sound data, and Dave Allen’s involved attempting to teach two white-rumped shamas to sing the birdsong-derived piano Catalogue d’Oiseaux by Olivier Messiaen. … (2) Brian Eno produced Paul Simon‘s new album, Surprise, out this past week, and the New York Times interviewed Simon (nytimes.com). … (3) The London Guardian spoke with Eno about the birth of ambient (guardian.co.uk). … (4) The remix site set up to celebrate the rerelease of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Eno’s 1981 collaboration with David Byrne, finally went live: bush-of-ghosts.com/remix. Download the multitrack material that comprise two cuts off the album: “A Secret Life” and “Help Me Somebody.” And then upload your own rendition. … (5) The only references to Bush on Byrne’s blog (davidbyrne.com) appear to be the U.S. president. … (6) The exhibit “Eigenheim, everything but the kitchen sink,” running through June 4 at the Kunstverein Goettingen in Goettingen, Germany, includes a sound installation by Mungo Thomson “of the artist making music on wine glasses call forth a narrative about time spent alone within one’s space” (kunstvereingoettingen.de). …
(7) Mathieu Briand‘s exhibit “Ubiq: A Mental Odyssey,” running through June 18 at REDCAT in Los Angeles, includes “an installation of four turntables and a mixing board connected to a vinyl cutting machine where viewers can create their own aural expression by manipulating samples and etching their own vinyl records” (redcat.org). … (8) Four entries with sound are listed among the material in the current Whitney Biennial, “Day for Night”: Trisha Donnelly; Dan Graham, with Tony Oursler, Rodney Graham, Laurent P. Berger, Bruce Odland and Japanther; Dorothy Iannone; and Jim O’Rourke. … (9) Mark Bain, Yuji Oshima and Semiconductor are among the sound artists, curated by Daniele Balit, participating in the Prague Contemporary Art Festival, through June 27 (tina-b.com). … (10) The Sonambiente festival (sonambiente.net) will bring some 75 sound artists to Berlin between June 1 and July 16, including Candice Breitz, Janet Cardiff, Terry Fox, Christina Kubisch, Helen Mirra and Carsten Nicolai. … (11) Speaking of Kubisch, there’s extended coverage at the website of MASS MoCA museum’s sound art exhibits by Ronald J. Kuivila, Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger, and Kubisch (massmoca.org). … (12) Speaking of Cardiff, there’s a great conversation between film director Atom Egoyan and her at bombmagazine.com. … (13) A music critic (Chris DeLaurenti) and an art critic (Carrie E. A. Scott) debate the usefulness of the term “sound art,” focusing on the artist Trimpin at thestranger.com. … (14) Watch a choir immitate the sounds of a Honda Civic (honda.co.uk/civic). (Thanks, David and Bart.) … (15) Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts author Douglas Kahn is using his Guggenheim Fellowship to complete his book Radio Was Discovered Before It Was Invented (ucdavis.edu). … (16) Also among this year’s Guggenheim recipients: musicians Paul Dresher and Scott Johnson, and sound artist Jeff Talman.
… Keeping Score: (1) Amon Tobin is credited with scoring the forthcoming film Taxidermia, directed by Gyorgy Palfi. Two clips are up on youtube.com (“Exhibit,” “The Taxidermist“), per pe7er.com. … (2) That drums-heavy, stripped-down version of Lalo Shifrin‘s theme for Mission Impossible running at the end of the third and most recent Tom Cruise movie is by Kanye West and Jon Brion. It doesn’t appear to be on the initial soundtrack album, released on Varese Sarabande. … According to IMDB.com, (3) David Holmes is aboard for Ocean’s Thirteen, due out in 2007; (4) Gustavo Santaolalla is working again with his 21 Grams collaborator, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, on Babel; (5) Philip Glass is on The Illusionist and The Reaping; (6) Clint Mansell‘s on Joe (Narc) Carnahan‘s Smokin’ Aces and Gregory Jacobs‘ Wind Chill; and (7) Cliff Martinez is on Mark Fergus‘ First Snow.
… Disquiet Heavy Rotation: (1) Pianist Daan Vandewalle‘s four-disc readings of Alvin Curran‘s Inner Cities (Long Distance), especially the glacially paced “Inner Cities 9 (For Reinier Van Houdt).” … (2) The “self-remixed” greatest hits of DJ Krush, Stepping Stones, which comes as two discs, one of vocal cuts and the other of “soundscapes.” … (3) The Disquiet Downstream entry of the past few weeks is Stephane Leonard‘s constantly shifting sonic data on tri, his set on the Luv Sound netlabel (link).
… Quote of the Week: “I can’t see all that gorgeous radio anymore… The stars have stopped singing like they used to.” That’s Lois Lane, coming down after a day of enjoying all the powers of Superman, his birthday gift to her in the third and latest issue of All-Star Superman (DC Comics), written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Frank Quitely.