Images from the art exhibit “Moiré” by Carsten Nicolai, perhaps better known in the world of electronic music as Alva Noto. The show ran at the Pace Gallery in Manhattan from May 21 through June 25 of this year:
The exhibit is associated with Nicolai’s recent book, also titled Moiré, which follows his similar collection Grid. Both volumes present numerous examples of the stark geometries defined by the books’ titles. Moiré is a meta-sequel to Grid, in that it focuses on how multiple patterns, when combined, produce the illusion of a subsequent pattern. The exhibit presents a range of op art that plays with viewers’ perceptions. What’s especially interesting is how the patterning mirrors Nicolai’s vibrant-yet-spartan musical output.
Images from the review by Geeta Dayal at frieze.com of the show (in which she reports, “Nicolai’s visual work is so well integrated with his work in sound that while there’s no music to be heard here — unless the hum of an air compressor counts — you can see music in everything.”), and from the gallery’s website, thepacegallery.com.
The top searches of the month were “autechre” (big surprise there), “aairria” (subject of a couple Downstream entries), “lesley flanigan” (interviewed here in June, and shown in the photo at left), and “oval,” and then in a multi-way tie “:¬l” (that’s a musician’s name), “aphex” (as in Aphex Twin), “exit strategy,” “green day” (your guess is as good as mine), “nah und fern” (the title of a box set of work by Gas, aka Wolfgang Voigt), “p-funk,” “rss,” “terry riley,” “topic,” and “vuvuzela.” That’s leaving out search requests that yield null results.
A package arrived in the mail recently containing the above artifact, a floppy disk labeled “epulse 1997.” It contained most of the issues of epulse published that year. Epulse was a zine I founded in 1994 at Tower Records, where I was an editor from 1989 through 1996. I left the company in 1996 to join Citysearch.com, and continued writing freelance for the magazines (in addition to epulse, there was the flagship, Pulse!, and a magazine I co-founded, Classical Pulse!). Epulse, somewhat advanced for its time, was published only via email: 1997 was its third full year of existence, and it ran through 2002.
Thanks for the disk go to Jason Verlinde (of fretboardjournal.com), who took over the editing of epulse when I left the company (years later I took it back on as a freelance project).
A car honks twice, and then what follows is an inundation of descriptions of a grisly automobile accident that has taken the life of a loved one, as well as of the detached bystanders who snap mobile-phone pictures of the splattered corpse.
A rector talks at length about the intense, the unknowably demanding, emotional requisites of his funeral work, and as his measured tones come to a halt, church bells seem to ring out in the distance, muffled by solemnity and space — and, no doubt, by some manner of digital processing.
The processing is courtesy of Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud), who produced the work, titled “Sighs, Wonders,” with writer Sukhdev Sandhu on a commission from the Spitalfields Festival London earlier this year. Two versions are available for free online. There’s a nearly 20-minute “instrumental” take (albeit with a few brief spoken passages) he posted yesterday:
And there’s a shorter excerpt (MP3), about half that length, at the website of the sponsoring festival:
[audio:http://spitalfieldsfestivaladmin.new.mindunit.co.uk/images/resource/SighsWon.mp3|titles=”Sighs Wonders”|artists=”Scanner and Sukhdev Sandhu and Paul Turp”]
Scanner and Sandhu previously collaborated on the hypertextual “nocturnal journal” nighthaunts.org.uk, with visuals by the digital studio Mind Unit. For “Sighs, Wonders” they again plumb matters of urbanism and mortality. As Scanner’s characteristic ambience unfolds, voices are heard intoning about the history of the land, matters of flesh and spirit, of “Roman bones” and “paupers’ bones” and everything in between.
Scanner’s early career involved using words he snatched from the ether (hence his name), the candid words of others unwittingly sewn into his sound art, but he also works with dramatic efforts, such as these texts. In one of the many “Sighs, Wonders” spoken bits, the following is uttered:
“For the upscale slummer, it’s a peepshow picturesque. For the missionary, it’s a chance to play imperial redeemer, tamer of beasts, a human chandelier radiating the darkness.”
Sandhu could be speaking of the unwashed masses of an urban setting. Or he could be speaking, more self-consciously, of the tension inherent in Scanner’s practice. The instrumental version of “Sighs, Wonders” is a lovely thing, a mix of moody synthesized noise and occasional field recordings, punctuated by brief utterances. The spoken version, naturally, brings the narrative concerns to the fore. The rector’s words are spoken not by Sandhu but by an actual local Shoreditch rector, whose presence blurs the space between documented and constructed reality. (Such a quintessentially British place name, Shoreditch, the sort of deeply mundane, semi-oxymoronic term that had it not existed, surely China Miéville would have created it for one of his novels.) We experience the piece (in either its instrumental or verbalized editions) simultaneously as a virtuous art, and as an archive of deterioration.
Usually the majority of the most popular posts in a given month on Disquiet.com are drawn from the site’s daily free (and legal) recommendations of MP3s. July was no exception, though four non-freebie posts also appear in the top 10: (1) 
The six most popular free downloads of the month, rounding out the top 10 most popular posts, were (5) 
The top searches of the month were “autechre” (big surprise there), “aairria” (subject of a 
