Thursday, March 29, 2018

animasonix (Piotr + Bernard)

















(via Bollops at Found Objects)

the first three at least are definitely soundtracked by Parmegiani

reviewing a Bernard P box set, I noted direct parallels between the processes of animation and musique concrete

"In the booklet accompanying L'Oeuvre Musicale, Parmegiani talks revealingly about an artistic past-time that preceded his adventures in sonic fiction: photomontage. He'd cut out a large number of image-fragments from magazines--human limbs, machine parts, etc--and then glue them into surreal assemblages. His music-making would follow a similar process, starting with the building-up of a sound-bank, an inventoried miscellany of noises, before embarking on composition. Compared to the photocollages, though, Parmegiani's music has at least one extra element: life. It's analogous maybe to animators who use stop-motion film techniques to bring a queer vitality to their materials, whether three-dimensional puppets or photographic and illustrative material (as with Terry Gilliam's Monty Python collages). "I do consider sounds as living things," Parmegian has said. But with concrete as with animation, the movement in the musique is life-like but umheimlich."


Bernie soundtracking one of his own experimental films



Now a lot of this concrete for cartoons and experimental shorts was rounded up, unofficially, by a label that called itself New England Electric Music Company for a six part series of mini-CD-Rs.

This label would seem to be the immediate precursor to Creel Pone:

"... named after the original New England Electric Music Company from the early XX century, which funded Thaddeus Cahill's ambitious plan to transmit music, produced on his Telharmonium, to hotels, restaurants, theatres and private homes via the telephone network. This visionary project (preceding the concept of online music streaming for generations) failed due to high costs and potential interference with telephone calls on the same line. The description on the website mixes reality with fiction, describing Thaddeus as our contemporary and Whitman' "good friend": 

"The New England Electric Music Company was set up by our good friend Thaddeus Cahill to make rare, obscure, and unreleased historic electronic music available to individuals on a local basis. All NEEMC releases are lovingly researched and sourced by Thaddeus throughout the world, mastered in the Math Lab by Hrvatski, designed by Pieter Christophssen and manufactured in small runs in the Reckankomplexreplication bureau by the Reckankreuzungsklankewerkzeuge staff. They are sold to local music stores on a not-for-profit basis".



1 comment:

Bollops said...

Ah wow, that NEEMC is a find! Ta! I imagine they'll be impossible to get hold of, but in a way that's even better.

Re: PK and BP, the idea of that set-up they were involved with - Service de la Recherche ORTF, an equivalent to the Radiophonic Workshop I suppose but with even greater freedom, by the sound of it - that's Utopia, isn't it? I would commit terrible acts to be involved in something like that. "Here's a load of equipment, make weird things, we'll broadcast it." Perhaps it wasn't quite like that, but the idea of it, pure bliss.

One thing worth noting about Kamler: apart from the soundtrack, he worked completely alone. He wasn't just a director, he had no grunts to do the animation for him, that was all His Own Work. Even the mechanical / structural gubbins that fixed everything in place.