flowers of evil flowers of evil

well this is pretty weird innit - two female electronic composers making albums based on the Baudelaire pomes  - in the same year: 1969







another female avant-garde Baudelaire rendition - with emphasis on the word 'rend' - but in this case the primary instrument is not synth but voice



live evil




release rationale for the Ciani, which came out this summer

As a genuine vanguard of electronic music composition at the forefront of the modular synthesiser revolution in the late 1960s, Suzanne Ciani’s forward-thinking approach to new music would rarely look to the past for inspiration, which makes this unheard composition from 1969 a rare exception to the collective futurist vision of Ciani and synthesiser designer Don Buchla. In choosing to adapt the controversial prose of French poet Charles Baudelaire, Suzanne would join the ranks of ongoing generations of pioneering musicians like Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Serge Gainsbourg, Etron Fou Leloublan, Celtic Frost and Marc Almond (not forgetting Star Trek’s William Shatner!), all equally inspired by the 19th century writer’s works of “modernité” (modernity), a self-coined term dedicated to capturing the eeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, best exempli ed in his symbolic, erotic and macabre ode to Parisian industrialisation, Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers Of Evil).

In her varied career that would combine art gallery installations, major lm soundtrackings and commissions for Atari, Suzanne Ciani’s earliest experiments remain some of her most challenging, beguiling and timeless... Flowers Of Evil ticks all the above boxes and icks switches that would power-up a new uncharted universe of her own musical modernité. For the many enthusiasts that have already drawn the parallels between Baudelaire’s writings and experimental/ electronic music (a relationship rivalled only by the likes of J. G. Ballard and Aldous Huxley) some might instantly recognise an unconscious sistership between this recording and another 1969 electronic adaptation of Flowers Of Evil by celebrated female electronic composer Ruth White. An interesting distinction of White’s excellent version of Flowers Of Evil (released via Limelight records, home to the likes of Fifty Foot Hose and Paul Bley) is that its dark tone generation and vocal manipulation was created with a Moog synthesiser, the commercially triumphant rival to Suzanne and Don’s Buchla Systems (Buchla and Moog’s historic, simultaneous, neck-and-neck synth developments are well documented.) The fact that Ciani’s version was never intended for commercial release (not unlike her 1975 Buchla concerts, which could easily have taken Morton Subotnick’s Bull by the horns!) is also poetically re ective of the nature of Ciani and Buchla’s alternative perspective. The choice to present this extract from Flowers Of Evil in its intended French language further distances Ciani’s faithful reaction from some of its better-known variations. Having attempted to voice the poem herself, the multilingual Italian-American composer’s French accent did not meet her own standards, resulting in the request for a fellow unnamed French student who lived on campus at Mills College in Oakland to accurately verbalise the section of Baudelaire’s collection entitled Élévation.



Not Baudelaire, and not a woman - but here's Ilhan Mimaroglu electrono-rendering Mallarme

stylemag eyecandy - ZG

i used to flick through these in the Virgin megastore - never bought one though

wish i had now, as they go for a packet - if you can find them

got just the one - issue 81 #2  (actually fourth in the sequence) with the theme Future Dread.

anyone got any copies, fancy scanning -  give us shout, maybe we can do a pdf trade

vampir-caudecuc

peaceful

fridge fright

mouth music (Bushwacked)

actually quite like this version

VH1 ladies

(before VH1 existed, but of the genus)




(more MTV than VH1)

Dorothy

from this



to this



is a journey to parallel Skank Bloc to Perfect Way

a cover of a Prince song

this is an original Birch-Aspinall composition



the decisive influence was Birch's discovery of this artist

Zygmunt played piiii-aaaa-noo

mouth music (trojan bird)

elizabeth swados

mouth music (breathspace + mouth research + structure phonétique)

(via Celestial Railroad)

mouth music (Tonks for the memories)

well that is a very eerie animation technique




a tantalising thought

Sono-Montage aka ABC in Sound: Alphabet Poetry 

A experiment in combining spoken poetry with electronically produced sounds
Arranged, directed, and introduced by Rosemary Tonks in conjunction with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
The programme is based on the following nine poems:
Speechhouse and Steeple-jock by Michael Baldwin
Mediterranean and A Silent Man by Peter Redgrove
Midsummer Thames and Fisherman of Alaedras by Paul Roche
Poet as Gambler, Badly-chosen Lover and Orpheus in Soho by Rosemary Tonks
Produced by George MacBeth
The original effects on which the orchestrations in this programme were based were recorded by 'Stagesound' for a public performance of sono-montage in Hampstead followed by an interlude at 18.50.

mouth music (scat-ology)

chimescape (gong gong gone)

"Just Gong" by Antti Tolvi - from the excellent Longform Editions series - whose releases include works by Sun Araw, Lieven Martens, Matthewdavid's Mindflight, Yamaneko, Norm Chambers, Richard Youngs, Bitchin Bajas, Pan American, to name just a handful

release rationale:

Just Gong is recorded with one take on one sunny autumn morning in our home Kemiö Island Finland. Playing with gongs is maybe a bit different than playing some other instruments. You do something and then you listen and notice how it response. You literally follow the sound. Sound may vary pretty much depending a day, place, temperature and so on. So it’s a very alive instrument in a way. And gong is very total instrument because the whole instrument is just one piece. No interfaces. No boundaries. Just one.

I think gong might be the one of the oldest noise/drone instruments in the world. The first signs of gongs are around 3 000 years ago in China.

This piece is played with 44” Wind Gong Wuhan and recorded with Soundman Binaural Microphones to Zoom H5 recorder. Mastering made by my dear friend Pentti Dassum.

After more than decade of daily meditation, deep listening, or I like to call it just listening has become one of my main practices. In just listening I just listen. And not just sounds around me, but also my inner world. Feelings, thought, tensions, everything that arises to my consciousness. And idea is to just listen them, let them come and let them go. See the constant transformation. And to be able to see the transformation, you need to listen for a while. And what you will hear? Just life all around. One huge life. Just gong… 


artist bio: 

Antti Tolvi was born at the farm in Panelia, small village at west coast of Finland. Antti works as composer, performer and sound artist and has been one of the main figures in underground music scene in Finland since 2002. Antti has played over 300 shows around world in three continent. There is thirteen solo records under Antti´s name and Antti has been part of over fifty record as composer and/or musician. Last year Antti has made many sound art installations to galleries around Finland and worked with wide range of different arts; performance, dance, puppet theatre, light art, films… Antti has also organized sound art festival Kiilan Äänipäivät since 2014. Antti´s other profession is working as Qigong and mediation teacher. Antti has studied Taiji, Qigong and Zen meditation since 2002 with various teachers and has been teaching since 2010.

www.anttitolvi.com



more on Longform Editions

Longform Editions is an ongoing series creating a space of musical discovery for extended pieces of exploratory, expansive and immersive music pieces from around the world, looking to reclaim time and space in the fractured world we live in.


longformeditions.com

https://longformeditions.bandcamp.com/

chimescape (the son of)

chimescape / crystal vibrations

first release from Sounds of the Dawn in a year and a half!

J Rowe
drums, percussion, gongs,
tibetan bowls, vibraphone,
harmonium, mellotron, piano

plus

Jordan Schug
double bass, cello
Molly Jones
flute

chimescape (the return #2)

chimescape (the return)

Patrick et Michèle

hollis-schwartz

                                                      

  

 

beatriz potty

avant eye candy (the return's return 4 of ??)