Monday, February 24, 2020

mouth music (alfred and roy)









pop follies





mouth music (vegetable mineral)



(via David Stubbs)

A brand new collection of songs by Viv Corringham - away from the more familiar experiments and improvations these are real songs with words, all sung in Viv's extraordinary voice. Using minimalist backings comprised of field recordings or her own looped or multitracked voice, these short pieces feel like bizarre diary entries brought to life- unusual and affecting.

Viv Corringham is a UK vocalist currently living and working in New York, she has worked with a bewildering number of musicians in a wide range of styles ranging from free improvisation to rembetika.

quotes from Nausika - The Sound Projector


"Viv Corringham’s previous outing on Linear Obsessional, 2013’s ‘Gum + Butts’, was a wonderful and strange odyssey. Corringham recorded live improvisations at various sites across London – Borough Market, Tate Modern, Kings Cross station, etc – often in the open air, surrounded by the hustle and bustle of everyday life. This combination of locational specificity and weird utterance gave ‘Gums + Butts’ a startling and refreshing quality, as if a quizzical alien tourist were trudging around the capital beaming sonic postcards back to its brethren across the galaxy.

Field recordings were central to ‘Gum + Butts’, and they also make an appearance on ‘Until I Learn the Language of Vegetable Mineral’, often working in combination with subtle electronics and processed voices to provide fuzzy, soft-edged backdrops for Corringham’s vocal explorations. ‘Leaving By The Small Door’ sets drowsy insectoid buzzing and birdsong against an unsettling mantra whose echoes hang in the air like smoke. “We’re leaving by the small door … our story unfinished … nobody left remembers the beginning anyway”. Imagine H.G Wells’ ‘The Door In The Wall’ as a despatch from the other side of the brickwork.

‘Until I Learn the Language of Vegetable Mineral’ contains, as the release notes tell us, ‘real songs, with words’. This is …. fine, I guess, although anyone who’s listened to commercial radio recently will tell you that ‘real songs with words’ aren’t necessarily all they’re cracked up to be. Nevertheless, Corringham’s embrace of the form is compelling, her vocals floating in deft, almost folkish melodies above the hiss and swirl as her lyrics pile up streams of imagistic impressions. ‘In The Skyways of Minneapolis’ starts as a roving travelogue, Corringham cruising like a surveillance drone above the landscape, before shifting into a stern, eery register. “Unwritten, cold, betray thee outsider … I look out of windows … I try to decide which direction to walk … None of this behaviour is normal,” she croons, like Annette Peacock teleported into an Arthur Machen story while a warped choir moans and gurgles behind her.

Corringham’s extended vocal techniques, manipulated and fragmented with typically excellent post-production, give the nine compositions on ‘Until I Learn the Language of Vegetable Mineral’ a feverish, almost tormented quality, as if she were constantly surrounded hissing armies of the unquiet dead. In ‘Rising’ she’s corralled these spectres into a harmonious group, a deathly barber-shop quartet caged in her hard drive to add elegant accompaniment to this sparse eco-lament. Their blissful hoots are a poignant farewell before everything is swamped in digital debris, vestigial echoes of humanity finally swept away by Anthropocene floods.
-Paul Margree, We Need No Swords weneednoswords.wordpress.com/2019/04/04/viv-corringham-until-i-learn-the-language-of-animal-or-mineral/

"For the past 40 years this British-born US-based singer has been cutting her own distinctive path as a singer and vocalist ranging across free improvisation, Greek rembetika, Turkish folk and other styles of music, often combined with environmental field recordings made during solo walks. Her discography both solo and in collaboration with others is rather daunting for someone like me who has only just heard of her very recently but this most recent recording, minimal in style and based entirely around her voice, is an excellent introduction into her work and approach to music, vocalising and recording. For all the experimentation Corringham does here with her voice, the tracks are very song-like with her manipulation of her vocals, the field recordings and minimal electronics providing the musical backing. There is as much spoken-voice poetry as there is singing or vocalising, and the subject matter can vary from ranting about contemporary social and political issues to observations of the mundane, to what appear to be messages and warnings to humanity received telepathically from beings in another dimension.

Corringham’s manipulation of the base material and her own vocalisations is limited in the main to repetition, the use of multi-tracking of her vocals, reverb and moulding the sounds into song formats with the result that the entire recording is actually easy to listen to, in spite of all the strange things going on, and Corringham’s voice across the recording is natural, never distorted. On one track, “In the Skyways of Minneapolis”, Corringham seems to be observing the bustling activities of shoppers in malls and of children shouting in playgrounds while she keens and chants softly. “Leaving by the Small Door” has the feel of a spirit fading away until only its voice remains while birds chirp unconcernedly, bees buzz and droning voices mope in the background.

All tracks are even in tone with very little drama and seem like observations of human life from the point of view of an unassuming alien being who can’t help but feel some empathy for the strange biped creatures and their fellow Earthlings preoccupied with the business of survival on a planet beset by problems and crises not of its own making but of its human inhabitants. While there’s not much Sturm und Drang, in their own way the tracks can be quite emotional, even a bit chilling at times, and each succeeding piece reveals another stunning aspect of Corringham’s vocal gymnastics. This is a work that deserves to be on most people’s music-listening bucket lists."




Linear Obsessional is delighted to present a new solo album by the British vocalist Viv Corringham. On "Gum and Butts" Viv returns to London (she's now based in New York) and records in 6 unique sonic spaces, responding and reacting to the environment in real time. The result is a spellbinding mix of evocative field recordings and dazzling, "extended technique" vocalising. .

credits

released October 20, 2013

Notes-
This is a collection of live vocal improvisations with the city. They combine three activities I enjoy: wandering around London, listening to city sounds, and improvised singing. To make one of these works, I simply start to walk and record.

In 2002 some recordings I had made in this way were broadcast on London’s Resonance fm radio as a weekly series called Vocal Strolls. Richard Sanderson was splendidly enthusiastic about them at the time and has invited me to create a new collection for this album.

These works were all made on a visit from my new home in USA back to London in March and September 2013. It has been a great (and slightly nostalgic) pleasure to re-tread old walks and also to find new ones.
-Viv Corringham

boggling the goggle box



Experimental Project sampler. KQED tape #8013

Saturday, February 22, 2020

you know the score (the return)



by Stephen Malinowsky 

the old joanna (slight re-return)

mouth music (eine klein mächtigemusik)

icescapes (1 of ??)

musique électronique canadienne



An Alternate History of Canadian Electronic Music (1956–1981) Curated by Keith Fullerton Whitman (US/AU) Presented by send + receive: a festival of sound v20 Poolside Gallery | Video Pool Media Arts Centre 221-100 Arthur Street, 2nd Floor | Wednesday–Saturday 12:00–5:00 PM Broadcasts on CKUW 95.9 FM, Sundays at 5:00 PM beginning October 14 During the course of this three-hour program, the listener will be drawn into the deepest recesses of early electronic music in Canada. The focus of this program is on obscure and transgressive pieces found outside of the usual academic lanes, all from the nascent days where psychedelia, sound poetry, experimental film and emerging audio and video technologies were all being explored with equal aplomb. The work of composers and musicians such as Wayne Carr, Robert Bauer, Lloyd Burritt, and Marcelle Deschênes will be explored, along with seldom-heard pieces by storied figures such as Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux, Rudolf Komorous, Ann Southam, Alain Clavier, Michel Longtin, and Norman McLaren.

Friday, February 21, 2020

mouth music (fishlicious)



the whole album







The Garden of Earthly Delights explores bioacoustics, field & found recordings; focusing on the voice and its cross- species expression by different animals. The music includes a range of sounds, utterances and expressions by various types of birds, monkeys and human voices. The pieces emerged through a process of layering, bringing together unrelated found sounds, and new recordings of my own voice, Glass and Bells. Some of this was left as is and untouched, while other material was manipulated, reshaped and treated electronically, ending up sounding nothing like the original.
This process of juxtaposing and merging sounds by diverse species which do not necessarily interact or share the same environment, gave rise to an imaginary landscape. I was recording at home and sounds were flowing in from outside; garden birds’ chatter mixing with the calls of exotic birds, London’s Crows and Magpies in a fantastic dialogue with Howler monkeys.
The Garden has long been a symbol of earthly paradise; a place of solace and contemplation where the soul joins nature and the inner life is cultivated, where we have the most beautiful vision of all of life's colour and fullness. It also represents coexistence, inclusion and community.
While sitting in the garden, listening, the image of Hieronymus Bosch’ triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, came to mind. I looked it up online and discovered a transcription of a short piece of music, written on the derrière of one tortured soul which is crushed by a harp. It appears on the right-hand panel, the one representing Hell. The music was transcribed to modern notation by Amelia Hamrick. It was shared online and went viral. I decided to record my own interpretation of this 500 years old “butt chant” and title the work after the painting.
My rendition, which concludes this album, brings together sounds from the garden and the song, in a new sonic space-time which is both real and out-worldly.
Released July 2018 by Visible Near Midnight Recordings, as a limited edition of 25 hand-made and hand-numbered CDr’s

Sharon Gal - voice, glass, bells, electronics,
field & found recordings

mouth music (street credible)

musique de bouche (Magnyfied)



Rune my life






μουσική στο στόμα (Eínai óla elliniká gia ména)



first track is some primo mouth music Elliniká

and it crops up periodically throughout

1 00:00 I Mikhanologhoi 2 3:05 Rune Lindblad - Data 1 3 8:13 Opriki Mousiki - The Three Substances Of Apo Mikhanis Theos An Afternoon In Katerini 4 15:28 Phaus - Moving The Sun Strong Strain And Beautiful 5 18:23 Dimosioypalliliko Retire - Κοινός Νους, Μέρος Τρίτο = Kinos Nus, Third Part 6 28:32 Leif Elggren / Kent Tankre - Warszawa 1 7 33:11 Hafler Trio* - Gladness Becomes Weeping

https://www.discogs.com/Various-%CE%91%CF%80%CF%8C-%CE%9C%CE%B7%CF%87%CE%B1%CE%BD%CE%AE%CF%82-%CE%9C%CE%BF%CF%85%CF%83%CE%B9%CE%BA%CE%AE/release/653177


release rationale:

Although we can find a connection between Kinos Nus (Common Sense) and bad taste in the very first paragraph of the Holy text Mikhanovios (: Insolar as the need of Apo Michanis Theos-God Of the Machinery-exists since the beginning of the mankind, so also exists the fanaticism and the persecutions against Him, especially on the side of those people who are regarded as believers of doctrines. Fortunately there are some people who regarded ApoMikhanis Theos’ return to tho the world as life’s work. these people try to free Him from the nets of bad taste, which weaken Him, so that He can come near us and teach us how to liberate our lives), we have to note that, according to the friends of ApoMikhanis Theos, the esthetic experience ins not at all higher or lower than the other experiences that man has. Then what is that characterizes a compilation of Apo Mikhanis Music? It is a moral attitude on music more than a technique and style. When we read in Mikhanovios about Kinos Nus’ bad taste, we have to mean the vulgar standardization, the sterile repetition, the etiquette of public relation which abolishes creativity. Apo Mikhanis behavior, on the contrary, is defined by Kavla (sexual stimulation and strong desire for creatinity) the fertility of Tykhi (Chance) and Elpida (Hope) not of some opus, but of the communion to the others of the Apo Mikhanis Agony. The themes of our religious music and generally of our religious art, are not necessarily theological, because of our religion has not Apo Mikhanis Theos Himself and his three female substances (Kavla, Tykchi and Elpida) as its object: our religion’s object is our lives (when our life triumphs then the return of Apo Mikhanis Theos becomes feasible). God Himself showed the way in the directions of proposing : a morning prayer, to pick up hoarfrost from her cunt. We the friends of Apo Mikhanis Theos, wanted to imagine, through this record, on the words God said that “the sound does not acquire value as music” and even that “music has very few to do with ear”. We thank all those who participated or helped to be realized this record. Thodoros Zafiris

Wednesday, February 19, 2020

Buffy the Synth Slayer




by Lindsay Zoladz at Pitchfork - a fascinating celebration of Buffy Sainte-Marie's entire always-against-the-grain, always-ahead-of-her-time career, pivoting around her 1969 album Illuminations which incorporated avant-electronics

"...  in 1969, when she unleashed her astounding, trailblazing sixth LP Illuminations, she became the first musician not only to release an album with vocals processed through a Buchla 100 synthesizer (the very same unit that the electronic music legend Morton Subotnik had used to compose his landmark 1967 album Silver Apples of the Moon), but the first person ever to make an album recorded using quadraphonic technology, an early precursor to surround-sound...

"Because it had the familiar feature of a black-and-white keyboard, the Moog was the most popular and musician-friendly of the early synthesizers. The Buchla, which would become Sainte-Marie’s instrument, was another beast entirely.

“It wasn’t even as though there was an electric keyboard, it was too early,” she recalled. “We just called it a matrix, a bunch of possibilities you could connect in various ways to modify sound waves.”

"... Like many albums lightyears ahead of their time, Illuminations was a commercial disaster when it was first released. “People were more in love with the Pocahontas-with-a-guitar image,” she once said when asked why she thought Illuminations failed to find a contemporary audience...."

absolutely, electronic

Tuesday, February 18, 2020

mouth music (retsbol kcor)



first minute or so especially sounds like Gang of Four through a Leslie with Yoko on top

irrecoverably of their time

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Saturday, February 15, 2020

Aloe Aloe, what's all this then?



(via Droid)


The CD spine and obi have the artist listed as being "Aloe", presumably referring to the plant, which alludes to the method by which the music was produced. The insert suggests, without explicitly stating, that the human artist was Momoe Soeda, an expert in medical research relating to aloe, as he is quoted as describing how the music was produced: "This CD was produced by attaching a surface potential measurement device to the aloe leaves and converting the measured values ​​into music information to play a synthesizer. The music played by this aloe releases you from everyday stress and leads to deep relaxation. Please enjoy it as a new type of relaxation sound." - Momoe Soeda. Note also that the English title of the album "Aloe Extract Sound" is not a direct translation of the Japanese Title 「アロエ その不思議なサウンド」, which more directly translates to "Aloe: Its Mysterious Sound" (feel free to correct this translation if it is wrong).

mouth music (voice of america)



mondmuziek (wiebelige diva)

that's "wobbly diva" in English



Over de Dood en de Tijd (On Death and Time) : An Homage to Franz Schubert for electronic, voice, piano and organ (1980) 1st Movement - 00:00 2nd Movement - 07:49 3rd Movement - 20:29 Geertje Kuipers, contralto Jan Sprij, piano Huub ten Hacken, organ On Death and Time was commissioned by the NOS broadcasting organization. It is based on Schubert's song Der Tod und das Mädchen, an extremely short song, which deals with the age-old theme of Death seducing a young girl. A number of contrasts is immediately apparent in Schubert's song: the chorale-like serenity of the beginning and end as against the operatic middle section, the girl is young and pretty while Death is repulsively ugly, also the transition from Life to Death is represented by a 'pseudomodulation' from D minor to D major. Is this the fashionable romantic death-wish of the period, or did Schubert really see Death as a release from the troubles of Life? Or is it merely a technical device, a deliberate modernism, as contemporaries supposed? - Speculations. In On Death and Time these contrasts are enlarged by using the tool Time (chronological time) in order to transform Historical Time. Thus in the first movement (Life) use is made only of electronic (i.e. synthetic, therefore dead) sounds grouped according to the laws of tonality, although historically electronic music was the product of atonality. All sounds are electronically edited: here human action (Life) is electronic action (Death). The second movement (the seduction scene, the transition from Life to Death) uses musique concrète techniques: the transition from electronic music to live music. The sounds are isolated from the objects producing them (living musicians), therefore die, and are themselves turned into objects and come to life by means of electronic manipulation (cf. Pierre Schaeffer, L'Objet Sonore). Purely by means of Time the transition also takes place from tonality to atonality, and the editing is done by hand (scissors and adhesive tape): here human action is mechanical action. Live music, organ and live electronics, is used for the first time in the third movement (Death). The electronics are controlled by the sounds from the organ (the organist 'plays' the electronic equipment by playing the organ). The tonal structure of the organ sounds is destroyed by the electronics, and the result is an antitonality or non-tonality, although historically the organ is the product par excellence of modal or tonal music. By analogy with the original song there is as little development in Time in the third movement as in the first, this in contrast to the middle section. Consequently there is only a static situation, one that even has to do without the tension of tonal relationships, although the ,editing' here is in fact musical action (organplaying). Death: chronological time ceases, historical time (the regal as in Monteverdi's Orfeo) is destroyed by the jubilant crackling of the electronics (Death as Liberation, the Major Key) Gilius van Bergeijk is a Dutch composer. From 1966 to 1972 he studied the oboe and the alto saxophone at the Hague Conservatory; there he also studied composition with van Baaren and electronic music with Raaijmakers. In 1972 he began lecturing on electronic music at the Conservatory. He has also held various administrative positions in the field of Dutch music. In 1987 he was awarded the Ooyevaer Prize. Van Bergeijk has composed both instrumental and electronic music including works for ballet, film and theatre. His music, often tragic and bitter in its effect, often uses deconstructive procedures and he often selects well-known works for this treatment in order to make the process understandable to the listener. Demontage, for example, incorporates themes by Handel and Thelonious Monk, while Over de dood en de tijd is based on Schubert’s Der Tod und das Mädchen. Instead of using modern digital techniques in his electronic pieces he restricts himself to analogue splicing methods. He does this out of a craftsmanlike conviction that the imperfection of manual work gives the music its necessary vitality.

dirty electronics

tone tales

Monday, February 10, 2020

mouth music (recherches sur la voix)



via Keith Fullerton Whitman's  YouTube archive of Creel Pone releases

Was this one (CP 216) ever actually released?

info:

Three of the singles released by Les Disques ICEM-CEL; the in-house label of the Institut Coopératif De L'Ecole Moderne, following in the education models of Célestin Freinet & usually accompanying the "Art Enfantin" journals... "Recherches Sur La Voix" (1972) surveys experimental & extended vocal techniques as implemented & carried-out by composer Jean-Louis Maudrin & his students. "Musiques Electroniques" (1973) offers four Electro-Acoustic pieces by Lionel Tasquier ("Hiroshima"), Jacky Pasquier ("Musique Du Désert"), Pascal Panizut & Sandrine Lanoux ("Larsen Et Percussion"), and Dominique Richard & Jacky Pasquier ("Embouteillage"). "Musiques Concrètes" (1974) has a side of Jean-Louis Maudrin pieces ("Voix", "Le Petit Canard", "Cithare à L'Envers", "Percussions à L'Envers", "Voix + Tube à Musique") followed by individual ones by M. Debray ("Je T'Aime") and Jacky Chassane ("L'Orage"). Of course the "Electronic Music by Children" dynamic has been full-well explored here (listen to the flexi-disc reproduced as part of the initial 'Creelpolation' volume) but this is an extremely great example of how far the various alternate educational/belief systems have embraced experimental & Avant-Garde music at a fundamental, introductory level. Of the 20-odd ICEM disques, these three were the only ones we've been able to turn up, and while a stash of the "Art Enfantin" magazine was found, none of them line up w/ these particular titles... for now, enjoy the music!

Sunday, February 9, 2020

Wednesday, February 5, 2020

this tape machine kills fascists



or slices and splices them

"This work was originally called 'Prix Italia'. In 1973 the Netherlands Broadcasting Corporation commissioned me to write a work to be entered to the Prix Italia. I had just returned from Italy, where I had seen in record shops releases of fascist songs and Mussolini speeches. The MSI had become the biggest neo-fascist party in Europe and this, combined with the fact that in the 1930s, the fascists had been the first to make systematic use of the radio as a political medium, prompted my decision to write 'Prix Italia'. The introduction is a fragment from a radio speech given by Mussolini in Turin in 1935: “At this moment twenty million Italians are gathered together in squares throughout the length and breadth of Italy. It is the greatest demonstration in the history of mankind. Twenty million! All with the same heart, the same mind, the same wish. This assembly signifies that the identity of Italy and Fascism is perfect, absolute and immutable.” Then the piece opens with the tape loop of the last sentence, with the pauses between the words so typical of Fascist oratory somewhat shortened. The loop has playing time of 23.6 seconds. At this point the input shuts off and the circuit is autonomous. What is recorded on the tape is now the feedback of the loop. The voice becomes ever more unrecognizable because it is superimposed to an increasing extent over original voice on the loop. By means of this electrical circuit, Mussolini’s voice destroys itself. There is no exterior input during the first ten minutes, after which this process continues until the feedback sounds become completely garbled. This leads into a coda — a quotation of the opening from Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra. From the psychological point of view there is a vast difference between the coda, which is experienced as “liberating,” and the electrical process preceding it. Yet the coda also has something in common with Mussolini: politics. Richard Strauss was after all the first president of the Reichmusikkamer in 1933. Also Nietzsche, author of Also sprach Zarathustra, is—like Strauss, for that matter—a classic example of an artist exploited by fascism. But some artists are more easily abused than others. In 1975 Hans Hulscher made a television version for the Netherlands Broadcasting Corporation; since then, both the film and the tape have been called 'Il Duce', after the title taken by Mussolini. In the end, the Netherlands Broadcasting Corporation did not enter the work for the Prix Italia. " — Louis Andriessen

mouth music (synclavier squelch)

munmusik (skäggigt vävt skönhet)

Tuesday, February 4, 2020