"Really awful is more interesting to listen to than pretty good" - Eno ................................................................................................................................................................................................................. welcome to the drivel blog of "music detractor, Simon Reynolds"
this unfindable self-released cassette by the Australian field recording / sound artist / experimental musician Ron Nagorcka was actually reissued last year I recently noticed, with another similar nature sounds recording on the flip
Ron Nagorcka (1948) is a composer, performer, and naturalist. In 1988 he moved to a remote forest in northern Tasmania, where he built his own house and solar-powered studio (some fascinating photos of his home-studio are present in the booklet attached to this release).
This CD collects his first works recorded in his forest residence in Tasmania, his music sites on the borderline between documentation and the fictional landscapes.
Are among the strangest, most fascinating, most intense field recordings based works and an essential chapter in the history of Australian experimental music.
"I can only hope it will encourage people to discover for themselves the mysterious harmony that is wilderness." Ron Nagorcka 1988
That particular track "Lemarrcootya (Grey Thrush)" in the YouTube clip ABOVE is probably my ab fav example of "beak music" aka avian-garde music, indeed I've posted it here before. But the whole album is lovely and well worth a listen / purchase.
"Black Truffle is delighted to offer up a rare serving of unheard works by legendary Swiss artist Anton Bruhin. Active as a visual artist, poet, and musician since the 1960s, Bruhin has created important work in forms as varied as concrete poetry and landscape painting, imbuing everything he does with wit, humility, and absurdist humour. A recognised master of the jew’s harp (or Trümpi, as this ancient folk instrument is known in Swiss German), Bruhin’s sound work also encompasses tape collage, sound poetry, and manipulated bird song.
On Speech Poems/Fruity Music we are treated to 26 short pieces made between 2006 and 2008 using the audio software Fruity Loops. These pieces carry on Bruhin’s long-running project of exploring the creative use and misuse of cheap, accessible technologies. In many of his analogue works, Bruhin explored the possibilities of simple cassette equipment. He invented DIY approaches to layering sounds by using multiple tape machines, experimented with distortion and tape speed, or, in his classic Inout (1981) created a maniacally single-minded audio monument to the pause button. Like the computer pixel drawings the artist produced around the same time as these recordings, Speech Poems/Fruity Music extends this approach to consumer software, presenting two parallel sequences of works that make use of Fruity Loops’ inbuilt synthetic instruments and its speech synthesis function. The instrumental works play like a twisted take on the aesthetics of 1980s video game soundtracks, using synthetic accordion and harpsichord sounds to realise jaunty little ditties that exploit their machine-realisation by making use of improbable pitch-bends and humanly impossible tempos and articulations.
Between these samples of Fruity Music, we are treated to the Speech Poems, a series of recitations by a lone computer-generated voice. Many of them are in fact songs, as the synthetic voice crudely and hilariously changes pitch as it moves through its fragmented syllables and odes to cream in coffee. Carrying on Bruhin’s interest in the creative misuse of technology, many of the Speech Poems attempt to force Fruity Loops’ voice synthesis, designed only to speak English, to speak German. By entering phonetic text into the program, Bruhin gets it to produce a passable German alphabet and a series of approximations to a proper pronunciation of his name.
Hilarious while strangely austere, entertaining but bizarre, Speech Poems/Fruity Music is classic Anton Bruhin, arriving in a beautiful mosaic cover by the artist, with the text of the ‘abc für anglophone’ on the back cover. "
The mysterious habits of birds, especially electronic ones, is the theme for ”Oiseaux électroniques en Suède”, Sven Rånlund’s third release on GEIGER Grammofon. Birds of all sorts come alive in the language of control voltage through his modular synths.
On ”Oiseaux électroniques en Suède”, Sven Rånlund has documented birds from a tiny corner at the West Coast of Sweden, Svensängen. Born and raised in an exclusively modular family – the offsprings of a dynamic Eurorack system and a fixed Buchla Music Easel – these birds have been painstakingly recorded both separately and collectively. Most of them have first explored their songs, chirps and calls in an outdoor environment near the ocean in the company, and sometimes bewilderment, of their feathered cousins.
During the process, the birds have been given names, designations and characters. For instance, we can hear grand soloists like the Korntrast (Cornthrush), Fyrkantsskata (Squarewave Magpie), Lödsångare (Soldering Singer), Sinusskogssnäppa (Sine Sandpiper), Glitchuv (Glitch Owl) and Aylerfink (Aylerfinch). The last one can be easily identifed by its crazy swarms of hi-pitched melodies.
Stories are told throughout the album. In 13 chapters, these electronic creatures expose their daily routines and inner lifes, for instance: a migrating bird reflects on homesickness; a long-legged wader on solitude; a scruffy sea bird on fear of drowning. Sounds and harmonics also come from their interaction with friends and foes in the landscape in which they live. This surrounding material, full of colour and perfume, has been integrated in the compositions.
Music on birds, like ”Oiseaux électroniques en Suède” dare to be, have a long history. Just think of all the classic composers and their swans, ducks and cuckoos. No one more birdloving than Olivier Messiaen; his ”Catalogue d’oiseaux” was a meticulous transformation of melodic outlines of birdsong into notated music. Öyvind Fahlström, the Swedish text-sound composer, came up with a new language, fåglo, that became sound materia for his radio play ”Fåglar i Sverige” (”Birds in Sweden”).
For a 21:th century bird and noise lover as Sven Rånlund, these forerunners in the field of music on birds have paved the way for new sound discoveries and other ways of listening. The birds have landed, ready to electrify curious ears all around.
release rationale: 'Le Petit Duc' [The Little Scops Owl] is a sound work by Danish artist Knud Viktor, made between 1978 and 1983. Viktor was classically trained as a painter at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in the 1950’s. In 1961 he moved to France to live and work, but was overwhelmed by the sounds of the wildlife in Provence, and instead of painting began listening to and recording his surroundings. With these recordings, he composed what he called sound images – images sonores – and throughout the rest of his career, sound was his main medium.
'Le Petit Duc' is primarily composed of recordings Viktor made of an owls nest in the spring and summer of 1978. Narrated by Viktor himself and put together from recordings throughout a whole nesting season, 'Le Petit Duc' tells the story of an owl family. The piece speaks to children and adults alike. Knud Viktor originally made the piece to fit on a 7” record, but it has not been released before.
release rationale:
The lost masterpiece Les Éphémères by the self labeled ‘sound painter’ Knud Viktor (1924-2013) now sees its first ever release by Institute for Danish Sound Archaeology – 40 years after it was conceived. Viktor’s pioneering work – his Images Sonores – are composed of field recordings of insects, animals and the his surroundings.
A finished master tape and even a complete cover layout for Les Éphémères was found in Viktor’s archives after he passed away in 2013. The phenomenal piece was originally commissioned by the French radio station France Musique in 1977. The twenty short ‘sound images’ of Les Éphémères were originally broadcast as vignettes in-between other radio programs.
From the middle of the 1970’s Viktor began composing almost exclusively for four channels. He invented his own intuitive quadraphonic mixer – the Tetramix – to realise his spatial visions for his Image VI – The Lubéron Symphony, and from then on worked with quadraphonic sound, thus making the release of his works difficult. Les Éphémères is close in time and also holds close ties to The Lubéron Symphony, which Viktor considered his magnum opus. Perhaps most strikingly is the shift in the way he uses the recordings of insects, birds and animals in both The Lubéron Symphony and Les Éphémères: Often untreated and clearly recognizable, the field recordings leave the inherent melody and rhythm of the animal sounds to sing for themselves, layering recordings to create simple and elegant sound images. In two of the twenty pieces Viktor’s own voice blends with the animals, as he recites two poems. One about the singing vineyard populated by musical crickets, the other painting an autumn picture with wine bubbling in the barrels as we hear the wine flies humming.
Viktor’s work emanates with a tremendous love and fascination with his companion species and the landscape and geology that surrounded him. His works are devoted to depicting the life on the mountain where he lived for fifty years. Hearing how the ecology of the landscape changed as commercial farming and pesticides took effect, a larger perspective in his work became clear to him:
"As it turns out, my work has actually set many things in motion; it touches upon something universal that I feel I have a duty to convey to others. A duty that I feel as a citizen of the earth. Not as a human citizen, but as a citizen of the earth. It may sound pretentious, but this is a question of generations to come." – Knud Viktor
The world has seen dramatic ecological change since Viktor recorded his sounds. Not only have the individual insects and animals that he recorded vanished from Lubéron, so too have entire species. Like fossils, their imprints now exist only in his works, in the recordings stored on tape. In the midst of our planet’s sixth mass-extinction event, the growing silence that Viktor heard in his immediate surrounding is now global: scientists estimate that half of the planet’s animal life has already disappeared. Viktor’s sound works allow us to borrow his ears. They convey his love for the animal worlds that surrounded him and perhaps we too can see our companion species differently through his works.
credits
released January 17, 2019
release rationale:
This reissue documents Knud Viktor’s only two releases on record – Images and Ambiances – both released in 1972 on the french label L’Oiseau Musicien. These records have long been out of print and are hereby made available again, gathering the two separate albums on this double-release.
The utmost care has gone into creating a reproduction that is as faithful as possible to the original works. These have been transferred from the original analog master tapes and have not been remastered to any other extent than to prepare them for the vinyl reproduction. Thus, Knud Viktor’s pieces appear with the same degree of tape hiss, hum and other “artefacts” related to his aesthetics, compositional process and tools.
All the works on this release was composed by Knud Viktor in and around his home in Luberon, in the south of France.
more on Ambiances - Images
Overlooked and unheard Danish sound art Knud Viktor (1924-2013) graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen as a painter. In the 1960’s he moved to the Luberon valley in southern France to paint the Provençal light and nature. However, Viktor left the painting and gradually moved towards filming and recording the sounds of nature. He used the field recordings as raw material for a series of abstract electronic compositions, which also served as soundtracks for his filmworks. A selection of these compositions were released in 1972 on the two records Images and Ambiances on the French label L’Oiseau Musicien. The records came in very limited editions, and therefore Knud Viktor’s works have remained largely unknown. With the re-issue of these records The Institute for Danish Sound Archaeology wishes to revitalize Knud Viktor and his contribution to the history of sound art.
The small sounds of nature Knud Viktor is recognized as an important figure in the field of sound art in France and he is regarded as a pioneer within field recording and acoustic ecology. During the 1970’s he turned his house in Provence into one large mixing desk with a myriad of homebuilt microphones and cables spiralling into the surrounding landscape. From here he would carefully record the sounds of snoring rabbits in their holes, the rhythmic songs of cicadas in the night – even termites gnawing through an old cupboard in the bedroom As the Danish poet Morten Søndergaard writes in the essay A Sonic Seismograph, which accompanies the release: “Light became sound. The most fascinating aspect of Knud Viktor’s world is perhaps that there is a universal coalescence of all things: of artistic expressions and natural science, of painting, sculpture and installation. A paintbrush becomes a microphone. Music becomes sound.”
By re-issuing Ambiances and Images, The Institute for Danish Sound Archaeology hopes to contribute to a revitalization of Knud Viktor’s important work, and that more listeners will engage and lend the deserved attention to these works.
The Institute for Danish Sound Archaeology is an independent association with the overall purpose of uncovering and releasing historical Danish electronic music and sound art.
Allô la terre [Hello, the Earth] is a sound work that you listen to in a telephone booth powered by solar energy and installed in a public space. When you lift the telephone handset, you can listen to the rhythms of busy lives, which Knud Viktor calls Petits sons [Little sounds]: a dreaming rabbit; two snails chewing lettuce; the love song of vinegar flies; a fleeing fox; a nestful of tits; a suckling mouse… and all these sounds evoke a visual symphony.
Originally from Denmark, Knud Viktor has lived in the Luberon area of Provence, where he derived all his inspiration for 50 years until his death in August 2013. A forerunner of sound art, Knud Viktor was revealed by radio in the 1970s. Making sounds of the landscape a space of experimentation, he used microphones to record the most unexpected sounds: erosion, the chatter of ants, the melodies of the woodworm, etc. He records the “Song of the Earth” in order to “preserve that which we will perhaps never hear again”. Therefore it is more as a painter than as an entomologist or geologist that he explores the world or rather the miniature worlds. With exceptional patience and perseverance, he records the imperceptible and preserves the ephemeral, to the point where he himself become a part of this environment, an organic element, full of wonderment inspired by this natural opera.
Knud Viktor’s work echoes the Digne area: in response to the monumental Geological Reserve, it replies with a microcosm that is just as spectacular. For this reason, the collection of items from the artist’s workshop have been preserved in the Musée Gassendi.
This recording (real name of the recording unknown if any) has been made by Knud Viktor and given to accompany the pregnancy of my mother. The sounds were used to discover my reaction to them in her belly.
Je ne dispose d'aucun droit sur l'image qui sert d'illustration (cover of "Images" long play)
