The idea is simple. Find an object, any object, declare it a work of art, and it is a work of art. Art becomes truly objective, just an object, artistic techniques become unnecessary, and the seeds of “non-intentional” art are planted at the same time. This Marcel Duchamp principle, the “readymade” or the “objet trouvé is now recognized everywhere as a perfectly valid way of making art. A generation of Fluxus artists developed this point of view, John Cage adapted it to compose music through chance operations, and it is now quite natural that a composer or artist might choose to work with a found mathematical object, like Pascal’s triangle or the Narayana series or some automaton, just as well as with a urinal, a bicycle wheel, a comb, or a bottle rack.

Tom Johnson, “Found Mathematical Objects”, 2001. [PDF]

She’s ten miles of bad road for every hood in town. They say she kissed 2,000 men. She’s a one-mama massacre squad. She’ll put you in traction. She forced an entire lifetime of passion into one lust filled summer. Tonight she will love again and kill again. Her beauty is a dangerous weapon of war. Her passion for art changed the face of history. She’s brown sugar and spice but if you don’t treat her nice she’ll put you on ice. Mistress of the waterfront, she was too much for one town and no town would have her. No man could tame her. She’s a love-starved moon maiden on the prowl blasting Nazis on a bold commando raid and finding love in precious, stolen moments. As a lawyer all she wanted was the truth. As a daughter all she wanted was his innocence. She’s 15. The only adult she admires is Johnny Rotten. She Lives. Don’t move. Don’t breathe. She will find you. Could she kill and kiss and not remember? On the naked stage she has no secrets. When she shimmied, the whole world shook. When she sang, the whole world thrilled. She steals his car and his furniture. But can she steal his heart? She scorched her soul to save an American cavalry officer. Here she is. That eye-filling, gasp-provoking blonde bombshell. The man-by-man story of a lost soul. Every time she says, “I love you” she breaks the law.

From Brian Joseph Davis, “Voice Over”, 2006. Voice Over is a script composed from over 5000 film taglines [PDF], performed by voice over artist Scott Taylor [MP3]. (Taylor is only reading 6 pages. The original edit of the script is 23 pages).

(The piece is “a periodic composite sound waveform environment created from sine wave components generated digitally in real time on a custom-designed Rayna interval synthesizer”, playing non-stop here).

This show features a combination of field recordings and experimental sound art (Glenn Gould, John Cage, Janet Cardiff, Max Neuhaus), home-recorded folk and pop songs (Charlie Mcalister, Simon Joyner, Wio), as well as more traditional indie rock (Palace, Neutral Milk Hotel, Animal Collective) and British shoegaze (My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Cocteau Twins). I will focus primarily on artists who explore non-conventional recording techniques and experiment with ways of capturing sound outside of the studio context. More generally, rather than conceiving of radio as a means for merely transmitting prerecorded material, I am interested in approaching the medium as a potential site of artistic production – stitching together acoustic fragments and layers of static, noise, and junk, to create spontaneous sound collages. What would it sound like, for example, if one superimposed a handheld recording of an industrial dishwasher and two people fighting in a wooden room, on top of an audio biography of Helen Keller, and used the resulting chaotic garble as a segue between a Cocteau Twins song and a home-recorded folk song about owls and fried oysters? I suspect that, at the very least, certain familiar songs would be reenergized by the new contexts in which they were embedded and, if one listened even more closely, occult voices would eventually begin to emerge alongside the death rattle of the everyday. Running water would sound like fires in the street.

Mode d’emploi – Direction for Use!!

Pay no attention to what you have learned in your piano lessons.
Do not consider for long whether you should play D# with the fourth or sixth finger.
Play this piece very ferociously, but keep strictly in rhythm like a machine.
Regard the piano here as an interesting kind of percussion instrument and treat it accordingly.

(This translation from Glenn Watkins, Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century, Schirmer, New York, 1988, p. 289. Cited by Avior Byron, Schoenberg as Performer: An Aesthetics in Practice, PhD Thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, London, p. 64).

Now, Charles Bukowski was born in Germany and voraciously consumed classical music, so the title of his Play the Piano is almost certainly a nod to Hindemith:

These days there are lots of interesting things being done to pianos, and I’m glad to be getting back into New York early enough to hear this:

A widely discussed painting by the Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela, “The Problem,” depicted Sibelius drinking with friends, his eyes rolled back in his head.

Just as with his earlier discussion of photographs of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern posing in the uniforms of the Austrian army, no associated image is contained in the glossy centre pages of the book. So I thought I would post some more information and images here, so that other people reading the book can easily see what Ross is describing (unfortunately I haven’t yet been able to find the army photographs online).

It turns out that The Problem is more frequently referred to under the Finnish titles Probleemi or Kajustaflan, and that it was in fact a draft for the later work Symposion. Here it is:

And here is the later work Symposion:

The other figures in the paintings are (left to right) the painter himself, the composer and critic Oskar Merikanto, the conductor Robert Kajanus, and Sibelius—while the drink on the table is DOM Benedictine. The second work is more carefully executed and less fantastical; but perhaps of most interest in the historical context is that the figures are less wildly drunk than darkly intense and brooding. Where in the first painting Sibelius is pale and wasted, and Gallen-Kallela snarling directly at the viewer, in the second painting the artists are represented as staring intently at the wings of Osiris, lost in philosophical reflection rather than drunken stupor. Gallen-Kallela’s eyes are completely sunken into shadow, while Kajanus holds a cigarette that looks like it will burn off in his hand. I wonder whether this was the painter’s response to the public controversy over the raw drunkenness depicted in the first painting, which was loud enough to result in Sibelius being refused loans—a painterly revision designed to reveal the real heart of the Symposion evenings superficially depicted in Kajustaflan.

More background on Sibelius’s so-called “Symposion Years” can be found here.

An artist must regulate his life.

Here is a time-table of my daily acts. I rise at 7.18; am inspired from 10.23 to 11.47. I lunch at 12.11 and leave the table at 12.14. A healthy ride on horse-back round my domain follows from 1.19 pm to 2.53 pm. Another bout of inspiration from 3.12 to 4.17 pm. From 5 to 6.47 pm various occupations (fencing, reflection, immobility, visits, contemplation, dexterity, swimming, etc.)

Dinner is served at 7.16 and finished at 7.20 pm. From 8.19 to 9.59 pm symphonic readings (out loud). I go to bed regularly at 10.37 pm. Once a week (on Tuesdays) I awake with a start at 3.14 am.

My only nourishment consists of food that is white: eggs, sugar, shredded bones, the fat of dead animals, veal, salt, coco-nuts, chicken cooked in white water, mouldy fruit, rice, turnips, sausages in camphor, pastry, cheese (white varieties), cotton salad, and certain kinds of fish (without their skin). I boil my wine and drink it cold mixed with the juice of the Fuschia. I have a good appetite but never talk when eating for fear of strangling myself.

I breathe carefully (a little at a time) and dance very rarely. When walking I hold my ribs and look steadily behind me.

My expression is very serious; when I laugh it is unintentional, and I always apologise very politely.

I sleep with only one eye closed, very profoundly. My bed is round with a hole in it for my head to go through. Every hour a servant takes my temperature and gives me another.

I wonder to what extent the history of western musics is an outline of people’s deteriorating ability to listen.

Jeph Jerman, Sound Diary, 8 January 2000.

The first piece, Metasmatter, was performed by a mixed sextet comprised of piano, flute, violin, cello, bass clarinet and percussion. This is a wonderful eclectic piece clearly influenced by jazz and Balinese music, and was performed with much exuberance by the assembled musicians.

The second piece, not listed on the original program for the evening, was a performance by Kim and percussionist Nathan Davis, who have frequently worked together as the duo Odd Appetite. They played Sotong, a small and delicate work of Kim’s, originally scored for theatre, involving a loop of cello recorded and repeated through guitar pedals coupled with delicate melodic counterpoint on cello and metal percussion instruments.

Sotong
[audio:http://www.oddappetite.org/audio/Sotong.32.bounce.mp3]

The third piece was a debut performance of Threadsuns played by the Flux Quartet, who announced Kim as their newest member. This was easily the highlight of the evening. The piece is in three movements. The first movement is a bracing, discordant rush of halting themes that reminded me of the filmic soundscapes—Decasia and Gotham in particular—of composer Michael Gordon—which indicates something of the magnitude of the sound the quartet was able to generate. The second movement is a restrained and subtle exploration of microtones and harmonics, a frail echo of the first movement, as if we were standing amid the final ripples of a wave smashed against the walls. The third movement is a gradual extraction of the melodic core of the themes hinted at in the earlier movements, culminating in a beautiful unrestrained outpour of sound ascending to the climax. Like all of the work performed, the piece as a whole exhibited a pure blend of traditional Eastern and contemporary Western musical influences, and a perfect balance of traditional and experimental lines of musical heritage. In introducing the piece Ha-Yang described the origin of the title in Paul Célan’s Fadensonnen, and how the piece represented for her a vision of the sun as a symbol of wholeness in contrast to the fractured nature of the contemporary world—and it is natural to superimpose the image of a fitfully rising sun over the work as a whole.

(William Gaddis, The Recognitions, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1955, p. 700).

Kim’s debut record Ama was released last year by John Zorn’s Tzadik label, and we can only wait patiently for a recording of Threadsuns.

As for the new album, it screams out lack of ideas: devoid of the vinyl crackle that might have given it some relation to the ‘hauntological now’ of Burial or Philip Jeck, I can only hear it as clapped out coffee table miserabilism ten years past its sell-by date.

As they say at Boomkat, who gave the album a characteristically hyperbolic review (they have to sell records after all): Essential.