Saraband by Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman's self-declared final film "Saraband" is a masterpiece. Period. It's also one of his greatest films and one of the all-time great closing statements of a film director - to be ranked alongside Robert Bresson's "L'Argent", Andrei Tarkovsky's "Sacrifice" and Sergei Paradjanov's "Ashik-Kerib".

The general meaning ascribed to the title "Saraband" by the film critics has been an "erotic dance for two". And because its ten sections (each preceded with an intertitle) involve only two characters at a time, most critics feel they have discovered the director's intention behind the title of the film. But is this really the case? A "Saraband" is a musical term, which refers to one of the most soulfully beautiful and deeply searching pieces in all Classical Music. In J.S. Bach's music the Saraband was raised to the highest height of musical spiritual expression. While all of his Sarabands (and he wrote a lot of them) are stunning, the ones he wrote as part of his "Cello Suites" are particularly amazing. In this film, Bergman uses the Saraband from Bach's Fifth Cello Suite - the same piece, incidentally, that Mstislav Rostropovich performed at Tarkovsky's funeral.

A brief mention should also be made about the stunning look of the film, which was shot on HD digital video, and makes one regret the late arrival of a technology that could have been of great use to this genius of the cinema. The finely delineated textures of the mise-en-scene and the rich immediacy of the actors faces creates an overwhelmingly vivid canvas for Bergman to weave his magic on. The masterful chiaroscuro compositions so identifiable with long-time Bergman cinematographer Sven Nykvist have been beautifully rendered in this film by a team of three(!) cinematographers. Scene after scene, the interplay of light and shadow reminds one of the work of Rembrandt and Caravaggio.

For Bergman this is undoubtedly the end of life's road. And there is an unmistakable aura of the Final Judgment which pervades this film, a sense which actually underscores all his best work (from the "Seventh Seal" to his "Trilogy of Faith" to "Hour of the Wolf" and "Shame" to "Cries and Whispers" and all the way to "Fanny and Alexander"). It is in this context that one of the principle characters, Henrik (Johan's son) proclaims, "sometimes I feel that an incredible punishment is waiting for me." >> more

>> imdb
>> trailer
>> making of

Popol Vuh by Mika Vainio and Haswell & Hecker

Popol Vuh's soundtrack work for the films of Werner Herzog in 1970's and 1980's are some of the most stunning in the field. editions mego is pleased to present 2 re-workings of classic vuh tracks. mika vainio takes 'nachts: schnee' from the 1987 soundtrack 'cobra verde', and delivers a skillfully constructed ambient piece of beauty, which shifts and turns over 10 minutes. haswell & hecker turn the majestic 'aguirre 1' from the 1972 soundtrack 'aguirre - the wrath of god' into possibly the first track to be played at the last rave on earth. unlike recent h&h releases on warner classics and warp this does not utilize the upic system but vintage digital delays and freeze effect units, in conjunction with digital compositional tools.

>> listen the remixes
>> the band
>> Werner Herzog

Idea Space - a cyclic universe

This was an installation at Mediaruimte, Brussels in 2004, a simulation of a cyclic universe. Every frame 10000 new moving particles are added so that after several ten thousand "years" (1 rotation = 1 year) the space ended up as white cube, fully saturated with matter. Due to the way this cyclic nature has been coded it too created the paradoxical situation where the simulation never actually slows down even though the number of moving particles is approaching infinity. The lines are a visualization of the invisible moving attractors in that space and the inverse square law used to compute the particles trajectories.

As the particles move through space they become attracted by the various, initially randomly positioned gravitational centres. the force of attraction follows the classic "inverse square law" in physics, meaning a particle is a lot more influenced and accelerated by a close attractor than by ones further away. the more particles are in a highly active gravitational reqion of the space, the more clearly lines start to appear, showing the trajectory of these particles through space as well as time towards the locally strongest gravitational center.

>> karsten schmidt, 2004

Empty Words by John Cage

"John Cage's Empty Words is more of a literary work than a musical composition -- at least it is written (or rather, assembled) on typing paper with a typewriter, rather than on staff paper. Divided into four parts, Empty Words is a long text derived from the journals of Henry David Thoreau, achieved through extraction of its words, letters, and phrases through Cage's use of the I Ching. Nothing in Empty Words is actually meaningful, but Cage is moving beyond language into the realm of pure speech, something nearly musical related to both sound poetry and randomly generated texts, such as Tristan Tzara's novel drawn, word by word, from a hat, L'Homme approximatif. Cage's careful recitation of the alphabet soup that makes up the text of Empty Words comes close to being a musical performance, though the result is not one that many will be patient enough to withstand for as long as it goes." - Uncle Dave Lewis, All Music Guide

>> listen the audio interview on "Empty Words"
>> read the book

Iancu Dumitrescu

Iancu Dumitrescu (born July 15, 1944 in Sibiu, Romania) is a Romanian avant-garde composer. Dumitrescu received a master's degree in composition in Bucharest; Alfred Mendelsohn was among his teachers. Later, he studied conducting and philosophy with Sergiu Celibidache; Celibidache led Dumitrescu to an engagement with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and an effort to apply the principles of phenomenology to music. He began composing his mature works in the early 1970's. In 1976 he founded the Hyperion Ensemble, which he describes as "a multimedia group dedicated to experimental music." Several of Dumitrescu's early works for solo contrabass were recorded by the noted avant-garde bassist Fernando Grillo.

Dumitrescu's music is spectral, is electroacoustic, but above all is a coherent totality grounded in a different conception. Of all living composers, Dumitrescu is the one who has most exploded sound. Dumitrescu's work is a negation, from the depths, of everything in contemporary music symptomatic of distraction, of banalization, and of a radical loss of purpose. His music is not a new convolution in the knot of modern music, but an unravelling of the curse.

Interviewed by Tim Hodgkinson (March 1997):

Q: One of the first pieces I heard was Pierres Sacrées; I was very struck - as were many other people - by the sound of this music. It seemed quite unlike the usual sound of contemporary composed music. It had far more distortion, noise and violence. There seemed to be a shift away from stable fundamental frequencies, and a greater emphasis on the unstable aspects of sound. Do these characteristics of the sound have a special significance in your musical thinking?
D: First of all, you are quite right to say that there is this distortion, and secondly, it is absolutely deliberate. I myself was in a way surprised by it. When it first came - and during the development of this piece Pierres Sacrées there was a brief but intense period of experimentation out of which came this new sound - I wondered from what part of myself it had come. But I also knew that I needed it. You could say that this distortion in the sound comes from the attempt to release or unveil the god that is living in every piece of base matter. Pierres Sacrées placed me not only in the avant garde but also in the avant garde of deliberate and progressive use of distortion as an integral and necessary part of music...

On the technical level it comes from a kind of artisanal production. In Romania we had, and still have, a poverty and lack of equipment as compared with, say, IRCAM in Paris. Evidently - and this is not intended as a criticism - in the West, composers have at their disposal a massive array of technical possibilities. Unfortunately this tends to produce very conventional, very impersonal music. Music demands a process of introversion, of isolation and introspection. You have to go alone into your corner and concentrate. You can't be always looking around at what's happening, with your attention dissipated. But I don't want to say that this technology is inherently bad - simply that it was my fate to be poor.


Q: When you compose, do you start by examining a sound that interests you? You have said, on another occasion that, following the phenomenological principles of Husserl, you try to discover the inherent direction of an acoustic phenomenon, and that this leads to its modification in the imagination. To run over this briefly, in Husserl the appearance of a phenomenon requires the prior intentionality of the sensory act, so the phenomenological approach is to reveal this intentionality in terms of the character of the phenomenon - the immanent direction it contains. But, unlike a philosopher, a composer has to actualise what this direction implies - to make it happen in the real world. Given that these phenomena of resonance and complex harmonics are the result of very unstable physical conditions with virtually unpredictable behaviours, do you have to compose directly with the instruments, trying everything out before you set it down on a score?

D: Well, you want me to explain how I compose, and I will do just that. There are two main aspects. There is the process of trying things out on instruments to find new possibilities, to get ideas. And there's the importance of having a way of using what you've heard.

To explain in more detail, I begin with trying some sound: I concentrate and focus my intention on it - as in phenomenology. Then - again like phenomenology - I eliminate everything around that isn't strictly part of it. I start to isolate a very small world. This concentration and stripping away of everything else is not a stressful or desparate procedure; it is meditative, observant.

Gradually, after doing this several times, an image starts to crystalize. After this, and only after this, musical rationalism can begin to reassert itself, working on the memories of the sounds. Now structures can begin to develop, to extend into time; I can start to think of opposing themes and so on. All this is done in the presence of instruments, so to speak.

But what am I going towards? You mentioned the instability of the sounds in my music in your first question, and this is very important. There is definitely not the idea of perfecting something, of making the sounds fixed and perfect for all time. The point is to find out how they can be different every time but in exactly the way that is right for that particular time. So the final stability is a relative one.

Stabilising the sounds is a matter of technique, of examining, for example, exactly what kind of violin bow produces what result. There is a process of ongoing research and constant noting down of results to find concrete solutions to making the sounds. Always you have in mind that in the end there will be a score, so that, in this respect, composing is writing, and this writing starts with noting down how sounds are made. This is what Stockhausen was doing in the 60's, and it's sad to have to say "was doing."

There's a constant search for the best way to write things so that the musicians get the right sound. Pieces are revised during, and as a result of, rehearsal. I use different ways of notating in different pieces and also within the same piece. There are sections with regular measures, other sections with free time. Especially with the orchestral writing there is very precise scoring to get synchronisation. But, even here, there are moments which are meant to be blurred, which is a big risk, because with an orchestra and only three rehearsals, you are courting disaster. But in the end, in this kind of music, everything is a risk.


Another aspect of the life of sounds, of their instability, is that the sounds live through the interpreters, and that each interpreter is different. Each person has, so to speak, their personal phenomenology. For each person you have to discover the things that are valid. Music has to acknowledge fully the uniqueness of persons and the fact that sounds only come alive through persons. It is not the person in the voluntary sense, but in the more objective, "given", sense. For example, I've literally dreamt my music two or three times; an unimagineable splendour, my ears exploding with a sound so magnificent that I had no way to recreate it. But, when I woke up, I was left with a kind of glowing emblematic image in my memory. This stayed with me, it had a kind of precision, very concrete, very real. What I am saying is that this is just me, a personal experience, and that my music reflects something that is in my unconscious. So it's not something artificial, imagined: it's ingrained in me. The ideal is in my unconscious. Of course there are other conceptions of the ideal - social, and so on - but here, in the case of my music, there is this inner ideal which I've been able to possess in a completely concrete form in a completely realised experience a very small number of times in my dreams. This is something really fabulous, to have this ideal sound in all its richness, its harmonic complexity...


A-M: Now perhaps Iancu can answer the question about Pierres Sacréess, the question of what in his unconscious produced this explosive and violent quality. When Iancu was doing his military service, which was extremely hard, hard for everyone, but also bad for a musician's mind, he once had to do sentry duty at night, guarding a military flag in an isolated place in the mountains.

D: Well, to go into confessional mode, which I don't really like; it was dark all around and there was one small light, like a masonic ritual. I had to stand to attention with my gun; my superiors could check up on me. To try to keep awake I wandered around a bit in the dark, feeling the mysteriousness of the place, but at the same time obliged to be a soldier. I started tapping quietly on various things to see if they had any sound: there was this very large sheet of glass hanging on wires which had a slogan on it; it had an interesting sound...

I realised after an hour and a half that I was incapable of standing any longer; I sat down for ten minutes thinking I'd be able to stand up again quickly if anyone came. But after two or three minutes of sitting, I fell asleep. I've no idea how long I slept, but whilst I slept I had a kind of cataclysmic explosion inside my head as if a thousand glass plates were falling and bursting at once. I wasn't observing the plates falling from outside; I was inside them falling and exploding, I was inside the sound. This dream perhaps lasted two or three seconds, but the explosion lasted an eternity, a lifetime, like a 20-minute piece of music. I was in the center of this explosion with a vast detail of sound but also vast force...

So the point of this story is that when we're trying to find out why something works musically and why something else doesn't, it's because there is something inside the being, the body, which works like this. I don't invent my dreams. I'm bringing things out of myself as if they existed inside. They are givens. I can relive these dreams a thousand times. They are inscribed in my memory. What connection there is to Jung or to Freud I don't know...

So I've understood that, for an artist, it's important not to try to become somebody else, somebody Other. It's important to look in yourself.

>> read the whole interview
>> listen

Ramifications by György Ligeti

György Sándor Ligeti was born in Romania - Dicsőszentmárton (Romanian Diciosânmartin, now Târnăveni) to a Hungarian Jewish family and lived in Hungary before later becoming an Austrian citizen. Many of his works are well known in classical music circles, but to the general public, he is best known for the various pieces featured in the Stanley Kubrick films 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut.

His arrival in Austria freed him from the constraints and strictures he had lived with until that point, and the true originality, creativity and genius that had been surpressed began to flower almost immediately. He was soon recognised by the European avante-garde, notably Stockhausen, Gottfried Michael Koenig and Herbert Eimert.
Ligeti, being an original mind, did not however follow the current trends of extreme serialism that were then almost the only game in town. Instead his music focused on texture, density, and sound per se.

The ‘Ramifications for String Orchestra’ (1969) needs to be listened to with this in mind. Those of you who will listen to this piece hoping for a melody or rhythmic motives (in the conventional sense) will be disappointed. These elements would not only be out of place in a piece of this nature, but would actually detract from the main aim of the music – the exploration of string textures and sonorities. This he achieves with stunning dexterity and skill.

The string orchestra itself is divided into two sections. The first section, comprising 4 violin groups, 1 viola group and 1 cello group is tuned to A= 453 hz, a quarter tone above the normal A= 440. The second group, tuned normally is made up of 3 violin groups, 1 viola group, 1 cello group and 1 double bass group (There is by the way, a version which uses solo strings).

The violins all play more or less the same thing, but it is the ‘more or less’ that makes the piece. The pitches or notes themselves move within a very restricted range, mostly within a 3 or 4 semitone tessitura. However, whereas the 1st group might be playing eight notes to a beat, the 2nd group will play seven, the 3rd six and so on. Furthermore, these patterns are shifted slightly in each group, so that even if two or more groups are playing the same amount of notes per beat, they will start at slightly different time points. The overall effect is of a texture that moves in and out of phase, and of a ‘skein’ (a length of yarn or thread wound loosely and coiled together) that slowly unwinds and separates into strands. Herein lies the key to the title – one meaning of Ramification is ‘the process of dividing or spreading out into branches’.

The technical demands on the players is enormous as on top of the difficulty of playing 3’s, 4’s, 5’s, 6’s, 7’s, 8’s, 9’s and 10’s etc. they have to doggedly stick to their particular part and avoid being ‘pulled’ one way or the other by their colleagues. Luckily, Ligeti has said himself that the margin of error is built into the music.

"The title refers to the polyphonic technique of the part-writing; in one skein, individual parts that are twisted together move in divergent directions so that the strands of the voices gradually become disentangled. The total form is made up of the alternation of ramification and unification of the parts and of the rents or binding together of the net-formation that ensues from this."

>> listen
>> wiki

A word with Brice Marden

An Interview With Brice Marden on Cold Mountain series - By Pat Steir

PS: Tell me about your relationship to the book Cold Mountain. To the poet and the poems.

BM: I was working with calligraphy, and looking at a lot of Chinese calligraphy. Getting poems by chance, I found the Red Pine translation at a bookstore. It has the Chinese characters and the translations in it. It was that form that I picked up on-four couplets, and five or ten characters per couplet. In the beginning I did drawings using the form that the poems take in the Chinese, then I started joining image and calligraphy, using the shape of the poem as a skeleton. I'm becoming more and more interested in the ideas of the Tao and of Zen. The Cold Mountain poems are very much about that.

PS: I see in this work your interest in landscape.

BM: These are not pictures of specific places or things. But yes, there is an interest in landscape. Some of the drawings have been started in front of landscape. Later I work them in the studio. There's a palm grove that I worked in, in St. Barts. The St. Barts drawings were started there.

PS: Do you see these drawings as calligraphy?

BM: It's not a form of writing. I'm not trying to make a language. I think of Chinese calligraphy as simply the way I see it, not knowing the language....But if someone translates a piece for me, and I hear the relationships I am affected by that. I use the form of calligraphy, then it disappears, but, it's always there, in some way. I start out with a formal structure-couplets or whatever. Then I take it from there. It's about joining things up, making relationships, but at the same time letting the drawing itself do the work. They start out with observation and then automatic reaction, and then back off, so there's layering of different ways of drawing. I'll start with, say, five characters to a line, three, four or five lines, and [then] I start joining or refining what I've done. Maybe going back, again and again refining the image. I impose a kind of grid on it, and after a while it starts breaking out and becoming its own. Ideally, the drawing is working and I'm working with it. The drawings now look more like Chinese landscape and less like calligraphies. But then, who knows? I'm looking more at the Chinese. And I'm looking more at the landscape. Before I was looking at Greece. The only Western art I've been investigating has been Pollock. I used to not want to have anything to do with Oriental art or Asian art. I thought, I'm Western, I just can't understand a different philosophy. I guess that's one of the things about coming through middle age. You don't feel you have to restrict yourself anymore.

PS: Do you think art carries some spiritual thread?

BM: Definitely. In a way, Beuys was very helpful in clarifying a lot of that....The Abstract Expressionists were very good, but also, they were embarrassed to deal with those issues. If you accept certain unknowns, it becomes easy to accept an idea of the spiritual. But you can't go about making spiritual painting. Say you're drawing a tree and you feel there's an energy there that is just not exactly what you're seeing, you try to get some of that into the drawing, whatever you call it. I think one of the things art does is lead you to forget the rules. So it isn't only pedagogical. It really takes you back to yourself. That's really important. That's my involvement with making art. [For me, drawing's] an intimate medium. It's very direct, it's very close. There's less between the artist and the art. There is real closeness, direct contact. A painting is about refinement of image. And drawing isn't. I don't think drawing is less than painting....I love the kind of layering I can do. A lot of those drawings were about moving from place to place. Staying in one place one night, and drawing the tree, and then the next day going some place and just sitting in a hotel room, I would draw a seashell on the same drawing, and then go back into it and draw another tree. Just layering all those observations. The less you have between you and what you're making the better. The best drawing instruments are the ones where you are what your hand is. When the hand moves with the least resistance. In a way, pencil is much less resistant than a brush.

PS: Tell me how you started to draw with sticks, and why you use them now.

BM: There was always something about a picture of Matisse working on drawings for his chapel. I think he made them with charcoal attached to bamboo. By getting farther away, with a delicate instrument,...in a way it becomes closer: the slightest move is reflected. There's also accident, and I use it. That's the Abstract Expressionist thing. That's really part of the whole vocabulary-my whole vocabulary. I think that's a very important point. What one is physically...I am 5' 8 1/2", and I weight this much, and I am left-handed, and I'm a certain age. That has a big effect on what the thing looks like. The kind of mark I can make physically. If everybody tried to draw the same line, they just couldn't do it.
I keep finding I want to work with longer and longer sticks, to get further and further away, and to get a different swing into the drawing. Instead of using fingers and wrists, I want to have a little bit more arm and shoulder. But I find that painting doesn't have the fluidity that the drawing has. And that's always, to me, the battle, to get fluidity into the painting.

PS: For some ancient Chinese landscape painters the task was to become a medium for Nature.

BM: To me, one of the greatest twentieth-century statements is Pollock's saying "I am Nature." I mean, that is so hard to deal with, in terms of working from Nature.... What happens in the paintings is I'll paint, then I'll paint things out, make corrections by painting out with white paint. The paintings, in a funny way, are very realistic, because there's no way I can take anything out. The things that get painted out suddenly become images on their own. I erase with the gouache, but then that starts becoming an image itself.

PS: I love the fact that I can see everything you did and that nothing was hidden.

BM: Yes, it's funny. They are quite organic in their way...

PS: Do you think that sometimes drawings are about grace and paintings are about hard work.

BM: Yeah. It's like air and dross. A painting, you know, it's all dirty material. But it's about transformation. Taking that earth, that heavy earthen kind of thing, turning it into air and light. The transformation, you know, that's what it's about. Working on these paintings there's always an idea which is an ideal. It's always impossible....But I think every time, maybe, I just get closer to some impossible thing....

PS: Why do you make the etchings? How do the etchings relate to the drawings?

BM: Etching, you know, has a more physical resistance to it than drawing. For me etching becomes something between drawing and painting. I like to work etchings along with the paintings. Things have happened in the etchings that have gone back into the paintings.

PS: Most people think your work is beautiful. Is the beauty of the object a consideration for you?

BM: I really relate to form. If the form is resolved, it's beautiful. The idea of beauty can be offensive.

PS: What do you mean?

BM: Maybe beauty is too easy. It doesn't deal with issues; political issues or social issues. But an issue that it does deal with is harmony....One of the reasons I wanted to do this work was that by using the monochromatic palette in the past basically all I could get were chords. I wanted to be able to make something more like fugues, more complicated, back-and-forth renderings of feelings.

>> artworks
>> wiki

COH plays COSEY (raster-noton 091)

COH PLAYS COSEY CD is the first part of an ongoing collaborative project between Ivan Pavlov/COH and Cosey Fanni Tutti known for her solo performances and work with Chris Carter/CTI as well as for being a part of the radical cultural phenomena COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle. Very much a statement rather than just a musical venture, COH PLAYS COSEY deals with concepts of honesty, trust, privacy, communication as well as (perception of) sexuality. The work represents a very close, if an intimate, contact between the two, where one (Ivan) was to interpret voice recordings made for him by the other (Cosey) - recordings made in intensely emotional states to establish a dialogue that extends beyond words, beyond intellect. A most private emotional diary of one (Cosey) pronounced to the general public by the other (Ivan ). The work has been kept hermetic by Ivan voluntarily restricting his choice of sound exclusively to that originating from the voice recordings, thus preserving the raw quality of his source material. In this explicit sonic adventure COH plays Cosey without inhibitions, without fear and without questioning the content submitted. COH plays Cosey like an actor - becoming her through his elaborate transformations of the voice. COH plays Cosey like a computer game - making his way though the infinite combinations and variety of human expression with ease and sense of fun. COH plays Cosey like in sex - fully controlling the process and manifesting the eventual outcome. COH PLAYS COSEY is a world of the embarrassingly unspoken made audible, COH PLAYS COSEY is the place where there is nothing left to hide.

Available march 26th 2008 - raster-noton

Urban Echo

Urban Echo is an ongoing series of interactive sound and video installations. The project has appeared in many forms ranging from intimate outdoor video sculptures to large interactive public façades. Urban Echo aims to collect and creatively represent the thoughts and imaginings of city-dwellers.

In each installation, participants send their thoughts and questions via SMS and voicemail. The responses are then projected and added to a dynamic spatialized audio composition.

This version was installed at Huset i Magstræde in Copenhagen, Denmark for the International Computer Music Festival in late August, 2007. It was completed in collaboration with composer J. Anthony Allen.

>> christopherbaker.net/projects/urbanecho/

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen (August 22, 1928 – December 5, 2007) was a German composer, widely acknowledged as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th century. He is known for his ground-breaking work in electronic music and aleatory (controlled chance) in serial composition. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music" (Hewett 2007).

He experienced true horror and carnage as an orphaned teenager on active service near the end of WWII. He then went on seemingly to redefine contemporary music: from Kreuzspiel, the early electronic Kontakte, the intuitive works, the hour-long a-capella Stimmung, to the Licht cycle of seven operas. His influence is widely felt, even in unexpected places within the world of popular music.
After dealing first-hand with the victims of conflict and allied bombing out in the field and in the hospital, he began his post-war musical studies in Europe. He had thoughts of being a writer, and did a stint as a travelling magician's pianist. This life gave way in the early-1950s to the project of redesigning music, from the bottom-up, on his own terms. Melody, regular rhythm, and literal repetition were not to be found, while fearsome serial structures (and philosophical paradigms) underpinned the sparsest surface texture. Stockhausen's frequent cosmic flights of philosophical and moral fancy are important to his works.

The sharp practicality of his musical thinking is in its own league among post-war composers. By the mid-50s Stockhausen was enjoying huge success as leader of the avant garde. Dedicated festivals soon sprung up around the globe, and they continue. For some though, even now, this is one musical emperor who walks unclothed.

Recommended for starters are: the electronic Telemusik, all the early chamber pieces, the erotic ode Stimmung (arguably the finest of all takes on mimimalism), Mantra for two pianos, the epic Hymnen, Trans, Gruppen (for 3 orchestras), Carré (for 4 orchestras and choirs), Unsichtbare Chöre, Mixtur.

>> watch the lecture to the Oxford Union on 'Sounds'
>> listen

Synthetic life

In 2001, Craig Venter made headlines for sequencing the human genome. In 2003, he starting mapping the ocean's biodiversity. Now he's working to create the first synthetic lifeforms - microorganisms that can produce alternative fuels. And he's very, very close.
"Can we create new life out of our digital universe?" asks Craig Venter. And his answer is, yes, and pretty soon. He walks the TED2008 audience through his latest research into "fourth-generation fuels" -- biologically created fuels with CO2 as their feedstock. His talk covers the details of creating brand-new chromosomes using digital technology, the reasons why we would want to do this, and the bioethics of synthetic life.

In the last two decades the field of genomics has undergone a revolution. Scientific discoveries have come at a dazzling pace. These breakthroughs were made possible by advances in underlying enabling technologies such as high-throughput DNA sequencing, high-performance computing and bioinformatics. Many of these advances are directly attributable to the innovation of Dr. Venter and his teams. With the genomes of more than 300 organisms and millions of newly discovered genes readily available, genes now have the potential to be the design components of the future industrial world.

Genomics has improved our understanding of the workings of living organisms through sequencing and analyzing DNA; Synthetic Genomics is focused on the next powerful step of synthesizing and programming DNA by developing and utilizing the latest advances in synthetic genomics. Synthetic genomics is a new field of science that involves the design and assembly of genes and gene pathways and whole chromosomes from chemical components of DNA. As a computer analogy, we view the genome of a cell as the operating system and the cytoplasm of the cell as the hardware. The cytoplasm contains the ribosomes and the other components necessary for expression of genetic information contained in the genome. Synthetic Genomics' goal is to modify the cell’s operating system, design new genomes, to code for new types of cells with desired properties for the production of bioenergy or substitutes for petrochemicals.

>> watch the video

Beauty and truth in physics

Murray Gell-Mann is an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles.

"What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental psysics, a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant."

Wielding laypeople's terms and a sense of humor, Nobel Prize winner Murray Gell-Mann drops some knowledge about particle physics, asking questions like, Are elegant equations more likely to be right than inelegant ones? Can the fundamental law, the so-called "theory of everything," really explain everything? His answers will surprise you.

>> watch

Werner Meyer-Eppler

Werner Meyer-Eppler was a German physicist, experimental acoustician, phoneticist, and information theorist. He studied mathematics, physics, and chemistry, first at the University of Cologne and then in Bonn, from 1936 until 1939, when he received a doctorate in Physics.

Meyer-Eppler published essays on synthetic language production and presented American inventions like the Coder, the Vocoder, the Visible Speech Machine. He contributed to the development of the Electrolarynx, which is still used today for the speech-impaired (Ungeheuer 1992; Diesterhöft 2003).

In 1949 Meyer-Eppler published a book promoting the idea of producing music by purely electronic means (Meyer-Eppler 1949), and in 1951 joined the sound engineer/composer Robert Beyer and the composer/musicologist/journalist Herbert Eimert in a successful proposal to the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) for the establishment of an electronic-music studio in Cologne. After two years of work, it was officially opened with a broadcast lecture-concert on 26 May 1953, and was to become the most important such studio in Europe.
He published and lectured frequently on the subject of electronic music, introducing the term “aleatoric” with respect to concepts of statistical shaping of sounds based on his studies of phonology (Meyer-Eppler 1955).

His most important work was Grundlagen und Anwendungen der Informationstheorie (Basic Principles and Applications of Communication Theory), published in 1959.

>> find out more...

Angular Momentum (part 1)

A sound pattern rotating about some reference point is the measure of the extent to which the sound pattern will continue to rotate about that point unless acted upon by an external torque (moment).
In particular, if a point mass rotates about an axis, then the angular momentum with respect to a point on the axis is related to the mass of the sound pattern, the velocity and the distance of the mass to the axis.
While the motion associated with linear momentum has no absolute frame of reference, the rotation associated with angular momentum is sometimes spoken of as being measured relative to the fixed stars.
Torque (or often called a moment) can informally be thought of as "rotational force" or "angular force" which causes a change in rotational motion. This force is defined by linear force multiplied by a radius. Torque is the rate at which angular momentum is transferred in or out of the system.

Listen:
http://www.last.fm/music/bogdan/angular+momentum

ante-rasa

Located in Liège/Belgium, ante-rasa is a free techno netlabel. Its objectives are broadcast and promote artists a few or not known, producing original and quality music. Something obscure, raw, dense, percussive & hypnotic. The result of this project is thus to bring freshness to a scene tending to standardization and to offer an independent space of expression for those who want it. Initially, tracks are distributed freely to mp3/320kbps format under Creative Commons rights. Later, vynil releases are envisaged.

>> http://www.ante-rasa.be/

8 March

Dangerous Knowledge

In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.

The film begins with Georg Cantor, the great mathematician whose work proved to be the foundation for much of the 20th-century mathematics. He believed he was God's messenger and was eventually driven insane trying to prove his theories of infinity. Ludwig Boltzmann's struggle to prove the existence of atoms and probability eventually drove him to suicide. Kurt Gödel, the introverted confidant of Einstein, proved that there would always be problems which were outside human logic. His life ended in a sanatorium where he starved himself to death.

Finally, Alan Turing, the great Bletchley Park code breaker, father of computer science and homosexual, died trying to prove that some things are fundamentally unprovable.

The film also talks to the latest in the line of thinkers who have continued to pursue the question of whether there are things that mathematics and the human mind cannot know. They include Greg Chaitin, mathematician at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, New York, and Roger Penrose.

Dangerous Knowledge tackles some of the profound questions about the true nature of reality that mathematical thinkers are still trying to answer today.

>> documentary part 1
>> documentary part 2

Sitting in a Room with Alvin Lucier

I Am Sitting in a Room (1970) is one of composer Alvin Lucier's best known works, featuring Lucier recording himself narrating a text, and then playing the recording back into the room, re-recording it. The new recording is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated. Since all rooms have characteristic resonance or formant frequencies (e.g. different between a large hall and a small room), the effect is that certain frequencies are emphasized as they resonate in the room, until eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself. The recited text describes this process in action—it begins "I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice," and the rationale, concluding, "I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have," referring to his own stuttering.

Lucier had also specified that a performance need not use his text and the performance may be recorded in any room. However, Lucier himself has recorded the piece in at least one room he did not find aesthetically acceptable.

Narrated text:
"I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have."

Listen: "I am sitting in a room"

Bucharest Biennale 2008

BEING HERE
MAPPING THE CONTEMPORARY

“How do we know that we are not living in a grand map, doing its best to represent a reality we don’t recognize?”

Never perfect, never complete, never comprehensive, always tentative, wanting, deficient, the map insistently makes us aware of that unrepresentable whole, that catholic embrace of all things, also known as reality. The map, in fact, upsets any representational faith we might still sport and leaves us in savory shambles. It deconstructs realities, it suggests certain paths, particular possibilities, suggestive options, while at the same undermining any secure grasp we might have thought we had for a moment on our existential context, or on, in other words, life.

Mapping is, in fact, not a mimetic exercise, a process of analogue imitation by way of reduction and abstraction, a means towards the splendid and refractory lives of copies and reproductions. Maps are, rather, paralell worlds, rich and powerful out of their own specific properties, producers of other spaces and alternative geographies. And exactly because of this: resourceful and productive and beautiful instrumentalities for the contemporary moment, for navigation – or withdrawal ? in these strange times in the midst of the landscapes of terror, fear and loss, of the territories of restricted movement, control and surveillance, of borders which are walls, of globalization with its promises and defeats.

BB3 attends to the geographical turn in contemporary creativity and currrent representational practices. Promoting cartographic literacy, imagining the map as a problematic and unpredicatable and productive and liberating instrument, BB3 invites mapmakers, cartographers, navigators, mapreaders, guides, maptravelers, mapprogrammers, mapdevotees, mapdestroyers of all kinds. Join us in mapping our moment, join us in being exactly here, which, as Joyce had it, is the same as being everywhere. And nowhere.

Jan-Erik Lundström
Johan Sjöström

>> Bucharest Biennale 2008