Thursday 21 July 2016

News: Contemporary Music Review, Special Issue: Gender, Creativity and Education in Digital Musics and Sound Art



A new edition of the Contemporary Music Review has just been published; a special issue on Gender, Creativity and Education in Digital Musics and Sound Art, edited by Georgina Born and Kyle Devine, and featuring writing by Freida Abtan: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/gcmr20/35/1

Thursday 14 July 2016

Event: Place at Hatcham













































PLACE
Saturday 16 July 2016, 7:30pm at St Catherine's Church Hatcham, Telegraph Hill SE14 5SG
(at the top of either Jerningham Rd or Pepys Rd, from New Cross)

After two months of research on the site and surrounding areas, exploring their history and present sociocultural dynamics, the pieces 'CONCORDANTIA DISCORDANTIA CANONUM' by Rodrigo B. Camacho and 'Where is the Person with the Sixteen Parts?' by Sara Rodrigues will be performed by Roxanna Albayati, Henry O'Brien, Gabriele Cavallo, Chase Coley, Nicole Trotman and Scout Creswick.

Further information here

Tickets at the door
£5 / £3 for students and recent graduates
Refreshments during the interval

Saturday 2 July 2016

Call for Contributions: Performing, Writing.


Deadline 15 July 2016. 
Full updated call as .pdf here.

Performing, Writing: A symposium in four turns imagines how a text can be conceptualised, written, presented and figured with equal or more contingency and responsiveness to temporal and corporeal happenings, and vice versa. What creative, dialogic, autobiographical or alternative writing approaches might elicit a text that engages with the plurality of affects of an artwork? How might a creative work be informed, inspired, directed, scripted or critiqued with the same respect for live-ness that unfolds spatially as it does textually? How might these parallel practices inhabit space symbiotically? How might a new culture of criticality develop in between acts of “performing through”?

The symposium is structured as four turns playing out across several days of experiences, textures, flavours and modalities linking acts of performing with acts of writing.

Turn One: ON Live occurs as part of Performance Arcade, a public programme running 9-12 and 16-19 March 2017 on the Wellington waterfront and beyond. This turn includes a collection of curated new performance works, the symposium opening event and a series of seminars. The performance works are intended to highlight the primacy of practice and serve as hosts for on-going discussion around the translation or transference between performance works and textual works.

Performing, Writing will formally begin on 12 March 2017 with an evening keynote. All participants are encouraged to arrive in Wellington no later than 10 March in order to witness the Arcade works at least once and engage in ‘floor talks’ and masterclasses. Those artists involved in Performance Arcade will be given the option to perform 9-12 March, 16-19 March or both periods leaving the artists the ability to attend the symposium.

Turns Two, Three and Four are foregrounded by three provocations: ON Site, ON Score and ON Voice. Participants will encounter a series of situated ‘turns’ around the city, exploring different sites and environments, and thereby allowing us to ‘turn our thoughts’ in the direction of some of the various spaces in which performance and performance writing ‘turns up’. The precise order and format of these situations, and the particular ways in which they host the 'turns', are to be developed in parallel with the curation of the proposals. Thus, they form part of a performative framework from which the form(at) of the symposium will emerge.

The provocations for Turn Two, Three and Four are:
ON Site questions the nature of the relationship between performance writing and place, traversing territories that may include site-specific works, works about place, or narratives around journeys between places. This day of the symposium is an excursion to Matiu Island (also known as Somes Island), an island in the middle of the Wellington Harbour rich in New Zealand cultural, geographical and geological history. Matiu island raises notions of islandness and pries open concern for ownership and stewardship, migrancy and transience, internment, bio-security and environmental heritage, belonging and outcast. It offers a space for us to distinguish what site-specific, site-situated and site-responsive are in practices of performance and writing.
ON Score asks us to consider a shifting spectrum between the singularity of the script and the plurality of the score, challenging the relationship between the written, inscribed, or etched, and the performed, live, or imagined. The situation of a black box theatre at Bats Theatre offers an intimate acoustic range and potential friction to the differentiation between live art and theatre. It is an opportunity to test the limits of the theatre space's interior contours, audience-performer relationships, and the affective qualities of darkness.
ON Voice prompts an exploration of aurality and oral traditions including those emerging from indigenous peoples and those associated with storytelling, singing and public speaking. It is here that we welcome proposals sensitive to the voice and pitch of the writer, the reader, the speaker and the space(s) in which such elocution occurs including the immediate room, the atmosphere and/or the political, geographical or cultural climate.

Wednesday 29 June 2016

News: Tom Richards' 'Mini-Oramics' project features on the BBC website



Today sees a main feature on the BBC News website featuring a number of SPR members who have been involved with Tom Richards' fantastic project to create Daphne Oram's Mini-Oramics machine.
"An electronic sequencer and synthesiser has been built based on designs produced more than 40 years ago by electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram.
Ms Oram who died in 2003, co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and developed a system of creating sounds and compositions using drawings.
The machine is thought to have remained unfinished in her own lifetime.
But experts say the Mini Oramics's approach to composition and performance would have been influential.
Tom Richards, the researcher who finally constructed the machine, told BBC Radio 4's the World at One programme it had helped answer the question: "What if this had come to pass in 1973?""
Full feature is here. 

Monday 27 June 2016

Review: Premiere of Daphne Oram's 'Still Point' in the Financial Times



Today sees a review in the Financial Tmes of Daphne Oram's 'Still Point', premiered at St. John's Smith Square on Friday night, realised by SPR member and composer James Bulley in collaboration with composer Shiva Feshareki.
"Receiving its debut performance as part of the Southbank Centre’s DeepMinimalism festival — a celebration of close listening and outrĂ© composition — Daphne Oram’s 1949 opus Still Point is that rarest of things: a groundbreaking work of art that remains almost completely unknown. Had it been performed at the time of writing, it would have almost certainly altered the landscape of electroacoustic music shaped by Schaeffer and Stockhausen. With any justice, tonight’s performance at St John’s Smith Square — a breathless realisation of the piece by the young composers Shiva Feshareki and James Bulley, working with the London Contemporary Orchestra — should help propel it into the canon of contemporary classical music."
Read the full review here.

Tuesday 10 November 2015

Conference & CfP: Sound Art Matters, 1-4 June 2016


SOUND ART MATTERS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOUND ART

JUNE 1-4, 2016 AARHUS UNIVERSITY, DENMARK

The current art field is full of sound: audible and inaudible, infrasound, ultrasound, sound machines, sound installations, field recordings, digital sounds, biological sounds, sound walks, sounds from instruments, voices, nature, sonifications of data and so on. Sound art comprises a wide range of different artistic practices in which sound is a central element. It occurs in a variety of formats and contexts, crossing conventional boundaries between art genres and institutions. Despite this abundance of sonic expressions, sound art is still, as Christoph Cox noted in 2011, ‘profoundly undertheorized’. 

Call for Papers here

Monday 9 November 2015

Talk: J.J. Jeczalik, 12 November 2015

















Date: November 12th, 16.00-17.00
Location: Goldsmiths, Richard Hoggart Building Room 167

J.J. Jeczalik is a founder member of the Art of Noise and played an important role in many early Trevor Horn and ZTT projects as the creative programmer of the Fairlight CMI digital sampling synthesizer. JJ Jeczalik has been involved with many music projects over the years, featuring the likes of Kate Bush, Godley & Creme, Paul McCartney, Yes, and many others. Most of these sessions happened during the '80s, and JJ was there to man the Fairlight -- the pioneering Australian sampling machine that was sprung upon an unsuspecting world in 1979. It was with the same radical, punk-influenced outlook that he made his mark on the music of one of the most seminal hi-tech bands of all time: the Art Of Noise. Much of the weirdness and incongruity of Art Of Noise music was the result of JJ's disregard for musical and studio conventions. Art Of Noise transgressed many of them, going out on a limb with sonic innovations, and spreading their musical net over pastoral, ambient pieces like 'Moments In Love', to upbeat hits like their collaborations with Duane Eddy, in 'Peter Gunn', and Tom Jones, in their glorious reworking of the Prince song, 'Kiss'.

All are welcome to attend these public masterclasses but priority will be given to students on the BMus Popular Music programme.

Monday 2 November 2015

Event: Noizemaschin!! #1, 3 November 2015



Date; Tuesday 3 November, 7.30pm
Venue: Amersham Arms, 388 New Cross Road, SE14 6TY London, United Kingdom
£5 entry

Album: Hollow Blown Egg



SPR member Dr. Lisa Busby has
started a DIY campaign for her upcoming debut solo album. The single and video 'Hollow Blown Egg' are out now, and the album comes out in mid November. The album uses improvisations on playback media and other simple sound making devices as a basis for songwriting, and explores a territory where melody meets noise and collage, and song fragments float in larger structuresYou can see the video for the single here - http://fingersinthegloss.co.uk - 
as well as access free downloads.

Wednesday 30 September 2015

Friday 31 July 2015