Begin Anywhere: The Fourth Review!

From the Hypnagogue website:

An open mind and a touch of patience are good tools to have on hand when going into Stephen Christopher Stamper’s debut, Begin Anywhere. Like many of the experimental releases on the Runningonair label, this disc steps off from a pretty heady theoretical perch, involving “natural VLF radio phenomena…algorithmic composition… prolonged experimentation with the Debian GNU/Linux operating system, Miller Puckette’s Pure Data visual programming language…” and more. This initially manifests itself in aggressive, static-laden, generative-sounding tangles that border on being unapproachable. A piece like ”Crackle On and On (Version 1),” the longest track on the disc at 12 minutes plus, stands a very good chance of putting off less adventurous/tolerant listeners. A random-feeling, constantly changing backdrop of sounds rebound their way through a minefield of (appropriately so) electronic crackles. There’s intent and movement in the piece, but after a while the interference overpowers the mix and can be a bit exhausting. A saving point in Begin Anywhere is that as Stamper proceeds, he shows that he can use his array of sounds in a way that’s less threatening, with fewer barbs and prongs. Deeper emotional threads emerge as he exhibits an ability to coax a response out of the listener rather than chasing it out. The calm-but-textured roll of “Growth” comes after a series of Stamper’s more out-there tracks, and the switch in sound and approach comes with a degree of relief. “Fata Morgana” and “Cantus in Memoriam” both carry a hint of sacred music; the former in its church-organ-like tones and latter in a certain meditative, hymnal quality. Begin Anywhere is not an easy listen, but there are spots where the effort pays off substantially. Stamper’s fearless compositional stance promises interesting things going forward.

Available from Runningonair.

Walking Piece

Walking Piece Drawing by Matthias Sperling

Walking Piece is an installation performance by Matthias Sperling featuring a diverse group of performers who create a single-file loop that continuously circumnavigates Siobhan Davies Studios. Audience members are invited to travel along, around and among the performers’ circular route in their own time. Meeting points and shared journeys between performers and audience continually shift as you encounter each performer’s unique way of navigating the loop.

On Sunday 15th July 2012, my fellow ‘diverse group of performers’ and I performed Matthias’ Walking Piece a grand total of three times!

The past three months of rehearsal and performance have been a truly amazing adventure with a wonderful group of people I will not forget: Anastasia, Bruce, Caroline, Charmaine, Denise, Emma, Evangelia, Franck, Hanna, Jo A., Jo B., Kate, Maddy, Margaret, Philip, Rachel A., Rachel G., Rosie, Shane, Toyin, Zokaya, Robyn and Matthias. Thank you all!

angel n. a messenger…

 
Unit 3: Sound Arts Project

You read extraordinary descriptions of listening experiences, you recognize them, but they are un-reproducible. This imaginative dimension disclosed by words is crucial, and it was important for me in my 20s: to find descriptions of music in literature, in works of anthropology and in travel books, and to hear that music in the words, while knowing that the reality was going to be different (Toop to Cascella, 2010).

The roots of this project go back two years to my time on the London College of Communication’s ABC Diploma in Sound Design and Music Technology. One of my many ideas for the ABC Diploma’s final project was that of a paper instrument. During research into this idea I discovered that it was possible to use the sharp corner of a piece of paper as a crude form of combined stylus and loudspeaker: amplifying the sounds pressed into the grooves of a vinyl record. Though the paper instrument idea was ultimately discarded, the idea of the paper stylus and loudspeaker combo continued to hover on the periphery of my imagination.

While struggling with my initial idea for this year’s final BA (Hons) Sound Arts and Design project, a discussion in one of the accompanying lectures bought the paper stylus and loudspeaker idea back into sharp focus. A fellow student was discussing a project that revolved around music and memory. This led me to thinking about my formative electronic music influences, the power of the written word in the weekly music press back in the early 1990s and an interview with David Toop from 2010 that I had just recently discovered (from which the quote at the beginning of this essay is taken) where he discussed his then newly published book Sinister Resonance. I remembered a small review dating from August 1993 in the Melody Maker’s Singles column by the writer Simon Reynolds that 20 years down the line still resonates with me. His description of the Metalheads 12-inch vinyl single Angel – an ‘ardkore jungle record not easy to obtain in St. Albans: the city in Hertfordshire where I was living at the time – so fired my young imagination that I felt compelled to try and recreate this unheard record on my lowly Commodore Amiga home computer. Needless to say I failed, but if it was not for the fire that Reynolds’ small spark of a review lit within me, I very much doubt that I would be where I am today. I decided there and then in that lecture that I would take these thoughts and ideas and combine them with the concept of the paper stylus and loudspeaker.

With this piece I wanted to expand on Toop’s idea and somehow convey the power of this ‘imaginative dimension disclosed by words’ (Toop to Cascella, 2010). By holding the review in one’s hands and plunging the sharp corner into the record’s grooves, I wanted to give some impression of how I heard and, through the vibrations of the paper loudspeaker, felt the ghost of the music within Reynolds’ words.

Bibliography

Cascella, D. (2010) David Toop. Frieze Blog [Internet], 17 August. Available from: <http://blog.frieze.com/david-toop/> [Accessed 25 May 2012].

Metalheads. (1993) Angel [Vinyl]. London: Synthetic.

Reynolds, S. (1993) Singles. Melody Maker, 28 August, p. 33.

Toop, D. (2010) Sinister resonance: the mediumship of the listener. London: Continuum.

Arrhythmia

 
Arrhythmia: an alteration in rhythm of the heartbeat either in time or force.

My initial inspiration for this piece was a description of a performance by dance artist Deborah Hay in an essay by Rosalind Krauss entitled Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Instead of dancing, Hay announced that she wished to talk. She proceeded to explain to the audience that she aspired to be in touch with the movement of every cell in her body. Steps and gestures visible to the audience were to be replaced with the motion of blood, cells, and organs from within. With this performance, Hay reduced dance down to one simple fact: the presence of her living, breathing body before the audience.

Even when we are at rest, our bodies are in constant motion. My first thought was to simply provide the audience with a stethoscope and a short written statement and allow them to listen in to this inner movement. However, taking part in Lucy Cash’s Dance and Beyond: Expanding the Choreographic Field elective course and Joe Moran’s Points of Departure choreographic workshop had reawakened an acute awareness of my own living, breathing body; an awareness, I realised, that was last triggered over five years ago when my life was interrupted by the diagnosis and treatment of thyroid cancer.

Because of this, the stethoscope began to take on a whole new meaning as the focus of the piece shifted from installation to performance. The stethoscope would become the centre of the audience’s attention as they used it to listen to the beat of my heart; a beat that had been interrupted by illness and the intensive treatment I had received.

In order to treat the cancer, the doctors had to completely remove my thyroid gland. The thyroid gland produces thyroxine: the hormone that controls the body’s metabolism – in effect dictating the body’s tempo. It was replaced with the man-made metronome of levothyroxine: a synthetic form of the thyroid hormone. As a consequence I suffered from hypothyroidism – my heart rate dropped, my respiratory pattern slowed – until the doctors were able to once again find the correct tempo for the inner dance of my body by adjusting my levothyroxine intake.

The follow-up radioactive iodine therapy proved to be another major disturbance to the natural choreography of my life. Family routines were interrupted and normal, everyday interaction ceased, as I was twice confined to a lead-lined room until the amount of radiation in my body reached a safe level.

Although thankfully I have now passed the five year cancer milestone and am feeling fit and well, I wanted to give the audience some idea of how all these carefully planned and orchestrated treatments, procedures and interventions can impact on and interrupt the flow of everyday life, while simultaneously offering up the presence of my damaged and scarred but still living and breathing body as evidence of their worth.

Bibliography

Banes, S. (1987) Terpsichore in sneakers. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Krauss, R. (1977) Notes on the index: seventies art in America. Part 2. October, vol. 4, pp. 58-67.

Lambert-Beatty, C. (2008) Being watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s. London: The MIT Press.

 

Tutor Lucy Cash’s comments:

Congratulations. Firstly, you made a powerful and thought provoking performance piece which worked on several different levels: it brought our attention to the body and its rhythmical systems, it was a subtle and honest portrait of a particular body and its relationship to illness, and it was a sensitive and intimate one-to-one encounter which gave each participant the space to connect the real-time experience of what they heard with their own body and sensations of touch, as well as circular systems in general. Although framed within the abstraction of the biological body, it was a moving and very human encounter.

An Evening of Live Sound Performances: Rehearsal 21/06/2012

 
As part of the Reflected Back Into Space project, the Hoop & Toy in South Kensington hosted an evening of experimental music and sound art performances.

See here for more details: https://www.facebook.com/events/251027605003088/

Rather embarrassingly, a room full of BA (Hons) Sounds Arts & Design students and not one digital recorder between them meant that no recordings exist of the night! Therefore this rehearsal recording is the only evidence of what my performance sounded like…

The performance consisted of an Asus Eee PC 2G Surf running Debian Squeeze plus a Maplin Telephone Pick-Up Coil plugged into a Behringer Eurorack UB502 Mixer. The Eee PC was turned on and the following commands were entered via the command line:

./howse/self "/bin/ps" "-ef" > /dev/dsp
cat /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/* > /dev/dsp

Begin Anywhere: The Third Review!

From the Collective Zine website:

Reviewed by Captain Fidanza.

Excellent, another album from Runningonair Music and something of a return to what I have come to expect from them. My heart was already racing when I read on the press release, the artist expressing an interest in both “algorithmic composition” and “Karplus-Strong string synthesis” but when the music started buzzing out of the speakers, the beat of my heart moved up a gear.

There will never be words in the English language to adequately express the joy I feel at the fact people like Stephen Christopher Stamper are making music and someone is taking the time to release it. Twenty years ago, people like Stephen would have been bullied to the point of autism and might never have had the confidence to create something as beautifully quixotic as this, but now, the weird science people of yesteryear are finding their way out of the laboratories and releasing skeletal electronica on boutique labels. Capital, capital.

I won’t even try to describe the music on here as it’s not possible. I’ll make a couple of clumsy comparisons but they don’t really come close to elucidating the restrained majesty of this release.

Bits of it sound a little like the song “Phase 3: Agni Detonating Over the Thar Desert” from the album “Thrones and Dominions” by Earth. Other bits sound like the album “94 Diskont” by Oval.

The rest you will have to find out for yourself.