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FAULTY SOUND NIGHT 2012 IS AT CAPACITY!

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Faulty Dog present the 2nd FAULTY sound art night as part of the Brighton Digital Festival on Thursday 27th September @ Northern Lights. Expect strange and immersive experimental LIVE sound and video as 5 performers bend your perception of acoustic and digital sound. LUMO, Krill & Captain Kelp, MAFF the ROM + C-BA perform live manipulation of sound, samples, loops, vocals, hacked instruments and video processing. Faulty Dog is proud to welcome our headline C-BA from across the water in Belgium for this one-off spectacular AV treat. Relax, have an Akvavit and open your mind upstairs at Brighton’s fantastic Scandinavian bar, Northern Lights. This will be a night of intimate sound and visual performance.

Thursday 27th September. Upstairs @ Northern Lights
6 Little East Street, Brighton BN1 1HT

Breaking news @Maff_Faulty

Brighton Digital Festival 2012
FAULTY Sound Art Night>>
Thursday 27th September>>
Upstairs @ Northern Lights>>
6 Little East Street, Brighton BN1 1HT.

Over the last 10 centuries, ever since the nuem found in Gregorian chants, composers have constantly refined the way they notate music. One thinks of the unequivocal scores of the late 19th century, where an equation was reached between music as it had been created and music as it was performed.
All the while, popular music remained mostly unnotated, but it most certainly influenced what we used to call serious music. In the 20th century, these two trends crystallised in a strange form. First there was a yearning for evermore precision in notation from a large number of composers who wanted to leave no room to the interpreter’s initiative (the composer retaining control like a demiurge). This issue of exact interpretation came to an end with the invention of musique conrete and electronic music (where the composer is necessarily his own interpreter). In parallel, other composers – and in some cases the same ones – have imagined open works (Pousseur, Stockhausen, Cage…) in which the interpreter has control over the order of certain sequences. The complexity of the sound materials – integrating chance, electronics, or specific devices – gave birth to new forms of scores, themselves occasionally opened to interpretation. When music became tape music, it excluded interpretation altogether – it was played back following specific instructions. There may be something mortal (as in finished) in this observation: that is all it is. When the need to re-interpret became impossible to satisfy, we began to look for a way to change the unchangable. The remix was created to perform variations of the music text. When the object of modification is the sound material itself, the process results in new work, with all possible degrees of variation – the scale goes from 1 to 100 – from a light modification to a full-scale re-creation, by way of a middle point where the source is left recognisable and is combined to the mark of the remixer. That’s the most common form.
If one can constantly create new works from older works, then one can assert that there is no base work and that all branches are to be put on the same level.
So we can see that the idea od accuracy in interpretation, one of the biggest issues in previous centuries, was abandoned to a large extent once technology allowed us to work directly on the sound text.
Guy Marc Hinant

Guy-Marc Hinant is an author, editor, and Belgian filmmaker born in Charleroi. He directs the independent label Sub Rosa specializing in electronic music and avant-garde which he is the creator. He is edited An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music series. He has written several narrative fragments and notes on the aesthetic to the issues of the time, various international journals such as Leonardo Music Journal (SF), Luna-Park (Paris) and for the Magazine Lapin (the Association, Paris). Dominique Goblet comic author companion, he appears in his albums under the name “GM”.

At the beginning of the 1980s, he was a member of the Pseudo Code with Alain Neffe of Bene Gesserit and Xavier Stenmans group. In 2000, he founded OME with Dominique Lohlé, together they make a series of documentaries on the art of listening and noise.

Inspired by the Colour of Sound Weekend I dug out my old Casio PT-50 childhood keyboard with the idea of bringing my toy of the 80′s into the 10′s. I knew she would come in handy one day so was stored with my other nostalgic 80′s electronica. Despite a few dodgy slider contacts no doubt clogged from 3 decades of forgotten toy cupboard dust, with a new set of batteries and a good shake the PT-50 was ready to be wacked into the mac to see how she fared in a new digital age. And I must say, even just using Garageband for a bit of extra echo, reverb and fuzzbox it actually sounds half decent! And so, research pointed me to the idea of Circuit Bending where I found an example of that very keyboard…

Reed Ghazala – self styled multi media artist, hailed as the Father of Circuit-Bending, pioneered the transformation of the existing circuitry of basically any sound making toy or device. His other-worldly creations, controlled by transplanted switches, movement and sound itself saw a new kind of instrument genre. Musical artists such as Tom Waits, Peter Gabriel, Faust & Towa Tei wishing to push musical boundaries were quick to commission instruments for themselves.

The legacy continues… poor teletubby

The Colour Out of Space Event was a 3 day extravaganza of experimental Sound and Art where I had to check my usual listening habits at the door and open my mind to a whole new set of aural experiences. From the serene and sublime to the unnerving assault to the ears, Colour Out of Space supplied a non-stop line-up of some of the most cutting edge sound artists along with big names who have established themselves over decades of sound experimentation. Whilst I am still trying to compute the information (there is a backlog) I will give a brief summary of my highlights…
Morphogenesis was the first act I saw – a gentle and soothing introduction to what was to come. The group manipulated a hypnotic soundscape using found objects along with traditional instruments. One of the most interesting aspects was discovering the sound of material against material – violin bow on glass vase – wire in can of coke! With a table full of bits and pieces, real and impromptu instruments the sound would build into a harmony of electronic yet at the same time familiar and tactile arrangement.
Groundbreaking Composer Trevor Wishart performed an uplifting improvised voice piece without the use of technology (except the microphone) which explored the limits of human language and vocal expression. His second arrangement (entirely electronic) ‘Globalalia’ explored the ‘dance’ of human speech using 26 different languages, constructed and decontsructed in waves of distorted speech. Wishart has been experimenting with sound since the 1970′s and is a well documented name in the British sound art world.
Tomutonttu (which loosely translates as ‘dust gnome’) is Jan Anderzen – a key figure on Finland’s creative underground scene. His work uses the talents of a musical collective and reworks traditional Finnish folk idioms in a contemporary technology driven arrangement. Instantly more accessible to my senses due to the rhythmic elements, I enjoyed Anderzen’s performance – the use of effects, cassette and home wired electronic gizmos – to produce Scandinavian folk for the modern world.
Audrey Chen tours worldwide with her moving experimental cello and vocal performance. Using a combination of electronic layering, traditional musicianship and an incredibly versatile vocal range Chen moved the crowd with a deeply emotional piece. Starting with the rattle from a chopstick jammed between the cello strings, her sometimes crackling, sometimes beautifully haunting voice built to a emotional climax which left her (along with the listeners) visibly drained. In such close proximity, this was a powerful sound experience.
Most relevant to my own musical sensibility was Joseph Hammer, an influential artist in the LA sound-art scene for more than twenty-five years. Drawing on the complexities of playing, listening, memory and time, his sample based piece used a vintage reel tape player to manipulate handmade loops controlled manually into a complex ‘phonomontage’. The resulting audio clearly highlighted and explored his influences from AM radio stations, American popular culture and a love of vintage equipment and samples. Accessible in it’s output, there is a clear correlation to the urban US contemporary music scene.
Listen to my experimental sound piece inspired by the event…
The piece contains 2 samples from Tsui Hark’s Film ‘Once Upon A Time In China’, along with elements of feedback and distorted clicks created by the interference between Mac and internet dongle (Now I have a use for the damn thing)! Click Below
Sound Experiment