srijeda, 5. ožujka 2014.

A Peer-Reviewed Journal About Post-Digital Research

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Časopis o postdigitalnom dobu.

 www.aprja.net/


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Post-digital Research

“Post-digital Research” is the outcome of an extensive peer process. In August 2013 a number of researchers responded to an open call to participate in a research/Ph.D workshop organized by Aarhus University and transmediale, Berlin. In advance of meeting, each participant prepared a short text addressing the notion of the post-digital, posted it online and commented upon each others’ contributions (postdigital.projects.cavi.dk). The group then met at Kunsthal Aarhus in October, where they – in an on-going peer-review process – presented, critiqued and further developed their writings. This included the invention of a common working definition of the post-digital:
Post-digital, once understood as a critical reflection of “digital” aesthetic immaterialism, now describes the messy and paradoxical condition of art and media after digital technology revolutions. “Post-digital” neither recognizes the distinction between “old” and “new” media, nor ideological affirmation of the one or the other. It merges “old” and “new”, often applying network cultural experimentation to analog technologies which it re-investigates and re-uses. It tends to focus on the experiential rather than the conceptual. It looks for DIY agency outside totalitarian innovation ideology, and for networking off big data capitalism. At the same time, it already has become commercialized.
Following this, the current issue of A Peer-reviewed Newspaper (Volume 3 Issue 1), and the current issue of A Peer-reviewed Journal About “Post-digital Research” (Volume 3 issue 1) have been developed. The peer-reviewed newspaper was developed as a ‘sprint’, where the group decided to rewrite their contributions using a set of constraints. Building on shared impressions of the post-digital, a common vocabulary was developed that included a list of words considered good to use in their writings (those words that were shared), alongside a list of those that were considered taboo (words that only had a single instance). Over the course of two days, all articles were rewritten and made more concise, and in addition a script was developed to analyse how each text compared to the common working definition of the post-digital (written by Florian Cramer). Another script (written by James Charlton) analysed all submitted images and compared them to the average of all images.
postDig_COMBO2
Whereas the newspaper reflects the post-digital in relation to the changing conditions of research in ‘the afterglow’ of a digital revolution (related to the thematic framework of transmediale 2014, entitled Afterglow), the peer-reviewed journal further reflects the developed arguments of the participants’ research in a lengthier academic format.
Although in many ways the post-digital “sucks but is useful” as Florian Cramer notes in his article, the journal takes it to be a serious concept that deserves our critical attention. The journal issue is divided into three sections, that address the term itself, its genealogy and wider connotations, as well as its potential usefulness across different fields (including art, acoustics, aesthetic theory, political economy and philosophy). Given that the term comes from practice, it also addresses how the post-digital potentially operates as a framework for practice-based research that relate to material and historical conditions. As part of this, the journal includes a commissioned artwork, Psychoacademic dérive by Christophe Bruno, to make comment on the political economy of academic citation.
Christian Ulrik Andersen, Geoff Cox, Georgios Papadopoulos
Aarhus, February 2014


VOLUME 3, ISSUE 1, 2014
Edited by Christian Ulrik Andersen, Geoff Cox and Georgios Papadopoulos
ISSN: 2245-7755

JOURNAL CONTENTS

The Post-digital condition

Applications of the Post-digital

Post-digital practice-based research

Artist commission

 Christophe Bruno – Psychoacademic dérive

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In referring to the cancellation of Pluto’s planetary status in 2006, BWPWAP (Back When Pluto Was a Planet) – the 2013 edition of the transmediale festival – interrogates techno-cultural processes of displacement and invention, and asks for artistic and speculative responses to new cultural imaginaries. In light of this, the conference and workshop Researching BWPWAP took place in November 2012 in Lüneburg, Germany, organised jointly by Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Aarhus University and the reSource transmedial culture/transmediale. The call for participation focused on Ph.D. researchers and other participants to speculate on BWPWAP as a pretext for presenting their research and even to further reflect on its circulation as a meme... read more
VOLUME 2, ISSUE 1, 2013
Edited by Christian Ulrik Andersen and Geoff Cox
ISSN: 2245-7755

JOURNAL CONTENTS


Download the newspaper (pdf)


slide_incompatible

Different technologies, their cultures of use, and how they are conceptualised, at once represent compatibilities and incompatibilities. What happens when such in/compatible phenomena are brought to the fore rather than hidden away in the dark underbelly of digital culture? Is their in/compatibility a threat to stability, connectivity and to the operations of socio-technical systems more broadly? How do these unresolved tensions and paradoxes of media technologies continue to impact experimental artistic imagination and research practices? ... read more
VOLUME 1, ISSUE 2, 2012
Edited by Christian Ulrik Andersen and Geoff Cox
ISSN: 2245-7755

JOURNAL CONTENTS

MethodsSollfrank, Cornelia: “Performing the Paradoxes of Intellectual Property – Tactical Questioning”Thompson, Marie: ”M*anifesto f0r Interfer!ng Wom/en”Kristensen, Thomas Bjørnsten: “In/compatible Imagi(ni)ng – Ideal reproduction and discrete signals”Blas, Zach: “On Queer Viralities”
Tarasiewicz, Mathias: “Artistic Technology Research”Baio, Cesar: “Programming abstract machines – the artist’s role in mediation technologies”Breinbjerg, Morten: “Echoes of the Past – Poetic expression as research method”Riis, Morten: “An interview with the steam engine”Jucan, Joana B.: “An Experience of Thought – Measure for Endurance”Murphie, Andrew: “Models and the Future”Wenhart, Nina: “Speculative Archiving && Experimental Preservation of Media Art”

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newspaper_21march.indd

Emerging from ongoing research around interface criticism in the Digital Aesthetics Research Center and Center for Digital Urban Living, the aim of this newspaper is to broaden the topic to encompass the changing concept of the ’public’. The newspaper is organized into three thematic strands: ART as public interface; the public interfaces of URBAN space; the public interface and CAPITAL... read more
VOLUME 1, ISSUE 1, 2011
Edited by Christian Ulrik Andersen, Geoff Cox & Jacob Lund
ISSN: 2245-7755

JOURNAL CONTENTS


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ABOUT APRJA

“A peer-reviewed journal about //” (APRJA) is an open-access research journal that addresses the ever-shifting thematic frameworks of digital culture. Through open calls we invite researchers, artist-researchers, and particularly PhD students to participate in an on-going exchange of ideas that functions as a peer-review process for the joint publication of a research journal and a conceptual print newspaper. We take a particular interest in software studies, media archaeology, platform politics, interface criticism, computational culture and artistic research.
Despite the precarious conditions of the cognitive capitalism, we believe that research remains a powerful force in shaping our understanding of the world and the institutions through which we operate. APRJA has an ongoing collaboration with transmediale festival, Berlin, and thereby places an emphasis on the work of emergent researchers working both within and outside the academy. APRJA further seeks to expand the use of non-traditional methods, speculations, and actions in collaboration with other partners (festivals, events, research groups, etc. – see open call)
APRJA seeks to publish new research under conditions that promote a culture based on sharing, open distribution and the on-going exchange of ideas, but without losing sight of the academic conventions of peer-reviewed publication. APRJA performs this function with some degree of irreverence but at the same time provides a serious way to distribute new research that both our peers and our academic institutions will recognise as valid.
Series editors: Christian Ulrik Andersen and Geoff Cox
Series advisors: All participants so far.
Publisher: DARC (Digital Aesthetics Research Centre), Aarhus University, Helsingforsgade 14, DK 8200 Aarhus N, Denmark.
Web design: Sune Kjær Nielsen and Winnie Soon
ISSN: 2245-7755
License: Unless stated otherwise all articles are released under the CC license: ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike’.


What is ‘Post-digital’?

Posted on 2014/01/23 by Geoff Cox
Florian Cramer. Reader, Creating 010, Hogeschool Rotterdam

Typewriters vs. imageboard memes

typewriter_hipster_meme
Figure 1. “You’re not a real hipster – until you take your typewriter to the park”
In January 2013, a picture of a young man typing on a mechanical typewriter while sitting on a park bench went ‘viral’ on the popular website Reddit. The image was presented in the typical style of an ‘image macro’ or ‘imageboard meme’ (Klok 16-19), with a sarcastic caption in bold white Impact typeface that read: “You’re not a real hipster – until you take your typewriter to the park”.
The meme, which was still making news at the time of writing this paper in late 2013 (Hermlin), nicely illustrates the rift between ‘digital’ and ‘post-digital’ cultures. Imageboard memes are arguably the best example of a contemporary popular mass culture which emerged and developed entirely on the Internet. Unlike earlier popular forms of visual culture such as comic strips, they are anonymous creations – and as such, even gave birth to the now-famous Anonymous movement, as described by (Klok 16-19). Other important characteristics of imageboard memes are: creation by users, disregard of intellectual property, viral dissemination among users, and potentially infinite repurposing and variation (through collage or by changing the text). As low-resolution images with small file sizes, they can be created and disseminated almost instantly, in contrast with the much slower creation, editing and distribution processes characteristic of traditional publishing media.
The ‘digital’ imageboard meme portrays the ‘analog’ typewriter hipster as its own polar opposite – in a strictly technical sense however, even a mechanical typewriter is a digital writing system, as I will explain later in this text. also, the typewriter’s keyboard makes it a direct precursor of today’s personal computer systems, which were used for typing the text of the imageboard meme in question. Yet in a colloquial sense, the typewriter is definitely an ‘analog’ machine, as it does not contain any computational electronics.
In 2013, using a mechanical typewriter rather than a mobile computing device is, as the imageboard meme suggests, no longer a sign of being old-fashioned. It is instead a deliberate choice of renouncing electronic technology, thereby calling into question the common assumption that computers, as meta-machines, represent obvious technological progress and therefore constitute a logical upgrade from any older media technology – much in the same way as using a bike today calls into question the common assumption, in many Western countries since World War II, that the automobile is by definition a rationally superior means of transportation, regardless of the purpose or context.
Typewriters are not the only media which have recently been resurrected as literally post-digital devices: other examples include vinyl records, and more recently also audio cassettes, as well as analog photography and artists’ printmaking. And if one examines the work of contemporary young artists and designers, including art school students, it is obvious that these ‘old’ media are vastly more popular than, say, making imageboard memes.[1]

Post-digital: a term that sucks but is useful

1. Disenchantment with ‘digital’
I was first introduced to the term ‘post-digital’ in 2007 by my then-student Marc Chia – now Tara Transitory, also performing under the moniker One Man Nation. My first reflex was to dismiss the whole concept as irrelevant in an age of cultural, social and economic upheavals driven to a large extent by computational digital technology. Today, in the age of ubiquitous mobile devices, drone wars and the gargantuan data operations of the NSA, Google and other global players, the term may seem even more questionable than it did in 2007: as either a sign of ignorance of our contemporary reality, or else of some deliberate Thoreauvian-Luddite withdrawal from this reality.
More pragmatically, the term ‘post-digital’ can be used to describe either a contemporary disenchantment with digital information systems and media gadgets, or a period in which our fascination with these systems and gadgets has become historical – just like the dot-com age ultimately became historical in the 2013 novels of Thomas Pynchon and Dave Eggers. After Edward Snowden’s disclosures of the NSA’s all-pervasive digital surveillance systems, this disenchantment has quickly grown from a niche ‘hipster’ phenomenon to a mainstream position – one which is likely to have a serious impact on all cultural and business practices based on networked electronic devices and Internet services.
2. Revival of ‘old’ media
While a Thoreauvian-Luddite digital withdrawal may seem a tempting option for many, it is fundamentally a naïve position, particularly in an age when even the availability of natural resources depends on global computational logistics, and intelligence agencies such as the NSA intercept paper mail as well as digital communications. In the context of the arts, such a withdrawal seems little more than a rerun of the 19th-century Arts and Crafts movement, with its programme of handmade production as a means of resistance to encroaching industrialisation. Such (romanticist) attitudes undeniably play an important role in today’s renaissance of artists’ printmaking, handmade film labs, limited vinyl editions, the rebirth of the audio cassette, mechanical typewriters, analog cameras and analog synthesisers. An empirical study conducted by our research centre Creating 010 in Rotterdam among Bachelor students from most of the art schools in the Netherlands indicated that contemporary young artists and designers clearly prefer working with non-electronic media: given the choice, some 70% of them “would rather design a poster than a website” (Van Meer, 14). In the Netherlands at least, education programmes for digital communication design have almost completely shifted from art academies to engineering schools, while digital media are often dismissed as commercial and mainstream by art students (Van Meer, 5). Should we in turn dismiss their position as romanticist and neo-Luddite?

Post-what?

Post-digital = postcolonial; post-digital ≠ post-histoire
On closer inspection however, the dichotomy between digital big data and neo-analog do-it-yourself (DIY) is really not so clear-cut. Accordingly, ‘post-digital’ is arguably more than just a sloppy descriptor for a contemporary (and possibly nostalgic) cultural trend. It is an objective fact that the age in which we now live is _not_ a post-digital age, neither in terms of technological developments – with no end in sight to the trend towards further digitisation and computerisation – nor from a historico-philosophical perspective. Regarding the latter, (Cox) offers a valid critique of the “periodising logic” embedded in the term ‘post-digital’, which places it in the dubious company of other historico-philosophical ‘post’-isms, from postmodernism to post-histoire.
However, ‘post-digital’ can be defined more pragmatically and meaningfully within popular cultural and colloquial frames of reference. This applies to the prefix ‘post’ as well as the notion of ‘digital’. The prefix ‘post’ should not be understood here in the same sense as postmodernism and post-histoire, but rather in the sense of post-punk (a continuation of punk culture in ways which are somehow still punk, yet also beyond punk); post-communism (as the ongoing social-political reality in former Eastern Bloc countries); post-feminism (as a critically revised continuation of feminism, with blurry boundaries with ‘traditional’, unprefixed feminism); postcolonialism (see next paragraph); and, to a lesser extent, post-apocalyptic (a world in which the apocalypse is not over, but has progressed from a discrete breaking point to an ongoing condition – in Heideggerian terms, from Ereignis to Being – and with a contemporary popular iconography pioneered by the Mad Max films in the 1980s).
eethuis
Figure 2. Popular take-away restaurant in Rotterdam, echoing an episode from 19th-century Dutch colonial history, when members of the Chinese minority living in Java (Indonesia, then a Dutch colony) were brought as contract workers to a government-run plantation in Suriname, another Dutch colony.
None of these terms – post-punk, post-communism, post-feminism, postcolonialism, post-apocalyptic – can be understood in a purely Hegelian sense of an inevitable linear progression of cultural and intellectual history. Rather, they describe more subtle cultural shifts and ongoing mutations. Postcolonialism does not in any way mean an end of colonialism (akin to Hegel’s and Fukuyama’s “end of history”), but rather its mutation into new power structures, less obvious but no less pervasive, which have a profound and lasting impact on languages and cultures, and most significantly continue to govern geopolitics and global production chains. In this sense, the post-digital condition is a post-apocalyptic one: the state of affairs after the initial upheaval caused by the computerisation and global digital networking of communication, technical infrastructures, markets and geopolitics.
‘Digital’ = sterile high tech?
Also, the ‘digital’ in ‘post-digital’ should not be understood in any technical-scientific or media-theoretical sense, but rather in the way the term is broadly used in popular culture – the kind of connotation best illustrated by a recent Google Image Search result for the word ‘digital’:
digital
Figure 3. Google.nl image search result for ‘digital’, October 2013
The first thing we notice is how the term ‘digital’ is, still in 2013, visually associated with the colour blue. Blue is literally the coolest colour in the colour spectrum (with a temperature of 15,000 to 27,000 Kelvin), with further suggestions of cultural coolness and cleanness. The simplest definition of ‘post-digital’ describes a media aesthetics which opposes such digital high-tech and high-fidelity cleanness. The term was coined in 2000 by the musician Kim Cascone, in the context of glitch aesthetics in contemporary electronic music (Cascone, 12). Also in 2000, the Australian sound and media artist Ian Andrews used the term more broadly as part of a concept of “post-digital aesthetics” which rejected the “idea of digital progress” as well as “a teleological movement toward ‘perfect’ representation” (Andrews).
Cascone and Andrews considered the notion of ‘post-digital’ primarily as an antidote to techno-Hegelianism. The underlying context for both their papers was a culture of audio-visual production in which ‘digital’ had long been synonymous with ‘progress’: the launch of the Fairlight CMI audio sampler in 1979, the digital audio CD and the MIDI standard (both in 1982), software-only digital audio workstations in the early 1990s, real-time programmable software synthesis with Max/MSP in 1997. Such teleologies are still prevalent in video and TV technology, with the ongoing transitions from SD to HD and 4K, from DVD to BluRay, from 2D to 3D – always marketed with a similar narrative of innovation, improvement, and higher fidelity of reproduction. In rejecting this narrative, Cascone and Andrews opposed the paradigm of technical quality altogether.
Ironically, the use of the term ‘post-digital’ was somewhat confusing in the context of Cascone’s paper, since the glitch music defined and advocated here actually was digital, and even based on specifically digital sound-processing artefacts. On the other hand, and in the same sense as post-punk can be seen as a reaction to punk, Cascone’s concept of ‘post-digital’ may best be understood as a reaction to an age in which even camera tripods are being labelled as ‘digital’, in an effort to market them as new and superior technology.
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Figure 4. ‘Digital’ camera tripod
‘Digital’ = low-quality trash?
There is a peculiar overlap between on one hand a post-digital rejection of digital high tech, and on the other hand a post-digital rejection of digital low quality. Consider for example the persisting argument that vinyl LPs sound better than CDs (let alone MP3s); that film photography looks better than digital photography (let alone smartphone snapshots); that 35mm film projection looks better than digital cinema projection (let alone BitTorrent video downloads or YouTube); that paper books are a richer medium than websites and e-books; and that something typed on a mechanical typewriter has more value than a throwaway digital text file (let alone e-mail spam). In fact, the glitch aesthetics advocated by Cascone as ‘post-digital’ are precisely the same kind of digital trash dismissed by ‘post-digital’ vinyl listeners.

Digression: what is digital, what is analog?

Digital ≠ binary; digital ≠ electronic
From a strictly technological or scientific point of view, Cascone’s use of the word ‘digital’ was inaccurate. This also applies to most of what is commonly known as ‘digital art’, ‘digital media’ and ‘digital humanities’. Something can very well be ‘digital’ without being electronic, and without involving binary zeroes and ones. It does not even have to be related in any way to electronic computers or any other kind of computational device.
Conversely, ‘analog’ does not necessarily mean non-computational or pre-computational. There are also analog computers. Using water and two measuring cups to compute additions and subtractions – of quantities that can’t be counted exactly – is a simple example of analog computing.
‘Digital’ simply means that something is divided into discrete, countable units – countable using whatever system one chooses, whether zeroes and ones, decimal numbers, tally marks on a scrap of paper, or the fingers (digits) of one’s hand – which is where the word ‘digital’ comes from in the first place; in French, for example, the word is ‘numérique’. Consequently, the Roman alphabet is a digital system; the movable types of Gutenberg’s printing press constitute a digital system; the keys of a piano are a digital system; Western musical notation is mostly digital, with the exception of instructions with non-discrete values such as adagio, piano, forte, legato, portamento, tremolo and glissando. Floor mosaics made of monochrome tiles are digitally composed images. As all these examples demonstrate, ‘digital’ information never exists in a perfect form, but is instead an idealised abstraction of physical matter which, by its material nature and the laws of physics, has chaotic properties and often ambiguous states.[2]
The hipster’s mechanical typewriter, with its discrete set of letters, numbers and punctuation marks, is therefore a ‘digital’ system as defined by information science and analytic philosophy (Goodman, 161). However, it is also ‘analog’ in the colloquial sense of the word. This is also the underlying connotation in the meme image, with its mocking of ‘hipster’ retro culture. An art curator, on the other hand, might consider the typewriter a ‘post-digital’ medium.

Analog = undivided; analog ≠ non-computational

Conversely, ‘analog’ means that the information has not been chopped up into discrete, countable units, but instead consists of one or more signals which vary on a continuous scale, such as a sound wave, a light wave, a magnetic field (for example on an audio tape, but also on a computer hard disk), the flow of electricity in any circuit including a computer chip, or a gradual transition between colours, for example in blended paint. (Goodman, 160) therefore defines analog as “undifferentiated in the extreme” and “the very antithesis of a notational system”.
The fingerboard of a violin is analog: it is fretless, and thus undivided and continuous. The fingerboard of a guitar, on the other hand, is digital: it is divided by frets into discrete notes. What is commonly called ‘analog’ cinema film is actually a digital-analog hybrid: the film emulsion is analog, since its particles are undifferentiated blobs ordered organically and chaotically, and thus not reliably countable in the way that pixels are. The combined frames of the film strip, however, are digital since they are discrete, chopped up and unambiguously countable.
The structure of an analog signal is determined entirely by its correspondence (analogy) with the original physical phenomenon which it mimics. In the case of the photographic emulsion, the distribution of the otherwise chaotic particles corresponds to the distribution of light rays which make up an image visible to the human eye. On the audio tape, the fluctuations in magnetisation of the otherwise chaotic iron or chrome particles correspond to fluctuations in the sound wave which it reproduces.
However, the concept of ‘post-digital’ as defined by Cascone ignored such technical-scientific definitions of ‘analog’ and ‘digital’ in favour of a purely colloquial understanding of these terms.

Post-digital = against the universal machine

Proponents of ‘post-digital’ attitudes may reject digital technology as either sterile high tech or low-fidelity trash. In both cases, they dismiss the idea of digital processing as the sole universal all-purpose form of information processing. Consequently, they also dismiss the notion of the computer as the universal machine, and the notion of digital computational devices as all-purpose media.
Prior to its broad application in audio-visual signal processing and as the core engine of mass-media consumer technology, computation had been used primarily as a means of audio-visual composition. For example, Philips ran a studio for contemporary electronic music in the 1950s, before co-developing the audio CD in the early 1980s. By this time, audio-visual computing had shifted from being primarily a means of production, to a means of reproduction. Conversely, Cascone’s ‘post-digital’ resistance to digital high-tech reproduction echoed older forms of resistance to formalist, mathematically-driven narratives of progress in music production and composition – particularly the opposition to serialist composition in 20th-century contemporary music, which began with John Cage, continued with the early minimal music of La Monte Young and Terry Riley, and was further developed by improvisation/composition collectives such as AMM, Musica Elettronica Viva and Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra. After all, the serialism of Stockhausen, Boulez and their contemporaries was ‘digital’ in the most literal sense of the word: it broke down all parameters of musical composition into computable values which could then be processed by means of numerical transformations.
Yet most serialist music was not electronic, but composed with pen and paper and performed by orchestras. This demonstrates once again a crucial issue: unlike the colloquial meaning of the term ‘digital’ as commonly used in the arts and humanities, the technical-scientific notion of ‘digital’ can, paradoxically enough, be used to describe devices which would be considered ‘analog’ or ‘post-digital’ in the arts and humanities.

What, then, is ‘post-digital’?

(The following is an attempt to recapitulate and order some observations which I have formulated in previous publications.[3])
Post-digital = post-digitisation
Returning to Cascone and Andrews, but also to post-punk, postcolonialism and Mad Max, the term ‘post-digital’ in its simplest sense describes the messy state of media, arts and design after their digitisation (or at least the digitisation of crucial aspects of the channels through which they are communicated). Sentiments of disenchantment and scepticism may also be part of the equation, though this need not necessarily be the case – sometimes, ‘post-digital’ can in fact mean the exact opposite. Contemporary visual art, for example, is only slowly starting to accept practitioners of net art as regular contemporary artists – and then again, preferably those like Cory Arcangel whose work is white cube-compatible. Yet its discourse and networking practices have been profoundly transformed by digital media such as the e-flux mailing list, art blogs and the electronic e-flux journal. In terms of circulation, power and influence, these media have largely superseded printed art periodicals, at least as far as the art system’s in-crowd of artists and curators is concerned. Likewise, when printed newspapers shift their emphasis from daily news (which can be found quicker and cheaper on the Internet) to investigative journalism and commentary – like The Guardian‘s coverage of the NSA’s PRISM programme – they effectively transform themselves into post-digital or post-digitisation media.
Post-digital = anti-’new media’
‘Post-digital’ thus refers to a state in which the disruption brought upon by digital information technology has already occurred. This can mean, as it did for Cascone, that this technology is no longer perceived as disruptive. Consequently, ‘post-digital’ stands in direct opposition to the very notion of ‘new media’. At the same time, as its negative mirror image, it exposes – arguably even deconstructs – the latter’s hidden teleology: when the term ‘post-digital’ draws critical reactions focusing on the dubious historico-philosophical connotations of the prefix ‘post’, one cannot help but wonder about a previous lack of such critical thinking regarding the older (yet no less Hegelian) term ‘new media’.
Post-digital = hybrids of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media
‘Post-digital’ describes a perspective on digital information technology which no longer focuses on technical innovation or improvement, but instead rejects the kind of techno-positivist innovation narratives exemplified by media such as Wired magazine, Ray Kurzweil’s Google-sponsored ‘singularity’ movement, and of course Silicon Valley. Consequently, ‘post-digital’ eradicates the distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, in theory as well as in practice. Kenneth Goldsmith notes that his students “mix oil paint while Photoshopping and scour flea markets for vintage vinyl while listening to their iPods” (Goldsmith, 226). Working at an art school, I observe the same. Young artists and designers choose media for their own particular material aesthetic qualities (including artefacts), regardless of whether these are a result of analog material properties or of digital processing. Lo-fi imperfections are embraced – the digital glitch and jitter of Cascone’s music along with the grain, dust, scratches and hiss in analog reproduction – as a form of practical exploration and research that examines materials through their imperfections and malfunctions. It is a post-digital hacker attitude of taking systems apart and using them in ways which subvert the original intention of the design.
cassette_store_day
Figure 5. Cassette Store Day: 2013 twist on Record Store Day
Post-digital = retro?
No doubt, there is a great deal of overlap between on one hand post-digital mimeograph printmaking, audio cassette production, mechanical typewriter experimentation and vinyl DJing, and on the other hand various hipster-retro media trends – including digital simulations of analog lo-fi in popular smartphone apps such as Instagram, Hipstamatic and iSupr8. But there is a qualitative difference between simply using superficial and stereotypical ready-made effects, and the thorough discipline and study required to make true ‘vintage’ media work, driven by a desire for non-formulaic aesthetics.
Still, such practices can only be meaningfully called ‘post-digital’ when they do not merely revive older media technologies, but functionally repurpose them in relation to digital media technologies: zines that become anti-blogs or non-blogs, vinyl as anti-CD, cassette tapes as anti-MP3, analog film as anti-video.

Post-digital = ‘old’ media used like ‘new media’

At the same time, new ethical and cultural conventions which became mainstream with Internet communities and Open Source culture are being retroactively applied to the making of non-digital and post-digital media products. A good example of this are collaborative zine conventions, a thriving subculture documented on the blog fanzines.tumblr.com and elsewhere. These events, where people come together to collectively create and exchange zines (i.e. small-circulation, self-published magazines, usually focusing on the maker’s cultural and/or political areas of interest), are in fact the exact opposite of the ‘golden age’ zine cultures of the post-punk 1980s and 1990s, when most zines were the hyper-individualistic product and personality platforms of one single maker. If we were to describe a contemporary zine fair or mimeography community art space using Lev Manovich’s new media taxonomy of ‘Numerical Representation’, ‘Modularity’, ‘Automation’, ‘Variability’ and ‘Transcoding’ (Manovich, The Language of New Media, 27-48), then ‘Modularity’, ‘Variability’ and – in a more loosely metaphorical sense – ‘Transcoding’ would still apply to the contemporary cultures working with these ‘old’ media. In these cases, the term ‘post-digital’ usefully describes ‘new media’-cultural approaches to working with so-called ‘old media’.

DIY vs. corporate media, rather than ‘new’ vs. ‘old’ media

When hacker-style and community-centric working methods are no longer specific to ‘digital’ culture (since they are now just as likely to be found at an ‘analog’ zine fair as in a ‘digital’ computer lab), then the established dichotomy of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media – as synonymous in practice with ‘analog’ and ‘digital’ – becomes obsolete, making way for a new differentiation: one between shrink-wrapped culture and do-it-yourself culture. The best example of this development (at least among mainstream media) is surely the magazine and website Make, published by O’Reilly since 2005, and instrumental for the foundation of the contemporary ‘maker movement’. Make covers 3D printing, Arduino hardware hacking, fab lab technology, as well as classical DIY and crafts, and hybrids between various ‘new’ and ‘old’ technologies.
The 1990s / early 2000s assumption that ‘old’ mass media such as newspapers, movies, television and radio are corporate, while ‘new media’ such as websites are DIY, is no longer true now that user-generated content has been co-opted into corporate social media and mobile apps. The Internet as a self-run alternative space – central to many online activist and artist projects, from The Thing onwards – is no longer taken for granted by anyone born after 1990: for younger generations, the Internet is associated mainly with corporate, registration-only services.[4]

Semiotic shift to the indexical

The ‘maker movement’ – as manifested in fab labs, but also at zine fairs – represents a shift from the symbolic, as the preferred semiotic mode of digital systems (and of which the login is the perfect example), toward the indexical: from code to traces, and from text to context. 1980s post-punk zines, for example, resembled the art manifestos of the 1920s Berlin Dadaists, while 1980s Super 8 films, made in the context of the Cinema of Transgression and other post-punk movements, proposed underground narratives as an alternative to mainstream cinema. The majority of today’s zines and experimental Super 8 films, however, tend to focus less on content and more on pure materiality, so that the medium, such as paper or celluloid, is indeed the message – a shift from semantics to pragmatics, and from metaphysics to ontology.[5]

Technically, there is no such thing as ‘digital media’ or ‘digital aesthetics’

Media, in the technical sense of storage, transmission, computation and display devices, are always analog. The electricity in a computer chip is analog, as its voltage can have arbitrary, undifferentiated values within a specific range, just like a fretless violin string. Only through filtering can one make a certain sub-range of high voltages correspond to a ‘zero’ and another sub-range of low voltages to a ‘one’. Hardware defects can cause bits to flip, turning zeroes into ones and vice-versa. Also, the sound waves produced by a sound card and a speaker are analog, etc. This is what (Kittler, 81-90) refers to, somewhat opaquely, when he argues that in computing “there is no software”. An LCD screen is a hybrid digital-analog system: its display is made of discrete, countable, single pixels, but the light emitted by these pixels can be measured on an analog continuum. Consequently, there is no such thing as digital media, only digital or digitised information: chopped-up numbers, letters, symbols and any other abstracted units, as opposed to continuous, wave-like signals such as physical sounds and visible light. Most ‘digital media’ devices are in fact analog-to-digital-to-analog converters: an MP3 player with a touchscreen interface for example, takes analog, non-discrete gesture input and translates it into binary control instructions which in turn trigger the computational information processing of a digital file, ultimately decoding it into an analog electrical signal which another analog device, the electromagnetic mechanism of a speaker or headphone, turns into analog sound waves. The same principle applies to almost any so-called digital media device, from a photo or video camera to an unmanned military drone. Our senses can only perceive information in the form of non-discrete signals such as sound or light waves. Therefore, anything aesthetic (in the literal sense of aisthesis, perception) is, by strict technical definition, analog.
digital = analog = post-digital…?
A ‘digital artwork’ based on the strictly technical definition of ‘digital’ would most likely be considered ‘post-digital’ or even ‘retro analog’ by art curators and humanities scholars: for example, stone mosaic floors made from Internet imageboard memes, mechanical typewriter installations,[6] countdown loops running in Super 8 or 16mm film projection, but also computer installations exposing the indexicality of electrical currents running through circuits. The everyday colloquial definition of ‘digital’ embraces the fiction (or rather: the abstraction) of the disembodied nature of digital information processing. The colloquial use of ‘digital’ also tends to be metonymical, so that anything connected literally or figuratively to computational electronic devices – even a camera tripod – can nowadays be called ‘digital’. This notion, mainly cultivated by product marketing and advertising, has been unquestioningly adopted by the ‘digital humanities’ (as illustrated by the very term ‘digital humanities’). On the other hand, ‘post-digital’ art, design and media – whether or not they should technically be considered post-digital – challenge such uncritical notions of digitality, thus making up for what often amounts to a lack of scrutiny among ‘digital media’ critics and scholars.

Revisiting the typewriter hipster meme

The alleged typewriter hipster later turned out to be a writer who earned his livelihood by selling custom-written stories from a bench in the park. The imageboard meme photo was taken from an angle that left out his sign, taped to his typewriter case: “One-of-a-kind, unique stories while you wait”. In an article for the website The Awl, he recollects how the meme made him “An Object Of Internet Ridicule” and even open hatred.[7] Knowing the whole story, one can only conclude that his decision to bring a mechanical typewriter to the park was pragmatically the best option. Electronic equipment (a laptop with a printer) would have been cumbersome to set up, dependent on limited battery power, and prone to weather damage and theft, while handwriting would have been too slow, insufficiently legible, and lacking the appearance of a professional writer’s work.
typing2
Figure 6. C.D. Hermlin, the alleged typewriter hipster
Had he been an art student, even in a media arts programme, the typewriter would still have been the right choice for this project. This is a perfect example of a post-digital choice: using the technology most suitable to the job, rather than automatically ‘defaulting’ to the latest ‘new media’ device. It also illustrates the post-digital hybridity of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, since the writer advertises (again, on the sign on his typewriter case) his Twitter account “@rovingtypist”, and conversely uses this account to promote his story-writing service. He has effectively repurposed the typewriter from a prepress tool to a personalised small press, thus giving the ‘old’ technology a new function usually associated with ‘new media’, by exploiting specific qualities of the ‘old’ which make up for the limitations of the ‘new’. Meanwhile, he also applies a ‘new media’ sensibility to his use of ‘old media’: user-customised products, created in a social environment, with a “donate what you can” payment model. Or rather, the dichotomy of community media vs. mass media has been flipped upside-down, so that a typewriter is now a community media device, while participatory websites have turned into the likes of Reddit, assuming the role of yellow press mass media – including mob hatred incited by wilful misrepresentation.

The desire for agency

Cascone and Andrews partly contradicted themselves when they defined the concept of ‘post-digital’ in the year 2000. Though they rejected the advocacy of ‘new media’, they also relied heavily on it. Cascone’s paper drew on Nicholas Negroponte’s Wired article “Beyond Digital” (Negroponte), while Ian Andrews’ paper referenced Lev Manovich’s “Generation Flash”, an article which promoted the very opposite of the analog/digital, retro/contemporary hybridisations currently associated with the term ‘post-digital’ (Manovich, “Generation Flash”). We could metaphorically describe post-digital cultures as postcolonial practices in a communications world taken over by a military-industrial complex made up of only a handful of global players. More simply, we could describe these cultures as a rejection of such dystopian techno-utopias as Ray Kurzweil’s and Google’s Singularity University, the Quantified Self movement, and sensor-controlled ‘Smart Cities’.
And yet, post-digital subculture, whether in Detroit, Rotterdam or elsewhere, is on a fundamental level not so different from such mainstream Silicon Valley utopias. For (Van Meer), the main reason why art students prefer designing posters to designing websites is due to a fiction of agency – in this case, an illusion of more control over the medium. Likewise, ‘digital’ cultures are driven by similar illusions of free will and individual empowerment. The Quantified Self movement, for example, is based on a fiction of agency over one’s own body. The entire concept of DIY, whether non-digital, digital or post-digital, is based on the fiction of agency implied by the very notion of the self-made.
Each of these fictions of agency represents one extreme in how individuals relate to the techno-political and economic realities of our time: either over-identification with systems, or rejection of these same systems. Each of these extremes is, in its own way, symptomatic of a systems crisis – not a crisis of this or that system, but rather a crisis of the very paradigm of ‘system’, as defined by General Systems Theory, itself an offshoot of cybernetics. A term such as “post-Snowden” describes only one (important) aspect of a bigger picture:[8] a crisis of the cybernetic notion of ‘system’ which neither ‘digital’ nor ‘post-digital’ – two terms ultimately rooted in systems theory – are able to leave behind, or even adequately describe.

Notes
[1] (Van Meer); also discussed later in this text.
[2] Even the piano (if considered a medium) is digital only to the degree that its keys implement abstractions of its analog-continuous strings.
[3] (Cramer, _Post-Digital Writing_), (Cramer, _Post-Digital Aesthetics_).
[4] In a project on Open Source culture organised by Aymeric Mansoux with Bachelor-level students from the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, it turned out that many students believed that website user account registration was a general feature and requirement of the Internet.
[5] It’s debatable to which degree this reflects the influence of non-Western, particularly Japanese (popular) culture on contemporary Western visual culture, especially in the field of illustration – which accounts for an important share of contemporary zine making. This influence is even more obvious in digital meme and imageboard culture.
[6] For example (and six years prior to the typewriter hipster meme), Linda Hilfling’s contribution to the exhibition MAKEDO at V2_, Rotterdam, June 29-30, 2007.
[7] (Hermlin) writes: “Someone with the user handle ‘S2011′ summed up the thoughts of the hive mind in 7 words: ‘Get the fuck out of my city.’ Illmatic707 chimed in: I have never wanted to fist fight someone so badly in my entire life.”
[8] A term frequently used at the Chaos Computer Club’s 30th Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, December 2013, and also very recently by (Gurstein).

Works cited
Andrews, Ian. “Post-digital Aesthetics and the return to Modernism.” (2000) Web. December 2013 <http://www.ian-andrews.org/texts/postdig.html>
Cascone, Kim. “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music.” Computer Music Journal, 24.4 (2000): 12-18. Print.
Cox, Geoff. “Prehistories of the Post-digital: some old problems with post-anything.” (2013) Web. December 2013 <http://post-digital.projects.cavi.dk/?p=578>
Cramer, Florian. “Post-Digital Aesthetics.” Jeu de Paume le magazine, May 2013. Web. December 2013 <http://lemagazine.jeudepaume.org/2013/05/florian-cramer-post-digital-aesthetics/>
Cramer, Florian. “Post-Digital Writing.” electronic book review, December 2012. Web. December 2013 <http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/postal>
Eggers, Dave. The Circle. New York: Knopf, 2013. Print.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. New York: Columbia UP, 2011. Print.
Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art, Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hacket, 1976. Print.
Gurstein, Michael. “So What Do We Do Now? Living in a Post-Snowden World”, January 2014. Web. January 2014 <http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2014/01/01/so-what-do-we-do-now-living-in-a-post-snowden-world/>
Hermlin, C.D.. “I Am An Object Of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything.” The Awl, 18 September 2013. Web. December 2013 <http://www.theawl.com/2013/09/i-was-a-hated-hipster-meme-and-then-it-got-worse>
Kittler, Friedrich. “There Is No Software.” Stanford Literature Review 9 (1992): 81-90. Print.
Klok, Timo. “4chan and Imageboards”, post.pic. Ed. Research Group Communication in a Digital Age. Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University, 2010: 16-19. Print.
Manovich, Lev. ‘Generation Flash.’ (2002). Web. December 2013 <http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/generation_flash.doc>
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002. Print.
Negroponte, Nicholas. Beyond Digital. Wired 6.12 (1998). Web. December 2013 <http://web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/Wired/WIRED6-12.html>
Pynchon, Thomas. Bleeding Edge. London: Penguin, 2013. Print.
Van Meer, Aldje. “I would rather design a poster than a website.” Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University, 2012-2013. Web. December 2013 <http://www.iwouldratherdesignaposterthanawebsite.nl>, <http://crosslab.wdka.hro.nl/ioi/C010_folder.pdf>

(With cordial thanks to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Nishant Shah, Geoff Cox, Søren Pold, Stefan Heidenreich and Andreas Broeckmann for their critical feedback, and to Aldje van Meer for her empirical research.)

Posted in Post-digital Research

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Max Eilbacher - Red Anxiety Tracers (2014)

Red Anxiety Tracers cover art

Snimka u kojoj se prikazuje sam proces snimanja.
Sve razine svijeta su u igri.



 

Max Eilbacher's “Red Anxiety Tracers” is the debut long player from the multi-talented Baltimore, Maryland stalwart . Elibacher has performed with various projects such as Matmos, Horse Lords, and the mind-altering underground Needle Gun aktionist unit. Despite years of busy touring and recording, “Red Anxiety Tracers” is the first vinyl artifact from this young mastermind.
Crafted over the course of a year, “Tracers” is a labyrinth of shapes and sounds which glide through a complex and arcane environment of found sounds and synthesis. An expertly crafted maze of deja-vu, audio hallucinations, and dislocating atmospheric forms an audio obstacle course for the listener. Complex editing techniques and sound structures recalls the works of J.D. Robb or Owl Records era Tod Dockstader albeit witha radically fresh perspective and educated hindsight.
"Red Anxiety Tracers" exhumes impeccable flow and careful attention to dynamic range, with it's surgical placement of sound events challenging the deep listening abilities of it's audience. Raw and manic tension overloads are cut with alien float and abstract aether transmissions with a constantly shifting palette of sounds spun from blasted modular electronics, vocoded terrestrial-speak, and glowing mellotron clouds. Eilbacher communicates a strange and beautiful dialect conceived through disciplined compositional structure and an intuitive improvisational style unparalleled in the current landscape. "Red Anxiety Tracers" breathes new life into modern electronic composition.- editionsmego.com/

This debut solo LP from Baltimore noise artist Max Eilbacher on Spectrum Spools has all the range, curiosity and intrigue one would hope for. Red Anxiety Tracers is a continuous journey through several absorbing environments built from practically every kind of sonic material. Slowly rotating from ad-hoc percussive sounds to grand cosmic vistas, miniature synth riffs and gouts of distortion, it's a multi-coloured listening experience that draws you in and suggests an artist with much promise. - boomkat 

On his debut full-length, Max Eilbacher guides his audience across an electro-acoustic lattice of sonic fragments that appear to be related in their essence, but only through the most distant of means. Connected by the finest compositional fabric, the sounds that make up both extraordinary sides of Red Anxiety Tracers are like webs of cellular tissue that conjoin a single tone, frequency, or sample. These fragments then leech onto the next in an attempt to foster a sense of cohesion. In this way, Eilbacher’s formative method is personified by a cluster of gushes, clangs, hammers, and thumps, each of which spawn from a single, modular-induced processing effect. The eventual trajectories of each component are therefore impossible to fathom as they pass the duration of this intricately constructed network of ideas.
And this is a journey, by the way, even in the absence of identifiable entrance and exit points. The accompanying video trailer for the album features two men zoning out to the encompassing chapters, as they rotate on a record player, stepping into an unpredictable void without physically moving. It suggests that the music has been devised for the sole purposes of inducing a psychotic episode rather than a typical listening experience, which is reflected in the expression on each character’s face as they become increasingly sedated. But for this listener, the sounds are conducive to creating their own fractured imagery, allowing for an act of engagement as a substitute for vacuous spaces in which to mentally disintegrate.
In a recent interview with Ad Hoc, Eilbacher talked about Red Anxiety Tracers as a depiction of the recording procedure itself, a reflection of his learning curve in preparing to work with vinyl. After having recorded a batch of music by way of self-imposed technical restrictions, masses of content were archived before being dismembered and then rearranged. It’s the latter phase that I find the most curious, how months of experimentation are sculpted to form a body of work that knowingly represents the acquisition of a technique or familiarity — it verges on an album about the making of an album. It’s great to hear a musician removing themselves from their comfort zone (which for Eilbacher involves playing in Needle Gun and Horse Lords) and applying their skills to a fresh format. Perhaps this is why the tracks are arranged as chapters instead of being separately spliced up — it’s difficult to discern where the idea behind one recording ends and another begins, yet there remains a textural convergence between each sonic particle.
On the introductory section, “Slowlo” showcases a reel of clicks, bleeps, and static, which breathe in and out of samples cut from a lively crowd of people. There is a feeling of excitement and exasperation as those involved converse with one another, or at least that’s how the recordings manifest. When the space between these patterns of sporadic dialog move closer together, the sound of detectable conversations take on a telling form, where the human voice seems to have been selected for aesthetic reasons as opposed to providing a commentary on the interaction between organic and mechanical elements. Further contrasting fusions can be found throughout the album, but the most impressive occurs when “Persistent Scenes” merges into “Did the Surfer Survive?” The transition depicts gritty oscillations as they are charged against a refined melodic tone, flowing in and out of focus in a similar approach to the “Slowlo” background conversation, before panning out into a beautiful, high-frequency glitch progression.
Each documented sequence comes teeming with intrigue, where the details within each chapter keep the listener keen to find out how the dots are going to connect and where the next set of effects are going to take them; for in spite of the convoluted fashion in which the tracks are assembled, they’re married in a manner that takes textural similarities into account first and foremost. Where theories or concepts behind the music might otherwise encroach on our enjoyment of it, Red Anxiety Tracers seeks to rekindle those base feelings of what made “experimental” music so wonderful to begin with; it’s a reminder that documentary affirmation of the learning process can also lead to the most compelling works of art. - Birkut

Baltimore's Max Eilbacher has involved himself in so many different projects—Matmos among them—that he hasn't had much time to work by himself. Red Anxiety Tracers, on American synth outpost Spectrum Spools, is his first solo vinyl release, and it's good enough to make you wish he would produce alone more often.
Red Anxiety Tracers is the kind of record that asks you to invest yourself: the deeper you burrow, the more it gives to you, though it doesn't come easy. It comprises two side-long pieces, and the first section of the first side ("Slowlo") could scare away some potential listeners. A sputtering collage of sound effects and field recordings, it sounds more like Eilbacher setting up his equipment than a proper song. The rest of side A drifts off into more serene currents, through "Persistent Scenes" and the slow flow of "Did The Surfer Survive?" Rather than settling on a zen-like calm, however, Eilbacher constantly disturbs the peace with glitches and interruptions, as if he were picking at a scab.
By comparison, the B-side offers up more discrete sounds, emerging from a smoky fog of ambience with the tremulous pluck of treated guitars. As minutes pass the sounds get hectic and the composition turns chaotic, taking itself apart just when you think it's settling into a groove.
An unruly series of contrasts, Red Anxiety Tracers is unpredictable, but it progresses slowly enough that you get a feel for its odd contours. As it roams from one idea to the next, it begs the question of what exactly Eilbacher's personal style is, but he's got plenty of time to figure that out. For a musician who cut his teeth working within the projects of other artists, Red Anxiety Tracers proves that he's got a lot to offer on his own, too. - 

 Max Eilbacher Talks NSA Classmates, Learning Pro Tools


by Mike Sugarman


Max Eilbacher Talks NSA Classmates, Learning Pro Tools
John Elliott is wrapping up Spectrum Spools' strongest year yet with a release by a young Baltimore video artist and musician, Max Eilbacher. If you're familiar with the goings-on in Baltimore these days, perhaps you'll know Max from his involvement with The Bank, the DIY space where he lives, or Horse Lords, the fantastic, post-internet band of freaks he helped found. He has also toured as a member of Matmos. In their early days, Horse Lords used to rehearse in Matmos' basement, and the duo has something of a fatherly affection for the band. During my interview with Eilbacher-- a lot of which was cut for length considerations-- it became obvious that his personal Baltimore is a comfortable site for creative exploration, where rent is cheap and the community is strong. His new solo album, Red Anxiety Tracers, is a thrilling statement for someone who is really only beginning his exploration into frontiers both artistic and technological. It willl be interesting to see what this guy is doing in 10 years. Video work seems to be his his main interest, so that's where our conversation started. If you want some idea of his twisted, trippy 3D animations, just check out the trailer he made for his album.
Ad Hoc: I love the trailer for your album. Can you talk a bit about your video work?
Max Eilbacher: I went back to school because I wanted to do production and film work. I’ve always made video art since I was young, even if I didn’t know it was video art-- making weird movies, like kids do. Especially with 3D animation being so easy and fairly available, it just seems like the next step in that. So I’m just really into making stuff that’s connected to 3D animation, and then a continuation of what I did as a kid, like weird, dumb videos that are psychedelic and psychotic. For some weird reason I can get a degree in that, which I’m really into.
Ad Hoc: Are you studying at the art school?
ME: No, I actually go to the state school down the road from me, UMBC. There’s like huge stakes in my school, because it’s an engineering school, and most the kids that go there go for some weird government contracting reason, so there’s a huge revolving door of 20-year-olds graduating and going to work for the NSA. It’s a really psychotic workspace. Especially when I was taking electronic music-- their electronic music lab is in the basement of this building that’s paid for by Northrop Grumman, so everyday when I go in there’s giant Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin posters, saying all these advancements they’ve made in missile technology and stuff like that. It’s an insane environment.
Ad Hoc: Just a constant reminder that the center of a massive goverment-military machine is just a few miles away.
ME: Yeah, it’s integrated with everyday life. I take classes with kids who work for the NSA and they’re like, “Yeah the NSA paid for me to go back to school.” Especially being part of an arts community, where everyone is so anti-government, and these kids are like, “Oh yeah, the NSA paid me to go here and I write code for NSA programs."
Ad Hoc: Is there any way that culture manifests itself in your video work or music, or is it just something that’s in the back of your mind?
ME: I’ve been going to this school for about two and a half years, so it’s part of my everyday thing. But I have to say, it makes me work harder in a way, because if I went to a normal art school I could present something like a Jordan Belson influence, and it would be more readily accessible, while my school would enlist these kids-- they’re doing this to [work in] Hollywood production. If I showed a Belson influence in art school, they would be like, "Whatever, yeah everyone's done that,” but showing it in my environment, it becomes way more abstracted. The littlest thing I do that’s weird is multiplied, so I make these not-very-strange films. To these kids, [my films are] just so abstracted and bizarre. I think that creates a different workflow for me. Or the normal becomes more bizarre, in a way.
Ad Hoc: Could you talk about your involvement in Horse Lords?
ME: Bernie [Alexander Bernstein] and I were in Teeth Mountain at the same time. Right when I joined, Owen [Gardner] had quit-- It was a band with a big revolving door. So Bernie and I did a lot of touring with Teeth Mountain and we just really related through musical styles with that. He was really into drone and texture stuff. And I guess three summers ago, Sam [Haberman] and I, just from knowing each other through Baltimore, started playing. We all had side projects together, but we just started doing this and it clicked. We actually just finished mixing the next album last night. So we’ve been at it two and a half, three years maybe.
Ad Hoc: Do you guys have some sort of collective goal when you make music, or is it just like, "Yeah, we come together and do what we do?"
ME: It’s not as simple as I kind of wish-- like getting together and we jam something out and we build the song from that. It’s like someone will make an idea and then send us a MIDI track, like, “Oh yeah, I have this drum pattern that I like.” And then we’ll work off that, but it’s very much about people bringing ideas: “This drum pattern sounds really good if we subdivide it this way. What if we do that?” We’ll jam on that. So it’s not as intuitive as other bands I’ve been in. We sit together and we jam and we edit the tape together. That’s when the composition comes out: very much in the studio, hashing, talking ideas out.
Ad Hoc: How does your solo work diverge from that?
ME: I actually see it as very similar, because-- let alone with the synthesizer, especially with the rig I use-- you're thinking monophonically through this signal path. It’s sort of for me the same as playing bass. I have to think about these super minimal, repetitive [ideas], but still having an air of catchiness to them, without being cheesy or melodic. When I sit down and I think of synthesizer parts, it’s almost exactly the same as thinking up bass parts. And then, with Horse Lords, because I use a just-intonation bass, the range of notes I have is super limited, so I have to be really creative about how to change different parts. Whereas when I’m composing with a synthesizer, or a computer, or tapes, or whatever, I sort of have that same feel, like, “Ok, how can I-- in the simplest way-- keep this very interesting, repetitious…”
Ad Hoc: What is the appeal of the modular to you?
ME: I just love its complete, open signal path. Some dude in a factory didn’t decide that the off-splitter has to go through the filter a separate way because people in the past have made string sounds. Modular is completely open. But it’s not open-- they’re so expensive, and you really have to choose what you want to buy. So I like that contradiction of like, “Oh, yes, so open,” but you’re limiting yourself if you can only really afford four things to use. It’s cool because, to me, you can actually mimic the brain in a way. You’re making weird connections between different points, and to me that’s so artistically pleasing-- having this open board of patch points that create new things.
Ad Hoc: Are there any other ideas you had going on with this album, or was it just playing with the modular, trying to come up with certain sounds?
ME: There’s definitely concrete compositional ideas. It took a while to assemble. I wish I could have just sat down in two weeks and laid everything out and then spent another two weeks planning it and mixing it, arranging it, but it took a long while, especially because before this record, I’d only made tapes, and even from that, I had only used a four-track. But when I got asked to do this record, I was like, “Oh, you know, I should probably really step my game up.” And I got a computer, I got Pro Tools, and then I was like, “Uh, ok, I guess I have this nice setup now. What the fuck do I even do.” So it just took me a while to think about, what do I want to present as a product? What is my music? So it took about eight or nine months or ten months just to get all the sounds, and then I just recorded tons of music. Tons. Then I spent about two months just arranging, and I was still having problems, because I’ve never made a record.
Every time I’ve done a vinyl, it’s been with a band. And when I do a tape, there’s so much less pressure, whereas with this vinyl, I was really confused. Actually, I went to John [Elliott]’s for a week, and he helped me, [gave me] sort of like a crash course, like, “Oh yeah, this is what you do with electronics on a computer.” It’s just a totally different realm from working with a modular and a four-track-- working with a few modules and Pro Tools. It was interesting taking compositional ideas I had-- just from live stuff, and spending hours in the studio-- and then being like, “Oh yeah, auto-panning, sick! I guess auto-panning’s really useful here.” This record’s a lot about learning, and I guess even though I talked shit on experimenting, there’s definitely elements of experimenting, because the format’s new to me.
Ad Hoc: I do think that’s interesting, that the sound of this record is really the sound of someone learning how to make a new type of music.
ME: Yeah, well, it’s not so much the abstract electronic music [that was] new, it’s just how to present almost forty minutes of that interestingly. That was the hardest part. Sort of going back to what I was talking about with experimental music, I want to do something experimental, but I want it to be listenable. I like enjoying things. I don’t want to name names, but I just don’t like… especially harsher stuff, unless I’m in a fight or want to break through a wall, why would I ever put this record on? Especially with a long-playing record, I think it's cool to emit series of emotions, and not just have this intense, dark drone album, or this euphoric, blissful psychedelic experience. I really wanted to get a plethora of emotions across. While still being cohesive. - adhoc.fm/
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utorak, 4. ožujka 2014.

Ruth White - 7 Trumps From the Tarot Cards and Pinions (1969)



Pleistocenska elektro-okultna muzika za balet.





In 1967 White was commissioned by choreographer Eugene Loring (for the University of California) to create the music for a performance called “Seven Trumps From The Tarot Cards And Pinions.” Not only was the event a huge success, but it was something of a coming-out party for White. “The Los Angeles Times reviewed ‘Seven Trumps’ as ‘…a really exciting, organically musical, electronic score…Not only the soloists but all the participants seemed to draw heat from this score…’. Dance Magazine said ‘choreographed on contrasting planes, ‘Pinions’ comments on the wings of imagination and love, the shackles of philistinism, and always, Ruth White’s specially written and especially eloquent score heightens the drama of the dance while plumbing its depths…” Two years later, the score was released by Limelight. - www.swanfungus.com/

Necessary first ever vinyl reissue of Ruth White’s dark experimental electronic masterpiece ‘7 Trumps From The Tarot And Pinion’. Originally issued in 1969 on Limelight and now available in an edition of 500 copies through French label Black Mass Rising, who many of you will know were responsible for reissuing Ruth White’s ‘Flowers of Evil’. If you were fortunate enough to score a copy of that record, then make some space on the shelf for its evil twin. This is proper holy grail stuff for historical electronic music connoisseurs and in the current climate for darker strains of electronic music and fetish for horror soundtracks this really illustrated how it should be done - Some 45 years ago. - Norman Records



Flowers of Evil (1969)
 



Ruth White (b. 1925 Pittsburgh) is an American electronic music pioneer, most notably for her early explorations of sound using the moog synthesizer. According to the back cover of her 1971 release Short Circuits, “Ruth White is considered among today’s most gifted arbiters of what is termed ‘the new music’.” With a string of recordings in the mid 1960's/early 1970's - most notably “Seven Trumps From The Tarot Card And Pinions” (1968), “Flowers of Evil” (1969), and “Short Circuits” (1970) - featured surprising and new uses of the Moog Synthesizer as well as other pieces of electronic musical equipment. While her use of technology was the focal point in the late 1960's, most of her career was dedicated to educational recordings. - www.discogs.com/



 
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Julian Cole - Ostia (1988)

ostia1.jpg

Derek Jarman (užasno loše) glumi Pasolinija u studentskom filmu o njegovu ubojstvu.

 



One of Derek Jarman’s many unfilmed projects was PPP in the Garden of Earthly Delights, a study of the last days in the life of director Pier Paolo Pasolini seen through a prism of references to the director’s cinematic work, and also the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Jarman’s proposal exists as a synopsis rather than a screenplay, presenting a series of isolated scenes: the film set for the final scene from Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975); an expensive restaurant; a street at night where Pasolini is cruising for sex; a cheap restaurant; a petrol station; an area of waste ground where Pasolini is killed by the rent boy he’s picked up. The foreground events parallel moments from Pasolini’s life and death, while the background would have featured characters from his earlier films, and various Boschian figures or motifs. The synopsis was printed in the Derek Jarman issue of Afterimage in autumn 1985, and it’s likely that the outline contributed to Julian Cole’s film, Ostia, which was made as a final-year student project a year later.
Ostia is unusual for being a film in which Derek Jarman is the lead actor, although when you see his acting it’s not so surprising that he kept himself out of his own films; Cole says on a commentary track for Ostia that some of Jarman’s performance was so bad it had to be cut. There is the curiosity value of seeing him playing the part of Pasolini, something that Jarman suggested when they were discussing the film.
The title refers to the name of the Tyrrhenian resort near Rome where Pasolini was murdered in November 1975, and the narrative favours the theory that Pasolini wasn’t so much murdered as assassinated by an establishment for whom he was a continual thorn in the side. The unforgettable Salò uses De Sade as a frame to explore the worst period of Italian Fascist brutality at the end of the Second World War. Many of those who were complicit in wartime atrocities were still active in Italian society in 1975, and even without the film’s other excesses they wouldn’t have been impressed by Pasolini’s dwelling on the crimes committed during the period of the Salò Republic, or his allusion to the Marzabotto massacre. Pasolini was also a vocal Marxist, of course (Jarman’s synopsis throws some barbs at this), and heavily critical of the deleterious effects of consumerism on post-war Italian society. The assassination theory carries some weight, in other words, even if the face-value explanation—a rough-trade assignation gone awry—seems just as likely. Philo Bregstein’s documentary, Whoever Says the Truth Shall Die (1981) explores the theory in a roundabout fashion, while Ostia (The Death of Pasolini) (1986) by Coil looks at the tragedy through a symbolic lens. “Kill to keep the world turning.”
Julian Cole was working with a micro-budget so beyond the token presence of an Alfa Romeo like the one Pasolini drove (and which was driven over him on the beach) there’s no attempt at verisimilitude. All the scenes are shot in London locations circa 1986, and the dour skies of the metropolis are no match for the perfect blue of Italy. Cole’s film can’t help but be less ambitious than Jarman’s project but at least it got made. Viewed today Ostia has an unavoidable melancholy quality; Cole says that Jarman had just been diagnosed with HIV when they were making the film, and he refused to kiss actor David Dipnall because of this; at the time little was known about the infectiousness of the illness. Dipnall himself, in an unrelated chain of circumstances, died of AIDS a few years later. Ostia is also a reminder of how Pasolini’s death has gained a martyr-like quality among a certain group of gay men, making it a kind of cinematic equivalent to the martyrdom of Oscar Wilde 70 years earlier. It can be seen as an extra on the BFI’s Derek DVD or watched here.

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 Twenty years ago yesterday, Derek Jarman succumbed to AIDS. Around the time that he was first diagnosed of the illness, in 1986, Jarman starred in a student film by Julian Cole about the last days of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Pasolini, was one of the few homosexual cinema icons Jarman could look to for inspiration, his grotesque murder in Rome in 1975 was a blow for film lovers all over the world.
In 1985 Jarman published a movie treatment, never realized, with the title P.P.P. in the Garden of Earthly Delights that spanned Pasolini’s life from the shooting of the final scene of Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom through to his death. (Reminiscent of Jarman’s Caravaggio, the treatment apparently drew in the works of Hieronymus Bosch too.) The extent to which that treatment influenced the development of Ostia, Julian Cole’s 25-minute homage to Pasolini (named after the site of his death), is not entirely clear, but the fact is that Jarman agreed to appear in the movie as Pasolini. (According to John Houghton, Cole found Jarman’s acting to be at times so atrocious that it was a considerable challenge to edit around it. Oh, well.)
In the final volume of the director’s journals, Kicking the Pricks, Jarman relates the following reminiscence:
Last year Julian Cole asked me to play Pasolini in his graduate film Ostia. Getting murdered and buried in freezing mud at 4 am as an uncertain sun came up was gruelling, but there was compensation in a trip to Camber Sands where we filmed a desert sequence in the dunes. I took my Super 8 with me and one shot from that day, my shadow racing across the sand, ended up in The Last Of England.
London and the coastal stretch of Camber Sands were never going to pass comfortably for Rome, but to my eye Cole did a pretty good job pulling off the switcheroo. (The spiffy Alfa Romeo helps.) Ostia is purest experimental moviemaking of the mid-1980s, which means it ain’t the easiest thing to follow, but the final chunk depicting Pasolini’s death can’t help but be profoundly affecting.
Jim Ellis comments in Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations:
As Jarman’s words [meaning the P.P.P. treatment] indicate, there are profound sympathies between the directors that go beyond the biographical similarities, and indeed, it’s difficult to name a film by Jarman that does not contain some echo of Pasolini, from Sebastiane, where Jarman comes closest to emulating Pasolini, to Blue, which calls to mind the all-blue painting made by the son in Teorema, after a homosexual affair has stripped away his bourgeois pretensions.
If you’ve seen any of Jarman’s movies, you won’t be surprised to learn that Ostia is also strictly NSFW. - dangerousminds.net/

 

Derek Jarman's Angelic Conversations

 By Jim Ellis
 
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Lucy - Churches, Schools and Guns (2014)



Unutarnji zvukovni dizajn mračnih, sočnih tehnoida.








Churches Schools and Guns. A provocative name for a provocative album of techno from one of the genre’s most consistently intriguing producers, Lucy. This, his second solo album, pushes forward from his debut full-length, 2011’s Wordplay for Working Bees, and firmly establishes him in a league of his own. Over the past few years Lucy’s label, Stroboscopic Artefacts, has became a watchword for techno’s vanguard – providing a platform for new artists pushing at the genre’s boundaries and a harbor for some of the most experimental work from names you already recognize. Lucy’s progress as a producer has followed that same trajectory, moving from relatively straightforward dancefloor-driven material to deeper, murkier places. Churches Schools and Guns continues on, a collection of 12 tracks that sound – more than anything else – like the act of searching. - www.stroboscopicartefacts.com/

Not content with running Stroboscopic Artefacts, one of the finest forward thinking techno labels currently on offer, Luca Mortellaro finds time to serve up his second album and follow up to 2011′s excellent debut Wordplay for Working Bees.
 Churches, Schools and Guns continues the dystopian fractured techno theme of its predecessor albeit one punctured with smudged ambient darkness. As has come to be expected of anything on Stroboscopic Artefacts, the sound design is intense with clever juxtaposition of techno against deeply evocative soundscapes and kinked dissolute explorations.
As a genre, and in quite a loose sense of the term, techno feels tricky to experiment with. The style itself being an extremely tough production call. The theory that it’s all “whomp whomp, bleep bleep and blam there’s some techno” just doesn’t float if you’ve ever tried to sit down and write the stuff. Which makes it even tougher to bend the rules and experiment successfully. However, Lucy achieves this here with aplomb whilst stylistically in keeping with the rest of Stroboscopic Artefacts output.
For the most this is an exercise in combining tension with moments of unfurling beauty—there’s also undoubtedly an underlying darkness throughout. Vocal samples culled from 1976 film Network intone “Our air is not fit to breathe,” “We know things are bad, worse than bad” and the album title alone throws up darker depths of the American dream. Yet all this suffixed with dream like synth shimmers and notes of strangely positive melancholia.
Juxtaposed soundscapes abound as tracks like “We Live as We Dream” pulse with stratospheric heart ache whilst “The Illusion of Choice” hammer out 4/4 reverberations against snaking modular lead lines. “Leave Us Alone” features a half cut shuffle underpinning a distraught Moderat / Burial framing whilst “The Best Selling Show” floats a creepy circus organ across frenetically bubbling percussion, conjuring up black and white imagery of demented Punch and Judy puppets. There’s even inclusion of Tuvan throat singing across a couple of the tracks—an extraordinary other worldly style of Siberian singing not heard, at least by these ears, within electronic music since The KLF’s 1990 classic Chill Out.  I’d love to think Lucy got a real life throat singer in the studio and have imagined further of seeing a Tuvan native at a Lucy gig adding live harmonics into the mix.
Experimental without being inaccessible Churches, Schools and Guns inhabits an excellent netherworld of dark technoid rumblings, sound design and synth abstraction.
If all this isn’t enough there’s also a fine selection of remixes available including a stomping tribal yet kick free Donato Dozzy take on “The Illusion of Choice”. So much good music, so little time. -

Is Luca Mortellaro's new Lucy collection, the enigmatically titled Churches Schools and Guns, as much of a game-changer as his 2011 debut full-length Wordplay for Working Bees? The short answer is no, which shouldn't come as a huge surprise given how startlingly original that earlier collection sounded upon its 2011 release (and still does today, for that matter). But that doesn't mean that his sophomore effort isn't thoroughly satisfying in its own way and on many levels. It's certainly an ambitious and auspicious collection that provides more than its share of listening pleasures.
In the three years since the debut release, the Italian-born and Berlin-based Mortellaro has hardly been dormant. Last year, for example, he collaborated with Speedy J under the Zeitgeber name, with the duo issuing a well-received self-titled album on Stroboscopic Artefacts, the operation of which is overseen, of course, by Mortellaro. The new album thus finds him running on all cylinders, so to speak, and in prime form on the seventy-three-minute release. That Churches Schools and Guns will be no paint-by-numbers effort is made immediately clear when the harrowing intro “The Horror” provides a brief intimation of the scenic and sometimes unsettling journey that lies ahead.
“Leave Us Alone” opens in quasi-Monolake mode with percussive noise ricocheting across a chugging techno groove, before the radiant atmosphere is soiled by the infamous rant by TV news anchor Howard Beale (played by Peter Finch) in the film Network (it's the one where he challenges viewers to open their windows and shout "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore"). That the track invites comparison to Monolake is telling in another sense, too, which is that, like some Monolake albums (Hong Kong and Gravity, for example), Churches Schools and Guns manifests certain qualities that invite a dub-techno classification, among them ultra-spacious production, hazy ambient treatments, and thunderous pulses. The tracks' heavy textural emphasis likewise suggests that it wouldn't be inaccurate in describing the album as industrial-techno in places, too (e.g., “All That Noise”).
Numerous memorable moments surface: “Human Triage” juxtaposes surging string washes and a pulsating rhythm pattern to ear-catching effect; “Follow the Leader” overlays a throbbing strut with choral whispers and a Tuvan throat singer's eerie, low-pitched croak; and “We Live As We Dream” (the title an abbreviation of the Heart of Darkness line “We live as we dream—alone”) underlays chiming keyboards with hyperactive pops. But while Lucy is definitely committed to pursuing the experimental dimension in his material, he also isn't averse to letting its clubbier side show, as shown by the locomotive swinger “Laws and Habits” and the pounding, future-funk space-jam “The Illusion of Choice.” One final surprise arrives when “Falling” adds Emme's ethereal vocal musing to the dream-like swirl of the track's beatless arrangement.
One thing in particular is common to Churches Schools and Guns and the other albums that have appeared on the label, those by Xhin and Dadub, for example, which is that all boldly stretch the boundaries associated with techno by focusing attention on its more experimental and explorative sides. For that alone, Mortellaro's efforts and Stroboscopic Artefacts deserve to be supported and celebrated. As an example of the high regard with which his work is held, in 2012 he was asked to perform at the Rossini Opera Festival, whereupon he remixed the celebrated composer live—a request made to one electronic artist per year. - www.textura.org/


Wordplay for Working Bees


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Carla Bozulich - Boy (2014) / Evangelista



Pop koji želi "sjebati cijeli svijet".
Upravo su "korijeni" naš najapstraktniji dio.




Carla Bozulich is an art-punk heroine. Time and again she has headed up bands that sound like nothing else and arguably stake out genres unto themselves: the bent agit-prop of Ethyl Meatplow; the ferocious roots-tinged epic rock of The Geraldine Fibbers; the vocal-driven sound-art of Scarnella and Evangelista; her large-scale performances including the ongoing Eyes For Ears series. Her first "solo" record, the 2003 album-length cover of Willie Nelson's Red Headed Stranger, was rightly hailed as a masterpiece of reinterpretation and recontextualisation. Her first album for Constellation was 2006’s Evangelista, after which Bozulich adopted the Evangelista moniker for subsequent work, and released three more albums between 2008-2011. She has set aside Evangelista for now, to focus on the songs that form Boy, her third record under her own name.
Boy is Carla's self-proclaimed "pop record" and undoubtedly it is, albeit within the context of her particular path of experimentation and deconstruction. Boy is a refreshing and much-needed reminder of what pop – as an oblique angle, influence, and intent – can do in the hands of a ferociously commanding singer/lyricist who has cut her teeth on genre-bending, genre–blending, and DIY aesthetics. Bozulich says she was “resuscitated” in her teenage years by punk rock, and then “destroyed, in a good way” by people re-inventing the idea of how music works. Here is a batch of ten songs that clock in at 3-5 minutes each, mostly hewing to recognizable structures of verse, chorus and bridge, but full of destabilizing accents and strategies, and nothing that could read as winking irony, gloss or mere effect/affect. The songs are grounded by hooks and melodies, delivered by the singing itself, with the underlying instrumentation and arrangements always in the service of Carla's voice and lyrics – in that respect, there is a strong through-line from the Evangelista albums. But Boy sharpens and focuses each song's intent and structure; unlike most of the Evangelista work, this new album, apart from a song or two, would not be mistaken for sound art, dark ambient, or quasi-Industrial music.
While Bozulich wrote most of it, played the majority of the instruments and made the album artwork, the album’s creation was aided, abetted and sometimes rescued by the input of John Eichenseer (aka JHNO). The duo traveled and played together all over North America, Europe, South America and India - with a particularly fruitful burst of writing on a tiny island off the coast of Istanbul. They joined the Italian drummer Andrea Belfi in Berlin to record with his impeccable rhythmic support. The songwriting reflects a life of travel - remaining purposefully uprooted and nomadic, living without ever really unpacking that single bag - and guided by some of Bozulich's most perceptive, honest and sometimes venomous lyrics.
Boy unfurls a beautiful, unsettling narrative wrung from an artistic life of unflinching creative experience, commitment, courage and learning. It is sharp, supple, satisfying and generous. - cstrecords.com/

"'Boy' moves away from the loose instrumentation and sparse production of Evangelista, and makes much use of the interplay of surfaces, setting vocals amid thick, fetid atmospheres that part to reveal unexpected surfaces... ‘One Hard Man’ stomps and clangs itself to fever pitch, invoking lust on a seismic scale, whilst the hushed bluegrass ballad ‘Drowned to the Light’ meaves mystery from John Eichenseer’s wiry viola and looped, birdlike screeches. The deser gothic of 'Don't Follow Me', meanwhile, creates a sense of watchful edginess from drummer Andrea Belfi's rolling, reverberant tom hits and a windswept organ whine.”- The Wire (March 2014)

One of my favorite things about Carla Bozulich is her ability to so beautifully deconstruct and then reassemble various strains of roots music into something that feels both completely alien and inextricably connected to the work from which it draws influence. Her previous solo albums, Red Headed Stranger and Evangelista, were prime examples of this, with the former modernizing Willie Nelson’s classic work, and the latter reducing the minimal harmonic movement of blues/gospel songs into haunting drones augmented by Bozulich’s fervent vocals. Bozulich’s more recent albums with her band Evangelista still explored the art of deconstruction, but that project often seemed more focused on delightfully cathartic eclecticism in comparison to the focus of her solo work.
Bozulich’s forthcoming album, Boy, is another excellent foray into the realm of the deconstructed song, but where Evangelista focused on creating drone-based soundscapes out of the remnants of song forms, Boy focuses on generating hypnotic grooves that subtly allow melodies to drift off into weirder territories at any moment. “Lazy Crossbones” is a particularly great example of Boy’s aesthetic. The track is reminiscent of the more rhythmic moments on Talk Talk’s later records, and like those albums, “Lazy Crossbones” embeds its formal deconstruction into the song structure itself. On the surface, “Lazy Crossbones” may seem fairly straightforward, but listen closely and you can hear Bozulich’s consistently incredible voice being used as a catalyst for the song to be taken into new sonic territories. It’s a great example of how Bozulich’s ability to re-contextualize has grown even more streamlined and synthesized with her recent work.- Tiny Mix Tapes

"Bozulich dips into her more abstract, primal tendencies on this album, hinting at earlier work with the Geraldine Fibbers and even Evangelista (nary a whiff of her occasional forays into folk and alt-country, however). But it’s absolutely, distinctively her own, a challenging collection of tunes." Blurt Online

"The track “Lazy Crossbones” opens with a mid-tempo drum pattern—the drums recorded with enough air to define a convincing picture of the performance space—before making room for warm keys, searching guitar, and, of course, Bozulich’s special voice, which is as alluring as it is alarming. The result is something like a wonderfully twisted, damaged Fleetwood Mac single—beautiful, powerful, and chilling: equal parts nightmare and 'Dreams.'" - Stereophile

Reasons for not making art are all around us. It serves its own purpose. But it seems we’re stuck with this absurd drive. One could call this clinging a plea for levity at best, but the most lasting art always moves past distraction. The stressors that we face in trying to be good or content or ideal become shades instead of obstacles. We wanna create from a position of strength, to command an audience. Yet an artist is only as strong as its art. Life is so much bigger and stronger than what’s in anyone’s brain. Perspective and values, however cherished, are easily shattered by their sheer insignificance in the overwhelmingly complex balance (or lack thereof) of life itself.
But all works of art, like all minds, have the potential to overcome mere sentiment. And that potential is glimpsed here in 10 restless hatchlings that make up Carla Bozulich’s new and perhaps most essential record. There is no shortage of dire, overwhelming music being made that reflects life’s continued de-affirmation through chaos and wanton destructions great and small. What seems to be lacking more often than not is the cold light of day. There is no aesthetic scrim to Boy’s music, despite its traceable precedents. What we have here is human and messy, fearsomely fretting about the tender enclosure of sing-song and how it will not lift you over the chasm. Its hooks are more like bloody torn fingernails at the wall of pleasure-seeking. Not one of these songs are satisfied with themselves, but they exist in a realm of sonic grace that heedlessly pushes ahead.
When Bozulich sings “I just wanna fuck up the whole world” on “Deeper Than The Well,” it’s not a pose. The barren, loping structure of the instrumentation narrows as it goes, teetering on the brink of potent nihilistic forces that lurk around consciousness but hold fast in the glassy glare of despondency that is the vocal. Its severity is tempered by a dangerously attractive sense that you are in the room with this organism, and it’s taking you down to die (finally, a decent night’s sleep). “Wouldn’t it be fine, if at checkout time, I was doing what I’m doing right now” is how this record says goodbye, despite the slinky defiance of its ultra-refracted gospel opener. This album and all its itinerant pieces of paper and plastic will get dusty and mildewed in libraries and desks and landfills. At best, these scraps will be remolded or reused for new scraps. For Bozulich to do what she does, like any artist, she must love what she does as she’s doing it. “Sentiment be damned,” says every unpredictable noise, tonal shift, and rhythmic stutter, “I wanna be here and now — here and now and how”!
And so it is. All fetish and confection aside, Boy is a living, gasping, impassioned/dispassionate grapple with existence. It patiently yet economically moves through melody and rhythm to walking, dancing, convulsing, and fleshing the fuck out. It’s an elegant beast that screams to be, even though the world would sooner acknowledge a video of a cat trying to eat a cactus. I’m excited to’ve communed with this fearsome creature, even if it leaves final obsolescence as my responsibility alone despite the looming. Tomorrow is another day, but this isn’t just another record, and that’s a relief. - Willcoma

Prije:

 
 
In Animal Tongue
Evangelista  
 
 
 
  
Evangelista returns with a fourth album, following the critically-acclaimed Prince Of Truth (2009) that cemented Carla Bozulich's reputation for aesthetic quality, intensity and iconoclasm as she entered a third decade of tireless artistic and musical activity.
"[Prince Of Truth is] a fascinating interplay of conventional song forms and more experimental tendencies...there's a barely restrained brutality to this music, which seems always on the edge of something, either a descent into the abyss or elevation to some majestic heights..." POPMATTERS
Evangelista's new album continues to broaden the sonic canvas against which Bozulich deploys her distinctive voice and lyricism. In Animal Tongue reflects Bozulich's escape from her Los Angeles home base and an increasingly nomadic existence in the last couple of years, devoted in equal parts to collaboration and improvisation with a wide range of players in diverse contexts, the conception and execution of site-specific sound/art events and residencies, rocking the circuit with Evangelista (equally at home in bright museums and dingy clubs) and retreat to the American desert.
In Animal Tongue was largely written and recorded by Bozulich, in a variety of locations, driven (in Carla's words) "by the forces of rocks, evolution, geology, drugs, boxing, everything-ology and dead stuff that makes the dirt and cement and the tress grow. Plus real versus fake!!!" The album steams and bubbles like a simmering cauldron, with carefully metered elements stirred and coagulating around a core of low end provided by Tara Barnes on bass, seasoned with piano, organ and cut-and-paste arrangements by Dominic Cramp. This core trio is augmented by Sam Mickens (The Dead Science), Shahzad Ismaily (Laurie Anderson, Secret Chiefs, Sam Amidon) and John Eichenseer (jhno), who contribute to several tracks.
Through it all, Bozulich's powerfully adventurous voice weaves vital, semi-improvisatory melodies of gasping, restrained intensity ("Artificial Lamb", "Bells Ring Fire"), brooding incantation ("In Animal Tongue", "Hands Of Leather", "Die Alone") and a rich half-whispered alto ("Black Jesus", "Enter The Prince").
In Animal Tongue is a superb addition to Bozulich's canon and as original a voice as can be found at the current nexus of punk, poetry, and experimental music. - cstrecords.com/
 
"In Animal Tongue is not an easy listen, but it wasn't meant to be. Rather it investigates, explores, and experiments to open-ended conclusions, and to that end, it succeeds magnificently."All Music Guide

"Alarmingly disconcerting, [Bozulich's] words dissolve the opposition between dream and reality."
The Quietus

"Ranks among the most provocative work [Bozulich] has done in recent years."Tiny Mix Tapes

"There's an inexplicable beauty to the maddening frequencies and drumming that abounds here...a profoundly interesting album."The 405

"By using strings, organ and percussion in a loose, semi-ritualistic way, and retaining a strikingly open conception of what ‘song’ entails, Evangelista are pursuing a trajectory that continues to throw up surprises"The Skinny
 
Prince Of Truth
Evangelista   





Prince Of Truth stays true to Evangelista’s uncompromising and compelling combination of delicate coaxing love and wicked cathartic awakening sonic voyage. Evangelista has coalesced around a core trio, with Carla Bozulich and bassist Tara Barnes now joined by keyboardist/sound artist Dominic Cramp. Returning to Montreal and the Hotel2Tango studio where the previous two Evangelista records were made, the new album was co-written by the above trio along with several members of their extended Montreal family.
With Prince Of Truth, Bozulich has shaped her Evangelista group into something more intense, more committed, more complex and more sonically and compositionally obsessive than ever. Conventional song structure is mostly absent – the pieces are built from an extremely diverse set of sound sources, taking shape through layers of accumulation and juxtaposition, foreground and background, sudden shifts, suspensions and dissolutions – and Carla’s commanding voice and brilliant lyrics.
Sprung from the obsessions of Bozulich’s instinctual, maniacally detail-oriented mind and channeled through the incantatory/seductive/soul persona of the classic chanteuse, Carla and her Evangelista band have made an album of searing and beguiling depth, the spoils of a phenomenal group of musicians occupying an entirely original zone at the intersection of improv, noise, post-industrial and musique concrete, forging an experimental gothic soul music for our impossible times. - cstrecords.com/

"The ragged beauty [takes the listener] on an absorbing, experimental and typically emotionally draining journey." Mapsadaisical

"One of Bozulich's most compelling releases... There's a particular kind of angst on display in Prince of Truth that's downright sinister. The noise of it all is emphatically primal, as the songs ooze and bubble out of the dark recesses of some sonic psyche" Exclaim!

"A conflicted and meticulous collection of songs... a hugely current, almost perfectly flawed record." Tiny Mix Tapes

"The seven bleak songs contained herein tiptoe around the fringes of melody... They are like huge wall paintings lit only with a tiny candle: you are aware of their grandiose beauty even if you can’t quite make it out through the darkness."
Drowned in Sound

"There’s a barely restrained brutality to this music, which seems always on the edge of something, either a descent into the abyss or elevation to some majestic heights." Pop Matters
 
 
Hello, Voyager
Evangelista   




We can call this a debut record of sorts, as it is the first album to be released under Carla Bozulich’s band moniker, Evangelista. Bozulich’s first record for Constellation, issued in 2006, was released under her own name, and bore the album title Evangelista. That album title has now migrated to become the band name. So…this album is titled Hello, Voyager, by the band Evangelista, featuring Carla Bozulich.
Carla’s 2006 Constellation release was widely celebrated as her strongest, most fearless and compelling record in years, and ended up on many year end lists, including The Wire (UK), Blow Up (Italy) and WMFU (Brian Turner’s blog) to name a few. Carla toured Evangelista all over Europe and North America, with core bandmate Tara Barnes at her side, and a rotating cast of other musicians, including Shahzad Ismaily and members of Thee Silver Mt Zion (all of whom contributed to the original recording as well).
The Evangelista band continues to comprise Carla and Tara as its nucleus, and continues to build on its relationship with Montreal. Hello, Voyager was recorded in Montreal at the Hotel2Tango by Efrim Menuck in late summer 2007, with an even larger cast of Montreal musicians joining Carla, Tara and Shahzad this time around, to work up a more stylistically diverse batch of songs. Raw, beautifully ravaged, semi-improvised soundscapes underpin Carla’s incantatory sung and spoken lyrics on the album’s opening and closing tracks, but much of the rest of the record is more overtly composed. Blistering nuggets like the snarling “Smooth Jazz” and the desperate “Truth Is Dark Like Outer Space” are the most rocking tunes Carla put to tape since the demise of The Geraldine Fibbers, while “The Blue Room” (one of Carla’s finest songs, and one she has been carrying around for many years) was finally captured in a stunning studio arrangement that includes organ, violin, cello and contrebasse. “Lucky Lucky Luck” is a playful, sassy, fractured take on the misfit narrative and “Paper Kitten Claw” is its methodical, reflective, poetic foil. Carla’s voice perfectly sets and channels the prevailing mood on each song, and is strong as ever.  - cstrecords.com/

“Engrossing and full of unexpected twists, Evangelista’s sophomore outing finds Bozulich reborn as a lightning rod of passion and hope.” Magnet

“A truly bracing adventure” Musicworks

“These are torched songs – as if, once (co-)written down, Bozulich has lit the pieces of notepaper on which they were composed and let them slow-burn, crease up and blacken before our very ears…[but] for all of its smouldering, serrated edges, Hello Voyager offers an embrace rather than an assault.”
The Wire

“[Evangelista] careen through a broken itinerary of radiant darkness… Some of the most heart-wrenching, sordid songcraft this side of Scott Walker.” Tiny Mix Tapes

“Ache is caked into the crevices of this album…The longer Bozulich makes music, the more pain and grief she seems to uncover.” Dusted Magazine

“This is a fascinating record that enjoys toying with musical boundaries and unnerving the listener… It’s damn bleak. But as an artistic endeavour, it’s a resounding success.” Drowned in Sound
 
Evangelista
Carla Bozulich   

“Evangelista is a sound that you can open your chest with, pull out what’s inside and make it change shapes. Make it open more times and, even more… til the sound inside has finally sealed the hole where your vile/beautiful heart belongs… loved and safe even when you think you’re totally alone. Even if you believe in nothing. good or bad, I must report: there’s really no such thing as empty space. Even inside this void there is sound. You will hear it. You will see. You will be cradled and near deafened by love and mercy sounds and the sound of your own pulsing blood which used to drive me mad as a child when I would try to go to sleep…” – Carla

Carla Bozulich needs no introduction. Her work with Ethyl Meatplow, The Geraldine Fibbers, Scarnella, The Red-Headed Stranger (with Willie Nelson) and many others spans over twenty years of uncompromising sound, driven by a voice and vision that consistently delivers spine-tingling beauty, originality and directness. This album (her first on Constellation, and the label’s first release by a non-regional artist) is a devastating, elegiac, brutally honest song cycle that finds her voice unleashed with unprecedented emotive depth and determination. Evangelista is heartrending and gutwrenching, with isolation and desperation redeemed by incantatory sonics and out-reaching, soul-saving words. One damn compelling exorcism of a record, churning and channeling out of loneliness to heal and rebuild connective tissue through sound.
Carla came to Montreal to record the album with Efrim at the original Hotel2Tango in coldest wintertime, with multi-instrumentalist and co-producer Shahzad Ismaily at her side, and a pocketful of beautiful noises and loops prepared back home in L.A. Various guest players added strings, guitars, drums, organ, piano, hums and other sounds. - cstrecords.com/

“'Evangelista' is cloaked with an atmosphere of impending doom but ends with a defiant breath of survival. Bozulich's masterpiece, it rocks with a genuine sense of agony and ecstasy.”  The Wire

“It's a soulful, careful work that is the result of a long period of musical experience and growth.”
Urban Pollution

“Fans of highly emotional, powerful, tormented music will find great beauty in Evangelista's dark drones, quiet reflections and desperate, violent intensity. Stunning!”  Left Hip Magazine

“[Bozulich's] bottomless pipes--for those unfamiliar, Bozulich sounds a bit like Neko Case's wicked stepsister--help to give the bleeding instrumental textures an urgency of purpose.” Signal to Noise

“There truly isn't anything worthy of a comparison to the madness and despair that ring from her lyrical prowess.” RIFT Rock
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