MEMORA8ILIA

a filing cahinet for 8sided.blog

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❝ The show explored the aesthetics of non-performance, object-made music, online self-surveillance, and the fragile utopia embodied by the music platform SoundCloud. A unifying point of reference is the seemingly utopian space provided by this platform; its apparent non-hierarchical openness to all producers of audio material, while also being deeply embedded in the structures of surveillance capitalism… I presented ‘Standard Documents,’ which was a sound installation reworking my earlier suite of works focusing on surveillance, using the indiscrete signals pulled down from the ether, including private mobile phone conversations. ❞ *

https://memora8ilia.com/index.php/2022/04/20/the-show-explored-the-aesthetics-of/

❝ So glib you can’t predict whether it’s a prayer for war or a warning against it, Sun Ra’s “Nuclear War’’ (1982) is a preemptive war memorial, a song sculpted at the altar of imminent danger, but in a spirit of maddening and defiant play… This might be the most effective protest song ever made because rather than decry injustice until it becomes saccharine and unbearable to listen, stuck in time reifying that injustice by denouncing it, “Nuclear War”  joins the unjust activity, revels in it as an accomplice as if the potential suffering of nuclear fallout is up to its potential victims. ❞ *

https://memora8ilia.com/index.php/2022/04/19/so-glib-you-cant-predict-whether-its-a-prayer/

Computer program by Jack Citron ; music by Balachander.

❝ In Permutations, each point moves at a different speed and moves in a direction independent according to natural laws’ quite as valid as those of Pythagoras, while moving in their circular field. Their action produces a phenomenon more or less equivalent to the musical harmonies. When the points reach certain relationships (harmonic) numerical to other parameters of the equation, they form elementary figures. ❞ *

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❝ Such a process is clearly dependent upon the analog process of optical printing, but the use of punched cards as data storage is no more ‘digital’ – and no more so than the spinning disc of an optical hard drive, of course. If Permutations is one of the outcomes of such ‘computer assisted movie production’, then we might ask to what extent it is accurate to describe it as ‘digital animation’ when the transfer between digital and analog processes are crucial to its production. What Whitney encountered, as Gene Youngblood pointed out at the time, was the ‘curious nature of the technological revolution… that, with each new step forward, so much new territory is exposed that we seem to be moving backwards.’ ❞ *

https://memora8ilia.com/index.php/2022/04/18/computer-program-by-jack-citron-music-by/

❝ The first version of Orient-Occident is music for the film realised by Enrico Fulchignoni, commissioned by the Unesco and performed in Cannes on May 1960. The film was about an exhibit in 1958-59 organised by Vadim Eliséeff, curator of the Parisian museum ‘Musée Cernuschi’, which showed sculptures and other objects from Asia, Europe and Egypt and highlighted the relationships between East (Orient) and West (Occident). ❞ *

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❝ Orient-Occident (1960) is very different from the other electroacoustic pieces of Xenakis (and even from his whole music) … on the level of sound objects’ montage, Orient-Occident doesn’t follow the schaefferian project, which is characterized by the attempt to replace the note by the sound object in the hope of remaining into the traditional definition of music … ❞ *

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❝ Xenakis, who “found God” at 13 but was a staunch atheist later on, once said that art could “lead to realms that religion still occupies for some people.” ❞ *

https://memora8ilia.com/index.php/2022/04/17/the-first-version-of-orient-occident-is-music/