I really liked the interview with John Cage. An interesting thing he said was that his favourite sound was silence and that the silence of the world now is traffic. He really loves sound. I imagine that the ambience of traffic is like the pulse or steady breathing of the city, and as comforting. I like how earthy the idea is. He inspires you to be more sensitive to sounds, and to take pleasure in it. Music is almost too obvious for him, he can appreciate the flashy stuff, but at the end of the day he just likes noise for itself. This makes me think of writing that is down to earth. I used to really love reading boring styles. It was oddly comforting. It’s the somehow rolling rhythm of the the’s and and’s and said’s and did’s. I’d like writing like that. But probably no one would read it.

A lot of the links including John Cage’s video seem to have the common idea of sound for sound’s sake, and the obliteration of meaning. John Cage talks about how music to him is meaningless noise. He teaches us not to be afraid of this. Myself, I obtain some of my pleasure from any art from the meaning that is involved. But most of the meaning is probably contextual; I find lyrics ocassionally bothersome. My favourite lyrics are nonsense lyrics, or lyrics from another language. Sigur Ros comes to mind. Why does writing need meaning? Meaning is just a course to feeling. Wouldn’t it be just as (if not more) effective to come to feeling immediately? Eliminate the middle man? But it is difficult to do this with writing alone alas. A word is so much more passive than a sound. It requires something on the part of the reader. A promise of meaning invites the reader to devote himself to a piece of writing. A meaningless piece does not do this, and the reader will not concentrate and be able to appreciate it.  But, a piece of writing with some promise of meaning, from the syntax or the diction, that is in the end meaningless… yeah maybe that’ll wokr.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqUZ5AECPO4

Robin Rimbaud is an electronic sound artist who works under the name Scanner, a name derived from a device he used in early recordings which would scan airwaves for indeterminate radio or cell phone signals. He literally samples human voices that he scanned from the airwaves in his performances. He has also incorporates police scanners into his performances. He is a member of the band Githead.

In addition to being a sound artist he is also: a writer, a media critic, a multi-media artist, a record producer.

He seems to have a bit of a thing for french filmmakers. He resoundtracked Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville in live performances. He made a BBC radio production of Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice (though this one is admittedly a play).

He has some interesting thoughts about the way we are affected by sound in an urban setting:

“What’s interesting to me is the way that we consume sound now. When I used to listen to sound when I was 16, 15 years old, I would lie in my bed in the dark and listen to a Pink Floyd album or a Brian Eno record. And you really would absorb it on so many levels. You would really breathe that record. I wonder today when we listen to music how we consume it. When we’re listening to a CD on a portable carrier, we are incorporating acoustic sound around us. How much does that become part of the work? I’ve fed that into my work. It led me to begin to ask myself questions. When you listen to techno, do you walk quicker than if you were listening to 15th century church music? If you listen to hip-hop, which generally runs at around 110 per minute, do you generally walk along at that kind of sloppy pace? It’s interesting because when people use mobile phones today, they generally, if they’re in a conversation, walk away from the group, because they’re on the telephone. It’s interesting because that suddenly becomes a private space for them, even though it’s a public space. They generally take seven to nine steps around, up and down. If you notice now I’ve said this, you start looking outside a café, you see people start to take this amount of steps. It’s really interesting, these kinds of moments. It all comes from listening. It all comes from this kind of almost obsession. It’s like, if you were to go and buy a pair of shoes tomorrow, you start looking at other people’s shoes. Because I work with sound all the time, I constantly listen to these kinds of sounds. We sit and talk now, but we embrace the sound of water coming through the system behind us, some kind of engine hum in the distance here. But once it’s erased, that noise, once the machine is switched off, we suddenly realize how noisy the environment has been.”

Another very interesting quote about his intentions with his work:

“What I’m interested in is stories. Our history of development has been through stories, in a way, through family stories, through parables. The bible is just a series of stories. And it’s really interesting because stories get changed. You have a tendency to reinterpret a story. You hear a conversation or a part of a conversation and you start to fill in the spaces, and that’s what began to interest me. Not you and I talking together, but just overhearing one part. You start to picture an image of what these people look like. Their social backgrounds. What relationship they hold to one another. And then try to fill in the spaces. When you didn’t hear what the other person was saying, what were they really talking about. You just heard a bit of a pop record, Scannerfunk, where there are these voices buried underneath the mix. These people saying things like “The sun is shining” and “I’m too sad to tell you,” and all these very melancholic phrases just keep spinning out underneath this elegant, melodramatic music. I like to use these voices on that level. “

Judy Dunaway is another sound artist who is known for her sound work with latex balloons. She is well The use of these balloons as sound conduits is her main instrument for improvisation. She is well respected in the sound artist community, although she is little known outside of New York avant-garde circles. She has a PhD in music composition from the state university of New York. In recent years she has lectured and taught on sound arts.

In 2006, she created ‘SWIRL’, The sex workers internet radio lounge, a webcast of audio art by and for sex workers.

She has used dildos in her work, sliding it along the surface of the balloon. Here is a video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWpqZckpsUY

this is a picture

She’s a performance artist and musician, and she has been active in the art world since the 60s. She has a very wide-ranging art career. Her first notable performance art piece was in 1969 when she played a symphony using automobile car horns. One interesting fact is that she married Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground in 2008.

When asked what artist she admired, she said this:

“Thomas Pynchon I admire very much. And now I’m using “artist” in the broadest sense of the word. Gravity’s Rainbow is just so beautiful because it’s very multidimensional. I really like books that you can kind of hear as much as think about, that are so graphic and visual. I wanted to make an opera of that book, actually, and I wrote to him and asked him if that would be OK (I actually found him; he’s quite reclusive). And he wrote me this funny letter. He said, ‘You can do it, but you can only use banjo.’ And so I thought, ‘Well, thanks. I don’t know if I could do it like that.’ I suppose it was his polite way of saying, ‘No. No way can you do this.’ “

I thought this was cool since Pynchon is a fan of Spike Jones who is a bit of an early sound artist, integrating unusual sounds such as gunshots, whistles, and cowbells, and ridiculous vocals in his songs.

Laurie Anderson has also been known for inventing instruments to use in her performances. One such instrument is the talking stick, which is a 6-foot batonlike MIDI controller. It is a wireless instrument that can access and replicate any sound. It breaks sound down into tiny segments and plays them back in different ways by rearranging hte fragments into random strings, and then playing them back in overlapping sequences to create new textures.

A single, ‘O Superman’, reached #2 on the UK charts. According to her, this came about quite accidentally.

In response to what she is trying to do with her art, she says:

“I think I do my work for some sadder version of myself, a woman who would be sitting in Row K. I am trying to make her laugh. “

She dislikes Broadway musicals very much.

watched some movies

 And what I’d like to know is what moves inside us and where does it go, no, I’m not talking about worms, microbes, bacteria, those living creatures that inhabit us, I’m referring to something else, something that moves and perhaps moves us at the same time, just as constellation, galaxy, solar system, sun, earth, sea, peninsula, and Deux Chevaux move and move us with them, what is the name, finally, of the thing that moves all the rest, from one end of the chain to the other, or perhaps there is no chain and the universe is a ring at once so thin that apparently only we and what is inside us fit into it and so thick that it can accommodate the maximum dimension of the universe, which is the ring itself, what is the name of what follows after us.

his style is supposed to mimic normal speech (keep in mind that his work is translated though we must always keep this in mind). note the aversion to periods and punctuation save for commas. sometimes he does not even capitalize proper nouns. words feel a lot different when uncapitalized spain italy einstein brian

she is about 30 years old and published her collection of short stories once last year in november and she won a lot of awards and distinctions for it. in an interview she says that shes interested in writing stories about public places that really packs people together: she likes this because she was from the country and wide open spaces, she likes to see strangers and she likes public transit. she says about the title of her short story collection once that is it an answer to once-upon-a-time because her stories are grounded in a time and place and character but are still magical like in chilly girl. there is one fairy tale that i have adored more than any other since i was a little boy called the snow queen which has also to do with coldness which is interesting. i really like fairy tales because they are very warm things to read no matter the content.

i like to connect things i have read together and when i read the end of chilly girl i was very strongly reminded of a passage from something i had just finished a book called world’s fair by some dude called doctorow:

I found now if I held myself the nauseating ache was bearable. Then I pressed Meg’s head against myself. I knew everything now, the crucial secret, so carelessly vouchsafed. After all, I had not intended this, it had come to me without my bidding, without any planning or calculation on my part, presented, in fact, as an accident of the adventure. It was not my fault. I had worried before, all the time in this enormous effort to catch up to life, to find it, to feel it, comprehend it; but all I had to do was be in it and it would instruct me and give me everything I needed. As I fell asleep the fireworks went off over and over again like me pounding my own chest and sending my voice to the heavens that I was here.

i dont know why or how but there is some strange subconscious connection that i cannot explain.

the story starts off with the chilly girl as a rather timid character and sympathetic because of this. this timidity comes so naturally i wonder this could a chilly girl have been not-timid? i dont think so.

This refers to the two television sets, one piled on top of the other showing different films that are somehow interconnected. It refers to the Yardbirds, a band I have heard of before, playing the song Train Kept A-Rollin’ (I heard an Aerosmith cover of this one a few years back).

I listened to them on youtube and they’re o.k. I’m not crazy about them. They were some kinds of pioneers, famous for starting the careers of guitarists Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page. Their genre was rhythm and blues and they were active in the mid 60s.

The Yardbirds started out with Eric Clapton, who left in protest of the band turning to a more pop-oriented sound. Jimmy page signed on as the new lead guitarist. Jeff Beck was hired and fired after a short interval. Finally Jimmy Page left and disbanded the Yardbirds.

Jimmy Page later formed Led Zeppelin.

I’m not really interested in this band so I’ll keep this short.

Anne Frank is much larger than her writing. What is quite interesting is that the diary can have such a tremendous impact on some people because they already know how it is going to end. Generally, this is not revealed in stories. For some stories knowing the ending may make it more effective.