Lines of Flight 2011

The experimental/electronic/ambient/avant garde/sound art/improv event par excellence kicked off last night, and I'll be reviewing the entire series for the radio one/ gilbert may co-produced magazine entitled CROP. Yehaaah!

LINES OF FLIGHT BLOG

Libya Operation: Foreign Oil Interests Prompt Invasion

Libya Operation: Foreign Oil Interests Prompt Invasion

Crude Transactions release party perspectives part 2

Black Yoghurt aka Sefton Holmes was the man of the match. The penultimate set. Synth based dark pop with organic juno 6 triads underneath. But not far behind him was a blissful Armpit featuring 'LSD Fundraiser' aka Dene Barnes. 2 blazing saddles. The signature phaser and tubescream of Barnes a bed (of nails) for the transcendental snitzle that is Clayton Noone's guitar amp. A beautiful percussion free set lending credence to the entire transactions venture.
After them twas thee ISO12 electro event. An ISO12 set is like a crash course in chuang-tzu style spontaneity. ISO is less solo performer than facilitator - he selflessly offers up what he has called 'the train'...an old school electro beat triggering moogs and software synths, sampler and free style rap and vocals breaks abound - isos sensuous'n'smooth almost 'northern soul' style singing creeps under yr skin and makes you shiver. hes oblivious to whoever joins the stage as long as what they're doing is in sync with the train. So we got a few players up, Max 'Batskin' Read truly conjuring up a truly odd atmosphere from the juno 6, for instance. Thanks iso12, Jason Aldridge that is - a man I have known since '95 and someone i can truly call a good friend and an integral member of the musical community down here.
Next up was 420 Center. Jeez 8.8 on the richter scale!!!!!!! Japan just hit. Man oh man. 420 centre was a special one of version of 'Mental Health Triangle' a free style out-fit with an ethic of absolute lyrical spontenaity - even if it comes across as childish. Especially if it comes across as childish. Billy Childish. This version was carried by Jon White (mc jumps)_. His is a mind of rare wit and melodic playfullness. Justin Ta'ulu was classic mc science community. A rich tenor. Animated unassuming and a little bit filthy. Joining the 420 center was rachel dragonforce ancd
mc norgacs.....//? ///////i was a bit lost for words up there , by that point my vocal output was reduced to hooligan hooting and that uselessly inauthentic eastern accent
personality. The gulf left by an absent lady grey (toki) was humungus. He got the genius.

review:: Jason Kahn, Bruce Russell, Richard Francis, Radio Cegeste, Lee Noyes

bruce russell //.///richard francis ///radio cegeste //// lee noyes ///jason kahn

DPAG back in january 2011

Sound Art has reached a new level of credibility since Susan Philipsz won the prestigious Turner Prize last year in the UK. “A shot in the arm for Sound Art” is how one 'culture editor' described her victory. So we shall see more and more speakers and head-sets inside bone white gallery spaces.

A close relative of the sound installation is the sound performance - instead of automatic or generative sounds that bleed from sonic machines and sculptures we have rock stars at the helm. Or perhaps data entry workers, comms technicians, the old in-out-in-out telephone operator schtick.

Here in Dunedin we are at the tail end of many southern journeys by experimental/improv/sound art 'helmsmen', and on January 28^th Richard Francis, Jason Kahn and Bruce Russell arrived in town to champion their cause(s). In support were Sally Ann McIntyre aka Radio Cegeste in collaboration with Lee Noyes.

A little background. Our international visitor was Jason Kahn, most famous for his label Cut which operated between 1998-2008. Essentially an outlet for his own work, he branched out to release other artists quickly and at its closure the Cut backcatalogue boasted releases by Gunter Muller, Olivia Block, Tu m' and Gregor Hotz, amongst several others. Kahn is an artist par excellence – his CV is a jaw-dropping compendium of installation pieces, collaborations, publications, group exhibitions, seminars, works for radio, graphical scores, works for theatre and writing. He has colluded with hundreds of avant garde luminaries worldwide – both in the orient as well as occident. His is a model of excellence that any emerging sound-artist might like to emulate.

And so, were in truly esteemed company as he assembled his circuits with low-keyed, retiring ease. A New Yorker based in Zurich, Kahn cut a wirey figure with large framed spectacles part Woody Allen part William Burroughs..

Dunedin art intelligensia assembles and shuffles..a connectionist chorus, face-time, plans, latest projects, new house, new hair, new life. Joints crack, snot purged. Settle, settle, striaghten the spine, sink, sink. Credit, waffle, boyish.

Lee Noyes and Sally Ann McIntyre performed first. Sally had amassed a curious collection of items

to toy with – and in a speculative facebook post early that day she mused over the outcomes of a meeting between “ a mini-FM transmitter, a bakelite valve radio, a homemade kitset theremin, six identical pocket size transistors, a 78rpm record from the 1940s featuring "master radio canaries" (a gift from John Demetrick), field recordings made in the grounds of seacliff lunatic asylum, and a small music box that plays edith piaf's l'accordeoniste...” . Noyes utilized his famous mini-sized kit, this time stripped back to absolute bare boner. What occurred was simply gorgeous – the FM and valve radios effervesced and tittered, radio emits a sound so archetypal to those of us with a penchant for information and paranoia, grey sound – empty fuzz such a narcotic delight in my childhood..Noyes mirrored the chatter and crunch of radio by stretching drum-skins, scraping and sucking, blowing and shuttling, his kit transforms into an ululating backdrop for McIntyres radio-orchestration. Melody enters as McIntyre spins the haunting 78 and manipulates music box ,the evocative multi-verse of source materials create a new world. There is a delerium to this performance.

The birdsong and field-recordings created a sense of the baroque and the oriental, like a scene from an islamic garden of delights..birds and warm sweet breezes, beneath which rivers flow.

And so I attended my first improvised performance of radio and drum. And I don't think any one else would have had the imagination and responsive sensitivity to make it work. Bravo Lee and Sally.

After a short break Auckland based sound artist Richard Francis sits at his console, his laptop, tone generators and pedal box attuned and primed, his goatee and heavy-rimmed glasses adding a sense of continental sophistication to the display, a new look since I met him last. Francis, who runs the CMR label, works in a similar fashion to Kahn, touring widely, collaborating actively – and creating sound pieces for installation. Kahn and Francis released a Cd on the Monochrome Vision label in 2009. Praised for its controlled minimalism, the album is available via Francis's website , listed below. www.richardfrancis.co.nz .

Racing this time....Francis calls forth Ba'al in the form of a whistling digital drone. Jason Kahn sits at his portal centerstage and gets to work on his own sadistic tone. Bruce Russel joins the trio and adds a wailing seemingly pre-recorded synth or organ line into the cloud, an alien warble with religio-magical proclivities, organic and vile and senile, a sick meditation on indo-aryan death-rites perhaps, a nasty drug drone. The three gentelmen sit at their portals and weave a long-slow feed ...gurgle and dribble and fiz'n'whizz. Tonal palpitations. Hiccups. 3 men and a big-bang. A long one. We ponder how the sound relates to the space and vice versa. A body with no organs. Pain. Metastasis and neuronal plasticity. Slowdive. On a (circuit) bender. Kahn, Francis and Russel speed on. The din shifts and heaves and races through phases and moments. The sound calls into question tense and time, moment and memory, micro-repetitions, the roaring blizzard is essential circular. Do we travel with the sound, or do we step outside it and observe it as a whole unit? Do we have a choice? What is the ultimate measure?

The piece runs the gamut of aesthetic proceedures electro-noise has to offer. Spastic delays, glacial phasers, mindbending echoes,lurid loops, circuit bends, trembling tremolo, anti-natural reversals, over-wrought compression......many more besides. In summa - What better way to spend an early evening!

Noise music and electro-acoustic experiments are physical things. Tactile experiences. We are made to pay attention to the moment and its link to the next moment. We are called on to endure, we are

called on to appreciate new angles, new cracks, new peaks, new troughs. Time and event. How noise saturated space moulds the psychosocial. Sound art illumines the invisible. It links space to time in new ways. And its time is always now.

For more information on the work of Jason Kahn and Cut records, go to his website at http://jasonkahn.net/ . An essay by Bruce Russell http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/2116/ and information on he work of Richard Francis is here: www.richardfrancis.co.nz .

Matt Middleton

....look out for my Lines of Flight 2011 review in the Radio One Arts and Culture Magazine due out in April.

Crude Transactions release party perspectives

How bout that Charlie Sheen. Channeling the soul of some mid-20th century American novellist with crack-rock fury. The whole WORLD is watching. A strange distraction. My reading has moved away from the great Stoics and Cynics of Greece and Rome back eastward again into South India and its Advaita Vedanta traditions. The Upanishads, Adi Sankara, Ramana Maharshi, Brahmanism. The soul is eternal, indivisible and is both Atman and Brahman. We must enquire within and find our true self beyond ego beyond time beyond body beyond space. In the end we find Brahman. Such richness in this philosophy and so many parellels to Daoism and Zen Buddhism. The ancient Upanishads are a document as important as the Lao Tzu, as deep as the Zen doctrines.

And a big FUCK YOU to the National Party, sneaking through their neo-liberal anti-life anti-worker anti-r+d policies while we're all preoccupied by the earthy-quake. Thats electioneering GOLD for the National Party eh. World cup! Rugby and Money is ALL WE CARE ABOUT EH. Fuck em, Im outta here mate. Gooodbye NZ and good fucking riddance. It really does make you wonder if it was HAARP all along.

So we threw the Crude Transactions release party the other night, and it was a potent little mix of good people and performers with the ability to adapt and survive.

Beagle boys. First thing, I'd like to thank my lovely wife Christine for doing the door . That is one job i just don't seem to be able to handle - people streaming in in pugnacious spurts, pretending not to even notice you sitting there, people wanting to 'see someone' or 'use the toilet', people who simply will not pay because they're related to one of the musicians, groups of American tourists pouring in en masse - in these situations i would usually crumble into a twitching altruistic mass, guilt complexes from fifteen years ago raising their ugly heads again, letting people in all over the place, in fact I'm convinced that if people even LOOK at me they'll assume they can get in free. Perhaps its the amount of free content i have online or something. Its quite possible the fact i have so much free content has other musicians fuming. The amount of 'fuck offs' i get when I'm onstage (especially when im playing with Idiot Prayer or Mr Biscuits or something) says it all. I'm a dinosaur who's holding all the new blood back. I'm personally responsible for these acts not getting the complete attention they deserve. Why is it that I can get away with playing shitty music and its considered

'art' ? Whats so special about me? The musician union want me out. And soon ill be giving you what you want!! Yehawwwww!!!! You can have your Matt M free world finally!! But i digress ---I'm 'pulling a Charlie '(Sheen). Chris turned them away like a trooper. Shes my rock. My crack rock.

First up was an installation of sorts, FM radios positioned around the bar ready to receive the master transmission, conspicuous bugging, geo-spatial vectors. Radiotronic and Tesla conscious. Radio Cegeste relayed the piece we had worked on for the cd. The space resonated with tinny splendor. Lil' radio under the pillow when you were 6, on acid. Or something.

Next was Wu, or Wu version one before Alex MacKinnon joined our ranks. Lee Noyes is an absoloute joy to improvise with. He drums like a painter. Very painterly drumming. Flitter flicker and glissando. Pollock. Scratch and snuff. Toking. Purple. Tenor and clarient and Shawm. Clack.

Next up was uhhhh...um....shit.. oh yeah BLACK YOGHURT . And MAN he ruled it. He was slick, pro, bleeding edge and playing great arpegiated songs on a Roland Juno 6. Top marks.What ho. Part two coming soooon

end of part one

CRUDE TRANSACTIONS IS NOW AVAILABLE.

Review of the release party coming, all involved shall get their copies soon, copies for sale email crude696@yahoo.co.nz

the insert: