In an indeterminate place » Internet

invalidObjects

Nipperkin — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:15:33 +0000

As I scan around for interesting things to listen to on-line, I often find myself returning to Fällt Publishing’s invalidObject Series (2000), a thoughtful collection of recent electronic music. The series comprises 24 releases by 24 microsound composers, each one containing 15 one-minute compositions that range in style from glitch to ambient to degree-zero sound. The entire invalidObject Series, originally released on 3″ CDs but long out of print, is happily available for free download on Fällt’s website. Here are three samples to get you going:

Pimmon, “while (not &fission) &”

Junior Varsity KM, “(export) 02”

Andreas Berthling, “with(in.III)”

A full description of the invalidObject Series can be found here, with further details about the individual artists and releases, as well as music files for listening or download, at the links below:

The Conet Project

Nipperkin — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 07:15:50 +0000

In the event that interested readers and shortwave radio fans might have missed it, I thought I’d point out that The Conet Project is available for either listening or download on-line.

Never heard of The Conet Project? Well, it is a rather fascinating 4-CD compilation of 150 recordings of “numbers stations” put out by Irdial-Discs in 1997 and which is unfortunately long out of print. The package includes an 80-page booklet containing a history of “numbers stations” and detailed notes on the recordings, from which I’ve drawn the following description:

For more than 30 years the shortwave radio spectrum has been used by the world’s intelligence agencies to transmit secret messages. These messages are transmitted by hundreds of “Numbers Stations.”

Shortwave Numbers Stations are a perfect method of anonymous, one way communication. Spies located anywhere in the world can be communicated to by their masters via small, locally available, and unmodified shortwave receivers.…

These stations use very rigid schedules, and transmit in many different languages, employing male and female voices repeating strings of numbers or phonetic letters day and night, all year round.

One might think that these espionage activities should have wound down considerably since the official “end of the cold war,” but nothing could be further from the truth. Numbers Stations (and by inference, spies) are as busy as ever, with many new and bizarre stations appearing since the fall of the Berlin wall.

The sampler below gives a glimpse of the uncanny and atmospheric beauty of the collection, and will hopefully inspire you to visit the site for a more thorough listen.

The Swedish Rhapsody

“This station operates on a rigid and complicated schedule, in both voice (AM and SSB) and Morse modes (M5). It does not operate on Fridays. The operating agency is unknown. R 06/09/93”

Phonetic Alphabet – NATO

“The E10 setup has been on the air from the mid-1970s, and can be heard 24 hours a day on a large number of frequencies. The Israeli Mossad have been named as the organization responsible for this huge network, by magazine writers and authors. R 1994”

English Man

“Russian Intelligence. R 12/03/92 ”

Tyrolean Music Station

“Vintage Numbers Station, recorded 1971. […] Two examples of some of the songs transmitted, the first bar of ‘The Internationale,’ voice sample, message with farewell, and final song. Total weirdness in full effect. See enigma list, and the forthcoming Enigma book. ”

IT

Nipperkin — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 07:15:01 +0000

IT, vol. 1, no. 12 (April 28, 1967)

I thought I’d point out, for those who might not have seen it, that a complete run of the seminal 1960s counter-culture paper the International Times or IT is available for perusing on-line at the International Times Archive.

The International Times was arguably the first such publication in Europe. Brain child of John “Hoppy” Hopkins and Barry Miles, IT was founded in London in October 1966 and ran until regularly until 1980, then was revived sporadically before ceasing publication definitively in the mid-’90s.

IT was the spiritual cousin of the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Free Press, the East Village Other, et al, and its origins and early history are entwined with those of the counter-culture and psychedelic scenes of 1960s London: its first offices were located in the basement of famed Indica gallery; it was launched at an all-night proto-rave event featuring musical performances by The Soft Machine and The Pink Floyd, a happening orchestrated by Yoko Ono, fortune-telling by The Fool, and an all-night film screening including, among other works, Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and William Burroughs and Anthony Balch’s Cut Ups and Towers Open Fire. Among the 2,000 or so who attended the launch party were Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Vitti (who were in London working on Blow Up), Marianne Faithful, Paul McCartney (a friend of Miles and a frequent benefactor of IT), and an apparently uncomfortable Kenneth Rexroth, who reported on the event in a chronicle written for The San Francisco Examiner (“I felt exactly like I was on the Titanic.”).

In addition to continuous socio-political reporting (on the Black Panther party, pornography, the drug culture, the war in Viet Nam, genocide in Biafra, Mai ’68, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, etc.), IT also published a range of writing by, among others, William Burroughs, Morton Feldman, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound (previously unpublished wartime broadcasts for Radio Rome), and Bertrand Russell; interviews with J.G. Ballard, Jean Luc Goddard, George Harrison, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Pete Townsend, Frank Zappa, and many others; and reviews of books, concerts, exhibitions, films, and records by a long list of artists ranging from Yoko Ono and Ray Lichtenstein to Sun Ra and Albert Ayler, as well as by just about every interesting rock group or musician of the period.

The archive is a time capsule as fascinating for the topics it presents as for what it has to say about them, and what in turn that says about the times, society, and readership of which it was a reflection. It is also one of an ever-growing number of on-line archives of print publications presented integrally in the form of scans of the original pages, confirming that there is indeed a life after death. Since pages can take a moment to load, and thus browsing IT can a bit tedious, readers may wish to consult the illustrated index of yet another International Times website, then go straight to the issues/pages they wish to read.

Works Consulted

Miles, Barry. In The Sixties. London: Jonathan Cape, 2002.

Levy, Shawn. Ready, Steady, Go! The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London. New York: Broadway Books, 2002.

In a roomful of shouting people

Nipperkin — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:05:57 +0000

Above the Clouds

For many years, the name Peter Schmidt was uniquely associated in my mind with Brian Eno. It was Schmidt who did the cover art for Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and Evening Star, it was also he who made the four prints included with early pressings of Before and After Science and who collaborated with Eno on Oblique Strategies, and Eno often spoke of him in interviews, mentioning his sadness at Schmidt’s untimely death. Attracted by the work, impressed by the high esteem in which Eno held him, and admittedly intrigued by the relative lack of information that seemed to be available about him, I recall sniffing around for anything I might find out about Peter Schmidt in the pre-internet days of the late ’70s and early ’80s but came up with nothing of consequence and eventually gave up.

Well, nowadays of course it’s people and things that don’t exist on the internet that are the exception, and fortunately that is no longer the case of Peter Schmidt. In January 2008 John Emr created a website and a blog devoted to Schmidt, and both are invaluable resources for those who wish to learn more about the artist and view a broad sampling of his work. The blog in particular is interesting in that it contains examples of finished pieces, preparatory sketches and notes for paintings, writings, and a variety of ephemera about Schmidt, public showings of his work, etc. Through his contact with Schmidt’s family, friends, and collectors Emr is able to present many pieces that I imagine have never been displayed publicly before. Collectively, they give an idea of the surprising breadth of Schmidt’s work, and allow us better appreciate what he was able to accomplish in his unfortunately brief life.

I’ll admit a bias for his watercolor still-lifes and landscapes, many of which are striking examples of the understated beauty of otherwise mundane objects and unspectacular scenes and views. These to me embody what is most interesting about Schmidt’s work: its indifference to the monumental and the superlative, and its focus on the quiet, the “insignificant,” the intimate. For this reason I have always thought that Schmidt’s phrase, “In a roomful of shouting people, the one who whispers becomes interesting,” was a perfect epigraph to both his work and the position he occupied in the art world of his time.

You can see a selection of Peter Schmidt’s paintings in the Peter Schmidt gallery. Having visited the gallery, I hope you will feel sufficiently inspired to explore John Emr’s website and blog, listed below.

ShortWaveMusic

Nipperkin — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 15:00:19 +0000

For the radioheads among us I’d like to point out ShortWaveMusic, Myke Dodge Weiskopf’s paean to the random poetry and intermittent static of short wave radio. Weiskopf, who works as a radio producer, began the ShortWaveMusic blog in 2005, and it ran for some three years before loosing steam. After a brief haitus it was resuscitated in October 2009 and has been going strong ever since. In addition to regular postings, the site houses an archive of more than 60 atmospheric recordings and related, thoughtful commentary. You’ll also find some L.A. Theaterworks productions there (Myke’s day job), as well as assorted other treats, including mixes of some of Myke’s short wave captures.

The following sampler from ShortWaveMusic is intended to fire your imagination. If it catches your ear as well I recommend that you visit the site and work your way through the archive; you won’t be disappointed. The truly smitten may also wish to download the catalog of more than 100 recordings that had appeared on the blog between 2005–’08, and will find instructions on how to do so here. Now, on to the sounds…

Dark Radio

“[This is] a short layer piece incorporating what sounds like three or four radio sources. I’m pretty sure this is just a brief recording of one of my all-night sleep installations.”

SWM09.04: आकाशवाणी

“I would have remained a music-illiterate myself, had I not been in bed one monsoon with asthma, and listened to the radio to fill the hours. Around 2 a.m., I chanced upon some haunting music being played on the General Overseas Service of All India Radio. While the rest of India slept I listened, and was converted…” – Ramachandra Guha

SWM09.00: Qrv Qrv Qrv de ShortWaveMusic

“Station: Unidentified XMTR Test Sequence
Frequency: 11885 kHz
Transmitter: Unknown
Rec Date: Wed 09-Sep-2009 : 0406 UTC”

SWM09.08: Modernizing Khan Asparuh

“This piece is an example of ‘arranged folklore’ attributed to the Upper Thracian region of Southern Bulgaria, most likely performed by Donka Koleva, a Bulgarian-born and trained singer now living in New York.”

Duelling XMTRs! #3

“…a collision of modern Eastern electronics and Qu’ranic recitation which sounds so natural to our world-fusion-softened ears that it hardly registers as an accident of propagation at all. You could probably even dance to it …”

KJES (“King Jesus Eternal Savior”)

“…in certain fluke moments of peculiar propagation and signal chaos, KJES [“one of the weirder evangelical shortwave stations”] occasionally crosses the line from lip-biting strangeness to an inexplicable burlap-dress beauty.”

If you are as captivated by the beauty of these disembodied sounds as I am, you might consider purchasing a copy of At the Tone, Weiskopf’s “ ‘Little History’ of NIST Radio Stations WWV and WWVH” (you’ll find a teaser for it here). Be sure to keep an ear out for his forthcoming Historical Longwave CD Project, too. In the meanwhile, you can enjoy his first “catalog mix,” 833-45: Howth St PART/SEQ (Pananorama Mix), a sound collage incorporating “shortwave elements, Qur’an recitation, and music,” which you can read about and download here.