MP3s for download:1. The Old School Is Built On The Ruins Of The New School
(take 1, 21 July 2008. 7’53”, 13.53 MB)
2. The Old School Is Built On The Ruins Of The New School
(take 2, 21 July 2008. 8’21”, 13.93 MB)
My old laptop is dying, but I managed to coax another performance out of it while I was in Melbourne. I was asked to play at Stutter, which happens every Wednesday night at the fine Horse Bazaar.
I decided to make a new piece for digitally-emulated feedback, a bit like last year’s The One Who Was Neither Or Nor, but with some refinements. Again, The Old School Is Built On The Ruins Of The New School was made using AudioMulch, with nested loops of sound processing contraptions which generate self-modulating feedback signals that can either be sent to the speakers, fed back into themselves, or into one of the other loops.
This time around, the new piece was designed to have a more elegant performance interface. Instead of furrowing my brow glaring at a computer screen, fussing with a mouse making adjustments and changing connections, I constructed a simple set of control points which had distinctive, but indirect, effects on the sounds produced. These control points could then be manipulated through AudioMulch’s Metasurface interface.
The resulting sounds were more complex than Neither/Nor: with greater variety in timbres and in phrasing. I particularly liked the way the loops would cancel each other out from time to time, suddenly introducing silences of unpredictable lengths. It’s not really relaxing listening, but it keeps you guessing.
Unfortunately I couldn’t make a recording of the gig. My computer was already being taken to its limits by this piece, and attempting to capture the sound data to hard drive at the same time would send the laptop into seizures. The two mp3 files above were recorded at home earlier today, each take lasting until the computer overloaded and I lost the thread of what was happening.
A new page for this piece, with more info, will be up on the music page shortly. Hopefully, I might have a few pics of the gig, too. In the meantime, here’s a woozy snap of the fine trio that played after me: Natasha Anderson, Ben Byrne, and Sean Baxter, making a scrupulously detailed racket with improvised analog electronics, percussion, computer manipulation and the world’s biggest recorder. Sorry the pic’s so bad: blame it on the bar’s subdued lighting and too much Cooper’s Pale.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Frontier: Coburg
Saturday 19 July 2008
A few years ago, my girlfriend went to her first medical checkup in London and found herself explaining to the British-born doctor that Australian houses have bedrooms, thus correcting her assumption that verandahs were primarily designed for sleeping. When the only news story from Australia that has impinged upon British consciousness this year is the one about the bloke with the seatbelt on his slab, it can be hard explaining to Brits that Australia is a modern, largely urbanised society, with a complex and sophisticated culture.
Then you come back to Melbourne for a visit, sit out on the verandah of your friend’s house in leafy Coburg, and flip through the Personal Services classifieds at the back of the local paper.
“Yee-haw! There’s a passel o’ fine fillies up from South Yarra ways on that thar stagecoach, pardner!”
“Shucks, Jed, I ain’t seen me a gin-u-wine South Yarra lady up the Sydney Road in a month o’ Sundays!”
“Shucks, Jed, I ain’t seen me a gin-u-wine South Yarra lady up the Sydney Road in a month o’ Sundays!”
And then there’s this inspired promotional campaign that’s guaranteed to drum up trade. It’s enough to make any bargain-hunting man grab his hod and head out west. Also note the somewhat excessive zeal and efficiency that Amy brings to her job.
(Crossposted at Sarsaparilla.)
Filed under: Journalism, Stupidity, Travel by Ben.H
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New on the Art pages
Thursday 17 July 2008
Two of my art exhibitions now have pages up on the main site, with some background information about the shows and a few photos to pretty it all up.
Redrawing: String Quartet No.2 (Canon in Beta): All about the audiovisual installation I made for the Redrawing exhibition last month. Who’d have thought so much could be said about a blank screen and a D chord?
Mock Tudor No.2 (Why doesn’t someone get him a Pepsi?): “Every once in a while Don would scream at his mother ‘Sue! Get me a Pepsi!’ There was nothing else to do in Lancaster.” My first live sound installation, generating feedback with two loudspeakers and a microphone. Presented at Bus gallery in 2002.
Filed under: Art, Self-promotion by Ben.H
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More about Carl Stone
Tuesday 15 July 2008
After yesterday’s addition to Please Mister Please, I would like to direct you to Carl Stone’s website, sukothai.com. The site features plenty of examples and discussions of his more recent work, in addition to a number of movies about barbecues.
The composer has graciously allowed me to keep a “quaint” example of his earlier work on my site, mid-80s MIDI and all, if only for a few weeks as usual.
- Note to self: Get more composers’ websites on the sidebar ->
- Additional note to self: I’m old enough to have written stuff I must now find a teensy bit embarrassing. In fairness, I should dig it out and upload some of it for public exposure.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please
Monday 14 July 2008
Carl Stone, “Vim” (1986).
(10’26”, 15.05 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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A Dozen Dormobiles
Monday 14 July 2008
OK, NOW the name and subject indices are updated to the end of June. And the old VW campervans just keep multiplying around my block.
Filed under: London by Ben.H
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What’s on top of the pile?
Sunday 13 July 2008
Milton Babbitt, Philomel and other works (Bethany Beardslee, Lynne Webber, Jerry Kuderna, Robert Miller)
“What if Elliott Carter‘s name was Ginsberg?” asked Morton Feldman once. Would his reputation be so high? I listen to Babbitt’s music pretending he’s called Babtescu, in the hope that the sensuousness and humour for which he’s praised will become apparent to me.
CDCM Computer Music Series Vol. 1
I bought this second hand because it has Jerry Hunt’s Fluud on it. I hope there’s a grant out there for a scholar to go through Hunt’s archives to translate the paralanguage he wrote in:
Fluud is a system of translation of the mechanisms of austral/boreal trace patterns produced as an aural-visual performance extraction (Robert Fludd [1574-1647] monochordum mundi syhiphoniacum, 1622). The interference austral diagrams are duplicated to generate embedded templates of patterns. Pulse and melody bursts with orders of motions (color) are translated from the channels of regulative currents (austral, boreal). The templates are selective codings of the elemental determinants (body)….
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Well Sorted
Friday 11 July 2008
Filed under: Self-promotion by Ben.H
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String Quartet No.2: The Performance
Thursday 10 July 2008
In addition to presenting String Quartet No.2 (Canon in Beta) as an installation in Melbourne last month, I gave another live performance of the “concert version” of the piece. Unlike the Paris performance last year, I remembered to make a recording this time. (In any case, the Paris gig suffered from some electrical interference towards the end.)
Don’t get too excited. I was going to upload this recording, but having listened back to it I’ve decided it’s not quite good enough, at least as an audio-only experience. Sorry to get all La Monte Young on you, but my timing was a little off when playing the piece, and so I want to prepare a more flattering “studio” version in the next few days.
There’s supposed to be a video of me somewhere trying to look musical while performing in the gallery. In the meantime, you can enjoy this photo essay by an audience member, of me struggling with a faulty speaker cable immediately before the performance.
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Please Mister Please
Sunday 6 July 2008
Galina Ustvolskaya, “Piano Sonata No. 6” (1988). Marianne Schroeder, piano.
(6’15”, 4.89 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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The Belated Return of the List of People Or Things I Have Been Mistaken For, Or Allegedly Physically Resemble, In Increasing Order Of Ridiculousness
Sunday 6 July 2008
Has it really been that long? For the first time in two years, the updated List of People Or Things I Have Been Mistaken For, Or Allegedly Physically Resemble, In Increasing Order Of Ridiculousness.
- Don Watson
- Dylan Moran
- One of the greatest cynics of the 21st century
- Jim O’Rourke
- A jaded sex worker
- Neil Pye (Not this one.)
- A Girl
- Lou Barlow
- Tracy [sic] Emmin [sic]
- Harry Potter (Not this one, pity.)
- Russell Crowe
- Ben Lee
- A New Zealander
- Ben Harper
- Brian Kennedy
- The MMM-FM Fugitive
- Shit
- Terence Trent D’Arby
Filed under: Self-promotion, Stupidity by Ben.H
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Hopelessly Devoted to Who?
Wednesday 2 July 2008
I was emailed by a friend who received an invite to my exhibition (now closed, so no plug) in Melbourne, and noticed that the two letters UK appeared in brackets after my name. “Good to see the cultural cringe is alive and well in the local scene,” he said. I have tried, unsuccessfully, to convince several people that it wasn’t my idea to bill me as an Overseas Artist. When asked why they’ve listed me as British, I have a guess and say it’s something to do with claiming travel expenses.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been identified as non-Australian. Last year I played a gig in Brisbane which billed me as a New Zealander, owing to my having flown in via Auckland; but that was an honest mistake, whereas the British tag was, to my surprise when I recalled it, true.
Even though I have now lived in London for three years, and even have dual citizenship, there’s nothing about me that feels particularly British; yet it appears that my Australian identity is slowly and steadily slipping away, in ways I cannot control. Does extensive time out of the country inevitably extinguish my Australianness?
Earlier this year The Onion’s A.V. Club posted the latest in a semi-regular series, “The scandal of Olivia Newton-John: 12 surprisingly controversial Wikipedia pages“, chronicling the most protracted and furious arguments on Wikipedia’s Talk pages over the past few months. Fierce debates raged over such controversial subjects as Speedy Gonzales, Rotary International, the capitalisation of the name k.d. lang, and the nationality of Olivia Newton-John:
Yes, we know she was born in England, but moved to Australia at age 5, and left again at age 17. But such details don’t settle the linguistic and existential question of her essential nationality. Nv8200p “think[s] there is no doubt that Newton-John identifies with Australia,” but the ensuing complicated discussion covers dual citizenship, British birth certificates, whether Mel Gibson counts as Australian, and ultimately whether Australians have an inferiority complex. “English-born, Australian-raised” is the phrase that currently describes Newton-John in the first paragraph of her entry, but the issue may not be settled…
A quick straw poll among friends in Melbourne got a unanimous result: Hell yeah, she’s Australian. The English themselves most likely remember her, if at all, as American or Australian more than British – despite her sterling work for the UK in the Eurovision Song Contest. At the time of writing, her Wikipedia article describes her as an “English-born, Australian pop singer”, but of course this may change.
ONJ’s Wikipedia Talk page gives a fascinating, if not illuminating, account of the debating process that went into authoring her entry, including a section titled “Gay Icon Project” and the winning reprimand of “The E! TV special on Newton John isn’t the best source for wikipedia [sic].” Probably the most trenchant observation is this comment:
She’s still technically a British person. Australia is as guilty sometimes as some other countries in looking pass[sic] the home-born and reared people in preference of a claiming tightly[sic] to famous people such as Newton-John as the representer of Australia. I’d probably decide to only pledge my undying allegiance to the country that worships me as their symbol too.
Compare Our Libby to that other accidental icon of cheesy Seventies pop culture, the Bee Gees. Singing artistes with a similar, intercontinental upbringing, they are claimed by the British and the Australians with equal possessiveness – even though they are technically Manx. Their more contested national allegiance – in the real world, if not so much on Wikipedia – is doubtless due to their continued eminence in both countries.
Incidentally, the main debate on the Bee Gees Wikipedia Talk page concerns whether their formative years in Brisbane were spent in Redcliffe or the now-vanished Cribb Island. This sticking point seems to be more hotly contested than any of the larger claims for rival nations.
Perhaps it has been the fate of all world-famous Australians to have their nationalities confused, simply by the act of entering the wider world to be famous in. Percy Grainger was born in Melbourne, established his career in England, became an American to avoid the Great War, found his greatest fame in the USA, built his museum in Melbourne, and was buried in Adelaide beside his mother, to whom he dedicated a large memorial statue (with a rather fulsome poem on a plaque beneath) which dwarfs his own, modest grave. Depending on which country you are in, Grainger is either Australian, American, or English – the last in particular, given his identification with Anglo-Saxon, if not Aryan, culture.
There are also rare instances of celebrities who have falsely claimed Australian identities. For many years there were Tasmanians who swore they had personally known Merle Oberon as a girl growing up in St Helens, unaware that her biography was faked to disguise her mixed-race origins in Bombay. Far more common are the lazy inclusiveness granted by Australians to particularly successful New Zealanders, and the affectionate, unofficial status afforded to the likes of Our Tom and Our Fred. Such status, however, can be revoked at any time.
So, what does history have to teach me? Is my case yet another example of cultural cringe? Perhaps, having left Australia’s shores, I have been disowned, fobbed off to another unwitting country, at least until I become famous enough to be reclaimed. Or perhaps during my time abroad I have changed at an imperceptible rate until I am no longer recognisable to my fellow countrymen. Worse still is the fate of those who fall between two shores, the mercenary netherworld of the professional expatriate.
(Crossposted at Sarsaparilla.)
Filed under: Journalism, Writing by Ben.H
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Pavilion Plot Thickens
Sunday 29 June 2008
Two months after the mystery pavilion appeared in Bedford Square, another one has started to spring up on the next corner. The first one, the AADRL TEN Pavilion, finally has a sign posted beside it to explain what it is. This new one will probably also take a few months to explain its existence.
A few pics of the construction site are up on Flickr. Meanwhile, one of the two warning signs stood beside the first pavilion has been disappeared, and the other is fading to an interesting colour. Well after their job was finished, the unemployed barrier poles are still hanging around like Ken Livingstone (TOPICAL HUMOUR!)
Filed under: Art, London by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please
Friday 27 June 2008
Emmy the Great, “Edward is Dedward” (2006).
(3’29”, 3.19 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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The mummified corpse of Jeremy Bentham reads inter-office emails.
Friday 27 June 2008
