Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.20.1703192355410.13074@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: LIMIT cd from Public Eyesore, more information -
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2017 23:57:55 -0400 (EDT)
LIMIT cd from Public Eyesore, more information - http://www.publiceyesore.com/catalog.php?pg=3&pit=138 Below is an expanded description of the work - "For a new music" "Time Reversal and Anticipation in Music" Using reverse reverberation, it's possible to create a simulacrum of time reversal, the spatial environment itself producing the sound, which always follows, always ensues. In other words, spatiality, temporality, produce the sound which is emblematic, responsive, to the exigencies of the aural resonance, and likewise, the human body, the body of the musician, is an emergent property of the whole. Space is a dwelling in eternity, and speech has already been spoken in a form of future anterior. Behind us, we find ourselves in the future, and before us, the anticipation of a creation yet to come. (See Derrida, No Apocalypse, Not Now, (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives), Diacritics 14/2, 1984" And some fragments on reverse reverberation and inverting amplitudes - inverting amplitudes foregrounds body and operational instrument sounds; these are pieces which treat bodywork as fundamental to music, the body presencing; the usual focus of an instrument, proper sounds, almost a shell or manifold across flesh and breath. i haven't made work like this before, interior and exterior exchanged in an incredible sonic mapping tending towards possibilities (at least for me) of new modes of sound and musical philosophy. everything is experience and body; the transformations appear elementary, but create dwellings in alternative worlds that resonate with what we always already know; theories of unthemed dwellings, nomadic commons coming together and falling apart, falling apart and coming together, defeat of the punctum-turret, alignments of universal skies 'Since I must save the day of tomorrow, since I must have a form because I don't feel strong enough to stay disorganized, since I inevitably must slice off the infinite monstrous meat and cut it into pieces the size of my mouth and the size of the vision of my eyes, since I'll inevitably succumb to the need for form that comes from my terror of remaining undelimited - then may I at least have the courage to let this shape form by itself like a scab that hardens by itself, like the fiery nebula that cools into earth. And may I have the courage to resist the temptation to invent a form.' (Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H., trans. Idra Novey, Penguin, 2012, p. 7) nothing is comfortable when the transitional turns you on The grain of the voice, grain of the almost-black, grain of the seething world. Among the last dark and first black, the granular. The grit of the primal scene, grit of the floor, of the bed, of the stairwell, grit of the river dock, of the great outdoor projection screen, of the hallway. Grain and grit as the world turns black, as achitecture shifts, architectron. As the visibility of great expulsions. As great visibility. most innovative playing by the master of fifth.fourth.fifth the music/sound of anticipation and hope, among a dying friend, stabilized companion cat, panic attacks and depressions, and yet, the hope of the salvation of sound, so this piece is one of tuning up, getting ready for a performance or a recording, but the anticipation, the hope, of course become the performance itself, just as hope gathers hope and anticipation of hope becomes, appears, at the very beginning of hope, hope itself, and then, more-so, becomes comfort, enlightenment, advance we live always in such advance of death, decay, slaughter, illness, but we also live in-spite-of, the circulation of culture and culture's prohibitions and transgression, such makes us somehow more human, more among communality, more gladness " http://www.publiceyesore.com/catalog.php?pg=3&pit=138 And here are the liner notes: " LIMIT PE138 Luke Damrosch: programming, engineering, madal Azure Carter: songs, vocals Alan Sondheim: mastering, concept, viola, guqin, flute, clarinet, alto clarinet, long-necked saz, dan moi, ghichak, ukulele, guzheng, holeless shakuhachi, hegelung, sanshin, rebab Reverse reverberation in real time is an impossibility; the physics of space-time doesn't permit it. That said, Luke Damrosch has developed programs that approach the impossible; the result is a new form of music dynamics. The general idea is that you can reverse shorter and shorter segments 'almost' as if they were reversed in real time, but you're really dealing with fundamental limits of spacetime; only on a quantum level is reversibility possible (for example a positron as an electron moving temporally backwards in Feynmann diagrams - retrocausality in Wikipedia), and that's up for grabs. In any case, I've been interested in processes that operate at the edge of this sort of dynamics, where physics, acoustics, and philosophy meet. And here is a resulting cd, using acoustic instruments, where this is a guiding principle. A second example involves the use of dynamics processing (I'm using Adobe Audition), in which the louder something is, the quieter the output - reversing the usual dynamics. I've been doing this in post-processing, but with voltage-controlled amplifiers, it's easy to do as analog in real time. The result is fascinating - if I'm playing shakuhachi or guqin for example, the sounds of breathing, of the body, of string slip, etc., come to the foreground and the traditional musical 'content' recedes. The body becomes a fundamental source of sound, almost as if it were playing itself. Again there are a lot of contradictions here; since a slow sinewave, for example, varies in amplitude, it might disappear or become increasingly dominant itself, depending on the settings (frequency ranges employed) for the dynamics processing. I'm also working with pitch reversal, so that, for example, a frequency F is transformed into 1/F; the basis of F can be set so that the range as a whole is inverted. You can see how this is almost the same as dynamics processing; the two are deeply related. (This hasn't been implemented yet.) All of this connects to my interest in philosophy and the foundations of mathematics. Most acoustic transformations are 'surface' transformation, as if the physical acoustic environment were itself changing (larger or smaller room, etc.), or as if parameters were changing holistically (raising or lowering pitch, etc.). There are exceptions, but this is done, for the most part, in terms of musical or other aesthetics. I'm interested in something fundamental in a different way. Traditional foundations of mathematics begins with such things as logic, set theory, etc. - as you know, anomalies appear all over the place (Godel's theorem is the most obvious example). But the tendency now is to look at dynamics based on things like category theory - in which there are objects and arrows, or objects and morphisms and rules and structures emerging from these. Arrows are also objects, objects can be morphisms, etc. etc. I understand very little of this, but it's really relevant to the kinds of global transforms that revrev or inversions represent; I tend to think of dynamics applied through acoustic spaces for example - at least that's where I'd like to go.... " http://www.publiceyesore.com/catalog.php?pg=3&pit=138