The lovely folks at Pitt Rivers have just made the audio recordings from their 2012 conference Making Sound Objects available, including David Gunn’s opening presentation for the conference, where he reflected on some of experiences and themes from our Cambodian projects The Room and Krom Monster. For the temporally (or acoustically) challenged, here’s the gist of the argument, drawn from the original abstract: 

“Drawing directly upon the author’s own experiences of running a range of sound 
projects in Cambodia, this paper focuses upon the role of music artefacts, processes 
and archives as transitional objects (Winnicott, 1953) that enable individuals and
 groups to negotiate cultural memory and to frame experiences of inter-cultural
 contact … Where the discipline of archival curation and custodianship may traditionally place
 emphasis upon notions of clear transmissability of data, this paper will explore what 
happens to forms of sound and music when archival order or integrity collapses or 
simply is not present. In such circumstances, it will be argued that paradoxically it is 
precisely through staging its own collapse and obsolescence that the archive performs 
its most vital function.”

One of several academic outings for Incidental last year, this talk served as a great stimulus to start reflecting critically on our projects and practice, something we’re hoping to do more of as this year progresses – in person, in print and online. So … book chapters on the politics of memorialisation, linguistic pan-handling in the by-ways of South London and a treatise on ecumenical philosophy set to the boom chk chk of a ham-fisted 808. Maybe.

Following the success of Feed, we’ve been busy over the last few months on “Londonion”, a new app project developed in collaboration with the artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard and stand up comedian Stewart Lee. 

Based on Kurt Schwitters’ 1946 poem “London Onion”, the app is as a pocket-sized mega-mix of the original poem. It features numerous performances of the poem by Stewart, combined with sounds taken in realtime from your handset and archival sounds from across London. The app analyses and responds to the random sounds and fluctuating noise-levels of your immediate surroundings to create a unique version of the performance tailored to the context in which you listen to it. Sound good? Yup.

The app is part of merzbank.com , a series of commissions related to the current Schwitters in Exile exhibition at Tate Britain. The app will launch this Friday April 5th at the Tate Britain’s late event Exile, where the app will be presented alongside (and remix!) performances by Jaap Blonk, Steve Beresford and more.

Londonion was commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and supported by Arts Council England.

Incoming … preview video for our latest collaboration, “Londonion” …

On March 1st, we’ll be playing a looooong drop-in gig at the Wellcome Collection for one of their upcoming Lates. The Voice is organised by Alice Carey and James Wilkes (initiator of the Vox Lab residency), and is based around the idea of new approaches to voice performances, and offers opportunities to, among other things, “build a replica vocal tract, get up close to an incognito opera singer, and meet a talking parrot.”

We’ll be debuting a special installation using our Feed app, building on some ideas we developed for our Open Cities event for Net Audio Festival a few years back. The result? an live impromptu performance created from real-time recordings of audience members and aforesaid opera singer and parrot. Now come on … you don’t get too many chances for that …

Feed at The Voice is supported by Arts Council England and PRS for Music Foundation

The 12″ will be released via deranged and lofi Hong Kong indie label Metal Postcard. And yes, that is an awful website but home of Cambodian Space Project amongst others … and they know exactly what they’re doing.

Check back soon for release details!

Cambodian music is largely assumed by outsiders to be a rather clanky, traditional affair, most often enjoyed at special cultural events or inside of tourist-driven restaurants. But what about a modern take on traditional Khmer sounds — and an outlet for ambitious young Cambodian artists who want to break with tradition?

This is the basic reasoning behind Krom Monster, an interesting new improvisational quintet featuring young Cambodian musicians trained in four traditional instruments, playing over distinctly new-era ambient, electronic sounds, re-sampled from both studio and field recordings by London-based digital musician David Gunn.

How’s it sound? Mentally combine,if you will, the clanky — but — compelling stuff one might piped into a restaurant with waitresses dressed as apsaras, with the smooth, somewhat surreal dub-influenced beats more common in a violently chic New York hangout, interspersed with the quintessentially Khmer sounds of a summer rainstorm, or the far-off thrum of a gong. That’s Krom Monster.

And our Feed experiments continued at the end of last year, collaborating with the Bishopsgate Institute. In contrast to the Horniman, our session here focused on how Feed could be used to explore new forms of interactive soundwalk – with participants journeying across the London underground whilst using the app, collecting and experimenting with sounds of the trains and stations as they went. 

During the second half of the session, we then returned to the Institute, using maps and other material from their archive as imaginative stimulus to create a final audio narrative. The results were varied, but seemed to share a common dystopian theme – a soundfield lost in a mess of urban noise and contradictory directions to different stations, or even (as in the first of the two tracks within this player) as the stage for an imaginative ghost story, as a paranoid traveler finds himself swallowed up by ghosts and the noises of the trains. 

As with the Horniman work – these tracks were created by participants coming into contact with the app for the first time during short workshop sessions. And again, these experiments lay the groundwork for more ambitious work with the Institute in coming months …

The latest Feed experiments (including this one) are supported by Arts Council England and PRS for Music Foundation.

Following the initial launch of our Feed project over the summer, we began a new initiative funded by Arts Council England and PRS for Music Foundation, exploring how an app like Feed could be used in different kinds of cultural institution.

One of the first pilot experiments was with the Horniman Museum at the end of last year. For this first event, we focused upon educational approaches to their music archive, and specifically exploring ways to connect historical forms of instruments with more digital approaches to performance. 

For this session, we worked with a school group from Fairlawn Primary School, began by learning how to use the app, before playing a number of instruments (zithers, singing bowls, drums) and recording these sounds as samples into the app. They then worked in pairs to explore remixing and resampling these sounds together to create a short recording.

We were interested to explore with them what happens when you take acoustic instruments with quite ancient traditions, but to recontextualise them in new ways via digital media – but each pair was completely left alone to create their own work

Its worth emphasizing that they had never before used Feed, and that the entire process  took place in under 40 minutes – learning about the app, performing instruments and recording sounds, rehearsing and then creating a short performance. Not only that, but the students themselves were 10-11 years old. Given both of these considerations, the quality of the work is quite astounding – from a standing start and in a completely improvised performance, the students created some quite elegant tracks in very different styles.

For us, its a great example of exactly what Feed should be about. First – enabling people of all ages to very quickly explore and create more experimental forms of music. Second, offering a digital experience that doesn’t force you down a particular path, to use particular samples or follow particular musical styles, but encourages you to find your own voice. And finally, offering an app that can take any sounds as source material, and be used in different environments to very different ends.

Here’s a few of our favourite performances, exactly as they were made by the students – completely raw and unedited. First of all, Portialee & Kizzie, all about the zither, with ambient details swirling around it:

Or Max and Sinem, working with the xlyophones, repitching them and overlaying them like crazy, transforming them into Detroit techno patternings:

And finally Eryka & Grace … getting totally minimal, inspired from the ritual vocal incantations you can hear elsewhere in the gallery …

We ran a second event with the Bishopsgate Institute later during December, and will be posting about that soon. And following these events, we’ll be moving on to create some more ambitious, public-facing events with each institution in the coming months. 

The latest Feed experiments (including this one) are supported by Arts Council England and PRS for Music Foundation.

And now the last of the updates from our recent outing from Elektrostatic – a few stills from the live projections we developed for the evening recitals. A series of generative visuals were designed to respond live to the nature of the audio, for a series of four classical compositions, each supplied with its own visual style. Developed by the Feed team in collaboration with Benjamin Dobson.