On Air / Jim Ferraro
Violin Alap / Dr. L Subramaniam
SND / Florian Hecker

Title: Jean Baudrillard

Piotr Kamler & Bernard Parmegiani, Une Mission Ephemere (1993)

A portrait of Eliane Radigue (2009) by Maxime Guitton.

Philip Beesley's talk on living architectures, one of several highlights of mine at Sonic Acts XIII, along with J.P. Sonntag's low frequency standing waves and BJ Nilsen's multi-channel storm in a church.

snd://4,5,6

Excerpt of the Cornelius Cardew score, Treatise. Currently on show at The Drawing Room.

Klaus Röder's Kristallisationen are a great example of morphogenetic composition. Inspired by crystal growth, Röder attempted to grow sound particles around germ cells to create sound crystals. He constructed his own analogue synths and obsessively scored his pieces, photographs of which accompany this vinyl release, which you can pick up at Second Layer in Highgate. His work dates back to the mid-70s (he's credited on Autobahn) and he's still active today. You can listen to three decades' worth of electronic composition (including the 9 Kristallisationen) on the Klaus Röder website.

I've been reading Michael Hensel & Achim Menges' excellent documentation of their architectural research at the AA, Morpho-Ecologies. The ME approach can be broadly characterised by the design & fabrication of generative structures rooted in biological form, often based on cellular and plant growth models, as a means of improving the performance, intelligence and sustainability of architectural constructions. Erwin Hauer's wall for Knoll's showroom, a cellular Hydrostone surface that modulates light in sophisticated ways, is one example. See also the work of Alisa Andrasek's studio, Biothing (book), TheVeryMany, this gallery of compiled works or Bruce Sterling's documentation of generative architecture prototypes from AAST in Tokyo — some, if not all, of these examples display an ME approach.

The term morphology was coined by Goethe and ecology by Haeckel, worthy intellectual forefathers to any movement. If electron microscopy provides us with the contemporary equivalent to Haeckel's extraordinary work (see France Bourely, whose book is excellent), then the digital models produced by ME research at least induce some of the same responses; aesthetically complex, exploratory, biological, foreign designs that reveal new conceptions of form. They signal a future architecture rooted in biochemistry; Hengel & Menges are essentially trying to retool architects to think in terms of organism and environment. Speculations on membranes, synthetic life structures & evolutionary design are all to be found in ME practice.

ME surfaces can at times resemble diatoms, with gradual variation over many cells produced by adaptation to local environmental variables. I would broadly define these ME surfaces as supersurfaces, as a way of expressing the synthetic nature of their growth models; they are in a way looking to supersede the natural, not merely emulate/simulate. One such supersurface was exhibited as part of the London Design Festival by Amanda Levete Architects.

Superstudio brought the word supersurface into architectural discourse in the 70s as a vision of a homogenised, unified landscape, both an ironic counter to the spatial logic of tele-communication grids (Castell's space of flows) and a radical re-appraisal of boundary in the built landscape [1],[2]. In this new guise the supersurface is an emergent, contiguous form produced by simulated forces acting on interrelating components modelled using parametric design techniques, made real via the complex fabrication of many similar but often subtly varying components that interconnect in the final surface. The morpho-genetic growth is simulated in software, the fabricated surface simply a snapshot of the emergent form.

I'm interested in the idea of sonic supersurfaces, partially because a practice of ME in sound is timely given our algorithmic tools, but also because it's an inherently generative way to work (Tropisms was a step in this direction). Sound has the obvious advantage of being able to capture the dynamics of growth. It was Goethe himself who said,

I call architecture frozen music. Really there is something in this; the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music.

So, sonic supersurfaces. A work in progress.

Vladislav Delay at Union Chapel, 12th November

The new Cacao record, Permutopia, is now available via our own imprint, stdio. This one is mainly found sound - tape loops, turntable manipulations & field recordings. It's based on a variety of utopian visions. There's a physical release coming, we're just finalising the artwork.

The purpose of the imprint is to allow us to publish a variety of digital and physical artefacts authored by us & our friends. So there will be more things coming, not just sound works.

This is the back cover of Trevor Wishart's electro-acoustic piece, Journey Into Space (1972). I particularly like his declaration, The piece is best heard in total darkness, whilst seated as comfortably as possible. Worth reading in full.

Woebot first turned me onto Wishart in his pre-history of British electronic music. Surprisingly, Wishart is playing live in Brighton at the Colour Out of Space festival in October.

Listening a lot to Federico Mompou's piano pieces of late, thinking about what it means to play an instrument 'naturally'. His work manages to combine spontaneity with simple melodic and rhythmic motifs to produce something of lyrical beauty. Try Music Callada (Quiet Music) or the single piece, Pajaro Triste (Sad Bird). I'd recommend Stephen Hough's interpretations as a starting point. Here's a spotify playlist, if you like that sort of thing.

I was first exposed to the Catalan pianist in an intermission to Chris Marker's film, The Last Bolshevik (a film about "the tragedy of a pure communist in a world of would-be communists"¹). Marker shows us a cat (presumably one of his), lying around on one of his keyboards at his home studio, listening to a piece of haunting, melancholic piano music. Sparse chords are sustained to form a naive melody that just hangs in the air, accelerating and decelerating effortlessly. This goes on for four minutes.

Mompou's music, subtle yet deceptively straight forward, hardly impresses itself on the world. It's miniature rather than minimal, willfully naive rather than merely simple, delicate rather than crassly emotional. The clarity of purpose and economy of means is breath-taking. The work is a labour of poetry.

His oeuvre has a remarkable continuity to it, with no attempts at a forced evolution or disruption of compositional method. The pieces are intimate and direct, almost immediately recognisable as Mompou; the sparsely populated melodic lines of unresolved chords with distinct contours are his own, the compositions exquisite, resolute in their sheer smallness.

He was likened to Debussy (see something like Charmes V as to why), but such a comparison is unfairly reductionist; he constructed his own miniature sound world in which every note was an essential detail. Known for his humility, Mompou never knowingly attracted attention to himself during his lifetime.

I composed only for myself. I hate bravura music, the big things. I am a simple person. ²

- Federico Mompou, architect of quiet worlds, 1893-1987

[1] Viktor Dyomin
[2] Federico Mompou: Catalonian Composer Magnifico (pdf)

James Ferraro's vinyl diptych, out on Holy Mountain, available to order here.

- Sansula, Dominik Eulberg

Sotto Voce, the second edition of the one-day festival for improvised silence and noise, is at the State51 Factory just off Brick Lane next Saturday. Amongst other things, Aki Onda, of Cassette Memories fame and Matthew Bower, of Skullflower fame, are both on, as well as Benedict Drew, whose soundtracks for Emily Richardson's films are super. Come down. A bunch of tracks to listen to and pre-booking available at the Sotto Voce website.

I believe in the signal of the bass drum. It is the heartbeat of my life.

Danceflorensics, Wolfgang Voigt

Permutopia is the working title of the next Cacao release. We're working on it at the moment.

Ralph Steinbruchel: Circa, Basis, Stage, Opaque and Mit Ohne. Put them together and you have a soundworld.

Felix was nice enough to play Vasco & I a bunch of compositions on his sound machines at Gasworks. He says they're going to tour the world as a support act on the next Plaid tour. He says he's building lots more; machines with "blades" and wind instruments. Incredible.

Tropism VI is our last audio piece in the Tropisms project, which started out with a re-reading of Nathalie Sarraute's 1939 collection of mini-essays of the same name. I leave you with this excerpt from her piece, Tropism I,

They seemed to spring up from nowhere, blossoming out in the slightly moist tepidity of the air, they flowed gently along as though they were seeping from the walls, the boxed trees, the benches, the dirty sidewalks, the public squares.

They stretched out in long, dark clusters between the dead house-fronts. Now and then, before the shop windows, they formed more compact, motionless little knots, giving rise to occasional eddies, slight cloggings...