Commissioned and Performed by The Living Earth Show In Collaboration with Composers: Sharmi Basu Ava Mendoza Raven Chacon Morgan Craft Zachary James Watkins

There is no such thing as voice in literature. That is, we assign chimerical properties to characters’ voices; fictions based on voices we have heard in relation to the description of the characters’ personalities; identities we want to confer on the characters. Whilst we read and listen to this voice, it is neither true nor false. It is the product of a careful assembly of traces and features we believe represent a person – more physically even than their own body….

Nikita Gale and Alexander Provan are joined by Tashi Wada, a Los Angeles-based composer and performer. Wada presents Table of Visions, a composition for a “high-resolution player piano” commissioned by Triple Canopy, and asks how we discern between human expression and technical perfection, how we listen to virtuosos and machines. With Gale and Provan, Wada discusses the pandemic-era vogue for liveness at home, technologies that claim to capture the souls of performers, and music that prompts listeners to discern between the sounds of machines and humans. They listen to Conlon Nancarrow, Glenn Gould, Perry Como, advertisements for hi-fi systems, the ...

While we’ve applauded recent moves in art history and media studies challenging the hegemony of the visual, why does the waxing art world topicality of “listening” seem to be inversely proportional to sound practitioners’ waning interest in it? Does it really have to turn up on e-flux before people pay attention? Haven’t musicians, composers, and sound artists all over the world been thinking listening for centuries?… The contributors to Issue 2 face the immense material complexity of listening head on – physically, technically, formally, politically, socially. Their contributions continually orbit the question, ‘What is Listening?,’ all the while deftly dodging all ...

Yeah, I have tinnitus by now but it’s not so bad.. I’ve DJed a lot of parties and made a lot of mixtapes over the years… And now you can listen and download most of them right here. The best place to begin is 2001’s game-changing live 3-turntable mix, Gold Teeth Thief. This influenced a lot of people & opened many ears; over a decade later, the world sounds a lot more like I was hearing/blending it back then. Here’s a list of most of my mixes in chronological order for free download as V0 mp3s. After the list you’ll find cover ...

In Peter Ablinger’s work, the listener is often asked to cross the distance between sounds. These types of comparative actions fall into at least three categories. One of these categories is a comparison between two sound sources: a recording and a reproduction. The term Ablinger uses for these reproductions is “phonorealism.” Another type of comparison is between a sonic memory and the sound that is present. I’ll play two examples later that activate specifically musical memories through a process called “verticalization.” We’ll start, though, with yet another type of distance that is to be traveled, this time in the sonic imagination, ...

Eight years since its last issue Field Notes returns with a new design, and for the first time also accompanied by two (freely available) audio releases. In this all-new collection we present the writings and “audio-textual” contributions of Janko Hanushevsky (on the meaning behind every-day sounds and how they do play into his artistic work), Aleksandar Vejnovic (sharing memories about his ears capturing sounds from afar and how the microphone shapes the recording artist’s experience and work), Eli Neuman-Hammond (exploring the microphone-recorder as a creative tool and its role as a descriptive apparatus), and Ludwig Berger (on a long-form field ...

Voice, drums, recordings here and there. Composed July – August, 2015 I started this piece walking down by the Limmat on a cold, windy day. Whitecaps chopped the water and I was a bit out of breath from fighting the wind and trying to keep warm by moving at a brisk pace. Under the Hardbrücke the deep resonance there swallowed me up. A long rowboat chained to the concrete pilings of the bridge whipped to and fro in the strong current. I headed up the stairs to my studio. Schulhaussingen happens twice a year at my kids’ school. I usually go and I ...

MERGE LANE $3.33 / Celia Hollander Last week, within 5 days, I took a car to a bus to an airplane to an airplane to a car to my feet to a car to a bus to a subway to my feet to a subway to a train to a shuttle van to my feet to a shuttle van to a train to a subway to my feet to a subway to a train to an airplane to a bus to a car to my bed. Collecting myself horizontally, I realized that my insides had been whisked into a pureé from all ...

The Berlin-based producer and artist Steven Warwick presents a unique audio-visual ‘mixtape’ on PAN, compiled of a series of darkly lyrical and sonic musings, as well as personal snapshots, written stories and videos taken across trips whilst residing in LA and Berlin. Arriving as his first musical release under his own name, Warwick (aka Heatsick)’s latest venture also utilises a new sonic repertoire allowing for a new route for his music, “It’s a reset in a way, creatively and emotionally”. Titled ‘Nadir’, the release reflects on a somewhat sardonic, and at times melancholic and unsettling mood. Recorded in both Los Angeles, ...

Computer Program as an Artefact At first, the computer program is neutral and exists only in terms devoid of any reference other than to itself. The program is its function. It is a tool. It does something; it instructs a computer to perform a task. Its working is often imperceptible beyond the surface of its interface – screen based or physical – the material extension to the inner depths of its digital structure, the code. Focusing solely on a functional aspect of software limits our engagement with its wider assemblage of connotations beyond technical analysis. Beyond the functional and ostensible neutrality ...

Audio Excerpts, Movements 1.5, 2 March 21, 2014, EMPAC, Troy, NY The notion that underlies this piece is levitation, both literally and metaphorically. When composing I imagined the possibility of the sonic elements existing in a parallel dimension, the aural aspect holding matter suspended as if it were an apparition in an interstitial space. In the presentation of the work, a literal manifestation or demonstration of low-end frequency levitation takes place using hand-crafted subwoofers with materials hovering in the windows of the boxes. The piece evolved out of studies accompanied by drawings and texts as investigations of threshold states. It is comprised ...