ELECTRIC CHURCH

Room nr9000.psd by son:da [http://sonda.kibla.org/]
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SABAW Media Art Kitchen

presents

ELECTRIC CHURCH
22-23 FEB (Manila)

24-27 FEB (Baguio at Ax(is) Art Project) http://www.axisartproject.com/

Electricity, primarily through amplification, signifies.

Electricity threatened music (let alone trad. art) as purity of human expression, and also of innate 'talent', as it first distanced the musician from the sound, and second, masked the inadequacies of technique. Amplification takes over from the human voice, or music as expression of human feeling, emotion or subjectivity (often through approximation of voice). What you hear is revealed as electrically driven movements of air; sound is materialized, and becomes other to the expressing body. Music is now evidently prosthetic, mediated through machinery, and this shakes the belief in the centeredness, intention and authenticity of musical creation.

Surplus sound is a key characteristic of electrified music, and as the 1960s go on, distortion and feedback, pushing the machinery beyond limits, offers another layer of noise that is both literal and noise in the sense of being unwanted, excess, waste. These noises are quickly used, and become techniques, but along the way, they operate as a way of maintaining a community. Sociologist Paul Gilroy, citing Hendrix refers to an "electric church" ("Soundscapes of the Black Atlantic", Gilroy). Hendrix insisted on the necessity of loudness to convey the possibility of revolutionary change through both shock and the use of "the correct frequency" (ibid.), the later allowing a more direct connection, facilitated by the noisiness. We can take "church" as meant in the most general sense, as a way of capturing an elective community that somehow bonds together, in this case in excessive performance.

| CONCERT |

WE HATE WHEN PEOPLE MAKE TRACKS LIKE THIS
22 Feb. 10PM | B-Side, The Collective

Many have taken a utopian view of the deterritorialization of music production, as it is reterritorialized in ‘home studios’ or ‘bedroom labs’. As well as the evidence of Aphex Twin, Squarepusher and a good proportion of those involved in the nebulous genre ‘electronica’, Fete dela WSK! praises the creative potential of this underheard-of autonomy. For the first time in history, creative output and the means of its distribution have been inextricably linked. Along with the rhetoric of freedom comes a puritanical praise for self-teaching, as techno-autodidacts master new machinery, software, concepts and programming. Access to and increasing control of digitally produced or processed music move computer music beyond structures of existing musical convention, and almost inevitably, it seems, to the digital dismantling of music, and ultimately, to the dismantling of digital music (music as presented digitally, or digitalized).
Beats are often there to be thwarted, either through complexity, or purposeful variation, often as an odd take on microsound, where dissected sound (or information) is stacked up like in the music of Ježíš táhne na Berlín or JTNB (translated from Czech as Jesus Marches to Berlin) or Malek Lopez. Beeps, clatters, and momentary granular synthesis bursts scatter through the carefully composed pieces.

Beatsmiths Caliph8 and Supreme Fist alongside Taiwan's premiere pipa improviser, Luo Chao Yun perform in an electro-acoustic set: wherein time-based algorithms follow common buildups, but cuts it, layers it on itself, time compresses parts and strecthes other sections of each player. Parts are made staccato, broken into fragments, with some of these forming perfrect new microrhythms that disappear in a second. Sounds are taken from something familiar (popular hit songs) and brought into unfamiliar yet exploratory territory.

Mu Arae Transmission’s beeps, clatters, and momentary granular synthesis that bursts throughout piece are like alien signals that await confirmation. Ambient washes and pulsing glitch rhythms; beautiful chords with sombre melodies are taken out of context and placed into eerie communal dialogue between the machine and humanity.

Terraformer's beats are not only messy, they are overridden by hums, blasts, failings and direct glitch sounds, or hums signaling spaces between instrument and functionality. Elegiac tones build, there is still the jarring of back and forward movement, as even stasis cannot settle, and the whole clicks (is read as containing those clicks.)
Composer Tengal, often working with hundreds of short tracks prevent a unity forming, and glitch has become a component, in a realization it is now part of musicality rather than a gesture that takes the medium from music to being medium and failing at that.
The glitch ‘effect’ transfers into the relation between sound and listener, and, while losing the specificity of glitch, lets it play across tracks where glitch features (in the same way that noise in any ‘noise music’ plays across tracks featuring or consisting entirely of what are generally thought of as noises). Once away from the unwitting reification of glitch left to its own devices, we have something like hyperglitch, where it is an effect, not an essence of material and materialist commentary. Though these occur not only in sound but in the moving images, as 3D projections (or video mapping) of such kind are set-up by Tad Ermitano, Clang Sison, and Edsel Abesames.

The very fact that glitch phenomena is not there to be worshipped as the means and end, but is to always already have occurred and be re-played, or be itself disturbed to have anything to do with noise. The same conclusion could be said to apply in attempts to find noise working, even if construed as always provisional, as yet-to-come, as gone, as dissipating, mounting, but never there.

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|SYMPOSIUM|

BEDROOMLAB

23 FEB 8PM | Carlos Celdran's Living Room

Unit 24, North Syquia Apts.
M.H. Del Pilar, Malate, Manila City

artist talks | works-in-progress | media theory | speakeasy

BedroomLab functions as an informal art platform, wherein open discussions, brainstorming sessions, lectures, network meetings, performances, hands-on workshops, demonstrations and public gatherings take place.

Magdalena Peseva [Prague]
Peševová Magdalena, born 1979 in Prague, lives and works there. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, has undergone a classic painting studios and new media. She completed scholarship at Ecole des Beaux Artes in France, currently in residence at Yogyakarta in Indonesia.
Magdalena is primarily devoted to monumental painting, drawing, interior and exterior painting, hanging paintings and illustrations, as well as painting conceptual, such as combination with performance. Formally, her work is inspired by street art, graffiti, comics, symbolism,surrealism. Conceptually, she pays attention at current Anglo-Sax and Hispanic music, feminism, postmodern inheritance and gender, political and religious issues.

Ondrej Skala [Prague]
Czech breakcore king, Ježíš táhne na Berlín (roughly translated as “JESUS MARCHES TO BERLIN”) is the music project of young Czech artist Ondřej Skala. He studied at Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. His music can be best described as “Breakcore-Ambient”, where pre-recorded distorted digital instruments meet live-processed human beatboxing. Acting and creating music, Ondřej also participated in the digital puppet show Pollygone appeare in 2007. At WASTED OVER PRAGUE in 2008 hed with his new band alongside live bassist and drummer BJ Tzarr. He has performed all over the world, from Berlin’s Club Transmediale, to Indonesia’s Breakcore_Labs.

David Kousemaker [Holland]
David Kousemaker (1971) is an artist/designer who works on the crossroads of art and technology.
Since 2005 he has collaborated with Tim Olden under the name Blendid (www.blendid.nl) to create playful and accessible works.
Interactivity is an important element in their oeuvre which ranges from physical sculptures to projects which center around a non-conventional use of audio or video. Work was presented at a number of international festivals including Digifest (Canada), STRP (Netherlands), Biënnale Venetia (Italy), Synthetic Times (China), File (Brazil) and Utopia Now (Australia).

John Sobrepena
JUAN MIGUEL SOBREPEÑA, the Hermetic Lord of Filipino IDM, who is either Moon Fear Moon or Mu Arae Transmission, depending on the phase of his luminous namesake (T. Ermitano), composes haunting and eerie instances of IDM (Intelligent Dance Music). Endless horizons and barren wastelands. Ambient washes and pulsing glitch rhythms. Beautiful chords with sombre melodies, quiet polaroids with red-eye distortion. Lullabies and alien distress signals.

Mark Salvatus
Mark Salvatus a multi disciplinary artist based in Manila. His work deals with the dystopian rammification of urbanization often times making work in the street disrupting the established codes of social communication. Language and signs play an integral part in his aesthetic projects as he inserts a reconstituted design into the fabric of existing space and common gesture. Salvatus recently finished residencies at ACAR Asia Cultural Artist Residency, Gwangju, KR, Daedong Culture Foundation, Shatana International Residency, Shatana, Irbid, JO, Triangle Arts Trust, Can Serrat International Art Centre in Barcelona, Spain, and exhibitions at Annexe Gallery, Central Market Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Nospace Gallery, Bangkok, Thailand.

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