Stephen Mallinder – Cover Star of Electronic Sound Magazine

DMSA’s own Dr Stephen Mallinder is the cover star of the August 2022 edition of Electronic Sound Magazine.

https://electronicsound.squarespace.com/shop/p/issue-91 

“You find us in the Grand Parade Cafe & Canteen at Brighton University’s City campus. The seaside is just down there and a short stroll that way is the city centre. On the other side of the floor-to-ceiling windows, the quadrangle is starting to fill with the lunchtime hubbub of students.

Some of them will be on the Digital Music and Sound Arts degree course, one of the tutors of which is Stephen Mallinder. That’ll be Dr Mallinder to you. His PhD thesis, ‘Movement: Journey Of The Beat’, addresses “the trajectory and transition of popular culture through the modality of rhythm”. He’s also written academic papers and articles tackling subjects like the music of second-tier cities, the night-time economy, collaborative soundscapes, and the changing perceptions of music practices. It’s unusual to find such an influential artist deconstructing their own work and experiences in this rigorous way. But then Mallinder is not your usual anything […]”

“My morning is spent tagging along with Mal as he does the rounds, like a doctor. A disco doctor. We flit in and out of recording studios, workshops and live spaces, the echoey corridors and staircases buzzing with students many of them getting ready for the final year degree shows, while passing colleagues briefly stop for a chat and a joke.

In one lab, we find a pile of children’s electronic toys with the guts ripped out of them, their sounds cards being hacked for making very different sorts of noise. We crash an MA tutorial and meet a student who has been working on a concept using the massive reverb in the disused oil tanks at the Inchindown Fuel Depot, an abandoned military storage facility near Invergordon in the Scottish Highlands.

It seems incongruous that this course exists alongside fine artists, illustrators, sculptors and printmakers. So my first question is, what exactly is a Digital Music and Sound Arts degree? “It’s an art course… but with sound” explains Mal as we head for the canteen. “Our second-year students are currently doing group work, for example, and we’ve got one lot using a corridor with speakers in the ceiling to create linear sound. There are groups working on spatialisation, immersive sound, resonance, and creating a performance with shortwave radio.”

You can see why he’s at home here. The ideas flying around aren’t far off the sort of thinking evident in the loft of Chris Watson’s house in Sheffield at the dawn of Cabaret Voltaire […]”

Professional Practice Masterclass: Anna Celeste Edmonds

Monday 14th of October, 5.30pm-7pm
Performance Studio, GP

We are excited to have Anna Celeste Edmonds with us to learn more about her site-specific practice and research merging sound, heritage sites and new media technologies. Anna is currently pursuing PhD research supervised by Dr Papadomanolaki, Dr Behrendt and Dr Winter.

About the masterclass

‘Songs of the Sea’ – A masterclass on audio as a tool for exploration and engagement in heritage

This masterclass will involve discussions around audio as a tool for exploring and engaging with heritage; drawing on past work as well as a recent site-specific project titled ‘Songs of the Sea’, located at Brunswick Square in Hove. The processes of assembling different kinds of audio content for an outdoor public engagement setting will be examined, looking specifically at local composer Roger Quilter and her interpretations of his piece ‘The Sea-Bird’.

About Anna

Anna Celeste Edmonds is a sound artist and SEAHA-CDT doctoral student at the University of Brighton, exploring the areas of field recording, composition and voice in a heritage context. Her passion for landscapes and monuments has been present throughout her field and compositional work; researching different perspectives on audio capture and listener engagement. Previous work took the form of site specific and performative projects, with her current research moving towards locative immersive audio in outdoor heritage settings.

Website: https://annacedmonds.com/
Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-celeste-edmonds/
Twitter: @annacedmonds

Songs Of The Sea

Songs of the Sea

Anna Celeste Edmonds and her immersive audio work in Brunswick Square
The Regency Town House,
13 Brunswick Square, Hove, East Sussex, BN3 1EH

Dr Papadomanolaki’s current PhD tutee, sound artist and field recordist Anna Celeste Edmonds will be stationed at The Regency Town House to discuss her doctoral work on heritage engagement through immersive audio, as well as her recent project involving three interpretations of local composer Roger Quilter’s ‘The Sea-Bird’, using the geo-locative mobile audio application ‘Echoes’.

Come along for a chat, or an opportunity to test the ‘Songs of the Sea’ audio experience in Brunswick Square, Hove.

Opening Times

Saturday 21 September: 12:00-13:00 and 14:00-15:00

Booking Details

Pre-booking: Required
Go to: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/songs-by-the-sea-tickets-66565692779
Booking opens: 12 August 2019 12:00
Booking closes: 20 September 2019 16:00

Additional Information

Max 10 people per tour/session. 60 minutes

‘Place Language’ International Compilation inspired by Robert Macfarlane’s ‘Landmarks’

Dr Maria Papadomanolaki has contributed a piece to ‘Place Language’ a international non-profit compilation album project inspired by the themes found in Robert Macfarlane’s widely-acclaimed book ‘Landmarks’. In particular it focuses on the book’s extensive topographic glossaries, the “word-hoard” of depictive landscape terms gathered from 30 different languages, dialects and sub-dialects around Britain & Ireland which are divided into sections by type of terrain (Flatlands, Uplands, Waterlands, Coastlands, Underlands, Northlands, Edgelands, Earthlands and Woodlands). Relying on these topograms, or “tiny place poems”, as creative prompts, Place Language seeks to inspire a renewed interest in our natural surroundings and reinvigorate our appreciation for the audible textures & patterns that characterize them in keeping with the book’s stated desire to “re-wild” our vocabulary.

The collection features the work of 28 different sound-artists, field recordists, and musicians from around the globe each of whom chose a topogram and recorded an impression of it thus lending new aspects of dimensionality through sound. These selections cover all nine Landmarks glossaries along with place-words of new coinage as prompted by the blank glossary which Macfarlane leaves at the end of the book for readers to fill in for themselves. The end result is a truly global, collaborative survey of place, language, and sound.

More info on the project can be found here.

Opening Today: Salon Exhibition

Today is the opening of Salon, an exhibition celebrating the artistic work of professional services and technical staff at the University of Brghton’s School of Media. Salon has been organised by academic administrator Claire Levitt, curated by SSGT Haley Moyse Fenning and showcases the work by eleven technical and administrative staff from the School of Media. Included are a sculpture and 500 copies of a new instructional text piece by Joshua Legallienne.

More information:
https://www.facebook.com/events/499486080806736/
https://www.instagram.com/uobsalon/

Immateriality – sonic arts tour

Immateriality is a travelling sonic arts exhibition that is touring the UK July 30th until 7th August 2019. It has been curated by DMSA staff/alumni Joshua Legallienne and features the work of DMSA graduates Ecka Mordecai and Jordan Edge, alongside newly-commissioned pieces by international artists Ingrid Plum (DK) and Robert Stokowy (DE) and UK artists Ben Jeans Houghton, Daniel W J Mackenzie, and David Leslie Stearn. More information about the tour can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/events/664673170668278/

Immateriality sonic arts tour

Forever Stardust

Join University of Brighton lecturers and guest speakers for a tribute to the art and music of David Bowie, celebrating 50 years since the release of ‘Space Oddity’. Covering music, journalism, photography and graphic novels, ‘Forever Stardust’ will include a talk by DMSA Staff Dr Stephen Mallinder and live music from Bowiesque.

The event is on Friday 12 July, 1900-2130 at Sallis Benney Theatre, Grand Parade, University of Brighton.

£8 tickets

£4 concessions

Free entrance for all David Bowie impersonators.

More info: http://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/davidbowienight/

Chance Vs Causality

Cabaret Voltaire the DADA-inspired DIY, tape-machine, electronic project by Stephen Mallinder Richard H. Kirk and Chris Watson will release a rare soundtrack to the 1979 film Chance Versus Causality. The album will be available officially for the first time since the film’s release. Chance Versus Causality will be out on limited edition transparent green vinyl, CD and digitally on 30 August 2019 via Mute.

You can watch an excerpt here

DMSA Alumni to participate at Koumaria Residency 2019

Jordan Edge and Joshua Legallienne (DMSA Team) will be among the invited artists to participate in this year’s Koumaria Residency.

Organised by intermedia collective Medea Electronique since 2009, the goal of the residency is the creation of an educational experience for the participants that will inspire and exalt their future work. The cross-cultural dialogues that the residency engenders both create new artistic speculations and smelt older assumptions. Past residents have formed lasting friendships and new artistic partnerships. Medea Electronique, being an eclectic art collective, is interested in people from diverse cultural and artistic backgrounds. For us the residency serves as a model for future creative endeavors.

More info: http://medeaelectronique.com/koumaria/#about

Soundcamp at Stave Hill Ecological Park

The 6th iteration of the soundcamp at Stave HIll Ecological Park will take place over the International Dawn Chorus Day weekend (4-5 May) with a program of live sounds of daybreak together with installations, walks, workshops and discussions exploring urban ecologies and sound.

The event is organised by Dr Maria Papadomanolaki and her colleagues at Soundcamp. This year it will also feature a new ‘Single-Material Performance’ by Joshua Legallienne (DMSA Team and DMSA alumni).

In Single-Material Performance, one or more performers manipulate a giant, bio-degradable plastic sheet to produce a range of complex sounds and rhythms. Due to the particular physical properties of the material, the sheet animates with very subtle changes in air pressure; causing the material to create sound as it interacts with itself. Performers respond to the fluctuations in air pressure by altering the form of the material to shape the sounds produced. The piece reveals the invisible and inaudible; sonifying infrasonic (sound waves below the lower limit of human audibility) variations in air pressure of the environment.

More info on the soundcamp project can be found here. The full program is here.

Visit is free. To camp please book a ticket here.