DMSA student Olivia Louvel will be headlining the Synth Remix 2018 UK Tour, a project presenting music by musicians including Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Laurie Spiegel and Éliane Radigue.
Olivia will be touring the UK. Below are the dates:
08.11 – London @ 93 Feet East + @ Resonance Extra
09.11 – Manchester @ Anthony Burgess Foundation
10.11 – Leeds @ Belgrave Music Hall
11.11 – Birmingham @ Ikon Gallery
Featuring Jo Thomas, Olivia Louvel (Data Regina AV), Benjamin Tassie
Dr Maria Papadomanolaki has recently launched the Creative Sound & Music Research and Enterprise Group, a new research initiative focusing on sound and music related research across different media, contexts and applications. The aim of the research group is to create an interdisciplinary forum within the School of Media and across the University of Brighton, where ideas and practices are brought in dialogue with a common goal to develop strategies for impactful, outward and community facing projects, student and staff collaborations and practice-based research.
By bringing together researchers and practitioners from the School of Media who carry expertise on various areas relating to sound and music, the REG has the following interrelated strands
1) Creative Sound and Music in Community contexts
2) Music, Popular Culture and Digital Media
3) Immersive Music and Audio Research
4) Audiovisual Media Research
The above strands aim to address the ongoing research and practice topics of its core members but to also open up to debates relating, among others, to ecology, community engagement, heritage, mental health and well being, gender studies, open source technologies, design and innovation. The REG builds upon partnerships with, among others, the Lighthouse, Our Future City, Wired Sussex, Brighton Digital Festival to host events that create awareness and impact around the group’s research topics.
ID Spectral is a new student-led record label and multidisciplinary arts collective, pushing the works of forward-thinking and innovative creatives across the UK and worldwide.
To celebrate the launch of the label’s official website and radio show via. Resonance Extra and Radio Cascabel London, ID Spectral are currently accepting demo submissions for the IDS001 launch compilation.
This will be the first of the imprint’s series of compilation albums, showcasing the vast spectrum of experimentalism and contemporary music; derriving from the concepts of ambience, modern-classical, techno and IDM.
Newcoming and existing students and members of staff will have the opportunity to meet artists and listen to DJ sets and performances from the label’s roaster on Septemper 26th 2018. More info to be announced soon.
The DMSA Graduate show has been offering to audiences a mix of engaging, thought provoking and aesthetically diverse experiences. Works from our students have received prestigious awards for their outstanding quality. The Graduate Show is also a chance for our students to curate, coordinate, build and promote their show, to work as a team and show the world that they are ready to enter a competitive and difficult field. Moving beyond the traditional career paths often associated with digital music production and sound arts, our students engage with the social aspects of sound and how sound can prompt us to thing of wider issues and questions.
Have you ever wondered what the sound of The Cloud is? What is our place within the digital divide, what happens to our voices when uploaded to the cloud? PJ Davy’sHeads in the Cloud is a 13.1 multi-channel, sound and light installation concerning the digitisation of our lives through the internet. Recordings of social media, blog, and website posts, vocalised by the original, online-authors, move throughout the installation; transforming into intense, digital noise as they navigate through a central, audio-visual matrix. Caged LED lights and a central 360° loudspeaker act as a physical manifestation of the internet, presenting an audible, visual focal point for the encounterer. Heads in The Cloud presents a physical, human experience to reflect on our relationship with technology and each other, in an increasingly digitised world.
Ivan Arbiol Camp’s The Return of the Forgotten is a generative sculpture of refused electronics arising from a rejection to claim a space in modern society. Sounds come from the interaction between functional and dysfunctional devices interfering with each other as a form of conversation between necessity and ecology. The piece asks the question about the use and abuse of technology and the impact of these habits on the environment.
Liam Eshghi-Luck’s The Cacophonic Hospital is an Audio-Visual composition containing imagery and sound from different spaces within hospitals throughout London, Surrey and the South-west of England. Outside of just field recording the piece incorporates foley work from research of patient and staff experiences whilst also utilising a custom software made within Max/Msp, that determines the output of alarm sound throughout the latter of this composition. The aim of this composition is to embark the audience on a journey across hospitals throughout England, in the more densely populated and the not so populated Hospitals. The idea being that noise in the hospital persists whether busy or not, and much can be done to change health care design sonically for the sake of patient and staff satisfactory.
Chrstopher Brindle’s Dying Imperfections uses a custom made low power radio transmitter tool kit to create a series of site-specific radio graffitis recorded onto cassette tape. The piece explores the imperfections in how we capture sound and the effects on our perception of the sound when the flaws in the mediums are pushed to extremes. These circuit elements in the toolkit change and mutate the sound as it iterates through the circuit multiple times, with the tape loop echo, the sounds changing pitch and levels of distortion ultimately removing familiar sounds from the context we know them, in and creating new sonic landscapes.
Jasmyn Bloch’s Femporis is an exploration into the concepts of rebirth and new life; considering the constant state of flux and growth we experience throughout our lives. It is a consideration of the notion that something peaceful can then turn traumatic, to then become something new, like birth but also like life. The ebb and flow of ups and downs, yet one cannot exist without the other. The piece prompts the audience to feel as though they have just experienced a ‘change’; a shift in thought or person; to think more about the deeper roots within themselves, and remind them of the constant changes and ‘births’ they have experienced throughout their lives, whether they are small or considerable changes.
Michael McKeown’s Aquarium Music is an electroacoustic installation that has taken place in the Brighton Sea Life Centre in May 2018. The installation featured six pieces composed entirely of naturally sourced sounds that reflect the sonic environments of the marine life in the aquarium. Some of the sounds within the compositions were manipulated by the movement within certain enclosures, making the audio content unique to each section of the centre.Aquarium Music‘s immersive soundscape sets up a process for educating the audience and of creating a more authentic and appropriate sonic environment.The piece on display in Room 229 in Grand Parade brings the six compositions in one small room, blending them together as one environment, re-constructing the atmosphere of the aquarium for the listener.
PROGRAMME
Performance Studio:
Private view: 1st June
Aki Purser / Jeph Vanger (1800 changeover)
2nd – 3rd June:
Jeph Vanger // Sφera
4th June:
DMSA Day / Alvaro Villar-Castillo // SONORAMA
5th June:
Alvaro Villar-Castillo // SONORAMA
6th – 8th June:
JORDAN LEWIS // THE N0VA GATHERING
9th – 10th June
Aki Purser // 記憶 (MEMORY)
Sound Diffusion Lab:
1st – 3rd June:
Oli Johns // The Miraculous Land – Library
4th – 5th June:
Edward Scott // Lissajous Sounds
PJ Davy // Heads in The Cloud
6th June:
Liam Eshgi-Luck // The Cacophonic Hospital
7th – 8th June:
Edward Scott // Lissajous Sounds
8th – 10th June:
PJ Davy // Heads in The Cloud
Ongoing Installations Room 229
Oskar Jeff // Reconstructing Tapes
Sophie Kiarie // Soul
Liam Eshgi-Luck // The Cacophonic Hospital
Michael McKeown // Aquarium Music
Bobbie Cook // Hard Shoulder
Room 228
Jasmyn Bloch // FEMPORIS
The Shower room
Ivan Arbiol Camps // The Return of the Unwanted
Sound Diffusion Lab Foyer
Jack Lister // Flood the Box
DMSA Alumni Maja Mihalik and Guoda Dirzyte have been performing together for quite a while now as Más Hangok, a project exploring a multitude of cultures and traditional references through the medium of sound and custom-made instruments and effects-arrays. The Japan Nakama Blog has just published an interview of the duo and you can read it here.
On June 4th members of the audience and students will have the chance to experience a unique mix of works from our first and second year students as well as the degree pieces on display by our third year students. Expect an eclectic selection of innovative multichannel digital music compositions, interactive installations, audiovisual pieces and films, radio art experiements, custom instruments and generative pieces.
In the occasion of the DMSA show we will also have the honour to have internationally acclaimed artist and composer Robin Rimbaud (aka Scanner).
Scanner traverses the experimental terrain between sound and space connecting a bewilderingly diverse array of genres. Since 1991 he has been intensely active in sonic art, producing concerts, installations and recordings, the albums Mass Observation (1994), Delivery (1997), and The Garden is Full of Metal (1998) hailed by critics as innovative and inspirational works of contemporary electronic music.
He scored the hit musical comedy Kirikou & Karaba (2007) and Narnia ballet (2015) based on the popular children’s book, Philips Wake-Up Light (2009), the re-opening of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 2012 and in 2016 installed his Water Drops sound work in Rijeka Airport in Croatia.
His work Salles des Departs is permanently installed in a working morgue in Paris whilst Vex House, the residential house he designed a permanent soundtrack with Chance de Silva architects, was finished to critical acclaim in 2017.
Committed to working with cutting edge practitioners he collaborated with Bryan Ferry, Wayne MacGregor, Mike Kelley, Torres, Michael Nyman, Steve McQueen, Laurie Anderson and Hussein Chalayan, amongst many others.
DMSA Show is happening on the 4th of June, 12-6pm, Performance Studio, GP.
DMSA Show is curated by DMSA Alumni Maja Mihalik.
DMSA Alumni Guoda Dirzyte has a new essay published on online resource Sonic Field. Titled ‘Defining Tradition of Sound Culture: Questioning The Importance of Authenticity’, the essay Guoda argues
[i]t is difficult to talk about contemporary sound culture or cultures in general, their traditions and heritage while living in the age of post-globalization. Every culture has in one way or the other adopted different aspects of other cultures, and by slightly transforming them, made them part of their own heritage. Japan is one of the best examples for such a phenomenon, since this country already has ages worth of history of adopting cultural elements from other Asian countries and the west, transforming foreign ideas and making them part of their own unique heritage.
Más Hangok is a collaborative experimental music project between Guoda Dirzyte (LT) and Maja Mihalik (H). Guoda plays a Japanese heritage inspired handmade instrument that is a crossover between the traditional Japanese lute also known as the shamisen and the western cello. Her instrumental experimentations are accompanied by Maja’s eerie vocals that are inspired by Hungarian folk traditions. This improvised collaboration creates a cultural dialogue between the elements of Japanese heritage, traditional Hungarian folk music, and experimental percussive and plucked music techniques that provides unique sonic experience, subverting the hierarchy of traditional western 12-tonal musical system.
Guoda Dirzyte is a Lithuanian-born experimental musical instruments designer, composer and sound artist. Guoda’s work is mainly orientated towards exploring world music and sound culture. It focuses on the approach to life and communication rather than cultural industry, and critically examines the Eurocentric approach towards musical culture traditions.
Maja Mihalik’s work is lead by curiosity and playfulness with an awareness towards the ethical implications of creation as a process as well as an outcome. She deconstructs issues of cultural heritage, history, time, biodiversity, technology versus nature and synesthesia as well as waste, recycling and object permanence. Scarcely using traditional instruments, Maja opts for the more experimental, fabricated sounds of field recordings and non-synchronous Foley.
Maria Papadomanolaki will be performing with Robin Rimbaud (aka Scanner) as part of Borderline Festival in Athens on the 21st of April 2018.
Does it make sense to talk about borders in music? How can you fence in sound, a physical phenomenon that travels through solids, liquids and gases alike? Can we get to grips with something that’s in a state of constant flux, with what dominates the here and now?
Starting out with these questions, Borderline invites us to surrender to the infinitude of sound and experience live music free of barriers and compartmentalization. Song and noise, composition and improvisation, live dj sets and sound installations, talks and other activities at the 8th iteration of the Athenian festival that continues to support experimentation, new collaborations and sonic quests of every sort. At the OCC and beyond.
Third year student Aki Purser has been selected to participate in this year’s Red Bull Music Academy to be taking place in Berlin. RBMA is an internationally acclaimed event where an eclectic group of emerging artists are given the chance to collaborate, create and learn from a series of sessions led by world-known music producers and industry specialists. The competition is often high and it not unusual to see participants from the Academy becoming professionals soon after their graduation. Aki’s unique approach to sound, image and dance made here stand out and in their own words
‘From the refined piano of Chilly Gonzales to the elegance of modern dance icon Pina Bausch and the precisely engineered music of producer Alva Noto, there is a certain delicacy connecting the influences of Brighton-based artist Akiko Haruna. Trained as a pianist, violinist, flautist and dancer, she is fluent in the rules of music and composition, which she now breaks with her experimental noise output. Akiko’s current project comes after two years as a professional dancer, during which she appeared in music videos for artists including AlunaGeorge and John Newman. Now a full-time music student, Akiko flexes her myriad abilities in her own work, including the 2017 video for “i, omega,” a surreal black-and-white pastiche in which she dances, stretches and smiles eerily at the camera over the glitches and fuzz of her far-out soundscape.’
