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.
Read the full essay here.
The 5th edition of soundcamp will be taking place on the 5-6 May at Stave Hill Ecological Park in London. DMSA Course Leader Maria Papadomanolaki (co-curator of soundcamp and member of the SoundCamp collective) will be bringing a group of L4 students to the event. The students will have the opportunity to develop and present a project as part of the event in collaboration with Tom Fox of Vulpestruments/Hackoustic.
More info about the event
The fifth edition of Soundcamp will take place on the 5-6 May to coincide with the International Dawn Chorus Day.
During the event, Stave Hill Ecological Park becomes an audio observatory where visitors can
camp out overnight in the Stave Hill meadow and take part in a varied program of arts and ecology activities including:
Ecological survival games with Animal Diplomacy Bureau
Live 24 hour broadcast of daybreak around the earth
New sounds from Amazonia by Izabela Dluzyk
Site Specific interventions and installations by Alexandra Spence and Brigitte Hart, Tom Fox with students from University of Brighton’s Digital Music and Sound Arts course.
After dark performance by Noah Angell
Analogue photography: pinholes and cyanotypes with Ky Lewis.
Dawn chorus walk with David Darrell-Lambert, John Cadera, Richard Page-Jones
Workshops on DIY broadcasting, mixing, pit fired pottery, foraging, site tours, bat walk
Storytelling for Earthly Survival with Donna Haraway by Fabrizio Terranova
Food from Leon Lewis. Beer from Clarkshaws. Cake from The Dancing Baker. Coffee from the Lazy Coffee Van.
FULL PROGRAM TBA SHORTLY: http://soundtent.org/soundcamp_camp.html
Visiting is free, but please consider making a donation.
Camping is free for children. Adults need to book a camping ticket each.
Sign up for workshops on site.
Graduate Monthly
14 St George’s Place, BN1 4GB
Friday 27th April, 7 – 8pm
Sound Performance // Guoda Dirzyte & Maja Mihalik
FREE
Alumni Guoda Dirzyte (LT) and Maja Mihalik (H) will be performing as part of Graduate Monthly series of events titled ‘Other Voices’.
More info:https://www.facebook.com/events/188840335250500/
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.
More info: http://www.sgt.gr/eng/SPG2023/
Jade Gunner is the first of our first year students to contribute her thoughts to our features series. Jade’s entusiasm for experimentation has allowed her to create some fascinating work as part of the course but also outside it as it is clearly documented on her soundcloud page.
DMSA: Three important words that represent you as a creative person?
JG: Unique, Unafraid and Experimental!
DMSA: When did you start working with sound and music?
JG: I have always been interested in Sound and music throughout my life, I’ve always been fascinated by how it’s made. When i was 14 I started to learn guitar, then later on moved onto the ukulele. In college I studied creative Media Production, and started working with digital music/sound design through that. The project I did that made me realise I wanted to do this course was removing all the Sound from a game clip and re creating all the atmospheric music, Sound design, ADR and Foley. I feel in love with it from there.
DMSA: What made you choose the course and in what ways has the course supported or helped you so far to develop creatively?
JG: I chose this course as I was looking around for courses that focused on experimental music and working with sound. This course looked perfect for me, and when I went to an open day I realised it had everything i was looking for. I have been given so many opportunities to be creative, which is what i wanted. I have been able to do so much more than I imagined studying here so far, from learning how to use different studio set ups, Surround Sound, how to make atmospheric sound and Sound in Space. I am very excited with more boundaries I can push with my creativity!
DMSA: What are your plans for the near future? projects, events, visions
JG:I want to expand my portfolio more and create different styles of digital music. I am also looking for different artists from other courses that I could collaborate with, for either music purposes or sound design/art. I have also been very interested to visit the event: Splitting The Atom, as I know they do experimental music nights there which would been brilliant to experience.
Listen to more sounds from Jade via her soundCloud.
DMSA course leader and senior lecturer will be participating in this year’s Tuned City Messene 2018.
The event asks questions about listening and politics and has invited 50 international artists to work with the site and produce original works in response to it.
Tuned City’s previous milestones Berlin 2008, Tallinn 2011, and Brussels 2013 used to take place in central European metropolises. This year, Tuned City visits Ancient Messene May 31st – June 3rd and seeks out the exemplary ‘ideal city’, the ancient Greek polis.
‘The urban landscape of Messene was constructed in the Early Hellenistic era, according to certain architectural and town-planning principles of spatial organization, which reflected the political and social values of the period applied to the demands of this programmatic city founded by the Thebans in 369 B.C. on the south slopes of mount Ithome. The city was famous for its mighty fortification walls, the monumentality of its public buildings and the Hippodamian town-plan. The cityscape preserves evidence related to its successive constructional phases in the course of time from the 4th century BC to the 14th AD. The character of the landscape is defined and transformed by human activities and ideologies; it is a cultural product subject to constant re-interpretation.’ – Petros Themelis, director of the excavations
The archaeological site and active excavation with all it’s layers of history is the ideal place to reflect about ‘city as a construct‘ and explore the sensual aspects of space as well as social and political dimensions of the city.
What do we project on a site like this? How do we trace and preserve history and how does this shape contemporary and future culture identities? What lays underneath and in between the monumentalized obvious findings? How can we decode sedimented memories? What is the difference between local and distant, past and present modes of memory? How can we access or activate different modes of perception?
Listening seems passive, but it is an activity, a ‘silent production’, involving translation, decoding, abstraction, improvisation, the use of memory to recognize and connect elements from other things heard, subconscious filtering… The acoustic world surrounds us like the fabric of architecture in an urban city environment. Listening is a constant interaction.
Under this particular contingency, sound suggests a form of negotiation, listening partakes action, and hearing is always more than a simple perceiving of sound by the ear. With a focus on hearing’s emplacement and the pronounced situatedness of listening, Tuned City explores the ways in which oscillations enact a sense of place that also senses us back.
Each day of the proceedings will be focused around a central theme with the following provisional titles: Listening Politics, Media Matter, Spectral Ambience
Sound artists, performers and researchers meet for two weeks in the ancient place to establish a dialogue between the ruins that once hosted a vibrant city to be inspired by it’s conception and history, traces and findings and the special atmosphere. Questioning it’s proper function, and the different definitions of what an ideal city was and should be, the works range from sound installations, walks, lectures, concerts and participatory events.
Tuned City is going to listen underneath the surface and in between the obvious findings. In a weekend long event, the ancient Greek city of Messene will be transformed in to a vast platform for artistic production and presentation, discussion and intermediation of sound art and music in public spaces through a variety of site specific formats in a direct interrelation with the local context and a vital exchange with a local and international audience.
The invited artist will all present new commissioned works, among the confirmed artist and researchers are:
Petros G.Themelis (GR) / Savina Yannatou (GR) / Dimitris Tigkas (GR) / agf – Antye Greie Ripatti (DE/FI) / Yannis Kozantzas (GR) / Kosmas Koteas (GR) / Justin Bennett + Roelf Toxopeus – BMB con (NL) / noid (AT) / Gilles Aubry (CH/DE) / Nathalie Mba Bikoro (GA) / Hanna Hartman (SE/DE) / Dimitris Plantzos (GR) / Shannon Mattern (US) / Caitlin De Silvey (GB) / Douglas Kahn (AUS) / Eric Lewis (CA) / John Grzinich (US/EST) / Jens Brand (DE) / Raviv Ganchrow (US/IL/NL) / Els Viaene (BE) / Mario de Vega (MX) / Yann Leguay (BE) / Maria Papadomanolaki (GR/GB) / Michael Gallagher (GB) / Will Schrimshaw (GB) / Sylvain Perrot (FR) / Aggeliki Poulou (GR) / Marinos Koutsomichalis (GR) / Cevdet Erek (TR) / Steve Bates (CA) / ILIOS (GR) / Nikos Veliotis (GR) / Coti K (GR) / Martin Howse + (UK/D) + shiftregister / Marc-Alexandre Reinhardt & Eric Mattson (CA) / Vicky Bisbiki (GR) / Alexandros Drymonitis (GR) / Panos Amelides (GR) / Eleni Kavouki (GR) / Yiorgis Sakellariou (GR) / Stelios Giannoulakis (GR) / Rene Rissland (D) / Florian Tuercke (D) / Franziska Windisch (D) / Fernando Godoy (CL) / Nicolas Spencer (CL) / Christian Espinoza (CL) / Barbara Gonzales (CL) / Pablo Saavedra Arevalo (CL) and many more …
DMSA graduate Ben Hall was invited in Festival ZERO1 in La Rochelle, France to present ‘Threshold’, an audiovisual installation he created as part of his final degree project.
‘Threshold’ challenges the audience’s perception with a series of cross-sensory interactions between unusual sounds of frequencies on the threshold of human perception and computer generated visuals.
ZERO1 is an annual international festival in La Rochelle, France focusing on audiovisual digital arts. This year it takes place on 28/03-01/04. More info.
No Hollows and No Projections: Part 2
Monday 19th March 2018 | 6-8pm | Performance Studio
No Hollows and No Projections: Part 2 is a workshop led by Ingrid Plum exploring composition for ensemble performance, deep listening exercises, sonic meditations, improvisation and extended vocal technique following the teachings of Pauline Oliveros and Meredith Monk as well as a wealth of techniques gathered from other teachers and traditions around the world. In Part 2 we will review some techniques and also look at compositional methods for working with listening and performance using the voice as our instrument, with a focus on ensemble performance.
This workshop is suitable for all levels of experience and is best suited to those with an interest in contemporary composition, sounding the voice, sound art, experimental music and sonic meditation, but previous practice in those fields is not necessary. Learn a range of listening exercises to benefit production and performance skills along with breathing and vocal exercises with a focus on deep listening and harmony, involving discussion and working with the natural voice to develop confidence, plus compositional exercises for ensemble performance.
About Ingrid Plum
‘Gorgeously atmospheric vocal techniques woven around field recordings & electronics’ – The Guardian
Plum uses her voice with extended technique, improvisation, field recordings and electronics, to create layered soundscapes, spoken word and songs. Having performed and exhibited installation sound art and visual art since 2002, and studied with Meredith Monk, she creates work that sits between sound art, improvisation, multi-media installation, neo-classical and contemporary Nordic folk music.