Wednesday, June 11, 2003


[165.2] VISUAL MUSIC

Stefan Beyst has written to draw attention to two of his essays: one (particularly relevant to NFE) on 'musical space' , and the other on Antony Gormley and the archaeology of the image, which also, in its own way, conjours with the sound of nature and the noise of the body. Exploring the outer limits, you might say...

Friday, June 06, 2003


[165.1] DIFFICULT BUT WORTHWHILE

'Difficult Listening' -- Sunday Evenings 9-11pm. Public Radio RTR FM (92.1) Perth, Western Australia
Contemporary classical, experimental, electronic, industrial, ambient, noise, etc.
Presenters: Bryce Moore and Sarah Combes.

Public radio RTR FM is now broadcasting over the internet, 24 hours a day. Follow the Real Audio link from the Difficult Listening page. If you want to catch Difficult Listening in particular, it goes to air at 1.00pm, Sunday GMT, 9.00am US Eastern Time, and 6.00am US Pacific time.

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J.B. Floyd
Solos and Sequences II (7' 59")
J.B. Floyd, disklavier
CD: Transporting transmittance: the Music of J.B. Floyd (Mutable Music: 17512-2)
http://www.mutablemusic.com

David Franzke
CC Kid (6' 48")
Oren Ambarchi
Kozel (6' 6")
CD: Strewth! An abstract electronic compilation from Australia and New Zealand (Synaesthesia: SYN002)
http://www.synaesthesia.com

Tim Catlin
Metal Fatigue (12' 15")
CD: Slow Twitch (Dr Jim's Records: 034)
http://www.drjimsrecords.com.au

David Brown
Voices of the air shaft (5' 13")
CD: Samartzis + Pimmon + Verhagen + Brown - Grain (Dorobo)
http://www.werple.net.au/~dorobo/dorobo.html

Amongst Myselves
Sea of Rains (8' 26")
Steve Roberts, electronics
CD: Sacred Black (RMC Records: SG-13)
http://www.netspace.net.au/~amongst

Dual
casein (10' 14")
Colin Bradley; George Richardson; Alice Kemp
CD: Keimar sty (Coomb: coomb01)
http://www.coombrecords.com
chpstck (4' 38")
pyrrhic (13' 8")
Colin Bradley; Sean Reynard
CD: dual.pace (CEE: CEE02)
http://www.dual.co.uk

Colin Black
Paternity (6' 13")
CD: Demo CD (Cydonian Sounds)
http://www1.tpgi.com.au/users/cydonian/c_black.html

Bernhard Gander
fète.gare (10' 24")
Klngforum Wien/Sylvain Cambreling
CD: Demo CD (Bernhard Gander)
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Playlists are stored cumulatively (for the last three months) at the website listed below. Contact us if you want to receive them by email. If you have some music that you think I might be interested in broadcasting, on tape, CD or vinyl, don't hesitate to get in touch.

Wednesday, June 04, 2003


[164.3] HALL OF MIRRORS


(c) Early Opera Company / South Bank - Handel's 'Susanna'
See NFE 163.1, Tuesday 3 June below.


[164.2] ARRIVAL OF beepSNORT

News in from rec.music.classical.contemporary: Joseph Benzola, Jeff Harrington and Steve Layton have launched a new music blog featuring coverage of the online experimental and electronic music scene. With a focus on works in online distribution, beepSNORT plans to examine and curate the wild world of a genre of music which increasingly face the threat of a glut of artists calling themselves experimental but in actuality not experimenting at all. beepSNORT welcomes guest authors and plans to publish short commentaries from interesting music writers.

Harrington comments: "I'm interested in how the current electronic music scene is experiencing a blurring between academic and popular forms (as evidenced by David Horne's recent concert and another recent one at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival. "

Agent A adds: "Speaking of the blur, I thought it was cool that DJ Spooky was a participant in the roundtable set up by Philip Glass for his Andante writings I'm looking forward to the developing beepSNORT blog.."

As is NFE, of course... Meanwhile, here's an opportunity to plug our old blogospheric friends and allies, such as december and DJ Martian.

Tuesday, June 03, 2003


[163.1] NEGOTIATING INNOVATION & TRADITION

How does tradition appropriate innovation, how does the new embrace the old? Different answers to those perpetual questions are available to UK concert goers on Thursday 5 June 2003. At the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, jazz guitarist John Scofield (whose work as a freewheeling post-bop instrumentalist has both led its field, and collabarated in the wake of everyone from Miles Davis to Mark-Antony Turnage) takes on techno, acid dance and Asian dub... such that they come up smelling of themselves, but in a distinctive jazz context. This gig is part of a tour in support of the ground-breaking album 'Uberjam'. The featured band is: John Scofield - guitar; Avi Bortnick - rhythm guitar, sampler, Adam Deitch - drums, and Andy Hess - bass.


Meanwhile, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, a fresh version of G. F. Handel's aural feast, 'Susanna', given by the Early Opera Company, is set in a modern courtroom, using CCTV and video. It is the story of a young woman's resilience in the face of bullying, sexual harassment and false allegations. Going on to Salisbury, Northampton and Cheltenham, the production cast includes
Susanna: Rachel Nicholls; Joachim: Andrew Radley; and Chelsias: Arwel Huw Morgan. The opera is directed by Netia Jones and conducted by Christian Curnyn.

Sunday, June 01, 2003


[162.1] MEDIEVAL INVENTIONS

"As long as we understand that we are inventing this music as we go along, on the basis of slivers of evidence, we will not feel let down." James Fenton

Hardly unknown to those with a passing interest in musicology, James Fenton explores the making of the Medieval mind -- or, more strictly, our making-it-up -- in an entertaining sketch article in The Guardian (31 May 2003). He outlines the surprise discovery of dissonance, the swing of interpretative fortunes from the use of florid instrumentation (assisted by misleading derivations from ancient illustrated manuscripts) through to the re-instatement of vocal polyphony. An Early Music version of scat singing even makes an appearance. By-passing the contributions of the famous and tragically demised young talent David Munrow, Fenton traces the revival in interests in this (undefined) era to the early part of the twentieth century:

"The first [modern] French [Medieval] concert was given in 1914, just before the first world war, and the first German performances followed in the 1920s. During the Nazi period, many of those who had studied early music were forced to flee to the United States. In 1946 Paul Hindemith put on a concert at Yale using instruments borrowed from the Metropolitan Museum in New York. How the players worked out how to play these instruments is, no doubt, something of a story. The fact that they were using instruments at all to accompany medieval vocal music was due to a venerable misapprehension which Daniel Leech-Wilkinson [author of 'The Modern Invention of Medieval Music'] traces back to that grandest of high Victorian composers, Sir John Stainer."