Border areas can be dangerous. This is where the unknown, unexpected, unexplained, unspoken, unheard is lurking. An expedition into unexplored areas is risky, but may at least be profitable on an immaterial level: Great experiences. A chance for new knowledge and insight. An extension of our limits.

The expansion into new areas on the edges of reason or consciousness does also implicate the possibility of failure. This failure may be linked on a mental level with confusion, disgust and shock. On the physical level it can be associated with pain and, in extreme cases, physical destruction.

It is one of the core tasks of art to explore the edges and allow the audience to take a look at yet unexplored terrain. Experimental music is by definition located on the aesthetic edges. Artistic development is to explore new techniques and methods and to extend the limits of perception again and again. Anyone who is committed to the experiment, thus aesthetically oriented on these edges, may find himself also economically and socially marginalized. Some things found on this route may gradually be absorbed into the mainstream of the art world but only in rare cases the researchers themselves will benefit from this canonization.

Didi Bruckmayr & Bernhard Loibner once more aim to explore the edges of a musical territory with their performance.

The starting point is the human voice and its use by Didi Bruckmayr. He is looking for a path to the unconscious through the assignment of special vocal techniques. In 2009 he underwent a week-long special training in Rome where he learned to put himself into a trance, free of fears and compulsions, following his intuitions to sing and act from a state of unconsciousness. An intensification of this practices (which are often carelessly called “method acting”) leads to higher states of transcendence. The singer moves through “unconscious landscapes” without a sense of space and time by speaking and singing in weird languages.

Bernhard Loibner takes this acoustic raw material and tries to re-contextualize it. Using his computer instrument the vocals are processed, distorted, slowed down, accelerated, fragmented and destroyed, newly assembled and distributed to multiple speakers. The output of this acoustic particle accelerator serves Bruckmayr as a basis for further vocal activity, which again feeds the computer-controlled “contextualizing engine” — a musical-cybernetic system with an uncertain result.

Together voice and electronics form an abstract expression and effective tool for a walk through the border zones of the human soul. Uncertainty is waiting there.

Fooling the Foley is a radio parody on the art of sound for cinema by Joao Castro Pinto and Bernhard Loibner for Kunstradio-Radiokunst at the austrian public radio ORF.

The live radio performance took place on December 16, 2012 at 11.05pm CET on the public austrian radio ORF – OE1. (Kunstradio archive page here).

This is a short video documenting the live radio performance “Fooling the Foley” by Joao Castro Pinto and me. We did the piece for the radio show “Kunstradio-Radiokunst” and it was broadcast live at the Austrian public radio ORF on December 16, 2012. I think the video quite nicely conveys the idea of the performance: an electro-acoustic radio parody on the art of sound for cinema and the art of foley. Thanks to the Kunstradio crew for the nice video!

Cinema was born with the invention of the moving picture, its narrative / interpretation was at its dawn determined, upon other premises, by two main factors: 1st: gestural enhanced dynamics within the representation (dramatic emphasis of the gestures / facial expressions, in order to clarify the distinct intensities of the plot and describe each character’s profile) 2nd: the insertion of long captions, permutated with the images, in order to report the remaining significant information of the movie to the audience (thus allowing a contextual ground for the interpretation of the different scenes and overall narrative). Music was also present in the first motion picture exhibitions, mostly in the form of piano music. A pianist would play during the screening of the movie, with the aim to synchronize the unfolding of the narrative’s events with a musical “alike” structure.

The event that would dramatically change cinema’s history, dethroning the monopoly of the visuocentric paradigm, was the insertion of sound in the motion picture. Sound would take and expand most of the expressive roles of the mentioned characteristics from the first silent movies, rendering its aesthetical fruition more similar with everyday experience of reality. The expression of context could now be explicit due to the possibility of recording the soundscape (environmental sounds & the sounds of human interaction with objects), as the display of emotions, within the narrative, became clearer through the reproduction of actor’s dialogs.
Jack Foley was a pioneer (late 1920’s) in the art of introducing sounds in the motion picture like: steps, clothing sounds, squeaky doors / windows sounds, railroad train sounds, etc…. These sounds were fabricated in the studio, synchronized with the image, in order to enhance the experience of the movie. From that time to nowadays, cinema has learned to value sight as much as audition, thus cinema has became a rich complex audiovisual experience, a compound of image, music, sound effects and ambiences (currently enhanced with immersive surround sound).

FOOLING THE FOLEY – a radio parody on the art of sound for cinema, is a radio art piece that will present a parody on the Foley concept as it consists in a real time acousmatic sound performance of pre-recorded Foley sounds at the studios of ORF (digital signal processing will be used to transform some sounds beyond recognition) and of samples of distinct genres and epochs of the cinema history (drama, comedy, terror, sci-fi, western spaghetti, etc…). The main goal of the performance is to create a radio art piece where a feasible cinematic ambience is created, in terms of aural output, such as it will result in a rich and fascinating non linear sound-cinema-world narrative, where the distinction between prop Foley sounds and real time processed sounds will be blurred, distort and expanded through a collaborative acousmatic live sound composition.

Images will flow as Sounds and Sounds will turn into Images.

Bernhard Loibner & Tom Sherman aka Nerve Theory are participating in the Exhibition Über das Radio hinaus (Beyond Radio) – 25 Jahre Kunstradio-Radiokunst at the Research Centre for Artists’ Publications, Weserburg Museum for Modern Art, Bremen, Germany. The exhibition is running from November 10, 2012 until February 10, 2013.

The piece H5N1 which will be presented there is actually a series of short radio pieces we did for the radio program Kunstradio – Radiokunst in 2006. The series focused on the bird flu virus, H5N1, and the hysteria surrounding the inevitable global influenza pandemic. We used the idea of the evolving, mutating H5N1 virus as a launching pad for a series of statements about the world we live in. Imagine a world where artists write and deliver the news. Nerve Theory are not scientists, but they are experts in observing and describing media viruses and a whole spectrum of living, evolving ideas.

A selection of the 37 episodes of H5N1 will be part of an exhibition reviewing 25 years of the radio program “Kunstradio – Radiokunst” which is dedicated to radio art. Kunstradio is being broadcast on the austrian public radio ORF for 25 years and continues to be a unique forum for radio related art.

Kunstradio – Radiokunst (Art Radio – Radio Art) is more than the weekly radio programme on Österreich 1, the Austrian radio’s culture station, first broadcast on 3rd December 1987. From the beginning, collaborations with international artists have been central to the work of Kunstradio. In cooperation with radio institutions, art associations, festivals or museums, Kunstradio regularly organizes original projects developed by artists as well as facilitating exhibitions or encounters between artists and theorists in the form of conferences and symposia. »Beyond Radio: 25 years of Kunstradio – Radiokunst« gives an insight into the significance, the complexity and the internationality of this programme, whose institutional limits artists have never ceased to question.

The concert of Didi Bruckmayr and myself at this years Moozak Festival at Rinderhalle in Vienna was a real blast! We did an audio-visual live set, the music mostly improvised, glitchy laptop electronic with processed live vocals and framed by real-time 3D visual which were also to some extend controlled by the musical input. We both really enjoyed the gig, it was powerful and wild and it got pretty loud…

These are some images and a short video excerpt from the concert, I think they do convey some of the energy we felt during the concert. Thanks to Michael Rosenkranz for the great pictures and video (shot in a very tough lighting situation)!

update: here are some more great b/w pictures from the festival, shot by Markus Gradwohl

Here is an excerpt of the recording of a gloriously improvised piece which Didi Bruckmayr (voice) and myself (voice processing & electronics) performed live at Kunstradio’s Art’s Birthday party at the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation in Vienna last January. Check it out!

About Art’s Birthday

WIENCOUVER – “an imaginary city hanging invisibly between its two poles Vienna and Vancouver” was conceived by Vancouver based artist performance, radio and telecommunication artist Hank Bull in 1979 on the occasion of his participation in “AUDIO SCENE ’79″ in Vienna. To Bull, a friend and admirer of Robert Filliou , WIENCOUVER represented the idea of art as a relationship between people and life, the esthetic of social action and international communications between artists. Today WIENCOUVER is still alive, since 1999 also as the location of annual ART’s BIRTHDAY celebrations between artists in Vienna, Vancouver and beyond.

ART’S BIRTHDAY is an annual event first proposed on January 17th 1963 by French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou. He suggested that 1,000,000 years ago “A man took a dry sponge and dropped it into a bucket full of water. Who that man was is not important. He is dead but art is alive.” Filliou’s ideas have inspired many artists until today.

“After Filliou’s death in 1987, some artists began to celebrate Art’s Birthday with mail art, fax and slow scan TV events in the spirit of his concept of “The Eternal Network” or “La Fête permanente”. The birthday parties took place in different cities across the world and artists were asked to bring birthday presents for Art – works that could be shared over the network.

Art’s Birthday Party has never been a formal event, but was always organized on an ad hoc basis through the network. Every participating location (and they are different every year) organizes its own party – from a few friends in a private studio to a performance evening in a museum or gallery. Filliou’s invention of Art’s Birthday is wonderfully absurd and humorous in the typical Fluxus tradition of serious fun. So the global birthday party for art has always tried to be fun while paying homage to Robert Filliou’s dream of The Eternal Network.“ (Robert Adrian, 2005)

Since 1999 KUNSTRADIO in Vienna and the media section of WESTERN FRONT in Vancouver have become initiators and cooperating hubs of ART’S BIRTHDAY celebrations within the imaginary city of WIENCOUVER. ART’S BIRTHDAY 1999 was the launch of WIENCOUVER 2000, still ongoing exchange between artists in Vancouver and Vienna.

realtime audio/video session. rendered realtime in vvvv and max/msp. no cuts, postproduction etc. autogenerative. sequences include boids, box2d, readback, texture fx, misuse of cube mapping.

voice: didi bruckmayr, audio processing: bernhard loibner, realtime 3d: didi bruckmayr

Enjoy!

I have been a user of Cycling 74′s Max/Msp/Jitter for many years now. A good deal of my composition work is basically developing Max patches to create music and sound (and video sometimes).

For my performance at the Moozak festival in Vienna I have been doing some work on the Max/Msp patch which I use for live performances and recording my music. As this is an ongoing effort (for some 10 years now) and projects like this will never end the appropriate name the software seems “unfinished”.

The current incarnation features 5 modules: sample re-synthesis (2x), sinewave synth, fm synth, live processing (for the bass guitar). This version is also capable of diffusing sound into multiple audio channels (via the well known max spatialisation object “vbap”).

Besides all the programming effort a real challenge for this kind of software is to create a user interface that makes sense in a live performance situation i.e. making it reactive, flexible and intuitive to use on stage.

After using a Midi controller for some years I have now switched to an iPad as a controller for user interaction (see this post).

Also new in this version is a Softstep Midi foot controller mainly for switching the bass guitar effect section. The Softstep is pretty nice, light and fairly easy to use although the software is kind of buggy (didn’t have time to fully investigate this).

However, here are some screenshots for a behind the scenes view of this latest version of “unfinished”.

After getting an iPad a little while ago I have been working on a custom controller surface for my Max/Msp live patch. It is really nice what you can do here….

I am using the amazing (and free!) TouchOSC app for building the multi page controller surface for the iPad. This is used to control a very big Max/Msp 5 patch which I am using for composition, recording and live performance. iPad and Max communicate via the OpenSoundControl protocol which enables bi-directional exchange. So, with some smart patching you can really build wonderful stuff.

Great flexibility in terms of creating a custum interface. I am curious to find how this will behave in a performance setting.

Here are some screen shots of what I have come up with so far. Really cool stuff!

Here is one piece of the live soundtrack for Janyce Michellod’s dance performance “Once Upon Time”. The track was performed and recorded live during the shows in Sierre, Switzerland in February 2011. No edits, no overdubs. Just a little mastering.

Listening with headphones is highly recommended as the deep bass frequencies won’t be transmitted through computer speakers… Enjoy!

Watch this trailer for “Once Upon Time”, a dance performance conzeptualized and chereographed by by Janyce Michellod for which I created the live sound track. “Once Upon Time” is a 60 minutes piece exploring, testing and challenging the range of possible interaction(s) and dialogue(s) between 4 different mediums: dance, music, visual art and light.

Choreographic structures by Janyce Michellod. Music by Bernhard Loibner. Lighting by Raphaël Vincent. Performed by Janyce Michellod, Laura Dannequin, Stefan Baier, Bruno Michellod, Bernhard Loibner and Raphaël Vincent.

The piece was premiered and recorded in Les Halles, Sierre, Switzerland, in February 2011.