Images: selva @venuscyborg, Venue: Gessnerallee Zurich, Date: 19-04-24
, Video-works by: BOD [包家巷], Chino Amobi, Hannah Rose Stewart, Mark Leckey, Rustan Söderling & VISIO

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A SONIC ESCAPADE WITH SALIWA, MAGARI, XAFYA, JAUSS

Venue: Umbo, Wasserwerkstrasse 89a, 8037 Zurich
Date: 1 March 2024
Images: © Vital Romero

1. Sabiwa crafts shimmering resonances with a simple hose, setting the venue into vibration.
2. The screen constantly changes through filmed collages by the artist originating from Taiwan.
3. Sabiwa's live set is complemented by her own films.
4. Bridging the Gaps: DJ Sets by Marc Jauss (Above) and Xafya (Below).
5. Soundscapes based on a hand-operated harmonium: Magari during his live performance.
6. A letter written by Sabiwa captures her three-day residency in Zurich.

James K, Eve Essex, Dylan Shir, Leila Bordreuil, and V Manuscript Performing Elektra (Scream Through the Eyes of a Statue) at Issue Project Room, April 2018

Premiering the performance ELEKTRA (Scream Through the Eyes of a Statue) in 2018, the artist James K marked the beginning of her residency at ISSUE, NYC. Deeply rooted in a conscious art practice that has honed her peculiar aesthetic to the fusion of visual and sonic elements, with ELEKTRA, James K explored the female voice considering it as an "X-ray to the bones of sound." Building upon the translation of Sophocles' tragic play Elektra by the renowned poet, essayist, and classical music professor Anne Carson, James K externalizes the inner realm of female vocalization. In collaboration with musicians Eve Essex, Dylan Shir, and Leila Bordreuil, a multifaceted interpretation of the "screams" emerged, expressing the various relations between hysteria and the "gender of sound."

fromheretillnow unveils an exclusive interview conducted by the New York-based poet and artist Eli V Manuscript with James K.

James K by Eli V Manuscript

Statement by Eli

E: To start us off, I’m interested in how you’ve described your work as “conceptualizing the female voice as an X-ray to the bones of sound.”

J: In my recent work, I wanted to have each of the performances reflect personas that I am currently working with. When I say persona, it's not just a character with one backstory. It's more of an emotional, cultural, and historical embodiment -- a fragment made of fragments, taking form through an amalgamation of textures and elements: writing, sonic, visual, movement, performance. Additionally, I’ve been using Anne Carson's “The Gender of Sound” as a departure point. Her text discusses how patriarchy has entrapped female sound, tried to contain it; it’s about female sound in its unbridled form and how and why it's been controlled by patriarchal structures.  

E: For your piece Elektra (Scream Through the Eyes of a Statue), you used Carson’s translation of Greek playwright Sophocles’ Electra.

J: Right. I was introduced to her work through her poetry and then got into more of her theoretical writing and then her translations. I approached these pieces as further translations, exploring my current understanding of female sound. I wanted to give complex characterizations to the containers that have been put on female identities, to talk about them and then to also challenge them. 

E: In Anne Carson's “The Gender of Sound” -- how do you interpret that gendered sound? Your piece Elektra (Scream Through the Eyes of a Statue) utilizes the scream which Anne Carson separates from traditional uses of language, both in Greek and in her translation into English. In the piece, you focus on those screams which aren't words we are familiar with -- and I’ve heard you mention the scream as being a truly feminine sound.

J: Carson talks about screams in a few ways. I think most importantly, the screams were compared to two other protagonists in Greek mythology. One of them was turned to stone and she used tears to communicate; and the other was transformed into a bird and used birdsong to communicate. Electra’s screams were compared to these, in the sense that they are all modes of female sign language. So, even when any container or walls are put up around vocality, there is still a form to express and electrify through screams. The idea of female sign language is important to me. It is something that I have come to on my own terms and utilized much in my music and art practice, though I had never heard it articulated in this way until I read Carson’s essay on translating Electra. In my Elektra piece there are no lyrics. Even though I'm using Anne Carson's translation of Sophocles’s Electra as the departure point, for the specific work, I wasn't interested in having any of the text be completely legible. This differs from Strauss’ Elektra opera, which sticks to a linear narrative. My intention for this work was in direct opposition to that. I wanted the narrative to exist in a dream logic of layers and layers of materials: sound, visual, written, performative, video, architecture-layers that loop and consume themselves. Layers that have no beginning or end. In every sound, every being, lies a history of everything before them. I wanted the layers to allude to this. 

E: How did these layers turn into the score performed?

J: We were collaboratively improvising our translations of Electra’s Screams, and other sections from the text which I translated into improv exercises. From this recorded material, I then constructed a score, to form another, more layered and nonlinear translation of Sophocles. Any language that was in the text was disintegrated. Lyrically, I wanted the vocals in the piece to be other sounds that still communicate feeling or words in some way, without using language.

E: As humans, we've used vocality prior to written language throughout our history through grunts and screams. The slow naming of objects and ideas and actions developed into language amongst different peoples. That eventually formalized into forms of writing. Writing was formed when our oral stories started to become concrete and passed down as these definitive volumes, which eventually transform into law and the many absurd systems we deal with now that use language as an extremely structured and demanding form. In Greece, the era of Elektra, we're talking about a time when language was a little less formalized and we might have been closer to these original forms of vocality. Some people theorize that as writing developed, goddess worship ceased, and that those two paradigms are on a similar arc. It's a spectrum, not a moment, but the spectrum that led away from goddess worship also led to the formalization of language as writing, which became a legal system as opposed to a poetic and expressive system. Do you think that's the core of what you’re doing?

J: Yes, it also becomes a binary when language was solidified in form. Language makes things static, it stabilizes memory and repeats it, and this affects our thinking. Language comes from a reality which is way more fragmented. I'm interested in going back to the fragmentation and the multiplicity instead of the binaries. Elektra is a sensitive being. I feel that these systems are simplifiers, and they promote less sensitivity. The idea of a ‘rational’ mind, is a mind that likes structures instead of feeling. Elektra, and my connection to her, involves my interest in forming language through this hyper-sensitivity. This language, then, is and must be multi-layered, and not having much, if anything to do with what most call ‘reason.’  

E: We're talking about the idea of a binary versus a spectrum, and we're using words like woman and feminine. Can you explain a little bit about those ideas being within certain spectrums as opposed to a binary system?

J: I am interested in using those words in reference to language. My idea of what it means to be feminine comes down to a philosophy influenced by a lot of other things. When I was a teenager, I wrote this manifesto called the “Venomist Manifesto.” I was inspired after reading the writings of Donna Haraway and Judith Butler, and to give my own spin on the malleability of identity.  In my manifesto, I talk about how many containers for “feminine” exist, and how you can move constantly and demonstrate their multiplicity. It’s about finding truth in layers, in fragmentation, and the amorphous void which both holds and is the venom. For me, this is what is feminine- It is the quality of venom; oozing digestion, the disintegration and movement in the inside that we can't see, but rather feel.

E: One of your personas is a specialist in vomit. 

J: Yeah. “Nude Volvo” is a vomit archaeologist and she's discovering fragments of personas in vomit. Another V word. 

E: And this is the persona involved in your Elektra piece, or no?

J: Nude Volvo is more of an overarching persona that discovers and translates many of my other personas. She is also a DJ. In ways, she is the one who composes the structure, or scores. She is a mode I use for creating work, though she is not always present in the literal sense. That being said, I have done a few performances where she has been central. 

E: Let’s talk more about your approach to the scoring and construction of Elektra.

J: With Elektra, I wanted it to be all women involved in this piece and I wanted it to be conversational in the sense that it is a collaborative framework that I’ve created. I brought each of the players into the space two and a half months before the piece, and we started generating sounds in those first months. Before we met, I gave them Anne Carson’s translation, Sophocles Electra, and some of my notes. I wanted them to have an initial feeling for the content, so they could have some basis for interpretation. In those early generative sessions, we used the screams as a basis: I brought them in individually and gave each of them a scream. There's fourteen screams written with letters: “AIAI” is a scream, “O” is a scream, and then the words get longer: ‘EE AIAI,’ ‘OIMOI TALAINA,’ ‘OTOTOTOTOI TO TOI.’ I had an idea of the sounds that each of the players could be generating, but I wanted them to initiate their decisions. I lifted and created some exercises for improvising.  For example, when “Oh” was voiced, I would crescendo, the other person decrescendos, so on and so forth. Another scream, I go from longer and looser notes to more staccato and faster. These exercises were meant to promote conversation sonically. The idea was for each of us to react and translate from our own contained histories, and then through improvising, it becomes a conversation, these histories meld.

J: It was relatively loose. The exercises are simply parameters to start a conversational flow. We interpreted various screams using our instruments. We each had multiple instruments, some overlapping, so the sounds interchanged and moved around quite a bit. For instance, I was using voice, violin and modular synthesizer. There were four of us: myself, Eve Essex, Dylan Shir, and Leila Bordreuil. In terms of the set-up and layout, I positioned us facing each other in a circular form at the center of the space. Our backs were facing the audience, who were seated around, echoing out from our central circle. There were four tvs, staggered between each of us, which were facing out to the audience. They played other video translations, one being a choreography my friend and collaborator, dancer Alex Jacob generated from sounds I gave her. The tvs were the projections facing outwards, while we faced inwards, towards each other. I really wanted it to feel like we were having a conversation, also to visually have it reflect a seance of some kind.

E: On the Seance: Do you see the circle as a feminine form? Can you describe what was in the center of the circle during the piece and describe its purpose?

JK: There's no end point in a circle, it's continuous. A circle could also be a portal or a black hole. It’s also the first scream. In Elektra, related to the loop and to translations, I had my reel-to-reel recorder at the center of the circle. The whole piece started with me pressing play on the reel-to-reel and recording the performance. At the end, I rewound it, amplifying the sound of the reel rewinding. I pressed play, and we exited the stage as the whole recorded piece played back. So, the audience listened to the playback of that experience they just had. The idea is that it’s continuing. It's still moving, still translating.

E: You call that in your notes a collapsing of time.

J: I wanted to avoid an ending because I wanted this piece to exemplify a continuation, an endless infinity of movement. 

E: We know that live documents and recorded documents are different. To me, what it symbolizes was that there was the live form and the recorded form, and the looping alludes to the fact that this form will also degenerate. If we go further into time, someone might re-perform your piece and translate it as we know it, and we'll have another version of that form and it's recording, and so on.

J: Yes. This degradation is key to the process of translations. It is what informed my scores. 

E: The scores of Elektra are very beautiful. They're very instructive and descriptive, not only in a linear fashion, but also in the poetic description of actions that the musicians and performers will make. The score of Elektra, which I got to experience in real time as a performer, we read instructions which were both written by you and then augmented by the players. There was a lot of performativity and vocality in the way you, Eve, Dylan, and Leila performed.

Score, Section I

J:  The performativity has to do with us merging with our instruments, translating them into our voices. The idea is that these things are vessels for us to speak, hence “screaming through the eyes of a statue.” The reason why I wanted to work with Eve and Dylan specifically is because we started this band, Hesper, about three years ago. The band is purely improvisational. When we started, I would bring my recording set up and record the jams, so working in this way informed my process and method for composing the final score for Elektra. I wanted to do the piece with them because our conversational relationship sonically had already been established. The other ensemble member was Leila Bordreuil, who has a developed improv practice of her own. She was playing cello. At one point she also played violin through an amplifier. We were all creating many different types of sounds, translations. And the last person performing was you of course, Eli. 

E: Yes, you also asked me to interpret the screams. As opposed to a musical or vocal projection of those pieces of language, I represented them through images, the same fourteen screams. When we scream or when we say a word, no matter how loud it is, one visually represents it by putting an exclamation point on it. One can make the text bigger, but it's still the same 26 characters that we've learned to represent language. You had mentioned some of the distortions I’ve done with text and we've worked together on projects before. So, I made the same distortions to amplify those visual characters, as we would amplify a gentle sound into a louder sound. 

Projections, textual alchemy by V Manuscript

J: I didn't want the text to be there in blatant form, or too narrative or obvious. I really wanted the text to be another layer or translation. To reflect the sound, I gave you some of the audio that we had been generating and showed you the progression. I also showed you specific sections I had pulled from Carson’s text, my notes, and a book of Sophocles’ Electra in Greek. These were all of the materials I asked you to use to make your visual translations of the audio. I was excited by your work with text, and wanted the text to become more and more disintegrated and layered, as, sonically, the piece progressed and it too became degraded by layers of translations. The text compositions you made, even though I had a clear chronological ordering, I wanted these texts to somehow be performed live. So they were being projected and then you were using prisms to further distort them and perform those distortions live. The performance of these projections, animating them, making them move throughout the space, was all improvised.

E: What do you think gives the screaming of Electra its power?

J: Well, I suppose the scream is a common point of reference for artists working in sound, and people have made scream scores in the past. I was interested in screams primarily because I felt like it was a relatively obvious starting point to translate the gender of sound essay into unbridled sound. For me, it is more about a kind of catharsis. Personally, I use screaming to get rid of any evil, anger or anxiety I feel inside of me. It is the most direct way for me to release. It takes all the trauma, the history of violence we contain in our bodies and materializes it. This materialization is the translation into expression, which in turn communicates. People often get mad at babies’ cries, but that anger is their own fear. As humans we are programed to respond to a baby’s scream, it is an engrained sign of distress. The conditioning which occurs teaches us to hold it in, which causes more suffering. For me, releasing feels like the most honest and primal thing I could possibly do.

E: You have a phrase in some of your unpublished notes that we shared in the early scoring practice, where your cue for yourself was “I will scream again and break this harmony.” 

J: Yes, break this harmony. If there's a structure,  which is ‘harmony’ in western musical terms, or a container, or door, or the conditioning we all experience, whatever, a scream has the ability to cut through it. That's really why it's powerful. It has the ability to break it down. And it's related to Electra’s entrance. When Electra first appears in the Sophocles version -- and Anne Carson talks about this in her intro about the process of her translating this piece -- Electra enters and she breaks the iambic pentameter. This is really unheard of in Greek mythology. And she continually does that throughout the piece, breaking the iambic pentameter. In the first section of my score, I was really trying to create moments where we all come together in ‘harmony’ and then break that with a scream, or a cut. Just as the breaking can happen with a scream, the scream’s effect can also be translated into the transitions. So in thinking about the transitions, it could be a sharp cut, a car crash collapse, or an intense dissonance. I was using dissonance to establish this communicative collapse. 

E: When Electra breaks the pentameter, not only is it a cut in the continuity of pre-existing line, but often it’s cut by a long cluster of vowels, which you can't even figure out how to enunciate properly. In writing, whether it's playwriting or poetry, one has certain access to pre-existing techniques of breaking what would be a normal reading with an elevated or agitated or amplified reading. Some of these techniques exist through other experimenters through time and some of them you invent when you need what doesn't exist.

J: Right.

E: So in regards to Electra talking to herself with these unpronounceable clusters of vowels, we see some of this in the experimental poetry of the last couple centuries. We've developed techniques of learning how to make the page scream when there's not any amplification there. In music, over the past century specifically, we’ve developed a lot of techniques that have allowed us to make what would have been a quieter, more controlled, or more historically harmonious sound become louder, more agitated, or full of rage. We electrified traditionally non-electrical instruments in the mid-20th century, and had electric music. Simultaneously, even before we serialized all twelve notes on the keyboard, we experimented with forms of dissonance. In the 20th century, many composers have taken all of those limits really far -- all the way to full washes of full spectrum sound, the loudest possible sounds all the way to the quietest possible sounds. Can you talk about some of the practices that you utilize to make cacophony? Maybe talk on some of the practices that you use to make those screams scream louder and more dissonant. 

J: The cacophony exists in me, in my experience, and all around me. I’ve always wanted to embrace it. There was a brief moment when I was much younger, where I was trained classically in voice. I had a lot of issues with it. Basically, when you're training classically, there's a canon you have to train your voice to. So I used to go to these competitions and they would say okay you got 99.5 or whatever on this, because it was great but it sounded too much like you. I found this very problematic. This is going back to putting containers on the female voice and this idea that this canonized sound has culturally been associated with female beauty and purity. And the notion of purity is a problem as well. 

E: Similar to when a translator tries to make a “pure translation”, and how contestable that is.

J: Yes, I was interested in placing a classically-sounding voice right next to another voice, which was not canonized -- the scream. Dissonance can be formed when the classical voice is confronted with something that is unbridled. These contradictions form my truth, and I based the scores around this fragmentation and contradiction. I did a lot of research on experimental scores. Eve Essex gave me folders of many experimental scores dating back one hundred years. I researched them. These scores really demonstrate the flexibility of music notation and point to how it doesn't have to be structured traditionally. A score can be nothing and it can be everything. Overall, I took certain elements from researching these and elements from my own practice, and tried to create a score that would function and be legible for all of us. The score included time cues and explanations for the various improvisations and dynamics, which ultimately provided the structure for the piece. If I was to perform this piece again and make another score, I would like to include the actual screams, or to include sections that are purely visual images that we would have to interpret. 

E: Let’s talk for a moment on what's called the Electra chord in your notes. 

J: The Electra chord was a chord that Johann Strauss created specifically as a motif when Electra enters the stage in his opera. When it was created it was really controversial because of its dissonance. I wanted to create our own Electra chord. We did it through improvising and feeling/hearing dissonance. Our version of the Electra chord was brought into the composition multiple times, each time varying, of course. I even brought in a recording of Strauss’ chord from the wikipedia page on it, which I then filtered through one of my effects modules, warping it further. The interesting thing, is that when we were generating a dissonant chord, it's really the same concept as creating a harmony with each other. It's interesting because you do feel like there's still a harmony in that dissonance. 

E: I'd like to place your performance within a category of having many moments of extreme sound, minimal sound, and experimental sound that certain people trained in music theory and experimental music forms would be able to pick up additional ideas from. But your audience was very mixed. There were people that knew a lot about music and a lot of people that didn't. The age range was like eight to eighty-five and no one walked out of there not absolutely thrilled. So, you somehow found a way to maximize experimentation, yet also not take away from traditionally enjoyable forms of narrative and challenges to those narratives that allowed everyone to follow. 

J: There’s a consistent motion towards splintering and layering. Radicality must come from movement. If you can contain it, it isn't radical. Putting things together that wouldn't normally be put together is what I'm trying to do. When you bring together people with different types of histories, narratives, references, and education, whether musical education or not, it's going to create a hybrid where these narratives are seen in fragments within the people and within the piece itself. It’s creating a new narrative and a new translation. In my work if I'm talking about tropes—and not only the obvious tropes, but the unobvious ones, too—as being reflections of greater themes, it’s because these smaller things, the fragmented things, all develop it. I want to continually challenge that history. You can do that by bringing to light the other stories that are underneath the surface that weren’t told or that weren't known.

E: I was unaware originally in the Greek lexicon of heroes and heroines that Electra was a relatively minor, tertiary character. There's no mention of her in Homer’s Epics. Do you have thoughts about her centering as a story?

J: She is minor, but that has nothing to do with her importance. In fact, by the end of Electra she is described as the strongest character, amongst the ‘strongest’ characters, her father being King Agamemnon, a main character from the Iliad. 

E: You have these master narratives that are presented in their mythological forms whether poetically or religiously. But, it took Anne Carson translating Electra to re-center the story from how she viewed it through a feminist perspective. We're taking minor characters from master narratives and re-centering those narratives to understand a greater scope of their feelings, and realizing that every minor and even absent characters hold their own master narrative with as full range of life and story and emotions as the characters that were presented as major originally.

J: Exactly. Histories aren't fixed. You can illuminate that by bringing to light the other stories that are underneath the surface that weren’t told or that weren't known.

E: We know that entire histories are told by the winners of wars and how they committed that story to print. We have the same issue in poetic narratives, whether through religious mythos or poetic verse. So to find the stories of those whom weren't committed to print, we become more reliant on oral histories as opposed to written histories that are presented as some truth or legal document, when of course they were once an oral history as well. 

J: When Anne Carson translates, it sounds like Anne Carson, it's her voice and it's beautiful. She updates it into something that resonates for now. She talks about her process of translation-she has this recurring dream while translating Electra, where she's in a glass house trying to find the word for this Greek word, and she’s hovering over the word, but then it shatters and falls before she can see. That feeling is the feeling that I want to lean into. I don't think there is one word for this. And that's what's cool about her talking about translating something so ancient --these words don't exist anymore. There is no one word for that Greek word. That Greek word meant something in that society that is now lost to our minds. 

E: A translator who imagines they're doing some pure translation, finding the correct word for every word, finding the correct passage for every passage - is obviously setting themselves up for failure. Poetic sensibilities and political ideologies, everything about you is part of that translation. Anne Carson allows the veil to be lifted. We know we are reading both her poetry and a specific interpretation of a classic text through reading her translation.

J: Exactly. And with my translation, the idea is that there isn't one scream for “O,” that first scream. There are multiple screams. That's why there are multiple people creating these screams. For every word, there could be, and are an infinite amount of layers to that word. And that's what I wanted to show. 

E: You have! simultaneously through voice, through instrument, through pre-recorded passages, and through visuals. For Elektra, these tools represent the victory of female sign language. These are women who have left behind human form and rational speech and yet have not let go of the making of meaning.

ISSUE Project Room's annual Artist-in-Residence program provides New York-based emerging artists with a year of support, offering artists access to facilities, equipment, documentation, pr/marketing, curatorial and technical expertise to develop and present significant new works, reach the next stage in their artistic development, and gain exposure to a broad public audience.

Noise and shine, dimly perceptible glow and hum: these are the kinds of things that are more or less likely to keep bodies awake at night. Not intended to be seen rather than heard in an enraptured state of inefficiency. This is where light exceeds impression and noise gets rid of sound. This could be a … beginning

... Here and now, words migrate elsewhere, spiriting itself away as an illusive ground, a dizzy state of particles, a sigh, an anecdote

..with a unique vision of collectivity, movement, matter, affect, interaction, differentiation, composition and infinite darkness - a crystallized data base or a plot ready to combine and react, to be narrated on through the echo that activates it. 
As and Bs and Cs that originate from dark corners, different territories and domains of invisible hazards. They get composed to knots, heaps or balls of countless terms, languages and materials belonging to entirely different deserts, hard to grasp but keeping the sleepless bodies streaming with noise and shine.

Echo Shelves was a special evening that featured soundscapes by Nina Emge and Heith, presented by fromheretillnow in collaboration with the artist Dominic Michel and Gioia Dal Molin (Istituto Svizzero). Echo Shelves gathered thoughts on the scenic quality of public inventories and used objects, sound, and places as carriers of stories that continually transformed and extended themselves. The event symbolized the gradual fading of the current exhibition, marking a transition into a 'dark mode' that marked the exhibition's conclusion.

Images © Binta Kopp & Jannis Davi

With the invitation to the PARA/SITE O. SINENSIS event, which was curated by Lhaga Koondhor, fromheretillnow responded with a selection of moving images and music videos that were focused on noise and the complex relationship between host and parasite.

The displayed videos combined different visual and acoustic aesthetics, providing insights into the multifaceted possibilities that had emerged between documentary fiction, experimental short films, and contemporary music videos. The program explored various types of disruptions and examined noises and their effects on our perception and existence while adapting symbiotically to the given environment.

Over the course of two days, works were shown by: Chuquimamani-Condori + Oshua Chuquimia Crampton, Dis Fig and Alice Z Jones, Evicshen, mm+tt, Mschyen, Loft Garten, Peter Tscherkassky, Ruhail Qaisar, Scotch Rolex & Lord Spikeheart, and Toshio Matsumoto.

Parasite O.Sinensis starring HAWA, Lord Spikeheart, münki, Ayshat Campbell & Asian Eyez, A Film by Binta Kopp & Jannis Davi

Photographers: © Alexis Rodriguez Cancino, Souleymane Said, Boris Camaca, Rebekka Deubner
In conjunction with the art magazine PROVENCE
Words: Marc Jauss

Stage elements made of aluminum, unfolded black boxes, and tangled intertwined cables that seem to have neither a beginning nor an end, mixed with diffused light and overdriven sounds in the room. Suddenly it becomes quiet. The soundcheck is complete. A glimpse behind the scenes reveals an authentic parallel world that stands in strong contrast to the perfectly staged show. The scene as a whole appears unfinished, chaotic, and somehow improvised. Ultimately, everything is aimed at a specific moment that fades away after a certain time and only exists in our thoughts or in recordings in the form of sound, videos or images. It has been a while since I first heard of the Parisian record label Latency. If I remember correctly, I learned of the label through the hypnotic rhythms of North American musician and sound artist Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe on the single Kulthan, which was released sometime in 2017. As a sonic-enthusiast and operator of a music platform, I was naturally drawn to it and continue to follow the curation work of the owners Sidney Gerard and Souleymane Said with great enthusiasm. Since the label's introduction, an elaborate catalog of artists such as singer and DJ Laurel Halo, virtuoso percussionist Mohammad Reza Mortazavi, and pop polymath Lafawndah has emerged.
In the past year, Latency made waves with a series of exceptional concerts, each of which took full advantage of the unique acoustic properties of their respective venues. Attendees were treated to impressive performances in the magnificent Flamboyant and Baroque-style church of Saint-Merry or the ancient Bourse de Commerce, originally used as a commodity exchange, in Paris.

st merry church, paris - laurel halo

paris - le malentendu music video - lafawndah, jonathan vinel & caroline poggi 

le bal, paris - eli keszler 

kunsthal charlottenborg, copenhagen – ctm, mads frøslev and agnete h. petri

bourse de commerce-pinault collection, paris - price, joseph schiano di lombo, tobias koch, modulaw 

st merry church, paris - eliza mccarthy plays mica levi 

contact, tokyo - latency showcase with ena, ypy, sidney & suli

gaîté lyrique, paris - tim hecker & mfo 

marian goodman gallery / louise lawler, paris - tlf trio 

Latency is a Paris-based record label run by Sidney Gerard and Souleymane Said. It explores a broad musical spectrum in dialogue with contemporary art and performances. Latency has released physical and digital editions of various works by artists such as Laurel Halo, virtuoso percussionist Mohammad Reza Mortazavi, TLF Trio and Lafawndah.

From the liner notes of the 1999 CD
Translated by Misako Matsuki

"Wave Notation" was begun as an environment musical series. This music could be said to be an 'object or sound scenery to be listened to casualty. Not being music which excites or leads the listener into another world, it should drift like smoke and become part of the environment surrounding the listener's activity. In other words, it is music which creates an intimate relationship with people in everyday life. Although still somewhat uncommon, there are several examples already of this kind of music, for example Erik Satie's (1866 –1925) work, "Furniture Music" or the rock musician Brian Eno's "Ambient Series," Also, the 'object sound music is not the music of self-expression or a completed work of art, rather it is music which by overlapping and shifting changes the character and the meaning of space, things, and people.

This is the kind of music I want to make with the "Wave Notation" series. because music is not only meant to be something which exists atone, What I am attempting to do, in an overall sense, can be called `sound design'. This includes the adjustment and regulation of sounds which are proper to an environment, along with the production and composition of the music within this series. Possibly, for a given environment, just one sound would be sufficient.

'Sound design' doesn't just mean simply decorating with sounds. The creation of non-sound, a in other words silence, as in a design, if possible„ would be wonderful. There's no question that our age — in which we are inundated with sound – is unprecedented in history. The Canadian sound environmentalist and researcher Murray Schafer warns of this state of affairs in the following: "The ear, unlike some other sense organs, is exposed and vulnerable. The eye can be closed at will; the ear is always open. The eye can be focused and pointed at will; the ear picks up all sound right back to the acoustic horizon in all directions. Its only protectionis an elaborate psychological system of filtering Out undesirable sounds in order to concentrate on what is desirable. The eye points outward; the ear draws inward. it would seem reasonable to suppose that as sound sources in the acoustic environment multiply – and they are certainty multiplying today —the ear will become blunted to them and will fail to exercise its individualistic right to demand that insouciant and distracting sounds should be stopped in order that it may concentrate totally on those which truly matter."

We should have a more conscious attitude toward the sounds – other than music —that we listen to. Presently, the levels of sound and music in the environment have clearly exceeded man's capacity to assimilate them, and the audio ecosystem is beginning to fall apart. Background music, which is supposed to create 'atmosphere', is far too excessive. In our present condition, we find that within certain areas and spaces, aspects of visual design are well attended to, but sound design is completely ignored. It is necessary to treat sound and music with the same level of daily need as we treat architecture, interior design, food, or the air we breathe. In any case, the "Wave Notation" series has begun. I hope it will be used and judged for what I had in mind as 'sound design', but of course the listener is free to use it in any way. However, I would hope this music does not become a partner in crime to the flood of sounds and music which inundate us at present.

The first edition of this album was released in 1982 on LP. I composed "Music for Nine Post Cards" while catching the waves of scenery out of the window and feeling the sounds form. Images of the movement of clouds, the shade of a tree in summer time, the sound of rain, the snow in a town, with those rather quiet sound images, I sought to add the tone of ink painting to the pieces.

Differing from the minimal musical style in my former piece" Clouds for Alma- for two koto harps" (1978), in this music a short refrain is played over and over while it changes its form gradually just like clouds or waves, based on the sound fragments noted on the 9 postcards. I put the first fragment of the sound, a seed or a stone as it were, to seek the "prime number" of the sound.

One day when I was composing this piece, I visited the brand-new contemporary art museum in the North Shinagawa area I took to its snow-white Art-Deco style, but not only that, I was also deeply impressed and moved by the trees in the courtyard which can be seen through the museum's large window. At that moment, I imagined how it would sound if were to play my developing album there. Could it possibly be one of the best sounds that fit this environment? This idea developed into the strong desire to carry it out.

Finishing the mixing, recording it on cassette tape, I visited this museum again. They gladly accepted such an unknown composer's request and said "OK, let's try to put it on in the museum." That made me so happy and encouraged me. After a few weeks, 1 received a phone call from this museum, where staff were often asked by the visitors "Where can I get this music?" On hearing those words, my desire to publish a record with those sounds was getting stronger and stronger. I decided to consult with Mr. Ashikawa about this. He said that he would start up a record label to present this new sound. in this way, "Music for Nine Post Cards" was released as the first LP record of the "Music Notation for waves" series.

This was followed by Mr. Ashikawa's "Still Way". This label's first attempt to present environmental music in Japan was taken up in many magazines. Although this album was a small publication by a minor label, I am very happy that not a few people still remember it. Now this album is being reprinted. I'm looking forward to the reaction of the people who are going to listen to this music for the first time. The Nine Post Cards which were sent from outside of a window. I hope this sound scenery makes quiet ripples.

Play the piano while watching scenery out of a window Transcribe the fragments of the scenery or the sound Mail these transcribed fragments.

This 'mail event' had its beginning when I sent "Clouds for Alma" to a friend in Holland in 1977. Because the transcription consisted of a short, one measure phrase, it lit just right on a post card. Afterwards, this event was repeated, transcribed onto a card, and I enjoyed sending these cards to my friends. In this music, a short phrase is played over and over while it changes its form gradually. Therefore, it flows freely as a fragment of scenery. Part of what has been recorded here has been used for dance performance, background music for art museums, and sometimes as reference' in searching for ideas. The nine pieces collected in this album, "Music for Nine Post Cards" are all recent works. l will be happy if, when you enjoy this album, the surrounding scenery can be seen in a slightly different light.
 

Images: © Bahar Kaygusuz / Johanna Odersky
Interview: Marc Jauss
Read the German version

A SPACE WITH MULTIPLE LAYERS:
JOHANNA ODERSKY RELEASES "THE ITCH"

Just moments away from Johanna Odersky's album launch and the multifaceted exhibition set to grace Berlin's Projektraum Ashley, I found myself immersed in conversation with the artist and musician at her studio nestled outside the bustling city. Together, we embarked on a journey exploring the nuances of spaces, emotions, and the transformative effects of sampling on her artistic practice.

Marc Jauss: Where are we located right now?

Johanna Odersky: We are in my art studio in Französisch Buchholz, Berlin.

MJ: What are the themes you are currently exploring in your work?

JO: In recent years, I have been oscillating between a sculptural and a musical practice. These two approaches are increasingly converging, but they also fundamentally differ in the social spaces they evoke and the economies that emerge around them. In my work, I am particularly interested in spatial systems that do not rely on predefined or fixed conditions but rather dynamically emerge from within themselves. I explore this interest both sculpturally and sonically.

MJ: Could you elaborate on that a bit more?

JO: For example, my paintings, which I create on folded canvases, lack perspective or clear linearity. Instead, they embody a kind of gravity that stretches and collapses the pictorial space within itself. Similarly, I view my musical compositions as continuously unfolding spaces. I use repetitive textures and samples, layering them into a dense sensory mesh that feels like it could keep expanding indefinitely. However, for my album "The Itch," I experimented with something new. I set out to create a pop production, so the tracks on the album were intended to sound more polished and "complete."

MJ: Are there also days when you have a clear intention of what you want to work on? What are your impulses?

JO: It is definitely very intuitive. I usually wait for an occasion to realize my work. If no current project is lined up, I mainly collect materials: objects, images, textiles, melodies, words... Things that, due to their nature, spark interest or have emotional significance for me. When preserved, they contain a thought or a feeling until I use them again in a new context. Just like sampling in music, I also enjoy mixing material "clippings." This often results in my sculptural works.

MJ: Your new album "The Itch" was recently released at Ashley in Berlin. What themes did you explore during its creation?


JO: Conceptually, with "The Itch," I wanted to create a tension between two contradictory desires. On one hand, the album describes the desire to escape one's own existence, while on the other hand, it also contains a longing for grounding and connection. This dissonance permeates all the tracks and "itches" the listeners.

MJ: What were your experiences with the lyrical aspect? How have your song lyrics evolved?

JO: I always find it very challenging to work with language or to write text from scratch. That's why I also used some form of sampling for the lyrics. I created a very long text document with words, sentences, and language fragments from various sources. Sometimes they were simply lyrics that I misunderstood from other songs. I find it interesting how the meaning and the sound aspect of language can create new associations that deviate from, or support the original meaning. Once enough text had accumulated, I spent a long time experimenting with it, combining and replacing different parts.. until I liked how the words sounded and the meaning they took on as a result.

MJ: Which aspects were important to you when conceptualizing the show?

JO: Because it was a self-release, I was fortunate to have a lot of freedom in shaping the release. I wanted the album to be experienced on different sensory levels, and what I found particularly interesting was seeing how different physical, mental, and social spaces can emerge through the music.
On a musical level, "The Itch" is highly emotionally charged, describing the feeling of being lost in space and time. It represents a dissociative state of being that breaks with shared reality and attempts to piece it back together through melodically recurring memories.
The exhibition at the Ashley project space, on the other hand, was a physical mise-en-scène of the album and literally served as a stage. It opened with a live performance of the music from "The Itch" and aimed to redirect attention to the body as a site of physical and emotional experience with the stage presence of "Iku." Alongside the album's launch, sculptures were exhibited, incorporating textiles, light, and sound. Together, these elements formed a backdrop reminiscent of music venues such as clubs or concert venues, thus incorporating them into the exhibition space.
A website is currently being developed as well. It will serve as documentation of the event at Ashley and as an audiovisual listening room. Through videos, photos, and 3D scans, I want to incorporate the physical elements of the exhibition, although the communal aspect of the event will be absent, resulting in a virtual reflection of the project.

MJ: Since we’re talking about spaces, in which spaces do you feel comfortable?

JO: I feel most comfortable in spaces that have a material familiarity to me. I enjoy having objects around me that feel like an extension of myself. Finding the sensual connections to these places and rediscovering my traces within them gives me a sense of continuity.

MJ: Your concert "Confinement in D minor" from the Covid year 2021 comes to mind...

JO: "Confinement in D minor" was originally developed as an online performance for Club Quarantine, an online dance party that provided a digital space for the queer community during the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, most of us were in quarantine, so I filmed the video alone from my apartment. I was interested in the intimacy that arises when you get a glimpse into someone's "home." Although it seems very important to me, I often find it difficult to establish this kind of closeness during live performances.

MJ: You often design your own outfits for your performances. What role does fashion play in your shows?

JO: I have always enjoyed playing with fashion and "dressing up," and through my performances, it has naturally integrated into my practice. I am particularly fascinated by the sensory aspect of fashion and textiles. I love the tactile experience of touching fabrics, building volume through layers, and combining patterns and textures. It also reflects, in a way, my music production, which is heavily influenced by the idea of layering.

MJ: What was your worst live experience?

JO: As a child, I learned to play the piano, and there were school events where students performed for their parents. I never really had any issues with it until one day, despite being well-prepared, I had a blackout on stage. I couldn't even remember the first note. Since then, I have had crippling stage fright before every performance.

MJ: And were you able to develop a technique that helps you relax?

JO: It may help a little to embody a "character." For me, this primarily happens through the costumes. Despite the fear of being on stage, I also find that the performances have allowed me to undergo a valuable growth. Through stage presence, I have developed a sense of curiosity towards the stage and its inherent possibilities, which I have further explored through my sculptural works.

MJ: Are there people from your surroundings that you would like to mention at this point? Who are you currently collaborating with?


JO: I find all of my friends to be fascinating and inspiring, and it's always wonderful when we can work together on something. For example, "The Itch" allowed me to collaborate with Joon Yeon Park, who designed the cover artwork. I'm a big fan of Joon's paintings, prints, and patchworks. Her works have a playful character through the use of patterns, decoration, and ornamentation, yet they also reveal a remarkably meticulous technique.
Over the past two years, I have been working with François Pisapia on an audiovisual performance that has greatly influenced the development of the album. François works with video, photography, and text, and I am continually amazed by his ability to seamlessly blend elements of documentary and fantasy. It's a delicate approach to the given, resulting in a closeness that is palpable for the viewers.
Currently, I am collaborating with Yong Xiang Li on a soundtrack. Although he primarily works with painting and sculpture, music videos occasionally find their way into his artistic practice as well. As the work is still in progress, I can't share much about it, but we are producing cover song with reworked lyrics. Similar to how Yong Xiang imbues existing song lyrics with new meanings in his videos, he also constructs skillful and humorous reformulations of cultural and historical narratives in his painting and sculptural works.

Weaving wistful, introspective lyrics into a densely layered landscape of samples and sonic textures, “The Itch” interrupts reality and inserts an altered state of being—outside consensual time and space—in the here and now. If reality posits a stable relation between body, consciousness, and environment, “The Itch” longs for its reversal: An oscillating movement, floating without ground, piecing reality back together through melodically recurring memories. In another register, one would call this desire. In yet another, the virtual.

FHTN 1123 is a grassroots project by Zurich-based music editor and Fromheretillnow curator Marc Jauss. Inspired by the tragic romance of Sister Küngold and the Pale Knight, an audio-collage of contemporary experimental music by selected musicians has been crafted. It incorporates references to classical and traditional instruments that support and accompany the local myth. Individual fragments of the story are interpreted by a narrator's voice and interwoven with field recordings from the Alsace landscape. Visitors to the Saalhof are thus presented with an immersive story that serves as a prelude to the event's opening. The audio piece is available alongside a specially designed object that provides access to the recording over the fromheretillnow website.

Access request

joyo ann

dreamcore vol.1 cassette

lumpex (czanagora records)

screening from the video present day - present time by webarchive

jamira estrada

XV06-Y

Manolo Müller & Axel Kolb

JUNCTIONS:SYMPOSIA took place on the afternoon and evening of January 21st 2023, at Brasseries Atlas in Brussels. In the form of a symposium, cultural workers from Zürich and Brussels presented, performed and displayed work in order to initiate conversation and establish first contact with each other. Weaving links between both cities and a multiplicity of practices, the evening at Brasseries Atlas unfolded smoothly transitioning between readings, talks, listenings, conversations, screenings, dining, and concerts. Everyone involved including staff from the living space at the Brasseries was included in the collective project of JUNCTIONS:SYMPOSIA.

Words by Nelson Beer

SAY, SWING, SWIVEL: PERFORMANCE AND OPEN MIC
In the first part of the evening, the young performance duo Say, Swing, Swivel made of Eve Gabriel Chabanon and Nelson Beer offered a fifteen minute performance succeeded by an open mic. Texts read during this 45 minute time slot include a poem by Eve Gabriel Chabanon, their translation of a Justin Chin writing; Nelson Beer read a paragraph from Sort of Like a Hug: Notes on Collectivity, Conviviality and Care by Park McArthur; Axelle Stiefel read a piece by Elisa Storelli and an excerpt of Notes on Mother Tongues: Colonialism, Class, and Giving what You don’t Have and Rosa Schützendorf read an excerpt from Deborah Levy’s Real Estate.

CÉLINE GILLAIN ON SONIC PATRIARCHY AND FEMALE LOUDNESS
After the open mic, Bruxelles-based artist and pedagogue Céline Gillain gave a inspiring and emotional conference about female loudness and sonic patriarchy underlining the violence sound technologies, western philosophical thought and cultural institutions wield upon the rich dynamic range generated through diversity. Parts of the conference were sung, comedic, historical and embedde in gender studies and feminist theory and activism. While identifying masculinities in hegemonic cultural discourses, Céline managed to propose strong alternatives and shared important tools for re-imagining cultural institutional frameworks from a non-western and feminist perspective.

FENÊTRE OVALE ON COMPOSITIONAL RESEARCH AND MUTUALISATION
Fenêtre Ovale a collective of nine acousmatic composers, educated at the conservatoire de Mons, followed Céline Gillain’s talk by offering a radiophonic recording documenting their field research in various areas of Belgium, focused on rare folkloric sonic practices. This radiophonic experience was discussed in a group conversation with each member of the collective and audience. Questions ranging from specific sound manipulation techniques to aesthetics of documentation and the mutualisation of resources were responded to with generosity and attention. Gildas Bouchard, Simon Lehmans, Gaëtan Arheuro, Lucie Grésil, Thibault Madeline, Léa Roger, Clarice Calvo Pinsolle, Flavio Bagnasco and Julien Ortuno were able to articulate formal and elaborate arguments on a wide array of topics surrounding their research practices. The hour was concluded by another listening session manifesting the richness of each member’s compositional talent through a carefully crafted compilation of sounds.

SNYE
Throughout the whole symposium an independent distribution channel titled Snye designed and brought to life by Caterina De Nicola, Julien Dumont and Marc Jauss displayed a myriad of instruments, records, tapes, art objects and fashion accessories. All of them artist made, these objects attested of the professional craftsmanship of the independent art scenes of Brussels and Zürich. In an effort to build autonomous networks for art distribution, Snye bared witness to the efforts of collaboration, solidarity and interdependence. Out of every object carefully displayed behind the mysterious curtains of Snye, several artist’s contributions stand out, other represent a collective effort.

FROMHERETILLNOW PRESENTS: E.N.C SCREENINGS AND A VIDEO PREMIERE BY MIAO ZHAO
The video premiere of Miao Zhao‘s Wei served as a seminal moment in the realm of creative collaboration, as the Swiss sound artist joined forces with Tizia Zimmermann and Dora Krylov to produce a piece that was both aesthetically and sonically captivating. The work was part of the E.N.C screening series, curated by the Zurich-based online platform Fromheretillnow.

The programme was offered as an audio-visual mixtape, highlighting works by local and international artists that include references to DIY methods in production and aesthetics. What kind of relationships are established between new and „old“ media in contemporary artistic production? Which techniques and production methods have been rediscovered? The videos shown are intended to give information, ideas and suggestions on such questions.

Through its presentation of videos by artists such as Eric Desjeux & Madame Patate (BXL), Nika Son & Helena Wittmann (DE), Ches Smith & Frank Heath (US), Sicc Puppy (CH/US), Maoupa Mazzochetti & Laurent Allard (BXL), Billy Butheel & Alexander Iezzi & Joseph Kadow (DE), and Leevisa (KOR), the screening series attests to Fromheretillnow‘s remarkable ability to discern multiplicity within an extensive range of works, and to curate its selection with a discerning eye for discourse and diversity.

Webarchive, present day, present time, 2022 (snippet)

CATERINA DE NICOLA AND TZII LIVE
The programme kept its cadence through the introduction of the evening’s first concert, carried out by visual and sound artist Caterina De Nicola. Caterina’s piece, in its generous multiplicity, maintained a steady relation to noise, dark wave, drone, and electronics. Her use of circuit bending and DIY toolmaking turn Caterina’s performances into unique aesthetic experiences, playing on the threshold of audibility and challenging the listener into a physical event. Moreover, Caterina De Nicola has been involved in the organisation of the symposium, by building and thinking of Snye, the side-channel distribution closet installed in a corner of the room.

Eric Desjeux, also known as Tzii, is a highly accomplished independent filmmaker, composer, and sound designer. Throughout his distinguished career, he has collaborated with organizations such as CANAL+ and UNESCO, served as an assistant director and camera operator on a number of African, French, and Belgian feature films, and worked as an audiovisual scenographer at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. He has also been a featured artist in numerous international digital art and electronic music festivals, showcasing his video installations, live A/V performances, and concerts. For the JUNCTIONS: SYMPOSIA event, Tzii provided a fitting conclusion with a slow, evolving sonic flux that started with the lowest bass sounds and gradually transformed into higher-frequency harmonic complexities. As a veteran of the underground music scene in Brussels, Tzii brought not only his exceptional sound expertise but also a community of like-minded cultural innovators.

Additionally, Tzii‘s contribution to the E.N.C screenings series in the form of a music video called Les Hiboux ne sont pas ce que l’on croit further demonstrated his unique artistic vision. The music, consisting of a field recording of an electric kettle and a harmonica, created an immersive soundscape that evoked the ambiance of a rainy night with passing cars. The accompanying video clip employed minimal lo-fi techniques and minimalistic imagery to construct a strange, surreal landscape that was both captivating and bizarre.

Copyright © 2023 Fromheretillnow. All rights reserved.
The content and images in this report are protected by copyright and may not be used, reproduced, or distributed without the express written consent of JUNCTIONS:SYMPOSIA. This report is intended solely for the recipient and may not be shared or distributed to any other parties.

all tracks in this compilation were purchased via the bandcamp profiles of the artists and labels.
compiled by marc jauss

Coby Sey - Eve (Anwummerɛ) - AD 93
James K - alright - Self released
Duval Timothy - Plunge - Carrying Colour
Alpha Maid - MILD WEATHER - c.a.n.v.a.s.
Ulla - sad face - 3XL
Klein - black star - Self released
Severed Heads - Somehow Pain - Dogfood Production System
Malvern Brume - Circling - Alter
Dylan Henner - Today I Learned What Makes Bugs Sick and How To Tie My Shoelaces - AD 93
You'll Never Get to Heaven - Pink and Gold and Blue - Séance Centre
Car Culture - Featherweight - Lighthead Records
Torus - The Moon Radiates To Us - Queeste
Loraine James - Maybe If I (Stay On It) - Phantom Limb
Rain Dogs - Perilous Woman - .jpeg Artefacts
Gilles Chabenat - De l'eau et des amandes - A Colourful Storm
Acopia - Chances - Companion
Morteza Mahjubi - Improvisation in Abu-Ata - Death Is Not The End
Christina Vantzou - Distance - Kranky
Voice Actor - Calculated Reactive Space - Stroom
Organ Tapes - heaven can wait - Worldwide Unlimited
AKIRA - Acidsss - FXCK RXP RXCXRDS
Shygirl - Wildfire - Because Music
Dawuna - Parable II - O___o?
Sign Libra - Fern Flower - Reif
The Fortels - She - Efficient Space
Vegyn - Attached to the line [166.489 BPM] - PLZ Make It Ruins
Emeka Ogboh - Verbal Drift - Danfotronics
XINDL - Cat Café - Subject To Restrictions
Metal Preyers - Escape - The Sunrise - Nyege Nyege Tapes
Lumpex - dukkha​-​dukkha - czarnagora
Horvitz Morris Previte Trio - Todos Santos - A Colourful Storm
Double Virgo - Chlorine - PLZ Make It Ruins
Maxine Funke - First In Spring - Disciples
NINA - Slur - World Music
Hydroplane - The Love You Bring - A Colourful Storm
Leevisa - Sori Wa Spirit - Perpetual Care
PRICE - Announced - Latency
GIL - Solo Peace (gil edit) - Self Released
TLF Trio - Passacaglia - Latency

fromheretillnow · Recap 2022 (Fadeout)

The first E.N.C event took place at Zurich's Offspace Mikro and showed selected works that were the result of research on DIY aesthetics in non-commercial and contemporary music videos. The programme is offered as an audio-visual mixtape, highlighting works by local and international artists that include references to DIY methods in production and aesthetics. What kind of relationships are established between new and „old“ media in contemporary artistic production? Which techniques and production methods have been rediscovered? The videos shown are intended to give information, ideas and suggestions on such questions.

Featuring Works By: Alexander Iezzi, Billy Bultheel, Ches Smith, Helena Wittmann, Frank Heath, Joseph Kadow, Leevisa, Latex Lucifer, Margaret Chardiet, Nika Son, Sicc Puppy

The exhibition format E.N.C (Encounters in Networks and Communities) explores new ways of curating in various physical locations as well as online, sharing moving images situated between experimental music videos, live-performances, and research-based contributions.
date: November 25nd, 2022, venue: mikro, sihlquai 125, 8004 zurich, flyer: jordi theler, logo design: janic fotsch

In the nineteenth verse of “Public Space in a Private Time” (1990), Vito Acconci contemplates intangibility and pop music as a new model for public art. What is at stake here are the levels of reading sound as both a commodity and a public object, weaving its historical contexts into our common perception of it as an object that “is” space, and that one carries with them across places. The matter of sound has the ability to cross walls; it bleeds into people’s lives as a melody or as a consequence of movement, as an echo of life. Though sound (or music), considered in Western culture as a production or a reproduction of musical or sonic events, only really exists through the act of listening. Recording a space, its sound or its image, automatically conjures the presence of absent objects. The object itself is always present.

The model for a new public art is pop music. Music is time and not space; music has no place, so it doesn't have to keep its place, it fills the air and doesn't take up space. Its mode of existence is to be in the middle of things; you can do other things while you're in the middle of it. You're not in front of it, and you don't go around it, or through it; the music goes through you, and stays inside you. It's a song you can't get out of your head. But there are so many voices, too many songs to keep in your head at once. You walk down the street and hear one song from the soundbox you carry with you, another song blaring out of an audio speaker in front of a store, one more through an open bedroom window, yet another coming off the radio in a car that speeds by another car with still one more, and then another, as the driver changes stations. This mix of musics produces a mix of cultures; of course pop music exploits minority cultures, but at the same time it "discovers" and uncovers them so that they become born again to sneak into and under the dominant culture. The music of the seventies was punk; the music of the eighties was rap. Each of these types is music that says: you can do it, too. You don't need a professional recording studio; anybody can do it, in the garage and in the house. The message of punk was: do what you can do and do it over and over until everybody else is driven crazy. The message of rap is: if something has been done better by somebody else, who had the means to do it, then steal it, and remix it; tape is cheap and airspace is free. The message of punk and rap together is: actions speak louder only because of words, so speak up and talk fast and keep your hands free and your eyes wide open and your ear to the ground and be quick on your feet and rock a body but don't forget to rock a culture, too.

Acconci, Vito. "Public Space in a Private Time." Critical Inquiry 16, no. 4 (1990): 900-18

"I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me." [1]

“... where at first 'blue' had been good enough, he now wallowed in 'azures,' 'ceruleans,' and 'ultramarines.'” [2]

The official video for Orlando , the titular track from Geneva-born experimental pop musician Nelson Beer’s forthcoming EP, premieres today. The full project will be released on OOO Audio in spring. [3]

Manifesting itself as an audio-visual collage of academic and non-academic writings and research materials, inherited familial memories, and encoded information, Orlando revolves around photogrammetry, a process by which three-dimensional information can be extracted from photographs. Orlando takes 'past' moment as starting points through which to generate an image of a greater whole, thereby pondering the potential effects of the indexical present - a direct attentional focus on "the concrete, immediate here-and-now," such as the reaction to a moment of sudden death - and the afterlives of this event. [4]

Between 2:24 and 2:54, we look unto the crouching artist as the frame pulls outwards in a counter-clockwise motion. An impossible network of jagged floating boulders and hexagonal pillars of grass swirl around him, slowly. Orlando suggests that the potential for split seconds to be deciphered according to their future documentary remains is contingent on the acceptance of memory lacunae as evidence. [5] This facet of the work complements, rather than denies another of the artist's interests: that machines, as supplements and symbolic mechanisms, allow us to see and (re) distribute vision. [6]

Orlando indulges the artist's desire to return to forensis, or “forensic architecture,” a concept established by Eyal Weizman and Susan Schuppli, founding directors of the Center for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, of which the artist is an alumnus. By inverting the direction of the forensic gaze, Weizman and Schuppli explain, a field of action can be designated in which individuals and organizations can detect and confront state violations. [7] This practice denotes the possibility for objects to bear witness to human violations. It asks how we can acknowledge the testimonies of non-human objects, whether in presence or absentia. 

http://www.fromheretillnow.com/orlando is an ongoing formalist archival project dedicated to exploring the capacity for consecutive sounds, transcripts, images, films, and texts to affect one another according to their literal and thematic proximites. 

Coordinated by Marc Jauss, Olamiju Fajemisin, and Nelson Beer.

More soon.

Orlando was composed, produced and mixed by Nelson Beer
Mastered by Heba Kadry
Drawing by Alice Rabot
OOO Audio © 2021

Written and directed by Nelson Beer & Pablo Padovani
Produced by Mireille Productions
Producer - Léo Burgat
Line Producer - Emile Olagne
Location Manager - Charlotte Schaeffer
Director of Photography - Yoann Suberviolle
Focus Puller - Zoé Mention
Key Grip - Pierre Frink
Wardrobe, Props & Make-up - Alice Rabot
Make-up adviser - Ruby Mazuel
Editing - Gwen Ghelid
Photogrammetry & 3D Modeling - Valentin Gillet
Coloring - Guillaume Schmitter

[1] Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph , trans. Normam Thomas Di Giovani in collaboration with the author. First published in Sur (1945).
[2] Ibid
[3] OOO stands for Objects Oriented Ontology, a Heideggerian school of thought that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of non-human objects. OOO also stands for On Our Own and Out Of Office.
[4] Adrian Piper, 'Xenophobia and the indexical present I: essay', in idem: Out of Order, Out of Sight: Selected Writings in Meta-Art, 1968-92 , Cambridge MA 1996, I, p.247; first published in M. O'Brien and C. Little, eds: Reimaging America: The Arts of Social Change , (Philadelphia 1990)
[5] Eyal Wiezman, Ines Weizman, 'Before and After: Documenting the Architecture' (Strelka Press, 2014)
[6] Christa Blüminger. Introduction. Reconnaître et Poursuivre , by Harun Farocki, ed. Christa Blümlinger, (TH.TY Théâtre Typographique 2002, 2017)
[7] Ed. Forensic Architecture (Project), House of World Cultures, Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth , (Sternberg Press, 2014)

Lead: Mathis Neuhaus
Interview: Marc Jauss
Image: © Oskar Pawelko

There are many approaches to running a record label. Finding a niche and sticking with it is one, sprawling out into many different directions another. Yegorka’s mode of operation is the latter. The label is run by DJ and producer Tobias Lee Christensen aka Why Be and Dan DeNorch, who founded the now defunct party series and label Janus with Michael Ladner. Taking an anything-goes approach to musical source material, Christensen and DeNorch do not give preference to certain genres or styles but often are drawn to projects with clearly traceable artistic identities. They see themselves mostly as facilitators for music they find “inspirational,” as Christensen told Marc Jauss of fromheretillnow. Their conversation, which was conducted on Yegorka’s home turf in Berlin, is printed below.

Yegorka’s approach resulted in a catalogue abundant with artists the label and its founders worked with over the years. Aside from releasing music by artists like Mechatok [see zweikommasieben #16], Ryong, Yantan Ministry [see zweikommasieben #15], and Angel Wei, Christensen also has his own collaborations to show for, including projects with Elysia Crampton and Chino Amobi, and for a recent video he worked with photographer Nadine Fraczkowski and cinematographer Catherine Pattinama Coleman. He traces some of these connections in the following conversation. Christensen also talks about what led him to move from Copenhagen to Berlin, and how his approach to collaboration was shaped by his years using platforms like Myspace and his experience as co-organizer of party series like Janus in Berlin and House of Mixed Emotions in Zurich.

the interview was originally conducted for issue #24 of zweikommasieben, which also featured artists like Nazar, Soraya Lutangu Bonaventure, Milyma, and more, and can be bought here.

Marc Jauss: What projects are you working on at the moment? 

Tobias Lee Christensen: A few. How they come together is very different. I’m currently working on two projects for Yegorka. It’s time-consuming work, building it up from the bottom. Artists often deliver finished material, and I basically only have to say “yes” or “no,” but the current project is different: I’ve approached people, and we’re doing the whole thing from scratch. It’s hard to talk about because it’s literally happening in real time. Our only rule is that things take the time they need. I would rather wait for something to develop into something good then to enforce a strict deadline.

MJ: I would like to know more about your background. Where are you from, and what brought you to Berlin in the end? I heard that you used to live in Copenhagen.

TLC: I grew up in the suburbs outside of Copenhagen. As soon as I graduated high school, I went to the city. I never actually thought I was going to move to Berlin because I used to come here for many years. I had a lot of friends who often invited me to play at their parties. I was using Copenhagen as a base and went wherever I needed to be, but then life left me in a situation without a place to stay. I split up with my partner, and a friend from Munich offered that I could stay at his flat in Berlin. I ended up here by chance, and I’ve been here ever since.

MJ: How did you experience Berlin’s and Copenhagen’s music scenes?

TLC: Most importantly, Berlin has a lot more spaces, which changes everything. One thing I kept hearing was that it wasn’t a problem to have a lot of friends in the music scene. Here in Berlin, they would be supportive of each other, whereas in Copenhagen, people are basically fighting for one space. Berlin offers more spaces, more opportunities, and, of course, more events. It’s less competitive in that regard, which is not to say that there’s no competition here, just that the city is so much bigger and more international. And I really like the sense of community that comes with that.

But Copenhagen also has changed since I came to Berlin. People collaborate and find each other in ways that weren’t happening when I was still there. Now, for example, I see the club scene organizing events with the noise crowd, and it really warms my heart to see this because it was something I missed while I was there. In that time, everything was segregated and tiny. It didn’t make sense to me that one small group of people refused to do stuff with another small group.

MJ: I’ve experienced similar things in Zurich: a little town filled with isolated micro-scenes. Nowadays, everything comes together naturally. What do you think are the reasons for this?

TLC: This probably goes back to the 1990s and early 2000s when it was still common to have clearly separated genres. A typical American high school canteen situation with the skaters in one corner and the goths in the other. This has changed a lot, I think. Today, people don’t take pre-defined roles and genre definitions seriously anymore. The 1990s were all about identifying yourself with one fashion trend or one musical genre. I’m sure that inspired a lot of people who came up in this period, but over time, people realized that this was restricting one’s character rather than defining it.

Yegorka marble logo by Kyselina

MJ: By the way, I am to send you warm greetings from Lhaga Koondhor. She was one of the people responsible for the House of Mixed Emotions series, and you were one of the first acts to play the series in 2011! Can you give me a little insight into that time? 

TLC: It was really the beginning of all these parties that identified themselves by not being genre specific. It also was a time when Instagram didn’t exist. Well, it did, but it wasn’t as crucial to one’s career as it is today. I remember back then I got booked by both Janus and by H.O.M.E because of three or four tracks on my SoundCloud. I don’t want to be too nostalgic, but it was a very special time in the sense that you had no idea what people looked like. It was all based on music.

MJ: Over the years, you’ve worked with some interesting people. I am thinking about Demon City [Break World Records, 2016], for which you collaborated with Elysia Crampton. How did that come about? 

TLC: The majority of people I collaborated with over the last ten years I met in a period from around 2007 to 2010. It was this weird Myspace time when I literally met everyone. I think that’s also why I still have strong connections with the people I met in this time. This was before any of us got any attention or could benefit professionally from just being friends. Demon City was Elyisa and my first official release although we had already done things together before that. The collaboration was always there, in the way we communicated and trusted each other. It was almost telepathic because we never sat down and decided to officially do something. For Demon City, Elysia just decided to include a lot of her friends to honor these friendships.

MJ: How do you feel about collaborating nowadays?

TLC: There’s definitely a lot more business that goes into it. People are getting more professional and are in a position to make money from their art. I have absolutely no problem with that, but sometimes I just feel the industry’s pressure at work, to which I’m a little bit allergic. I have seen how it has driven people apart, and I have also experienced how it complicates things. I sometimes wished that things happened more fluently or more effortlessly. I have also seen people get ripped off. I personally always aspired to make sure I have the option to not only think about the profits, but everyone is doing it their own way – that’s for sure. And I totally respect everyone’s personal drive or what they consider important in being a professional musician.  

MJ: Let’s talk about Yegorka. You run it together with Dan DeNorch, who also runs the label and the event series Janus. What was your motivation for starting the label?

TLC: I met Dan because I was familiar with Janus as a label and party series. He had booked me for the second Janus party ever, and since then he basically kept on booking me for the party as sort of resident. That was the beginning of our friendship, and I really saw a unique quality in what he was trying to do.  

MJ: What exactly was that quality? 

TLC: Janus possesses a strong sense of taste and a strong belief in doing it their way. It was cool because it was never trying to be cool. It was deeply defined by not being bound to one specific genre, culture, or type of artist. At some point, I think Dan personally didn’t feel like he could go further with Janus, which basically ended in 2017. That was officially the last Janus event at Berghain.

With Janus as a label, it’s been a comparable trajectory, so he asked me if I wanted to collaborate with him on something new. Dan lets me do what I guess he felt he couldn’t do anymore, but we are still finding our roles. From time to time, he gives me input or suggestions about artists or interesting music he has discovered, but my acquisition is mainly based on the people I meet or find inspirational or that I think could do something for us. After that, we discuss what can be done for the different projects. Looking back, Yegorka really came out of Janus, I think. Basically, Dan offered me his platform and his know-how in terms of music publishing, and I was able to plug my ideas into his existing infrastructure. I always felt very safe during this whole process.

Picture: Hee-Seong Han

MJ: Yegorka’s 16th release Flagrant Hours by Kittisol came out recently. It is a collaboration between Alexis Chan and Jackie Poloni aka Yantan Ministry. Can you shine some light on the process behind this release?

TLC: I was supervising this project from a non-access point of view and was just kept in the loop on what was going on. I have no problem art directing for myself, but I don’t like to tell other people what to do or how to do it. I like to think that I can trick people into doing something without actually giving them any specific direction, but Jackie and Alexis did Flagrant Hours completely on their own. It only came to my attention when it was already 90% done, which I really like. It gives me a feeling that it comes only from the artists, and I like artists to drive both the visual and the sonic side of the project.

Alexis and Jackie both have their own solo projects, but they really found each other for this one. It was a funny way of perceiving one’s past, present, and future. They were able to focus on exploring new territory by making use of a specifically vocal take on music. It was their first time using their voices as an instrument. In that sense, I helped giving them an additional kind of artistic identity that wasn’t defined by a trend or a demand because there was no demand for anything. They built a micro-universe for themselves.

MJ: Does it often work like this?

TLC: Over the years, people started to understand that I prefer not to be part of that creative process for reasons I’ve already explained. I’m afraid that I end up influencing things too much. For all the recent projects, the artists sent fully formed and developed things, and then it’s just on me to decide whether I want to take that further or not. Then again, the two things I’m working on right now are different because I asked the artists if they would like to develop something for me. There is no common thread or process. I don’t actually have a preference on how we develop the releases. I am essentially just a big fan of music and get inspired by people who have a strong drive and a strong vision. I like to sit back and enjoy something that visually and sonically is already done — and done well.

MJ: Last year, you released your album Caged Animal [Yegorka, 2020]. For the track “Dragged,” you collaborated with Elias Rønnenfelt from the band Iceage. This resulted in a video that was directed by Catherine Pattinama Coleman. In it you are tied up on a chair bathed in shimmering red light…

TLC: I had been planning a video shoot for a long time, but the pandemic kept preventing me from realizing it. Under normal circumstances, I would have wanted to shoot the video in one setting in Copenhagen. What ended up happening was that parts of it were shot here in Berlin, and parts of it were shot by Catherine in Copenhagen. Catherine is a professional cinematographer and was pregnant at the time, which made it even more challenging. I was really afraid of overworking her, but she was really into the project and also suggested her sister Ribka as an editor for the video. In Berlin, Hannya did the rope scene, and the visual cinematography was done by Nadine Fraczkowski.

What you see in the video is actually these four people: Nadine, Ribka, Hannya, and Catherine. It’s all their ideas coming together. It might be the one thing I have ever done for which I never at any point knew how it was going to turn out, and I never really had a clear result in mind other than incorporating what they all brought to the table. I have to say that I become a very evil dictator when it comes to my art and music. When that’s the case, then all the solidarity and all the smoothness and tenderness goes out the window. The video for “Dragged” is maybe the one time I wasn’t dictating or telling anyone what to do. I’m still very pleased with how it came out, and I’ve also learned a lot from it. 

Dragged Movie Poster by Dan DeNorch

MJ: The pandemic has shown us that there are other new ways to work with people. Where do you see opportunities (and threats) for the future of collaborative work?

TLC: How we do things on the label didn’t change during the lockdown. We actually did more releases during 2020 than in any of the previous years. Our setup is so simple that we weren’t logistically challenged by the lockdown. The shoot for “Dragged” was a very reassuring experience in that sense. If somebody is going to limit us, it’s going to be us ourselves. In that sense, we are our own ecosystem. I am also seeking ways to make the label profitable – not in the sense of me personally being able to take any money out of it, but I want to be able to offer more opportunities. I want to be able to do more ambitious things without compromising our vision. That is something that I am still struggling with: how to raise more funds without compromising in regard to the way we do things. Essentially, I want to give people the best opportunities to present their work in the most nuanced way possible.

latest yegorka releases:

buy zweikommasieben #24:

zweikommasieben is a Swiss magazine that has been devoted to the documentation of contemporary music and sounds since the summer of 2011. Released in print twice a year it features columns, essays and interviews and contributions by artists.

the playlist is part of a mix series curated by fromheretillnow for the swiss art magazine PROVENCE. Photos: Michael Meier and Yesh

In the Age of hyper energy im still driven by the light.
Sunrise. Sunset. Repeat.
In the first hour of waking when the hormone levels peak, I know I gotta get going and leave the maze behind.
Do the trees really know more than we do?
Palms facing skyward.
Happy at midnight.
I will visit this place in my dreams again and again.

Fresh reset greetings,
YESH

YESH is a tibetan singer / performing artist born and raised in Switzerland, based in New York City. In 2020 she released her debut EP hours 2147 with Pique Projects. Her latest work 49 days - a dance theater piece created together with the collective xenometok - premiered in early 2022 at the Theaterhaus Gessnerallee in Zürich. YESH recently performed at Le Consulat and Port de Suffren in Paris, at Zentralwäscherei ZW Zürich and at the Rubin Museum of Art in NYC.

images: © rob kulisek
text: david lieske, rob kulisek
music: misanthrope ca

East Hampton, NY, 2016

Through a fateful encounter in the Fall of 2015, a special opportunity presented itself to us:
The offer was to rent a worn-out mansion that was located near the famous town of Amagansett in East Hampton during the month of January 2016 for very little money.
All we would have to do was to make the estate, which was up for sale and subsequent demolition, accessible to potential buyers.
The Chance to explore the seasonal dark-side of the southern shores of Long Island which are internationally known for their sun-drenched beaches and cheerful summer hideouts to Manhattan’s Elite triggered pleasurably dark fantasies of icy solitude and isolation in both of us.
Amagansett in the depth of winter seemed like an almost too ideal equivalent of frost-bearing, Scandinavian coastal towns that we had read about in the context of the development of a particularly atmospheric and grim guitar sound, known as Black-Metal.
Two years before we had started our first efforts to create an American version of this abysmal ambience, that we both adored for many years, out of the bedroom of a small house in East Hollywood.
The thrilling present promise of having the chance to chase the unholy reminisces of famous Hamptons’ She-tragedies such as the mystery-shrouded deaths of glamorous women like Edith Metzger or Edie Bouvier Beale invigorated our fantasies to continue what we had started in California.
Little did we know that only a few days after our arrival at this disheartened wooden complex we would find ourselves trapped in a polar vortex of historic dimensions.
Imprisoned by an unreal site of frozen remains to a highly developed civilisation that seemed to have vanished entirely in view of these inhumane conditions we began a routine of expedition like walks and daily experimentations with musical equipment.
The ever-present odour of black mould from the basement bathrooms found itself easily up into the attic, where we had set up a provisional studio.
This special room was octagon shaped and seemed suitable as the hidden chapel to a demonic death cult. Small-sized triple bunk beads to each side intensified a ghostly presence of past days children’s laughter and terrible accidents that must have happened on the narrow and more than steep stairs leading up to this bedroom of evil dreams.

Misanthrope ca - lp, 2016

mix: fromheretillnow
visuals: marc jauss
screening: twitch tv
twitch.tv/vereinzzzz

ALOBHE - GLORYBOX [unreleased] CHANNEL GEKKO - ENGEL 62 [unreleased]
YANTAN MINISTRY - SANGUINE [Yegorka] JENNIFER WALTON - NEO RENAISSANCE GIRL [All Centre] SPICE BARONS - AROMATIQUE [Silent] BLAU GRISENC - LOS LUGARES REITERADOS [self-released] XYLA - WAYS [Leaving Records] TERZERO - MODUM A [self-released] COMPLETE WALKTHRU - LEAVIN' CHURCH EARLY [Numbers] TETTIX HEXER - VISIBLE WINDS OF SPRING [Janushoved] L.D.R - UNTITLED [unreleased] ANIMA - GLAD U CAME [self-released] THE BLESSED KITTY - EDM LIFESTYLE [Experiences Ltd ] LORD OF THE ISLES - WAITING IN ARISAIG [Whities]

Artist: Christian Naujoks
Album: Wave
Label: DIAL
Video by: Sung Tieu

The works of Tieu and Naujoks are interwoven in a complex and contradictory way. It is not their similarity, but the tension between their different artistic practices that characterizes their live performance - the contradiction in the widely separated coordinates of their expression and also their geographic location.

The latest works of the young artist Sung Tieu are influenced by her visit to the mountainous region of Bạch Mã in her home country of Vietnam. Her prose and experiments on the traditional Vietnamese stringed instrument Đàn Bầu underlie the wordless universes created by the Hamburg musician and artist Christian Naujoks. His melancholic soundscapes are based on short, concise melodies and the use of relays and echo effects on the guitar.

In response to Naujoks' recent compositions on his album "Wave," Tieu filmed a short video of snapshots of a tropical beach on her trip, which serves as a background for their performance together.

event: cardinal & nun, back 2 back massacre, garage 29
images: © marc jauss