Avsnitt
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Lotta Wennäkoski is a Finnish composer based in Helsinki. She has won praise and has been described as a lyrical Modernist and post-Expressionist.She studied violin in Budapest in her youth. She also studied music theory & composition at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki as well as the Royal Conservatory of The Hague under Louis Andriessen.
Wennäkoski launched her career composing for radio plays and short films. Her breakthrough was her performance at the Musica Nova Helsinki festival in 1999. Her work consists of orchestral, chamber and vocal works, many of which are performed worldwide. Notable works include Sakara for orchestra (2003), the flute concerto Soie (2009), which was one of the recommended works at the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers in 2012, Verdigris for chamber orchestra (2015), commissioned by The Scottish Chamber Orchestra, & the harp concerto Sigla (2022) for Sivan Magen & the Finnish RSO, which was awarded the Gramophone Award 2023 for the contemporary music category.
Wennäkoski was the artistic director of the Tampere Biennale festival in 2008 & 2010, composer-in-residence of the Tapiola Sinfonietta in 2010–2011 & designed the program of the Avanti! Summer Sounds festival in 2017.
Meanwhile, Heikki Nikula is no slouch either. He’s a Finnish musician from Seinäjoki, a small city in the southwest of Finland. He plays numerous wind instruments, percussion & harp but is most known for his work on bass clarinet. He is one of the only proponents of the bass clarinet as solo instrument & has a special fondness for free improvisation.
He graduated from the the Sibelius Academy & joined Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra in 1991, for whom he continues to perform. He also works with the renowned Finnish chamber orchestra Avanti! & the Free Okapi ensemble. He has also performed on numerous Finnish film & series soundtracks inc. the Battle for Finland. He has recorded 2 CDs of solo music for the instrument – Hoepnadium & Piping Down the Valleys Wild. He has been a member of the Helsinki Filharmonia since 1991, & is one of the original members of the renowned Finnish chamber orchestra "Avanti!."
Sound collage backdrop: b/art & Wreck This Mess
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CM Hausswolff: Immersion at the Junction of Electronics & Nature 32
"I was thinking about immersion & that word – when you become engulfed with something, when you sink into something & you feel that you are a part of something."
Carl Michael von Hausswolff [also known CM Hausswolff & personally known as Mickey] was born in Sweden in 1956. He’s unusual in that he readily admits he is a NONmusician musician, untrained in any instrument, but still able to make music with available electronic gadgets.
He is both a soundsmith & visual artist, working intuitively in the area of where sound meets light. He uses recording devices such as the video camera, tape deck, radar, sonar. He investigates electrical currents and frequencies & how these relate to architectural space. His electronic voice phenomenon [EVP] recordings, proposes conjuring up voices of the dead through radio signals much like Moriconi proposed.
His work has appeared at prestigious platforms & festivals such as Manifesta, documenta, the Venice Biennale, & many others.
His list of audio and visual work is long, esoteric and intriguing with provocative titles like "800 000 Seconds in Harar," "The Wonderful World of Male Intuition," & "There Are No Crows Flying Around the Hancock Building.” He is also a curator and, if that isn’t enough, he is King Michael l, one of several Kings of Elgaland-Vargaland.
This conceptual or conjectural nation, co-created with Swedish artist, Leif Ellgren is a state of mind, an art project – that covers a great deal of territory.
Although they first met in the late-70s, they came to know each other in the 1990s, when Charlie was based in Copenhagen for a time. They met in Gothenberg at Radium, an art gallery at the time. It would later evolve into a magazine, an independent record label establish in 1983, an organization that presented a film festival, a computer music festival, screenings, and exhibitions & also had their own recording & video editing studio, which paralleled the work Charlie was doing in New York with the New Wilderness Foundation established in the Ear Inn where they hade their own studio, cassette label & magazine.
Samples PlaylistBoo Wa Wa Wa • Charlie MorrowDay • CM von Hausswolff Brigati Music • Charlie MorrowSong of the Youths • StockhausenFlooded Lamphun Temple & Confused Hawks • CM von HausswolffHour of Changes • Charlie Morrow Water Drums • Baka PygmiesKoilinen • Pan Sonic Ramayana Melukat • CM von HausswolffAmplified Piano • Charlie MorrowNY USA • Serge Gainsbourg
Selection of topics covered: immersion, ski slope ambience, flotation tanks, EVP, Vienna, rock ‘n’ roll, Radium label, academic training vs DIY, sine wave generators, Stin Hensen, Stockhausen, drone music, Guatarri & Deleuze, rhizomes, non-musician musicianship, nature as inspriation, MAGA, minimal music, joy of collaboration, Fripp-Eno, meeting in NY in late 70s, artfulness of life, Sweden, Lamonte Young, Steve Reich, Pansonic, oscillosopes, color field work, Lord Byron’s poetry, open to influx of information, acceptance, Sufism, Finland, Finnish Sisu or perseverance, Leif Ellegren, EVP, drones, facing fear, humility, computer music, American exceptionalism ...
mix by b/art - Wreck This Mess
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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In the early 1960s, Poet & multimedia artist Gerd Stern & friends Michael Callahan & Steve Durkee founded USCO (an acronym for Us Company or the Company of Us). It became a burgeoning cooperative group of artists, poets, filmmakers, engineers, & composers who worked out of an old church in Garnerville, New York, north of NYC.
It is here that they emerged as probably the first producers of multimedia happenings, of immersive & oozing light shows, ephemeral performances that became all the rage during the height of hippie-LSD times. Part hippie, part beatnik, part Black Mountain, part Eastern mysticism, part fluxus, part political leftist, & part new music, they adhered to collective & inclusive artistic practices & preferred to work under the USCO name rather than as individual artists.
USCO utilized unique new uses for lighting, colors, projections, film, audio, & live performances to create multimedia & environmental art that included installations with slide projections, closed-circuit television, oscilloscopes, strobe lights, amplifiers, early IBM computers, live performances. This culminate most famously in the Expanded Cinema Festival & Timothy Leary’s Psychedelic Theater & the first multimedia disco called Murray the K’s World that incorporated immersive technology & ideas, allowing audiences – many of whom may have been tripping – to feel as if they were entering a new, immersive, sensory realm.
They’ve performed or exhibited at many great museums, universities & venues including the van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum, Tate Liverpool, Pompidou Center, MIT, & RISDI. The USCO Church was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2016.
I first met Gerd in the 20th Century. Born in Germany in 1928, he emigrated with his parents to the US as a refugee in 1936. Gerd & started crossing paths in New York City in the 1960s. We discovered common ground at a Phill Niblock loft concert in the 1990s. He asked me to write music & sound design for his play, “Lost Cabaret” or “Katandogastrophic,” produced for the 2003 New York Fringe Festival. I asked Gerd to create poetry for a 3D sound work Sky High. It is included in this iMMERSE! podcast.
Playlist mix by Wreck This Mess
When Then • USCOSkyHigh • USCO [Gerd Stern Poem, Charlie Morrow Music]Hubbub • USCOInsurrection Oratorio 1 • Charlie Morrow & Bread & Puppet Theatre Insurrection Oratorio 2 • Charlie Morrow & Bread & Puppet Theatre& various auditory intrusions
mix by b/art - Wreck This Mess
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“I define immersive as the first time I realized that there was a bigger universe than my daily life.”
David First is a many-sided composer-musician having played in Dead Cheese, a hippie guitar band in his youth, performed with Cecil Taylor in Carnegie Hall, produced many records of minimalist drone music some of which were released on Phill Niblockʼs XI label, he’s played in rowdy bar bands, led the no-wavish band the Notekillers, which had a significant influence on Sonic Youth and he has even conducted a Mummerʼs String Band in various Philly parades. The Village Voice once described him as "a bizarre cross between Hendrix and La Monte Young."
He’s performed at most of the avant garde’s hallowed halls including The Kitchen, Bang On A Can, Central Park Summerstage, The Knitting Factory, Tonic, the Deep Listening Institute, CBGBʼs as well as De Ijsbreker in Amsterdam and many festivals throughout Europe. Other projects include working with the sonification of the atmospheric phenomena known as the Schumann Resonances and human brainwaves and other esoteric projects such as The Western Enisphere, a drone and micro-pulse acoustic-electric ensemble.
Samples PlaylistWave Music III - 60 Clarinets & a Boat • Charlie MorrowTape Letter to Michigan • David FirstDead Cheese Twice Daily live @ Cheese Nation 1971 • David FirstHarmonic Dance • David FirstThe Distant Softening Spirit Wave Pulse Tape Girder Interference Etude • Wreck, First & Morrow Live at AmbientChaos • David First Wave Music V - Conch Chorus and Bagpipe • Charlie MorrowTell Tale • David FirstEtude 15 • David FirstDistant Signals • Charlie MorrowPulse Piece • David FirstBlossom Dearie Snippet of her Air • Wreck MixSpirit Voices • Charlie Morrow
Subjects touched upon: drones, bar bands, rock & roll bands, Lamonte Young, Dave’s Waves, Sunview Luncheonette Greenpoint, psychedelic revolution, poet Jerome Rothenberg, bending notes, Douglas Kahn, minimalist tendencies, free jazz, world music, Meteor Crater AZ, the heavens, the Kitchen, Phill Niblock, guitar, oscillators, signal generators, Muddy Waters, electronic music, Dennis Sandole, Hermann von Helmholtz, ancient voltaic cells, Harry Partch, Charles Ives, the minor third, blues, Gert Stern, new age, pseudo-science, Schumann resonances, improv, Discman, electrical engineer father, heterodyning, pursuit of magic, Canal Street ...
mix by b/art - Wreck This Mess
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Robin Sip as a Dutch writer-producer-director and CEO of Mirage3DRobin is best known for productions like Mars 1001, Dinosaurs at Dusk, Origins of Life, Natural Selection & Dawn of the Space Age, which was the world’s first 3D fulldome film. Sip is also an award-winning pioneer of special venue 3D cinema & his Mirage3D is a leading fulldome-VR producer, having produced some 20 fulldome shows.
He began his professional life as a computer engineer, moved on to become a 3D modeler, & eventually, a writer-director. More recently, he has focused His is on the improvement of live action capture for domes, with the design of new camera rigs for films & fulldome-VR productions.
I met Robin over a decade ago in Denver, Colorado when his work was featured by Dan Neefus in the Gates Planetarium at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Since then, we’ve collaborated on the creation of the Planetarium version of the feature documentary Moonwalk One on the anniversary of Apollo 11. It has my music & Sound by Robin.
Topics discussed: love of space flight, astronauts, Apollo 11 & 12, immersive practice & work flow, studied electro-computer engineering, Omniversum, tilted dome, digital projectors, space flight narratives, immersive educational films, fulldome cinema, planetariums, research, Darwin, soundtracks, dinosaur.
mix by b/art - Wreck This Mess
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Phill Niblock migrated to New York after completing a BA in economics at Indiana University, determined to pursue his passions: photography and film, often documenting jazz and modern dance performances. [Playlist below]
But, despite having no formal musical training, he soon found himself inspired by the New York music scene and immersed himself in experimental music, specifically loud sound, microtonal work, minimalism, and drones, producing works of often epic length. Fifty years later we can see how influential he has been in these genres with his copious output of records, videos and films and having won numerous awards along the way.
He has served as director of the Experimental Intermedia foundation for avant-garde music since 1985 and curates the record label XI. Niblock’s films includes a series called The Movement of People Working, which features workers at work in mostly rural setting worldwide.
Niblock has often collaborated with musicians, which include David First, Lee Renaldo, Thurston Moore, Susan Stenger, Al Margolis, and David Soldier as well as with me.
He just turned 90. He and I first connected in the 1970s when he attended Rhys Chatham’s presentation of my Spirit Voices in the Kitchen of the Broadway Central Hotel. He invited me to perform at his loft in Chinatown where he had just begin what has become a historic series. He came to my home sound studio on West End Avenue and West 77th Street for a session. I engineered and removed all the pauses from his solo cello work, making it a drone work. Phill's sunsets shone in our 1987 International TV Solstice. His Glittering Stream graced our Winter Solstice Celebration 2020.
Topics discussed by Morrow and Niblock: immersion, Lenny Tristan, Empress Dowager Cixi, China, rule of thirds, photography, high fidelity, history of hifi, speakers, dark room techniques, New York City water, performances, listening to records as immersion, tenement life, Mingus, Ellington, Monk, alcoholism, loops, file storage, loud sound, tech and gear, sound editing, reel to reel, archives, old trains, wire recorders ...
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Vitiello, a New York native, is an internationally recognized sound artist and mainstay of the New York scene since his early days as a punk guitarist. He has been influenced by Nam June Paik, has collaborated with Scanner, Pauline Oliveros and Frances-Marie Utti. He is also an electronic musician and visual artist. And, according to Morrow, “an absolute Geiger Counter for places.”
In 1999 he did a residency at the World Trade Center managing to capture the Towers’s swaying in the wind and recorded the creaking and cracking of the building’s skeleton. He has produced countless recordings on various labels such as Sub Rosa and has had many solo exhibitions that combine sound, installations, photos and drawings at museums and galleries and has been part of many Group shows including Soundings: Contemporary Score at MOMA, the Whitney and the Sydney Biennale. Vitiello serves as a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in the Kinetic Imaging department.
I met Stephen in the 1980s. We worked together on Nam Jun Paik’s Zapping for Swatch watch. Then on some of Paik’s soundtracks, including "Did George Sand Kill Chopin." Stephen curated the show, New Sounds New York, for the Kitchen in New York. It included the New York unveiling of my patended 3D soundcube with series of commissioned works including his most evocative, “Cinematic, With Crashing Roof,” one of 12 designed for the cube by an array of artists.
Samples Playlist Question Of Temperature • Balloon Farm Electrinocellia • MEM1 + Stephen Vitiello Train to the Plane • Charlie Morrow Brood IX • Stephen Vitiello Breath Chant • Charlie Morrow Bell Bell Horn Horn • Charlie Morrow Mental Radio • Stephen Vitiello Cascoplecia • MEM1 + Stephen Vitiello Genesis Song • Charlie Morrow Iron Oxide • Stephen Vitiello Thinking In, Thinking Out • Stephen Vitiello Trainslation • Steve Roden Spring Helsinki • Charlie Morrow Humming • Charlie Morrow
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Pierre Brand began sound mixing and editing for film in 1994 and has made a name for himself on feature films such as Ghosted and Trial by Fire and on international documentaries of note such as Blue Note A story of Modern Jazz, Absolute Warhola, Wildnis Europa and The Hunt for Gaddafi's Billions.
He attended the Berklee College of Music and currently works out of his Primetime Studio in Hamburg He has collaborated with me on planetarium installations using MorrowSound software. We work together on the International Planetarium Society immersive sound committee, which has created a survey on sound practise in Planetariums.
Playlist iMMERSE! Podcast 26
excerpts of Charlie Morrow trax & examples of Pierre Brand’s sound mixing
The Fire Trial by Fire (Henry Jackman) • Pierre BrandBlue Note A Story of Modern Jazz • Pierre BrandSweeter Times (Henry Jackman) • Pierre BrandABSOLUT Warhola part3 • Pierre BrandYou Can Trust Me Ghosted (Lorne Balfe) • Pierre BrandChant with Watches • Charlie MorrowUnder Suspicion (Henry Jackman) • Pierre BrandAmplified Piano • Charlie MorrowElizabeth (Henry Jackman) • Pierre BrandChoral Bounce • Charlie MorrowGendernauts • Monika Treut
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This is a summer interlude, a special remixed iMMERSE! version of the summer of 2022 broadcast of the Wreck This Mess radio show: Wreck the Drowning World 1249 & serves as a reaction to the countless 2023 summer climate catastrophes that have hit far & wide – including the iMMERSE! & Charlie Morrow archive & headquarters in Vermont.
I’ve been researching flooding & other climate crisis extreme weather globally – & notice that governments, companies & individuals talk the talk, especially for the cameras where their self-aggrandizing lies sound genuine until out of view, companies are dumping harmful chemicals into the waterways & individuals are still buying Hummers, dumping their garbage on the streets under cover of night. They hold onto their entitled pleasure & comfort-driven habits as if there is no tomorrow.
Electronic music + rain + water & sea + Gavin Bryars “Titanic,” global flooding news + leftist analyses + audiobook citations from JG Ballard’s THE DROWNED WORLD to create a mesmerizing sonic pool of beguiling beauty upon which floats the nauseating & heart-wrenching news.
Excerpts :: Base inTRO2final • Charlie Morrow vs bart / Emptied spaces • def / 24H 48 Demo Water Morrow & Remes / Atlantis • nthng / Svalor • Purl / fld-001.2 rain • .foundation / Ten Years of Rainy Autumn • Raflum / Cool Watery Depths • Rod Modell / FEAR FLOOD • B/art / Relaxing ocean waves & beautiful misty beach • OnSite / Butterfly Remix • Halftribe vs Warmth / Falling Mountain • Mount Maxwell / Sea • Delia Derbyshire / Oceanima • Purl /Warm Rain & Sleepy Water • KeepSleep / Cool Cool Water Alt Mix • Beach Boys / Spring Helsinki • Charlie Morrow / Cool Cool Water • Slim Whitman / Swamp Island Remix • Echo Box vs Volunteer / WHALESONG • DF Tram / Something in the Water • Mt Eden Dubstep & Khadafi Dub / Hold Dearly • Fuubutsushi / Space 1.8 • Nala Sinephro • WATER • Beat Pharmacy vs Mutabaruka / Waves Coming In, Surf, Seashore • Charlie Morrow / Walking Waves • Miruga / Lights In Window • 110ml / Out of Source • Alphaxone / Drowned World • JG Ballard / Endless Imbalance • Addex / Mind Bypassed • Respira / Floating • Lauge / Floating World • Anne Lockwood / Cascade (The Deluge) • William Basinski / Water Drums • Union Jack + Baka Pygmies / Thirsty • Orb vs Lee Scratch Perry / On Second Thoughts • Halftribe / Wishing Well • Julianna Barwick / fld-001.1 • .foundation / Last Hymn Sinking of the Titanic • Gavin Bryars
LISTEN to the original expansive version: https://www.mixcloud.com/wreckthismess/wreck-the-drowning-world-1249/
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Tim is a museum designer who transforms the static notion of a museum into something dynamic and engaging. He has worked for Ralph Appelbaum Associates, an award-winning international interpretive planning and exhibition design firm, for over 28 years. He is the director of RAA’s Berlin-based studio.
He has directed the interpretive planning and exhibition design for many major institutions, including the visitor center for Grand Teton National Park in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the Smithsonian’s Arctic Studies Center in Alaska, the First Nations Museum in Oklahoma, the Museums of Ethnology and Asian Art in Humboldt Forum in Berlin, the World Museum Vienna in Austria and is currently leading the design of the new Museum of the Viking Age in Olso Norway.
Subjects discussed: collaborations, immersive environments, Berlin, museum design, Holocaust Museum in Washington, fly fishing, Norway, Montana, Vienna, Cornell, outdoors, bringing museums to life ...
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Gideon D’Arcangelo is a man of many ambitions. His main interests include the integration of virtual and physical worlds, working toward the design integration of physical, media, systems, graphic & content to ultimately create holistic experiences.
He joined Arup’s New York office in 2019 where he is a Principal and serves as the Americas Digital Services Portfolio Leader and a designer of interactive and immersive environments.He has been the VP of Strategy and Communications at ESI Design. He has worked on the Hall of Human Life at the Boston Museum of Science, and the Institute for War and Peace Reporting’s web platform the Reuters Sign at Three Times Square, and the on-island and on-line ancestor search at Ellis Island Ellis Island Heritage experience. Another focus has been the intersection of new technology and musical experience. He is currently a contributing producer for WNYC’s Studio 360. From 2005-2008, he produced the series Listening In on “Weekend America.” In the 1990s, he worked with ethnomusicologist-folklorist Alan Lomax on the Global Jukebox, an illustrated database of world song and dance styles. I met Gideon when he was a youngster, living in upstate New York in the 1970s where his family was based. His father, painter Allan D’Arcangelo – briefly as well-known as Andy Warhol - and mom Sylvia were close friends of my mentor and artistic collaborator, poet Jerome Rothenberg and his anthropologist wife, Diane. Gideon and I were more in touch after his time at University of Chicago and continue through to the present. His interweaving of creative and social threads, his easy and evergrowing technological learning is a driver of this constellation. Aside from the magic Gideon has brought to his own designs he has kept his father's extraordinary art legacy alive.
Playlist of audio samples
A Future Harvest • Charlie MorrowEin Feuer Aus Licht Und Liebe • Die Welttraumforscher vs Klangwart Hamanamah • KlangwartWater & Ocean • Charlie MorrowSalmiana • Marc SloanInsurrection Oratorio 1 • Charlie Morrow & Bread & Puppet TheatreO Yeh Charlie Echomix • Charlie Morrow & b/artLeave With You • 2XMThalys bells + lobby & elevator & hotel ambience + mall muzak + distant trains + crickets + radio signals
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Ville Pulkki’s fame reached the techno avant garde with the adoption of his ingenious VBAP (vector-base amplitude panning) a tool for creating spatial sound. When I met him in Helsinki, I was delighted to discover that behind the techie who developed VBAP, a charming jokester. Since then, I’ve enjoyed his warmth and his efficient organizing of the Acoustics Department at Aalto University, including the 2023 convention of the Audio Engineering Society of Europe. Maija-Leena Remes and I interviewed Ville in his lab where he was studying the acoustic layers of the Earth’s atmosphere. He also talked about his learning to dance at the age of 40 and performing on television for commercials and musical events, where the delight of performance must compete with his delight of invention.
Ville Pulkki is a professor in the Department of Information and Communications Engineering at Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland who has worked in the field of spatial audio for over 25 years. He developed VBAP for his PhD. in 2001 and later, directional audio coding with his research group. He has also made contributions to the perception of spatial sound, laser-based measurement of room responses, and binaural auditory models. He received the Samuel L. Warner Memorial Medal Award from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers and the AES Silver Medal Award. He enjoys being with his family, building his summer house, playing various musical instruments, and acting, dancing and singing in musical ensembles.
Playlist of samples:Score The World contest STW2618 • Ville PulkkiSongs of Flowers and Stones • Charlie MorrowChorale bounce 1 • Charlie MorrowSoundflake orchestral version • Ville PulkkiMusical fractal Kuusi Soundflake instrumental • Ville PulkkiTous les Matins du Monde (Marin Marais) • Jordi SavallElla (1960) • Charlie MorrowUltrasonic spatial superhearing • Ville PulkkiA Future Harvest • Charlie MorrowScruTiny in the Great Round • Charlie MorrowDaydream musical composition • Ville PulkkiBinary sequences Six variations for orchestra • Ville PulkkiWave Music III - 60 Clarinets and a Boat • Charlie Morrow Sun Chant (1975) • Charlie MorrowBat Sounds
Themes discussed: VBAP, perception of spatial sound, early immersive experiences in Finland, experiencing silence, bat sounds, ultrasonic super hearing, physics vs music, esoteric inventions, ambisonics, performing music live.
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Micky Remann is a German media artist and producer of media events. He invented the “Liquid Sound” concept and its installation in various locations with exceptional waters such Bad Orb & Bad Sulza in Germany. They involve participants floating in body temperature salt water where they participate in immersive experiences that includes underwater sounds, music, lights and surround video.
Remann also developed the popular international FullDome Festival at the Zeiss Planetarium in Berlin. It features innovative productions, music and entertainment in the genre of 360-degree, audio-visual media and immersive fulldome theatre performances. He is also a some-time singer, a songwriter, and an author. I met Kicky in Bad Sulza where I could enjoy the underwater sound system. In this podcast Remann discusses his explorations of whale & dolphin languages and his more recent exploits expanding the Liquid Sound concept.
Playlist of samples:Underwater bubble soundsAquasonic • Between MusicPhoning Annea • Charlie Morrow & Annea LockwoodConcert for Fish • Charlie MorrowLive at Liquid Sound • BalsamfieberComet, Fire, Water • Charlie MorrowLiquid Sound Festival 2014 exc • Thomas Kagermann Liquid Sound Festival 2014 exc • Jim NollmanWater, Ocean • Charlie Morrow
Subjects discussed: immersion concerts, salt water flotation, pre-birth experiences, fulldome experiences, first immersive experience at age 3 when he almost drowned in a pond, his sister saw him in a dream-like state and yelled to his mother who ran to save him, mermaids, underwater crystal palaces, temple for underwater listening, communicated with whales of the Pacific Northwest coast with music, environmental opera & symphony, reincarnations as an Orca Whale, body temperature and salt water while simulating the musical experience of whales, underwater concerts, thermos / bad / spas, DJ nights, full moon concerts, Liquid Sound Festival ...
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Today’s iMMERSE podcast is even more unusual than many of the others. I interviewed Elke and Peter Schumann in February of 2020 in their Glover, Vermont home along with Jay Walbert, the archivist for my Archive in nearby Barton, Vermont.
The octagenarian Schumanns immigrated from Germany to New York in 1961 and have led the Bread and Puppet Theater since 1963.
In this podcast, they share their history and artistic politics and bread. As Peter says here: We went around and gave them pieces of bread to eat and found they were a better audience when they were chewing – we liked them better…"
In the beginning of our chat, Peter turns to Elke and says, "When I don’t remember something, you will".
"I will" she says. This happy conversation is ever so dear to me because Elke passed away on August 1, 2021.
I first met Peter in New York in the 1970s through public events maker, Karin Bacon. I first came to the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont in 1968 to work with Fluxus artists Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles.
In the years that followed, I bought some land from them and built a house there in the 1990, the house where I now live and am recording this introduction. Since 1990, my relationship with Bread and Puppet and the Schumann in the neighboring town of Glover continued to grow.
The Bread and Puppet Theater engages people, after filling them with hand-milled sourdough bread. They work environmentally and for many decades now, they've been making amazing use of the landscape, natural light changes and natural acoustics. Puppets from tiny to gigantic, signs, banners and hand-made art have always animated their events. Their roadside museum is filled with decades worth of their fanciful performance objects from their local, national and international pageants.
The tradition of handing-out bread always guarantees good spirits and an enthusiastic audience ready to be entertained by the humor, irony, politics, pageantry and their deep concerns for humanity. But let’s just let them tell their own story.
Topics covered in podcastJohn Cage, Merce Cunningham, Claes Oldenberg, anti-Vietnam war protests, Judson Church, Living Theatre, Red Grooms, Stefan Brecht, Tompkins Square Park, Lower Eastside, Daily street muggings of the Bread & Puppet performers, street performances, Grace Paley, volunteerism, Burning Man, War Resisters League, Strike for Peace, Vermont, Barton, Glover, Northeast Kingdom, Socialist pageants, searching for clay, puppet historian, John Bell, Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, Earth People Park, Burke, pianist Karl Schwartz, Sheffield, baking rye bread, summer Bread & Puppet performances in Vermont, homemade clay bread oven, May Day, Pageant Park, Crystal Lake, Peter Schumann’s sculptures, the Bread & Puppet Museum, Sheffield River clay wall, The Charlie Morrow Archive ...
Samples playlist:Insurrection Oratorio • Charlie Morrow / Strange Circus • Lee Volfoni / Carnival Of Souls • Verne Langdons / Wonder Bread Commercial 1950s / Bread and Puppet Theater 2021 • Tetsuro Hoshii / Brother Bread Sister Puppet • Grace Paley / Grosse Fuge • Charlie Morrow / Fellini’s Circus • Daniele Benati / Kiddie Land • Prelude to a Nightmare
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iMMERSE! 19 Charley Morrow interviews Chris Wangro
Today we talk with my long-time friend & co-conspirator in public events, Chris Wangro. We met through the New City Department of Parks, where he just had been hired as events coordinator. My colleagues and I at the New Wilderness Foundation were producing a summer solstice celebration in New York's Central Park. Chris had, at the time, the early 1980s, just returned from working in Europe with experimental rock band Henry Cow. We have continued to make things happen to the present-day.
Chris Wangro started out as the ringmaster of a one-man circus and rose to become the tzar of Special Events for the City of New York in the 1980s.
These days, he works as a Sought-After Public Space Strategist who pursues the improved design of public space, employing placemaking, community-building strategies that are enhanced by his PASSION FOR BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER IN JOYFUL, DYNAMIC, AND UNEXPECTED WAYS — all across the globe. He has produced countless prestigious events for audiences from intimate to massive including festivals, cultural programs, presidential summits, NASCAR rallies, papal visits, Dolly Parton conerts, pachyderm parades and art festivities worldwide. The event we produced was broadcast internationally.
Topics discussed: immersion, VR vs real immersion, the park as ultimate immersive experience, the circus as a tangible immersive experience, solstice events in Central Park, PT Barnum, concert hall vs informal space performance, immersive experiences are as old as mankind, what makes a good circus, magic tricks, experimental & political performance, live events & festivals, feeling the space, Olmstead, improv, homemade musical instruments, independent & noncorporate events.
Interview Transcript to Follow
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Charlie Morrow: The Magnetic Still Point
[hors-serie iMMERSE! podcast]
Hello, I’m Charlie Morrow. Welcome to iMMERSE! & our conversations on immersivity. Today is a still point. One of those moments when time seems to have stopped.
I’ve been moving further & further north from my origins in New Jersey, US & art & business beginnings in New York City. As a 7 & 8 year-old, my summers in Maine began my north-o-tropia. In 1968, I visited Dick Higgins & Alison Knowles at their Something Else Press workshop & home in Barton, Vermont.
In the 70s, I bought property there & in the 80s built a sugar house, where maple sap is boiled to become maple syrup, in the 90s I built a Vermont home in the sugar woods, the local name for a forest of maple sugar trees.
On my first trip to Lapland in 1986, I had come the furthest north I’d ever been. It was late autumn with light snow. In the night light, as I drove north through Finland toward Kat Kat Keino, I appeared to drive past giant, very wide, dark trunked trees, separated by narrow passages of white light. I came to understand that these were tiny trees & wide expanses of tundra! Still points can be just like this, moments when life turns inside out.
There’s a ready connection to what some call vertical time. Time when the past & the present & the future are one. Music & sound, like words & images, open the mind to immersion & to time travel. Human communication starts with gestures & graphic images evolve into writing & printing, photography & sound recording, visual & sonic transmission.
Memory & imagination starts with capturing experience, evolves storing selected information & distilling information.
The phrase still point appears in T.S Eliot’s poem “Burnt Norton”: “At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. & do not call it fixity, Where past & future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards.”
Medically speaking, the still point is a period of time when the movement of brain activity is not apparent. This temporary cessation of motion can last from a few seconds to a minute or two. It is thought that still points occur spontaneously as well as being able to be induced.
& then there is the vanishing point, which Wikipedia tells us is “The point at which parallel lines receding from an observer seem to converge. The point in linear perspective at which all imaginary lines of perspective converge. The point at which a thing disappears or ceases to exist.
Poet Armand Schwerer writes of an Aleut shaman’s statement to anthropologist Franz Boas: “When I do the ceremony just right & the setting sun light is just right I disappear.” Today is a still point. One of those moments when time seems to have stopped...
All iMMERSE! texts & transcripts available here: https://www.charliemorrow.com/immerse-podcast.html
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This is a relaunch of immerse! 6 with updated information on the Notre Dame renovations
Brian Katz, acoustican, CNRS Research Director at Sorbonne University’s Institute Jean Le Rond d’Alembert Sound Lab, is also a specialist in spatial hearing, room acoustics, and virtual reality. The most interesting development in the past few years was his work on the Notre Dame reconstruction with regard to the acoustics in trying to reproduce the century-old sound.
April 2023 will see the launch of a 4-part French podcast series called “Une Fiction Sonore” @ http://alarecherchedenotredame.pasthasears.eu/.
It includes “In Search of Notre Dame” which claims to plunge listeners Victor Hugo mind as he researches his new novel about the Notre-Dames in 1828. Hugo was upset by the poor condition of the cathedral. Hugo leads listeners on an investigation/experiment regarding Notre-Dame’s acoustics and soundscapes over the centuries.
April 2024 will see the streaming (audio or VR), of various works played in Notre-Dame in the simulated historic acoustic conditions appropriate to their composition period, spanning choir, organ, to full orchestras.
He is currently working on a listening study that examines how the acoustics affects the transmission/reception of medieval music via various virtual acoustic conditions
He and his colleagues are also placing a small choir in various virtual acoustic conditions corresponding to different historical states, and examining how their performance is modified.
as well as refining acoustic material definitions by measuring various tapestries, rugs, and other fabrics at the Louvre and National Monument Archives. The results will be incorporated into simulations examining the more decorated periods of Notre-Dame’s history.
Brian FG Katz, Research Director, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, CNRS, UMR 7190, Institut Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, http://www.dalembert.upmc.fr/home/katz
photo of Brian Katz used with permission, Notre Dame Gargoyle by bart plantenga
All iMMERSE! texts & transcripts available here: https://www.charliemorrow.com/immerse-podcast.html
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iMMERSE! is a series of podcasts I produce with Charlie Morrow who interviews colleagues & collaborators on the trending topic of immersion [think sensuround sound +]. For Morrow, it all began in the mother’s belly, eventually migrating to the Ear Inn where he met a pack of audio outliers & ended up with Ear Magazine & the Audiographics series of cassettes + countless events, interventions & concerts that forever changed the mindscape of NYC & elsewhere. We are now embarking on a sidebar Sub-iMMERSING!, which will feature offhand impromptu audio diversions ... here is the short intro to Sub-iMMERSING!
All iMMERSE! texts & transcripts available here: https://www.charliemorrow.com/immerse-podcast.html
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Thomas Kraupe is a German astrophysicist who specialized in x-ray astronomy at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. He’s managed a kind of magical situation by combining math & physics with his love of planetariums & music to create numerous interactive edutainment & art science crossover projects that have attracted artists such as Snap, Heaven 17 & Pink Floyd at several planetariums most recently as Director of Planetarium Hamburg, which he transformed into one of the most advanced planetariums in the world before retiring in late 2022. He continues to serve as a consultant for immersive theaters worldwide. I met Thomas in Colorado Springs, Colorado at one of the first immersive gatherings.His invitation for me to join & chair the International Planetarium Society Committee for Immersive Sound has opened the door for many projects. Charlie Morrow & Thomas again crossed paths at Imersa Montreal 2022.
All iMMERSE! texts & transcripts available here: https://www.charliemorrow.com/immerse-podcast.html
* production & audio backdrop: bart plantenga
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