Spectres #02 – Resonances

The fifth issue of the annual publication dedicated to sound and music experimentation, co-published by Shelter Press and Ina GRM – Groupe de Recherches Musicales, on the theme of diffusion and dissemination.

In a 1955 pamphlet entitled Seven Years of Musique Concrète, Jacques Poullin wrote:
"[...] sound projection in a concert hall is a logical extension of the concerns of the Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrète and requires its technicians to properly study multiple aspects of the problems of sonorisation that are often neglected and to date have been almost exclusively the preserve of 'public address' technicians".

From the very beginning, fixed media electroacoustic music in its various guises faced a significant challenge: that of how it could be shared with the public. Even before it was distributed in the form of records, musique concrète, having first been transmitted on radio, soon turned to the concert stage. From the time of its birth, a twofold question was posed: What strategy of diffusion could be used for this music which involves no live performers? But also, how could it make use of existing systems of sound amplification without losing its singular nature, making sure to preserve its own particularities? Identified very early on, these questions have lost none of their pertinence some seventy years later.

Under pressure from the cultural industries and faced with a largely commercially-driven standardisation of formats, it is important today to reaffirm both the singular nature of experimental electroacoustic practices, and the possibilities these practices open up beyond standards and rules.

This calls for an exploration of the vast domain of sound creation in which, here and there, ideas, concepts, and sometimes new works appear that fully embrace the question of the deployment of sound, its dissemination and its expansion. An exploration focussed on the listening experience—a fundamentally musical experience—but adopting a critical approach which may sometimes call into question traditional ways of sharing and listening to sound, the status of listener and creator, and which may even challenge the acoustic integrity of venues and the legitimacy of diffusion systems.

Such are the questions to be addressed here. Sketching out the contours of what is quite obviously a huge subject, this volume, drawing upon a wide variety of points of view, experiences, and ideas, hints at an entire critical apparatus that remains to be developed and consolidated, but is crucial given the primordial importance of the theme of dissemination. For dissemination is the transitional stage par excellence, the uncertain stage that sits between creation and reception while at the same time determining both. It is a critical stage, yet one that is often neglected or, as Poullin says, left to a technical intermediary who may impose conditions entirely exogenous to questions of music and listening.

For these reasons, it seems more necessary than ever to return to the experience of sounds, to once again listen attentively to their trajectories, their diffraction in space, their emergence and their disappearance. To get to grips with the mysteries of their deployment so as to reaffirm that this deployment is essential to them.

Edited by François J. Bonnet and Bartolomé Sanson.
Contributions by Marja Ahti, Scott Arford, Nicolas Debade, Michael Gatt, Tim Ingold, Rolf Julius, Jules Négrier, John Richards, Marina Rosenfeld, Hildegard Westerkamp, Randy Yau.

Spectres is an annual publication dedicated to sound and music experimentation, co-published by Shelter Press and Ina GRM – Groupe de Recherches Musicales.

In the long interview that forms the body of this publication, Éliane Radigue talks about her work, her reflections and underlying research, as well as her historical context. The publication also contains a commented list of works and Radigue's programmatic text on The Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal.

New expanded edition of the book first published in 2019.

Éliane Radigue (born 1932 in Paris) is considered one of the most innovative and influential contemporary composers, from her early electronic music through to her acoustic work of the last fifteen years. Influenced by musique concrète and shaped by regular sojourns in the United States, where she discovered analogue synthesisers, her work unfolds an intensity which is at once subtle and monumental. Through her deep reflections on sound and listening, not only her music but also her working methods have come to shape a widely resonating set of new parameters for working with sound as musical material.

Julia Eckhardt is a musician and curator in the field of the sound arts. She is a founding member and artistic director of Q-O2 workspace in Brussels, for which she conceptualized various thematic research projects. As a performer of composed and improvised music she has collaborated with numerous artists, and extensively with Eliane Radigue. She has performed internationally, and released a number of recordings. She has been lecturing about topics such as sound, gender and public space, and is (co-)author of The Second Sound, Conversation on Gender and Music, Grounds for Possible Music, and The Middle Matter, Sound as Interstice.

Edited by Julia Eckhardt.
Texts by Éliane Radigue and Julia Eckhardt.

The fifth issue of Rab-Rab: Journal of Political and Formal Inquiries in Art includes stories about nation traitors, fierce masses, socialist women struggles, love-forms, psychedelic counter-revolutionaries, workers unions, Brecht fiddlers, jazz surrealism, Soviet trains, and anti-fascism.

Among the contributors to the fifth issue are Anna Thew, Yehuda Safran, Peter Gidal, Cana Bilir-Meier, David Black, Marjo Liukkonen, Alejandro Pedregal, Peter Hallward, Minna Henriksson, and Jyrki Siukonen.

It has also two extensive dossiers. One dedicated to Franklin Rosemont is presented by Joe Feinberg and is introducing some unpublished and difficult to find texts parallel with writings of T-Bone Slim and Joe Hill. The other dossier on Robert Linhart is presented by Tevfik Rada, and it includes a translation of a chapter from Linhart's book on productivism, an article against Western bourgeois dissidents, and an interview with him.

An account of an album about Albania by British experimental musicians made in the eighties. Also involving stories about the Albanian Society, William Bland, A. L. lloyd, RCPB ML, and Cornelius Cardew.

From Scratch is a story of Albanian Summer: An Entertainment, an LP album released by Practical Music in London in 1984. The album was composed by Dave Smith—English experimental composer and musician, figure of the British minimalist scene, explorer of Javanese and Albanian musical traditions with the English Gamelan Orchestra and Liria which he co-founded, and a member of The Scratch Orchestra (with Brian Eno, Cornelius Cardew, John Tilbury, Keith Rowe, Michael Nyman, Michael Parsons, etc.)—, and performed by Janet Sherbourne and Jan Steele, improvised and classical musicians.

Through interviews, archival materials, and hard-to-find essays the publication contextualizes the background of British experimental musicians' interest in socialist Albania. It includes new interviews with Dave Smith and Jan Steele, three essays by Smith on Albanian music and culture, an essay by Gavin Bryars on Smith's music, discussions on the influence of A.L. Lloyd and Cornelius Cardew, and the role of the Albanian Society in the UK. The book introduces new insight into the leftist internationalist background of British experimental music influenced by the work of Cardew. 

Apart from the musical internationalism, the book also includes a section of nine abstract slogans depicting the political and artistic contradictions of socialist Albania; annotated bibliography of books published in different languages on Albania; the collection of images taken from the biweekly Zëri i Rinisë (The Voice of Youth) published in 1984 and 1985.

Au début des années 1990, des groupes inspirés du new jack swing états-unien comme N’Groove, Tribal Jam, et les artistes du label Sensitive marquent les premiers pas du R&B français.

Avec le succès des Poetic Lover et des refrains du rap français, dont certains des plus connus ont été chantés par des artistes R&B, il s’impose peu à peu dans le paysage. Une série d’excellents premiers albums voit alors le jour (K-Reen, Vibe, Matt Houston ou Wallen) avant qu’une seconde génération ne s’impose au tournant du millénaire, avec les tubes et albums de chanteuses de R&B variété. De leur côté, les médias et la critique ont souvent multiplié les malentendus et les marques de mépris face à ces différents artistes, réduisant leur musique à une version édulcorée du rap, une «revanche des filles de cité», ou en la rejetant comme une importation étrangère. Dans ce premier livre à lui être consacré, Rhoda Tchokokam montre la richesse non seulement d’un R&B en français, mais du R&B français comme genre à part entière.

En s’appuyant sur la parole des principales actrices et acteurs de ce mouvement, Rhoda Tchokokam en propose une histoire culturelle ambitieuse. Sa passion pour les chansons de R&B français croise en permanence l’analyse de leur dimension politique : elle examine aussi bien leur manière d’assumer la sexualité que leurs injonctions à la pudeur, les stratégies de formatage commercial que l’affirmation d’une sororité noire dans les clips.

The seventh entry in an ongoing series of anthologies, this book features rare poems alongside new essays and interviews that engage the artists and themes explored elsewhere in Blank Forms' public programming.

Where most of prior entries, including Aspirations of Madness (2020), Intelligent Life (2019), and Music From The World Tomorrow (2018), have foregrounded little-seen or newly translated archival materials, this iteration privileges new texts produced specifically for the publication. These include an in-depth retrospective interview with the idiosyncratic Texan singer-songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen conducted by ICA Philadelphia chief curator Anthony Elms; a conversation between multidisciplinary writers—and longtime friends—Thulani Davis and Jessica Hagedorn on the occasion of Davis's latest poetry collection, Nothing but the Music, recently published by Blank Forms Editions; a recent discussion between composer Sarah Hennies and cellist Judith Hamann about their recent collaboration, which is included on Hamann's Music for Cello and Humming; and a conversation with composer-performers Tashi Wada and Charles Curtis, on the heels of a recent compilation of Curtis's work, Performances & Recordings 1998– 2018, produced by Wada. Each of these interviews shed light on the particularities of the artists' careers and methods in terms both formal and casual, practical and theoretical. 

In addition to these dialogues, this book features new critical reflections on three artists whose work Blank Forms has presented: the legendary jazz percussionist and healer Milford Graves, by Ciarán Finlayson; English multimedia artist Graham Lambkin and his beguiling 2011 album Amateur Doubles, by Alan Licht; and the UK-based experimental music trio Still House Plants, by Joe Bucciero. These articles mine historical, social, and theoretical contexts, filling gaps in the existing literature on the given artist-subjects. New and archival poems and writing about poetry complement these interviews and essays, including rare texts by Davis, Hagedorn, and René Daumal—the latter translated by Louise Landes Levi—and a suite of Auto-Mythological writings commissioned from Chicago-based composer and musician Angel Bat Dawid.