Celebrate Sound: LYFFF 100th podcast episode!

Saturday, 20 November 2021 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm

Intro: Serene Ailment Incantation Praxis from cold_storage  

 

Black Quantum Futurism Time Distortion from Afterlife of Events (2015)

Moor Mother—aka the Philadelphia-based activist, poet, and musician Camae Ayewa—often uses samples and field recordings to write the lives of the oppressed back into history. Ayewa and her partner Rasheedah Phillips, who together form the multidisciplinary collective Black Quantum Futurism, draw inspiration from the mid–20th century blue singers who spoke of police brutality, and seek agency in areas as fundamental as memory. By sampling the dash cam recording of Sandra Bland’s 2015 arrest, their song “Time Distortion” gives the listener fragmented insight into the moment when Bland was stopped by a state trooper for failing to use a turn signal—an arrestable offense in Texas but one that is rarely used. It feels like you’re seeing everything take place from behind the fogged glass of the car window, with Bland’s abrupt, terrified replies to her arresters just barely discernible behind a wall of noise and squealing synth accents. “Time Distortion” makes you a witness to the event, but like a traumatic memory, the moment is skewed and its clarity is faded.

 

Chino Amobi Airport Music for Black Folk (2016) 

When Brian Eno created his classic 1978 album Music for Airports, he perhaps didn’t consider that its placid ambience wouldn’t be reflective of everyone’s experience at the airport. On Airport Music for Black Folk, NON label cofounder Chino Amobi provides an alternative soundtrack that includes recordings of a woman coldly reciting safety instructions, disintegrating rubble, and collapsing machinery. In tapping into the anxiety that black travelers often feel, Airport Music for Black Folk presents genre-crossing ambient and industrial music that is neither relaxing nor entirely in the background. Instead, it’s alienating, hostile, and makes us want to check over our shoulder.

 

Kate Carr For Some Odd Reason (2020)

"I made this piece because I started thinking about piped crowd noise at sporting events, and how widespread this had become during the pandemic. As I delved into this area I noticed there were many different types of sound streams that people were turning to as a source of comfort during this period. This work uses geophone recordings of city structures vibrating in response to footfalls and traffic, and samples four long youtube streams, one of a road, one of the streetscape of New York, one of bar chatter, and one of crowd chants at a football match. All the spoken material are comments left on these or similar long background noise youtube streams during the pandemic, and these are read by many different individuals."


 

Ernie Althoff and Clinton Green Chrysler on the Lawn (Ice Age - 2017)

Live outdoor performance using a variety of acoustic instruments, objects and appropriated objects (BMX bike, cardboard tube, prepared turntable, bird calls, the titular Chrysler), quietly urging a composition into life that subtly interplays with the soundscape of the site. 

Edited from a live performance at the "Inside/Outside" event on 26 October 2014.

EA: BMX bike tyres and spokes, octagonal roller instrument, 2 metre cardboard tube, long hinged wooden box instrument with tin tine ends, car bonnet.

CG: humdrum, car bonnet, cymbals and cups turntable machine, cheap kalimba, bird calls.


 

Scientia vs Bilg Dystopian Present (2021) Perth sound artists

Works of Science Fiction often depict dystopian societies in far futures. These works are a reflection of the idea that aspects of these futures have become realities in the present day.

 

The Shape of Sound Volume 3 (Ice Age - 2013)