sound art | PoetryFilm

Mar 10

BBC Radio 3 Hear and Now, Francisco Lopez, live from Cafe Oto, 14 March 2015

I am delighted to be part of the invited audience for this forthcoming BBC Radio 3 live broadcast.

bbc 3

Robert Worby presents a live broadcast of a performance by the Spanish electronic composer and sound artist Francisco Lopez. Appearing at London’s Café Oto for the first time, Lopez will perform two forty-minute pieces, specially created for Hear and Now, mixed and diffused in quadraphonic sound through speakers placed in the four corners of the room. Lopez is recognized as one of the foremost artists working with sound today, and has developed a highly original and uncompromising sonic language that utilizes his own recordings made in some of the harshest natural and industrial environments around the world. This broadcast will be made available as 4.0 surround sound, both live and for 30 days after transmission.

BBC Blindfold

Feb 7

Happy National Libraries Day 2015

To mark the occasion of National Libraries Day 2015, here is a photograph of the Librairie Sound Art at Le Bon Acceuil sound art gallery in Rennes, France, taken in October 2014.

Jul 8

Excerpt from “Characteristics of the New Amplic Phase in Poetry” – the Letterist Manifesto

“By emphasizing again the sound value of poetry, words in their printed form will not have any meaning that people need to labor over deciphering. Consonants will become empty, purely auditory, simple lines having physical meaning only in the listener’s ears. By placing value on effects beyond their usual meaning (in words), poetry will create a new sensitivity. In the place of the cerebral beauty that was created in the chiseling style of poetry, one responds simply with direct auditory understanding. It is then a matter of discovering the unknown abundance of purely oral constructions; of untangling the intangible accents in vocabulary. Poetry is thus liberated from all prose (reading for meaning without regard for tones), to become an instrument of lyrical communication. Poetry realizes its mission which is precisely to broadcast local imperceptibilities and applied suggestions, because poetry was created by individuals who wanted to understand each other, sensing the linguistic vibrations against their palates. Verse is the result of a need to consider the phonetic effects produced in other people’s imaginations. Letterism intends to introduce this beauty, which is limited in the present system of oral communication by lack of rules and even of letters. This is why it is necessary to regulate the stability of auditory frequencies by constructing elements specially designed for the purpose. It is a matter of enriching the possibilities for denoting the changes that occur between sound values. These particles of language, still inferior and unexpressed, must acquire proper signs so that they can develop in their own category, the auditory.”

Isidore Isou