From eastbayexpress.com: The Fall of Pirate Cat Radio by David Downs.

The Bay Area’s biggest pirate radio station is off the air, fined $10,000 for illegal broadcast, and its owner threatened with arrest if he returns. But Pirate Cat Radio isn’t going quietly into the night.

Not only is the thirteen-year-old San Francisco station still quasi-legally streaming to half a million listeners online per month, but the 1,200-watt station formerly broadcasting at 87.9 FM is fighting the Federal Communications Commission in federal court. While the station is raising funds to pay its fine with local events this month, it has joined a historic battle under way in Washington, DC over local control of the airwaves. Station owner Monkey (aka Daniel Roberts) says terrestrial radio has failed to serve the public interest, and Pirate Cat is fighting for consumer rights alongside pirates and politicians across America. Read more here .

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Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla :: July 11 - September 6, 2009 :: Opening: July 10; 9:00 pm :: Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin, Schlossplatz, Berlin-Mitte.

Allora & Calzadilla’s new work Compass, conceived specifically for the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin, creates a new spatial and acoustic experience. Dividing the Kunsthalle horizontally, a new level is introduced into the space, inaccessible to the viewer and reducing the grand exhibition hall to less than one third of its normal height. Visitors can only hear the vibrations and sounds of an a capella dancer performing a choreography above their heads. The otherwise empty exhibition space is turned into a huge resonating chamber: “The performer is like a specter that moves through this flat horizontal stretch and whose sonic traces become a type of metrical language – a rhythmic and poetic means of communication with the public below.” (Allora & Calzadilla) Continue reading

Zeppelin 2009: Sounds of Power | Listening of Fear :: December 10-12, 2009 :: Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Culture, Barcelona, Spain :: Call for Electronic Sound Works — Deadline: November 15, 2009.

We dedicate Zeppelin 2009: Sounds of Power | Listening of Fear to thinking about issues that have been insidiously encircling us for some time. We are concerned about signs that might suggest we’re going backwards in terms of hard-won social and intellectual achievements and freedoms. This concern led us to pose the following series of questions, which we hope will go some way to inspiring the pieces presented: Continue reading

Turbulence Commission: Hard Data by R. Luke DuBois [Needs Flash plugin and speakers; wait for data to load] Hard Data is a data-mining, sonification, and visualization project that uses statistics from the American military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq as source material for an interactive audiovisual composition based around an open-source “score” of events. Using Xenakis’ understanding of formalized music as a starting point, DuBois draws upon a variety of statistical data ranging from the visceral (civilian deaths, geospatial renderings of military actions) to the mundane (fiscal year budgets for the war) to generate a dataset that can be used for any number of audiovisual compositions. Continue reading

Pace Digital Gallery is pleased to present Turbulence@ PaceDigitalGallery, an exhibition premiering 3 works commissioned by Turbulence.org :: April 7 - May 1, 2009 :: Reception: April 7, 5:00 - 7:00 pm :: 163 William Street, New York City.

Hard Data — by R. Luke DuBois — is a data-mining, sonification, and visualization project that uses statistics from the American military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq as source material for an interactive audiovisual composition based around an open-source “score” of events. Using Xenakis’ understanding of formalized music as a starting point, DuBois will use a variety of statistical data ranging from the visceral (civilian deaths, geospatial renderings of military actions) to the mundane (fiscal year budgets for the war) to generate a dataset that can be used for any number of audiovisual compositions. Continue reading

The Music of Resistance is a six-part documentary series that tells the stories of musicians who fight repression and sing about injustices. Continue reading

ULTRA-RED: Raven Row Sessions in Spitalfields, London seeks applicants for Sessions: Saturdays 4, 18 April, 2, 16 and 30 May 2009; and a Concluding Public Event: 11 June 2009, 18:00PM.

What is the sound of community organising? A five-session practice-based workshop on activism and sound art open to UK-based artists, social movement activists, community organisers, and students. The artist activist collective Ultra-red will present a workshop in five daylong sessions at Raven Row, a new contemporary art exhibition centre in Spitalfields, London. The workshop introduces participants to the art of sound and learning from what we hear in the methods and politics of community organising. Continue reading

Sonic Bridge — over/through the wall/fence at the U.S.-Mexican border; a telematic event :: January 23, 2009; 9:30 pm :: Brown Rice, 4332 N. Kedzie Ave., 1st floor, Chicago, IL.

The U.S. Immigration Policy could change soon, since Obama will be sworn into office shortly as the U.S.’s 44th President. Currently hundreds of miles of wall and fence stretch across the US-Mexico border, and the Bush administration is trying to make sure that the border fence gets extended as quickly as possible — in these final waning days of that lame duck administration.

Sound artists and musicians will be part of a Sonic Bridge, a telematic performance that will run perpendicularly through the U.S.-Mexico border wall/fence, in conjunction with sound artists and musicians who live here in the U.S., Central America, and South America. Performers in remote locations will be able to interact with each other in real time. Continue reading

A History of Music Torture in the War on Terror by Andy Worthington, CounterPunch. Posted December 17, 2008 in AlterNet:

From Britney to Barney, any music can drive you mad if it’s played enough. And unlike with physical torture, you can’t mentally prepare yourself. There’s an ambiguous undercurrent to the catchy pop smash that introduced a pig-tailed Britney Spears to the world in 1999 — so much so that Jive Records changed the song’s title to “… Baby One More Time” after executives feared that it would be perceived as condoning domestic violence.

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