Petit Mal’s Crisis In The Credit System is the first (and only) great pop song about the financial crisis. Combining an elegiac-compulsive piano riff, twanging synths and waves of spooked electronics with sparse, melancholy vocals this is a unique and addictive electro anthem for the end of capitalism as we know it. Emusic, iTunes, Myspace.

Petit Mal, AKA Ben Seymour and Melanie Gilligan, fuse ’80s synth pop and ’00s electronica to create emotional, intelligent and irresistible new music. Poetic, oblique and compelling, Crisis in the Credit System collides a Pet Shop Boys-style pop drama with autistic vocal repetition a la Lora Logic and ends up somewhere completely unique and contemporary. Continue reading

Voices of America is looking for new sound work employing samples of coverage of the US election as reported on Voice of America (VOA) radio, the US government broadcasting service intended for an international audience. Here’s how it works:

RECORD audio of election coverage on a Voice of America station — UPLOAD your recordings to http://thevoa.net and tag them according to language and content — DOWNLOAD from the searchable pool of available recordings — REMIX the broadcasts and UPLOAD them back to the website.

A curated playlist of compositions and remixes will be broadcast from The Sea and Space Gallery in Los Angeles in a special event on November 4 - US election day - as part of the Audacity of Desperation exhibition. Upload from August 25 - November 4 to be included in the live event! Continue reading

TINA B - The Prague Contemporary Art Festival presents Stefano Cagol: Un-Secret Signals :: October 9-13, 2008 :: Janovského 23, Prague 7, Czech Republic.

Mass communication and Babilonia. Fragmented communication and freedom of expression. Secrecy and disclosure. Locked and open. Black and white. Morse Code and Light. Hallucinatory flashes of light from the top of the Petrin Tower in Prague illuminate and disorient the nocturnal cityscape of this historical and fascinating place. Sound sequences play intermittently night and day, concurrently accompanying light signals that simultaneously spell out cryptic messages in Morse Code. Continue reading

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay’s Listening to places is a series of place-based soundscapes, incorporating field recordings, electro-acoustics and digital media. Landscape in Metamorphoses is the second album of this series.

“Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is drawing attention to the rapid social and geocultural transformation of his native India on his latest album. Landscape in Metamorphoses, a 26-minute collection of field recordings on German label Gruenrekorder, documents the stormy environmental changes taking place in Tumbani, ‘one of the busiest industrial belts at the Bengal-Bihar border’. Recorded between February and April of last year with little more than a simple MD recorder and a binaural microphone, ‘Landscape in Metamorphoses’ aims at delivering both a vivid sonic snapshot and a strong political statement.” - Tobias Fisher at Tokafi.

You are invited to participate in http://thevoa.net, a participatory Internet radio project that reflects on the media spectacle of the 2008 US Presidential Election through the lens of the Voice of America Radio Network, the US government broadcasting service intended for an international audience.

Between now and November 4, you can: RECORD audio of election coverage on a Voices of America station; UPLOAD your recordings and tag them according to language and content; DOWNLOAD from the searchable pool of available recordings; REMIX the broadcasts and UPLOAD them back to the website; LISTEN to the recordings and remixes online anytime or to the radio broadcast at Audacity of Desperation in Los Angeles on Election Day. Continue reading

Another Protest Song :: CALLING ALL ARTISTS, SONGWRITERS, MUSICIANS… What does a 21st Century Protest Song sound like? Given the continuing political climate, we feel it is time for another protest song to be sung. Upload and share your jam today!

Politically engaged music is not only a consequence of history or nostalgia, but can be timely and pertinent commentary on our contemporary world. Another Protest Song is a collaborative project which uses the social networking space of the internet to archive and debate contemporary protest music. The project went public in late May and has become a daily/weekly growing archive with a number of original protest songs uploaded and shared by you the user, and other ideological persuaders. Fine tune your power chords, generate new lyrics and poetry, and set your protest to song. To upload, listen, and comment, check out >> Continue reading

The Olympics are not simply a matter of fun and games. They are a multi-national media spectacle that–as we’ve seen in recent protests–can arouse and galvanize political action. The event’s organizers pitch it as a zone outside of politics, but of course issues of national identity, human rights, autonomy, economic might, and foreign policy all coalesce around the Olympics. While much of the current attention to these matters is directed at Beijing, groups in Montreal and London are already forming to address the impact that the arrival of the famous torch (ceremoniously relayed in a model invented by the Nazis to promote a strong image of the Third Reich around the 1936 Berlin games) will have upon local communities. Continue reading

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla: Never Mind That Noise You Heard :: February 8 - May 4, 2008 :: Stedelijk Museum CS, Oosterdokskade 5, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

The exhibition Never Mind That Noise You Heard provides an opportunity to see (and hear!) recent videos and installations by the collaborative artist team of Jennifer Allora (b.1974, USA) and Guillermo Calzadilla (b.1971, Cuba). In the exhibition, the Stedelijk Museum CS is presenting two large installations: Wake Up and Sediments, Sentiments (Figures of Speech), alongside four video works. The production and usage of sound is central to all of these works, which were created between 2004 and 2007. Continue reading

Art Now: Seb Patane - So this song kills fascists :: until January 13, 2008 :: Tate Britain, Millbank, London.

So this song kills fascists, explores ideas of performance as a means of protest. The sound work, from which the installation takes its title, questions the revolutionary potential of music while new drawings, reminiscent of Surrealist or psychographic automatic writing, suggest a non-visible dimension implicit in the music. The central installation, Last Dance of the Nodding Folk, resembles an expressionist stage set, a theme echoed in the theatrical images leaning, placard-like against it. Footage of a fire juggler introduces an element of ritualised and controlled movement, which links to the energy of the drawings and the viewer’s choreographed passage around the installation. Patane identifies an aesthetics of subculture where protest has been exchanged for stylised performance, a husk detached from belief.

Some open-ended thoughts on sound in relation to environment (from Yolande Harris on YASMIN): After attending and presenting at the Mutamorphosis conference in Prague in the eco-sonification panel, and being tantalized by the beginnings of a discussion on sound, I would like to respond to the topics being raised in what’s become the ‘lovely sound’ section of the lovely weather thread (any intentional connection to the ‘lovely music’ label?).

As often, the coherence of discussions around sound can be somewhat unfocused, but I believe we’re slowly building up a ‘way of talking’ about sound through an increasing body of work that’s emerging from beneath the visual. Continue reading