Birdcage sound gallery presents Aki Onda: Cassette Memories, curated by Daniele Balit :: May 14, 2011; 8:30 – 10:30 pm [Nuit des Musées (Museum Night)]:: Cour Carrée du Louvre, Paris.

Aki Onda is an electronic musician, composer, and visual artist. He was born in Japan and currently resides in New York. Onda is particularly known for his Cassette Memories project – works compiled from a “sound diary” of field-recordings collected by Onda over a span of two decades. Onda’s musical instrument of choice is the cassette Walkman. Not only does he capture field recordings with the Walkman, he also physically manipulates multiple Walkmans with electronics in his performances. Continue reading

TELLUS The Audio Cassette Magazine Marathon :: Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 3:00 p.m. – November 13 at 12:00 a.m. :: at Harvestworks, 596 Broadway, #602, New York, NY :: Created By Joseph Nechvatal ::

Harvestworks/TELLUS can be viewed at the Alternative Histories Exhibition at Exit Art. (exitart.org) and tellusmedia.org

The presentation will take place in the Harvestworks audio gallery starting with TELLUS #1 through TELLUS #27 played in one hour segments starting at 3 pm until midnite on the following days: Thursday, November 11 – Issues #1 – #9 :: Friday November 12 – Issues #10 – #18 :: Saturday November 13 – Issues #19 – #27. Continue reading

[Image: Craig Leonard, Adventures on the Wheels of Steel, 2009] Sometimes Always: Listening in on Audio Art :: June 5- August 30, 2009 :: Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, 1723 Hollis Street
Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Obsolete technologies and anachronistic electronic devices are cleverly resuscitated by 10 international artists in Sometimes Always. Co-organized with the Centre for Art Tapes and presented in tandem with Sound Bytes, Halifax’s month-long audio art festival, the show harnesses the nostalgia associated with outmoded media to reflect on our shifting emotional connections to technology.

Several projects reinvest antiquated technologies such as eight-track players and audio cassettes with new artistic potential. Local artist Craig Leonard modifies bicycle wheels into low-fi musical instruments by adding duct-tape patterns to the spokes. Continue reading

re: construction – performance by Daniel Perlin :: November 18, 2008; 7:00 – 9:00 pm :: Studio-X, 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610, New York, NY.

What do buildings sound like? What is the residue of a building? How do structures house the process of their construction? Multimedia artist Daniel Perlin will use screws, glue, nails, sawhorses, an audio cassette and a laptop to question work and construction as auditory processes. In re:construction — a layered, hour-long performance piece — Perlin will build a small house at Studio-X. Recording and manipulating samples from the construction process, he will simultaneously build a large orchestral work with rhythm, melody and harmony to be recorded onto a cassette tape in real-time. This cassette will then be housed in within this new structure as an artifact built to highlight process, and to archive the sounds of its own creation. Watch a video of re.drill: Continue reading

SOUND BARRIER is a new work by Maia Urstad, a sound installation consisting of some 130 CD-and cassette radios assembled as a wall. Visually, these devices function as elements in a structure inspired by historical stone constructions.

SOUND BARRIER relates to earlier works such as STATIONS; a sound installation deriving its visual basis from the Roman arch; and CLEOPATRA’S NEEDLES; a concert performance inspired by Pharonic Egyptian structures.

The creative impulses for SOUND BARRIER originate in the historical remains of buildings, i.e., ruins. Technology, here, electronics – a development from our own time, comprises the ‘stones’. Continue reading

From Neural It, Uokand (Tapelake), playing with a pool of tapes: “Audiotapes, the medium that offered to millions of users endless possibilities to personally recombine sounds and emotions and introduced the concept of self-produced compilation, look like a distant memory. The MP3 generation, used to process huge quantities of digital data with a few simple clicks, can only condescendingly smile at the limits of such a technology. Recently, Currys, one of the biggest electronic retail chains in England (with over 500 stores), has announced that it won’t sell audiotapes anymore after the current stock is exhausted. This can be viewed as a true epitaph, however – as it often happens – a commercially dead object can live a new life by becoming artistic material. Continue reading

This Weekly is culled from a series of posts (1) (2) (3) on Continuo:

According to the Harvestworks website, TELLUS was created in 1983 at the Rum Runner Bar on Canal Street in New York City. Joseph Nechvatal, a visual artist, Claudia Gould, a curator and Carol Parkinson, a composer and staff member of Harvestworks/Studio PASS met to discuss the idea of a magazine on cassette which would feature interesting and challenging sound works. With the advent of the Walkman and the Boom Box, the editors perceived a need for an alternative to radio programming and the commercially available recordings on the market at that time… Continue reading

Upgrade! Scotland: Mark Vernon and Zoë Irvine :: November 27, 2007; 7.00 -9:00 pm :: CCA, Glasgow. Join us for a glass of wine from 6.30 pm. Admission is free, but to make sure of a seat please email: rsvp ‘at’ mediascot ‘dot’ org.

Mark Vernon and Zoë Irvine work between art, music, radio and sound. The artists have been working prolifically at the forefront of their field since shifting from predominantly visual practices. They will talk about their individual practices and touch on their numerous collaborations together. Including their recent project, Hairwaves: which produced an irreverent blend of music, interviews, haircuts, dog groomers and the paranormal. Continue reading

this is not memorex: sample culture revisited by Greg Smith – In familiarizing myself with this work over the past few weeks, I’ve felt an odd sense of nostalgia developing. These projects collectively highlight various facets of what we have dubbed sample culture, that is the continued evolution of the triumph of the fragment. There are dozens of threads that can be traced back to the 1980s and while I am personally indebted to the potent combination of Brian Eno and David Byrne, the perpetual litigation of Negativland, and the sonic collage of the Bomb Squad, I am going to instead direct my attention to another dusty artifact from collective memory. Continue reading

By using records, cassettes, and a radio transmitter to perform live sound collages, Kristen Roos pays homage to the history of the phonograph, tape and radio as tools for the development of experimental sound art. His alternative use of commercial media is also a Situationist technique—detournement, in which a familiar medium is re-purposed to create something new.

The Micro Radio project started as a site-specific sound and radio project in 2005. It involved collecting site specific sounds, creating compositions, and broadcasting them back to the collection site. Roos stored the sounds on his laptop and broadcast using a low-power radio transmitter (capable of transmitting 150 feet). Continue reading