Sound 8 Publications in Random Order

I paint contains the conjugation of the verb to paint. The linguistic content in this volume can be orally activated by the user in one or more voices.

I paint (Yo pinto) contiene la conjugación del verbo “pintar”. El contenido lingüístico incluido en este volumen puede ser activado oralmente por el usuario a una o más voces.

BORSHCH is a magazine for electronic music on and beyond the dancefloor. Founded in Berlin in 2017, it’s a space to provoke open dialogues and challenge established ideas about making, listening, and dancing to music. Through physical and digital formats, BORSHCH discusses the artistic, social, and political impact of electronic music on contemporary culture in and outside the club settings. The print edition of the magazine is published biannually.

In BORSHCH #5, we enter sweaty basements and concrete cathedrals and explore the culture of darkness born out of protest. In unsettling environments, we embrace the shadows and challenge our senses with obscure electronic music. When do you feel comfortable with your discomfort? What happens when the lights go off, and the only source of illumination you’re left with is blurry haze or an abrupt stroboscopic pulse? Conversation with Deena Abdelwahed, Lucrecia Dalt, and Alessandro Adriani question the ambiguity of ‘dark’ sound and psychological impact of unpolished music. Artist portraits of Animistic Beliefs, Rrose, Klein, Ziúr deconstruct the dark areas where sins, injustice, and disquiet are as human and real as pleasures and joy. This issue of Borshch considers entering the dark as an act of coming home, to the cave where the primary source of life is hidden.

TAMBOURINE is an online platform established for the promotion and distribution of the independent magazine scene. Its aim is to decipher the role of printed matter in contemporary culture, as well as provide its readers with the latest magazine releases, connecting the digital community with the highest quality printed matter goods.

Based on the cross-over between sound and image, BOOKSCAPES documents a journey across Mexico through a series of short recordings of a blank book made in various locations. The idea of bookscape, formed by the combination of words book and landscape, was born in response to the practice developed by composer Murray Schafer to study the acoustic environment of various contexts (soundscapes). The bookscapes incorporate into the sound recording the visual element of such environment, which is reflected into the blank pages of an open volume.

Through this process, an expanded sense of reading emerges, unsettling the established forms of a practice that usually contemplates the literary and visual material rather than the sonorous component, which in this case becomes a central part of the reading experience, responding to a certain place where the context in which the reader is located provides and creates the narrative.

The blank page is an invitation to listen, rather than to see; it outlines a form of expanded literature where the reader participates as an active listener, in search of a book always open to another time and another space.

→ TAKE PART TO THE CONFINED BOOKSCAPES EDITION

The time and space where we all suddenly found each other is a state of quarantine.The soundscape that surrounds us has changed deeply, and the environment of our lockdown has become our shelter.

For this reason, we would like to create a diverse and collaborative edition for our second volume of BOOKSCAPES, collecting the recordings of what has become the reality of each of you and put it together as a memory of these uncertain times.

If you’d like to be part of it:

• Find a sound and visual context of your quarantine that you’d like to share
• Take a blank paper or a blank book
• Record a one minute length video of it from above
• Send it to hola@urbildeditions.com

We will collect the material and weave together the next publication

This publication is an exercise on listening, an expansion to inner and outer spaces guided by Daphne Xanthopoulou.

Daphne Xanthopoulou is a musician based in Barcelona, Spain. She has published her music in Sonospace and Crystal Mine net and cassette labels and some writing in A A) GLIMPSE) OF), Golfo Magazine, Teflon and Thraca. Together with Blazej Kotowski they run Cachichi, a collective that focuses on new music and its intersection with contemporary art and thought.

The vibration-environment is a term that conceives sound as an immersive scenario. In close relationship to this, the abat-voix, as a surface used in churches to direct priests’ voices towards the public to make them distinct, becomes a clear example of sound deployment within a political dimension. Thus, listening to the abat-voix refers to the questioning of the vibration-environment and the questioning of the relationships between noise and the physical and contextual vibrations occupying spaces and bodies.

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La vibración-entorno es un término que concibe el sonido como un escenario inmersivo. En estrecha relación, el abat-voix—superficie utilizada en iglesias para dirigir la voz del sacerdote hacia el público y hacerla inteligible—se convierte en ejemplo del despliegue de lo sonoro en su dimensión política.

Así, la escucha del abat-voix hace referencia al cuestionamiento de la vibración-entorno y el cuestionamiento de las relaciones entre ruido y la vibración física y contextual que ocupa espacios y cuerpos.

Entitled “Mixtape”, this catalogue brings together works by Dominique Hurth from 2008 to 2020. It comprises one text booklet with contributions by Daniela Cascella, Sonja Lau and the artist herself; one image booklet with 136 images from installation shots of Hurth’s work and one audio-tape (45-min each side) with recordings, music and sound material inherent to the research behind the works. The chosen format reflects on her interest in object-biography, technology and its history.

“We listened to historical recordings and futurist sounds, to tracks taking in everything from minimal wave and Detroit techno to hip-hop and chansons. We listened to the voices of the first speaking dolls that sounded like little monsters, to the voices of Sarah Bernhardt and Serge Gainsbourg as he burned a 500 Franc note on French TV. To Clarice Lispector as she lit a cigarette while being asked why she continued to write. We listened to music created in laboratories, music that was sent into outer space. We listened to lyrics and then languages and voices w couldn’t understand. Machine-generated sounds. Sounds created on celluloid. James Joyce reciting four pages of Finnegans Wake to Charles Ogden in the late 1920s. We listened to advertisements for vocoders and to music with vocoders as the primary transmitter of voice and the main musical instrument. We listened to France Gall singing — or rather, screaming — into the microphone at the Eurovisio Song Contest at the age of nineteen about being a doll made of wax and a doll made of sound. To a litany of okays sung by The Destroyer in a song by the Residents. To the breathing of Pauline Oliveros’s accordion. To the Holy Ghost in the Machine. To Minnie Riperton’s voice in the background, to atonal music, and to computer-generated hand claps. Electronic communication with the dead. Jazz.
A countdown to zero. We listened to beats.

The several hours of sound that we listened to eventually became two side of forty-five minutes each — Side A and Side B. Condensed and edited in this way, this mixtape actually conceals and contains several other mixtapes, recalling all the other tracks that burst out of the edges of the magnetic band.” (”Mixtape(s)”, D. Hurth, 2020)

This project seeks to take a new approach to traditional user manuals based on sampling, a musical production technique that is very common in hip-hop. Sampling (and resampling) is a working process that takes pieces from different elements and combines them to create a unique and new item. This technique extracts these pieces from their natural habitat to de-contextualise them; it chops them up, changes, deforms, serialises and combines them with a view to generating a new message.

We live in a world bloated with data, images, videos, news, messages and constant inputs. We live in a world where collective forms of sharing knowledge generate a massive amount of information that is constantly doing the rounds. And just like hip hop lifts portions of audio to compose, this user manual has been scanned and compiled with these elements that do the rounds, such as photos, articles, chats or illustrations, which redefine or complement the content. The outcome is a sampled manual.