[This article was published in Art Monthly Australia, Issue 225 November 2009, a special issue dedicated to 'Sound'. It was commissioned by guest editor Douglas Kahn. This is the original version of the text, as the version that appeared in the magazine ended up with some odd punctuation around the quotes. The quotes are all from the AF list. They are not credited in the text itself, but are meant to represent the collective voice of the list, in a vaguely representative manner. There is, however, a full list of who said what and when below the text]

1. That there is a tradition in Western thought, stretching back at least to Pythagoras1, that the cosmos is structured according to the principles of musical harmony.

2. That as a corollary of the above, harmony in music is seen as both 'natural' 2 and (ethically) 'good'.3

3. This concept of celestial harmony has been commonly expressed by the metaphor of the 'music of the spheres'4, wherein the planets are associated with specific musical notes or melodic modes.5

PROMO LIST COMPILED BY ANDREW CLIFFORD AND SAM STEPHENS FROM POSTMODERNCORE

If you’re pressing thousands of CDs, then you’ll want to circulate it as widely as possible to be sure of trying every potential outlet for some free promotion. More likely you’ll be doing a small run of around a 100 or so, so you’ll want to be more selective, sending copies only to the people you’d most like to impress and/or are more likely to give you some exposure.

15 December 1993

DB: Well... one thing that I wanted to ask about is structured music, does it have a place... What I mean is, I really like a lot of tightly structured music, This Kind of Punishment would be an obvious example. Are they just sort of left-over wishes for some sort of order, or do they have a purpose? Can the structures be fucked with and reappropriated in use against the dominant conception...?

Interview with Tetuzi Akiyama in 3 acts (excerpt from "haki-sou" fanzine)

Act 1

[Higashi-kitazawa station, North-east exit. MS searches in vain for the cafe Gendai Heights, wandering as far as Inokashira road. Despite having visited numerous times, he can't ever find the cafe by himself. Finally a call comes through on his cell phone]

MS: Hello? Tetuzi?
TA: Hi, Mark. Are you lost?
MS: Ummm, yes, I think I am.
TA: Well, where are you?
MS: Ahhhh, somewhere near to the North East exit I think...
TA: Oh, you didn't take the South East exit? Okay, I'll come to get you.

back

M-It seems that you are very concerned about your status as a woman in the musical field, which is a male-dominated -even sexist- cultural space (as is the whole political and social system, for ex. the power structures of liberalism, which are bound to those of the patriarch ate). How do you view the situation of women in today's musical economy?

Dec 19, 2004

Written while Digital Artist in Residence, Waikato University

THE TRADITIONAL APPROACH TO DISTRIBUTING MUSIC

It’s a wet and wild night in Auckland as a group gathered in the St Paul Street Gallery move calmly around the space, creating shifting vocal harmonies and dissonances as they go. First each one sings their own note, then replicates one they’ve just heard sung by a distant voice, before returning to intone a note that no one else is making, and so on. As participants alternatively tune into themselves and then others, it’s an uplifting exchange and one that perfectly illustrates Pauline Oliveros’s idea of Deep Listening.

On the Guitar

As an improvising sound artist, I was recently asked in an interview for a French magazine why I stuck to old hat stuff like playing the guitar, why I didnt radicalise my practice and get a sampler or something? I controlled my rage and politely expressed my disbelief that new technologies have rendered musical instruments anachronistic. I personally dont subscribe to any such notion.

duende / n. 1 an evil spirit. 2 inspiration. [Sp.]

'All that has dark sounds has duende.'

F.G. Lorca: 'Theory and Function of the Duende', in Selected Poems: Penguin Books; 1960,

p. 127

As the Spanish Instrument par excellence, the guitar comes pre-loaded with a burden of extra-musical cultural significance. When we play the guitar, we are always playing with a caravan of images which trail us like ghosts across a television screen. Jimi Hendrix; Robert Johnson; and a crowd of anonymous Spanish gypsies, swarming like penitents on the road to Santiago.

for Marco Fusinato

Some years back, having written a few sound stories of my own, I began collecting anecdotes from sound artists and experimental instrument builders I met with whilst travelling in the USA. Each artist would be asked to tell a yarn about a sound experience imprinted on their memory that may have influenced the direction or path they were to take as artists. A collection of these I later published as a video, titled
“Sound Stories #1: Meetings with 14 U.S experimental instrument makers”.

'Now that this most excellent and perfect concord of life does remain

principally in the midst of a line drawn from Unity, or the fountain of

form, to the Earth or duality, which is the fountain of matter, I prove it

thus by the accords of Music...'

Robert Fludd: Philosophia Moysaica: 1638