finders keepers

january 09, 2003.

Winter doesn't seem to be the right season for finding tapes... Days are short, it's cold and wet. I walk faster, take less time to look up and around. And there's less walkmen about, being listened to there out in the open. Well. Maybe. Anyway.
It is a fact that I did not bring home the least snippet of tape since december 2nd ...

Until this morning.

Wrapped around the pole of a road sign on the corner of the avenue de Paris and the avenue Antoine Quinson, additionally entangled betwixt dead leaves and broken off shrubbery twigs, and partly contained within some lumps of ice, solidly frozen to the pavement.

It took me quite some time to free it.
It must have been a curious sight, me there on my knees on the freezing pavement stones next to the road sign, gently pulling leaves and twigs from a clod of dirty old cassette tape, then cutting, hacking and scraping away the ice holding it with my keys ... I tried to do as little extra damage as possible.

In the end, of course I got it.
I took it home with me, and I'll keep it.
Some day soon I will listen to it.
Then I'll let you know what was on it.

[ Earlier related entry: exhibit #4 ; next related entry: new acquisitions (#5, #6)]

better more happy years

january 01, 2003.

Morrei_2003's first Better More Star (the tenth in a still ongoing series) goes to Porousher, from Pecsvarad, Baranya, in Hungary.

The six tracks on their mp3.com artist page are from a live set on the second edition of the x-peripheria event, that took place on june 2nd of 2001, in Budapest.
The event - entitled struktur.3 - consisted in a series of highly minimalistic, loopishly rythmical 'noise-scapes', developing and shifting in subtle and interesting ways... Well-structured pieces, and made using an interesting scala of 'electro-sounds'.
A series that merits repeated listening. Yes, I do recommend 'hi-fi'. And put your headphones on!

The complete struktur.3 can be downloaded in 'high quality' 192 kbps mp3-encoding from the Porousher site.
...
And all this is absolutely free ...

the sound of cricket

december 28, 2002.

In edition #36 of Radio Interference (the Amsterdam based sound-art site, containing nothing but the sounds), four tracks by Seamus Cater.

"Most of the original sound sources are taken from cricket commentary. Samples of commentary, cricket bat hits, shouts of players, stumps and crowd noise, we're extracted and then arranged..."

Originally part of an installation (Anthea Bush's 'Bowled a Maiden Over') that aimed at confronting the 'complexity' of the 'cricket terminology' with its 'absurdity' ... at least that's what I more or less gathered from a description of the project.

And I do think that that reads like an exciting idea for a project. Listening to Seamus's four tracks, actually I get the impression that he merely skimmed an itsy-bitsy part of something that has enormous potential. I think one could do so much more with this, sound work wise... Shame I won't be able to check this out in the context of Anthea Bush's art.