Preview: Otomo Yoshihide and Sachiko M

Published on 9 March 2009 in Uncategorised, events, music, photography and reviews. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

London fans of minimal electronic music will find themselves spending much of this week in Dalston, as Cafe Oto hosts a three-day residency featuring two of Japan’s preeminent improvisers. Each night, Otomo Yoshihide and Sachiko M will play with a different experimental luminary and as well as collaborate with each other in what is easily one of 2009′s most exciting series so far.

Equally skilled on both turntables and guitar, Yoshihide draws as much on cut-up sound technique as free jazz, while Sachiko M’s work centres on the most basic building block of synthesized sound, the sine wave generator. I recently listened to her Sine Wave Solo CD from 2000 and was shocked by how alien it still sounds nine years later. Whereas most experimental electronic music from the turn of the century sounds dated with too much garish glitch, Sine Wave Solo sounds positively fresh and timeless. If you’re hoping to hear her undiluted sound, Monday night is her only solo set, so don’t miss it!

The special guest each night will undoubtedly influence the direction the performers take. While Otomo Yoshihide will probably explore the jazzier side of his guitar with Evan Parker in the spotlight on Wednesday, I can’t imagine he’d miss the opportunity to hop behind the decks and spin alongside Technics virtuoso Christian Marclay on Tuesday. I’ve seen Marclay and Yoshihide collaborate once before, each manning their own set of turntables, and it’s nothing short of amazing.

With the stunning set of sounds Marclay and Yoshihide can extract from the much abused vinyl in their crates, augmented by Sachiko’s sine waves, if I had to pick one event to see, it would be Tuesday’s trio. Since each gig only costs £10, and a three-day pass can be had for £22, choosing just one seems a bit silly, really. It’s not every day you get some of the finest noisemakers in the world together in one place for the better part of a week, so arguably you have a moral obligation to attend at least two of these stellar gigs.

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If you’re not sold yet, here’s a small sample of the sort of sounds you can hope to hear this week. It’s the first track from Sachiko M’s Sine Wave Solo, “Don’t Move”. Not only is it one of my favourite pieces of hers, but it’s among my most loved works of experimental electronic music in general. It’s a proper mental palette cleanser, a bit like giving your brain an acid bath so it comes out all shiny and new again.

Right-click here to download or stream below:

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Full schedule:

Monday, 9 March 2009 at 8pm
Otomo Yoshihide – Solo
Sachiko M – Solo
Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M and Eddie Prévost (AMM) – Trio

Tuesday, 10 March 2009 at 8pm
Filament: Otomo Yoshihide and Sachiko M
Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M and Christian Marclay – Trio

Wednesday, 11 March 2009 at 8pm
Otomo Yoshihide and John Butcher – Duo
Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M, Evan Parker, John Edwards and Tony Marsh – Quintet

Vote For My Photo Contest Entry

Published on 4 March 2009 in photography. 0 Comments Tags: , .

It’s no secret that I love contests. I enter all sorts of them. The obsession began when, at nine years old, I realised that just like LL Cool J, I couldn’t live without my radio. Anytime B96 announced they were giving shit away, my fingers were on the buttons: 5-9-1… oh hell yes, I’m the ninth caller! I won a fair amount of prizes that year, and with positive reinforcement being especially effective at that tender age, I sealed my fate as a contest geek for life.

In the past few years, photography has become one of my main hobbies, but only recently have I started submitting my snaps to photo competitions. I entered the following picture in last month’s EcoTrotters contest and I received word today that they’ve chosen it as a finalist.

Lamanai River

From now until the end of March you can vote for me to win. You’ll have to register as a user on their site, but that’s fast, free and easy. Once you’ve got that sorted, you can go directly to my photo page and click the little thumbs-up icon to vote. Thanks in advance!

The Great Barrier Reef

Published on 18 February 2009 in and autobiography. 0 Comments

Almost as soon as Tourism Queensland announced their competition for The Best Job In The World, it became a meme. How could it not when they set it up so perfectly? Create a one minute video of yourself explaining why you should be the caretaker of the islands of the Great Barrier Reef, upload it to them and cross your fingers with hopes for the best. Within days, news of the contest spread across mainstream media outlets and blogs alike and soon thousands of videos poured in.

Never one to ignore a powerful meme, my lovely wife Rin knew she had to step up to this challenge. Since three memes are always better than one, she found inspiration in the recent rash of covers of Britney Spears’ “Womanizer” as well as VH1′s Pop-Up Videos programme to bring you this:

Please visit Rin’s page on the competition’s official site and give her 5 stars if you’d like to help ship us off to Australia. Also, in case you were wondering, I am accepting freelance work as a professional hand model (see 0:22 in the above video), so if you’re trying to move some soap or Casio watches, do be in touch.

Mix-Up

Published on 9 February 2009 in music. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Ever since I first encountered scratch and sniff stickers as a kid, I was obsessed with sensory crossovers. If you could scratch a sticker to produce a scent, certainly you should be able to turn a photograph into a song or taste colours. Whilst I’ve only been able to accomplish the latter under the influence of at least a ten strip, there are loads of software options for mixing up sight and sound.

The latest entry in the synesthetic toolbox is Voice Draw, a fun little Flash application from Ze Frank. After accessing your computer’s microphone, it acts as an audio-controlled Etch-a-Sketch, using volume to determine whether it will change direction or continue drawing on its present course. With volume as the decisive factor, it’s less important what you say than it is how you say it. In order to draw anything specific, you’re probably going to have to go with gutteral proto-lingual tones.

When I discovered it yesterday morning, I immediately wanted to try it out. Since Rin was sleeping and I didn’t want to wake her with my best attempts at throat singing, I decided to feed it some pre-recorded sound from my speakers. The first mp3 I stumbled upon was The Kinks’ classic, “Lola”, which produced a rather pleasing horizontal squiggle when played at a medium volume:

Voice Drawing with LolaThis was nice and all, but I wanted to give it something slightly more sinister. Waking Rin up to the sounds of Throbbing Gristle didn’t seem wise either, so in the dulcet tones of William S. Burroughs I found a reasonable compromise. I recently picked up a 3 CD collection of his audio cut-up work entitled Real English Tea Made Here, and two pieces from the first disc, “Cut-ins with Dutch Schultz” and “23 Skidoo”, gave me this:

Voice Drawing with William S. Burroughs

“Cut-ins with Dutch Schultz” created the dark explosion in the upper-right, whilst “23 Skidoo” produced the spiral crash which makes up the majority of the image. I couldn’t believe how well the picture suited the sound and I’m eager to see what else I can make with it.

One of the commenters on Ze’s post left the program running for 24 hours in his flat just to see what the ambient noise of one day looked like. It was small but dense, which kinda made sense to me.

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William S. Burroughs – “23 Skidoo”:

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Setting Things On Fire

Published on 15 January 2009 in reviews. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

When travelling, a fantastic experience can be had by doing something that would be incredibly mundane at home: going to the supermarket. Despite the age of globalisation that we currently live in, some products never make it very far out of their homeland (sometimes for good reason, too). On a recent trip to Austria, Rin and I stopped in a Salzburg supermarket and, of course, ended up in the booze aisle. It was there that we first saw Baumann’s Gletscher-Eis in all its glory.

Blue and toxic-looking, Gletscher-Eis stands tall.

Blue and toxic-looking, Gletscher-Eis stands tall

Along with a few other assorted miniature bottles of schnapps, we bought big blue as a souvenir of our time in the land of Mozart and singing nuns. How could we resist a spirit containing 50% alcohol by volume which required three minutes spent burning before it became drinkable? When we arrived home from our trip, we promptly found a nice spot for it on the shelf where it could collect dust until we mustered the courage to set it on fire and kick it back.

A few days ago courage came in the form of several glasses of Jameson, so Rin grabbed the video camera and filmed my first true encounter with this formidable Austrian bastard. Please excuse the South Park pyjamas, for the degree to which I was chilling precluded the wearing of proper trousers.

I have at least 75% of the bottle left and, not one to waste intoxicating substances, I’m sure I’ll give it another chance. For take two, I’ll follow the instructions more closely and give it a minimum of 3 minutes’ worth of burn time. I’ll also sip it through a straw since burnt lips aren’t very nice.

You can learn a lot of things about a country by visiting one of its supermarkets. For example, it wasn’t until I first came to Britain that I learned tea could come in boxes of 500 or more bags, or that one needed a choice between 30 different types of marmalade. On a recent trip to Belgium, I was surprised to find that it was cheaper to buy a bottle of Chimay than a Diet Coke. Sadly, I went with the Diet Coke, because whilst drinking on the street is legal in the UK, I wasn’t sure if that was the same case there. I may like foreign supermarkets, but I’m still too much of a pussy to start exploring foreign jails. Maybe I just need another bottle of Jameson.

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