{"id":4634,"date":"2022-02-01T17:07:57","date_gmt":"2022-02-01T17:07:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theculture.net\/radio\/?p=4634"},"modified":"2024-12-16T15:27:36","modified_gmt":"2024-12-16T15:27:36","slug":"sign-waves-for-cats-and-dogs-and-other-people-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theculture.net\/radio\/sign-waves-for-cats-and-dogs-and-other-people-too\/","title":{"rendered":"Sign Waves for Cats and Dogs (and other people too)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Play\"<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

An engaged post-human episode today, flowing naturally from our recent cross-species collaborations with Elo Masing and her avian friends, \u2018Kakaduu,\u2019 in Berlin.
These explorations have deepened our sensitivity to the beings around us\u2014how long we have lived in the dark! They\u2019ve awakened us to the possibilities of direct engagement through sound, without words, with the non-human world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For many years, I noticed how the cats sharing my space would puzzle over and engage with the unfamiliar tones and resonances produced during sonic experimentation. At first, I assumed I was simply anthropomorphizing their analytical poses. I ignored, or found it amusing, when they dashed into another room in response to changing sounds, whether from my work or live broadcasts on Resonance FM (yes, Bermuda Triangle Test Transmissions, it was you). But through our work with Elo, we\u2019ve started taking a more direct and sensitive approach, creating compositions with this potential dialogue in mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, I present a new piece,\u00c2\u00a0Sign Waves for Cats and Dogs (and Other People Too)<\/em>\u2014a composition made with all of this in mind. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Below, you\u2019ll also find a brief history of my personal journey into sound without instrumentation, tracing back to my time as a live sound engineer in collaboration with Alan Vega (of Suicide) and others many years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Watch
Watch Idoru engage with rising and falling sine waves while listening to an episode of the magnificent Bermuda Triangle Test Transmissions on Resonance 104.4 FM<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

We start the program with the sublime\u00c2\u00a0Leo Ferr\u00c3\u00a9<\/a> and his song\u00c2\u00a0\u201cL\u2019\u00c3\u00a9toile A Pleur\u00c3\u00a9 Rose,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/strong>\u00c2\u00a0from his album Verlaine et Rimbaud.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n


<\/a>Released in 1964, this album is a profound musical homage to the poetry of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. The magnificent Ferr\u00c3\u00a9, a revered French singer, composer, and poet, skillfully sets the evocative and often tumultuous verses of these two iconic poets to music, blending his own lush, melancholic, and passionate style with their rich, symbolic imagery. The album is celebrated for its deep emotional resonance and Ferr\u00c3\u00a9\u2019s ability to capture the essence of Verlaine and Rimbaud\u2019s work, making their 19th-century poetry so truly accessible and relevant to contemporary audiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
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L’\u00c3\u2030toile a pleur\u00c3\u00a9 rose<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Arthur Rimbaud 1871<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n


L\u2019\u00c3\u00a9toile a pleur\u00c3\u00a9 rose au c\u00c5\u201cur de tes oreilles,
L\u2019infini roul\u00c3\u00a9 blanc de ta nuque \u00c3\u00a0 tes reins
La mer a perl\u00c3\u00a9 rousse \u00c3\u00a0 tes mammes vermeilles
Et l\u2019Homme saign\u00c3\u00a9 noir \u00c3\u00a0 ton flanc souverain.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

\n

<\/h3>\n\n\n\n




The star has wept rose-colour in the heart of your ears,
The infinite rolled white from your nape to the small of your back
The sea has broken russet at your vermilion nipples, 
And Man bled black at your royal side.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Using a digital delay, I then capture and freeze the powerful final extended vocal note from Ferr\u00c3\u00a9\u2019s wife and frequent collaborator, Marie Christine Ferr\u00c3\u00a9<\/strong>, and go on to build an improvised, \u201cperformed\u00e2\u20ac\u009d composition using a range of digital effects and processes without any further added analogue audio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This technique grew from my early live sound engineering work, where my enthusiasm for \u2018playing\u2019 sounds would perhaps sometimes cross an unspoken boundary between the musicians and the live \u2018producer.\u2019 Most directly, this was evident when touring with Alan Vega<\/strong>
\"Thumbnail<\/span>
<\/a>in the early eighties on a European tour without his other half of Suicide, Martin Rev<\/strong>, using instead some session musicians and an ancient drum machine which replaced the proposed live drummer at the last minute as before they left New York.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vega\u2019s performances were truly something else, more a series of confrontations with<\/em> the audience than a set list of Vega entertaining them. He would strut the stage apparently lost in his own psychodrama, taunting the crowd by viciously beating his own face with the microphone, his rapid fire vocals almost muttered as if in conversation with himself, with only his frequent screams and yelps being truly directed outwards, which I would capture within a tape loop fed back into infinity against the visceral low end industrial beats of the most basic of drum machines (rock, pop, and bossanova being the only flavours). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a keyboard player, a guitarist, and bass player too I think? yet it always felt like a solo show, Alan Vega and his <\/p>\n\n\n\n

until one night somewhere in Sweden (I think?), as Vega left the stage he flipped the controls on the drum machine to a full manic speed, which I then captured using a digital delay, and started feeding the sound back and forth between various effects, sweeping the sound dub style from left to right long after the band and Vega had left the stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was so engaged in the process that I had not really noticed they had gone until I glanced up and saw Vega watching the audience (and me) from the wings and grooving on the sound I was creating. The audience continued dancing until I eventually faded the sound out, at which point the house exploded into applause and calls for encore. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Years later, I again saw Vega live in London, and was pleased to see this had become a formal, if perhaps sanitised part of his live set, and this week with Sign Waves for Cats and Dogs (and other people too), we explore that idea a little further……… which I hope you enjoy listening to just as much as I did making it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An engaged post-human episode today, flowing naturally from our recent cross-species collaborations with Elo Masing and her avian friends, \u2018Kakaduu,\u2019 in Berlin. These explorations have deepened our sensitivity to the beings around us\u2014how long we have lived in the dark!…<\/p>\n

Tune in to this episodeSign Waves for Cats and Dogs (and other people too)<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4712,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,3,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-goldstars","category-sonic-detours-with-simon-tyszko-on-resonance-fm-londons-premiere-arts-station","category-strange-and-eerie","excerpt","zoom","even","excerpt-0"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theculture.net\/radio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theculture.net\/radio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theculture.net\/radio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theculture.net\/radio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theculture.net\/radio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4634"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/theculture.net\/radio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5808,"href":"https:\/\/theculture.net\/radio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4634\/revisions\/5808"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theculture.net\/radio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theculture.net\/radio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theculture.net\/radio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theculture.net\/radio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}