MetaFilter posts tagged with avantgarde

"Ruthlessly simple and mind-boggling"

kenko — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 12:54:51 -0800

Never Again is a novel in which no word occurs more than once. Published in Ubuweb's contemporary collection. The post title comes from Harry Mathews' description of the novel's constraint in The Oulipo Compendium. However, the author, Doug Nufer, is not a member of the Oulipo.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

kenko — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 17:45:29 -0800

Primiti Too Taa is an animated excerpt from Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate. You can see the whole text, and hear the whole thing as voiced by Schwitters or many others, including a text-to-speech program and the author of Eunoia. The various performances are quite different; Christian Bök takes it extremely quickly, Jaap Blonk's 1986 version is very soft, and Adrian Khactu is more speechlike. Kun Jia's "Simultaneous Ursonate" is surprisingly musical.

Kathleen Supove rocks

fcummins — Sat, 23 May 2009 11:56:52 -0800

Kathleen Supove, pianist extraordinaire. [via] The first performance in the second link is live piano accompaniment to a bizarre slice-and-dice remix of gym/infomercial patter. Also, on MySpace, and an interview.

Trimpin: Musical Sculptor

Kattullus — Mon, 04 May 2009 13:32:29 -0800

Seattle-based German artist Trimpin makes sculptural musical instruments. He was profiled in a mini-documentary by Washington public TV station KBTC a couple of years ago. Here are videos of some other works of art he's created, Fire Organ, Liquid Percussion, Cello, Sensors and Record Players, Contraption at Seattle-Tacoma Airport, MIDI-controlled Player Piano and Sheng High. Kyle Gann wrote an essay by that placed Trimpin in the tradition of John Cage, Harry Partch and other avant-garde American musical inventors. The audio of a nearly hour and a half long 1990 interview with Trimpin by Charles Amirkhanian can be downloaded from the Internet Archive. Another, more light-hearted interview in connection to his show at this year's SXSW, where a documentary about him premiered (trailer).

Carter at 100

ob — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 15:00:42 -0800

Elliot Carter, American Composer, turns 100 Born in 1908, Carter's life is a virtual biography of twentieth century music. He attended the US premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Perhaps a slow developer, Carter didn't write his first opera until he was over the age of 90. He turns 100 tomorrow, December 11th. A brief and two longer overviews of his career and a transcript of a fairly recent interview. Also, there are plenty of celebration concerts this season.

Break it down, Martin! Yo, I'm tr-tr-tr-tr-tr-tr-tr-try-try-try-try-tryin' to.

Ambrosia Voyeur — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:44:34 -0800

Cinemnesis, filmmaker Martin Arnold's 41 minute compilation of the films of his "compulsive repetition" trilogy, is available to you online. The quality is lacking, small details are missed, but I thought you'd enjoy these nonetheless. Time codes for the three pieces and more inside. "The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented. And it is exactly that that is most interesting to consider." pièce touchée, 1989 passage á l'acte, 1993. Begins at about 15:15 Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy, 1998. Begins at about 26:40. Alone is, apparently, the one with the broadest appeal. Try it first if you don't like the beginning of pièce touchée. His new(er) installation work, Deanimated, is the screening of the The Invisible Ghost, a Bela Lugosi picture, with a flawless removal of selected characters throughout, lending it a perplexing and uproarious sense of haunted emptiness. He does not own a Tivo. I asked.

i made this. you play this. we are enemies

flatluigi — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 19:13:48 -0800

i made this. you play this. we are enemies - A new game by Jason Nelson (previ ously). Featuring Metafilter's own, uh, everything!

Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000

Christ, what an asshole — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 19:03:15 -0800

Connecticut's Have a Nice Life is responsible for one of the year's most acclaimed, highly conceptual albums this year, Deathconsciousness. The two discs (entitled The Plow That Broke The Plains and The Future, respectively) feature music spanning over five years of collaboration between the two artists, and are accompanied by a 75-page booklet on medieval Italian heretics in lieu of liner notes. Combining elements of shoegaze, new wave, ambient drone, post-rock, experimental industrial, avant-garde dark metal, and electronic music, and citing references such as My Bloody Valentine and Joy Division to their credit, the original and only pressings sold out within hours. Full stream of all 85 minutes available here. Direct mp3 samples here and here. From their myspace: What is Deathconsciousness? Deathconsciousness refers to three things: It refers to the debut double album from Have A Nice Life, featuring over 4 years and 2 hours worth of recorded material. All songs have been re-recorded, remixed, and remastered, including the songs from our demo release, Powers of Ten. It refers to the short book of the same name that accompanies the record. Over 80 pages in length, written by a University of Massachusetts History professor, this book explores the deep religious symbology we used for inspiration while writing the record. The songs contain elaborate references to 12th century apostasies; the book will help those without a background in religious history to understand their meanings. And, finally, Deathconsciousness is the concept that lies at the heart of the record itself: the overwhelming awareness, at all times, of death and it’s proximity.

The World Beyond What?

not_on_display — Thu, 29 May 2008 13:00:08 -0800

About twenty years ago, HBO aired The Mondo Beyondo Show, a sort-of send-up of avant-garde performance shows like Alive From Off Center and Night Flight. Hosted by Bette Midler (as the character Mondo Beyondo), it showcased artists that covered the broad spectrum between performance art, dance, and absurdist comedy. Strap on your Eighties Goggles; here's the meat of the show: Bill Irwin | La La La Human Steps | The Kipper Kids | Yes/No People | Paul Zaloom | David Cale | and the Divine Miss M as Eudora P. Quickly • The Kipper Kids featured Bette Midler's husband, Martin von Haselberg. Wikipedia Page. More Youtubes of Kipper Madness. • The Yes/No People eventually became STOMP. Here's their Brooms music video. • Who is Bill Irwin? Oh, he's generally done everything. (No hating on Mr. Noodles, please--do hate on the red furball he's with. And hands off the McFerrin, too.) • Paul Zaloom, activist and puppeteer, is also better known to the masses as Beakman from Beakman's World. C'mon and Zalooma-loomaloom-Zaloom. • More from La La La Human Steps. Youtuberances. • David Cale is a monologist. That's all I could find out about him, plus this duet with Syd Straw.

Bebe Barron, RIP

Chinese Jet Pilot — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:10:12 -0800

Bebe Barron, 82, Pioneer of Electronic Scores, Is Dead. Best known for the soundtrack to the 1956 sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet -- the first full-length feature to use only electronic music -- she and her husband Louis Barron recorded the film's pre-synthesizer "electronic tonalities" with electronic circuits of their own invention. She never scored another feature film, but remained active in the avant-garde music scene.

A loveable old wheelchair-bound Stalinist...

sleepy pete — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 10:47:48 -0800

Robert Wyatt is not dead. In fact, he recently released a new album titled Comicopera. Robert Wyatt was a part of the psych/prog combo The Soft Machine in the late 60s. In 1973 he fell out of a window at a party and broke his spine, leaving him in a wheel chair. Wyatt's music can be jazzy, avant garde, and psychedelic, as well as combinations of beautiful, ethereal, political, and depressing, usually all at once (his first solo album after the accident was titled Rock Bottom, a play on his condition and mental state with cover art depicting divers and liner notes saying, "songs and drones by Robert Wyatt"). Here's Wyatt doing Elvis Costello's "Shipbuilding" and a YT version of one of my favorites "Heaps of Sheep" from the Eno collaboration Shleep (Wyatt provided percussion and backing vocals on Eno's Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) as well). Here's some more Robert Wyatt youtube stuff. Here's a discography up to 2002 that includes his Soft Machine and Matching Mole material and here's another that includes albums released after 2002 (in case you wanted to know). By the way, the post title was taken from this comment. When I first thought about this post months ago, it was about the only time Wyatt had been mentioned on MeFi, so I thought (and still think) it was fitting.

Vis(ual)po(etry)

Kattullus — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 22:28:31 -0800

Vispo is a site dedicated to visual poetry, both static and animated, run by Jim Andrews (though there's also a sound section). Among my favorites are bpNichol's First Screening (made in Hypercard), poem game Arteroids, the works of Ana Maria Uribe, Oppen Do Down (warning: audio starts immediately), Enigma M, strings and a selection of typographic works by Clemente Padin

20th Century Avant-Garde

Kattullus — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 23:13:58 -0800

20th Century Avant-Garde is a great resource guide to experimental art from 1900 onwards. Special sections for dada, the situationists and fluxus. You can also browse by categories such as artists, film and video art, movements in art, publishers and many more. If you're interested in experimental art of the 20th Century you can get lost in this site for hours.

A series of sacrifices in which the victims are words.

Hypocrite_Lecteur — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 21:02:35 -0800

Eclipse is a free on-line archive focusing on digital facsimiles of the most radical small-press writing from the last quarter century. There's a lot to choose from, but here are three of my favorites: Lyn Hejinian's A Thought Is The Bride of What Thinking Susan Howe's The Western Borders N.H. Pritchard's EECCHHOOEESS

Freaky Flicks

sushiwiththejury — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 17:27:58 -0800

Freaky Flicks is a p2p community with a radical mascot that collects arthouse and cult cinema.

Browse the selection on The Pirate Bay or look at their list of Red Letter Directors.

The FF Forum is pretty good for recommendations and links to non-p2p and legal online video.

20th-century classical-experimental-electroacoustic music

sushiwiththejury — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 09:44:11 -0800

The Avant Garde Project is a bunch of experimental outofprint music digitized from LPs. Free. Available in Flac and 192 kbps MP3. Start off at the Archive.

The writings of Owen Hatherley

Kattullus — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 21:38:22 -0800

Owen Hatherley, has three blogs where he expounds on culture and architecture from an English Leftist perspective, sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy, The Measures Taken (which has longer essays than the previous blog) and the group film blog kino fist. To give you an idea of the range of subjects he covers, here's a sampling of his blogposts: Towards a Communist Couture? Sartorial Socialism from Huey P Newton to Honecker, Zuckendes Fleischer (on pre-WWII American cartoons), Industrial Island Machine - Vorticism and the absence of an English Avant-Garde, Hurrah for the Black Box Recorder (on songwriter Luke Haines and The Daily Mail), The Children’s Book as a Revolutionary Object (with a bunch of pictures from Soviet avant-garde children's books), Architectural Drawings of the 1960s, Art is a branch of Mathematics (Taylorism and Russian SF classic We), Brechtian Productivism in an age of Mechanical Stagnation and Notes towards an attempted refutation of the 'Associational Fallacy' (on architecture). All of the blogs are heavily adorned with pretty pictures, some not safe for work. He has been mentioned before and one of his essays was the subject of a previous fpp.

Asemic Writing

Kattullus — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 19:07:29 -0800

Asemic is a magazine of asemic writing, which is writing without semantic content. The editor is Australian Tim Gaze, who's made the asemic books Aussie Runes and The Oxygen of Truth, volumes 1 and 2. "Only words lie; asemic texts cannot lie." Kiini Ibura Salaam writes about his reaction to asemic writing. Asemic Calligraphy by Emma Viguier.

Living in the Mall

Kattullus — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 09:26:50 -0800

Living in the Mall is an art project by Providence artist Michael J. Townsend that has come to an abrubt end. "Eight artists snuck into the depths of Providence Place mall and built a secret studio apartment in which they stayed, on and off, for nearly four years until mall security finally caught their leader last week." Townsend's wife, Adriana Yoto, also documented the project at her website.

Stainless Steel Ondine

Blazecock Pileon — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 02:18:18 -0800

Steve Mann's hydraulophone with sculpture gallery and performance video snippets: [1] [2] [3]

Ingmar Bergman's Soap Commercials

Kattullus — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 13:47:24 -0800

The 9 soap commercials Ingmar Bergman made are a little known part of his oeuvre. Slate's Dana Stevens explains how they came about.

The Force inspiration

tellurian — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 23:41:08 -0800

21-87 is a short film from Arthur Lipsett that has been discussed before.

Sean Bonney's Translations of Baudelaire

Kattullus — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 04:37:52 -0800

Sean Bonney's translations of Baudelaire are unconventional. Instead of following the form of the French originals they are semi-concrete typewriter poetry. In a review of the book, everyone's cup of tea, onedit magazine says that they are "certainly the best translations of Baudelaire in English ever written." Which might explain why they published 35 of them in their latest issue. You can listen to Bonney read his translations here [mp3]

I'll take what's behind door number 4'33".

converge — Fri, 18 May 2007 21:07:38 -0800

John Cage gives a little concert on a 1960's gameshow called "I've Got a Secret." (Flashvid)

"We were just trying to write songs about prostitutes and lesbians, that's all."

Blazecock Pileon — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 21:25:09 -0800

Introduced to Western culture by the Beatles in their single Norwegian Wood, the sitar has featured prominently in North Indian classical music for centuries. Princeton-based computer scientist Ajay Kapur updates the instrument with his ESitar, an audio and video controller that uses gesture input (PDF) and machine learning algorithms to facilitate joining the computer with Ajay in his sitar performance. Undergraduate engineering students at the University of Pennsylvania work from the other direction, building RAVI-bot, an award-winning, self-playing robotic sitar (YouTube) programmed to generate music from classical Raga scales and melodies all on its own. For those in the Philadelphia area, be sure to check out a live performance of RAVI-bot at the local Klein Art Gallery.