Wolf Notes #8 is now available from Compost and Height. This printed issue brings together a collection of texts written by some of the most innovative composers working today, with each writing about one of their own compositions. The riso-print A5 edition is limited to 200 copies, and is available for £5 plus postage. UK – £7 (£5 + £2 p&p) International – £9 (£5 + £4 p&p)
Also available from:
The Wire Bookshop, Penultimate Press, OTOROKU, South London Gallery
Composers include: Ryoko Akama, Antoine Beuger, Olivia Block, Seth Cluett, Jane Dickson, Patrick Farmer, Bruno Guastalla, Julia Holter, Sarah Hughes, Jason Kahn, Caroline de Lannoy, Dominic Lash, Joseph Clayton Mills, Tim Parkinson, Gino Robair, James Saunders, Mark So, Adam Sonderberg.
Ryoko Akama is a sound artist / composer who works across sound installation, performance and composition. Her aesthetics approach empty field – silence (time) and space, and pursue the quality of the minimal, abstract and cumulative in multidimensional sonic experience. She explores sound objects and electronics, and also employs texts in order to create scores. She is the co-founder of Reductive Journal and runs Melange Edition.
Antoine Beuger studied composition with Ton de Leeuw at Sweelinck Coservatorium in Amsterdam 1973-78. In 1990 he began composing after an interruption of about 10 years. Two years later he founded Edition Wandelweiser together with composer/performer Burkhard Schlothauer. Since 1994 he’s been active with the conception and organisation of KLANGRAUM, a concert series at Kunstraum Düsseldorf. During the years 1995-2001 he was working together with visual artist Mauser as artistic director of “Werkraum”, Place for Interdisciplinary Artistic Events, Cologne. Since 1996 he’s been artistic director of edition wandelweiser records and since 2004 managing director of Edition Wandelweiser gmbh.
Olivia Block creates electroacoustic sound compositions for performance, recordings, installations, cinema, orchestra and chamber music concerts. Her solo performances include partially improvised pieces for electronics and amplified objects, presented in a slow and deliberate gestural style. Block also performs original pieces for inside piano. Her compositions often combine field recordings, chamber instruments and electronic textures. In addition to her compositions for solo recordings and performances, Block creates multimedia works for sounds and video and writes scores for large ensemble, string quartet, and orchestra.
Seth Cluett (b. Troy, NY) is an composer, performer, and artist whose work ranges from photography and drawing to video, sound installation, concert music, and critical writing. His “subtle…seductive, immersive” (Artforum) work has been characterized as “rigorously focused and full of detail” (e/i) and “dramatic, powerful, and at one with nature” (The Wire). Exploring the territory between the senses, Cluett’s works are marked by a detailed attention to perception and to the role of sound in the creation of a sense of place, the workings of memory, and the experience of time. His research interests and critical writings investigate embodied experience, immersive multi-media systems, the media history of the loudspeaker, the history and documentation of sound as an expressive medium, and architectural acoustics as compositional material.
Jane Dickson is a Glasgow based composer and pianist. She is a member of international group n s m b l, dedicated to the performance of new and alternative compositions, and is currently working with librettist Nic Chalmers on a piece exploring the fugue and the fugue state. Her research interests include instrumentality, virtuosity and gender.
Patrick Farmer is the co-founder of the online curatorial platform, Compost and Height, and the co-editor of the new-music journal, Wolf Notes. Over the last three years he has published three books and has written compositions for groups such as Apartment House and the Set Ensemble. Farmer has performed and exhibited internationally with artists such as Angharad Davies, Michael Pisaro, Sarah Hughes, and Jason Kahn. Festival appearances and residencies include Audiograft (Oxford), The Wulf (Los Angeles), LMC (London), I & E (Dublin), Geiger (Gothenberg), Blurred Edges (Hamburg), Forestry Commission England (Cumbria), Q-O2 (Belgium) and MOKS (Estonia). His work has been released on labels such as Another Timbre, Nadukeenumono, and Winds Measure. His current work looks at the nature of the arbitrary; Farmer has begun writing compositions that primarily focus on the sound producing means rather than the sound itself, often utilising more and more fantastical methods to create sounds that are themselves, wonderfully ordinary.
Bruno Guastalla is a violin maker and restorer and also a musician.
Julia Holter is an American experimental artist, singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist based in Los Angeles. A CalArts graduate, she released her first studio album, Tragedy, in 2011. A second album, Ekstasis, followed in 2012. Holter also collaborates with other musicians including Nite Jewel, Linda Perhacs, and Michael Pisaro. In 2013, she released her third album, Loud City Song to resounding critical acclaim.
Sarah Hughes is an artist, composer and performer, producing work that ranges from sculpture, installation, composition and music. She is the co-founder of Compost and Height, a curatorial platform that focuses on new music and composition. She is also co-editor of the new music journal, Wolf Notes, and co-founder of BORE, a publication dedicated to experimental text-based and graphic scores. Hughes’s work has been exhibited and performed internationally, including at Supplement, London; V22, London; Sydney Non Objective, Australia; Oriel Davies, Wales; Center for New Music, San Francisco; Constellation, Chicago and The Wulf, Los Angeles. Hughes is Composer-in-Residence at South London Gallery 2015-2016.
Jason Kahn is a musician, artist and writer. As an electronic musician, vocalist and drummer Kahn collaborates regularly with many musicians, both in improvised settings and in the context of graphical scores which he composes for specific groups. Kahn has exhibited his installations in museums, galleries, art spaces and public sites internationally. These works focus on the idea of space: the conceptual and physical juncture points, its production and dissolution, and our relation to it as a political, social and environmental medium. Kahn’s other activities include sound pieces for radio, film, dance and theatre. He has also designed numerous CD, LP and cassette covers. As a writer, his work has appeared in books, magazines and as liner notes to many audio publications. Performing regularly around the world, Kahn has given concerts throughout Europe, North and South America, Australia, Egypt, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Japan, Korea, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, Turkey and South Africa.
Caroline de Lannoy was born in Brussels and lives and works in London. She studied at Athens School of Fine Arts, Central St Martins College of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art. She works across painting, drawing, installation and composition. She has exhibited extensively across Europe as well as internationally including exhibitions at: The Collection Lincoln Museum, La Verriere, Art In General, Huddersfield Art Gallery, MASS MoCA, Royal Academy, Arnolfini, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Whitworth Art Gallery, Gallery North, Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum, Mondriaanhuis, Kettle’s Yard, South London Gallery.
Dominic Lash is a freely improvising double bassist, although his activities also range much more widely and include playing bass guitar and other instruments; both writing and performing composed music; and writing about music and various other subjects.??He has performed with musicians such as Tony Conrad (in duo and quartet formations), Joe Morris(trio and quartet), Evan Parker (duo, quartet and large ensemble) and the late Steve Reid. His main projects include The Dominic Lash Quartet, The Set Ensemble (an experimental music group focused on the work of the Wandelweiser collective) and The Convergence Quartet. ??Based in Bristol, Lash has performed in the UK, Austria, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey and USA.
Joseph Clayton Mills is a musician, artist, and writer who lives and works in Chicago, where his collaborators have included Adam Sonderberg and Steven Hess (as Haptic), Michael Vallera (as Maar), Noé Cuéllar (as Partial), Sylvain Chaveau, Jason Stein, Michael Pisaro, and Olivia Block, among many others. His recordings have appeared on numerous labels, including Another Timbre, FSS, and Entr’acte. In 2013, in collaboration with Noé Cuéllar, he launched the label Suppedaneum to focus on releasing scores and their realizations.
Tim Parkinson (b.1973) is an independent composer, based in London, UK since 1997. Music has been written for various groups and ensembles including Apartment House, [rout], Incidental Music, Dedalus, Basel Sinfonietta, London Sinfonietta; and for various instrumentalists including Stephen Altoft, Angharad Davies, Rhodri Davies, Julia Eckhardt, Anton Lukoszevieze, Tanja Masanti, Andrew Sparling, Craig Shepard, Philip Thomas, Stefan Thut. Music has been performed in UK, Europe, USA, Armenia, New Zealand, Japan. He is also active as pianist and performer, both independently and also by invitation, having been an occasional performer with Apartment House, and Plus-Minus, and having performed in the UK in venues such as Tate Modern, Barbican, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and further afield in Europe, and South America. Since 2003 Parkinson has been regularly performing with composer James Saunders in the lo-fi electronics, auxiliary instrument and any-sound-producing-means duo Parkinson Saunders. In 2005 launched the yearly London based concert series, “Music We’d Like to Hear” with composers John Lely and Markus Trunk.
Gino Robair has created music for dance, theatre, radio, television, silent film, and gamelan orchestra, and his works have been performed throughout North America, Europe, and Japan. As a percussionist, he has performed and recorded with Tom Waits, Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, Nina Hagen, John Butcher, Terry Riley, and Lou Harrison. Robair is one of the “25 innovative percussionists” included in the book Percussion Profiles. Recent compositions include Grand Electric Skull for the ROVA Saxophone Quartet and Ikue Mori, and Neither Confirmed Nor Denied, an opera based on number stations.
James Saunders is a composer with an interest in modularity, series, and group behaviours. He is Head of the Centre for Musical Research at Bath Spa University and performs in the duo Parkinson Saunders.
Mark So lives in Los Angeles. His many pieces (300 alone involve John Ashbery’s poems) variously take form as scores, tapes, and other more obscure manifestations, exploring ordinary situations through simple recording/transcription/reading and changing experiences of silence. Mostly un-scored practices drive his latest work (involving different uses of text, type, and tape), which remains preoccupied with the mysterious and chaotic dimensionality of language – the music of its emergent nature. In 2014, his publishing initiative DEATH-SPIRAL released 3 titles: Dark Interiors/Places of the Heart, a tape of So’s music; New complaints. New rewards, a book/dvd by Stuark Krimko & Mark So; and Immaterial, a collection of text compositions by Jason Thomas. (DEATH-SPIRAL.net)
Adam Sonderberg is a composer working predominantly with concrete-based compositions utilizing the computer as a discrete processing and assembly tool. His selected discography includes over a dozen releases, both solo and ensemble work, published by a number of different labels including: Absurd, BOXmedia, Crouton, Tonschacht, Cathnor, Entr’acte, Con-V, and Longbox Recordings. Co-director, with Sam Dellaria, of the DROPP ENSEMBLE (pronounced ‘drope’) which consists of an international grouping of musicians and technicians that work together through mail-based data transfer and extensive post-production. Also a member of HAPTIC; a drone-based, performing entity that utilises a rotating fourth member to augment the content of each concert. Since 2003 has collaborated with theatrical, and movement artists / ensembles by producing sound work for theatre, performance art, dance, and film.
https://wolfnotes.wordpress.com/2015/05/25/wolf-notes-8/