Sound and Music

JUICE - Thursday 17th Dec Forge, Camden

In the NASA documentary For All Mankind's crowning moment, a man walks on the moon, planting a bright American flag on the barren lunar landscape. It's a moment we've all seen before, etched indelibly on the popular consciousness to the point of cliché.

Tape is the material that gathered and collected a curious generation’s first experiments in home-recording, and historically disseminated the power to author, retain and remix the soundscape of the home.

It has been twenty-one years since Richard Barrett began his relationship with Elision, an extraordinarily fruitful period for both parties, which was celebrated with a concert at Kings Place, London.

It seems that the important times are those when a lot is needed or required, and we're hypnotized by motion. In truth it could be quite different: that all that's important comes in quietness, and that activity is the working out, digesting and putting forward of what's been learned, in order to become empty again and receive more.

The salt crystals snap into sharp geometries: snowflakes, perfect circles, striated waveforms, registering the frequency of the note. Mathematicians, acoustic scientists and philosophers since the ancient days of Pythagoras have been fascinated with desmonstrating the invisible number-magic of sound.

Since the early 1960s he has moved like a shadow through the Tokyo, New York and European avant-gardes, leaving few tangible traces, but equally at home with the Fluxus crowd, Downtown improvisers and European electronica experimentalists.

Frank Zappa once asked, via album title, “Does humor belong in music?” The iconoclastic musician surely believed this was a rhetorical question, to be answered with an emphatic “YES!” After all, pop music and comedy have coexisted for centuries, for as long as there has been a so-called “popular music.” Zappa’s potty-mouthed provocations, Weird Al Yanko

He has gradually eschewed contemporary musical preoccupations with novel sonorities and formal schemes as foundational praxis, in favour of an engagement with a variety of musically contingent signifying practices, art-forms and disciplines relevant to his own creative aims.

The first piece of Roger’s that I heard was the gripping oboe solo Ausgangspunkte, written for his brother Chris. Although composed twenty years ago, it has all the hallmarks of his mature style, and still sounds as striking today, featured in the recent Bmic Cutting Edge series.