Category: events

Posted on

John Cage at BBC Proms

Prom 47: Cage Centenary Celebration
7.45pm, 17 August, Royal Albert Hall, London

To mark the centenary of John Cage’s birth, Ilan Volkov has curated a programme that reflects the composer’s iconoclastic thinking, fertile imagination and arresting humour.
John Tilbury, who has for decades been associated with Cage’s work tonight plays the exquisitely beautiful Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra. Cassette players and plucked cactuses are just two examples of the blindingly original yet almost naively simple thinking that saw Cage – wittingly or otherwise – upturn practically every musical rule in the book.

The following pieces will be performed over the course of the evening, and Vicki Bennett will be one of eight participants performing “Improvisation III” and “Branches”.

Cage – 1O1 (12 mins)
Cage – Improvisation III (12 mins)
Christian Marclay – Luggage 2012 – improvisation for orchestra (c5 mins)
Cage – Atlas eclipticalis/Winter Music/Cartridge Music (30 mins)
Cage – Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra (20 mins)
Cage – Four2 (7 mins)
Cage – But what about the noise of crumpling paper … (15 mins)
Cage – Experiences II (3 mins)
Cage – ear for EAR (Antiphonies) (2 mins)
David Behrman, Takehisa Kosugi, Keith Rowe & Christian Wolff – Quartet – improvisation (c25 mins)
Cage – Branches (20 mins)

More information here: bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on/2012/august-17/14218

Posted on

Sounds Like Silence at HMKV

SOUNDS LIKE SILENCE
Cage – 4’33” – Silence
1912 – 1952 to 2012
08/25/2012 – 01/06/2013
Exhibition | Dortmunder U

Sounds Like Silence 87

Two works by Vicki Bennett will be included in the exhibition “Sounds Like Silence” at HMKV.

Sounds like Silence (Cage – 4’33” – Silence / 1912 – 1952 – 2012)

On the occasion of John Cage’s 100th anniversary and the 60th anniversary of the premiere of his famous “silent piece” HMKV shows 35 contemporary references to 4’33” from the fields of art and music as well as works that deal with general questions of e.g. perception of silence or sound ecology. The exhibition runs in parallel to Documenta 13 in Kassel.

Sounds Like Silence

Download the pdf of the press release

Documentation:

Sounds Like Silence 01Sounds Like Silence 11Sounds Like Silence 43Sounds Like Silence 33

Posted on

Critical Conversation Series

Paul Hamlyn Foundation, ArtWorks NorthEast: Developing Practice in Participatory Settings
Critical Conversation Series
Venue: Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle Upon Tyne
Date: 8th August 2012 7:00 to 9:00pm
Hosts: The Pixel Palace
Chair: Dominic Smith
Speaker: Vicki Bennett

http://www.thepixelpalace.org/events/critical-conversation-with-vicki-bennett

Background Cultural organisations in the North East of England have a strong record of working with artists to develop participatory arts projects in different settings. As part of a national arts research project funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and designed to facilitate new dialogues around and understandings of participatory arts practice, the University of Sunderland is working with a consortium of regional partners (ArtWorks North East)* to develop a clearer understanding of what makes for good participatory practice. The overarching aim is to establish an innovative and sustainable cross disciplinary approach to creating excellent practice in participatory leadership.

Critical conversations: dialogues around the practice of arts in participatory settings
As part of this, ArtWorks North East is together hosting a series of ‘critical conversations’ over the next 12 months involving artists, participants, host groups and other collaborators from a variety of art forms. We are inviting different people responsible for creating and delivering participatory work to reflect on their practice, and to open that practice up to discussion by others. Each conversation will take place in an open learning atmosphere in which artists/presenters will share their practice with others and where people feel able to ask challenging questions about that practice in appropriate ways.
The Pixel Palace is delivering one of these events on behalf of the University of Sunderland. This event will focus on Participation in Creative Digital Media and online environments. We would like to discuss the different models of practice which exist and seek your views on issues of quality, process and experience. We hope that the opportunity to reflect on practice will be beneficial for those attending as well as informing this research project.

To book a place please email info@thepixelpalace.org

Posted on

Thanks for listening to Radio Boredcast

Hopefully you’ve been listening all month to the online radio station curated and programmed (and sometimes containing) by People Like Us. It ran through March as part of AV Festival 12, and had 20,000 listening hits over the month.

Throughout the month we’ve been airing specially created shows and recordings as well as carefully selected programmes that reflect the AV Festival theme of As Slow As Possible. You who have listened know that we have really stretched the theme and have been surprised and hopefully delighted by what you have heard.

We will now start to archive the month on WFMU’s servers and make it available in streaming/on demand format. To keep up to date on this you should subscribe to our mailing list on the peoplelikeus.org front page.

UPDATE: Radio Boredcast is now archived at WFMU: http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/ZZ

Posted on

Radio Boredcast Schedule

The Schedule for Radio Boredcast, running from Noon on 1st March 2012 to Midnight 31st March is now up and is broadcasting online!

Listen at Basic.fm

If you have problems listening through a browser because you are at work etc, you can listen to the mp3 stream here – Just open iTunes, go to Advanced on the Menu bar and Open Stream and past it in.

http://www.avfestival.co.uk/programme/2012 – navigate using the Radio Boredcast link or by viewing each day of the AV Festival calendar in its entirety. Or follow the links below that take you to each day.

Meanwhile, subscribe to the Radio Boredcast Preview podcast – which runs from now until the end of March 2012. Clicking on this link will prompt your computer to open iTunes. This is normal, let it do so.

AV FESTIVAL
1-31
MARCH
2012
 THUR 1
MARCH
 FRI 2
MARCH
 SAT 3
MARCH
 SUN 4
MARCH
MON 5
MARCH
 TUE 6
MARCH
 WED 7
MARCH
 THUR 8
MARCH
 FRI 9
MARCH
 SAT 10
MARCH
 SUN 11
MARCH
MON 12
MARCH
 TUE 13
MARCH
 WED 14
MARCH
 THUR 15
MARCH
 FRI 16
MARCH
 SAT 17
MARCH
 SUN 18
MARCH
MON 19
MARCH
 TUE 20
MARCH
 WED 21
MARCH
 THUR 22
MARCH
 FRI 23RD
MARCH
 SAT 24TH
MARCH
 SUN 25TH
MARCH
MON 26
MARCH
 TUE 27
MARCH
 WED 28
MARCH
 THUR 29
MARCH
 FRI 30
MARCH
 SAT 31
MARCH

boredcast

avfestival.co.uk / thepixelpalace.org

HERE’S THE FULL LIST OF PARTICIPANTS!

The full list of participants in Radio Boredcast with new and exclusive recordings and shows are Carl Stone, Pseu Braun & Alex Orlov, Touch, Rob Weisberg, Nicolas Collins, Andrew Lahman, Chris & Cosey, Jonathan Dean and Transmuteo, Cheese Snob Wendy, Kevin Nutt, Tony Coulter, Daniel Menche, Scott Williams, John Wynne, Chris Watson, Jem Finer and Longplayer, Tim Maloney, Ergo Phizmiz, Matmos, Dave Soldier, Charlie and Busy Doing Nothing, Andrew Sharpley, Nancy O Graham, Gwilly Edmondez, Anna Ramos & Roc Jiménez De Cisneros, Doug Horne, Irene Moon, David Suisman, Radio Web MACBA, Mark Gergis and Porest, Jez Riley French, Don Joyce, Carlo Patrao and Zepelim, Dorian Jones, Jason Willett, Zach Layton, Primate Arena with Alex Drool and Eran Sachs, David Toop, Dylan Nyoukis, Jared Blum and GiganteSound, Ed Pinsent, Adrian Philips aka Mr Rotorvator, Axel Stockburger, Craig Dworkin, Felix Kubin, People Like Us, Language Removal Services, Daniela Cascella, John Levack Drever, Joel Eaton, Clay Pigeon, Gudrun Gut, Charles Powne, Carl Abrahamsson, Andreas Bick and Silent Listening, Phantom Circuit, Patti Schmidt aka Wheelie Houdini, Leif Elggren, Ken Freedman, Erik Bünger, Douglas Benford, Christof Migone, BJNilsen, Andy Baio, Adam Thomas aka Preslav Literary School, Caroline Bergvall, Ken’s Last Ever Radio Extravaganza, Tapeworm, Brent Clough and The Night Air, Ilan Volkov, Nat Roe, Steven Ball, X41, The Long Now Foundation, Sharon Gal, Michael Ruby, Jonathan Leidecker, DJ/rupture, Gordon Monahan, Michael Cumella aka MAC, Lloyd Dunn and nula, DDDJJJ666, and Kenneth Goldsmith.

PODCAST

Subscribe to the Radio Boredcast free podcast now – it will arrive into your iTunes with previews of show highlights every 2-3 days through the month of March. Subscribe Now and receive a Welcome podcast.

Subscribe via iTunes here –
itpc://radioboredcast.podomatic.com/rss2.xml

Or through the apple store –

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/radio-boredcast/id501309800

ANDROID AND iPHONE APP

Radio Boredcast is hosted by BASIC.fm, and there’s a free Android and iPhone app that you can download now as one way to listen to the radio station while on the move. BASIC.fm already exists in it’s own form, and magically will change into Radio Boredcast throughout the month of March.

For iPhone – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/basic-fm/id481267209?ls=1&mt=8
For Android – https://market.android.com/details?id=com.bandxmedia.basicfm

boredcast

BLOG POST by Vicki Bennett about Radio Boredcast http://www.avfestival.co.uk/blog/2012/02/19/radio-boredcast-presents
INTERVIEW with Vicki Bennett about Radio Boredcast http://www.thepixelpalace.org/basicfm/radio-boredcast
REVIEWS
WIRED interview http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/03/slow-radio/
The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/mar/07/av-festival-as-slow-possible/print

BACKGROUND ON RADIO BOREDCAST…

Time is a curious thing – on one hand we complain about being so busy we just don’t know what to do with ourselves, and on the other hand we literally don’t know what to do with ourselves and say we are bored. Given that we need more time, when we are not killing it, it is also strange that (in the western world) we are so obsessed with speed – the one thing guaranteed to make us miss out on the detail, complexity and depth of experience in exchange for thrills and illusions of gaining something, that “something” often being more time. It is with these thoughts that I’ve entered into curating “Radio Boredcast” for AV Festival 12.

The first thing that struck me is that 744 hours is quite a long time. 744 minutes is a long time. Four weeks lined up in iTunes is a long playlist. It would be easy to think about how to fill this up as quickly as possible, but that’s Speediness rearing it’s rather worn out head again. “Slow” is subtle, it avoids the obvious, the short cut or the first hurdle; it is to start at the end of the race and see where we are running to. The only thing to be stretched is the concept of what Slow actually might be – the only aim to make it an engaging, entertaining and unpredictable a listening experience as possible.

Radio Boredcast has and impressive list of participants, providing content in the form of specially produced new and unpublished works, playlists and regular freeform radio shows, field recordings, interviews and monologues and much, much more.

While listening, you may hear adults talking for hours about slowness and children complaining about how boring it all is, thematic freeform radio shows, mathematical experiments and time-based compositions, field recordings of nature’s cycles and underwater rumblings, musical meanderings through memory and inner worlds of sleepless nights; across landscapes and back through time, discovering the world of ritual and speaking in tongues by way of babbling poets and bubbling brooks full of musical elephants, a voyage into deep concréte through art gallery toilets, scientific discussions on insects and evolutionary biology, ultrasound recordings of bats, journeys through very slow cheese, soundscapes from faraway lands with long phonecalls full of language removal, testcard music and shipping forecasts, vast sweeping summaries of the entire history of everything, and then… Silence. Outside of this will be programming of thematic playlists all the way through “Acconci” (Vito) to “Zzz…” (Leif Elggren & Thomas Liljenberg)

Here’s how the schedule began… on post-its in an A2 notepad.

UPDATE (June 2012): Radio Boredcast is now archived at WFMU:
www.wfmu.org/playlists/ZZ

Posted on

Off The Page – The Wire / Sound and Music

Date: Friday 24 – Sunday 26 February 2012
Venue: The Playhouse Theatre, Whitstable
Produced by: Sound and Music and The Wire

People Like Us will be participating in a panel discussion at Off The Page, an event co-produced and curated by The Wire and Sound and Music, in Whitstable, UK on Saturday 25th February 2012.

Off The Page is the UK’s only literary festival devoted to music criticism and audio culture. Taking place in the seaside town of Whitstable in Kent, this unique weekend-long event looks to expand the discourse surrounding contemporary sound and music by bringing together leading critics, authors, musicians and artists in a programme of talks, presentations and panel discussions.

Panel debate
Collateral Damage: Music in a Digital Economy
In recent years, the internet and a raft of new technologies have transformed the ways in which we produce, perceive and consume music. And as the reality of music’s new digital economy starts to bite, musicians and labels are having to rethink both philosophy and practice, addressing the issue of how they create and disseminate work – while some decry the free movement of music across file sharing networks and the collapse of traditional record industry models, others look to exploit the new possibilities offered by crowd sourcing and social networking. For this panel discussion chaired by The Wire’s Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Tony Herrington, Vicki Bennett (People Like Us), Chris Cutler (ReR Records) and Robin Rimbaud (Scanner) discuss possible responses to the challenges posed by music’s changing eco-system

Posted on

WFMU Marathon 2012

Who’d think another year has passed since the WFMU Marathon? Well the WFMU bank balance is well aware of that. Please help keep this wonderful station on the air if you appreciate what we do, and put your money where your mouse is. Lots of swag to be won too, no one goes away empty handed for $15 or more! Oh, and don’t forget the true value of what you’re pledging for the hours, days, months, YEARS of FREE programming that has enriched so many peoples lives. If you have ever listened to DO or DIY with People Like Us please consider donating.

https://www.wfmu.org/marathon/pledge.php

Add this pledge widget to your site or blog too.