When the blind street musician Moondog roamed New York City in the early 1950s, he must have chosen the places where he laid out his instruments on the pavement with his ears. Sometimes it seems as if the sounds of the city were just waiting for him.
Joseph Nechvatal’s 1995 cybersex novella '~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even' is based on the idea that any form of sexual order is only temporary and that social gender is therefore in a permanent state of becoming.
The American nation as a media construct – that is the core thesis of the Tape-beatles. The Iowa-based collective has been exploring it in collaged pieces featuring samples from film, television and music. During the Iraq War in 1990/91, there was ample opportunity to collect material.
Surrounded by mosquitoes, spiders and cockroaches, David Toop spent two weeks aboard a boat in the Venezuelan rainforest in 1978. The musician was on his way to the remote villages of the Yanomami people and wanted to record their shamanistic rituals with a microphone.
In the ragas of classical Indian music, the emotional characteristics associated with the moods of different times of day are translated into sound. The German band Neu!, which became legendary in the Krautrock era of the early 1970s, considered what the month of November should sound like.
’The Belgian Congo Records‘ is a series of traditional music recorded in the 1930s during a brutal colonial regime. When Swedish techno producer Peder Mannerfelt discovered the songs with their manic, driving rhythms in 2015, he decided to reinterpret them on a synthesiser.
When Andy Warhol introduced the element of repetition into art in the early 1960s, he caused both confusion and inspiration. In Germany, artist Peter Roehr applied this technique to audio from 1964 onwards, editing together passages from radio news, music and advertising into loops.
Elephants are social animals – but can they also be encouraged to make music together? And with ‘real’ musical instruments, no less? Composer Dave Soldier tried this out in 1999 together with Richard Lair at the Elephant Conservation Centre in Lampang in northern Thailand.
For most users, the noises made by devices are nothing more than unwanted by-products. Dot matrix printers were particularly unpopular with their operators because they were loud and disruptive. Thomas McIntosh and Emmanuel Madan discovered the musical potential of these machines in 1998.
