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20170506

Heard Belorukov & Zherbin, Filter Feeders and Pasha Rotts at Akusmata gallery last night. A warm and noisy evening. Saw a Make Noise 0-Coast and a SP-303 in use. Also a brilliant electronic music gig hat (by Pasha). Petri Kuljuntausta offered some guidelines for the upcoming Ore.e Ref./Storijapan: Sound of Work exhibition/gig. He wants us to prioritize on audio. We’ll possibly also present audio pieces from the Ore.e Ref.: Meta- Collection (Record Singers, Topi Äikäs 4’33, Wuolio usb stick?). Particullary Äikäs and RS serve as solid references. Came up with the idea of making a helmet xylophone (like the one Ewoks play in Star Wars) and using the same styles of exhibition display techniques we deployed for SIC (2014).

Ore.e Ref. on a winning streak. Washington Post writes that The hottest trend in Web design is making intentionally ugly, difficult sites. Apparently web brutalism is a thing.

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20170330

“‘Prism House Complete Percussion Vol. I‘ is a compilation of 320 found sound samples gathered from field recordings made exclusively in New York City”. It works well (The music the band makes is sentimental). Sounds of the Junk Yard (1964) Michael Siegel is a better reference for sound of work! My favorite is  “Alligator Shear” (201). Siegel’s Sounds of the Office is a classic (Perhaps it inspired the PO-24?).

I’m not sure if SOW: Blacksmith ed1 is offering anything new to the continuum of groove oriented musique concrete. I guess the publications openness (direct availability through archive.org / freesound) is it’s best merit. But there are so many great free sample packs already out there that it’s impossible to stand out. I’ve been bragging that SOW is a True-Marxist sound publication: It is NOT a representation of labor or a glorification of the labor force – It is a tool (Which can be used to to make techno). The grooves of the machines can be yielded to move our semi-unemployed bodies struggling through post-industrial landscapes.

The idea that techno is the music of the working class was announced by Jori Hulkkonen in 2011. I got to interview him during Kotimaan teknokatsaus vol 3 (16:41). Similar views are present in Jeremy Deller’s Acid Brass project. In 2011 Hulkkonen described techno as a “Human soul with the frame of the machine”. He talked about Detroit and how the cities empty industrial spaces were appropriate for social gatherings. Abandoned factories filled with bodies moving to the rhythm of machine made music. He believed that Kemi’s development as a city forged him into the artist he is today. After factories were closed and parents were unemployed, their children occupied the factory facilities, filled them with mechanical sounds and developed new cultural expressions (and industries). Techno served as a gateway for learning how to work with computers, to organize gatherings and to work creatively. It was born from necessity.

The response for SOW has been ok. People have celebrated the release on Reddit. Apparently “Industrial sounds are so hot right now” and the Novation Circuit tailored .syx has is well received (52 likes). Also got in touch with Petri Kuljuntausta who invited me to host an exhibition at Akusmata sound art gallery in the summer. I’m moving steadily into towards sound arts. The transition of migrating from performance art to post-marxist sound art has taken two years and a little under 800€ in gear investment. I regret that we didn’t explore the sonic possibilities of Jesses forge in more detail. The sounds are pretty straightforward. I guess I should apply funding for ed.2? I could ask Hulkkonen etc. to produce songs from the sounds too.

Interesting audio slicer, loopers and scratch emulators as VST: kammerl.de/audio/. Beat-Repeat Effect is also available for
Mutable Instrument’s Clouds.

Visited Ars17 at Kiasma. Not as scary as I thought. Simple stuff. It felt homemade and I was only scared by Ilja Karilampi.

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20170329

Today is the day! All of the files are available at http://oree.storijapan.net/praxis/sound-of-work/. The complete 1gb .zip file can be downloaded from https://archive.org/details/sow-blacksmith-ed1. Made a video announcing a selection of sound for the Novation Circuit .syx. I got confirmation that the files are ok in freesound (still some tweaking to do). Published a demo on soundcloud. I can now begin to wear the Atlas Copco cap I got from the company as a sponsorship as a token of a successful publication.

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20170323

Float like an artists, sting like an institution. #ॐ

The SOW: Blacksmith ed1 metadata .cvs asks for intensive work but I’ll try to have it ready by tonight. Witness evidences of labor online.

Shot video at the Helsinki mounted police crowd control training session in the morning. Inhaled training mace spray and horse manure. Horses marched through smoke and flags were waved. A gun was shot at random. The sun was low and the officers backlit. The event looked like a buddhistic ritual. I was offered the opportunity to join their training sessions with the defence forces. Unfortunately the session will take place on the same day as our Kontula Electronic gig. Morning with the horses and evening with techno. Art, spring, stress.

Dance lessons were fun and intensive. Learned some Pilates movements but hurt my wrist (The pain comes from poorly executed kettlebell lifts and unergonomic phone handling). Mr. Pilates believed that modern work and lifestyles have weakend our bodies and to fix us into shape he develloped the practice of Contrology (know today as Pilates). 

During the process of disemboweling charismatic authorities as political organizers – A mass of physical authorities telling us how to live in our bodies has a emerged. 

Wonder if there is some sort of Anarcolates out there which would aspire break our bodies? Movement is always relational (to body parts, others and spaces) which makes autonomy as a body impossible. Anarcolatic exercises would attempt to replace current relations with new codependencies. Such new codependencies should be toxic and work to free us from the temporality (history) of the body. Perhaps technology could be used to mutate us! A dancer providing and controlling the oxygen flow of an other with a pump serves as an simplified illustration.

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20170322

Submitted the terms deep time Marxism and the institutional horizon to the Bureau of Linguistical Reality database.

Work on the SOW: Blacksmith ed1 metadata is progressing steadily. I’m currently authoring a .csv table with descriptions, filenames, tags etc. for freesound.org. The work is very tedious. The table has 324 rows (each with eight columns). Also added ID3v2.3.0 & RIFF INFO metadata to the files. Unfortunately I couldn’t sync the data automatically so the details are a bit different between the .csv and the metadata embedded into the files. Got the Sound of Work: Blacksmith edition 1 webpage on Ore.e Ref. site ready. Prepared a collection of one shot sounds for Kristian, so that we can start rehearsing with them.