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SPECTRES 004BK
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The fourth issue of the annual publication dedicated to sound and music experimentation, co-published by Shelter Press and Ina GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales), around the topic of voice. The voice is everywhere, infiltrating everything, making civilization, marking out territories with infinite borders, spreading from the farthest reaches to the most intimate spaces. It can be neither reduced nor summarized. And accordingly, when taken as a theme, the voice is inexhaustible, even when seen in the light of its very particular relation with the sonic or the musical, as is the case in most of the texts collected in this volume. There is no point therefore in trying to circumscribe or amalgamate the multiple avatars of the voice. We must rather try to apprehend what the voice can do, to envisage its landscape, its potential effects. Featuring contributions from/about François J. Bonnet, John Giorno, David Grubbs, Yannick Guédon, Lee Gamble, Sarah Hennies, Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, Stine Janvin, Joan La Barbara, Youmna Saba, Akira Sakata, Pierre Schaeffer, Peter Szendy, and Ghédalia Tazartès.
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SPECTRES 003BK
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The expression "ghost in the machine" emerged within a particular context, namely as a critique of Cartesian dualism's separation of soul and body, and thus served to revive a certain mechanistic materialism. In simple terms, this critique denies the existence of an independent soul (the "ghost") contained in a corporeal organism (the "machine"). It asserts, on the contrary, that the "soul" is just a manifestation of the body -- that ultimately, they are one and the same. The artificial always brings with it the fantasy of emancipation and autonomy, and a break with a supposedly natural order of things. In a certain respect, the domain of musical creation constitutes a kind of front line, at once a terrain of exploration for possible applications of AI and a domain that boasts an already substantial history of the integration of machines and their calculative power into creative processes. From algorithmic composition to methods of resynthesis, from logical approaches to the creation of cybernetic systems, from the birth of computer music to neural networks, for more than half a century now music has been in continual dialogue with the binary universe of electron flows and the increasingly complex systems that control them. Each of the texts included here, in its own way, reveals a different facet of the strange prism formed by this alliance. Each projects its own particular spectrum -- or spectre; each reveals a ghost, evokes an apparition that is a composite of ideas, electricity, and operations. This book, then, does not set out to cut the Gordian knot constituted by the question of the possible mutations and becomings of binary logic, and in particular its most recent avatar, AI. On the contrary, it seeks to shed a diverse light upon the many possible ways of coming to grips with it today, and upon the dreams, promises, and doubts raised by these becomings, whether actualized in the creation of codes and programs to assemble sounds or infusing a whole compositional project. Above all, though, what is at stake here is to discover how these developments resonate together, and how this resonance manifests itself through all these approaches, all these reflections, all these modes of creation and of living. For the artificial, the artefact, is always the extro-human brainchild of a human, all too human dream. Authors: Keith Fullerton Whitman, Émilie Gillet, Steve Goodman, Florian Hecker, James Hoff, Roland Kayn, Ada Lovelace, Robin Mackay, Bill Orcutt, Matthias Puech, Akira Rabelais, Lucy Railton, Jean-Claude Risset, Sébastien Roux, Peter Zinovieff.
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SPECTRES 002BK
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Limited restock. To resonate: re-sonare. To sound again -- with the immediate implication of a doubling. Sound and its double: sent back to us, reflected by surfaces, diffracted by edges and corners. Sound amplified, swathed in an acoustics that transforms it. Sound enhanced by its passing through a certain site, a certain milieu. Sound propagated, reaching out into the distance. But to resonate is also to vibrate with sound, in unison, in synchronous oscillation. To marry with its shape, amplifying a common destiny. To join forces with it. And then again, to resonate is to remember, to evoke the past and to bring it back. Or to plunge into the spectrum of sound, to shape it around a certain frequency, to bring out sonic or electric peaks from the becoming of signals. Resonance embraces a multitude of different meanings. Or rather, remaining always identical, it is actualized in a wide range of different phenomena and circumstances. Such is the multitude of resonances evoked in the pages below: a multitude of occurrences, events, sensations, and feelings that intertwine and welcome one other. Everyone may have their own history, everyone may resonate in their own way, and yet we must all, in order to experience resonance at a given moment, be ready to welcome it. The welcoming of what is other, whether an abstract outside or on the contrary an incarnate otherness ready to resonate in turn, is a condition of resonance. This idea of the welcome is found throughout the texts that follow, opening up the human dimension of resonance, a dimension essential to all creativity and to any exchange, any community of mind. Which means that resonance here is also understood as being, already, an act of paying attention, i.e. a listening, an exchange. Addressing one or other of the forms that this idea of resonating can take on (extending -- evoking -- reverberating -- revealing -- transmitting), each of the contributions brought together in this volume reveals to us a personal aspect, a fragment of the enthralling territory of sonic and musical experimentation, a territory upon which resonance may unfold. The book has been designed as a prism and as a manual. May it in turn find a unique and profound resonance in each and every reader. Features writings by: Jean-Luc Nancy, Tomoko Sauvage, Christian Zanési, Maryanne Amacher, Christina Kubisch, Okkyung Lee, David Toop, Pali Meursault, David Rosenboom, Chris Corsano, Ellen Fullman, and The Caretaker. Editors: François J. Bonnet, Bartolomé Sanson. Binding: thread-sewn metallic softcover; Size: 135 x 200 cm; Page count: 196 pp.; First edition: 2500 copies; Language(s): French/English. Published by Shelter Press with the support of INA GRM.
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SPECTRES 001BK
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Restocked, third printing. Published with the support of INA GRM. Composing Listening features texts by: Félicia Atkinson, François Bayle, François J. Bonnet, Drew Daniel, Brunhild Ferrari, Beatriz Ferreyra, Stephen O'Malley, Jim O'Rourke, Eliane Radigue, Régis Renouard Larivière, Espen Sommer Eide, Daniel Teruggi, Chris Watson. This book has been conceived as both a prism and a manual. Following the "traditional" arc of electroacoustic composition (listen-record-compose-deploy-feel), each of the contributions collected together here focuses in on a personal aspect, a fragment of that thrilling territory that is sonic and musical experimentation. Although the term "experimental music" may now have be understood as referring to a genre, or even a particular style, we ought to hold on to the original use of this term, which was based more on an approach than on any particular aesthetic line to be followed. The experimental is first and foremost a spirit, the spirit of the exploration of unknown territories, a spirit of invention which sees musical composition more as a voyage into uncertain territories than as a self-assured approach working safe within the bosom of fully mapped out and recognized lands. 228 pp; thread-sewn softcover; one color offset; Size: 135x200cm; Language(s): French, English.
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