Hz #19

In the latest issue of Fylkingen's journal Hz you will find an article of mine, Electronic music archives in the collection of The Swedish Performing Arts Agency. It is a translation from the Swedish original (which contains a few more pictures) from Dokumenterat no. 45. This text supersedes my earlier post on Swedish EAM archives, although the latter has some additional info.

Thanks to Sachiko Hayashi, the editor of Hz, who also contributes an article to this issue, A brief historical overview of Fylkingen's journals. Thanks also to Isabel Thomson, who checked the translation.

The other articles in Hz #19 are:

• Martyn Hudson: What, am i hearing light? Listening through Jean-Luc Nancy
• Florian Cramer: What is 'post-digital'?
• Michael Betancourt: Critical glitches and glitch art
• Edward Picot: Mixing it: 12 remixes by Michael Szpakowski
• Laura Plana Gracia: Landscapes {soundscapes: Dronestrikes on Saturn
• Ben Grosser: How the technological design of Facebook homogenizes identity and limits personal representation
• Aymeric Mansoux: My lawyer is an artist: Free culture licenses as art manifesto
• Robert Spahr: Cruft: art from digital leftovers
• Alan Sondheim: Outline for a talk on blank that can't be given
• Kevin Logan: Rolling stones gets me no satisfaction
• Gx Jupitter-Larsen: Ordinarily nowhere

Various stuff

The new issue of Fylkingen's Hz journal (#18) contains several articles on sound art and electroacoustic music.

Uncollectable - April 2013 issue of ArteEeast journal covers Middle Eastern sound art.

Data Garden "is a journal, record label and events producer encouraging the discovery of electronic music through the windows of history, science and community."

Kunstradio - a Zürich sound art radio station.

Le Perce-oreilles - French sound art archive and web portal.

Two online archives

noise-arch.net - a collection of experimental music released on cassette during the 80s and 90s.

ICA Soundworks - really an online exhibition of sound art.

Sonosphere

Sonosphere is an online museum with streaming audio of EAM, radio art and sound art. It's a collaboration between Phonurgia Nova, Deutschlandradio Kultur – Redaktion Hörspiel/Klangkunst and Bauhaus Universität Weimar – Experimental Radio.

Francisco López's SONM archive

Francisco López has very generously made his private music collection into a public resource, the Sound Archive of Experimental Music and Sound Art (SONM). It's a free streaming-only archive, but one has to register to listen. According to López,

[t]his sound archive is not the result of a collector's accumulation (I am not a collector) but is instead the consequence of an intense activity as an artist, and also of one of the most fundamental features of the international community of sound artists: the exchange and collaboration, both physical and telematic. The archive is thus a personal collection, subjective, partial, and particularly focused on the global communities of so-called "independent" or "underground" artists, which I am part of since the late 70s.

In spite of this, however, since my sonic and pesonal interests have always been very wide, the natural result in the collection is a large variety and representation of the inmense universe of sound practices in experimental music and sound art. With nearly 5,000 items on cassette, vinyl, CD, and DVD, at the time of its offical opening, this sound archive is predominantly composed of very small editions -in many cases self-editions by the artists themselves- encompassing all kinds of aesthetics, movements, periods, labels, and sonic manifestations: electronic, concrete, industrial, noise, minimal, improvisation, soundscapes, glitch, turntablism, avant-garde, etc.

Furthermore, the collection is in constant expansion with all the sound materials I personally receive and with the contributions of a myriad sound artists worldwide that want their work to be adequately preserved and promoted with the resources of this sound archive.

The Latin American electroacoustic music collection

The Latin American electroacoustic music collection is a convenient resource compiled by Ricardo Dal Farra. It lists 1723 works by 390 composers from 1956-2007, with an historical introduction, composer biographies and interviews.

A nice bonus is that a selection of 231 compositions is available for listening online, some with scores or sonograms.

I wish we could do something similar with the EMS music archive.

Some sound art papers

The papers from the Sound Art Theories Symposium 2011 papers are now available. For those interested in digital archiving, David Grubbs' paper "'Remove the Records from Texas': Parsing Online Archives" discusses two "very different kinds of online archives", UbuWeb and DRAM (the acronym stands for Database of Recorded American Music, but the archive holds works from other countries as well).

More calls, conferences and some other stuff

Maryanne Amacher online archive: http://maryanneamacher.org/

An online open source database of city sounds and soundmaps from around the world using online found sounds and field recordings: http://soundcities.com/

A nice collection of sound art links: http://www.onelonelypixel.org/soundart.html

Conferences

KISS2011. Kyma International Sound Symposium, 15-18 September 2011, Porto, Portugal

TCMP2011. Tracking the Creative Process in Music, September 29th – October 1st 2011, Maison Européenne des Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société, Lille

First international Csound Conference. September 30 to October 2 2011, HMTM (Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien), Hannover

Sound Art Theories Symposium 2011, November 5-6, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Deadline for paper submissions: August 1, 2011

Symposion on Xenakis’ electroacoustic music, 23-25 may 2012, Université Paris 8, E.A. 1572. Esthétique, musicologie, danse et création musicale in collaboration with Cdmc, Grm, Cix, Ircam, Motus. Deadline for proposals of papers: 1th of January 2012

IRCAM music research residency 2012-13. Application deadline: October 14, 2011 (Midnight Paris Time)

For more conferences, see Some conference calls for 2011.

The archive of EMS and related archives

Note July, 30, 2014: For an updated and extended version, see Electronic music archives in the collection of The Swedish Performing Arts Agency.

The archives of EMS and Fylkingen were donated to the Music and Theatre Library of Sweden in 2009. Archivist Jens Bjurman processed the EMS archive during spring 2010, and the inventory (in Swedish) is now published on the library website (his master's thesis on the processing can be found here). For EMS's tape archive, see below. The Fylkingen tape archive is partly digitised and available for research at Fylkingen.

The Music and Theatre Library also holds some other archives of interest to researchers in Swedish electronic music (links are to the inventories, if available. Please note that most of them are in Swedish):

• Sven-Erik Bäck (1919-1994). Autographs, correspondence etc. can also be found in:
• the Lars Frydén archive;
• the Birgitta Nordenfelt archive;
• the Silverstolpe collection;
• the Bo Wallner archive.
• Elektronmusik. Sources used by Olle Olsson for his work list Electroacoustic music in Sweden : musique concrete, computer music, live-electronic, text-sound composition (1986?).
• Ulf Grahn. Autographs, sketches, correspondence etc.
• Bengt Hambraeus (1928-2000). The main Hambraeus archive is in Canada: Bengt Hambraeus fonds, but there are some autographs and other manuscripts in the Bo Wallner archive.
• Ralph Lundsten (b. 1936) and his fan club, the Andromeda Fan Society. Autographs, sketches, correspondence, tapes etc.
• Arne Mellnäs (1933-2002). Autographs, sketches, correspondence etc.
• Ákos Rózmann (1939-2005). Autographs, sketches, music scores. Tapes, cd:s and dvd:s are also available for research, but are not listed in the inventory.
• SEAMS (The Society for Electroacoustic Music in Sweden). The former Swedish section of ICEM/CIME.

The Swedish Museum of Performing Arts stores some of the former studio equipment of EMS, Ralph Lundsten and Ákos Rózmann (information only in Swedish).

In addition, the National Library of Sweden holds the archives of Karl-Birger Blomdahl (1916-1968) and Åke Hodell (1919-2000), and a small Öyvind Fahlström (1928-1976) archive (the main one is in Barcelona at the Museum of Contemporary Art). For more information, search for these names in Ediffah. The Hodell tape archive is in SMDB. The archive of his father, Björn Hodell, is at the Music and Theatre Library.

The EMS tape archive
EMS's music archive ("bandarkivet", the tape archive) has been donated to the National Library of Sweden for long-time preservation (except for commercially released records, which will be kept in the EMS library). The digitised content will be accessible through the Swedish Media Database (SMDB).

There are three ways to search the EMS music archive:

1. For digitised materials only, search SMDB with 'collection:"EMS bandarkiv"' to see all available items. Currently, SMDB holds only about 80 works, but more will come. One can listen to these works at the National Library of Sweden/Audiovisual Media, but not online, due to copyright restrictions (what else?).
2. To search the entire archive, use DISMARC, which I've blogged on elsewhere. The metadata is limited, and one can't listen to the music, but one sees all content, whether digitised or not.
3. Visit EMS and search the full database. It has some additional functionality compared to SMDB and DISMARC, e.g. an hierarchic display of a composer's works, their versions and audio carriers (based on FRBR). The EMS database is also the most frequently updated, and one can listen to all of the digitised music, including CD:s and DVD:s that haven't been migrated to the database yet.

EMS music archive searchable online

Read more in EMS' blog.

The Experimental Music Studios of the UIUC celebrates 50th anniversary

The Experimental Music Studios of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has released an four CD set in celebration of their 50th anniversary. The music is freely available as mp3s.

There is also a paper on the history of the center by Emanuele Battisti: The Experimental Music Studio at the University of Illinois, 1958-68: Environment, People, Activities, and one can find more history-related stuff if one looks around the site.

Lejaren Hiller created and directed the studio during its first ten years. He left in 1968 when he was appointed professor of composition at SUNY at Buffalo, and his archive belongs to the SUNY Music Library. The inventory, together with a brief chronology and bibliography, is compiled by Pei-jung Wu (this resource will be added to the EAM meta-bibliography).

Via Synthopia.