The droned and the saved

droid

Well-known member
Just got back from another festival drone performance. May have been some accidental Wyatting. On headphones or in the studio, this is a rather intense but palatable bit of drone.

On a big system at 3:40AM with a bunch of prone drug casualties its an endless plunge in the cold dark heart of infinite cosmic nothingness.

 

droid

Well-known member
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droid

Well-known member
Overwhelmed by ambient and drone right now.

Gorgeous LP Id never heard from the lists - trombonist Stuart Dempster - or should that be tromDRONEist?? Eh? Eh?

 

luka

Well-known member
Just got back from another festival drone performance. May have been some accidental Wyatting. On headphones or in the studio, this is a rather intense but palatable bit of drone.

On a big system at 3:40AM with a bunch of prone drug casualties its an endless plunge in the cold dark heart of infinite cosmic nothingness.


Enjoyed that
 

Leo

Well-known member
coolest part is how the sound changed as you turned your head, depending on the angle as your ears aligned with and then turned away from the various speaker stacks.

photos and recordings weren't allowed, but i managed to sneak about :30 of video/audio on my phone. not sure i'm able to upload video from my phone/computer here.
 

droid

Well-known member
Anyone familiar with Herman Nitsch? His bio is outstanding.

Beginning in 1960, following a period in which Nitsch had turned more towards literature, he returned to painting, creating works in the Arte Informel style. It is in this year that the first painting actions take place, and already they are seeking to realize the idea of the Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries. Revolving around the intensive sensory experience of various substances and fluids, these actions become increasingly provocative in the coming years.

Following screaming and noise action performances, conceived as abreaction plays, Nitsch undertakes the dismemberment of lambs, which lead to further actions involving flesh. After the Theatre proves a resounding success in the US and Germany at the end of the 1960s, Nitsch performs numerous actions throughout the 1970s in cities across Europe and North America.

In 1971 Nitsch is able to acquire Prinzendorf Castle in Lower Austria from the Catholic Church, a purchase that allows him to now also realize his musical ideas for his theatre in large-scale action performances. Noise orchestras, scream choirs and electronically amplified instruments all play a part. Nitsch interprets life as passion, the painting process as a condensed form of life and thus as the very incarnation of passion. Through the painter smock he wears while working, subsequently positioned centrally in the painting, the artist remains present and animates the viewer to identify with the painting process and accompany him into the painting.

 

nomos

Administrator
Have you seen this, droid? Bought it a few weeks ago, but I've only had a quick look so far.

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Drone and Apocalypse is an exhibit catalog for a retrospective of twenty-first-century art. Its narrator, Cynthia Wey, is a failed artist convinced that apocalypse is imminent. She writes critical essays delineating apocalyptic tendencies in drone music and contemporary art. Interspersed amid these essays are “speculative artworks”, Wey’s term for descriptions of artworks she never constructs that center around the extinction of humanity. Wey’s favorite musicians are drone artists like William Basinski, Celer, Thomas Köner, Les Rallizes Dénudés, and Éliane Radigue, and her essays relate their works to moments of ineffability in Herodotus, Aristotle, Plato, Pliny the Elder, Isidore of Seville, Robert Burton, Hegel, and Dostoyevsky.
Well after Wey’s demise, the apocalypse never arrives, but Wey’s journal is discovered. Curators fascinated with twenty-first-century culture use her writings as the basis for their exhibit “Commentaries on the Apocalypse”, which realizes Wey’s speculative artworks as photographs, collages, and sound/video installations.

http://www.zero-books.net/books/drone-apocalypse
 

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martin

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Anyone familiar with Herman Nitsch? His bio is outstanding.

Yep - always enjoyed a quality weekend in my dickie bow round Hermann's gaff, sipping cognac with the prime minister of Andorra's daughter while Hermann sprayed us with BSE and black pudding.

To be honest though, I always felt his early recordings lacked the offal-splattered mayhem promised by the insane covers. A lot of those really rare vinyl releases that go for stupid money have superb, menacing, OTT artwork but are sonically dull over the course of 30+ mins - or, at best, never quite lived up to expectations.

His 'masterpiece' is probably 'Island' - think you can grab the 4xCD set for under £25 on Discogs. It pretty much contains all of Nitsch's standard Live Aktion moves: livestock moaning, long droning brass sections, proto-Whitehouse high-pitched whistling, jolting drum thuds, sudden excursions into oompa music, sections of cable/amp hum, etc. Put it this way, he didn't 'vary' styles much in a live setting. There's not a massive world of difference between that release and 'Musik Der 60 Aktion', which features a 'punk band' (PVC, from Germany) - not that you'd be able to tell.

His first proper vinyl outing, "Akustisches Abreaktionsspiel", is a real oddity worth hearing (via torrents, unless you're spectacularly flush this month) - mainly people screaming their heads off and oompa band nonsense, with an Austrian radio presenter cutting in and out and 'explaining' what's going on. Proper 'art nutter' release, though perhaps less droney than the later, numbered 'Aktion' stuff.

That Harmoniumwerk 1-4 CD you posted is also pretty lovely. I don't think you need to track down the other volumes though. He recorded something like 1,000 hours' worth of harmonium drone, fuck knows how much of it has been released since, but I think Cortical Foundation put out another three double-CDs of that stuff.

Oh, and off the beaten track, but, somewhere, perhaps on a corrupted hard drive, there's evidence of me and Kek-W (from Kid Shirt) doing a hardcore gabba track called 'Hermann Nitsch's House' and screaming SPRINGTIME FOR DEWHURST and DRONE WAR IN KEBABHAUS!! like lunatics, plus some unpleasant text regarding Babsi from 'Christiane F'
 
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