Drone Records

MOORE, ANTHONY / THERAPEUTISCHE HÖRGRUPPE KÖLN - Ore Talks

Format: do-LP

Label & Cat.Number: Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln (KMH)

Release Year: 2017

Note: phantastic / cryptic album by ANTHONY MOORE (of HENRY COW fame) with the THK about the idea of artefacts and minerals deep in the earth sending strange signals up to the earth, captured by various / historical devices... listen to deep philosophic ("eccentric") texts about sound, send through these devices = noises in cryptic materialisations...+ 20 page (12" x 12") booklet, gatefold cover; few last copies available, highly recommended!

Price (incl. 19% VAT): €25.00

More Info

" 'ore talks' limited edition release, gatefold sleeve with booklet. a double lp of essentially electronic and noise-based pieces paired with astonishing texts spoken by anthony moore. the concept is that objects of value, artifacts or minerals, buried deep in the ground send strange signals through the earth up to the planet's surface. they are detected by the ears and instruments of miners, explorers and archaeologists who are tuned-in to the subterranean frequencies. the album contains a large booklet explaining this idea and featuring many pages of eccentric writing about sound." [label info]

Four sides of vinyl: this has served as a time constraint from the very outset of the project. With around 18 minutes per side giving an overall run time of 72 minutes, these time slots are designed to offer recordings of four sets of historical, technical processes and their devices. Each of the four chapters is conceived in two parts and realised in a number of actual compositions.

A. VALVES / ROEHRE:
1. Their Electrons. The developement of De Forest‘s Audion.
2. Noise as signal and the power of redundancy.
B. PIEZOS:
1. Reversibility; Loudspeakers as Microphones and The Transmitting Ear.
2. Mercury Acoustic Delays Lines.
C. RECORDERS:
1. Wax Cylinders, Hill ’n Dale, Voices of the Dead.
2. Magnetic Oxide and Memory Machines, Storing Time.
D. CRYSTAL SETS:
1. Waves; The Air as One Vast (negentropic) Library.
2. Farewell to AM, Fades to Infinity.

A voice is transmitted through various materials; early microphones, the reproducer of an Edison phonograph, glass phials filled with mercury, piezo crystals, transducers, and piezo discs attached to polystyrene spheres, shortwave radios, old russian valves and the self-built circuitry of condensers and switches. What emerges are speech-driven patterns of noise, electronic music and occasional passages where the voice can be plainly heard in 14 separate pieces of widely differing durations.

ORE THOUGHTS
Galena to Stibnite, starting with lead, ending with lead; the history of soldering, cementing connections for currents of information and noise alike. In the undigital realm, noise is a context for the signal and can be information in itself. For example rotating surface noise is useful for finding the original speed at which early shellacs may have been cut. Redundancy is vital for a proper understanding of the world. So Ore Talks celebrates lead and soldering and making connections and, endotically, noise; noises at the outer ear but also of the inner ear. Perec and the Oulipians employ the term ‚endotic‘ as an antonym to ‚exotic‘ in order to focus attention on the everyday, on what might be dismissed as mere noise. The infraordinaire, as Perec calls it, is very much the subject of a historiographical approach that prefers to explore the lives and times of the distinctly unfamous; a more vivid, sensory history that concerns itself with sights and smells and sounds.

In addition, Ore Talks posits a strange attraction between the discoverer and the yet-to-be discovered; between buried artefacts and the archeologist seeking to disinter them; between prospector and rich, subterranean lodes. The ‚ground‘ in the electrical field is a conductor that reaches into the earth. Simultaneously, metalliferous ores and objects alike call out to be uncovered in an equivalent act of active perception. The only prerequisite? Keep an ear to the ground; the telluric source for chthonic voices.
Murmurings from below the surface: the call of buried things that seek to be disinterred. Anthropomorphism notwithstanding, there is something to be said for giving a voice to inanimate minerals. After all, their constituent elements come from the stars and have also given rise to us humans. Furthermore, when those same elements are alchemically transformed into compounds of metal and fillers of plastics, of quicksilver and piezo crystals, of the very air, water or copper that play host to sound in its various forms, transporting speech, then ORE TALKS emerges as a title with some resonance.
And text too can be a ground from beneath which conceptual objects stem (voices in the grey matter). Here is a list of such objects that have been disinterred in no particular order from the paragraphs above. “Active perception; superluminality in the collapse of the sender/receiver paradigm”
“A History of Simultaneity; how far back does same-timedness go?”
“Noise in History, noise as history”
“The importance of redundancy in human communication”
“Sound and the continuum are products of each other”
“What holds true for time also applies to sound; they both depend on disappearing as they come into existence.”
“The speed of sound is a good rate at which to think about a speed of time” These and related topics are expanded over the following pages. They contain the sources for all readings recorded and subsequently transformed in the ORE TALKS experiments on this double LP.

www.therapeutischehoergruppekoeln.de/ore.html

"Antimonit Bleiglanz Coelestin... Ein erzernes ABC bis hin zu Zinnober.

Verbunden mit 72 Minuten Text + Klang in vier Kapiteln / Vinyl-Seiten: a. Valves / Röhren b. Piezos c. Recorders d. Crystal Sets. Kreisend um Ore [Erz] =

Mineralgemenge, die wegen ihres Metallgehaltes abgebaut werden, um es für Werkzeuge und Ähnliches weiterzuverarbeiten.

Kreisend um L/ore, dt. Lehre -> Folklore = the knowledge and traditions, frequently passed along by word of

mouth. Merke: Transmission is a vital part of the folklore process -> 1. Orality =

Mündlichkeit -> 2. Literacy = Reeling and Writhing / Lesen & Schreiben -> 3.

Technical Devices = Aufschreibesysteme. Es geht um Medientechniken: Alphabet - Grammophon... (Friedrich Kittler), um Recording Angels' Mysteries (Klaus Theweleit), um Dead Letters (Gregory Whitehead). Bevor Moore 1996 (bis 2015) Professor an der KHM wurde, hatte er mit Slapp Happy den Mond vom Himmel gepflückt, mit Pink Floyd gearbeitet und Soundtracks für Werner Nekes kreiert.

Akademisch forschte er dann synchron mit Kittler über die Geschichte und Gesetzmäßigkeiten von Sound, über phonetische und klingende Techniken des Daseins und der Erinnerung. 2004 nahm er teil an Kittlers Sirenenexperiment, das vor Amalfi Odysseus' Affäre mit den Sirenen nachstellte. Zwischen '...and the Gods made love' und Moores 'Dogs of War' spielt sich alles ab, was es zu singen und sagen gibt. Polyphone Erkenntnis über Sound und Zeit, Noise und Information, gefiltert aus den Lebenserfahrungen von der Bronzezeit her. Darüber schreibt und spricht Moore mit medienarchäologischem Knowhow und einem Ohr für die chthonischen Stimmen. Innere Stimmen, wie sie zuerst noch bikameral fluktuierten (Julian Jaynes), dann akusmatisch, mimetisch, alphabetisch, speicherbar, decodierbar, repetierbar wurden. Die Namen Zeiss, Chladni, Tyndell und Helmholtz oszillieren steampunkabenteuerlich an den pythagoräischen Küsten wie Töne und Zahlen zwischen Rauschen und Offenbarung. Schwingquarze geben den Takt an.

Memory Machines verflüssigen Vergangenes und Kommendes, um es zu fixieren, so wie Moores Sätze zu Science Fiction verschwimmen. Er raunt von The Etherial Skin of Interference, er wird poetisch, fasziniert von den Ur-Geräuschen, die Scott de Martinvilles Schweinsborsten-Phonautograph einfing oder Rilke der Kronen- Naht des Schädels zu entlocken gedachte. Klang wurde das mit Hilfe der Therapeuten Beck, Grewenig & Hennes (von The Knob, The Finger & The It), Langguth und Specht (einst bei 40 Sekunden Ohne Gewicht und Kunstkopf). Moores Stimme wispert und fitzelt subliminal unter löchrig-perkussiver Bruitistik,

er reiht Zahlen oder verschwindet hinter sirrenden Spuren, taktilen Geräuschen,

spurenelementaren Impulsen. Silben und Satzfetzen mischen sich mit Hilfe der

Hörgruppe zu Kratzern, Partikelkollisionen, Radiowellen, Zeitrost, Reibung von

Entropie und Negentropie, sprachmelodischem Blaseton, Frequenzpingpong.

Umso überraschender daher die klaren, wenn auch für den Laien kryptischen

Sätze über Interferenz, Simultanität, die Unschärfe des Now-Space, von Senden und Empfangen. Moore meditiert über Turings ACE und die Alchemie von Quecksilber-Laufzeitspeichern, aber die Sprache wird wieder verzerrt, der Noise dafür prickelig und wohltönend. Doch dann umfängt einen wieder im ursuppig, uhrsuppig brodelnden, radiowellenberauschten Äther protologisch wummernde Sonic Fiction, die zuletzt endlosrillenstottrig ausgroovt." [Bad Alchemy]