All posts by Alex Donnithorne

Memory Burn: 2/3

Events

The Auricle Sonic Arts Gallery
Wednesday 13th June
7:30pm
Facebook event

 

The second of three consecutive Wednesday night shows, this performance will feature collaborations with our good friend Adam Willetts! Searching, reflective acoustic sounds…8pm (prompt) start, Free!

 

 

 

Memory Burn: An electracoustic accession

Events

The Auricle Sonic Arts Gallery
Wednesday 7th June
7:30pm
Facebook event

 

Memory Burns for you on three consecutive Wednesday evening sessions that aim to highlight different sides of the duo IRD/ Months, with guests.

For this first evening Memory Burn will be pulling out the tapes, radio, turntable and other devices misused and repurposed, in an attempt to redefine “soundspace”

 

 

 

An Audacious Decade

Exhibits

The Auricle Sonic Arts Gallery
Showing: Friday 2-23 June 11am-4pm
Saturday 3-24 June 1-4pm 2017
Opening: Thursday 1st June, 5:30pm
Facebook event


An Audacious Decade Exhibition — Festival Opening — Magazine Launch

An Audacious Decade celebrates ten years of the Borderline Ballroom – an arts collective and group of friends who have been instrumental in building Canterbury’s Sound Community. This group exhibition both documents the decade through images and sonic artefacts, and features new ambisonic, intermedia, and oenosthetic installations by Malcolm Riddoch, Nicolas Woollaston, Adam Willetts and Jo Burzynska.

Join us for a preview of the exhibition, the opening of An Audacious Decade four-day festival, as well as the launch a special commemorative publication, An Audacious Decade, featuring documentary photography from CSSA members and essays from Jo Burzynska, Bruce Russell, David Khan, James Hope, and Malcolm Riddoch.

Wines for the opening supplied by Pegasus Bay.

Documenting a Decade 2007–17
Documentary photographs contributed by the following CSSA members and sympathisers: Chris Andrews, Marine Aubert, Rustle Covini, Helen Greenfield, David Khan, Malcolm Riddoch, Jan Titus, Peter Wright, and Nicolas Woollaston

Ghosts of Auricles Past
Malcolm Riddoch

Featuring spatial recordings of audience outtakes from Auricles past, this sonic intervention mixes the present and past of the gallery’s sonic space and time. The artwork seeks to immerse a present audience in a living, shared sonic heritage, and invites an openness to the sonic future of Auricles past and present.

Malcolm Riddoch’s sonic arts practice melds experimental electroacoustic techniques and phenomenological method in an investigation of acousmatic listening and the electronic transformation of soundscapes; notions of indeterminacy in composition for installation and performance; the use of whole acoustic spaces in sound art installation and music performance; and electroacoustic feedback as an embodied, intentional, temporalizing process. His medium is non-tonal, timbrally focused and technologically organised sound, where thematic dissolution is his sonic theme.
http://malcolmriddoch.com/

Light Chimes
Adam Willetts

Adam Willetts is exhibiting two pieces in the Audacious Decade exhibition. A new work called Light Chimes in which a number of simple solar engines perform an evolving sound work on pentatonic chimes, and also a DIY synth that he built in 2008 using circuit designs by Nicolas Woollaston.

Adam Willetts is a sonic and visual artist based in Christchurch. He works across a wide range of media from the high tech to the very low tech and handcrafted.

The Fall of Water
Nicolas Woollaston

Listen to the rhythms of water whose periodic patterns have been the governor for all of human history and indeed all of life’s time on Earth. Listen for the rhythmic patterns, listen for the chaotic missteps. The ways of water tread a fine line between order and chaos, which perhaps tells us less about water and more about the way our minds distinguish order from chaos. Water is the yard-stick that humanity can use to calibrate all our relations with the Earth.

Nicolas Woollaston is a Christchurch artist.

Amazuppai
Jo Burzynska

Amazuppai uses the interactions between sound and wine to explore the physical sensations, conceptual contrasts and subconscious synergies of ‘sweet and sour’. The knife-edge balance between these two contrary but often complimentary tastes and their semantic associations is explored in Amazuppai (the Japanese for sweet-sour, comparable to the idea of bittersweet); reinforced and destabilised through the interplay of a crisp off-dry Riesling with a modulating soundscape. Presented over the Audacious Decade festival days.

Jo Burzynska is a sound artist and wine writer whose work in these areas has increasingly converged in the production of multisensory art. Her installations and performances are regularly created at the intersection of the senses, combining sound and taste, which is also the topic of her current doctoral research. Joburzynska.com

Anthony Charles Lynton Blair by Kraus

Events, Exhibits

The Auricle Sonic Arts Gallery
Showing: Friday 12th, 19th May, 11am-4pm
Saturday 13th, 20th May, 1-4pm
Opening: Thursday 11th May, 5:30pm
Facebook event

 

Anthony Charles Lynton Blair by Kraus

Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (born 6 May 1953) was a British serial killer who murdered an unknown number of victims between 2003-2007. Many of his victims were subject to dismemberment, torture and rape. An Oxford graduate and successful lawyer, Blair was regarded by many as handsome, charismatic, and intelligent, traits that left his victims with little chance to overcome him. He was
found sane and guilty at his trial and executed on 20 March 2023.

Blair was an unusually organized and calculating criminal who used his extensive legal and political connections to avoid capture for years. He was skilled at minimizing physical evidence – his fingerprints were never foundat a crime scene, a fact he repeated often during his trial.

After Blair’s death was confirmed at 12:58 a.m. on March 20, 2023, his brain was removed. It is in the possession of Dr. Helen Morrison, a witness for the defense at Blair’s trial, who interviewed Blair and other serial killers in an attempt to isolate common personality traits of violent sociopaths.

Blair’s metallic grey 2002 Vauxhall Omega is presently on exhibit at the The Museum of Modern Crime.

A study published in The Lancet in 2006 estimated the number of Blair’s victims at 654,965. The true victim count remains unknown, and could be much higher.

This sound work for four-channels was featured in the Discovery Channel documentaries “The New Detectives: Case Studies in Epidemiology” and “Most Evil: Blair”. It is in seven parts:

1. Fuck You
2. I Kill You Tony Blair
3. The Courage of Our Convictions
4. Murder
5. A Journey (Into the Mind of a Serial Killer)
6. I Fucking Kill You Tony Blair
7. Watch Out

Goh Lee Kwang – NZ Tour – Christchurch

Events

The Auricle Sonic Arts Gallery
Friday 28th April
7:30pm
Facebook event

 

Malaysian artist Goh Lee Kwang is coming to New Zealand to present a series of workshops and performances in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch between 22-28 April 2017.

The final evening of the tour sees GLK hosted at the Auricle on Friday 28 April, and will feature an eclectic cohort of Otautahi’s sonic stalwarts, including David Khan, Tony Miles, Nicolas Woollaston and IRD, culminating in a performance by Goh Lee Kwang and Mike Minchington.

Performances start at 7:30pm, $10 on the door.

 

 

New Ear – Making Experimental Music in the 21st Century

Events

The Auricle Sonic Arts Gallery
Thursday 27th April
7:30pm
Facebook event

 

This workshop, hosted by the Auricle and facilitated by Malaysian artist Goh Lee Kwang, will involve discussions on genres of experimental music that are currently relatively new and energetic, including field recording, electronic music and improvisation.

Goh will focus on the practices of several contemporary musicians including Eric La Casa (France), Bernhard Günter (Denmark) and Toshimaru Nakamura (Japan), seeking to develop an understanding of the techniques, aesthetics and concepts which inform their work.

The workshop starts at 7:30pm Thursday 27 April – koha entry.

 

CRITICAL STATE by SYNC

Events

The Auricle Sonic Arts Gallery
Wednesday 26th April
7pm
Facebook event

 

CRITICAL STATE
by SYNC
Jan-Bas Bollen (bass function and sound design)
Alison Isadora (midi-violin/electronics)

Extreme weather, colony collapse disorder in bees, melting polar ice, rising sea-levels – all examples of trends that can be directly related to human actions. However, other events such as the 1953 flood in the Netherlands, the February 2011 earthquake in Christchurch and the 2016 7.8 earthquake that changed the shape of the east coast of the South Island expose a more complex relationship between humans and the planet.

Our relationship with the earth is dynamic. Our actions influence our environment, which in turn responds, not always in ways we can foresee. Often there is a specific tipping point, after which there is no return. The preceding state is critical.

CRITICAL STATE embraces the oppositional forces that human beings contain within them – the desire for control on the one hand and the need to be able to respond with flexibility, on the other. How do we balance our needs and desires with the needs and desires of the other?

Inspired by sounds from natural disasters and the dynamic properties of these phenomena, SYNC explores a sonic environment that oscillates between slowly evolving textures and moments of unpredictable audio disruption. The musicians respond to and have influence on their audio surroundings through a combination of improvised and composed material.

SYNC is the composer/performer duo Jan-Bas Bollen (NL) and Alison Isadora(NZ/NL). Over the last 19 years they have created a number of compelling works within an interactive electronic environment: Trace (2008), concerned with the dynamics of trauma on a political and personal level; Born and Bred (2001) dealing with issues of citizenship and belonging; The Deep South (2002) inspired by NZ geography and
The Big Shop (1998), a critical approach to consumerism. See: https://jbali.home.xs4all.nl/SYNC_HOME.html

Alison Isadora is a composer, performer and educator born and bred in Aotearoa/New Zealand and practising in the Netherlands since 1986. She studied political philosophy and music at the Victoria University of Wellington, violin and composition at the Hague Conservatorium and post-graduate performance theater at DasArts in Amsterdam. In the last years she has become increasingly interested in the possibilities of connecting music to other disciplines. Isadora’s works often incorporate elements of story-telling and participation while addressing social issues. She is the Creative New Zealand/Jack C. Richards Composer-in-Residence at Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music, Wellington for 2016/17.

Jan-Bas Bollen studied at the Sweelinck Conservatorium Amsterdam and the Royal Conservatory The Hague. He is internationally active as a composer, sound designer, bass player and educator, and creates both chamber music as well as music for ensembles, theatre productions and installation art. In many of his works he uses electronics, often employing cutting-edge technologies. Hij regularly collaborates with dansers and choreographers. His recent compositions include works for RedEar Rotterdam, Trio 7090, David Kweksilber Big Band, pianist Gerard Bouwhuis, Percussion The Hague, Club Guy & Roni, the Royal New Zealand Ballet and several radiophonic productions.