Sounds only
April / May 2010
Works by Warren Burt – curated by Kirsten Reese
Works presented in this program (all by Warren Burt):
From the Dreambooks, Melbourne November (1980)
1) November 7th / 2:59
2) November 10th / 2:58
3) November 23rd / 2:58
4) November 11th / 3:00
5) November 27th / 3:01
Fairlight CMI, Victorian College of the Arts Studio, Melbourne
From the Dreambooks, Albany August (1980)
6) Memoirs of a Cat Hammerer / 3:04
7) The Cybernaut and the Maid / 2:52
8) Severed Dwarf Tongues for David Dunn / 3:03
9) Rajah Rabo and Lucky Lucille, flushed with numerological victory, stumble into a leather bar and are set upon by the inhabitants! / 3:00
10) A dance for Eva Karczag – made from her name / 3:08
New England Digital Synthesizer, Play 2D language, Joel Chabade’ studio, Albany, NY
From: Four Environments (1984-85)
11) Simmons Island Bridge, Cohoes, NY / 8:18
Lo-Fi Proposals (1986) - excerpts
12) Samples I for orchestra / 5:30
13) Microtonal Canon in 4 speeds and transpositions / 4:19
14) Noise Piece – Arte Povera for Ros Bandt / 3:46
15) America – A Political Portrait / 5:17
Casio SK-1, Multitrack recorder, Environmental Tapes, Ray Burt’s studio, Waterford, NY
Warren Burt (born 10 October 1949 in Baltimore, Maryland)
attended the State University of New York, Albany (BA, 1971) and the University of California, San Diego (MA, 1975) before moving to Australia in 1975. In Australia he has worked in academia (La Trobe
University, NSW Conservatorium, Victorian College of the Arts, Australian National University, Victoria University of Technology), education, and radio (freelance and commissioned productions for ABC and PBAA),
and as a composer, film maker, video artist, and community arts organiser.
He is known for composing in a wide variety of new music styles, ranging from acoustic music, electroacoustic music, sound art installations, and text-based music. Burt often employs elements of
improvisation, microtonality, humour, live interaction, and lo-fi electronic techniques into his music. Currently, he is Australian Research Council Post Doctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Creative Arts at
the University of Wollongong.
Also highly recommended is the CD The Animation of Lists And the Archytan Transpositions (2005, Experimental Intermedia Foundation XI Records).
More information on some of the works:
From the Dreambooks
For many years, as a source of random numbers, I was enamoured of dreambooks, which are gambling charts formerly used mostly by the black American population. You have a dream about, say, a turtle, and you look up ‚turtle’ and it says ‚379’, so you bet that number in the lottery the next day. My take was that John Cage’s use of the I-Ching – a form of random numbes which had evolved by the Chinese nobility – was very Apollonian. And as a young postmodernist with punk sympathies, I wanted to have something that was more Dionysian and gritty – with the people. So I used random numbers which were based on the numbers racket. Cage had used Chinese nobility – I used the Mafia. In 1980, in a burst of happy irreverence, I came up with a way of using bogus numerology to produce musical structures. My intention was light-hearted and satirical, but the method produced music that sounded good to me, and which somtimes had an amazing aptness to the source material. For example, while I was working on Albany August, David Dunn was visiting me. I explained to him the method, and laughingly, he said he thought it was ridiculous. I said, „Okay, give me a phrase, and I’ll make a piece out of it!“ He said, „Severed Dwarf Tongues.“ So I reduced the phrase numerologically, consulted the dreambooks for the associate numbers, and made a piece on the spot. We both laughed uproariously as the piece seemed to stick ist tongue out with irreverent glee.
Four Environments
For many years I have been involved in using environmental sounds in my music. A number of pieces have either used environmental sounds or set up interactive systems where musicians interacted with specific aspects of various environments. But I’ve always been puzzled as to how to deal with environmental sounds as music in themselves. My desire was to present recordings of environmental sounds in a way that satisfied me compositionally, but which was minimally intrusive upon the sounds themselves. In different environmental compositions I found different forms for presenting the sounds. For Four Environmental Compositions I used a more ‚literary’ form, sectional and made up of discrete environments recorded for specific documentary reasons, where the ordering and seletion of these sections was determined not only by intrinsic geographical factors, but also by sonic and literary ideas. In Simmons Island Bridge the structure of the metal grating bridge, just a few metres above the rapids of Mohawk River, is articulated by the cars passing over it, their flow controlled by traffic signals just west of the bridge.
Lo-Fi Proposals
1985 I bought a Casio SK-1 monophonic toy sampler. As an
afficionado of lo-fi, this instrument immediately appealed to me, and I made Lo-Fi Proposals with
it, using my father’s multitrack, alternating movements of sampled and environmental sounds.
Samples I for Orchestra is random samples from works by Ravel, Delius, Debussy, and Galzunov
transposed, made into phrases, and multitracked. Microtonal Canon is an improvisation played back
at the 4 slowest SK-1 sequencer speeds using samples of 4 microtonal tuning forks. Noise Piece is
miswired (today we’d call it circuit-bent) $2 transistor radio sampled and multitracked.
America – A Political Portrait is a juxtaposition of two electronic environments: a damaged
muzak tape on the left; and fanatical preachers recorded off a car radio on I-787 between Waterford
and Albany on the right.
Hier werden Produktionen aus Archiven der Elektroakustischen Musik, wie z.B. dem Archiv der DEGEM oder dem IDEAMA- und dem DEGEM-Archiv des ZKM, dem Archiv des elektronischen Studios der TU Berlin sowie anderen internationalen Archiven und Dokumentationen elektroakustischer Kunst unter verschiedenen Aspekten präsentiert.