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EVP, voice & performance, telephony, technology, haunting, new writing practices, glitch aesthetics, noise, poetry & experimental sonic art
“Peter Coffin: The Ecological Mystic (or how to appreciate the inherent stupidity of everything)”
Posted 15 January 2015 by nathan | Comments Off
by Robert Jackson Think of all the thousands and thousands of media studies students brought up on Marshall McLuhan’s dictum, ‘The Medium is the Message’. One might wonder how many of them privately believed that McLuhan was literally alluding to some clairvoyant delivering a spectral message? McLuhan said a lot of stuff to be fair. [...]
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Curt Cloninger: Static Trapped in Mouths
Posted 29 May 2014 by nathan | Comments Off
Another extraordinary online commission specially for the EVP website. The five videos here [below] are accompanied here by an essay by the artist, circumambulating and extending the reach of the artworks into Curt’s own family life and theoretical ether. Electronic Brain Violence, Creepy Pasta, and Undecidable Texture [essay] + STATIC TRAPPED IN MOUTHS [video [...]
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JR Carpenter’s Etheric Ocean
Posted 13 May 2014 by nathan | Comments Off
This latest digital commission for the EVP website is a browser-based ‘underwater audio writing noise site’. In it, J.R. Carpenter weaves references such as Tom McCarthy’s “C’ Eliane Radigue’s field recordings, with original writing, which span the gaps between the nautical, radiographic, spectral and aeronautic. Her intuitive composition of shifting, morphing texts, audio and images [...]
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Echoes of Individuation: The Black Stack, Bicameral Minds & EVP
Posted 2 April 2014 by nathan | Comments Off
Nathan Jones described the ambition of Electronic Voice Phenomena as moving beyond the occult trappings of EVP towards a deeper consideration of what “hearing an electronic voice” means. Arguably a defamiliarisation of the electronic voice is needed. In an era of Siri and uncanny Mechanical Turk call centres it can help to recall how odd [...]
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Antonio Roberts AKA Hellocatfood commission
Posted 12 March 2014 by nathan | Comments Off
spɛl ænd spik: Phonemes are the smallest units of sound in a language. Unlike letters which describe how words are written, phonemes describe how words should be pronounced. There around 44 phonemes in the English language, though this varies with different accents and dialects. In spɛl ænd spik I hand over the composition of these [...]
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Sell Your Cleverness
Posted 12 February 2014 by admin | Comments Off
A found poem by Emma Hammond. Made using a selection of the poet’s ‘favourites’ on Twitter. What I have attempted to do is write a kind of crowdsourced poem to replicate the idea of stray, difficult to hear voices in EVP. The effects are there to convey the confusion of constant voices you hear while [...]
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Glitchenskypen by Mark Amerika
Posted 10 February 2014 by nathan | Comments Off
A sound piece by high flying electronic literature pioneeer Mark Amerika. PERHAPS the first recorded Skype session from an airplane featuring @msdemeanor 35000+ feet high and the inquisitive interlocuter @markamerika challenging chance to risk sounding as if it never never was ever “Tell this to silence!” (read it aloud that is to say “tell this [...]
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The Shape of Oblivion: Poetry and the Rollercoaster
Posted 20 December 2013 by admin | Comments Off
When is a poem like a Rollercoaster? Jack Underwood passes the height requirement and gets strapped in. I wouldn’t exactly say that I like going on Rollercoasters but my annual trip to a themepark is a recent tradition that I’m keen to uphold. I tend to go in autumn when the queuing time is minimal, [...]
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“Who You Gonna Call?” – Sophie Mayer meets the Ghost Librarian
Posted 15 November 2013 by admin | Comments Off
_ 1. How to Approach a Ghost Librarian. Or, Dr. Venkman gets busted. When Ghostbusters’ hapless trio of paranormal investigators confront their first ghost, wreaking havoc in the stacks and card catalogues of the New York Public Library, Peter Venkman’s approach is to break the silence of the library – loudly, wittily and flirtatiously. Against [...]
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The Render Ghosts – James Bridle
Posted 14 November 2013 by admin | Comments Off
The Render Ghosts are the people who live inside our imaginations, in the liminal space between the present and the future, the real and the virtual, the physical and the digital.
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The Pillow Talk of Robert Desnos by Richard Milward
Posted 19 August 2013 by admin | Comments Off
In his commission for the EVP tour, novelist Richard Milward unpicks the strange life of the French surrealist poet Robert Desnos. Robert Desnos made a career out of talking in his sleep. A poet, psychic shapeshifter, cat lover and considered by his peers to be able to ‘speak surrealist’ at will, Desnos was the natural [...]
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Electronic Feedback
Posted 29 July 2013 by admin | Comments Off
_ Press highlights from the EVP Tour The experimentation in this show is amazing to watch, and the way it deals with such a difficult subject in a head on way is commendable. The show makes the audience feel in a way that most theatre doesn’t. It accesses a fundamental, animalistic emotional response to [...]
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THE VAGINA HAS TEETH [1]: MYTH, CONCATENATION + EVP by Victoria Gray
Posted 22 May 2013 by nathan | Comments Off
This text is a response to the first evening of the Electronic Voice Phenomena tour at Sage, Gateshead, Friday 10th May, featuring performances by Outfit, Hannah Silva, Ross Sutherland, SJ Fowler, Hetain Patel & Richard Milward. _ In the gap between emission and reception there lies a threat to communication. Noise. A disturbance. A bite. [...]
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The voices in the radio: SJ Fowler’s Electric Dada
Posted 20 May 2013 by admin | Comments Off
Sarah Lester explores the inspiration behind poet SJ Fowler’s new commission Electric Dada. Why can’t a tree be called Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been raining? 1916 Dada Manifesto, Hugo Ball Zurich seems like an unlikely city to spawn a revolutionary, “anti-art”, art movement, but in the midst of a war-ravaged Europe, the seeds [...]
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Honor Gavin: Am I There
Posted 18 May 2013 by admin | Comments Off
My voice arrived long before me. Already, while I was still in Berlin, shutting up my soundproofed bunker and remembering to pack at least two universal adapters, was my voice there before me. I can’t call what were already wobbling in my Gran’s house in Birmingham either my tonsils or the ghost of them, because [...]
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Munster Page Habit 2 by Mark Leahy
Posted 18 May 2013 by nathan | Comments Off
on being spoken through as conduit for sticky words [For Muster Page Habit 2, I propose an intersection of speech / thought and vocalisation that teases together a sensing of language as speaking through the body, that performs a talking that is thrown from the speaker outwards to a public / for a public / [...]
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Synchronicity: Ross Sutherland and the Poetry of the Crystal Maze
Posted 13 May 2013 by admin | Comments Off
Juggling two inputs – poet Ross Sutherland insists – is better than gawping unflinchingly at one. Taking as much inspiration from Oulipo techniques as he does from Bill Murray’s unenviable predicament in Groundhog Day, Ross has been using processes of synchronicity, and his Grandad’s old VHS tape, to create a new, quasi-hypnotic poetic form. Sarah [...]
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Subliminal messages: Judas Priest and the mythology of suicide
Posted 1 May 2013 by admin | Comments Off
Sarah Lester investigates the story behind Judas – a new musical work by synth-pop group Outfit, inspired by the Judas Priest suicide trial. Mythology, music and self-annihilation have a long and tangled history. The fatal lure of dulcet tones can be traced back as far as the 8th century BC when Homer explained the disappearance [...]
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Better night vision, more vegetarianism: Stan Gooch’s Total Man
Posted 24 April 2013 by admin | Comments (1)
In the first in a new series of blogs, writer and journalist Sarah Lester investigates the strange story behind paranormal researcher Stan Gooch and his magnus opus Total Man. The mark of greatness is always intuition, not logic (Colin Wilson World) Towards the end of his life the psychologist and paranormal researcher Stan Gooch lived [...]
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Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomena
Posted 22 April 2013 by admin | Comments Off
In Willem Levelt’s Speaking: From Intention to Articulation, I came across a description of the ‘Tip-of-the Tongue’ state, the name for that common experience of being almost but not quite able to remember a word. Levelt is interested in what happens when the TOT state is brought about in experiments; he uses the example of [...]
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Instructions for Catch* Construction
Posted 18 April 2013 by admin | Comments Off
Honor Gavin explores three ways in to her piece 0121 Stimmtausch, which she is developing for Electronic Voice Phenomena. *Catch, n. 14. Music. Originally, a short composition for three or more voices, which sing the same melody, the second singer beginning the first line as the first goes on to the second line, and so [...]
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Describing Silence (6 Distortions)
Posted 12 April 2013 by admin | Comments (1)
In June last year, I managed to spend an hour in UCL’s anechoic chamber. This space is one of the quietest places in the city, if not in the world: isolated from all external sounds through thick insulation and a ‘floating floor’, its inside walls are covered in fibreglass wedges to prevent any noise you [...]
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Disfluency
Posted 11 March 2013 by admin | Comments Off
EVP artist Honor Gavin on the stuttering dialogue of the telephone call. The discipline of linguistics calls a collected sampling of ‘real world’ language a ‘corpus’ — a body of data. A corpus is thought of as yielding information about how language operates. As samples of language as language irresistibly happens in the world as opposed to [...]
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Stop Press: The Electronic Voice Phenomena Tour
Posted 25 February 2013 by admin | Comments Off
A glitch-cabaret of haunted circuitry and phantom language. Taking its name and inspiration from Konstantin Raudive’s 1970s experiments into hearing unidentified voices in electronic interference, EVP is a brand-new programme of performance works divining the role of voices-from-beyond in the creative process. Whether muses, ancestors-cum-confidantes, the subconscious or ephemeral static, the project asks how voices [...]
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A word in your shell-like: Nia Davies on The Listener
Posted 11 February 2013 by admin | Comments Off
The maxim ‘seeing is believing’ is enduring. We’ll believe it when we see. Meanwhile we may distrust what is only heard, smelt or felt. Hearing is essential or unavoidable in the experience of most art that isn’t music or sound-related and yet it very often ‘eclipsed’ by the visual when it comes to discourse around [...]
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‘Half-articulated wailings’: Nia Davies on The Voice
Posted 28 January 2013 by admin | Comments Off
What is it about an unidentified sound – a noise with no visible source – an acousmatic rustle in the bushes? We regularly tune out unwanted background noise but some sounds jolt us awake in the night, stop us dead in our tracks or silence our conversations. Mid-winter, walking in Abney Park Cemetery in London [...]
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Rorschach Audio Book Release
Posted 28 January 2013 by admin | Comments Off
This just in from Joe Banks / Disinformation. Wonderfully argued, eccentric and impassioned (The Quietus) What are the connections between Leonardo da Vinci and Dick Whittington, between the BBC Monitoring Service and punk band The Clash, between wartime military intelligence work, visual arts theory, battle management systems, Spiritualism, radio and recording technology and criminal witness [...]
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Beyond Plagiarism
Posted 21 January 2013 by admin | Comments (1)
by Jon Stone The case of Christian Ward’s plagiarism of Helen Mort and others has graduated from local to national news and attracted a great deal of comment, but hardly for encouraging reasons. If anything, it’s the very lack of real controversy that makes this particular incident suitable fodder for the mainstream media, which struggles [...]
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Unspeakable Telephony: Ulysses
Posted 18 January 2013 by admin | Comments (1)
James Joyce gets phone tapped. Honor Gavin publishes the results. ‘…strandentwining cable of all flesh. Hello. Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one’ #Ulysses#telephony — whenwebuildagain (@wwbuildagain) November 17, 2012 11.00am, 16 June 1904. Stephen Dedalus strolls Sandymount Strand, the strip of sand that skirts the city of Dublin. The [...]
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Boursnell & Riviere: 5 actions / 5 texts / 5 songs
Posted 10 January 2013 by admin | Comments Off
Live artist John Boursnell documents the development of 5 actions / 5 texts / 5 songs – a work in collaboration with poet Sam Riviere. It used repeated actions, lo-fi sounds, ball-bearing dropping and Polaroid picture-taking to create patchworks of quiet sounds and ‘concrète songs’. * 0 At the start of this. The voice was [...]
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Nathan Jones charts the development of EVP
Posted 19 December 2012 by nathan | Comments Off
The Electronic Voice Phenomena story so far… Auspicious beginings: a venn diagramme featuring eference points for the first EVP show – Star Trek, Rolf Harris, Gertrude Stein, Chris Packham, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and a Tuvan Throat Singer EVP is a curatorial strand, and something of a personal obsession, which started out just as a cool [...]
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Rorschach Audio and the Cemetery of Sounds
Posted 7 November 2012 by admin | Comments (3)
Just as our ancestors perceived thunder as “Theophany” – “The Voice of God”, in much the same way, similarly anthropomorphic misperceptions of sounds of wind are probably the most primal manifestation of what is commonly perceived as the memetically archetypal sound of a ghost (the ghost of film and folklore, which drifts across rooms, clothed [...]
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Bird Talking
Posted 7 November 2012 by admin | Comments Off
This is a kind of nature poetry found in the repetition a machine allows. It’s the only kind of poetry I can make. Weblink: Emma Bennett’s Bird Talking. * Listen to approximate robin: *
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The New King of Pop: Dr Konstantin Raudive
Posted 7 November 2012 by admin | Comments (1)
A visit to a 19th Century medium was very much a theatrical experience. One would watch the medium to detect shifts in body language or voice that could be attributed to the controlling spirit. One would be on the lookout for trickery relative to the appearance of ghostly apparitions or disembodied voices. [...] A worn-out [...]
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Tom McCarthy interviewed by 3:AM
Posted 7 November 2012 by admin | Comments Off
Technology makes certain aspirations possible. [It] becomes a kind of depository for people’s fantasies and beliefs. Radio comes of age with the First World War, when almost every family in Europe loses a child. In the following years, séances, for example, become hugely popular, a massive thing. If in the 19th century it was all [...]
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Glissolalia
Posted 7 November 2012 by admin | Comments Off
Aura Satz explores ghostly presence and illusion through performance and sound, often focussed on unusual sonic devices, early musical instruments and automata. [...] The basic components of Glissolalia have a haunting ghostly sound, playing on the notion of glissando, merging each element with the next, as well as the idea of glossolalia (religious speaking in [...]
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Art After Death
Posted 7 November 2012 by admin | Comments Off
It’s more about spirit life, actually, than death. And spiritual life is not Gothic, it’s really present in practically every aspect and period of human culture.What we actually do is, we sit down with professional mediums in museums (or private homes) and conduct interviews. The whole process is a lot more matter-of-fact than you might [...]
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Featured blogs
Nathan Jones charts the development of EVP
Unspeakable Telephony: Ulysses
Describing Silence (6 Distortions)
Instructions for Catch* Construction
Better night vision, more vegetarianism: Stan Gooch’s Total Man
Subliminal messages: Judas Priest and the mythology of suicide
Synchronicity: Ross Sutherland and the Poetry of the Crystal Maze
Munster Page Habit 2 by Mark Leahy
The Render Ghosts – James Bridle
“Who You Gonna Call?” – Sophie Mayer meets the Ghost Librarian
The Shape of Oblivion: Poetry and the Rollercoaster
Glitchenskypen by Mark Amerika
Antonio Roberts AKA Hellocatfood commission
Echoes of Individuation: The Black Stack, Bicameral Minds & EVP
Curt Cloninger: Static Trapped in Mouths
“Peter Coffin: The Ecological Mystic (or how to appreciate the inherent stupidity of everything)”
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