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| Sound Bomb (From Games to Explosives) Kaspars Groševs, Artist | |
 Terre Thaemlitz. Lovebomb. 2003. Comatonse Recordings | |
| Notwithstanding the abundance of experimental music records, I would like to highlight the relatively recent album "Lovebomb" (2003) by Terre Thaemlitz for its well-founded conceptual approach, because a muddle of fragments of noises, historical speeches and pop music is nothing extraordinary today, to be honest. Futurist painter and composer Luigi Russolo claimed in his manifesto L'arte dei rumori (The Art of Noises) in 1913 that noises were born along with machines; he also invented several novel instruments, including intonarumorus, playing (i.e., creating) various noises. Several records of these instruments long lost can be found in the marvellous archive of Ubu Web: http://www.ubu.com/sound/russolo_l.html After some time machines were not only capable of making sounds, they were also helping to process them. For instance, French composer Pierre Schaeffer is credited with originating musique concrete in the 1940s, creating collages of acousmatic sounds: that is, sounds one hears without seeing an originating cause (instrument, recording of another composer, event, etc.). Of course, technology has developed immensely since then and collages of sounds are very common technique, both in pop music and academic music today. I would like to focus on two of the artists of the latest decades, Christian Markley for his mixed vinyl sound collages and John Oswald for inventing plunderphonics (music made by taking one or more existing audio recordings and altering them in some way to make a new composition, often too cacophonic to be enjoyable). The abovementioned artists were searching for hidden and unknown revelations by altering already existing forms of music, whereas Terre Thaemlitz, by creating his mutants of sounds, brings more focused messages and the stories behind these collages to his audience, as well as urges it to look for the origin of sound. Love is not the answer, T. Thaemliz says in the booklet of the album, which contains a summary of the main concept together with explanations on each work. I have to admit that "Lovebomb" is a group of interesting and impressive compositions, giving us an opportunity to look differently at the seemingly well known ocean of music experiments. "Lovebomb" CD/DVD version (together with video interpretations for all compositions) is available at: www.comatonse.com/writings/lovebomb.html /Translator into English: Laura Zandersone/ | |
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