Horror and the Art of Noise, by Philip Hausmann

Fifty years ago, on September 20, 1963, director Alfred Hitchcock shocked movie-goers with his thriller that showcased killer birds. Perhaps even more than the images of assaults by seagull and crows, it was the birds' chilling screeches that worked themselves into cinema fans' collective consciousness.
It's a jarring story with a number of surprising elements: after a brief encounter in a pet shop, Melanie Daniels follows attorney Mitch Brenner to the California coast, where Brenner wants to spend the weekend in Bodega Bay. There, Daniels is attacked and injured by a seagull. More attacks occur, and increase in intensity, until some people are killed. Huge swarms of birds begin terrorizing the town. Many residents flee; others barricade themselves in their homes.

In his film, Hitchcock manages to transform seemingly harmless and familiar creatures into deadly beasts. But for the soundtrack, his audio crew was originally only able to come up with the quaint tweets of backyard birds. "I hear sounds like that all day long. I need something that is really coming to shake people up!" the film king told them. Hitchcock saw the soundtrack as integral to his 1963 movie.

 The trautonium

When Hitchcock met Remi Gassmann, a former student of German composer Paul Hindemith, for the first time, Gassmann said he knew the right person for the job: his former fellow student from Berlin, music pioneer Oskar Sala. Hitchcock didn't hesitate for long.

And Sala placed his bets on an unusual instrument: the trautonium. Named after its inventor, Friedrich Trautwein, this electronic instrument resembling a little organ is considered a predecessor to the analog synthesizer.

Hitchcock had heard sounds from the instrument once before: on Berlin Radio at the end of the 1920s. But for the film, Oskar Sala used the instrument to create all sorts of noises: the cries of the birds, the slamming of windows and doors, even the hammering by the people wanting to barricade their homes to protect themselves from the flying fiends. All of the sounds were created in Sala's little studio in the Berlin district of Charlottenburg in 1961.

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Chronic Illness of Mysterious Origin III

Friday 12th Feb 

Join us for an evening of experimental ritual performances, vocal contaminations, noise, ceremonial electronicks and esoteric post-industrial techno-primitivism which will take place within an exploratory environment, forming in the depths of The Dungeons of Polymorphous Pan on Holloway Road London.

Full address will be released soon, check here for updates:
https://www.facebook.com/events/160736174297009/

Acts:

Jose Macabra
http://soundcloud.com/josemacabra

Martin Palmer and Angela Edwards
http://xenogenetic.net/
http://www.angelacarolinedwardsart.com/

Douglas Park
http://douglasism.blogspot.co.uk/

CAO
http://www.soundcloud.com/cao-6
http://www.cao-music.net/

Richard Crow & Carmelo Bene
http://soundthreshold.org/season2_session3.htm

KALLA
https://www.facebook.com/kallanoise/?ref=aymt_homepage_panel

Neo Fung
http://neofung.tumblr.com/

House of Health
https://www.facebook.com/houseofhealthcollective/?pnref=lhc

Astaroth
https://soundcloud.com/astaroth29
https://vimeo.com/129025026

The Flesh Gallery (video installation)
https://vimeo.com/150777402

The Company You Keep, by Shruti Ravindran

Hallucinated voices can be helpful life guides, muses of creativity, and powerful agents for healing the fractured self.

Rosie’s marriage did not last long. But many months after she returned to her parents’ cottage on a south Indian tea estate, her husband’s voice rattled around her head like a vengeful earworm, berating her for her dark skin and overall worthlessness. One day, another voice spoke up. It was gravelly and hoarse, like a grandma who had chain-smoked cheroots for half a century. ‘There is a goddess within you,’ it rasped. ‘She can make you fairer and prettier. Listen to her instructions.’ That is how Rosie arrived at the beauty regimen she followed every day for the next 10 years: collecting excrement at dawn, and carefully smoothing it across her limbs and face.

The regimen caused her father, a widower, to eject her from his home. Rosie eventually found herself in a shelter on the outskirts of the city Chennai. Here, a kind young man informed her that she suffered from schizophrenia, and that the old lady didn’t exist. Rosie listened to what he said, but she was not sure she believed him. After all, the old lady said only what Rosie had been hearing all her life, from her mother, her friends, her husband, and her television set. They all spoke in one voice, telling her that dark skin was unlovable, that fairness was synonymous with femininity, and that she should whiten her skin at any cost.

 I first heard about Rosie from the social worker Vandana Gopikumar, co-founder of the Banyan, the shelter in Chennai where Rosie lives. She said hers was one of the most extreme cases she’d seen. ‘But what struck me then,’ she said, ‘was how much the voice reflected her socio-cultural background.’ Like many epiphanies, Gopikumar’s sounds startlingly obvious. It seems natural that imagined voices reflect the fears, anxieties and desires of their hearers, and for these emotions to be shaped, in turn, by the pressures and expectations of local culture.

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Exhibition: The Book of Evil Spirits, Chiara Fumai

28 January - 23 April 2016
Private view Wednesday, 27 January, 6-9pm

waterside contemporary

2 Clunbury Str, N1 6TT London, United Kingdom

waterside contemporary is pleased to present The Book of Evil Spirits, an expanded video installation by Chiara Fumai, and the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

The Book brings together a number of characters whose narratives Fumai has embodied in her performative practice to date. In creating this catalogue, Fumai enlisted the help of Eusapia Palladino, a 19th century internationally renowned psychic and medium whose séances were attended with conviction by the likes of Nicholas II of Russia, and Nobel-laureates Marie and Pierre Curie.

Participation in the séance requires a departure from the rational and the conscious; by calling on a medium - and becoming one herself – the artist bypasses cultural structures, and her own narrative method itself. Fumai has borrowed from an array of historical characters, often women in history who from marginal positions gained recognition for voicing their dissent. They have included the writer and activist Ulrike Meinhof, bearded lady Annie Jones, philosopher Carla Lonzi, and indeed Palladino, the artist’s muse. Fumai allows herself to become ‘possessed’ by them, and under the comfortable guise of re-enactment, hijacks their narratives for her own purpose.

In The Book, Palladino convenes the spirits of Fumai’s motley crew of evil spirits – activists, terrorists, freak-show performers, philosophers, all at one point alter-egos of Fumai herself – who collectively represent the fears of a bourgeois society. The artist’s camp parody is itself obscured by knowing anachronism and occasional bursts of uncontrollable stage violence.

The events are observed and narrated by the French scientist Camille Flammarion, Palladino’s contemporary and a scholar of mediumship, who takes turns with himself in affirming and discrediting what he sees. This place of misunderstanding and fragmentation is at the crux of Fumai’s production: presented with the sitting are various paraphernalia relating to the ghosts and the medium herself – a spirit board, collages of automatic writing, an anonymous message of warning spelt out in International Sign alphabet. ABCDEFGHIJLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ Arrivederci.

Chiara Fumai (1978, Italy), lives and ‘unworks’ in Milan. Recent one-woman-shows include Der Hexenhammer at Museion, Bolzano, 2015; With Love from $inister at A Palazzo, Brescia; I Did Not Say or Mean 'Warning' at Fondazione Querini Stampalia, 2013.

Her recent group exhibitions and performances have been presented at David Roberts Art Foundation, Contour Mechelen, CA2M Madrid, 2015; Whitechapel Galley, De Appel Amsterdam, Nottingham Contemporary, Fiorucci Art Trust, London, 2014; MUSAC, 2013; dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, 2012; Nomas Foundation, 2011.

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The other KKK: how the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift tried to craft a new world, by Jon Savage

George Orwell thought they were ‘sex maniacs’. They thought they were spiritual samurai, rebuilding Britain after the Great War. With their magical rituals, outdoor living and utopian vision, they are the most fascinating of forgotten youth movements – and their ideas still resonate.

Young men and women strike ritualistic poses on Stonehenge, Silbury Hill, the White Horse of Uffington and the Long Man of Wilmington: stark figures wearing strange, hieratic clothes in the elemental landscape. Taken in 1929, there is something disquieting about these black and white photographs. You feel as though you have intruded on the rites of a secret society that may or may not be benign, that indeed intends to be ambiguous and unsettling.

In one image, a young woman in long belted coat and cap is captured raising her arm by a standing stone. It’s an echo of the salute that would sweep Germany only a few years later, and it jars the viewer back into a time between the wars: a continent destroyed, and a desperate search for new solutions that often took curious forms.

Annebella Pollen’s The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift is a revelation. This scholarly book explores England’s most fascinating and forgotten youth movement. Through a detailed examination of the highways and byways of esoteric thought and alternative politics in the early 20th century, as well as plentiful photographs (many taken by a young Angus McBean, an active kinsman in the late 1920s), it reconstructs a radical moment lost to history, a future that never happened.
Formed by John Hargrave in 1920, the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift were an extraordinary mixture of the archaic and the hypermodern. A back-to-the-land movement that used the techniques of contemporary advertising, it offered a holistic, dazzling vision. As Hargrave wrote in 1924: “The method of the Kibbo Kift is based upon a direct appeal to the senses by means of colour, shape, sound and movement, that is, by every form of symbolism.”

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Exhibititon: Intellectual Barbarians: The Kibbo Kift Kindred

10 October 2015 – 13 March 2016

This archive display features rare woodcarvings, furniture, ceremonial dress designs and photographs of the English organisation The Kibbo Kift Kindred (1920-1932).

Formed by the artist, writer and pacifist John Hargrave after becoming disillusioned with the Boy Scout movement, the Kibbo Kift philosophy was based on a shared appreciation of nature and handicraft, as well as a commitment to world peace. Though small in number, notable members of the group included suffragettes, scientists and the novelist H.G.Wells. A 1929 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery was a way of spreading their ideas, and this display reveals their remarkable aesthetic drawn from ancient Egyptian, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Native American crafts, dress and language.

Through revealing photographs and footage of the group on parades and camping trips, this display presents not only a forgotten moment in British social movements but a futuristic vision which continues to resonate today.

Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High St
London
E1 7QX

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