Bringing Ancient Sounds Back to Life, by Alex Marshall

LONDON — Peter Holmes, a 76-year-old former aircraft engineer, was standing in his tidy living room in North London recently holding a Scandinavian war horn more than four feet long. When asked how the instrument, known as a lur, is played, he said: “I’ve no idea. No one’s played it for 3,000 years.”

With that, Mr. Holmes put the lur to his lips and blew. Rather than an angry bellow that might transport a listener to a lonely fjord among Viking warriors, it sounded more like a bugle played by someone with a lisp.

Mr. Holmes, an expert on ancient music, built the lur and other long-forgotten instruments at the University of Middlesex’s engineering department, where he is designer in residence, and in his cluttered garden shed.

He is also a central figure in the European Music Archaeology Project, or EMAP, a 4-million euro (about $4.6 million) effort started in 2013 to recreate the sounds of the ancient world. The project unveils the results of its work this year. It started with a concert in Glasgow on Saturday, to be followed by a touring exhibition that opens on June 6 in Ystad, Sweden.

 The classical record label Delphian is also releasing a series of albums as a tie-in with the project, beginning with works of ancient Scottish music in May.

John Kenny, a trombonist from Birmingham, England, who also plays the carnyx, an Iiron Age horn, said that ancient instruments were important because they offered a different perspective on the past. “I’ve witnessed the most extraordinary skills used to reconstruct buildings, clothes and language, but those don’t put you into the imaginative world people used to live in,” he said. “Only music does that.”

“If you reconstruct a sword,” he added, “no one apart from a homicidal maniac could use it for the purpose intended. But reconstruct an instrument, and anyone can experience it.”

The project, half funded by the European Union, with the rest coming from an assortment of institutions and state agencies, covers the Paleolithic era to around A.D. 1,000 and the Dark Ages. Calling on the skills of archaeologists, philologists, acousticians, metal workers and others, it has brought back to life instruments ranging from ancient bagpipes to 30,000-year-old vulture- bone flutes (although some say those are merely vulture bones that some poor animal chewed holes in).

Read more here

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.

read more here

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

Event: The EVP Sessions

The EVP Sessions
Saturday 14th November

Start time: 8pm
Tickets: £11
Book online

Shoreditch Town Hall
380 Old Street
London EC1V 9LT
Website: shoreditchtownhall.com

Electronic Voice Phenomena returns with a series of electrifying live sessions featuring the very best in hauntology, spoken word, glitch noise and performance. The EVP Sessions takes its inspiration from Konstantin Raudive’s notorious Breakthrough experiments of the 1970s, in which he divined voices-from-beyond in electronic noise. Enter the labyrinthine basement of Shoreditch Town Hall and experience a “mind-boggling”, “perplexingly good” avant-garde cabaret of human, ghostly and machine voices.

Featuring

EX-EASTER ISLAND HEAD
LAURA BURNS, TIM MURRAY-BROWNE & JAN LEE
ROWAN EVANS & MAISIE NEWMAN / DUNCAN GATES
LUKE JORDAN / GARETH DAMIAN MARTIN / NICK MURRAY
NATHAN PENLINGTON / JOANNE SCOTT
ANTOSH WOJCIK / NICOLA WOODHAM

with special guest
S J Fowler

Full programme of works: http://www.electronicvoicephenomena.net/index.php/shoreditch-town-hall-london/

https://www.facebook.com/events/1639973726274802/

Ghostly Voices From Thomas Edison’s Dolls Can Now Be Heard, by Ron Cowen

Though Robin and Joan Rolfs owned two rare talking dolls manufactured by Thomas Edison’s phonograph company in 1890, they did not dare play the wax cylinder records tucked inside each one.

The Rolfses, longtime collectors of Edison phonographs, knew that if they turned the cranks on the dolls’ backs, the steel phonograph needle might damage or destroy the grooves of the hollow, ring-shaped cylinder. And so for years, the dolls sat side by side inside a display cabinet, bearers of a message from the dawn of sound recording that nobody could hear.

In 1890, Edison’s dolls were a flop; production lasted only six weeks. Children found them difficult to operate and more scary than cuddly. The recordings inside, which featured snippets of nursery rhymes, wore out quickly.

Yet sound historians say the cylinders were the first entertainment records ever made, and the young girls hired to recite the rhymes were the world’s first recording artists.

Year after year, the Rolfses asked experts if there might be a safe way to play the recordings. Then a government laboratory developed a method to play fragile records without touching them.

The technique relies on a microscope to create images of the grooves in exquisite detail. A computer approximates — with great accuracy — the sounds that would have been created by a needle moving through those grooves.

In 2014, the technology was made available for the first time outside the laboratory. “The fear all along is that we don’t want to damage these records. We don’t want to put a stylus on them,” said Jerry Fabris, the curator of the Thomas Edison Historical Park in West Orange, N.J. “Now we have the technology to play them safely.”

 More here

No Ghost Appears: Luciano Chessa’s Reconstructions of the Futurist Intonarumori, by Benjamin Lord

I. A Photograph Comes to Life

In every history of sound-art lurks a photograph of the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo (1885-1947) and his assistant in Russolo’s painting studio with the intonarumori. Literally noise-intoners, these were musical instruments with delicious names: gorgoliatore (the gurgler), ululatore (the howler), stroppicciatore (the rubber), and so on. Played with levers and cranks, and housed in simple plywood boxes, the intonarumori channeled their gurgles and howls through large, speaker-like cones. Much in the photograph is obscure: the bulky boxes hide the internal mechanisms from view, and both the photographer and the precise date of exposure are unknown.

In spite of or perhaps partly because of its obscurity, the image has become famous, entrancing generations of artists and experimental musicians. Part of its allure is formal: the patterned spread of hexagonal tile on the floor creates a strong, almost diagrammatic perspective in the foreground, which then terminates in a jumble of boxes against the back wall. The effect is deeply classical, not unlike some paintings by the 15th century master of perspective Paolo Uccello. In the photograph, the two men appear dwarfed by the giant instruments. Together, they seem composed but slightly ill at ease, late-19th century men adrift in a 20th century world of inflationary geometries. The whole scene is suffused with the decline of the Belle Epoque.

Luciano Chessa, a musician and musicologist, has studied this photograph intensively for several years. He is probably the world expert on this picture and on its close cousin, an alternate exposure of the same scene with a slightly different arrangement. Ever since he began looking at the photos while writing his dissertation on Russolo (published in 2004), he hasn’t been able to leave them alone, mining them for their every minute detail as a documentary record of the instruments. When RoseLee Goldberg, impresario of the Performa festival in New York, invited him to recreate the instruments for concert performance in 2009, he began an extended project of reconstruction. At once scholarly and creative, Chessa’s project recreates a technique of the historic avant-garde, bringing it into the present in a necessarily altered form. Given its massive scope, it also raises historically complex aesthetic, political, and musicological concerns that have so far escaped serious critical review. This essay attempts to situate and evaluate Chessa’s remobilization of the intonarumori within each of these realms.

Read more here

Book Download: An Individual Note, by Daphne Oram

Download from ubuweb here

Graham Wrench: The Story Of Daphne Oram’s Optical Synthesizer, by Steve Marshall

In the early '60s, pioneering British composer Daphne Oram set out to create a synthesizer unlike any other. The engineer who turned her ideas into reality was Graham Wrench.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in April 2008, I wrote about its history for Sound On Sound (you can read the article on‑line at /sos/apr08/articles/radiophonic.htm). I've always felt that Daphne Oram's importance has been underestimated, both as a co‑founder of the Workshop and as an electronic composer, so I tried to redress this by including as much as I could about her graphically controlled Oramic synthesiser. This was not easy, as Daphne died in 2003 and I was unable to find anyone who'd even seen the Oramic System, let alone knew how it worked. I did my best, but shortly after the magazine went on sale, an email was forwarded to me by Sound On Sound. 

"I enjoyed the article very much,” said the writer. "With reference to the bizarre design concept of the original Oramics machine, you might be interested in some background as to why and how it took shape! I was the engineer who originally turned Daphne's concept into a reality, with an extremely tight budget and a lot of inverted, lateral thinking.” It was signed: "Yours respectfully, Graham Wrench.”

I had to meet this man! So off I went to rural Suffolk, where Graham lives in a little house crammed with engineering wonders. There are musical instruments, home‑made telescopes, model railways, vintage photographic gear… There's even a steam railway museum just down the road! Despite these temptations, I managed to spend a whole afternoon listening to Graham's account of how Oramics really worked, and how he came to design and build the prototype.

Read more here

The ANS Synthesizer: Composing on a Photoelectronic Instrument, by Stanislav Kreichi

THE ANS SYNTHESIZER

For the past 30 years, I have been working with the ANS synthesizer. This photoelectronic instrument takes its name from the initials of Russian composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, whose creative work and ideas about synthesizing the different arts inspired the young inventor Eugeny Murzin [2,3].

In 1938 Murzin invented a design for composers based on synthesizing complex musical sounds from a limited number of pure tones; this proposed system was to perform music without musicians or musical instruments. The technological basis of his invention was the method of photo-optic sound recording used in cinematography, which made it possible to obtain a visible image of a sound wave, as well as to realize the opposite goal - synthesizing a sound from an artificially drawn sound wave.

Despite the apparent simplicity of his idea of reconstructing a sound from its visible image, the technical realization of the ANS as a musical instrument did not occur until 20 years later. Murzin was an engineer who worked in areas unrelated to music, and the development of the ANS synthesizer was a hobby and he had many problems realizing on a practical level. It was not until 1958 that Murzin was able to establish a laboratory and gather a group of engineers and musicians in order to design the ANS. I joined his laboratory in 1961 as asound engineer and composer.

One of the main features of the ANS is its photo-optic generator, which Murzin designed in the form of a rotating glass disk with 144 optic phonograms of pure tones, or sound tracks. The narrow tracks that proceed from the wide track at the edge to the center of the disk correspond to the 144 pure tones. The track nearest to the center has the lowest frequency; the track nearest to the edge has the highest. A unit of five similar disks with different rotating speeds produces 720 pure tones, covering the whole range of audible frequencies. To select the needed tones, a coding field (the "score") was designed in the form of a glass plate covered with an opaque, nondrying black mastic. The score moves past a reading device made up of a narrow aperture with a number of photoelectric cells and amplifiers.

Scraping off a part of the mastic at a specific point on the plate makes it possible for the light from the corresponding optic phonogram to penetrate into the reading device and be transformed into a sound. The narrow aperture reads the length of the scraped-off part of the mastic during its run and transforms it into a sound duration. The nondrying mastic allows for immediate correction of the resulting sounds: portions of the plate that generate superfluous sounds can be smeared over, and missing sounds can be added. The speed of the score can also be smoothly regulated, all the way to a full stop. All this makes it possible for the composer to work direcdy and materially with the production of sound.

Read more here

The Sound of Soviet Science Fiction, by Robert Barry

Eduard Artemiev first met Andrei Tarkovsky at a house party thrown by the painter, Mikhail Romadin, in the spring of 1970. The conversation somehow turned to the subject of electronic music and, to Artemiev's surprise, the director soon invited himself to the electronic music studio in Moscow where the composer worked, keen to see the working methods behind the ANS synthesizer that was housed there.

Artemiev had been one of the first composers to work with the ANS, after its inventor, Yevgeny Murzin, posted a note up at the Moscow Conservatoire where Artemiev was a student, looking for composers interested in electronic music. This machine, the first Russian synthesizer, operated using a unique system of drawn sound synthesis. The composer would paint on a sheet of glass which was scanned by the synthesizer, becoming a kind of graphic score, allowing the composer to work like a painter, tinting and shading, forming textures and tone colours directly. Due to the similarities such a method conjured up with the colouristic music of Murzin's idol, the Russian composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, the device was named after his initials.

Tarkovsky was evidently impressed with what he saw at Artemiev's studio for he soon asked him to compose all the music for a new science fiction film he was working on with Romadin, Solaris, having recently fallen out with regular musical collaborator, Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov. Tarkovsky gave Artemiev a completely free hand on Solaris, insisting on just one stipulation: that the film must include JS Bach's Choral Prelude in F-minor, ‘Ich ruf zu Dir, Herr Jesus Christ’.

Though the soundtrack to Solaris uses both orchestral and electronic textures (from the ANS), Artemiev has said in interviews that in terms of its treatment, the orchestra "functioned like one giant synthesizer." From the composer's notes written before he started work on the film, we can see that he delineated five general areas: landscapes; personal sound perceptions; various transformations and distortions of the Bach theme; recollections of the Earth; and the sounds of the living ocean, Solaris, itself. Of this final category, Artemiev remarked, "It is, obviously, composed of the sounds of terrestrial life as if processed by the Ocean. . . The characters of the film hear (or are trying to hear) sounds either similar to terrestrial ones, or sounds which are kind of little cells or islands remaining from the Earth which they manage to identity out of the mass of strange and yet incomprehensible noises."

Read more here

The X-Ray Audio Project

We are telling a story of forbidden music, cold war culture and bootleg technology  with a documentary, book, live events and travelling exhibition.

Many older people in Russia remember seeing and hearing strange vinyl type discs when they were young. The discs had partial images of skeletons on them and were called 'Bones' or 'Ribs'.

In an era when the recording industry was ruthlessly controlled by the State, an alternative source of raw materials was found to make illegal recordings - used X Ray plates obtained from local hospitals.

"The Age of the Bones" was a period lasting about fifteen years during which the sound of forbidden Russian and Western music was associated with images of the human skeleton. It was a period of what might be called "roentgenizdat" - the audio equivalent of  "samidzat" private publication of banned written works.  

In the Soviet states during the cold-war era, most modern Western bands and music was banned for all sorts of reasons including 'neo-fascism', 'mysticism' and even 'obscurantism'. Much Russian music was also forbidden for a variety of other reasons. Even certain rhythms were regarded unfavourably. But a vibrant, secret and risky trade grew up in what became known as 'Bones' or 'Ribs'.

These Bones were medical X-Ray fluorography sheets unofficially obtained from hospitals, cut into discs and embossed with the grooves of bootlegged gramophone records - a kind of medical version of a DJ dub plate. The quality was poor and the discs wore out quickly but the cost was low, just a couple of roubles compared with the fabulous cost of an actual Western LP.

To listen to Bones records go here.

There are many stories to be told about the people who made these recordings and how or why they did it. Some of them not only bootlegged the discs themselves but also copied the machines that made them in order that the process spread and persisted. They were often people who were fired up with a passion to share music, who risked and sometimes lost their liberty at a time when listening to certain songs was an offence and the private copying of music could result in a gaol sentence.

Despite the inevitable imprisonments and clamp downs, the culture of the Bones persisted right up to the early sixties when reel-to-reel tape recorders became common enough for this laborious real-time process involved to no longer be necessary.

More here

Controlling Sound: Musical Torture from the Shoah to Guantánamo, by Melissa Kagen

“Purely physical torture is losing importance,” observed the psychologist Gustav Keller in 1981. “Psychological and psychiatric findings and methods are taking its place, planned and sometimes administered by white-collar torturers.” This statement, though prescient, is debatable: plenty of purely physical torture has been reported by former prisoners of Guantánamo and Bagram. The implication, however, is one of progress: that torture has been civilized, professionalized, in some way stripped of its teeth.

After the news broke that American soldiers were torturing detainees in secret prisons like Guantánamo, the idea spread that so-called “no touch” torture is more humane than more conventional methods involving violence to the body. No-touch torture utilizes methods like sleep deprivation, temperature regulation, violation of cultural and religious taboos, the playing of loud music, and psychological manipulation while interrogating prisoners. These methods, though often brutal, frequently don’t leave physical marks, thus nebulizing the concept of torture and leaving the act more open to interpretation.

Music torture at Guantánamo is a prime example of this mindset. Endless news cycles discussed whether waterboarding, hooding, and playing loud music could even be considered torture. Musicians, when asked for comment about “music torture”, sometimes responded dismissively: Metallica’s James Hetfield replied to the news with the comment, “We’ve been punishing our parents, our wives, our loved ones with this music for ever. Why should the Iraqis be any different?” Bob Singleton, who composed the often-used Barney the Purple Dinosaur theme song, wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Would it annoy them? Perhaps … But could it ‘break’ the mental state of an adult? If so, that would say more about their mental state than about the music.”

The implication that these torture methods are somehow softer or easier to withstand than traditional methods is an interesting but dangerous fallacy. In no-touch torture, the torture weapon is the prisoner’s own body, which aches in stress positions, shivers, sweats, and demands sleep. The body itself becomes the enemy, psychologically destroying the prisoner from the inside out.

Read more here

Phantom Airwaves (Michael Esposito)

Michael Andrew Esposito was born in Gary, Indiana in 1964. He is a descendant of Alfred Vail who invented the Morse Code and several early telegraph devices with his partner Samuel Morse. The invention of the telegraph sparked the spiritualist movement of the middle 1800s and the telegraph was used in spirit communication. Another ancestor, Jonathan Harned Vail was office manager and assistant to Thomas Edison. Edison, in his later years attempted to develop a device for communicating with the dead. Michael studied communication theory at Purdue University, University of Notre Dame, American University in Cairo, Egypt and Governor's State University. During the Gulf War Michael was a Psy-ops officer in Iraq.

Over the years, under the Phantom Airwaves institution, Michael has participated in hundreds of paranormal investigations all over the world. He has conducted extensive research at many active locations and has developed a great deal of unique theory and devised many unique experiments within the field of EVP. Focusing primarily on EVP research, he has collected tens of thousands EVPs and video. He has had numerous television, radio and newspaper appearances.

Working extensively with EVP's relationship to experimental music, Michael combines EVP with field recording and related frequency tones of research sites. Michael is currently published by Touch Music[MCPS] UK.

More here

In search of perfect sound – introducing Britain’s largest horn loudspeaker

A long black metal tube, slightly tapered and almost 9-foot-long lay on a row of filing cabinets at Blythe House, the Science Museum’s storage facility. The object was pointed out by John Liffen, the Museum’s Curator of Communications, who guided me during a research visit of the collections in 2008. It was all that remained of a mighty horn loudspeaker that was demonstrated in the Museum during the 1930s, John explained. A demolition accident had almost totally destroyed it in 1949.
Now the tube assumed a more fascinating form, like a fossil or a dinosaur bone as we delved into audio archeology.

The story of the horn, researched in great detail by John, sparked an interest in me. Four years later in 2012, on being appointed as the Museum’s first-ever sound artist-in residence, I was given a wonderful opportunity to initiate its reconstruction.

The exponential horn loudspeaker was designed in 1929 by the Museum’s curator of  ‘Electrical Communication’ R. P. G. Denman who also personally built a radio receiver to run in tandem with it. The purpose of this new sound system was to provide the public with demonstrations of the highest quality broadcast sound that was obtainable at the time. Denman saw it as setting a benchmark for audio quality, his aim was, in his words “to provide a standard by which commercial apparatus could be judged”.

The horn measured 27 feet (8.23m) in length with a cross section that curved exponentially from 1 ^1/16 inches (27mm) to a massive 7-foot-1-inch square (2.16m sq.) at the horn mouth. The science and theory of how horns propagate sound had only begun to emerge in the mid-1920s. It was found that a horn with an exponential shape was the most effective means of converting the sound energy from high pressure, low velocity vibrations produced at the narrow end of the horn, into low pressure, high velocity vibrations at its mouth, then radiated into the outside air. However, in order to reproduce the lowest sounding frequencies, this type of horn has to be very long with a correspondingly large opening.

More here

and here

Voudon: Art, Uprising & Gnosis (Party)

[ Voudon | Art, Uprising & Gnosis ]
http://nnnnn.org.uk/doku.php?id=voudon

After navigating the pathways of Voudon, it's time to shake out the daemons

spirit servants::

DUNGEON ACID https://soundcloud.com/dungeon-acid

XENOGLOSSY https://soundcloud.com/xenoglossix

RYAN & LUKE JORDAN http://ryanjordan.org/ http://l-r-jordan.blogspot.co.uk/

BROOD https://soundcloud.com/broodexperiments

projection::

ORPHANDRIFT http://orphandrift.com/

screening::

ACHANTÉ (2008) by Emily McMehen and Sautner/Mazibel Productions
http://emilymcmehen.com/
http://mazibel.com/

BOUNDA PA BOUNDA (2008) by Leah Gordon
www.leahgordon.co.uk

8pm - 3am Saturday 5th July 2014

£5/3 on the door - rough bar

Top Floor, Unit 73a Regent Studios, 8 Andrew's Road, Hackney, London E8 4QN

This is the after-party for http://voudon.wordpress.com/
https://www.facebook.com/events/1412487765681234/

Voudon: Art, Uprising & Gnosis (Conference)

The Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness salon presents:

Voudon: Art, Uprising & Gnosis

2pm-7pm, Saturday, 5th July, 2014 (1:30pm for a 2pm start)

The October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester St, London WC1N3AL
http://voudon.wordpress.com/

Ticket sales IN ADVANCE only – via:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/voudon-art-uprising-gnosis-rhythm-tickets-878057293


Presenters/performers include:

David Beth

The Gnostic Science of Esoteric Voudon: Cosmos, Deity and Gnosis in the Work of a Voudon Secret Society

In this presentation David Beth, offers a rare glimpse into the Metaphysics and Modus Operandi of an initiatic Voudon Secret Society. Unique teachings on the soul, the esoteric dimensions of the cosmos and its primordial deities, form a powerful and complex system of Voudon; providing its adepts with the keys to attain magical powers, creative freedom and Gnostic liberation. Elaborating on these, and other central themes, the speaker takes us through some of the most hidden realms of Inner Voudon.

David Beth is an internationally respected spiritual and esoteric teacher. Born to German parents in Angola, Africa he has been initiated into several lineages of Afro-centric Gnosis, as well as Western forms of Esotericism. Amongst other accolades, David Beth is the founder of La Société Voudon Gnostique, a selective group of initiates and artists dedicated to manifesting the more powerful, inner revelations and transmissions of the Gods of Esoteric Voudon. SVG aims to push evolution and research of Voudon freely beyond all frontiers of orthodoxy. David has authored a range of authoritative books and essays on Voudon and related topics. He has recently established the esoteric publishing house: Theion Publishing. University educated in Germany and the USA, David has travelled and lived all over the world from Nigeria to Hamburg and Los Angeles to London, studying and teaching spiritual and esoteric systems for over two decades. David currently lives and works between Europe and Jets to Brazil

John Cussans

Voudon and the Haitian Revolution

John Cussans discusses the role of Vodou in anti-colonial struggles in Saint-Domingue/Haiti such as the famous Bwa Kayiman ceremony that inaugurated the Haitian Revolution and in resistance struggles against the USA occupation from 1915 to 1934. Attention is paid to the particular loa associated with these struggles and the colonial authority's responses to them.

John Cussans is an artist, writer and independent researcher whose current work examines misrepresentations of Haitian Vodou in popular culture, its association with moral panics within the mass media and its role in anti-colonial struggles. In 2009 and 2011 John participated in the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince and continues to work with the Ti Moun Rezistans artists’ community there. He is currently a visiting research fellow in the Visual Cultures Department of Goldsmiths College.

Leah Gordon

Vodou and Art: a Border Culture

Leah Gordon explores the multifarious links between Vodou and art in both Haiti's rich art history and contemporary practice. Leah will discuss the use of image and artifact within Vodou ritual and the often-interchangeable role of artist and Houngan (Vodou priest). To conclude Gordon will explore the liminal space that contemporary artists currently inhabit whilst trying to negotiate their ancestral histories and cultural antecedents within a contemporary art market, which still has a conflicted relationship toward ethnographic and ritual objects

Leah Gordon is an artist, curator and writer who explores the boundaries between post-colonialism, religion, folk history and art. Her practice investigates the ruptures between Haiti and Britain's intervolved histories and cosmologies. Leah's work has been exhibited internationally including in the National Portrait Gallery, UK, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the Dakar Biennale. Leah Gordon co-curated 'Kafou: Haiti, History & Vodou’ at the Nottingham Contemporary, was the adjunct curator for the Haitian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale and was on the curatorial team of 'In Extremis: Death & Life in 21st Century Haitian Art' at the Fowler Museum, Los Angeles and the Musee de la Civilisation, in Quebec City.

Gabriel Toso

Drapo Vodou: Sacred Flags of Haiti

In this lecture Gabriel Toso presents his research on Vodou flags or Drapó Vodou, an essential element and integral part of Vodou ceremonies. Traditionally made of sequins or beads in the oum’phor (temple) by the houn’gan (priest), they are intrinsically connected with the lwa they represent and are therefore considered powerful magical tools. The Drapó incorporates African elements, Catholic imagery and Masonic symbols becoming a reflection of the unique syncretic nature of Vodou itself. The lecture focuses on the flags’ forgotten African origins, their key ritualistic use and multifaceted iconography. Due to their visual appeal and the strong interest from Museums and art collectors on both sides of the Atlantic, Gabriel also explores their inevitable transformation from sacred objects to art objects.

Gabriel Toso is an art historian born in Venice by Italian-French parents. He now lives in London where he works in the art market and he is collaborating with the Learning, Volunteers and Audiences department at the British Museum. Having traveled in Haiti, he has developed a strong passion for Haitian culture and a keen interest in Vodou and ‘Vodou sacred art’. He is currently researching the place and role of the LGBT community in the Vodou religion.

Luke Jordan - Spirit Trumpet (2014)

More here

Leif Elggren & his characters

Leif Elggren talks about Queen Christina, Charles XII and Emanuel Swedenborg at the opening of his solo exhibition "MOVEMENTS IN THE DUST"

Sarah Angliss - Infrasonic

I initiated and led Infrasonic,  project which was awarded funding from the SciArt Consortium. To delve into the curious world of infrasound, I put together a team of experimental psychologists, acoustic consultants, composers, a visual artist and a pianist. Our aim was explore some tantalising claims about infrasound and put them under scientific scrutiny. Of particular interest were its reputed emotional effects. Infrasound is used in sacred music, for instance during cathedral organ recitals, and there is debate about why it’s used. Some people say it adds a sense of awe to the music – it puts a shiver down your spine. Others say that giant infrasonic organ pipes are nothing more than ‘an expensive way to make a draught’. Stranger still, infrasound has also been detected at some ostensibly haunted sites (see Vic Tandy, 1998) where it may also be making people feel very uneasy.

According to Tandy, even when infrasound comes from a mundane source, such as a faulty ceiling fan, it can give people such strange sensations, it might lead them to think they’ve been haunted. This was enough information to encourage us all to unleash infrasound on an audience.

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