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C o m p i l a t i o n s

Charles Stankievech

09 Ikeda, Ryoji. +/- (1996)

Original Format: Audio CD. +/- Touch Records. TO#30. <A high frequency sound is used that the listener becomes aware of only upon its disappearance.> Reboot.   Shifting from form to content, from space to voice. Ikeda’s title track comes from the album with the liner notes that claim: “the listener can experience a particular difference between speaker playback and headphone listening.”  Listening to this track on headphones, Ikeda focus on the second sound Johan Cage famously discovered when sitting in an anechoic chamber.  Continuum referenced the eternal sound of the heartbeat, while +/- taps into the high pitched buzz of the central nervous system. Does Ikeda’s high frequency disappear because it slides into the bodies CNS frequency, or is it simply on the threshold of hearing? #

Play 1:05 min, Charles Stankievech 18/4/2009

10 Nauman, Bruce. GET OUT OF MY MIND. GET OUT OF THIS ROOM (1968)

Original Format:  Audio Installation (Collection Jack Wendler) Get out of my mind. Get into your head.  What does this piece mean after the invention of the Sony Walkman in 1978 and mobile and virtual audio architecture goes mainstream? #

Play 4:16 min, Charles Stankievech 18/4/2009

11 Migone, Christof. Excavation (1996; edited 2004):

Original Format: Audio CD. Hole in the Head (Quebec: Avatar/Ohm éditions.) «Quietly, let’s unplug everything, blindfold. Ears plugged, nose clampled tongue tied, let’s strip the hardware off radio.  The exciter, heart of the FM tranmitter, comes last.  Once off, the purring winds down and we find ourselves radiophonic without transmitter.  Commnoly, the resultant dad air spells anguish and panic.  No longer can the signal signify the voice and radiate it with power.  For the moment, however, we will dwell and even revel in the air dead.  There are remnants and potentials in our voices hereto untapped that will be sufficient to carry this broadcast home.» #

Play 1:05 min, Charles Stankievech 18/4/2009

12 Kubisch, Christina. LISTENING THROUGH THE WALLS (1984) – excerpt

Original Format: Audio Installation: Documented on audio CD “On Air” “It is paradoxically easier to introduce new music than a new way of listening.  I abandoned concert halls in favour of new sound environments….  The result is a ‘magnetic trail’ formed by a network of electrical cables which creates a visible [or invisible] labyrinth.  With the aid of special earphones, specially designed for these works, the trails are then transformed from a visual structure into a musical one.” Christina Kubisch is a German sound artist and one of the earlier composers who made the switch from musical compositions to art exhibitions.  She is one of the few artist, whose work almost always relies on some time of headphone technology: either special receiving headphones picking up purposefully installed wires transmitting a pre-arranged composition or simply a designated walking route through a saturated electromagnetic location, such as a busy urban neighbourhood. #

Play 6:12 min, Charles Stankievech 18/4/2009

13 Cardiff, Janet. (with George Bures Miller) VILLA MEDICI WALK (2001) – excerpt

Perhaps a way to engage Cardiff and Miller’s work—and headphone listening in general—is with Lacan’s concept l’extimité.  Developed in the later phase of Lacan’s writing, the idea of the l’extimité continues the importance of the voice in the psychoanalytic tradition since Freud first outlined the foundations for the “talking cure.” L’extimité is a neologism by Lacan that combines exterior and intimacy.  Linked in his seminar VII with the german term das Ding, Lacan defines the concept as that “something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me.” This phrase could be used to describe the fundamental listening experience wearing headphones, but a phantom voice inside the head suspended by headphones is the ideal example of this strangeness..  In a dynamic space that links the exterior with the interior via the topology of a möbius loop or better yet a Kleinnian bottle, the subject listens.  And in this listening the outside is on the inside of the listener. The difference between contained and container slides, as does the difference between you and I.   We easily identify with our phantasies once we have become the Hollow Men making room for an Other.  Janet’s words commands us to listen, and touched by a phantom intimacy we do.  “Listen to me” Janet’s voice seems to beg, and already having donned headphones I “always already” have obeyed before even hearing her voice.   I listen carefully and confess with the words of Roland Barthes, “The Other collects [her] whole body in [her] voice and announces that I am collecting all of myself in my ear.” #

Play 6:59 min, Charles Stankievech 18/4/2009