Oval is an electronic music group founded in Germany in 1991 by Markus Popp, Sebastian Oschatz and Frank Metzger. The group is regarded as pioneering glitch music, writing on CDs to damage them and produce music with the resulting fragments.
Sound Recordist
Tim Hecker
Tim Hecker is an electronic musician and sound artist based in Montreal, Canada. Hecker previously recorded under the moniker Jetone, but has become better known internationally for his ambient recordings mainly released through Kranky Records under his own name.
William Basinski
William Basinski (born 1958) is an avant-garde composer based in New York.[1] He is also a clarinetist, saxophonist, sound artist, and video artist. Basinski is best known for his four-volume album The Disintegration Loops (2002–2003), constructed from rapidly decaying twenty-year-old tapes of his earlier music.[2]
The Rise of Sound Art
If an artist creates a sound, but no one is listening, is it still art? Like performance art, sound art is ephemeral, intangible, and appears to be the next vogue in terms of art experimentation and curation. But it’s been around in various manifestations since Dadaism, Futurism, and the Surrealists, and came into its own through the compositions of John Cage in the 1950s. One piece of his, entitled 4’33”, is a recording of a pianist walking onto a stage and sitting silently for four minutes and 33 seconds, while coughs and fidgeting can be heard within the concert hall. It touched upon something that is rarely explored in the public’s consciousness: the power of noise. This and other works were fundamental stepping-stones to today’s sound art. The genre was finally coined in 1983, after a landmark exhibition called ‘Sound/Art’ at the Sculpture Center in New York.
FreeSounds
Freesound is a collaborative database of Creative Commons Licensed sounds. Browse, download and share sounds.
‘Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities’ are Little Worlds Made Cunningly
The curators of “Otherworldly”—which consists largely of meticulous models and dioramas, some of them artworks themselves, others constructed by artists only to be photographed—trace the diorama back to Louis Daguerre and posit as its animating question, “What is real?” But that’s not really the question anymore, except insofar as Renaissance perspective, like Newtonian physics or the Ten Commandments, continues to dominate the popular imagination. If there is a question, it might be “What is the difference between art and design?” But there’s no particular urgency to that one either, since art and design, like spectacle and pathos, can so happily be concurrent. In fact, you could say that “Otherworldly” consists of two separate, concurrent shows: one for children and other devotees of technology, and one for devotees of art.