Aki Onda is an electronic musician, composer, and visual artist. He was born in Japan and currently resides in New York. Onda is particularly known for his Cassette Memories project – works compiled from a “sound diary” of field-recordings collected by Onda over a span of two decades. Onda’s musical instrument of choice is the cassette Walkman. Not only does he capture field recordings with the Walkman, he also physically manipulates multiple Walkmans with electronics in his performances.

Cassette Memories is a music performance, or a ritual, that Onda conjures up the general essence of memory by playing his field recordings, so to speak his personal memories, at a location which has its own memories. It’s invisible, but you would feel that live memories awake sleeping memories.

Birdcage is a sonic gallery initiated by Daniele Balit as an itinerant and temporary display to host artistic initiatives. Previous appearances include Stockholm with Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Amsterdam with dj sniff, and Beijing with Yan Jun.

Birdcage gracefully acknowledges support for the production of this project from the Dena Foundation for Contemporary Art. A special thanks goes to the Louvre Contemporary Art Program (chief curator Marie-Laure Bernadac and Pauline Guelaud), and to : Eric Cordier Licia Demuro, Silvia Ferro, Satoko Fujimoto, Mathias Geoffroy, Daniel Hosner, Hannah Huesberg, Marie Lelouche, Anthony Morabito. Eric Perier, Vincent Voillat.

Streams from: Barcelona (Spain), Dakar (Senegal), Boston (US), Ann Arbor (US), Greensboro (US), Amsterdam (Holland), Reykjavik (Iceland), New-York (US), Solleftea (Sueden), Paris (France), Chicago (US), Belfast (Irland), Lagos (Nigeria), Medellin (Colombia), Buga – Valle (Colombia), Quebec (Canada), Montréal (Canada), Mumbai (India), Lijiang (China), Montréal (Canada), Baltimore (US), Yogyakarta (Indonesia), Honk Kong (China), Yokohama (Japan) Marseille (France), Nice (France), Vesinet (France)…

Locus Sonus Lab: Julien Clauss, Alejo Duque, Scott Fitzgerald, Jérôme Joy, Anne Roquigny, Peter Sinclair.

Production team: Etienne Fortin, Stéphane Cousot, Grégoire Louvain, APPLES Marseille, Chabaud et cie.

Partners: Délégation aux Arts Plastiques and Mission Recherche et Technologie from the French Minister of Culture and Communication, CNRS and Ministère de l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche and in co-production with Transcultures/City Sonics, Mons, Belgium, l’Ecole Supérieure d’art de Aix et Seconde Nature

LOCUS SONUS: http://locusonus.org/
SOUND MAP: http://locusonus.org/soundmap/
FESTIVAL MIMI: http://mimi2010.amicentre.biz/wordpress/

urban sound stories is a five-part series of sounds and photographs as soundscapes of European cities. The artists participating in this “curated by”project were selected by Gruenrekorder, a German based organization and label for phonography, field recording and soundscape.

Five sound artists — Simon Whetham, Tobias Bolt, Eric Cordier, Lasse-Marc Riek and Roland Etzin — explore eight places each, in five different cities, using the means of phonography and photography. The exploration of artificial and natural space within the city takes place within the same space of time.

The field recordings are presented as a narrative. The photographs will be transformed into audible signals, with the help of digital processes. The whole composition presents the listener with a concrete soundscape opposed to one artificially produced from the photographs, transferred in the space of radio.

Conflux, the art and technology festival for the creative exploration of urban public space, is pleased to announce the 6th annual Conflux Festival will take place from September 17-20, 2009. The festival, produced by Glowlab, will be headquartered in Manhattan with partner and host, NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

Conflux will organize a user-generated open format event on Sunday September 20th, 2009 from 10am-6pm. Through an open submissions process, ConfluxCity will provide a platform for artists, urban geographers, technologists and others to organize and produce innovative activities dedicated to the examination, celebration and (re)construction of everyday urban life.

Conceptually, this work challenges ideas of territory, control, transmission, tranception and how we listen to the world. Ultimately it is about a very complex and delicate sonic texture. We access the constructed space via our auditory perception. Through listening we perceive a landscape that in turn triggers the imagination to construct a picture of what this space looks like. It becomes a partly imaginary space yet it is a shared space. It is live and interactive: the participant becomes the transmitter and is transmitted/ displaced (in sound) in many actual places in fractions of milliseconds. A recursive eavesdropping becomes possible in this unseen territory.

Live sound travels from location to location, reverberating in each space. A kind of anonymity reverberates through the piece. It is a borderless territory designed for listening. Acoustically the reverberations and other characteristics of each space add up, thus creating a new recombinant space that is the distorted and warped sum of its parts.

directional audio tunnel - loudspeaker to microphone to network device to loudspeaker to microphone to network device and so on … traveling around the world through sound.

Locustream audio Tardis is an imaginary journey between various open mikes of the Locustream project, initiated by the Locus Sonus lab. All the sounds that are heard are transmitted live from the distant locations where volunteers taking part in the project have set up microphones which permanently stream their chosen soundscape via the web. By switching from stream to stream the audience hear the cyclical sequence which are successively played. A simple video-image showing the name of the location and of the streamer is projected during each sequence. Streams from: Marseille, Dakar, Boston, Amsterdam, Reykjavik, Solleftea, Paris, Les Lilas, Vesinet, Nice, Qu bec, Chicago, Lagos etc.

AROUND is a month-long sound art festival about listening. Internationally renowned artists stay in Hong Kong on a 10-day residency, developing original live performances and installations at the tranquil Tung O Beach in the south of Lamma Island and in old Chinese brick houses in Motat village nearby. Sound objects and audio works are concurrently presented in multiple venues in the city. Public talks and workshops on sound in different cultural contexts take place throughout the month.

The festival is grounded on the place-making potential of the aesthetics of sound. This unprecedented event brings visitors out of the routines of urban space and back, enabling extra-ordinary and lasting listening experiences. AROUND is a direct and positive response to the domination of visual culture and noise pollution in the city, the numbing of our sense of hearing as a result, and the growing interest of artists working with sound.

AROUND presents international artists and emerging sound art talents from Hong Kong. Participants include Mike Cooper (UK), Kawai Shiu (USA/ Singapore/ HK) with Hong Kong New Music Ensemble (HK), Phoebe Hui (HK), Locus Sonus / Jerome Joy (France), Jaffa Lam (HK), John Lee (HK), Jason Lim (Singapore), Simone Merli (Italy/USA), Donna Ong (Singapore), Beatrix Pang (HK), Kacey Wong (HK), Patrick Shek (HK), Su Hei (HK), Akio Suzuki (Japan), Anthony Yeung (HK), Yan Jun (PRC), Miki Yui (Japan/ Germany).

The creators specifically set out to create a connection between the physical, digital and mobile planes. The website features a map of the Bronx and an archive of contributed rhymes. They then put up posters near the physical locations marked on the online map, describing the location’s relevance to hip-hip history in a rhyme. The posters also challenged passersby to respond via SMS with their own rhymes about the location, the people who made it famous, or hip-hop in general. The project captures the battle tradition of hip-hop, while informing the community through multiple mediums…” Continue reading BronxRhymes Uses Locality, Maps to Track History of Hip-Hop by Megan Taylor, PBS-MediaShift.

This project explores the relationship between sound, space and identity as experienced through a cree worldview. By creating a “performative audio map”, L’Hirondelle will negotiate a journey through new territory, developing a nomadic relationship with the land. Her actions/singing will be in direct response to her encounters within the territory - the physical environment she finds herself in and its inhabitants.

During the month of December, the artist will make daily journeys throughout Vancouver and “sing” the landscape she encounters. These encounters will be captured by mobile phone by the artist and whatever other technologies are made available by participating viewers/audience (video, photo, audio).

During the live performances, she will sing, record, upload and tag these audio clips to an online database. Each audio clip will be tagged to one or more of the 16 cree values. The clips will automatically be available to online audiences interactively through a rich online media experience available here.

This interactive experience intends to illuminate the relationship between the spirit or inspiration for the singing (the song, the audio) and the value it corresponds to within a cree worldview while engaging online audiences to interact with the content via a mashup/audio remix style interface.

Unscheduled live performances will begin November 24th and take place daily until December 31st with the interactive website premiering December 7, 2008. Additionally, selected scheduled performance locations during December will be listed on the grunt gallery website

Subscribe to project feed at Twitter.com to learn more about following/participating or tracking daily performances or visit the blog.

Participants are also invited to take part in the daily performances by submitting text, photos, videos or audio material to vancouversonglines@gmail.com for inclusion in the project blog. In addition to this, audiences may contribute sound clips to the remix interface by uploading audio to the website and can additionally link videos to the project’s youtube site.

Cheryl L’Hirondelle is a currently Vancouver-based multi and interdisciplinary mixed blood artist and musician originally from northern Alberta. Her artistic practice is an investigation of the junction of a cree worldview (nêhiyawin) in contemporary time and space.

“Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is drawing attention to the rapid social and geocultural transformation of his native India on his latest album. Landscape in Metamorphoses, a 26-minute collection of field recordings on German label Gruenrekorder, documents the stormy environmental changes taking place in Tumbani, ‘one of the busiest industrial belts at the Bengal-Bihar border’. Recorded between February and April of last year with little more than a simple MD recorder and a binaural microphone, ‘Landscape in Metamorphoses’ aims at delivering both a vivid sonic snapshot and a strong political statement.” - Tobias Fisher at Tokafi.

Nina Katchadourian: I’m often looking at the natural world, but just as often I’m looking at the human and social world. The Marfa Jingles looks at the town as a social structure — as a place where people live, work, and run businesses and organizations. I’ve kind of collected Marfa, and used the project as a vehicle to get to know the town. I think of it as not so far from my project Office Semaphore, and other public pieces that I’ve done that look at the rather mundane fixtures of everyday life. The jingles I’ve made are now being played on Marfa Public Radio — they’re in the public space, which is on the airwaves, where the people of Marfa and all of west Texas can hear this stuff.

And although I do use the term jingle, which is a form that we associate with advertising, when you hear the songs I think that it becomes evident that they aren’t ads at all. I’m using the term very loosely. The jingles are more like little sound-songs portraits of various public-service clubs, organizations, and stores. I’m doing something that when taken collectively provides a cross-section of this tiny place in Texas. I don’t really feel like I’ve been writing advertising; I feel like I’ve been writing songs and cross-pollinating them with the jingle form. “From An Interview with Nina Katchadourian: by Suzan Sherman, NYFA Current.