Ellard and squoonsch
Tom Ellard’s latest blog entry picks apart “sound art”.
Very funny piece. I have had opinions exactly like this when listening to performances and recordings of that kind of music. I have even thought about drones as an ‘easy way’ at times, my well documented fondness for them notwithstanding… (ahhh drones, like a warm snuggly blanket!)
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Then I’ve also attended some performance festivals where the ‘squoonsch’-y stuff was more entertaining and enjoyable than the scores of kids with laptops making skittering IDM beats ill-paired with simplistic melodies, when droning haze was closer to ‘music’ than the other stuff.
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A friend of mine once said “Making music is easy, making good music is ass-hard.”
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Then again, I don’t know anything about “sound art”, a term which seems antiseptically academic. I’m just a guy who digs making and listening to weird shit.
Hello. I was hoping I’d manage to find you online : something of a long shot… for some reason I have (was given, perhaps ?) an accompanying sheet for a 1990s cassette you put out, called Grime, a compilation of strands of found tape from around the world (to which Michael Leigh of A.1 contributed). Sounds wonderful. I know it’s extremely late in the day but was wondering if you still have a copy I might buy ?
Posted by Stephen Drennan | June 29, 2009 1:38 amBest wishes, Stephen (of The Vitamin B12)
Hello Stephen, thanks for the comment.
I’m glad you were able to find me! The Grime project collecting the sounds of audio tape found by the roadside into one gritty chaotic mess was a pretty fun one to do. I did that in my mail art days in the nineties. I’ve been wanting to digitize it and transfer the documentation onto my site, but I haven’t gotten it done yet.
There are a very few numbers (less than five I think) of the limited edition cassette release left, but I haven’t sold one in years and years. I should be able to get one together for you
Do you know Michael? He was a pretty cool guy! I’ve fallen out of contact with most of my mail art friends.
Posted by C. Reider | June 29, 2009 4:23 pm