Today 3-12-2020 Jean-Luc Godard will be ninety-years young!
There is only one JLG, and we all have our own Godard. To me JLG is like Moving Poetry. The sharpening of the mind, the dancing thoughts. Beautiful moments, the act of creation, this designing of meditations.
go on, try it, FILM FOR THE EARS
The power of things to move us ‘MONO NO AWARE”, this process of ‘the moving’, that what ‘moves’ us, is what triggers me, haunts me, fascination, sensations? The moving image, the movings clouds, the edit/ montage, the substance, the contrast. It is easily found in such things like desire, passion, this raw emotion that sets the wheels in motion, but it is also found in the delicate, almost unnoticeable things that move us, like the wind in trees. I’m a researcher of movement, the ‘mono no aware’ the power of things to move us. And here i find support in the work of others, Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Jullien, William Burroughs, Toru Takemitsu, Jurg Frey. There’s great beauty in this study of the ‘mono no aware’ but also great danger, because you so easily get in a state of excitement , and you are no longer studying, and perhaps loose track and get lost for some time or……. AVALON!
Danny is a composer of very playful compositions. Here is an example where Matt Hannafin, curator and director of ‘The Extradition Series’ is unboxing one of Danny Clay’s ‘Box Compositions Series’ : https://youtu.be/xZcrAnc-erk
Plastic Song is a short film featuring the artworks of Steve McPherson who, for the last 25 years, has been picking up pieces of plastic from the beaches of his home town in Margate, Kent and turning them into extraordinary and complex artworks. Directed by Julian Hanford
This is a nice and interesting short film [20 min.] with a positive vibe, could be great for school material too!
This is my one and only software tool! I love it and I hate it, an everlasting affair. I call it ‘INSTANT COLLAGE’! I used it a lot, check the electric souvenir soundcloud page!
I use LLOOPP/PPOOLL [by Klaus Filip a.o.] together with GLEETCHLAB [by Giorgio Sancristoforo] and SOUNDHACK [by Tom Erbe]
If you found your way here, i assume you are in need of some info on how to get this stuff working. That’s the reason i’m posting the tutorial.
Just some background info:
Even though I’m not using LLOOPP/PPOOLL a lot at the moment [ my orientation is analogue these days ] i must say that using this software will bring you a lot, it’s a box full of surprises, new sounds, new ideas. If it was only for this purpose [to open yourself up for new musical insights] that would be enough reason to give it a try, give it time and enjoy. It will be very rewarding.
USE HEADPHONES FOR THE BEST DETAILED LISTENING EXPERIENCE! A lot of the music is soft, in terms of loudness. This is an essential part of the music.
2Track of treated voice [FG] and organ [BG] ‘le Petit Soldat’ [Jean-Luc Godard] & Bach Choral
[use headphone for detailed listening] electricsouvenir-recording
Silence Sequence: ‘i’m trying to hold onto my own thoughts. What about words? Where do our words come from? Maybe men talk incessantly, as if searching for gold.. in their quest for the truth.But instead of digging in riverbeds, they dig deep in their thoughts. They cast aside all the worthless words. And they end up with just one. One single golden word…silence.’ [Jean-Luc Godard ‘le Petit Soldat’]
Most people specialise in one thing, and sometimes become a genius specialist. Designing cars, writing books, making money, making films, making war, philosophise, designing chairs, making peace, composing, the list is as long as there are people specialising in one thing.
Some people specialise in 2 or 3 things, sometimes completely different things, sometimes combinations.
JLG concentrates on different design tools that will fit his meditations at hand. This is the JLG that came into my life while being a teenager. And all along he’s been giving me tools to improve myself.
What has this to do with FILM? Is JLG a filmmaker? I say, he is a designer of MEDITATIONS. But JLG has something to offer for all of us. He is a homo universalis!
sound meditation on ‘Alphaville’ [ Jean Luc Godard ] electric guitar & Max/PPOOLL electricsouvenir-recording
This meditation-maker will take you on an endless tour, showing you editing, graphic design, the art of color, sound-art, collage, politics, history, the art of motion design, films for the ear, trailers, …. His meditations are confronting, puzzling, provoking improvisations, sometimes in the form of a movie or a documentary or a mix of both, but mostly they are essays using son+image.
Through the years I’m making my conversations with JLG, there’s always a moment in time where I feel inspired to give him some credit. Like a title! So when I was composing some music for electric guitar and the EHX FREEZE, I knew that one of them would be a ‘salut’ and indeed ‘ à Godard ‘ turned out to be the one.
simple testrecording with an old iPhone electric guitar & EHX Freeze electricsouvenir-recording
‘ à Godard ‘ = Part of a collection of Solo Pieces for Electric Guitar and EHX Freeze
Today, while working on a transcription for electric guitar of a Telemann ‘Fantasia’ [1735], i was thinking of another transcription i once made a long time ago of a piece by Orlando Gibbons [1583-1625],
The piece i’m referring to ‘Five Part In Nomine’ was scored for Wurlitzer Electric Piano, Vibraphone and Electric Guitar. A fine instrumentation!
This may be the right moment to post a transcription i made of a panel discussion that was video taped by Other Minds in 2010. Charles Armirkhanian is discussing the 2nd String Quartet with composer Jurg Frey. You can see it here: https://archive.org/details/OMF_2010_03_04_c2_01
My transcription: ” I can tell something of the background of the piece, which is a book which I have at home, it’s an old book of the late 18th Century, which is a choral book, a book with chorals and psalms, and many years before I wrote this string quartet I was busy with these books, I copied single voices and parts in my sketchbook and made scores of these chorals, because this book is not in the usual score, it’s written first the soprano, alto and then tenor and then the bass. If you want to know how the harmonisation is then you have to make a score. And I like it very much to copy without a special focus why I’m doing that, and I combined it, this material, with other material of my work and slowly slowly it started to become a process into the direction of the String Quartet. And this process I think was the interesting thing, how can you turn a choral book into my own music, and this was a slow process. It was also a very delicate balance between pushing it forward and let it happen, and you cannot force a piece process, but if you are doing nothing you will not have a piece in the end. So, it’s some kind of letting go for it, let it happen and to come to, yeah, slowly the piece comes into focus and after months, it was not a struggle, sometimes I stopped for weeks and then after months I thought maybe this could be a String Quartet and then it took me another 1 and a 1/2 years to elaborate all details of color, of durations and so on. So this book is on the background, and this book doesn’t have any variation it’s just this book and it’s 80 or 90 psalms..”
What strikes me so is this important role church music, psalms and hymns and chorales still play in music. This leads me to my own fascination with church music in general. From the Ecole de Notre Dame, to Orlando Gibbons, to Claude Goudimel, [the composer to which Jurg Frey might be referring to, when he speaks of his book of chorals], Goudimel the composer of the Genevan Psalter Book, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Goudimel], to Jurg Frey, to Morton Feldman [” if i want my music to demonstrate anything, it is that ‘nature and human nature are one. Unlike Stockhausen, i don’t feel called upon to forcefully ‘mediate’ between the two. Stockhausen believes in Hegel; i believe in God. it is as simple as that”]. [‘A life without Bach and Beethoven’ – Give my Regards to Eight Street].
I get the feeling this is a universal thing, at least in the context of western music, and it surely is of importance to me. I’m convinced that some knowledge of this subject will give you good insights of music in general.
So for now i’d like to end with the mentioning of Roscoe Holcomb, a Kentucky Mountain Music man with a strong faith.
system diagrams, modulair thinking, composition, notation
SIMPLE SELF GENERATING SYSTEMSTILL LIFE / JEAN LUC GODARDSKETCH WITH LINE6 DL4 / EHX FREEZE / EHX CATHEDRALMUSIC ECO SYSTEM PLAYING & RECORDINGLLOOPP/PPOOLL ENVIRONMENTE.G.O. ELCTRIC GUITAR ORGANSKETCH FOR ELECTRIC GUITAR / EHX FREEZE
