Only Connect

‘Everywhere it is machines – real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts.’

Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari: Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

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In our software-operated society we use applications accessed from flat, shiny surfaces on flat, shiny objects to access information and entertainment. And through these objects we communicate.

But when machines began to make their way into everyday life following the Industrial Revolution, the prospect of automation was met with fear as well as euphoria; with the concern that some important human dimension might be lost. The American writer Henry David Thoreau wrote in 1854, in the opening chapter of Walden: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing to communicate”. Thoreau’s fear that electronic communication would only reinforce everyday inarticulacy and triviality was well founded. Through television and social media, to a certain degree, this is exactly what has happened.

Machine Dreams is a festival exploring the machine in all its glory. Not only as a paean to obsolete mechanisms and the soundscape that disappears with them, but as a celebration of the machine as a model for thinking.

Only Connect brings you celebrations of the vanishing white noise between FM stations where voices are heard fading in and out of range; an examination of the vocoder, a human-voice scrambling machine born within the US military which went on to define the sound of electro; explorations of time machines; mechanical pianos; machines transforming images into sound and vice versa; customised sonic tools as well as obsolete technology which seemed to offer the possibility of communication with another world altogether.

The ‘progress’ which machines are said to bring has always had its supporters and its critics. Through our diverse programme, we hope to examine the machine through multiple perspectives: both as a utopian construction built to improve lives, and as a dehumanizing force undermining something essential about society. Plus, we will look at ways in which people and machines are learning to live together, creatively and inventively. And at Only Connect, all of this, of course, is approached via the medium of music and sound, which, perhaps more than any other art form, has been profoundly affected by the enormous transformations of the machine age.
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Anne Hilde Neset, Artistic Director of nyMusikk.
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NILS HENRIK ASHEIM

Nils Henrik Asheim is a prolific composer and performer. His output includes theatrical, vocal and instrumental music as well as site-specific installations. Asheim is known as an innovative improvisor on church organ and has twice been awarded a Norwegian Grammy (Spellemannsprisen). Will be performing at Guitar Machne 5 June.

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ALF TERJE HANA

Alf Terje Hana is a composer and guitarist whose groups include Wasaband, Timebeat and Athana, where he blends guitar sounds with electronics, fuelled by inspiration from great painters and nature. He has also played with Sidsel Endresen, Eivind Aarset, Mungolian Jetset, as well as ex-Police drummer Stewart Copeland and The Stavanger Symphony Orchestra. Will be performing at Guitar Machne 5 June.

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CONLON NANCARROW

US born Conlon Nancarrow (1912–77) composed most of his work for the player piano, or pianola, whose actions are programmed using perforated paper or metallic rolls. This allowed him to create parts impossible to play by humans alone.

His Toccata, Piece For Tape, Study no. 3. will be performed at the opening concert, The Bad Tempered Piano, by Rex Lawson (player piano), Daniel Paulsen (percussion), Karin Hellqvist (violin).

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GEORGE ANTHEIL & FERNAND LÈGER

George Antheil, the self-styled ‘bad boy of music’, caused a riot with the score for Ballet Mécanique (1924) for 16 player pianos; here it will be performed on a single instrument with a rare screening of Fernand Legér’s original film.

Antheil's Ballet Mécanique will be performed at the opening concert, The Bad Tempered Piano, by Rex Lawson (player piano).

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REX LAWSON

Rex Lawson is the world’s leading performer on the player piano. He will speak about the player piano’s history as well as performing Nancarrow and Antheil, at The Bad Tempered Piano 5 June.

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ØYVIND TORVUND

Øyvind Torvund writes chamber music and orchestral works often incorporating improvisation and folk traditions.

Torvund's Forest Catalogue (A Slide Show In Sound) will be performed at the festivals opening concert, The Bad Tempered Piano, 5 June. This piece detects musical themes from within a collection of field recordings of forests. The musicians are imitating and responding to the sounds and textures found in each “frame” of the forest catalogue.

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CHRISTIAN BLOM

Christian Blom is an artist and composer who works with kinetic sculpture and mechanical devices.

At the opening concert The Bad Tempered Piano his piece Sommerfugl/Ensom vandrer/Liten fugl/Halling/Vokterens sang (interpreting Edvard Grieg) will be performed on piano by Ellen Ugelvik. Selections from Edvard Grieg’s Lyric Pieces for piano are fed through a randomising computer process, and the outcome is transcribed back into musical notation. A feedback loop that crosses from the human to the machine and back again.

His installation Al-Khowarizmi’s Mechanical Orchestra is an interactive system designed to perform music via a system of automated strings, bells and lights. Every time a spectator presses a button, a new variation becomes possible. The installation will be exhibited at Teknisk Museum.

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THE BRUCE LACEY EXPERIENCE

Combining the anarchic comedy of the Goons and Monty Python with cybernetic art and pagan ritual, Bruce Lacey has been a legendary figure in the British countercultural art scene from the 1960s to the present day. In a varied life, Lacey has collaborated with The Beatles, Spike Milligan and Fairport Convention, created performance art before the term existed, and invented a series of robots and automata. The Bruce Lacey Experience is a documentary made by British artist Jeremy Deller and Nick Abrahams, in which they go in search of Lacey's crazy genius and capture the spirit of this visionary artist. The film will be introduced by writer Rob Young (The Wire). Screening at Cinemateket 6 June.

Directors: Jeremy Deller & Nick Abrahams, 2012, UK (73 mins).

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BIOSPHERE

Biosphere, aka Geir Jenssen, hails from the north of Norway. At The Museum of Mechanical Dreams 6 June, he performs a piece specially composed for one of only seven surviving examples of the Subharchord – an electronic sound generator built in East Berlin in the early 60s – in the world.

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AKI ONDA

Aki Onda is an electronic musician, composer, and visual artist. Onda was born in Japan and currently resides in New York. His cassette project is compiled from a sound diary of field recordings collected over a span of two decades on a cassette walkman, which he also physically manipulates with electronics during his performances, at The Museum of Mechanical Dreams 6 June.

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TORE HONORÉ BØE

Tore Honoré Bøe makes music with wood: a box which contains mechanical objects amplified with tiny microphones. With these acoustic machines he discovers normally inaudible microsounds.

Tore Honoré Bøe will perform his Acoustic Laptops set at Teknisk Museum on Thursday 6 June. He will also be a part of Machine Kids at the same venue on Saturday, where he will make acoustic boxes with the children and demonstrate the fundamental principles of why and how sound is made.

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BJØRN ERIK HAUGEN

The Typist: Purloined Letters is a new piece by the Norwegian conceptual artist written for the ‘Typatune’, a chiming typewriter machine manufactured in the 1940s to teach children how to type. A secretary will be typing The Purlioned Letter, by Edgar Allan Poe on a Typatune, at The Museum of Mechanical Dreams 6 June.

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INA PILLAT & THE SUBHARCHORD

Independent film maker Ina Pillatt originates from East Germany, but is currently living in Oslo. Her latest documentary is Subharchord – A Child of the Golden Age, and traces the hidden history of the instrument played at The Museum of Mechanical Dreams, 6 June, by Biosphere. Pillat will show clips from the documentary and talk about its history in Norway, a story that has parallels with the Cold War and Norwegian experimental music.

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AURA SATZ

London based artist Aura Satz explores the complex interface between humans and machines in her multimedia work. At The Machine Dreams Symposium 7 June, Satz will talk about two female pioneers in electronic music.

As well as being a prominent Hollywood actor, Hedy Lamarr was a mathematician who co-invented ‘frequency hopping’ (a method for transmitting radio signals) with avant garde composer George Antheil.

Daphne Oram was a British composer and musician who co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Later she invented Oramics, a remarkable machine for generating and processing electronic sounds.

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PETER ZINOVIEFF

Peter Zinovieff is a British composer and electronic music legend. At the end of the 1960s, he created the EMS studio in his basement, and produced synthesizers like the famous VC3 (used by Pink Floyd, Kraftwerk, David Bowie, etc). The Machine Dreams Symposium 7 June is a unique opportunity to hear about the EMS glory days and meet a legend in electronic music and composition.

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JONNY TRUNK

Jonny Trunk is a British writer, DJ, musician and entrepreneur. His label Trunk Records specialises in reissuing obscure film scores and TV themes, Library Music, old advertising jingles, art, sexploitation and sonic kitsch. He will be introducing the historical survey of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a special department set up in the late 1950s that acted as a secret laboratory of avant garde sound. Trunk will talk about BBC Radiophonic Workshop at the symposium 7 June.

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DAVID TOOP

David Toop is a British composer, music writer and curator. His books include Ocean of Sound, Haunted Weather and Sinister Resonance. In “Machines of Time: Incense-Clock(s)-Time-FLATtime-improvisation (discursive thoughts on marking the non-space of hearing)”, he presents an anti-lecture of sound, image and performance including the use of automata in music and sound art through the ages. Toop will talk at the symposium 7 June.

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FRODE WEIUM

Frode Weium is a curator at Oslo’s Teknisk Museum. At The Machine Dreams Symposium, 7 June, he will present a talk focusing on his new book (jointly edited with Tim Boon from London’s Science Museum) of essays exploring technological innovations and their effects on music, Material Culture and Electronic Sound.

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OREN AMBARCHI

The Australian guitarist presents the live version of Knots, the centrepiece of his 2012 album Audience Of One (Touch). Ambarchi has worked with everyone from Fennesz, Charlemagne Palestine, Thomas Brinkmann, Phill Niblock, Jim O’Rourke, Keiji Haino, SunnO))) and more. Knots, a forceful hymn to the power and intensity of the rock machine, will be performed at Cracked Codes 7 June.

Oren Ambarchi (guitar), Joe Talia (drums), Crys Cole (objects), James Rushford (leader, string quartet) and string players.

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DAVE TOMPKINS

In his book How To Wreck a Nice Beach (2011), American writer Dave Tompkins traces the amazing history of the vocoder, from its invention as a speech recognition device at Bell Labs in 1928 to its use in Nazi research labs and Stalin’s gulags, right up to its more recent incarnation as a voice-modulating effects box. Tompkins will present his love letter to the vocoder at Cracked Codes 7 June.

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MAIA URSTAD

As standard radio technology moves from analogue to DAB, a whole world of sound will be lost: the strange yet familiar tuning noise found in the gaps between stations. Sound artist Maia Urstad’s performance, Crackle Stories, is a wireless composition in which she makes a live mix of voices and interference noise from radios around the world and sends it to portable radios held by members of the audience. Urstad will present this elegy for a vanishing region of the sound spectrum at Cracked Codes 7 June.

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STEFAN GOLDMANN

Stefan Goldmann is a Berlin based electronic producer with close connections to contemporary music (his father was modernist composer Friedrich Goldmann). The releases on his Macro Recordings label cover all bases from Minimal Techno to avant garde composition. For Only Connect, Goldmann has created a new piece, Trails, for Norwegian percussion ensemble Pinquins. Human input imitates the precision of machinery and digital sound generators, at Smooth Automators 8 June.

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AURA SATZ, MAJA S.K. RATKJE & ANTON LUKOSZEVIEZE

First performed at the new Tanks at Tate Modern, London, In and Out of Synch explores the soundtrack area of analogue film, in a mesmerizing 16 mm film scripted and voiced in collaboration with filmmaker Lis Rhodes. Working with Maja S.K. Ratkje and cellist Anton Lukoszevieze to create a live sonic counterpart to the film’s spoken word, Aura Satz will create a dramatic performance, visualising sound with spectacular waves of living flame. Smooth Automators 8 June.

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PEOPLE LIKE US

Consequences (One Thing Leads To Another) is an audio-visual concert about the interdependent mechanics of ideas. Through her innovative sampling, appropriating and cutting up of found footage and archives, Vicki Bennett has been an influential figure in the field of audio-visual collage for over 20 years. She creates audio recordings, films and radio shows that communicate a humorous and dark view on life. Smooth Automators 8 June.

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Wednesday 5 June
18:00

Transformer, Ullevålsveien 75

Guitar Machine

NILS HENRIK ASHEIM

ALF TERJE HANA

Nils Henrik Asheim and Alf Terje Hana have composed a piece for a ‘machine’ consisting of 50 guitarists, all aged between 13–19. Within the huge ensemble, ‘components’, or players, create individual functions, from hovering drones to pulsing rhythms, building to unexpected outcomes. Guitar Machine is a free concert performed in a temporary architectural structure called Transformer, which can itself be seen as a machine for altering and redefining public space.

Transformer was developed as part of Rom for Kunst og Arkitektur by Vigdis Storsveen and Rintala Eggertson Architects. In 2011 it won Norsk Kulturråd’s ideas competition, Kunstarena for de unge (Young people’s art arenas) to transform unused public spaces of Oslo into performative zones.

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20:00

Kunstnernes Hus

The Bad Tempered Piano

opening with

CONLON NANCARROW

GEORGE ANTHEIL

ØYVIND TORVUND

CHRISTIAN BLOM

Screening of Fernand Legér’s Ballet Mécanique with George Antheil's player piano soundtrack live plus a rare performance of Conlon Nancarrow's Toccata, Piece For Tape and Study no. 3. Rex Lawson (player piano), Daniel Paulsen (percussion), Karin Hellqvist (violin). Rex Lawson will also speak and demonstrate the player piano’s history.

Øyvind Torvund's Forest Catalogue (A Slide Show In Sound) will be performed for the first time by Ellen Ugelvik (piano), Martin Taxt (tuba), Espen Reinertsen (saxophone) and Eivind Lønning (trumpet), while the premiere Christian Blom’s piano composition Sommerfugl/Ensom vandrer/Liten fugl/Halling/Vokterens sang (interpreting Grieg) will be played by Ellen Ugelvik.

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Thursday 6 June
14:00

Cinemateket

Screening of

The Bruce Lacey Experience

Combining the anarchic comedy of the Goons and Monty Python with cybernetic art and pagan ritual, Bruce Lacey has been a legendary figure in the British countercultural art scene from the 1960s to the present day. In a varied life, Lacey has collaborated with The Beatles, Spike Milligan and Fairport Convention, created performance art before the term existed, and invented a series of robots and automata. The Bruce Lacey Experience is a documentary made by British artist Jeremy Deller and Nick Abrahams, in which they go in search of Lacey's crazy genius and capture the spirit of this visionary artist. The film will be introduced by writer Rob Young (The Wire).

Directors: Jeremy Deller & Nick Abrahams, 2012, UK (73 mins).

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19:00

Teknisk Museum

The Museum of Mechanical Dreams

BIOSPHERE

AKI ONDA

TORE HONORÈ BØE

CHRISTIAN BLOM

BJØRN ERIK HAUGEN

INA PILLAT

A showcase of customised sonic tools and self-built inventions, obsolete equipment and reclaimed technologies. This event at the Teknisk Museum breathes new life into technologies considered defunct or out of date.

Biosphere will perform a piece specially composed for the Subharchord, an electronic sound generator built in East Berlin in the early 60s, which Ina Pillat will give an introduction to, showing clips from her documentary. Aki Onda performs a walkman concert, physically manipulating his cassette tapes. Tore Honoré Bøe will present his Acoustic Laptops. The Typatune piece The Typist: Purloined Letters by Bjørn Etik Haugen is performed for the first time on this event, while Christian Blom's installation Al-Khowarizmi’s Mechanical Orchestra is available for interaction with the audience.

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Friday 7 June
10:00-15:30

Kunstnernes Hus

Machine Dreams Symposium

AURA SATZ

PETER ZINOVIEFF

JONNY TRUNK

DAVID TOOP

FRODE WEIUM

An international gathering of speakers and lecturers presenting a multi-faceted panorama of contemporary music, sonic art, technology and machinery.

Aura Satz on female pioneers in electronic music: Hedy Lamarr & Daphne Oram, Peter Zinovieff on the famous synthesizer VC3, Jonny Trunk on BBC Radiophonic Workshop, David Toop on Machines of Time and Frode Weium on Material Culture and Electronic Sound.

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20:00

Blå

Cracked Codes

OREN AMBARCHI

DAVE TOMPKINS

MAIA URSTAD

Oren Ambarchi's forceful hymn to the power and intensity of the rock machine, Dave Tompkins' love letter to the vocoder and Maia Urstad's elegy for FM noise.

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Saturday 8 June
12:00-15:00

Teknisk Museum

Machine Kids

Bring the children on a sound hunt to discover the magic of acoustics and sonic secrets with workshops, demonstrations, and hands-on experimentation. Make acoustic boxes with Tore Honoré Bøe, who will demonstrate the fundamental principles of why and how sound is made.

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20:00

Kunstnernes Hus

Smooth Automators

STEFAN GOLDMANN + PINQUINS

AURA SATZ + MAJA S.K. RATKJE

+ ANTON LUKOSZEVIEZE

PEOPLE LIKE US

Human/machine interaction, a flame instrument and an audio-visual concert about the interdependent mechanics of ideas.

For Only Connect, Goldmann has created a new piece, Trails, for Norwegian percussion ensemble Pinquins. Human input imitates the precision of machinery and digital sound generators.

In and Out of Synch by Aura Satz is a film and performance examining the relationship between image and sound. Working with Maja S.K. Ratkje and cellist Anton Lukoszevieze, Satz will create a dramatic performance, visualising sound with spectacular waves of living flame.

People Like Us creates audio recordings, films and radio shows that communicate a humorous and dark view on life.

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