Papernoise Sketchbook

Photos by Sara Masè

I did an interview with Patrick McCarthy from Roth Mobot some time ago (actually ages ago). Now I’m finally working on first comic version of this interview. For now I am making only one page, I have a magaine who’ll be publishing it (but that’s all they gave me) and it was really hard to squeeze so much interesting thoughts into one page… but I think I managed to do it somehow.
Anyway… here’s a little preview from what’s to come.

This post is dedicated to John Cage and here below is a little portrait I’ve made of him.
As most of you know yesterday was his 100th birthday anniversary (and this year is also the 20th anniversary of his death).
If you want a nice little roundup about his work and the celebrations, head over to createdigitalmusic and see what Peter Kirn has to say about it: http://createdigitalmusic.com/2012/09/john-cage-at-100-a-celebration-in-words-listening-and-prepared-piano-iphones/

A lot of what Cage did (and represents) is very important for my project. If you think about it, his prepared piano is basically a mechanical/acoustic version of circuitbending. And besides that his experimentations largely lead the way to a lot of contemporary experimental music, so maybe this comic project wouldn’t even exist the way it does without his work.

Another preview from the upcoming Revolving Agitator EP B-Movie B-Sides

Some time ago I posted this video here:

I don’t know how many saw it, and I can only imagine that few will have actually wondered what it was supposed to be.
Anyway the answer is quite simple: it was a teaser trailer for an album, by some guy whol likes to call himself kurodama, who incidentally is me, or at least one of my identities.

It’s now out! Spam is the New Dada, my latest musical endeavour, can be downloaded for free from Savant at the following address:

http://mmzsavant.bandcamp.com/album/spam-is-the-new-dada

On the 30th of April 1993 the Cern officially announced that the world wide web would be free for anyone to use. The internet as we know it was born.

It is now a big part of our lives, information flows in a continuous stream, and we flow with it, always connected.

There is no growing without pains. The singnal that once used to be loud and clean, is getting harder and harder to find, drowned in a sea of gaggeling noise.
Noise is what Kurodama likes to deal with, and the decay of information sometimes, unintentionally produces constructs of surrealistic beauty.

“Spam is the New Dada” is about that, about signal and noise, interference, information decay, content to bullshit ratio and about spam mails that deconstruct language to a point where it almost seems to mimic the work of the artistic avantgarde.
The irony of it all is that spam is much older than the internet itself. The first unsolicited advertising mail was send on the 3rd of May 1978.

You have randomly been picked to recieve this message. It’s all part of our plan.

Spam is the New Dada was released by Savant a sub-netlabel of Mesmerize Records run by Janet M Mars from Chile!

Check out their other releases if you like experimental, electronic stuff, that probes the borders between music and noise. I especiallty recommend Pop Album B by Sam Kaplan

Now you know.

The project titled 45″ (or 45 seconds), which I’ve been talking about in the past, is finally out!

You can download it for free here: http://www.sinewaves.it/s3p.html
(comes with a digital booklet designed by me and some extra tracks)

Or you can listen to a preview here:

After the recent circuit bending workshop we held here in Bolzano, the first videos have started popping up on youtube. Things are starting to move, and it’s great!

When we still had that comic group called monipodio, we used to have a lot of those comic jams (or exquisite corpse comics). We produced quite an amount of collaborative comics that way.

In 2011 these “good old times” come back to my mind because of two projects I’ve been involved in. One I created myself with a friend (Andrea Beggio), it’s a musical project called 45seconds, the other one is an international underground comic book called Puck Comic Party.

Puck Comic Party

More than 170 artists from all over the world (including big names like Tony Millionaire and Bill Griffith), 3 panels each. It’s maybe the biggest comic jam published as a book. What I really liked was the mix of old school and new school comic artists, more about it on puckcomicparty.blogspot.com (mostly in Italian, which is weird for an international project like this… but hey, we’re in Italy).

45secondi

This was a completely different project. Since it was all about music and the overall approach a lot more serious. On the other hand the structure was quite similar: each musician had 45 seconds and had to work with material from the preceding part.

When we first had the idea to create a collective musical project we really liked the simplicity of the surrealist cadavre exquis, but we knew that it had been done many times already. So we decided to expand the concept by introducing several variations to the original, making it evolve in new directions.
Instead of permitting free (and hence often random) collaboration, we decided to limit the possibilities of each participant, creating not only a more interesting challenge, but also a better foundation to explore the mechanics of collective creation. We assigned some simple rules to each musician to give more structure and consistency to the final piece. The assigned rules ranged from the use of variation on a predefined theme, to the use of certain compositional devices.
The musicians involved in the project all have different backgrounds ( such as circuit bending, electroacoustic or noise music) but are united by a common inclination towards experimental approaches to sound. This was definitely intended, as part of the experiment was to see how these different styles could combine and interact with each other through the project.

The track itself is nearly ready for release (through an Italian netlabel called  sinewaves.it). Int he meantime check out this version where I mashed up the track by taking single loops and layering them into a new composition. It’s kind of distillate of the 10 minute track we produced, or, if you want, a horizontal version of the same.