Errant Bodies Records #06 – #08

 

series of CDs

scope: package and CD design

client: Errant Bodies Press, Berlin / Los Angeles

 

#06: The Sonic Body: Figures 1 – 12 / Brandon LaBelle

 

Dancing recomposes music by pulling the beat, the melody, and the force of sonic experience the body to playback in excited gesture and movement. Extending the rapture of dance, The Sonic Body is a collection of the audible traces of dancing bodies. The movements of individuals listening to sound and music are recorded to form acoustic identities, highlighting dance as a form of translation: a heated musicology found in the step. The Sonic Body is a work that aims for the physicality of sound, as a process of ingestion, intake, a listening hunger, and finally, embodied reaction, a sensual vitality that refiguring bodily presence into an energetic micro-event.

 

 

#07: Lecture on Nothing / Brandon LaBelle

 

Lecture on Nothing is a recording of John Cage’s original text as read by a deaf individual. According to Cage, silence may operate as a positive frame through which to appreciate non-musical sounds and to heighten the experience of listening: by integrating silence into his compositions, Cage sought to allow sounds of the world into the musical experience. Appropriating Cage’s text, this work aims to further explore silence as a complex signifier by giving us a voice that cannot hear itself. In doing so, the work multiplies perspectives onto the act of listening, and on the notion of being quiet. From an open space for renewed listening to forms of disciplinary power, silence and silencing can be heard to perform a complicated influence onto auditory culture.

 

#08: Bodybuilding / Serge Baghdassarians & Boris Baltschun

 

Berlin-based artists Serge Baghdassarians and Boris Baltschun retrace mathematician and astronomer Charles-Marie de La Condamine's journey to South America, though instead of the tropical wilderness, they’ve measured the urban jungle of Rio de Janeiro. Instead of compass and quadrant, their tools are microphone and recorder. What remains unchanged is the physical effort of exploring foreign terrain. On foot, and with an assortment of quasi-ritual exercises, the artists move from their residence in Rio to the triangular plaza Largo do Guimarães. At the end of their aural training session stands the ideal form of a place, an artificial sounding-body that seems strangely familiar in the way it further alienates the alien.