William Weston: ecotopia

Privacy Notice from New Babylon. All text from the website www.newbabylon.nl Sounds from covertly recorded electromagnetic fields.

"all you left us with was a pile of books, you cunts"

piano: Akane Takada. music: Yota Morimoto. a fragment of a piano piece composed and recorded in new babylon. unlike its original form this version is devoid of parts other than the piano. the emptiness and the somewhat decontextualized musical time leave space for the 'raw' resonance.

On one of these rainy Autumn evenings, I sneaked into the New Babylon building located behind the Den Haag Central Station, with a broken-wheel heavy suitcase of mine, while I was back in Den Haag from Berlin after one of these perpetual travels. As I entered the foyer, there was some loading and unloading taking place around the adjacent Albert Heijn. There were a few passersby as well walking shadily through the deserted and semi-darkened corridors. The broken wheels of my suitcase were enlivening the paranormal underbelly of this building with nomadic sonic utterances. There were a few migratory birds outside proclaiming the coming of evening in rapturous murmurs. I took out my recording device, and started to chronicle these emergent interactions in mediated aural traces, before its battery went out. I brought these sounds home, and re-listened to them. This listening formed the work Berlin Babylon and a Migratory Bird in which a bird literally entered and left a trace as an expired memory. Acknowledgements: the unnamed birds, the loaders/unloaders, and the broken wheels of my suitcase.

Rolling Stones (2018) for Purls & Jars Composed by Ji Youn Kang Performed by Ji Youn Kang & Mei Yi Lee 3rd/June/2018 Studio Loos Den Haag https://jiyounkang.com

This 8’00” piece is mainly composed out of audio files from image to sound-software. Some of the original sketches of the ‘New Babylon’ project of Constant Nieuwenhuys were the visible input. Next to the rough data swaps of ‘raw’ files in between photo editing software and audio editing software, the app ‘Virtual ANS’ is used. Based upon the principles of the ANS photo-electric instrument that Sovjet engineer Evgeny Murzin developed in between 1937 and 1957, the ‘Virtual ANS’ transforms the slopes, structures, pixels, surfaces and lines of a drawing or photograph into a drone soundscape. This translation through the means of old and new technology refers to some extent to the expectations of a better life for human kind in a future that one expects – and expected - to be the plain result of all the steps in the tech revolution. That progress not only benefits, is already a certainty provided from the past. Paul Devens http://pauldevens.com

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