"lacunae" is a DVD release by Gill Arno, operating under the nom, mpld, two tracks, a brief one under 5 minutes and one of 33 minutes duration. The opener establishes the mood and frame: black and white flicker images, initially much more dark than light, allowing the viewer only glimpses of what eventually coheres into a landscape, low-horizoned, with the square silhouette of a building on the left. The sounds are percolations, clicks and a thin whistling whine. As track two commences (seamlessly as far as the sound goes), the image shifts to a brighter, but still flickering one, again a landscape, sea in the foreground, the scene bisected vertically, on a slant, by an artifact of the camera, I think, a thick black wedge, sharp on the left side, blurred on the right. The flicker-image necessarily brought to mind the fine Richard Garet/Asher collaboration, "Melting Ground", though the visuals here are darker, "older" looking. As well, they're still images, though the flicker imparts an odd sense of motion and it takes some amount of discernment to realize that nothing is, in fact, moving. The motor of the boat from which this has been shot (? I presume) gains prominence as does the intensity of the flicker as more light enters the frame. The water journey continues, the scenes slowly changing, the gurgling of the propeller in water surging and subsiding, shifting pitch an timbre. Some 23 minutes in, the dark outline of a man is seen in a still shot, against a craggy shoreline; views of other passengers ensue. At about 28 minutes, there's a startling close-up of a washed-out facial image, mannequin-like, blank. During the waning moments, the soundtrack reduces to a soft burble while the visuals become gently abstract, fold into negatives.

"lacunae" is a haunting, lovely piece, adrift in memories and their sensual associations. Excellent work.

Brian Olewnick

Includes: Jason Kahn, Civyiu Kkliu, Richard Garet, Scott Smallwood, Alfredo Costa Monteiro, Daniel Blinkhorn, Stefan Thut, Ben Owen, Toy.bizarre, Gen Ken Montgomery, Robert Curgenven, Manfred Werder / Incidental Music, Pierre Gerard, Giuseppe Ielasi, Ferran Fages, Tarab, Sawako, Tmm Mulligan, Gil Sansón, Lawrence English, Gilles Aubry, Takefumi Naoshima, Asher, Ben Scott, Barry Chabala, Ubeboet, Dominic Lash, Andy Graydon, Alessandro Bosetti, Greg Davis, Matt Marble, Andrew Hayleck, Seth Cluett, Phil Julian and Gill Arno.

Produced on the occasion of TXT FST, a series of concerts organized at Reanimation Library in Brooklyn, the CD and fold-out print are made using digitized sounds and images from the library.

"EA/Variations combines original tracks that were the result of a recording session that took place on August 25th, 2005 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and re-edited versions of the original tracks. The session that evening consisted of Andy Graydon, Ben Owen, Gill Arno, Gil Sansón, and Richard Garet—five of the original six EA members. Additionally, that night the five were joined by special guests Reto Pulfer, Siew-Wai Kok, and Tom Mulligan. However, each recorded set had a different combination of players at the time.
In addition to the re-edits made by Arno, Garet, Graydon, and Sansón, Ben Owen applied a distinct approach to his contribution. He made a score based on the four original tracks and invited Civyiu Kkliu, Matt Marble, Richard Kamerman, and Seth Cluett to perform his piece. This recording not only seals the project but it also mirrors the night of August 25th, 2005 by representing in the present the living spirit of EA…. "
(Text excerpt from release notes)

"Featuring tracks from Jeph Jerman + Albert Casais, Ting Ting Jahe, Richard Garet, Alfredo Costa Monteiro, Ben Owen, Lawrence English, Jeph Jerman, Civyiu Kkliu, Tommy Birchett, Ilya Monosov, mpld, Andy Graydon, and Ben Scott. Ranging from treated textures through to field recordings and plenty of interesting experimentation. A limited pressing with a beautifully minimal presentation style, this is a must for fans of any of the artists or engaging minimalism in general."
(smallfish.co.uk)

Composed in October 2008 during an artist residency at Campo, Chicago. The fold-out print is made using found metal objects to leave a trace on thermally sensitive paper. The music is composed with field recordings captured along the city railways.

"[...] they venture in unison from one zone to the next, from textural delicacy to white noise to blurpy near-melodies. The individual segments have seemingly little in common; the point of balancing act, true to the title, is how the group moves naturally between the varied sonic environments. The performance, presented here as one 30-minute track, was recorded in December 2006 in Fotòfono in Brooklyn."
(Marc Weidenbaum, Disquiet, March 25, 2008)

Performed by: André Gonçalves (laptop); Andy Graydon (laptop); Ben Owen (laptop, objects); Gill Arno (laptop, objects, fm radio); Richard Garet (laptop).
Mastered by André Gonçalves.
Score by Gil Sansón.

"On this release [David Velez] teams up with other composers and the results are nothing less but very impressive. Contributing partners are : Karras, Christopher McFall, Sascha Neudeck, Pangea, e:4c, Darren McClure, Kate Carr, Juan José Calarco, Fabian Moncada, Ben Owen, Gill Arno, Richard Garet, Andy Graydon. It is surprising to hear that all compositions are strong works. Most are in the electroacoustic field, excellently recorded and of the right length."
(Jos Smolders, EarLabs, December 27, 2007)

I began this series of booklets to keep a record of the projections done for the seasonal series of mixed media events. As seasonal brought together sounds and visuals in a dialogically open environment, I became interested in the idea of exploring the relationships between these found slides - mnemonic fragments that had lost connection with their original context.
The booklets layout reflects the typical performance setup, where two projection screens were juxtaposed in a room allowing for the brief encounter of two slides. The title, Temporary Sequence, points to the ephemeral and arbitrary nature of this encounter, and to the way in which narratives can develop in the mind of the observer. I see these narratives as mental lines, an invisible web connecting people and situations actually distant in both space and time. Various degrees of exhibitionism and voyeurism interlock to create an experience that is ultimately quite personal and subjective.

Not all of the the slide sequences have been translated into booklets - only one for each season. Although these published sequences were named after the progressive number of the slide show and the season, I also kept working names that reflect my own preoccupations with each one. The first booklet in the series (Temporary sequence #4/fall) was subtitled Quasi Random, referring to the fact that I had been picking slides from a large pool to arrange them without a predefined narrative order, as an improvised composition. I wanted each couple of slides to define its own enclosed moment.

With the following two sequences I had given up this intent. I had realized that as the mind tries to make sense of whatever it encounters, hypothetical narratives spontaneously arise. If I could not reject my role as a sort of narrator, I would play along with it instead. Sequence #7/winter was subtitled Horror Vacui, and based on a series of events that I had arbitrarily attributed to the "characters" in the booklet. I felt like piecing together a sort of puzzle whose parts had been found scattered around the world. The meaning of this puzzle, although clear to me, was to be subjectively re-defined by the spectators.

#9/spring, subtitled Black and/or White, works on the same principle. Where in the former I had thought of a commentary on facts and people around me, here the story is somewhat more self-centered. I see it as a sort of self portrait made of others and to a great extent by others. Still, this concept is no more than an internal device, not actually available to the seasonal spectator. Again, each one sees his or her own narrative through my story made of someone else's pictures.

With #10/summer I've been looking for a way to break the "rule of the sequence." I wanted to let the slides as free as possible from my arbitrary story-telling. That's why each printed booklet contains a different arrangement of the same 36 slides. The sequences are picked from randomly generated combinations, as if for each booklet the slide trays fell and the original arrangement was lost.

The booklets have been printed and hand bound at Ruben Noise Studio, Brooklyn. The slides were scanned at Pacific Third Studio, Brooklyn. All the slides have been collected over the previous seven years from friends' attics, flea markets and various dumps in Europe and North America. Between 2003 and 2005 I have produced a few hundreds of the fourTemporary sequences, most of which were traded for other hand-made objects or records, used gear, food...
A pdf version of Temporary sequence #4 is available in the downloads section.

I am immensely thankful to all photographers and photographed. A very special thank you goes out to Alessandro Bazzani, Esther Bourdages, John Dolan and Sonia Campagnola.