Felicitations oh music for bodies !

We salute you 21st century music project, go forth !

Make new music and take it to the streets away from the confines of the concert hall.

Build your vibrating instruments , your brilliant portable stages, your beasts of sonic delight for all away away from ticket sales and start times.

Let us come and fill your Beds, your Chairs, your Things that play the music that moves, that spins and caresses us, that sucks us down deep and pushes our buttocks and shoulders and thighs in pebbles of questions and swathes of answers. Wrap, excite, relax and charge our minds our cells whose own songs tune, harmonize with the vibrations you drive so carefully, so roughly, so sweetly and so shockingly through us.

Make us hungry for meat and soft from smiling.

Make us nothing but juice electric.

Make us alert

to feel no beginning and no end,

just this.

 .

 

Uuufff let me not loose the thread in my shouting.

Stay tight to the root of this thought.

For music yes speaks to all of us.

Unknown and unquantifiable.

Music too of all kinds, of any  tune or colour or rhythm or texture or noise or memory pip or emotion. Of cranial stimulation or out and out glut on sensation.

 

Is it our genes or geography or health wealth and fitness that makes our tastes, our experience so varied ? Were you brought up with jazz or the forest or weekend pirate rappers, or a war?  Did you sleep last night? 

 

How do you hear the music that plays choosing onions shopping or compressed online laptop or CD lounging gin, or stomping 500KW crammed 20,000 others, or tiny radio granny sofa spooning cock-a-leekie ? 

What fuels our perceptions ?

 

And we speak not of Missy or Mozart pray.  What of that mass of new ideas, new musical ways, new sounds that so many are carving ~ why available to so few?  Our times charge forward greedy for novelty, we worship at the alter of progress panting and struggling for new and new and more and new. Are we not then capable too of savouring – of being opened afresh by these new sound worlds, without having to seek them out in the cliques that know?

 

Performance times struggle. The stage still the place for some and so not for others. Let us acknowledge this finally.  Gone is the spiritual, the ritual with so much music that now is made. Question the need for the raised platform. Many explore the physical, the spaces and shapes  to drive compositions. Hark let us hear them. Let us make places for them to swirl in.  We shall not be content with the body static behind laptop. The novelty’s passed. We move physical. We pick up our instruments and make music with the passage of vibration.

 

Ah, the simple hook revealed.  The crafting of the vibrations of air molecules. The sub in the club, the passing car, the violin vibrating its song through the chin, the joyous gwwwwbrrrrr rattle clunk of  spin dryer in kitchen homeland.

 

Yes, it is so simple.

 

pause for breath, change gear, walk across the room.

 

The sound, the refrain, the throb brings us brain food, heart fuel.  Could though it be its subliminal and physical connection to our very own vibrating bodies that is the core that connects and communicates? Is this what you believe ?

 

Your instruments are themselves spaces, places, things for us to get in or on. Their music is made, composed, shaped to directly connect through contact physical. Do you consider the different affectations to our beings through their received surfaces, their volumes, their spaces, temperatures and moistures? Do you consider also the different affectations to our beings through their placement ?

 

Let us first consider this vital interface, this connection membrane, this surface.

when listening, the human body must be safe, comfortable, relaxed, the contact surface soft and strong enough to hold the varietous weights that hover to collapse over those vibrational sources, those speakers, haut-parleurs ~ magical cones of delight and electricity that makes all this possible, whose own details shape the released vibrations before our surface medium even steps in.

Ah what territories to explore! 

 

Materials sought: durable, resistant, waterproof, economic, environmental, vibrational, sensuous, sleek, colours, textures, conduction potential? conduction potential? Ah  ~ when can the surfaces themselves be the vibrational source rather than just the transfer medium? When can their conduction potential be electrical? The concrete the speaker ?

 

Yes, we have already these materials. We know you plan to make sonic clothes. Underwear that vibrates circular over meridians as you walk.  Shirts that play your shoulders and shoot up your arms as you write. Socks that suck toes at the bad moments. Silent fashion shows,   models grinning.   When will this chapter of solo sensations for wearers, cloudbursts of snowflakes running over skin scattering begin?

 

Are you needing to be further down the line in body frequency maps for score comprehension or are you merely greedy for the sensuous ?  For yes true ~ musical clothes for feeling will not play your bass. That  physical connection, that frequency field beneath 100Hz you play to make this music we speak of.

 

Physics of frequency behaviours and those that touch us. We move on from this juncture. Proven facts are found there we can all find in our own time. No, what we seek now to query is this music to feel, this music of vibration we can make.

 

Questions: how are you working in response to your studies of the biochemical and neurological response maps of human bodies to the physical aspects of sound? Are you managing to take readings through a purely bodily response rather than our ever greedy ear chipping in with an opinion ?  Are your measurements quantifiable and falling into any kind of comprehensive set of useful figures that we could all have access to ?  Are you delighted or bored and struggling with the rigour required ? Chide open collective!  Let us know ! Format and release your findings. Let us come forth and use them. Share our skills.

 

We feel and hear your music. The growing library of works are spreading their vocabularies. Some pieces make their motion through sounds tracing paths up our limbs. Other sounds locate carefully as monuments static on a map, their very frequencies changing over time making movement as undulations, as waves caressing then crashing or rising falling geological structures as lumps or mountains fast or slow or lapping inbetween against our butts.  Why though those crystalline shimmer nets that flash and swirl ?  Those harmonious  jewels, chords flung and shot as arrows glistening across our listening forms? Do you send them to make our ride musical over sonic ?  Or do we need to distract our ever inquisitive ear with candy so that our organs can innocently receive all that they deserve ?

 

Are you targeting specific frequencies in certain combinations to specific parts of the body to make these motions ?  Are you at same time buzzing our nervous systems direct to adjust our experience ? Is this what alters our perception of linear time? Or is it the structured effect of the whole ?

 

The pieces have no beginning and no end. There are no loops, each time we lie our ride is different. Does this mean that their order of play over time then has no consequence? Are you purposefully chucking out a central precept of traditional musical making?

Lo ~ pause, we challenge you ! Investigate your system!  Direct that flow !

Or are we merely confused by your game?

True – we never miss the start of the show or have to leave before it ends.

 

Do you win your game?  Should you plough on?  Do we all hail these geophysical compositions diving deep down through layers of nonlinearity oh music for our bodies?

 

Something must be working. Visitors young and old alike queue and come back for more. Those who’d never find that club or gallery or boat at 23.00h on a Tuesday can ride. Sometimes as many as 40,000 over 12 weeks will get the buzz. Do they come too to make the music?

How can we ?

 

You work collectively, virtually and locally, studio door open. You invite us to come contribute. You have your instruments all over the world. Are there different people there too making music for them? Can we truly sit on a concrete Bench in a park in London, England and feel music made for the Bench in Mexico City ?  Or lie in the bark covered Bed in Quebec, Canada and feel music made for the wooden flower carved Bed in Shanghai or hand-knitted cover of the ash-striped Bed in Scotland, which at that same moment is playing shifting layers of harmonies constructing pyramids from slabs blown by Eire and Scottish pipers together?

 

Who comes?
Who takes off their shoes?

How can we join in this game?

Singing and dragging our voices under the Bed as we lie, feeling the thuds of the tympani spreading under our shoulders, violins swirling o’er our bellies as the orchestra blasts next door to the crowd in the Concert Hall;  feel our favourite Ballroom tunes slide up and down our thighs ?

Can we plug in our i-pods?

 

Your Beasts are spread all over the world. Right now we know there are six Beds, two Armchairs and one Bench, each unique to its place of build through music and material and growing located life, all part of the same design species ~ beautiful and wooden and hand made with local materials, 12 channels of audio power driving full frequencies from 19Hz and above through six sub woofers and eight mids+tweeters. Then you invite us to remove our shoes, come lie down with a stranger, receive an  astonishing audio massage !

Who comes?

Who takes off their shoes?

Will the visitors in China dive in like the visitors in London?

Will they stay beyond the first moment ? 

Do they listen?

Do they think their body heat or movement controls their experience ?

 

Does it?

 

And what of the taxonomy of this design species ?

 

How has it evolved? Is it driven by the physical demands of  human body shapes at rest and behaviours of audio frequencies or are you merely pleasing aesthetic?

 

How will it evolve? You speak of making 3D music but make no projection from the third dimension. True yes you use reflection but when will you wrap us in that third within your structures?  Your new structures that we await, the sonic footstools, baby bouncers, bathroom seats – the more portable ones we could fold in our back packs powered by the sun or the wind when we unpack them at bus stops.

 

Ha! Portability! Halt! 

 

- pause –

 

Firstly my friends,  we have nut number two, location.

- digest - 

 

When will we find your Beasts vibrating the kebab shop, the Bank, the taxi rank, the shopping centre, the laundrette?  Away away from that Concert hall that gallery – remember?   Where can they go ?

 

When will there be local public meetings to decide? To build the network? 

Internationally too?

The Beasts are our venues, the music for all, let  us speak!

 

Out with the controlled solo perambulating sound space, the roving headphones, the self-designed portable home space transfer systems. The street is where we can live, where we can learn, where we can listen and smell and be alive with all the moments that are new and now.

Let us learn to listen !

Be free in our airspaces. Let us be shocked and scared and loved by things that startle and are unknown. 

Let us play and take risks.

Discard and explore!

 

How  pray can we manage this ? 

What are the systems we need to engage to build our networks? Can we organise? Who are the councillors and where the Local Governmental meetings? And where pray where the cash to build to research to move on ?

music for us bodies, please don’t take us down the route of solo wealth for solo pleasure.

Maintain the Beasts public and shared and resourced and grown between us.

 

You work a Think Tank. A multidisciplinary team of professionals from finance, curation, social psychology, local politics, acoustic design, material physics, audio engineering,  architecture, music, art, acousmatic composition, performance, digital media. Use their feedback. Push it back into your designs, your locations, your networks, your music, -

Activate systems !

 

We hear you move now into a permanent two floored Laboratory Space in London, UK.

music for bodies, 17B  Ellingfort Road, Hackney, London E8 3PA

 

Let us gather and work.

 

 

           

info@musicforbodies.net

 

Kaffe Matthews. February 2008.