| Info |  |
Ultra-Red | |||||||||||||||||
| |
 Ultra-Red and Various Artists ENCUENTRO: Day of Dialogue for militant sound investigations Public Record - - - MP3 and PDF. 17 tracks. 5 hours total. Recorded April 2006 at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions / LACE Featuring: Dont Rhine, Elizabeth Blaney, Leonard Vilchis, Manuela Bojadžijev, Eddie Peel, David Thorne, Susanne Lang, Walt Serterfit, Emily Roysdan, Jackie Leavitt - - - Public Record, the web archive created by Ultra-Red continues to baffle and amaze. Here is a release, but not in any sense that music consumers are familiar with. It contains 5 hours of informal conference proceedings conducted in April 2006. Five members of Ultra-red are present and give short talks sharing their ideas and giving a context to some of the projects they have been involved in. Eddie Peel introduces each speaker with an audio collage of field recordings and re processed extracts of Ultra-Red productions. After these talks, invited guests and audience members respond, expand and drift into dialogues along way away from Dont Rhine's opening gambit "Are we at war?" into a set of open ended utopian speculations that touch on feminist science fiction, dismantling prisons and ending the HIV/AIDS crisis. Encuentro is not a day of moralizing about 'ethical' art or 'politically correct' art, far from it. Rhine and his companions explore questions in such a way that the listener comes away full of hope and braced with a new set of perspectives and ideas. It is very rare these days to find anything like this in the world of computer driven electronic music. Indeed this release puts into sharp focus the fact the Ultra-Red are almost working alone in pursuing this direction. The interdisciplinary approach of the speakers, their openness and ability to share is something sadly lacking in the sealed world that electronic music usually exists in. Public Record have pushed their ideas of creating an archive a long way with this work. This is a completely different way to approach distribution, because Ultra-Red place the listener inside the process, the act of consuming this work becomes a creative act in itself. Thus this sprawling release, with it's fairly amateurish sound of one hand held microphone being passed around a room, adds to the sense that Ultra-Red genuinely wish to share knowledge as it develops and not to simply hand out finished statements. There is no way you can listen to Encuentro without becoming engaged in questions that so few people tend to ask in the world of experimental sound. Review by Mark McLaren
|
|
||||||||||||||||
