Sonic Commentary: Meaning through Hearing

ADACHI TOMOMI: TORTURING TWITTER (5:59)

Contact: Adachi Tomomi. Email: <atomo@adachitomomi. com>. Web: <www.adachitomomi.com>.

Performed by Tomomi Adachi at the IMRC Center at the University of Maine, 30 September 2014. Recorded live by Duane Shimmel. This performance was made possible in part through the support of the IMRC Center at the University of Maine at Orono.

Torturing Twitter is an Internet-based interactive performance in which I read and sing a real-time stream of several Twitter hashtags and search words in a destructive way. Some hashtags are used consistently in performances of the piece: #power, #war, #cooking and #sex. Additional interim hashtags and search words are also added. The Twitter time-line works as a real-time text generator or live score for the performance. The timeline is an epitomical text of people’s thoughts, politics and society that does not discriminate between public and private. The performance is a radical and funny cut-up of a textualized world.

During stage performances, the Twitter timeline is projected on a screen, and the audience is encouraged to send tweets in real time—as was the case in this recording. When the performance is broadcast live (for example, WFMU hosted the performance on 10 October 2014), some hashtags are announced beforehand. In performance I read English and Japanese but also try to read other languages and non-languages.

Conceptually, Torturing Twitter is an updated version of an older performance piece Newspaper Singing, which I performed frequently in the mid-1990s and in which I freely read and sung a newspaper of the day. Since Twitter is faster and more unpredictable, the swamped speed and inevitable lack of preparation are important aspects of the performance.

TOMOMI ADACHI, born in Kanazawa, Japan in 1972, is a Berlin-based performer, composer, sound poet, installation artist, and occasional theater director. He studied philosophy and aesthetics at Waseda University in Tokyo. He has played improvised music with voice, live electronics and self-made instruments. He had composed works for his own group “Adachi Tomomi Royal Chorus,” which is a punk-style choir. He has performed contemporary music: vocal, live-electronics or performance works by John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Christian Wolff, Tom Johnson, Dieter Schnebel, Takahashi Yuji, Yuasa Joji and Fluxus, including world premiere and Japan premiere of Cage’s Variations VII, Europera 5 and Waterwalk. He performed Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate for the first time in Japan. He has made several sound installations and original instruments (e.g. “Tomomin,” a handmade electric instrument familiar to many musicians). In the field of theater music, he has collaborated with experimental theaters and dancers. He also has organized many concerts of experimental music, sound art, collaboration work and interdisciplinary performance in Japan and Germany, including concerts with Chris Mann, Trevor Wishart, Nicolas Collins and STEIM. He founded the “Ensemble for Experimental Music and Theater” with his students in Tokyo in 2011, to work with pieces by Fluxus and recent conceptual composers.

Adachi has given lectures at Tama Art University, Yotsuya Art Studium, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Mills College, Bard College and London College of Communication. As a critic, he has written about visual art, music and performance art in papers and magazines. He had participated in an art theory bulletin “Method” 2000–2001. He stayed in New York 2009-2010 as an Asian Cultural Council grantee, and he was awarded the DAAD invited composer for Berlin 2012. His CDs were released from Naya Records, Tzadik and Omegapoint.

Recently, he has been focusing his activities on solo performance (with voice, sensors, computer, self-made instruments), sound poetry, video installation and workshop-style big ensemble with nonprofessional voices and instruments.

FRANCISCO LOPEZ: UNTITLED #333 [FOR A+A] (6:02)

Contact: Francisco López. Web: <www.franciscolopez.net>.

Created at “mobile messor” (Den Haag), July 2015.

© Francisco López 2015.

FRANCISCO LÓPEZ is internationally recognized as one of the major figures of the sound art and experimental music scene. Over more than 35 years he has developed a sonic universe, absolutely personal and iconoclastic, based on a profound listening of the world. He has realized hundreds...