Lis Rhodes 7 - Aura Satz

20 April, 2020 - 20:00
Paddenhoek

A program with and on Aura Satz’s work, with a focus on sound and recent pieces on female composers, including her new film Making a Diagonal with Music. Satz is a London-based artist who works with film, performance and sculpture. Fascinated by media archeology and technological obsolescence, Satz emphasizes the complex relationship between humans and machines in her work. A frequent collaborator of Lis Rhodes’, Satz will also take part in a conversation with Rhodes on Saturday 4 April.

 

In the presence of Aura Satz

Oramics: Atlantis Anew

Aura Satz
,
UK
,
2011
,
video
,
7'

Daphne Oram (1925-2003) was a pioneer of British electronic music and co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1958. She designed and built a radically new sound recording medium: Oramics. Oram used principles from graphical or drawn sound to compose “handwrought” electronic music, and yet the visual nature of her work remains largely unseen and unsung. Satz here pays homage to the inventor via a close-up portrait of the Oramics machine, now part of the collection of London’s Science Museum. The film brings this obsolete technological fantasy briefly to back to life, enabling the visualisation of the drawn sound material, re-interpreting and translating it into new filmic sequences. The soundtrack features electronic music composed by Oram, interlaced with her voiceover reading excerpts from a first draft of her book An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics (1971).

In and Out of Synch

Aura Satz
,
UK
,
2012
,
16mm
,
20'

Collaboratively scripted and voiced by Aura Satz and Lis Rhodes, this film focuses on analogue technology teetering on the brink of obsolescence: soundtracks printed onto filmstrips as optical sound. The flashing abstract visual patterns are produced by the soundtrack: they are an image of the artists’ voices encoded as light from both 16mm mono and 35mm stereo optical sound cameras. The two voices alternate overlap and coincide, interrogating the sound-image synchronicity.

Dial Tone Drone

Aura Satz
,
UK
,
2015
,
14'

Dial Tone Drone is a sound piece featuring conversations with electronic music pioneers and composers Laurie Spiegel and Pauline Oliveros, as well as excerpts of drone compositions. The piece unfolds the concept of the sustained note or drone in relation to the dial tone, and associ- ated discussions on telephony, telecommunications, electrical circuits, connecting voices, tuning in, and listening to sustained notes. Dial Tone Drone is edited in such a way as to hover between a conversation and a sound documentary/ composition - questioning, articulating and exploring the drone in all its political, conceptual, meditative and musical implications.

Little Doorways to Paths Not Taken

Aura Satz
,
UK
,
2016
,
video
,
7'

Following on from Satz’s previous films on electronic music composers and inventors, this short film provides an intimate view of the studio of American composer Laurie Spiegel (b 1945). Known for her electronic-music compositions and her algorithmic composition software, the film also reveals all manner of music and technology paraphernalia, from music scores to DIY inventions and quirky toy collections. The soundtrack features electronic music composed by Spiegel, and Laurie’s voiceover musing on electronic music and the compositional process.

Making a Diagonal with Music/Hacer una Diagonal con la Música

Aura Satz
,
UK
,
2020
,
video
,
10'

A short film about the Argentine electroacoustic composer Beatriz Ferreyra, an original pioneer of early musique concrete alongside Pierre Schaeffer during the 1950s and 1960s. Here she discusses her “sound hunting” recording techniques, and other thoughts on sound montage and spatialisation. Featuring creaking doors, barking dogs and rainbow hands.