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terminal beach: still frozen for a couple of weeks...
BLACK OUT
Jean-Luc Godard
Prière pour Refuzniks 2 (2004)
lo stereo è fatto
per i cani
e per i ciechi
proiettano sempre
così
mentre bisogna proiettare
così
ma dato che si proietta
così
e poiché io
che ascolto e guardo
sono in questo punto
poiché sono di fronte
e poiché ricevo questa proiezione
e poiché la rifletto
mi trovo nella situazione
descritta da questa figura
ecco la figura dello stereo
ma questa figura
se si guarda
ora
nella storia
dato che lo stereo
esiste anche
in storia
c'era Euclide
e poi c'è stato Pascal
Pascal dalla cui riflessione
viene l'esagramma mistico
ma nella storia
la storia della storia
c'è stata la Germania
che ha proiettato Israele
Israele che ha riflesso
questa proiezione
e Israele ha trovato la sua croce
e la legge dello stereo
continua
Israele ha proiettato il popolo
palestinese
e il popolo palestinese
a sua volta
ha portato la sua croce
ecco la vera leggenda
dello stereo
Jean-Luc Godard, JLG/JLG
17 novembre 2006
SCIOPERO GENERALE CONTRO IL GOVERNO PRODI
GENERAL STRIKE, THE FIRST AFTER THE BERLUSCONI REGIME
"è scomparso un uomo
non è scomparso un regime..."
David Perlov's Diary (1983)
J'écoute (Giulio Bursi)
"Non capisci che l'uomo, ogni uomo, nasce in quella palude di sangue? e che il sacro e il divino accompagnano anche voi, dentro il letto, sul campo, davanti alla fiamma? Ogni gesto che fate ripete un modello divino. Giorno e notte, non avete un istante, nemmeno il più futile, che non sgorghi dal silenzio delle origini."
(Mnemòsine a Esiodo - LE MUSE, C.P.)
Joaquin Jordà - Lenin Vivo (1970)
...and an image remembered, Lenin with kitten on his lap...
"Ilic accarezza il gattino ideologico per la sua forza di estrarre le unghiette dialettiche"
Joaquin Jorda - Dante No Es Unicamente Severo (1967)
... ancora DANTE NO ES UNICAMENTE SEVERO
Pedro Costa -
Juventude em Marcha (2005)
Michael Snow - Ssshtoorrty or Short Story (2005)
November 2006
Our Terminal Beach show enters a period of cryogenic suspension as the radio moves base.
Broadcasts to resume towards the end of November from the station's new premises in Via Cecchi 21-A.
BLACK OUT.
Our current listening:
Sunn O))) & Boris - Altar
Miya Masaoka Trio - Monk's Japanese Folk Song
Grey Daturas/Yellow Swans - Copper/Silver
Joanna Newsom - Ys
Charlemagne Palestine - In Mid Air
Religious Knives - RK3
Stephan Mathieu & Janek Schaefer - Hidden Name
Keiji Haino - Tenshi no Gijinka
Andy Moor & Kaffe Matthews - Locks
Christina Carter - Electrice
Oct. 22 Amsterdam Filmmuseum.
Melik Ohanian's Invisible Film was accompanied by a rare showing of its source, Peter Watkins' controversial political docu-drama, Punishment Park, made in 1971 at the height of the Vietnam War and immediately removed from circulation after a four-day screening in New York. Invisible for over thirty years, the film presents a documentary style simulation of a state of emergency in which civil liberties are suspended and 'suspect' individuals (drawn from a broad spectrum of the US sixties counter-culture) preventively tried and sentenced without jury or appeal. Offered the choice between a lengthy prison term and four days in Punishment Park they opt for the latter, where they become the prey of police and national guard in an organized manhunt that promises the mirage of freedom to the lucky survivors but whose grim purpose and conclusion is clear from the start. Ohanian took one of the few surviving prints of the Watkins film to the Mojave Desert where it was shot and projected it without a screen into the desert void, recording the phantom projection on video. Invisible Film consists of nothing more than this single fixed shot of the same duration as Punishment Park whose soundtrack can be heard both on and off screen, the delay echoing the temporal distance between the two works. Despite its conceptual nature, Invisible Film demands to be 'seen' in its entirety, preferably before seeing Punishment Park, an opportunity we were afforded at the Filmmuseum. As the projector empties its stream of light into the desert, we hear the soundtrack of Watkins film as a frantic melange of conflicting voices, forcing us to forge our own mental image of the people and events the film describes, effectively freeing it from its historicity to reflect also on the present ob/scene: the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanstan and the 'punishment parks' of Guantanamo Bay, Abu Grahib and elsewhere. Meanwhile as we watch night descend on the desert horizon, Ohanian's film, in part through the flatness of the video image, equally becomes a meditation on the twilight of 'projection' (in the sense proper to cinema that Godard speaks of in conversation with Serge Daney in Histoire(s) du Cinema), the distance at once critical and utopian required to imagine into being the lost horizon of the real and with it a possible renewal of the world.
As an ironic footnote, we were the only members of the audience who sat through the whole of Invisible Film, almost as though keeping vigil over the projector, a strange obelisk in a monument valley of its own making. Yet had we left before the end, the circle would have been complete.
Oct. 23 OT301
We check out the DNK improv night at Amsterdam squat/venue OT301 where Australian musicians Thembi Sodell (sampler, electronics) and Anthea Caddy (cello) give an invigorating performance that moves from Lachenmann-style single sound-event trajectories to Pendereckian harmonies to Lynchian ambient soundscaping to Merzbowish squall, all in the space of just under an hour.
Oct. 27, Paris
Caught a showing of Marguerite Duras' India Song redoubling the Straubian/Godardian lesson on the crucial disjunction between sound and image - one that few of today's filmmakers seem keen to follow - through ulterior disjunctions between the film's multiple voices-off.
At Instants Chavirés (Montreuil) a group featuring Greek laptopper Yannis Kyriakides and Andy Moor (from The Ex) improvise a new soundtrack to René Clair's Paris qui dort.
The spectacle is the guardian of sleep... (Debord)
Today was also the first anniversary of banlieu uprisings which began in Clichy-sous-Bois after two youths died, electrocuted in a power station while trying to flee from police (CHAMBRE A GAZ. CHAISE ELECTRIQUE in the lapidary terms of Straub-Huillet's last video Europa 2005).
A year on the flames are kindled once again...
Oct. 29
Chantal Akerman's Là-bas.
'Here among the blocks you at last find an image of yourself free of the hazards of time and space.'
Turin, 2005
Terminal Beach begins as an experimental/outsider music radio show on Turin's only remaining independent and militant/alternative radio station, Radio Blackout (105.250 FM). As well as presenting a broad selection of new music the show experiments with radio format through deterritorialized mixes and other strategies of listener disorientation, as well as a number of themed programmes including shows on glossolalia, night, the colour black, interlunar spaces and amniotic regression.
Music for/to/from the end of time. Or time for the end of music.
Selected show playlists from 2005-2006
9/10/06 Goodbye To Love
Film sound - Tears - Vive l'amour (Tsai Ming Liang)
John Duncan - Voicechoir - John See Soundtracks
Cheryl Studer/Staatskapelle Dresden - Isoldes Liebestod (Wagner) - Strauss/Wagner Lieder
Film sound - 'Maybe the next time...' - Crash (Cronenberg)
David Toop - Apartment Thunder (Eros + Sacrifice) - Black Chamber
Georges Delerue - Hiroshima Mon Amour (Musique, dialogues et ambiance) - The Music of Georges Delerue
Josquin DesPrez - Plein de deuil - Adieu mes amours
Shigeru Umebayashi - Long Journey - 2046 (OST)
Fursaxa - Twilight of Desire - Mandrake
John Duncan - Breathchoir mix - John See Soundtracks
Otomo Yoshihide New Jazz Ensemble - A-shi-ta - OYNJE
Film sound - Car Wash - Crash (Cronenberg)
Georges Delerue - Le Mépris (Musique, dialogues et ambiance) - The Music of Georges Delerue
Roxy Music - In Every Dream Home a Heartache - The Early Years
Naked City - Leng Tch'e - Black Box
Yellow Swans - High On the Mountain of Love - Bring the Neon War Home
Film sound - Club Silencio - Mulholland Drive (Lynch)
The Carpenters - Goodbye to Love - The Singles '69-'73
2/10/06
Strangers Die Every Day - There's No 'I' in Fuck You - They Have Already Defeated Us at What We Know Best
Grizzly Bear - Marla - Yellow House
Aiko Shimada - Mezame (Morning Pt. 1) - Blue Marble
Skullflower - Silver Stars Rot Mindlessly - Tribulation
GHQ - Twelve Events - Twelve Events
Chieko Mori - Fly Away - Jumping Rabbit
Boxhead Ensemble - Nocturne 2 - Nocturnes
Luc Ferrari - Presque rien No. 2 - Presque rien
Tod Dockstader - Whisper - Aerial 3
Hair Police - Track 1 - Drawn Dead
Iannis Xenakis - La Légende d'Eer (excerpt) - La Légende d'Eer
Minamo - We Were - Shining
Stephan Mathieu & Janek Schaefer - Quartet for flute,piano & cello - Hidden Name
Tim Hecker - Whitecaps of White Noise (1&2) - Harmonies in Ultraviolet
18/09/06 Keyboards of the Aurora Borealis
Alva Noto + Ryuishi Sakamoto - Aurora - Insen
Aki Tsuyuko - Aquilo - Hokane
Harold Budd - The Oak of the Golden Dreams - The Oak of the Golden Dreams
Elodie Lauten - Clearly Identified Floating Objects - Inscapes from Exile
John Zorn - Que Tran - New Traditions in East Asian Bar Bands
Gyorgy Ligeti - Arc-en-ciel - Preludes
Margaret Leng Tan - The Heavenly Spheres are Illuminated by Lights - Plays the Music of Somei Satoh
Fursaxa - Tyranny - Lepidoptera
Religious Knives - Electricity and Air - Bind Them/Electricity and Air
William Basinski - (untitled) 12 - Melancholia
Christina Carter - School Song - Bastard Wing
John Cale - Sun Blindness Music - Sun Blindness Music
Bang On a Can - Piano Piece No. 4 (Rzewski) - Cheating, Lying, Stealing
Terry Riley - Land's End - The Harp of New Albion
December 2005
A special all-night broadcast takes place in December 2005 during the occupation of Venaus in the Susa Valley, part of the on-going resistance to a planned high-speed train link between Turin and Lyon (TAV). Direct broadcasts from the site of the occupation and the barricades alternated with a selection of music and readings on speed and slowness, capitalism and revolt.
Summer 2006
TERMINAL TENT
on
TERMINAL BEACH
Our first season of broadcasting culminates with a Terminal Beach sound installation at the annual Blackout three-day festival, produced in collaboration with our friend Tax, guitarist of the mythical 80s punk band Negazione.
The installation, mainly composed of existing recordings (including extracts from pieces by Eliane Radigue, Thomas Köner, Ryoji Ikeda, Robert Schumann, Haco, Akira Rabelais, Angus Maclise and Thuja) mixed and reconfigured as instrumental voices in a meta-music continuum, ran on a loop for three days and three nights in a sand-filled 1970s style holiday tent in the garden of the Turin club Spazio 211, which was lit from the inside by a powerful battery of red spotlights designed to suggest Ballard’s ‘thermonuclear noon’.
Outside the tent was an attaché case containing loose leaf photocopied pages of Ballard's story that visitors could take away with them and attempt to reconstruct the narrative or reinvent their own “Terminal Beach” from the fragments available. As a series of punk hard-core bands thrashed in violent, impotent rage inside the club, the seemingly innocuous Terminal Beach tent continued to emit a relentless doomy pulse, inviting visitors to meet and inhabit it on their own terms.
You can see us bathing in a Ballardian thermonuclear noon in the pictures above and below
along with other terminal visitors...
October 2006
Terminal Beach begins its second season
October 16
TB opens for Brooklyn experimental improv outfit PSI at their show at Turin's Soundfactory with a DJ set featuring a composed mix of free-noise/drone/avant-folk luminaries.
The same evening we dedicate our radio programme to Danièle Huillet, broadcasting the sound from the last Straub-Huillet film, Quei loro incontri - one of the most radical cinematic oeuvres of the last 50 years.
- E credi ai mostri, credi ai corpi imbestiati, ai sassi vivi, ai sorrisi divini, alle parole che annientavano?
- Credo in ciò che ogni uomo ha sperato e patito. Se un tempo salirono su queste alture di sassi o cercarono paludi mortali sotto il cielo, fu perché ci trovavano qualcosa che noi non sappiamo. Non era il pane né il piacere né la cara salute. Queste cose si sa dove stanno. Non qui. E noi che viviamo lontano lungo il mare o nei campi, l'altra cosa l'abbiamo perduta.
- Dilla dunque, la cosa.
- Quei loro incontri.
(Cesare Pavese, Dialoghi con Leucò, "Gli dèi")
