Ebbing:Sounds
Symposium
May 2018
24. 25. 26.
Gray Area
San Francisco

Ebbing Sounds is an inter­disci­plinary sym­po­sium accom­panied by con­certs inves­ti­gating new ways of music pro­duction, music listen­ing and music cri­tique. As music access today is domi­nated by stream­ing for­mats mediated by industry dis­tri­butors and algo­rithm cu­ration, Ebbing Sounds explores how stream­ing shapes the spheres of music pro­duc­tion, music listening and music dis­tri­bution. A group of inter­national artists, mu­sicians, theo­rists and sound stream­ing industry media­tors will be gathered to dis­cuss the formats and ma­teriali­ties of new emerging music and sound in the context of an algo­rithm-driven indus­try-audience re­lation­ship.

Ebbing Sounds is being held from May 24th to May 26th, 2018 at Gray Area in San Fran­cisco. It’s orga­nized by zwei­komma­sieben in co­operation with mar­cella faust­ini, De­For­rest Brown Jr. and swiss­nex San Fran­cisco.

Ebbing Sounds is kindly supported by Pro Helvetia Schwei­zer Kultur­stiftung, Con­sulate Gene­ral of Cana­da, FON­DATION SUISA, Goethe-Ins­titut San Fran­cisco and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States.

May 24th 2018
Opening reception and Swiss showcase
8:30
PM
Welcome note by the organizers
9:00
PM
Keynote speech: Eric Harvey
[US; Pitchfork, Grand Valley State University]

Eric Harvey has reported for publications such as Pitchfork, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and others. He is an Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University. His scholarship and reporting focus on the transformations of musical commerce and practice through the use of digital technologies.
10:00
PM
Live-set: S S S S [CH; aufnahme + wiedergabe, Hallow Ground]

As a monicker, S S S S is an exercise in difference and repetition, reducing swiss producer Samuel Savenberg’s name to a string of basic elements— all equal and different. S S S S performs his variation of a new kind of Industrial in clubs from Milan over Berlin to Moscow
11:00
PM
Live-set: Bonaventure
[CH; PTP, NON Worldwide]

Bonaventure is Soraya Lutangu’s nom de guerre. Having grown up in Switzerland, she uses music as an identity research tool along with practical and speculative initiatives to connect her African and European roots and investigate human relationships.
 
May 25th 2018
Symposium
10:00
AM
Welcome address: marcella faustini [US]

marcella faustini works and lives in san francisco and has been co-organizing Ebbing Sounds. she is, when possible, a cultural instigator of many varieties. as an artistic director in local galleries and as an independent curator, she has collaborated with a variety of visual artists, writers and musicians.
10:05
AM
Intervention I: DeForrest Brown Jr. [US; PTP, zweikommasieben]

DeForrest Brown Jr. is a New York-based music writer, media theorist and curator. He has worked with publications such as Triple Canopy, Tiny Mix Tapes and Mixmag and has contributed writing to NPR Music, FACT, zweikommasieben and others. His collaborative project Absent Personae with Liverpool-based sound artist Jon Davies aka Kepla was released on PTP.
10:30
AM
Lecture: Ruedi Widmer
[CH; ZHdK]

Digitalization, economification and culturalisation turn the cultural public sphere into a «marketplace» in which players, needs, goods and values need to be re-negotiated. In his lecture, Ruedi Widmer will argue that the production and consumption of cultural goods and experiences combine technical and human components and that existing concepts like social market economy, fair trade or cosmopolitanism need to be translated into an new global reality.
11:10
AM
Lecture: Lawrence English
[AU; Room40, Touch]

Since its formalisation in the late 1970s, Ambient Music has brought with it a reconsideration of the conditions under which composer, composition and listener might come in contact with one another. Lawrence English seeks to examine the trajectories of ambiences in his lecture, as well as to argue for their continued relevance within music and to outline a series of provocations to take the practice forward into the 21st century.
11:50
AM
Lecture: James Hoff [US; PAN]

Hoff will discuss his work with sound in relationship to self-distributing models of illness, such as computer viruses, language-based syndromes, and ear worms, and prefabricated cultural forms created through or as a byproduct of networked communication.
12:30
PM
Lunch Break
1:30
PM
Intervention II: zwei­komma­sieben

zweikommasieben is a Swiss music magazine in print that has been devoted to the documentation of contemporary music and sound since 2011. Under the roof of Lucerne based publisher Präsens Editionen, zweikommasieben is part of a broader publishing effort – in the last few years several fanzines, books but also music and sound art have been published on analogue (vinyl, tape) and digital formats (download, stream).
1:40
PM
Lecture: Inigo Wilkins
[UK; Glass Bead]

Inigo Wilkins will talk about noise and the political economy of music in the age of platform capitalism and machine learning. Against the hypostatization and fetishization of noise, he argues, this requires an account of randomness and unpredictability at different scales of analysis and levels of description.
2:20
PM
Lecture: Curtis Roads
[US; University of California]

Curtis Roads is a musician as well as a Professor, Vice Chair and Graduate Advisor at the University of California in Santa Barbara. An expert in granular and pulsar synthesis he has published / his material has been published in / on various journals, books, CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray discs, vinyl, and cassettes. He is not an exponent of streaming media and his participation in social media is minimal. Roads' talk will examine his experiences in the "old" infrastructures of the music industry, while streaming services are on the rise.
3:00
PM
Lecture: Kara-Lis Coverdale
[CA; Umor Rex, Boomkat Editions]

This talk considers the gate as a musical access point from sonic and informatic perspectives. How does ecological sympathy, emulation, and data-informed practice affect the mind and body and inform process? How can harmonic and melodic structures function as portholes into buried experience? What is the expense and challenge of exposing these access points? How can reconstruction of experience ink to harmonic language, and how can we learn to read them as symbols tied to (or divorced from) source?
3:40
PM
Panel Discussion

Moderated by scholar and music journalist Eric Harvey, the panel will address the key aspects and themes discussed during today’s lectures.
 
Concerts
9:30
PM
Live-set: James Hoff [US; PAN]

James Hoff encompasses painting, sound, writing, and performance in his work. He has maintained a strong focus on distributed forms and experiments with language, including cross-disciplinary investigations that address orally-transmitted syndromes, computer viruses, and ear worms. PAN will release his latest record Post Tree and a new online version of his project HOBO UFO in Summer 2018.
10:15
PM
Live-set: Curtis Roads
[US; University of California]

Curtis Roads is a musician as well as a Professor, Vice Chair and Graduate Advisor at the University of California in Santa Barbara. An expert in granular and pulsar synthesis he has published / his material has been published in / on various journals, books, CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray discs, vinyl, and cassettes.
11:15
PM
Live-set: Kara-Lis Coverdale
[CA; Umor Rex, Boomkat Editions]

Kara-Lis Coverdale blurs the lines between human and machine in collages that conjure symphonies of the sacred, profane and transcendent while navigating new ecologies with ease. Informed by a Masters degree in musicology and composition and an sustained interest in popular music, Coverdale’s compositions mobilize traditional vocal and instrumental sources into surreal dreams of earthly existence.
12:15
AM
Live-set: Lawrence English
[AU; Room40, Touch]

Lawrence English is a composer, media artist and curator based in Australia. Working across an eclectic array of aesthetic investigations, English’s work prompts questions of field, perception and memory. He is the director of the imprint Room40, started in 2000.
 
May 26th 2018
Concerts presented with Surface Tension
9:00
PM
DJ-set: zwei­komma­sieben DJs
[CH; Präsens Editionen]

When deejaying, the team behind Swiss music magazine zweikommsieben explores the outer edges of clubculture, venturing into territories beyond the dance floor.
10:00
PM
Live-set: Beast Nest
[US; Ratskin]

Sharmi Basu aka Beast Nest is an Oakland born and based South Asian woman of color creating experimental music as a means of decolonizing musical language. She attempts to catalyze a political, yet ethereal aesthetic by combining her anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics with a commitment to spirituality within the arts.
11:00
PM
Live-set: Don’t DJ
[DE; Diskant, Berceuse Heroique]

Florian Meyer aka Don’t DJ is interested in what he calls «musique acéphale« – a metric which has no distinct starting nor ending point and thus encourages the listener to constantly switch his* or her* metric focus to discover different «points of listening» within the same arrangement.
12:00
AM
Live-set: Low Jack
[FR; Editions Gravats, L.I.E.S., Modern Love]

Philippe Hallais aka Low Jack is a French electronic music artist born in 1985 in Tegucigalpa (Honduras) and living in Paris. His music plays with the re-appropriation of sonic clichés, media folklores, and the multiplicity of musical languages associated with dance subcultures.
1:00
AM
DJ-set: Justin Anastasi
[US; Surface Tension]

Justin Anastasi has been active for over a decade in underground music as a DJ and musician. Currently he is founder of San Francisco promotional entity VX and co-founder of the Surface Tension collective. Surface Tension is an interface between primal sound and future vision, presenting a wide array of grounbreaking international artists in San Francisco. The Surface Tension collective founders are DJ CZ, Nihar Bhatt, Jason P, and Justin Anastasi.





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