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Journal of Visual Culture
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DOI: 10.1177/1470412911402895
2011 10: 232 Journal of Visual Culture
Valrie Vivancos
Sound Arts: An Insider's View on Independent Experimental Music Publishing

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by Horacio Espinosa on October 12, 2011 vcu.sagepub.com Downloaded from
journal of visual culture
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Vol 10(2): 232237 DOI 10.1177/1470412911402895
Abstract
In this article, the author examines the history of independent art
editions, the economy of multiples and an exposure to the current
experimental music and conceptual art scenes that led to the creation
of vibr/vibroles.com as an audio and visual chronicle of contemporary
sound creation. In the second part of the article, she exposes the
practicalities of such an endeavour when faced with a no/parallel-
economy, as well as the projects active relationship with contemporary
artists, critical writers, curators and institutions. A brief comparison with
similar ventures (labels, publishing companies, individual curators, event
organizers, artists collectives, etc.) helps to locate this experience in the
current topology of a creative domain recently labelled as sound arts.
The author concludes by trying to anticipate the possible development
and relevance of such a project in a wider perspective.
Keywords
agent curatorial economics frame reproduction reward sound
arts
Sound Arts: An Insiders View on Independent
Experimental Music Publishing
Valrie Vivancos
One of the characteristics of the DADA exhibition that travelled in 2005 from
the Pompidou Centre in Paris to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and
the Museum of Modern Art in New York was to show an extensive amount
of artists publications, printed work, quirky design and sound pieces dating
from the beginning of the 20th century. Raoul Hausmanns Pomes-Afches and
Tableaux-Ecriture (produced between 1918 and 1923) pregured an era when
artists expanded these media on a large scale and rethought the paradigms of
publishing conjointly with art production, economics and distribution.
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Vivancos Sound Arts 233
Many subsequent endeavours looked into the idea of multiplying, reproducing
and democratizing the art object as a desecration of its elitist purpose and market.
This position became even more radical with art movements on the verge of
politics such as Surrealism and its wartime yers, booklets, manifestos; Fluxus
and its editions intended for mass production running up to 5000 copies; the
rhyzomic revolution conveyed by the Revue Internationale situationniste; or
the social sculpture of Joseph Beuys and his popularized multiples. Gripped
by the need to stretch their horizons, visual artists, publishers, composers and
designers aimed at the concept of industrialized production. Born out of the
framework of this tradition, todays contemporary art editions and multiples
gather objects, CD-ROMs, DVDs, videos, tapes, posters, yers and artists books
that can be found in art and book fairs, institutions, libraries and online platforms.
They have become an accepted commodity.
Concomitant to the increased number and circulation of art editions, the
20th-century music industry ourished through the mechanical reproduction of
live or studio performances in its adaptation of electronic media for commercial
use and mass distribution. Regardless of the budgets involved, the industry resorted
to an economic model in direct contrast to that of a private collection. Affordable
works entered the domestic realm. The aim was propagation not retention.
But this area too is subject to the mechanism of rarity and value. From a different
starting point and development, 20th-century music came to reach the same
crossroads via its most obscure genre, known as experimental music. The
independent structures (labels) of production and distribution of this genre bear
many resemblances to those of art editions. In terms of the number of items
produced somewhere between 10 and 10,000 copies, some handmade, some
mass produced, some given, some sold in any case, the object bearing the mark
of its search for inventiveness remains a central preoccupation, often thought of
from a plastic and visual (design) point of view.
In some rare cases, developments came full circle when the music industry met
ne art logic and reached extremes such as the Onement project in which a
unique vinyl record was composed, pressed and sold to a single collector for a
price that was 200 times more than that of an ordinary music CD.
Exposure to the current experimental music and conceptual art scenes that
led to the creation of vibr/vibroles.com as an audio and visual chronicle of
contemporary sound creation
This short article is, of course, an individual testimony elaborated through
subjective experience and chance encounters. When imagining vibr, I
rst thought of an audio diary documenting the random and chronological
acquaintances with various agents of the sound arts and experimental music
scene. Gradually, it became a multi-format platform aimed at synthesizing the
previously mentioned publishing endeavours whilst taking earshots of the wide
scope of contemporary sound creation. The heuristic phrase sound art adopted
by English-language critical writers in the 1990s can be understood in various
ways. The German connotation is closer to a ne art sense (in the Sonambientes
vein of aesthetics), but our editorial team chose to use the phrase as an
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234 journal of visual culture 10(2)
umbrella encompassing all genres concerned with musical and audio research.
Among these loose and shifting categories, one could name musical research,
electroacoustics, electronica, radio collages, eld recordings, sampling, concrete
poetry, audio tools, streams, plunderphonics, noise, sound as a component of a
ne art installation or a conceptual piece, listening situations and so on.
As artists/editors, we do not have the same grounding as academics; even though
the project can be didactic in its format or intention, its purpose is not exhaustive
or scientic. Instead, we have been trying to maintain a strong subjective
editorial/curatorial line. We chose to solidify the uid audio practices through
carefully designed and visually engaging digibox editions. The ambiguous and
slightly ludicrous name vibr (hopefully dada in its spirit) was used to crack
the shield of intelligent music (musique savante, IDM). Even though this eld
is littered with bright stones through its heritage and cultural stance, it is also
fertilized by humour, emotions, raw energy, risk and radicalism. In any case, this
is the vibrancy we meant to convey to an amateur audience.
Several rules remain the modus operandi of our editions; creative quality is at
the centre of the selection. The format of the magazine is focused on the sound
(the artists cards matching the size of the CD), half the artists are chosen for
their seminal inuence in these contemporary elds (their relatively well-known
names help to highlight the second half) and newcomers are selected through a
permanent call for contributions and selective listening sessions. Extra information
and audio/visual samples are available on vibroles.com, the online counterpart
of the audiozine, which expands the scope and reach of the project/object.
The practicalities of a no/parallel-economy and the growing network of
artists, critical writers, institutions, labels, publishing companies, individual
curators, event organizers and artists collectives
To locate this experience within the current topology of the area known as
sound arts, it is essential to understand its transversality, its motives and means
of subsistence and circulation. In the 1980s, labels like Factory Records put an
emphasis on the conceptual design and numbered artefacts linked to its record
manufacturing; in the early 1990s, the promises of such cross-reference labels
going beyond their expected functions were embodied by the likes of Touch
Records or Mille Plateaux, widening the range of their purpose, stretching
their post-modern casing. Besides choosing fairly radical electronic music acts
such as Oval, Achim Szepanski, founder of Mille Plateaux, started a discursive
platform for aesthetic research that drew its inuence from critical thinkers such
as Deleuze and Guattari, whose writings inspired the name and spirit of the
platform. Although the label quickly went bankrupt alongside its distributor, it
opened a window of possibilities outside a commercial context.
Inevitably, and even more so nowadays, when it comes to nancial viability,
there rarely are pecuniary benets from such endeavours. The reward has to be
elsewhere. It is a pretext for exchange. The (audio) publication is used by artists
and editors as a key to engage in a discourse and activate further projects. As it
stands, a great number of the current experimental labels or audio publishers
are artists themselves, as illustrated by the netuned project established in 2005
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Vivancos Sound Arts 235
by artist collectives who maintain an engagement with sound oriented work
both curatorially and in their own practice. This ground activism is primarily a
trading necessity (not necessarily in the nancial sense but as an exchange) in a
restricted eld that branches out into bordering areas such as curating, lecturing,
documenting, exchanging information, writing, debating, organizing live events,
festivals, etc.
The list of the Audio Artists/Editors is long, ranging from Henri Chopin and the
revue OU, to Alejandro & Aaron and Lucky Kitchen, Pita and Mego, Phill Niblock
and AI, Mike Hardings eld recording and Jon Wozencrofts designs as part of
the Touch label, Terre Thaemlitzs philosophical corpus, to name but a few
drawing from a ne art and literary tradition, they sustain a protean identity.
In addition, the no-budget economy of such a eld encourages alternative
means of subsistence. If you do not belong to the special league of self-sufcient
composers, artists or publishers, keeping your practice alive might involve a
day job, which for the lucky ones means working in audio institutions such as
the GRM composers (Parmegiani, Ferrari, Zansi ), teaching at a university
or conservatory (Matmos, Dennis Smalley, Carl Stone, Christine Groult ),
gallery representation for some (Christian Marclay, Dominique Petitgand )
or commercial work for advertisements (Scanner, Christian Fennesz, Aphex
Twin ). Like Duchamp before him, the cryptic publisher Herv Binet is still
selling cheese somewhere in Paris. If I insist on painting such a blunt picture and
demystifying the aura of the nancially autonomous artist/editor, it is because,
on the whole, this area is quite a fragile one. This also explains the importance of
its networks and community cohesion which, despite the many discrepancies
and rivalries, are necessary vehicles for survival.
As far as we (vibr/ottoanna) are concerned, the expertise gained through a fairly
recent eld activity and study has led us to interact on a theoretical or curatorial plane
with an unanticipated great number of structures. They comprise universities and
art schools (Paris 8 - FR, Camberwell - UK, Columbia - USA, ZHdK-CH, FUNDAJ-BR),
art galleries and centres (Palais de Tokyo, CNEAI-FR, Vemelho - BR), - Collectives
(MU-FR), festivals (City Sonics-BE, Territoires Electroniques-FR, PRESENCES
lectronique - FR), radio (Resonance-UK, Shake Rattle and Roll - EU) and sound
research groups (GRM-FR, CRISAP-UK, IFCAR-CH). This enthusiasm is linked to a
discipline yet to be identied, dened and categorized on a formal level.
The main intentions behind the production of editions remain the circulation
of ideas and artworks together with the search for new (audio, media) forms.
The knowledge and practice of each agent is growing elliptically, feeding the
community and being fed by it. This dynamic interaction is unfolding as part
of a global network of artists and transmitters whose encounters take place at
various international platforms for debate and practice (venues, festivals, art and
research centres). Whether they belong to the electroacoustic music scenes or
the visual art eld, a common semantic and referential ground linked to sound
arts seems to have spread since the early 1990s.
Try to anticipate the possible development and relevance of such a project in
a wider perspective via new tools for production and distribution
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236 journal of visual culture 10(2)
Terre Thaemlitzs recent performance at CAC Bretigny, Meditation on Wage
Labor and the Death of the Album (as part of the Cornelius Cardew exhibition),
echoing his previous 30 hours live event in Tokyo and subsequent DVD edition
raises a major issue we are now faced with: the fear of the dematerialization of
the art object and the depreciated labour of the artist. For 81 minutes, he played
a single note on a piano whilst a projection behind him stated the following:
Our reckless extension of goodwill [via pro bono projects and performances]
is ultimately an act of self-sabotage. The impassioned artists stance,
art for arts sake, obfuscates a labor issue. The iconic struggling artist
who volunteers her work is a scab, but does not know it. If demanding
payment for our labor means culture industries would collapse, then so
be it. Perhaps we would nally begin conceiving of cultural production in
terms larger than industry. Or more likely, we might nd that we cannot
exist without those industries which fail to support us, making us already
pathetically irrelevant. Either way, I shant be mourning
* 1930: Introduction of the 36 minute 33RPM Long Play (LP) album
* 1980: Introduction of the 74 minute audio CD (followed by 80 minute
700MB discs, and now 90 minute 800MB discs)
* 1991: Introduction of the MP3 le format (le duration determined by
media size [CD, MD, etc.] or computer OS le size restrictions)
In the era of MP3 downloads, the link between performance duration
and media format duration has been severed. The album as a format is
dead in the wake of single-track downloads. Simultaneously, record labels
demand that audio producers produce albums that ll the longer media
formats while paying lower advances and royalties. From 616 June 2008,
Thaemlitz recorded the rst full-length MP3 album (4GB, FAT32 compliant,
approx. 30 hours at 320kbps) in the UK at York Universitys Sir Jack Lyons
Music Research Centre. That album (to be released in data DVD-ROM
format, label undetermined) is an edit of a 31-hour piano solo recorded in
sittings averaging 4 to 6 hours in length (after all, what is an album without
a fadeout of the longer studio sessions?). The theme is Meditation on Wage
Labour and the Death of the Album. The duration of this live performance
is a minimum of 81 minutes, so as to preclude a recording from tting onto
a conventional audio CD.
Even though new forms of transmissions restlessly emerge, reactionary attempts
to go against this ow can seem derisory. Moderate prognosticators, however,
foresee a lasting fetishism intrinsic to the object, the need to craft, seize, hold
and collect tangible artefacts in the same way that rare old books are being
treasured and speculated upon. As long as their independence is sustained and
their vocation lies beyond nancial achievement, these editions are here to stay
in an unthreatening and unthreatened discursive niche.
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Vivancos Sound Arts 237
Valerie Vivancos is a Paris-based sound artist, critic and publisher. Her artistic
practice lies at the crossroads of conceptual performance and experimental sound
compositions, illustrated by the participative event Sleep In Opera organized
in a bunker in Copenhagen (2002). She regularly collaborates with Rodolphe
Alexis (co-founder of vibr and as OttoannA), Claudia Wegener, other artists and
collectives including Double Entendre, M.U., NoGoZones, Foreign Investment,
on the occasion of live events, urban and radio interventions (Resonnance FM,
Sound Drop, Nuit Blanche, Palais de Tokyo, Agendas of the Venice Biennale).
She writes and translates theoretical texts for various French and English
publications, and is the co-founder of Vibr, a biannual digibox compilation of
electroacoustic and low- audio arts. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of Vibrles,
a web-based magazine providing additional information about the compilations
as well as articles on the eld of sound arts more generally.
Address: Double Entendre, 6 rue du Poteau, 75018 Paris, France. [email: valerie.
vivancos@gmail.com; website: www.vibroles.com]
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