Queridos amigos, medio recuperados de estas inolvidables fiestas y su indescriptible fin de año, os envío la primera propuesta para regresar otra vez en la bendita desolación contemporánea, sin aglomeración familiar ni televisión a todo volumen. Veamos.
Las grandes ciudades y los medios de comunicación crecen globalmente. Atrás quedan compartimentos secretos, barrios, viviendas, urbanizaciones privadas, naciones y regiones olvidadas. Sobre todo, un poco aturdidos, queda un sinfín de seres humanos a la espera, desposeídos de raíces y, a veces, de cualquier distancia anímica que les permita ser libres frente a “la sociedad”. A la espera: y sin embargo, decíamos no creer en otra vida… ¿Qué hacemos entonces con todos estas zonas opacas a la comunicación, qué posibilidades culturales y políticas, qué peligros podemos esperar de ellas?
Mientras gestionamos nuestro archipiélago de escenarios y franjas horarias separadas, ¿es posible que el pensamiento, a través de una acción y -sobre todo- una existencia cambiada, sirva todavía para revitalizar una experiencia común? De un lado, tenemos el silencio de la eficacia laboral; de otro, viajes secretos por la Red, series televisivas de ciencia ficción, efectos especiales para acumular alguna vivencia que nos permita sentirnos vivos, dormir. ¿Cómo romper esta funcional bipolaridad entre tedio y escándalo, entre parálisis e interactividad, entre secreto y estruendo de la que nosotros también somos cómplices? Debemos analizar cómo sea posible una nueva intervención del pensamiento en un mundo entregado a la urgencia periodística. Estresados por una información que sirve sin cesar esquirlas del planeta, ¿qué queda de una nueva experiencia de la reflexión y de la acción, del ideal práctico del pensamiento? ¿Puede éste ayudar al ciudadano a salir de su retiro defensivo, de este pragmatismo más o menos mudo en la cercanía, donde sin embargo se juegan los cambios?
Tal vez le esté reservado al pensamiento, a la filosofía, algún lugar significativo en la necesaria “reconversión” de nuestras vidas y nuestras sociedades después de la euforia de décadas anteriores. ¿Exige incluso el emergente panorama urbano, con veinticinco grandes metrópolis a partir de 2010, una revitalización del papel público del intelectual?
Con la vehemencia que “nos” caracteriza, cuestiones como estas y muchas otras implicadas serán planteadas en “El malestar del capitalismo”, un seminario que, de Agamben a  Badiou, uno se empeñará en que sea altamente polémico. Después, claro, depende de cada cual que todo siga igual o no.
Vuestro,
Ignacio Castro Rey

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Estimad@s amig@s;

El Círculo de Bellas Artes tiene programado para este febrero un Seminario de Filosofía  dirigido por Jorge Alemán, Germán Cano e Ignacio Castro. El Seminario llamado El malestar del capitalismo propone realizar una reflexión sobre cinco nombres clave del pensamiento actual: Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Ernesto Laclau, Tiqqun y Slavoj Žižek.

Les adjunto el flier y el link donde pueden encontrar más información y la posibilidad de realizar la Matrícula Online.

EL MALESTAR DEL CAPITALISMO
Pensamiento y acción: Agamben, Badiou, Laclau, Rancière, Tiqqun, Žižek
Directores: Jorge Alemán, Germán Cano e Ignacio Castro
02.02.10>17.03.10
19:30 H
Programa desarrollado por días

Reciba un cordial saludo;

Andrea De Pascual
Área de talleres y Didáctica
TLF. 913 605 409
Círculo de Bellas Artes
www.circulobellasartes.com
C/ Alcalá 42
28014 Madrid

“EXCLUSIVENOW” by Nick Gaetano, in response to Noise & Capitalism trading.

NOISE & CAPITALISM plus GIG with Alan Courtis, Anders Bryngelsson & Mattin
STOCKHOLM

talk:
Alan Courtis & Mattin discuss some of the issues related to Noise & Capitalism.
The talk will be in Spanish with Swedish translation.

gig:
Alan Courtis, Anders Bryngelsson & Mattin

11 January 2010
18:30hours / Free
Instituto Cervantes
http://www.cervantes.se
Bryggargatan
11121 Stockholm, Sweden
08-440 17 60

Miren Eraso, main editor of ZEHAR magazine since 1995, manager of the documentation center of Arteleku, artistic director of the same art center during  2007-08 and among some other things one of the promoters of the publication of the book Noise & Capitalism (she co-founded the editorial serie KRITIKA in 2008), passed away quietly yesterday.
We want to send a warm huge to all his family.

Thank you very much Miren.

NOISE CONFERENCE IN SALFORD Call for Participation
“Bigger than Words, Wider than Pictures”: Noise, Affect, Politics

“Bigger than Words, Wider than Pictures”: Noise, Affect, Politics

University of Salford and Islington Mill, July 1-3 2010
Organising Committee:
Dr Michael Goddard, Dr Benjamin Halligan and Professor David Sanjek

“If there are people that are dumb enough to use Metallica to interrogate prisoners, you’re forgetting about all the music that’s to the left of us. I can name 30 Norwegian death metal bands that would make Metallica sound like Simon and Garfunkel.” – Lars Ulrich

“… this music can put a human being in a trance like state and deprive it of the sneaking feeling of existing, ‘cos music is bigger than words and wider than pictures… if the stars had a sound it would sound like this.” – Mogwai, “Yes! I Am a Long Way from Home”

Noise Annoys. Is it not a banal fact of modern, urban existence that one person’s preferred sonic environment is another’s irritating, unwelcome noise – whether in the high-rise apartment, on public transport or the street, or almost anywhere else? The contingent soundscape of jack-hammers and pneumatic drills, mobile phone chatter, car sirens and alarms, sound leakage from nightclubs and bars and – moving into the suburbs – lawn-mowers and amateur renovation projects, neighbouring kids and dogs, represents a near-constant aural assault. As a pollutant, noise can legally attain noxious levels; it is both potentially biologically harmful and psychologically detrimental.

But what exactly is noise and what conditions these relative thresholds in which sound crosses over into noise? Or are these more organised and polite sonic phenomena merely varieties of noise that have been tamed and civilised, and yet still contain kernels of the chaotic, anomalous disturbance of primordial noise? As a radical free agent, how is noise channelled, neutralised or enhanced in emergent cityscapes? As a consumable, how is noise – or lack of noise – commodified?

Such questions are particularly applicable to contemporary forms of music which, based as they are on a variety of noise-making technical machines, necessarily exist in the interface between chaotic, unpredictable noise and the organised and blended sounds of music and speech. Does modern noise seek to lead us to new, post-secular inscapes (as with psychedelia and shoegazer), or defy the lulling noisescapes of processed background muzak with punitive blasts of disorientating, disorderly noise? And why the cult of noise – in term of both volume and dissonance – in which low cultural practices (metal, moshing) meet those of the avant-garde (atonalism, transcendentalism)?

This conference seeks to address the contemporary phenomenon of noise in all its dimensions: cultural, political, territorial, philosophical, physiological, subversive and military, and as anomalous to sound, speech, musicality and information. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

* Psychedelic and Neo-Psychedelic Musics
* Punk and Post-Punk Musics
* Experimental Musics from Avant-Classical to Digital Noise / Raw Data
* Industrial Musics and Cultures
* Krautrock and German Noise
* Shoegazer, Nu-Gaze and Post-Rock
* Noise as Cultural Anomaly
* Noise, Chaos and Order
* Noise and architectural planning
* Noise and digital compression
* Noise Scenes from No Wave to Japan-Noise
* Noise and electronic music pioneers (Delia Derbyshire, Varèse, Stockhausen)
* Noise and Territory
* Sonic Warfare
* Noise and Urban Environments / “Noise pollution”
* Noise and Subjectivation
* Sonic Ecologies
* “White Noise”
* Noise and Political Subversion
* Noise and hearing impairment / deafness
* Psychic / silent noise
* Noise and mixing, particularly in nightclub environments
* Noise in Cinema, Video and Sound Art
* Noise, Appropriation and Recombination
* Noise and Affect

The conference will be organised by the Centre for Communication, Cultural and Media Studies at the University of Salford in cooperation with Islington Mill, Salford and will take place from the 1-3rd of July and will include both an academic conference and noise gigs featuring amongst other groups, The Telescopes and Factory Star and other special guests tbc. Confirmed keynote speakers include rock historian Clinton Heylin, author of From the Velvets to the Voidoids and numerous other works on (post)punk and popular music, Stephen Lawrie of The Telescopes, and Paul Hegarty, author of the recent Noise/Music.

In addition to conventional papers, noise, sound and video art proposals are also welcome.

To participate in the conference please send a 400 word abstract and biographical note to Michael Goddard, m.n.goddard@salford.ac.uk and Benjamin Halligan, b.halligan@salford.ac.uk by 28 February 2010.

A new extensive and critical review of the book published at Paris Transatlantic excellent online magazine, written by Dan Warburton. Thanks.

NOISE & CAPITALISM by Dan Warburton
I was wrong when I described Guy Debord as a “much overrated Situationist maître penseur” in a recent Wire review, and reading Bruce Russell’s Towards a Social Ontology of Improvised Sound Work – probably the best written and certainly the most informative of the eleven essays (plus an introduction by editor Anthony Iles) gathered together in Noise & Capitalism – serves to remind me of the fact. Russell’s concise summary of the Situationist key concepts – spectacle, psychogeography and constructed situation – backed up with apposite quotations from Marx and Lukacs, is both clear and clearly relevant to his own practice as an improviser.

Eddie Prévost’s Free Improvisation in Music and Capitalism: Resisting Authority and the Cults of Scientism and Celebrity, complete with de rigueur quotations from AMM playing partners Cornelius Cardew and John Tilbury and sideswipes at poor old Stockhausen (once more the inevitable moans about the absurd excesses of the Helikopter-Streichquartett and the “composition” of Mikrophonie I) is a characteristically sober restatement of ideas previously elaborated at greater length in his books No Sound Is Innocent and Minute Particulars – if you haven’t read those this will do just fine as an introduction to his thought, but if you have you might have a distinct feeling of déjà lu.

Indeed, there seems to be a bit of recycling going on here (though I imagine maybe the editors would prefer to call it détournement): Ray Brassier’s Genre Is Obsolete originally appeared in Multitudes #28 in 2007, and Mattin’s liner notes to Going Fragile, his 2006 Formed album with that well-known Noise musician Radu Malfatti, are reprinted in their entirety, with one additional paragraph. No point in recycling my own review of that album, then, since I stand by what I wrote back in July 2006.

Standing by what you write is the springboard Ben Watson uses to dive into a typically vigorous exposé of his ideas in Noise as Permanent Revolution or, Why Culture is a Sow Which Devours its Own Farrow. Taking issue with The Wire‘s Sam Davies for trashing an Ascension gig in Bristol in 1994 only to remember it fondly 13 years later (being able to change your mind and admit that you’re wrong is obviously anathema to Ben’s militant aesthetix), he comes up with some splendidly quotable lines (how about “the courage of youth enables it to look directly in the face of things.. [i]ts folly is to imagine that no-one else has ever done so” and “people who talk about the problems of modern music without talking about capitalism and commodity fetishism are themselves one of modern music’s problems”?), though one wishes he’d spent more time explaining the subtleties of Giambattista Vico (see photo)’s Scienza Nuova – a work I’m not at all familiar with but for which this article has most definitely whet my appetite – than taking potshots, albeit amusing and well-aimed, at his former employers at Wire HQ. Watson writes well – he’s one of the few contributors to this book whose voice you can really hear from reading his prose – but quite why Jaworzyn’s Ascension is “THE answer to dilemmas facing anyone discontent with the musical ready-meals dished up by commercial interests” isn’t explained, and what Tony Oxley, Fernando Grillo, Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram are doing in a thesis ostensibly about Noise is anybody’s guess.

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