Coming attractions

It’s been a heck of a year so far, but more about that somewhere else, some other time… We’ll post some new news when the next event arises; in the meantime, there’s a lot of livestream content still posted for your ongoing enjoyment.

Recent news

Navigation with phog masheeen

Navigation at soundpedro2024 included three shorts by wikiGong:

• Last Known Heading, Part 1: Inbound
• Message in a Bottle, a reprise of our 2021 opus
• Last Known Heading, Part 2: Outbound

Visit https://tinyurl.com/SP-ACEnav to relive the hour-long October 31 preview any time. Here are the rough timings:

• Heather Williamson – Electric Leash 01:00
  
• Black Masheeen – Slit Gong Beats 09:15
  
• wikiGong – Last Known Heading, Part 1: Inbound 12:53
• wikiGong – Last Known Heading, Part 2: Outbound 17:25
• phog masheeen – Navigation by Magnetism 22:04
• Heather Williamson – North Star 25:20
• phog masheeen – Navigation by Stars 30:10
• Skunk Puppet – Atlas Incognita 33:37
• phog masheeen – Navigation by Satellites 44:06
• wikiGong – Message in a Bottle 47:51
• Black Masheeen – Of Course I Still Love You 51:00

At the Bottom with phog masheeen (2023)

We wrapped up our 2023 SoundWalk season, introducing four short videos as part of the soundpedro2023 artist-curated event, At the Bottom, on Saturday, October 23 at 8:00 pm PDT.

The Theme

From our host, who’d just completed the compilation:

“At The Bottom features contributions by Wikigong, Skunk Puppet, Kurt Comstock, Janet Housden, Heather Williamson and phog masheeen. The theme for At The Bottom was an intentional nautical reference. Chosen because of Soundpedro’s location of the physical event at Angeles Gate Cultural Center and because the city of San Pedro is a center of all things nautical. Although the prompt is “At the bottom.” The videos produced by the various artists take the prompt in directions of their own choosing.”

Program

From the YouTube web page:

• WikiGong – Living A Dream 00:27
• Kurt Comstock, Janet Housden – from the depths 04:37
• phog masheeen – Hydrothermal Vent 12:26
• WikiGong – Wishful Thinking 16:15
• phog masheeen – Chemosynthetic 19:47
• Skunk Puppet 23:11
• WikiGong – Going Places 35:39
• phog masheeen – Whale Fall 39:22
• Heather Williamson 42:42
• phog masheeen – Clarion Clipperton Zone 52:34
• WikiGong – Heading Down 56:04
• Kurt Comstock, Janet Housden – Fathom two 1:00:23

Nonsense In—Nonsense Out: Tales Told By an Idiot

We trotted out some new work this year in San Pedro for soundpedro2023 at the live “Mingle” event June 3, 2023 from 7 until 10 PM, adopting the buzz du jour—Artificial Intelligence—as our 2023 raison d’être. As usual, we attempted not to take ourselves too seriously while, of course, failing utterly to do so. And…hilarity ensues! A few teasers related to the event (and, hence, more exclamation points):

Avatars!

Audio

Finally, more credit where it’s due. Audio this year includes Schroedinger’s Television, a work released on ccMixter that, in turn, features the amazing writing and vocal talents of martinsea and Mario Manuel Celeste, respectively. Please observe copyright and release conditions for their work by releasing all remixes CC BY-NC.

We’re building a new Eurorack synth

Dave’s been blogging about an ongoing project, adding a new Eurorack modular synthesizer to the ENKaudio Arts media studio.

soundpedro2022: Military Sea Life w/ phog masheeen

Once again, wikiGong joined phog masheeen and other artists, this time for the soundpedro2022 Artist-Curated Event, Military Sealife…or is it “mammals”?

If you missed the premiere, Military Mammals: Life Among the Conscripted Sealife will be on phog masheeen’s YouTube page…indefinitely. More about the project is available on our blog and project pages.

Summer, 2022: Dave’s wind harp project

D A Ayer’s first aeolian harps appeared at soundpedro2018 under their wikiGong.com title, “Aeolus Woke”. Those six plastic harps were the second functioning versions (V2); even with the steady evening winds off Angels Gate, they required amplification. Ever since, Dave’s been working on designs that won’t. The “V6” harp of aluminum and zinc uses bronze-wrapped strings “played” only by the wind and readily audible to the unaided ear.

“Alviso Wind Harp Test” documents the result of this four-year investigation into free-standing aeolian harp design. The single, continuous audio recording used for this video montage was made in the open air with a free-standing acoustic microphone. Wind speeds were between seven and twelve mph. Sound editing was limited to low-cut filtering to reduce wind noise followed by mastering for video. It’s now posted on both Vimeo and YouTube.

The South Bay town of Alviso, California (a favorite haunt, see also its approach) endures wind speeds of eight to fifteen miles per hour and higher most days, which turns out to be more than strictly necessary for good sound volume.

Dave plans to post more sound harp documents as they become available.

Earlier, at soundpedro2022…

Besides the Military Sea Life premiere on October 29, we’ve a contributed to a few soundpedro events this year. The reistatement of a live event at the Angels Gate Cultural Center on June 4 was particularly welcome. Dave also submitted a couple of works to the “Sounding Videos” stream released September 20.

soundpedro2022 Sounding Videos

Extending their VBODOBV (Virtual BreakOut During the OutBreak Videos) tradition, Long Beach F.L.O.O.D./soundpedro premiered a series of acoustically-focused videos on September 20, 2022. Dave’s submitted two short videos for the premiere, available to stream online:

• Breath of Heaven on Vimeo and YouTube
• Alviso Wind Harp Test on Vimeo and YouTube

For a more immersive experience, you’ll find these interleaved with works by other artists archived on YouTube.

soundpedro2022 live event at Angels Gate

The soundpedro2022 event installments began with gallery shows opening April 9 at the Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro, California, followed by a live in person event on June 4.

wikiGong premiered Song of New Abalonia, an ongoing multimedia work now documented with its own project page.

Prayers Unspoken

Our live performance was buttressed by two minimal video loops: Breath of Heaven (above); and Prayers Unspoken, which marries a long fascination with the sound of gamelan ensembles to more recent investigations into aeolian music. It’s also now available on both Vimeo and YouTube.
Check FLOOD’s soundpedro page for the ongoing calendar of soundpedro2022 events.

The cPanel penny finally dropped

If you missed the site’s fourteen-hour service outage of January 14, 2022, it may not be clear that we’ve actually survived GoDaddy’s decommissioning of their “end-of-life” shared Linux hosting services. Actually, we self-resurrected following a process every bit as graceless and needlessly disruptive as we feared, but it’s over. Even Pour Your Own (musique) Concrète seems to be fully operational. Big sigh of relief here on our end…

You may notice some slow cache refreshes for a bit, but otherwise things should be back to normal. Keep those cards and letters coming.

soundpedro2021

We dove into the pandemic format of soundpedro2021 on several occasions:

Dark Waters

wikiGong joined longtime SoCal performers phog masheeen and Skunk Puppet on October 27, 2021 in the debut of this video project inspired by the deepest of terrestrial mysteries and the lore of those who dare cross it.

Watch the archived forty-five minute set on YouTube and read more about the project on our project page.

Check out more from the Wonder Valley Experimental Festival here.

Pour Your Own (musique) Concrète

On June 5, soundpedro2021 premiered Dave Ayer’s soundscape created using a long-planned and newly-reinvisioned-for-the-pandemic-era interactive work, Pour Your Own (musique) Concrète, a software instrument for making music out of pre-recorded sound samples.

Originally imagined as a gallery installation, the web-hosted version has been optimized for mobile phone displays. Use it to explore the free recordings available here at wikigong.com. Create multi-track soundscapes on the fly. Experiment. You can view the web page here.

On August 5 and 11, soundpedro2021’s VBODOBV live stream presented a brief video tour of the new page, which you can also view on Vimeo.

The same program featured wikiGong’s latest cosmological meditation:

Message in a Bottle

wikiGong.com has addressed the singularity and loneliness of humanity: Andrew Marvell’s “Deserts of vast eternity” surround us, and anyone else with wit to look. But what if we sent a message, with the speculative hope of anyone who commits a piece of paper in a wine bottle to the surf? What if we thought we had something worth saying? What if we wanted to be known? Remembered? Feared? Worshiped? Admired? What if we just wanted to help? If we were convinced we knew something important? Then, like Marvell, “let us roll all our strength and all / our sweetness into one ball” and fling it as far as we can! As many copies as we can, like dandelion seeds. A powerful gesture, drawn from the massive infrastructure sustaining wikiGong.com’s work, will send the best we can offer where we cannot go.

Suppose someone else sent a message like this, in an expression of…what? Hope? Fear? Arrogance? Proselytizing mania? In any case, some consuming passion. The message travels for eons. For this voyage, it has agency. It has everything necessary for a quest. It has vast patience, sustained by a tiny flame. (One does not simply walk across a desert of vast eternity.) It has feelings, much like its creators.

Now, what if the message arrives–with all its strength and sweetness–and we ignore it?