Volume 0.1

ENERGIZE

Welcome to the debut of Auricle, the free information resource aimed at individuals living on the frontiers of the ear. Deeply informed by independent artistry, acoustic ecology, aesthetic philosophy, and new technology, Auricle is a catalyst for fresh ideas put forth at a moment that is crying out for a new definition of what music can be. If you prize your appreciation of music as advanced; If conventional music does not reflect your values; If you are as aware of the social, political, scientific, environmental and spiritual substance of sound as its entertainment applications, then read on and join us in an adventurous odyssey to the heart of the auricular self.

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INNERVIEW

"I've been described in a seminar brochure as an "enemy of the music industry." Actually, although I heartily loathe 98% of it, I am not its enemy. That would, firstly, give it energy and, secondly, attract its hostile attention towards me. Neither serves my aim. I remain impartial to its operatives, unless they impact negatively upon myself or my family. Otherwise, I work alongside, and sometimes glide within before leaving again."

~Robert Fripp @ http://www.discipline.demon.co.uk

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FEED

Carl Steadman explains why MP3 isn't the future of music @ http://www.feedmag.com/column/killerapp/ck152_master.html

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AFFAIRS

South African President Nelson Mandela has asked leading British DJ, Carl Cox and the sex machine himself, James Brown to play at a special gig in South Africa this February.

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The headlines of musical application are often grabbed by dramatic recounts of the pop spectacle, while musical moods subtley influence the realms of everyday life.

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ELEMENTS

Synaesthesia

Physically, a sensation felt in one part of the body when another part is stimulated. Psychologically, a process in which one type of stimulus produces a secondary, subjective sensation, as when a specific color evokes a specific smell sensation. Better put, it is the experiencing of sensation in one sense modality (eg, visual images) when the actual stimulus is in another modality (eg, sounds). People who report such experiences are called "synaesthetes". The Russian composer Scriabin is reported to have experienced colors when he heard music. Thus, he experienced "chromesthesia," the most common form of syaesthesia.

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AUDIOPHILIA

AudioMUSINGS is an audiophile newsletter reviewing the latest audio equipment purchased in the marketplace and auditioned in real rooms @ http://home.earthlink.AAAnet/~audiomusings/

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SONICA

Sound is now being used for recycling. Kinetic Disintegration System has developed a means to disintegrate nearly all non-metallic substances into fine powders using sound waves. The effect of this development is that it produces a cost-effective means of breaking down, separating, and transporting previously problematic recyclable materials such as rubber tires, plastics, glass, and solid bio-wastes. It could prove to be a huge step in helping maintain our resources through recycling and so further limit the amount of land we dedicate to trash dumps and landfills.

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FREEZONE

There are plenty of servers on the net which offer to put up soundfiles for free. Here's four to score:
http://www.insignificant.com/ - http://www.free-music.com/ - http://www.nvg.unit.no/songs/ - http://www.hsq.co.uk/.

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DESIGN

Philippe Starck's "Good Goods" catalog (with French mail-order company La Redoute) provides 'non-consumers' with 200 products, designed or hand-picked by Starck himself, which display "integrity, practicality and a sense of purpose" @  http://www.goodgoods.tm.fr

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Rap is to music what Etch-a-Sketch is to art.

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COLLECTIBLES - eminent audio accessories

> Ambiants

Arne Nordheim's 'Electric' @ http://www.runegrammofon.com

> Ambiage

Lucia Hwong's 'Goddess' trilogy @ http://www.luciahwong.com/

> Electronica

Timewriter's 'Jigsaw Pieces' @ http://www.twisted.com

> Global

Labradford's 'Me Media Naranja' @  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ts/music-glance/B0000061I3/002-0080493-3801805

> Jazzedelic

'Stop and Listen Vol. 4' @ http://www.bbemusic.demon.co.uk/disco.htm

> Op-Rock

Seal's 'Human Being' @ http://www.ascender.underground.net/

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EAROTICA - Musical FreeDiving

Artist: Autechre
Cast: Sean Booth and Rob Brown
Origin: UK
Work: "Autechre"
Syndicate: Warp
Genus: Technologically-advanced
Highlights: "Rae", "Melve", "Corc"
Ambience: Clustered
Emotion: Pellucid
Cachet: Chaordic
Design: Bio-Logical
Amenities: Monochromatic Balm and Dazzlement
Depth: Illusional in both vista and tone
Word Picture: Burning Chrome
Tranceability: Elaborately Coded
Danceability: Slurred Shifting Breaks
Analysis: Cybernetic alchemists expressing dissatisfaction with the LP as an art form until it becomes free from rational and narrative context. With a calculated disregard for pop logic and rhythm, we hear a more impulsive, discontinuous series of sound collages at times improvisational as if automatic cinema. Perhaps deciding that music aims at representing peripheral aspects of the outside world, this output puts seemingly subliminal actions in a new noetic context by releasing them from lucid sound reasoning.
Links: Douglas Wolk interview @ http://www.amazon.com/autechre-interview

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NICHEMAP

"Tranceint" : Move with the new technomadic sound.

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One one of many levels, aural culture rises from the production of many pieces of music that interlace and reinforce one another over many generations to expand like a growing organism into an audioverse of seemingly infinite possibility.

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FACTOID

According to online market researcher Jupiter Communications, there are now over 85,000 websites dedicated to music. In addition, a digitally downloadable music market is at least 5 years away due to piracy and licensing issues. Digital music sales will only add up to US$30 million - just 2.2 percent of the total music industry - by 2002.

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LISTEN

Do you notice that your listening improves when your eyes are closed? It's because your eyes take up a great deal of mental energy, in fact it takes 18 times more energy to see than to hear.

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SONICBOOKS

Harvey "Gizmo" Rosenberg's 'The Search for Musical Ecstasy' is the enlightening bible of the archaic aural revival packed with essential speculations on an expanded gizomological metacontext for the electro-mechanical art forms which create the ecstatic aural metaphor. Coordinates: Image Marketing Group @ 203.357.7600.

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Sound knowledge is a compass into the creative mind of human nature.

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THE LISTENING ROOM

In today's accelerated world, it's hard to get away from it all to indulge yourself in luxury. We forget that by simply listening to the right music we can relax, revive and empower our well being. Creating your own personal listening room is a celebration of the whole self. It can be a reward to your mind, body and spirit. It is one place you can go to, again and again, to travel to new worlds and attain peace of mind. The purpose of creating the listening room is to have a special place to relax and listen as a ritual of calm and a dawning of clarity. It is your sacred place to unwind, luxuriate, and heal. Listening is both a fine art and a magical act, a ritual connecting you to the power of your sonic affinities. It is an essential element of life that promises enduring rewards. To relax yourself with the auroma of enchanting sounds is to commune with your self. In a sanctum of sound, we can breath freely, be delighted, and find deep enjoyment.

So dim the lights, burn candles and incense, spray aromatic oils, and create your own private retreat where you can enjoy tasty morsels, drink wine, smoke cigars, read books, write letters, paint pictures, smell fragrances, or do nothing but listen. Feel how all of your senses are connected - what you see, taste and hear is all part of your musical gestalt here in the listening room.

Next month: Pre-listening relaxation: massage, aromas, herbs, and baths.

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INSITE

TR-i's ("Todd Rundgren Interactive") PatroNet is a revolutionary artist patronage system on the net. For a small annual fee, patrons receive a variety of premium media packages of previously unreleased work by Rundgren and many others soon to come @ http://www.tr-i.com

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ELEKTROPRENEURZ

Chicago-based visualz outfit O.V.T. command raved reviews for their live video mixing and neuron-blowing media installations for everyone from Mass Ensemble to Keoki to Rabbit in the Moon. Contact Brien Rullman @ 312.226.4162.

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EARIDESCENCE

The old saying, popularized by the movie Field of Dreams said, "If you build it they will come". Auricle's version is, "If you dream it it will happen". Aural culture is the fantasy business. The best use their mind's ear to reach farther, dream bigger, and gain more mindshare. In other words, they're a perfect fit for a world that's evolving, with no clear rules, and elusive competition. Here are our meta-tips:

1. Ear people don't bother with the distinction between dreams and reality. They are always dreaming, always casting the practical in terms of the talent. They imagine themselves as gifted.

2. Ear people don't draw mental boundaries. Everything is useful: Psychology teaches understanding. Mythology helps us with development. Don't separate currency from creativity.

3. Ear people play with time and space. They imagine that rules don't apply to them. Where others see barriers, they see possibilities unfolding in sonic space, where anything is possible. When they don't groove with a problem, they make it a musical expression.

4. Ear people futurize but respect history. That's how they maintain sanity - and locate themselves within time-space. History does repeat, so ear people see their future clues in tales of the past. Ear people study film to predict parallel views in music. Aural culture is like the film business in 1910's, when everything was so new that every new idea was also a great idea. By that date, moving-image tech, 35-mm film, and sound amp'd to a theatre had made film a mass-phenom. Aural culture is at a similar point in its development.

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CELLULOID

David Cronenberg, director of cyber-fiction classics 'Videodrome', 'The Fly', and 'Crash' promises his coming Spring 1999 technodrama - 'eXistenZ', starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, will tell the story of a futuristic videogame designer who builds worlds that has everyone guessing which one's are real.

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POLITICS

The Revolution® is a new political party that aims to be the voice of the non-voter, the alienated, the visionaries, the rabble, and the Internet. Combining left and libertarian politics with a kind of post-political futurism and the love of a good laugh, The Revolution® intends to bring all the subcultural tribes together to wrest control of worldwide political systems from the drug warriors, the cultural ayatollahs, and the various corporate mega-destructo gangs, ranging from the military-industrial complex to the HMOs ad infinitum @ http://www.the-revolution.org/.

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ULTRAMEDIA

Personal Sound & Light Theatre. A comfortable chase lounge, an immersible set of wireless Stax-Kyogo headphones and Hitachi virtual goggles sent direct to a portable DVD player projecting interactive lightshows onto a 12 screen videowall to a seven hour net-customized music mix in 5 channel 3D spatialized sound by your favorite artists.

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IMPRINT

Magnificent music for the imagination arrives via Emit, a division of Nottingham UK's maverick and outspoken t:me Recording label. The 16 albums in their highly acclaimed collectors series are designed to reward the careful listener with hour upon hour of thought-provoking audio adventure. For consistently challenging, supernaturally relaxed, and hauntingly beautiful soundscapes  - Emit is the new frontier.
Coordinates: t~0115 985 9595 e~emit@msn.com

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Great music places us in the center of the universe, whether we belong there or not.

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RESOURCE

New Dimensions Broadcasting Network is an independent, listener-supported producer and distributor of public radio programs dedicated to presenting a diversity of views from many traditions and cultures, and to impart practical knowledge and perennial wisdom. For more than twenty years, many of the world's leading thinkers and social innovators have spoken through New Dimensions, inspiring and empowering people all over the planet to seek their own creative contributions. Created in 1973 by Michael and Justine Toms to address the dramatic cultural shifts and changing human values in our society, New Dimensions has become an international forum for some of the most innovative ideas expressed on the planet.

New Dimensions has compiled extraordinary archives of more than 2,000 recorded conversations chronicling the rapidly changing global culture of the last two decades. Included are over one hundred programs on music people such as Ken Nordine, Don Campbell, Bruce Cockburn, Gabrielle Roth, Mickey Hart, and Paul Winter @ http://www.newdimensions.org/

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TOOLS

Digital Card's 'cardD' is an advanced multimedia CD-ROM in the shape and size of a business card which allows you to make lasting impressions in text, grafx, audio, video, animation - even weblinks @ http://www.digital-card.com

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TEKSHOP

Sound Domes hang from ceilings looking like retro beauty-salon hair dryers - but these clear plastic domes send out focused sound beams ahead of their time. Based on a simple acoustic concept that when you step into the sweet spot beneath the dome you hear its sound. Orlando, Florida's Cyberplay game arcade has computer play stations that use SoundTube, a dispersion control dome system that lets players focus on their game only @ http://www.soundtube.com

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The entire music "industry" can be interpreted as the manufacture of supernormal stimuli. Fashion, band names, and album art enlarge the artists ego, music video brightens their star, concert staging brings mythological stature, costumes project vigor and advertise status, publicity adds omnipresence, charts amplify significance. All these elements do more than imitate the natural humaness of the artist. They go beyond the average normal.

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ACRONOME

T.E.K.N.O. :  "tangential euphonic kinematic nascent omen"

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ASSETS

The Binaural Source is the space for headphone listening, 3D audio, virtual audio, surround sound, spatial audio, dummy head recording, great music, nature sounds and audio drama @ http://www.binaural.com

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SOUNDBYTES

"Riverdance" Tapes Revealed

Julian Erskine, executive producer of the smash hit show's disclosure that the Irish dance troupe performs to a pre-recorded tape of its step dancing raised controversy over the validity of such a practice. With mass media critics ignorantly claiming "the dancing is for real, but the sound isn't," it sadly seems the credibility of artists using technology overall is still in question.

Riverdance producers defended the practice saying they are necessary because audiences demand perfection, and spectators in the far rows often can't hear the tapping: "All of the dancers are dancing, all the singers are singing, and the onstage musicians are playing live. Like many other Broadway and touring shows, there are special audio effects used that augment the live performing artists on stage. The technology that is used has become common industry practice to create a full and complete production."

People seem to assume that art is somehow technology free. But the most praised Greek statues were created by the cutting-edge technology in the chemistry of bronze manufacture. And in the Renaissance, workshops and guilds jealously guarded technological developments in the use of tempera, oil, board framing and perspective.

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DJ CULT

Our suggestion to Riverdance: start using DJ's on stage to mix the show, then your tape/disc element gains legitimacy when the audience sees a human manipulating the soundscape live. In the process the perception of "DJ" becomes expanded/redefined. This raising of the bar would go a long way towards the day when the obsolete term "DJ" is replaced with a more suitable title that genuinely reflects the diverse roles and skills involved in presenting music in the modern world. Today anyone, from those who can beatmix two records to those who press buttons and speak the time and temperature call themselves a "DJ". The term as a whole has become all too generic, limiting and misunderstood. We need a new way to classify and recognize those with skills that go beyond the general dictionary definition.

We need to have a clear understanding that a DJ and those artistic professionals who embody part mixer/remixer, part engineer, part sound manipulator, part musician, part producer, part programmer are as different as night and day. Our pick? "Mixologist".

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Musical ambiance is never a material goal to be acquired, but a set and setting for inquiring into a more refined process of being.

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WEBIZ

Xing Technology, one of two companies that produce MP3 technology that compresses music files at near-CD quality so they can be Net transmitted, announced the beta release of its Mac-compatible Audio Catalyst Encoder Tool will be released this month. The Recording Industry Association of America maintains that MP3 technology encourages piracy and is developing the Secure Digital Music Initiative, or SDMI to thwart its use.

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ACCESS

'Xcentrix' is a wired web compendium of diversity where flamboyant "realities" sub-merge into a tasty epicenter that's hip on sounds, fashion, hedonistic soirees, film, and literature @ http://www.xcentrix.com

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NOWLEDGE

Thinkers beware! Your employer thinks he owns part of your mind. Under the Economic Espionage Act of 1996, you could risk jail time for disclosing confidential intellectual property outside the company. Worse yet, creative ideas may also be classified as intellectual property. Sad but true, employers can and will lay claim to innovations on or off the job.

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OVERTONE

Everything is alive and signing or nothing is. What we recognize as the vibrancy of our minds is at the heart of everything created, pervading and binding mice, minerals, and gravity. Each order vibrates in its fashion; every octave sings. Everywhere the oscillating flux is crooning its heart out.

 ~W.A. Mathieu, from 'The Musical Life' (Shambhala, ISBN 0-87773-670-7, 1994)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0877736707/aauricleelofaucu

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( ( ( a ) ) )

A U R I C L E : musical communications for the next century of sound

Auricle is your aural thinktank and monthly global infoscanner offering wired intelligence for navigating the ever-expanding sonic galaxy. The inside hyperguide to emerging musical thought, Auricle is published monthly from the liberated laptop laboratories of Auricle Communications, Chicago, Illinois. Xecutive Inducer: Mark Christopher Riva, who having reasoned with himself, judged it to be for the interest of the present and future generations that they should be acquainted with his thoughts.

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CONTRIBUTORS
Robert Fripp, W. A. Mathieu, Sal Paradise, DJ Triggerfish, The Spindance Kid, Zig Zag, Samadhi, Nick Danger, Dr. Technolove, Mixmaster Flow, Morocco Joe, and Jah Love.

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POLICY

Send hard info and media for review consideration to:
Auricle, 1915 Clinton Ave., Berwyn, IL 60402
All soft works to: flow@auricle.cc

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PHILOSOPHY

Auricle outlines a constellation of sound and vision where the virtual and real blend together into a fuzzy twilight zone of hi-fi and cy-fi. Within that zone is an infinity of ideas to feed your mind's ear with sonic intelligence - vibrant points that are elementally important - not merely as a form of entertainment, but means of identity. One of our most significant motifs is that we don't spin music, music spins us. Prepare to be the spinner and the spun with Auricle, a giant musical composition where you are simultaneously its audience, DJ, engineer, producer, performer and composer.

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Copyright © 1999 Auricle Communications. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without written permission is prohibited. Linking to this site is not considered reproduction. We invite you to link to this or any of our pages.

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 Volume 0.2 docking 2.99