ANIMANS liVe at the Air Force Museum in Linkoping, Sweden

At Singh Thai, Norrköping, on 10th March, 19.20 CET

- Kosta is coming, Yvonne is coming, Antoine is also coming.

- Antoine? Who is Antoine?

- The guy from Animans who is playing with me. I think I'll recognize him when he enters the room. Googled.

- So you never met?

- No.

- Wow....and you are playing live tomorrow!

- Yes. That's pretty exciting. He is bringing his tape-recorder.

-  Bonsoir!

- Yeah, it's him! Bonsoir!

- Bonsoir!

11th March, Flygvapenmuseum, Linköping.
http://www.flygvapenmuseum.se/
Animans are in the program at around 14.00 CET, among the presentations by Vision Forum participants and guests http://vision-forum.blogspot.se/2014/02/vision-forum-spring-meeting-2014-march.html

Now that the jam is over, I am trying to look back. We had a lot of different ideas about the project: the concept, the message, the medium, the venue. Hard to evaluate the results. It could be better, it could be worse. Reading through our email conversations, I see a chain of key -words, all of them having something to do with "air" and "force". I know that they will never compensate for the failure with the radio stations- we didn't manage to build a chain of them, but to a certain degree they trace the trajectory of our work:

FREE AIR WAVES

AIR........................................FORCE
AIR WAVE...................................................POWER
BIRDS...........................................................DEMOCRACY
FLY........................................FREEDOM
FLIGHT.........................................................REBELLION
LINE.........................................................TARGET
AIRCRAFT....................................................DEVASTATION
WIFI.....................................................BARRIERS
INTERNET................................TRANSMISSIONS
ETHER............................................................NOISE
RADIO.............................................COMMUNICATIONS
TECHNOLOGY..............................................PIRACY
STREAM..................................................INSTITUTION
MEDIUM.........................................................MESSAGE
PERFORMANCE.....................................AUDIENCE
ART............................................................MORALITY
JAM.......................................COOPERATION
BROADCAST...............................................MONITOR
CHAOS......................................................CONTROL
RANDOMNESS...............................................ORDER
POETRY...........................................................WORDS
SOUNDS..........................................FREQUENCIES
TIME.................................................................SPACE
DIY.........................................MUSEUM
LINK.....................................................CHAIN
CONNECT.......................................................TRANSFORM
RECORD...................................................DEFORM
LIVE.....................REMOTE
ON AIR............................................................SECRET
FLOW......................................................................INTERSECT
SMOOTH............................................STRIATED
REAL TIME...............................................................LATENCY
PHONES................................................INARTICULATE
LISTEN.....................................................................DECODE
UNDERGROUND...........................MILITARY

As planned, we were showing a remote jam (two on stage, the third of Animans, Maggie, over the internet, the fourth remaining totally in the background)-crossbroadcasting and even receiving a broadcast or rather a re-broadcast by DJ Soulard from Spiritplants radio (www.spiritplantsradio.com), reading his poetry, all the sounds returning in a different rendition. One of the streams were hidden in a DIY "transmitter box" (a cardboard box with a plastic cup, connected to another one with a thread, passing through to the outside, a recorder, an iPhone and a mascot inside, the sound travelling through the thread, more often than not unsuccesfully). The audience could access it on their smart phones. Those who used them, brought the hidden sounds into the room, and they got picked up by the microphone, creating a continuous loop back into the flow. You can listen to some snippets from it here:http://soundcloud.com/kamikuma/animans-confessing-publicly

I was reciting a fable, written especially for the occasion- "Penguin and Chicken at Flygarns Haga"- the result of some brainstorming via emails. I even made a collage with it (can be heard on soundcloud-

http://soundcloud.com/jucumari/penguin-and-chicken-at

Here is the text:

Penguin and Chicken at Flygarns Haga.

- What kind of bird are you that cannot fly?

- A navy bird, I can swim.
And what kind of bird are YOU, little chicken?
You cannot fly either.

- Oh, mr Penguin, I could before- I mean my ancestors could.
I am what has become of me.

- That's not your fault. Beware, those who walk on two legs...

- Like you, mr Penguin?

- No, those non-birds, who walk on two legs and can fly, they'll see to it that you get in a soup.

- Ay! No no no, I don't want to be in a soup.

- We are in a soup already.

***

AIRMAN'S DEFOLIATING SOUP

Ingredients:

Monsanto Agent Orange (2,4- D and 2,4, 5-T) 1 tbs

PCB's 1 cup

Dioxin 5 tbs

Genetically engineered soybeans 1/2 cups ( from Dupont or Dow)

Genetically engineered corn 1/3 cups (from Syngenta)

Baking soda 10 tbs


Pre-cook soybeans and corn, mix well with the rest of the ingredients and pour into a plastic bag. Shake vigorously.

PFFFKT! PFFF! SHKTTT!.........AY! .....NGM GN GN......HRSSSS!......AY GNMN Ggn pkht pk


(silence)


Ikarus

He was a butterfly
The sunlight was a great attraction
It was a spectacular death
Not a postmodern performance

There was a lot of pathos in his wish
To shine with a stolen brilliance
What was forbidden for a creature of land
Only spurred Ikarus, but wasn't his goal

Alight on his wings- of wax was it
Competing in the air as wings usually do
The right congealed, the left close to a melting degree
He made a casimi and under the rays of sun

And the sun, that radiant solar bird
With a beak, sharp like a laser beam
Ripped apart those belligerent wings
And the toxic wax rain fell on the ground

You think Ikarus fell too
But that's a horrible mistake
He died, but
He learned to fly without wings

***

- Ah, mr Penguin, you scare me.
But I don't understand how he learned it.

- The same moment you forgot how to do it, he remembered it.

- How?

- He made a flying machine...

- Wait, wasn't he dead?

- Yes, he was. He was dead in his heart- it got scorched by the sun.
But please, don't interrupt me.
So, he made a flying machine with wings just like yours and a brain inside a pilot much smarter than yours.

- That's an insult, mr Penguin. You think that if you wear a smoking, you are as smart as them, the two-legged non-birds.

- No, I am smarter and I have to hurry before all ice melts away.



Penguin the Butcher Bird as Ikarus.

He was launched into atmosphere
On an airraft of ice
Illuminating the dark skies like a nova
And leaving meteorologists at a loss

He turned clouds upside down
Over the corn fields of the world
Like buckets of Chemtrail soup
To feed the hungry GMO sprouts

When all the foliage went grey
The temperatures stopped disobeying
Global warming ran out of steam
And ice was winning huge areas

On a kamikaze mission
Penguin the Butcher Bird
Self-butchered to join Laika
As the forces of gravity died
(Some ice splinters are still visible in the extinguished earth's telescopes)


I asked the audience right after the concert to try to imagine space as smooth and sounds from afar meeting no barriers on their way. Then we, who are playing together, while being located in different parts of the world, are not like separate dots, connected with lines, but  lines or separate flows of intensities, intersecting at some points during the performance. Even today I cannot see us as individual perfomers, only as Animans generating conjunction points in a seemingly chaotic flow of transmitted information.
For broadcasting we used a popular streaming platform- Mixlr- but rather unconventionally. We were both streaming and monitoring each other at the same time.

I put our streams together, not trying to correct the latency. It comes rather close to what I remember from my perspective:
http://www.iradeo.com/kamikuma/player/117190

Who are Animans?

http://soundcloud.com/xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

http://soundcloud.com/half-digested-taco

http://soundcloud.com/maggieledes

http://soundcloud.com/kamikuma

kamikuma is on Mixlr

Will be broadcasting here soon- Animans live in Sweden, at Flygvapenmuseet, on 11th March, around 14.00.

Created an internet radio station so far, where you can hear songs from our recent albums.


http://www.iradeo.com/kamikuma/player/114980

Animans is a remote collaboration between four people in different parts of the world, making nofi, noisy, primitivistic anti-music.

Imagine a choir of monads. They cannot hear each other, but still there is a kind of harmony or accord between them, leading the listener through half-pains to pleasures. Not total pain, I hope.

Four merge into one, one splits into itself and the the void

http://ratordog.blogspot.com/2013/09/no-fi-antimusic-16.html



Trying to get an aerial view of our project, I asked myself: What are the real properties of "Base"?
If we take it out of the box of identities, conditioning our perception- context, image of the author, name, gender, background, producer/consumer networks on Soundcloud, behaviour patterns, levels of activity and presence on Soundcloud as a social platform- what remains is pure sound, and then nothing is real except feeling. We can never disengage from narrativity, which is independent of tellability, but once again, with sound, as with non-objective art, the signifier/signified relationship works on the level of feeling rather than representation. We hear what everyone hears and we think what no-one has thought within the frame of the narrative. " It's amazing how sine tones, just before they turn into alarms, transform and dissolve into the whole. Drifting away, being washed away. A sweeping movement in sound-space. A feeling of pain followed by relief, spiced with melancholy." ( A listener's comment, my translation. Made after the title "Black Square" was added in the description.)

http://soundcloud.com/btt-rod/btt-base



http://soundcloud.com/kamikuma/kamikuma-base



http://soundcloud.com/half-digested-taco/base



http://soundcloud.com/maggieledes/mergfrommemphis-base



When authorship is ambiguous like in our case- it is four different people who claim it- each individual self gets obscured and each participant's ego demands become threatened by doubts of the listener and by frailty and transience of the work: literally so, the track was making its four days' transit over our Soundcloud accounts, remaining hidden for the following four days. Like that rogue planet Melancholia in Lars von Trier's film, hidden behind the Sun and then blocking Antares from view on a collision course with Earth, the track made the four corners of the black square fall upon its empty centre. I am referring to Animans and the four of us, not so much to the title with its associations with the iconic painting of Malevich.

"I arrived at where I started from: nothing. Nothingness is too much for you, Jack",- says the main female character of the film to her employer, harassing her on her wedding party about an unfinished tagline.
When nothingness becomes too much, we start longing back to our identity box, that threatens to swallow us under the pretext of branding- positioning on the market in a unique and different way with help of logo, name, slogan, character, mascot- anything that creates positive associations in potential customers' minds. Instead of crawling back, we can choose to re-design the box and turn it into a black box. Blackboxxx is in the cloud, connectivity of our networks is provided by a seamless flow, and opaqueness allows us to be ourselves. Who is the author of the track is going to remain a mystery.

Black square is not a denial of everything good and pure, it is not a dark prophecy of trouble to come, not a fear of the future, but a rejection of the secure past. We don't profit from yesterday's growth and we celebrate our victory over the Sun for a future world without objects, in which considerations of fame and prosperity are less relevant.





Melancholia 1

I'm dying at the bottom of a pit in the blazing sun

in Wild World with a female octopus named Marina

The small plane is normally not used for people

to float freely and experience weightlessness

Mystery horror woman who visited Cedar Sinai Hospital in 1972

Embrace Despair for free

A Living Stream in the Desert!

How the Christian faith will be a subversive

—and liberating—influence

away from her
....

(The universe went through an episode dominated by a different form of dark )


Melancholia 2

Somebody somewhere must be tolling a bell...

Octopuses have a relatively short life expectancy

and some species live for as little as six months

The wings of a fixed-wing aircraft are not necessarily rigid

A woman in white gown shows up

Objects not in contact with other objects "float" freely

The only problem is that she was soaked in blood.

...

We must embrace our awesome freedom

The decision, abandonment in making it alone, and despair when it backfires

Turn to it daily, tune out the clamor of living!

Gravitational attraction pulls galaxies towards each other to form groups

Stars burn out, stars cease to be created, and the universe goes dark...



Melancholia 3

The last thing I see is my heart. Still beating

The white lady grabbed the neck of one of the boys

There are no muscles in fingers and thumbs

Note that! Because the object is floating

Larger species, such as the giant pacific octopus

(if she finds that only its sides have been stained with blood

since all of us share the same situation)

do a good turn daily.

This is the slogan of the Boy Scouts

Communities usually avoid each other and are aggressive towards outsiders

Humans are an exception in that we form a variety of social group patterns

Is it true that all the stars we can see in the sky are so far away that they are all actually burned out

and that we are just seeing their glow?