A note on: Lunalia: a lunar sound project with Maja Jantar

One of the most comprehensive sound collaborations I've ever undertaken. One month of recordings, an entire lunar cycle, Maja Jantar and I exchanged sonic responses to the moon over the summer, including poem, songs, found recordings, mixed for publication. I was the 11th collaborator in Maja’s remarkable series. This was a brilliant, often intense process, another lovely moment in a series of works I’ve had the pleasure to collaborate on with Maja. And as before, I learned an extraordinary amount working with her, with her in my mind as I tried to keep up to the daily recording schedule. I’m proud of the result, it’s extensive, a real record of a time in my life.

All 30 files with adjoining blogs are available http://www.stevenjfowler.com/lunalia

Week One

August 18th: Worm-moon Wormwood Scrubs is a place most in London would associate with its adjacent prison. Outside of London it’s hardly known. It’s where I go to exercise, often at night, especially in the summer. It’s totally dark, surrounded by a belt of light, and the industrial trains entering and exiting Willesden Junction. From the middle of the scrubs I can see the moon, first 2/3 blood moon, and by the end of my exercise, the full red moon. I took the recorder to the middle of the open expanse of grass, empty of people aside from the odd dog walker emerging from the darkness and let my exhausted breathing ebb as I watched up. By complete chance, a genuine coincidence, earlier in the day, someone had said to me that I should watch for the super moon that night, that the celts called it the Dispute Moon, others the Hunger Moon, Corn Moon and Wolf Moon....

Performing at Cafe Oto: July 20th for Daniela Cascella's FMRL

Really pleased and privileged to be part of this grand lineup of artists responding to Daniela Cascella's amazing book https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/events/day/2015/07/20/

DANIELA CASCELLA – ‘F.M.R.L. FOOTNOTES, MIRAGES, REFRAINS AND LEFTOVERS OF WRITING SOUND’ BOOK LAUNCH - £4 £3.30 (WEGOTTICKETS)
Book launch event for ‘F.M.R.L. Footnotes, Mirages, Refrains and Leftovers of Writing Sound’ by Daniela Cascella (Zer0 Books). With Christian Patracchini, Colin Potter, David Toop, Elaine Mitchener, Georgia Rodger, James Wilkes, Patrick Farmer + Trevor Simmons , Richard Skinner, Rie Nakajima, Salomé Voegelin, Steven J Fowler.

For her book launch Daniela Cascella has asked artists, writers, performers, musicians to remix, rewrite, re-read the book: to use the book as raw material and to present a series of short responses in any form or medium. This event is the fourth and last in the reFMRL series, that challenges the conventional format of the book launch to work instead with the book as material presence, and to enhance the polyphonies that inhabit and form F.M.R.L. https://enabime.wordpress.com/2015/05/08/refmrl-curating-conversing-drifting/

Listening into writing, reading into writing take shape in F.M.R.L. through a collection of short texts, fragments and deranged essays, with attention to pacing and linguistic derives. An archive of books, notebooks, events and records prompts the texts in these pages, responding to encounters with Michel Leiris’s autobiographical fictions; concerts and events at Café Oto and the Swedenborg House in London; visits to museums such as the Pitt Rivers in Oxford and exhibitions such as Ice Age Art at the British Museum, among the others.

F.M.R.L. is a book constructed across sonic patterns, assonance, repetitions, comprising texts that intermittently drift from sense to sound and to nonsense and back. A flip from the immateriality of sound to the sounds of letters and words as material, a call from reading to voicing. www.zero-books.net/books/f-m-r-l

This event is produced in collaboration with SARU, Sonic Art Research Unit, Oxford Brookes University. http://www.sonicartresearch.co.uk

a year since EVP : the full Electric Dada

The Electronic Voice Phenomena was a huge watershed in my performance art, one year ago, racing up and down the UK with Ross Sutherland, Hannah Silva and co, thanks to Nathan Jones & Tom Chivers. I was never happy with the videos taken from the tour, as they captured the first performances and fragments, when I hadnt found my grove. The best stuff in Manchester, London and Bournemouth, will never see the light of day. In its stead, these 5 pieces of stumbling mauling glory.http://www.electronicvoicephenomena.net/index.php/electric-dada/ SJ Fowler Act 1 Gateshead from Mercy on Vimeo.
SJ Fowler Act 2 London from Mercy on Vimeo.
SJ Fowler Act 3 Gateshead from Mercy on Vimeo.
SJ Fowler Act 4 London from Mercy on Vimeo.
SJ Fowler Act 5 Gateshead from Mercy on Vimeo.