An internal conversation between the creator of iMMERSE!, Charlie Morrow & the producer of  iMMERSE!, bart plantenga. They’ve been working on the iMMERSE book-podcast-exhibition project for some years now & it was time to take stock of what they’ve learned & experienced... The fact is the subject of immersion, losing yourself in a context, a space, an altered consciousness remains fascinating. The podcasts are the offspring of the original iMMERSE! book ideas that came to the surface in 2019 as they reconnected after years of little to no contact. They hit upon a collaboration that continues full steam as they discover the depthless depths of immersion...

samples used

subjects: immersion, Jerome Rothenberg, dentures, under water, undertow, drowning, marching band, bass drum, Dutch coast, dunes, nostalgia, memory, birds, writing, serotonin, cymatic frequencies, silence, chewing on a bone vs gossip vs science, cochlear implant, SPL – sound pressure level, ears always exposed, mental earplugs, death, drowning, yodeling, Robert Thurman, Tibetan Buddhist Death tales, fallling dreams, lucid dreams, NY Yankees, transistor radio, Mickey Mantle, power of sound, power of words, lifeguard, echo, echo location, soak in the bathtub, enveloped in warm water, Descartes, Plato’s Cratylus, vibration, sense of smell, sight dominance, venue audio aesthetics, Kachun Yu, Halcyon Period, climate change, unstable earth, the valley as recording device, sampling, plagiarism, Beethoven was a sampler, notating folk music, Colin Turnbull, the Ik Tribe, coccoon of specialness, jingoism, the People, immersed in your own uniqueness, Infinite Distraction Syndrome IDS ...

Lotta Wennäkoski is a Finnish composer based in Helsinki. She has won praise and has been described as a lyrical Modernist and post-Expressionist.

Wennäkoski launched her career composing for radio plays and short films. Her breakthrough was her performance at the Musica Nova Helsinki festival in 1999. Her work consists of orchestral, chamber and vocal works, many of which are performed worldwide. Notable works include Sakara for orchestra (2003), the flute concerto Soie (2009), which was one of the recommended works at the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers in 2012, Verdigris for chamber orchestra (2015), commissioned by The Scottish Chamber Orchestra, & the harp concerto Sigla (2022) for Sivan Magen & the Finnish RSO, which was awarded the Gramophone Award 2023 for the contemporary music category.

Wennäkoski was the artistic director of the Tampere Biennale festival in 2008 & 2010, composer-in-residence of the Tapiola Sinfonietta in 2010–2011 & designed the program of the Avanti! Summer Sounds festival in 2017.

Meanwhile, Heikki Nikula is no slouch either. He’s a Finnish musician from Seinäjoki, a small city in the southwest of Finland. He plays numerous wind instruments, percussion & harp but is most known for his work on bass clarinet. He is one of the only proponents of the bass clarinet as solo instrument & has a special fondness for free improvisation.

He graduated from the the Sibelius Academy & joined Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra in 1991, for whom he continues to perform. He also works with the renowned Finnish chamber orchestra Avanti! & the Free Okapi ensemble. He has also performed on numerous Finnish film & series soundtracks inc. the Battle for Finland. He has recorded 2 CDs of solo music for the instrument – Hoepnadium & Piping Down the Valleys Wild. He has been a member of the Helsinki Filharmonia since 1991, & is one of the original members of the renowned Finnish chamber orchestra "Avanti!."

Sound collage backdrop: b/art & Wreck This Mess

CM Hausswolff: Immersion at the Junction of Electronics & Nature 32

"I was thinking about immersion & that word – when you become engulfed with something, when you sink into something & you feel that you are a part of something."

Carl Michael von Hausswolff [also known CM Hausswolff & personally known as Mickey] was born in Sweden in 1956. He’s unusual in that he readily admits he is a NONmusician musician, untrained in any instrument, but still able to make music with available electronic gadgets.

He is both a soundsmith & visual artist, working intuitively in the area of where sound meets light. He uses  recording devices such as the video camera, tape deck, radar, sonar. He investigates electrical currents and frequencies & how these relate to architectural space. His electronic voice phenomenon [EVP] recordings,  proposes conjuring up voices of the dead through radio signals much like Moriconi proposed. 

His work has appeared at prestigious platforms & festivals such as Manifesta, documenta, the Venice Biennale, & many others.

His list of audio and visual work is long, esoteric and intriguing with provocative titles like "800 000 Seconds in Harar," "The Wonderful World of Male Intuition," & "There Are No Crows Flying Around the Hancock Building.”

This conceptual or conjectural nation, co-created with Swedish artist, Leif Ellgren is a state of mind, an art project – that covers a great deal of territory.

Although they first met in the late-70s, they came to know each other in the 1990s, when Charlie was based in Copenhagen for a time. They met in Gothenberg at Radium, an art gallery at the time. It would later evolve into a magazine, an independent record label establish in 1983, an organization that presented a film festival, a computer music festival, screenings, and exhibitions & also had their own recording & video editing studio, which paralleled the work Charlie was doing in New York with the New Wilderness Foundation established in the Ear Inn where they hade their own studio, cassette label & magazine.

Samples Playlist

Selection of topics covered: immersion, ski slope ambience, flotation tanks, EVP, Vienna, rock ‘n’ roll, Radium label, academic training vs DIY, sine wave generators, Stin Hensen, Stockhausen, drone music, Guatarri & Deleuze, rhizomes, non-musician musicianship, nature as inspriation, MAGA, minimal music, joy of collaboration, Fripp-Eno, meeting in NY in late 70s, artfulness of life, Sweden, Lamonte Young, Steve Reich, Pansonic, oscillosopes, color field work, Lord Byron’s poetry, open to influx of information, acceptance, Sufism, Finland, Finnish Sisu or perseverance, Leif Ellegren, EVP, drones, facing fear, humility, computer music, American exceptionalism ... 

mix by b/art - Wreck This Mess

In the early 1960s, Poet & multimedia artist Gerd Stern & friends Michael Callahan & Steve Durkee founded USCO (an acronym for Us Company or the Company of Us). It became a burgeoning cooperative group of artists, poets, filmmakers, engineers, & composers who worked out of an old church in Garnerville, New York, north of NYC.

It is here that they emerged as probably the first producers of multimedia happenings, of immersive & oozing light shows, ephemeral performances that became all the rage during the height of hippie-LSD times. Part hippie, part beatnik, part Black Mountain, part Eastern mysticism, part fluxus, part political leftist, & part new music, they adhered to collective & inclusive artistic practices & preferred to work under the USCO name rather than as individual artists.

USCO utilized unique new uses for lighting, colors, projections, film, audio, & live performances to create multimedia & environmental art that included installations with slide projections, closed-circuit television, oscilloscopes, strobe lights, amplifiers, early IBM computers, live performances. This culminate most famously in the Expanded Cinema Festival & Timothy Leary’s Psychedelic Theater & the first multimedia disco called Murray the K’s World that incorporated immersive technology & ideas, allowing audiences – many of whom may have been tripping – to feel as if they were entering a new, immersive,  sensory realm.

They’ve performed or exhibited at many great museums, universities & venues including the van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum, Tate Liverpool, Pompidou Center, MIT, & RISDI. The USCO Church was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2016.

I first met Gerd in the 20th Century. Born in Germany in 1928, he emigrated with his parents to the US as a refugee in 1936.  Gerd & started crossing paths in New York City in the 1960s.  We  discovered common ground at a Phill Niblock loft concert in the 1990s. He asked me to write music & sound design for his play, “Lost Cabaret” or “Katandogastrophic,” produced for the 2003 New York Fringe Festival. I asked Gerd to create  poetry for a 3D sound work Sky High. It is included in this iMMERSE! podcast.

Playlist mix by Wreck This Mess

When Then • USCO

mix by b/art - Wreck This Mess

“I define immersive as the first time I realized that there was a bigger universe than my daily life.” 

David First is a many-sided composer-musician having played in Dead Cheese, a hippie guitar band in his youth, performed with Cecil Taylor in Carnegie Hall, produced many records of minimalist drone music some of which were released on Phill Niblockʼs XI label, he’s played in rowdy bar bands, led the no-wavish band the Notekillers, which had a significant influence on Sonic Youth and he has even conducted a Mummerʼs String Band in various Philly parades. The Village Voice once described him as "a bizarre cross between Hendrix and La Monte Young."

He’s performed at most of the avant garde’s hallowed halls including The Kitchen, Bang On A Can, Central Park Summerstage, The Knitting Factory, Tonic, the Deep Listening Institute, CBGBʼs as well as De Ijsbreker in Amsterdam and many festivals throughout Europe. 

Samples Playlist

Subjects touched upon: drones, bar bands, rock & roll bands, Lamonte Young, Dave’s Waves, Sunview Luncheonette Greenpoint, psychedelic revolution, poet Jerome Rothenberg, bending notes, Douglas Kahn, minimalist tendencies, free jazz, world music, Meteor Crater AZ, the heavens, the Kitchen, Phill Niblock, guitar, oscillators, signal generators, Muddy Waters, electronic music, Dennis Sandole, Hermann von Helmholtz, ancient voltaic cells, Harry Partch, Charles Ives, the minor third, blues, Gert Stern, new age, pseudo-science, Schumann resonances, improv, Discman, electrical engineer father, heterodyning, pursuit of magic, Canal Street ... 

mix by b/art - Wreck This Mess

Robin Sip as a Dutch writer-producer-director and CEO of Mirage3DRobin is best known for productions like Mars 1001, Dinosaurs at Dusk, Origins of Life, Natural Selection & Dawn of the Space Age, which was the world’s first 3D fulldome film. Sip is also an award-winning pioneer of special venue 3D cinema & his Mirage3D is a leading fulldome-VR producer, having produced some 20 fulldome shows.

He began his professional life as a computer engineer, moved on to become a 3D modeler, & eventually, a writer-director. More recently, he has focused His is on the improvement of live action capture for domes, with the design of new camera rigs for films & fulldome-VR productions.

I met Robin over a decade ago in Denver, Colorado when his work was featured by Dan Neefus in the Gates Planetarium at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Since then, we’ve collaborated on the creation of the Planetarium version of the feature documentary Moonwalk One on the anniversary of Apollo 11. It has my music & Sound by Robin.

Topics discussed: 

mix by b/art - Wreck This Mess

Phill Niblock migrated to New York after completing a BA in economics at Indiana University, determined to pursue his passions: photography and film, often documenting jazz and modern dance performances. [Playlist below]

But, despite having no formal musical training, he soon found himself inspired by the New York music scene and immersed himself in experimental music, specifically loud sound, microtonal work, minimalism, and drones, producing works of often epic length. Fifty years later we can see how influential he has been in these genres with his copious output of records, videos and films and having won numerous awards along the way. 

He has served as director of the Experimental Intermedia foundation for avant-garde music since 1985 and curates the record label XI. Niblock’s films includes a series called The Movement of People Working, which features workers at work in mostly rural setting worldwide.

Niblock has often collaborated with musicians, which include David First, Lee Renaldo, Thurston Moore, Susan Stenger, Al Margolis, and David Soldier as well as with me. 

He just turned 90. He and I first connected in the 1970s when he attended Rhys Chatham’s presentation of my Spirit Voices in the Kitchen of the Broadway Central Hotel. He invited me to perform at his loft in Chinatown where he had just begin what has become a historic series. He came to my home sound studio on West End Avenue and West 77th Street for a session. I engineered and removed all the pauses from his solo cello work, making it a drone work. Phill's sunsets shone in our 1987 International TV Solstice. His Glittering Stream graced our Winter Solstice Celebration 2020. 

Topics discussed by Morrow and Niblock: immersion, Lenny Tristan, Empress Dowager Cixi, China, rule of thirds, photography, high fidelity, history of hifi, speakers, dark room techniques, New York City water, performances, listening to records as immersion, tenement life, Mingus, Ellington, Monk, alcoholism, loops, file storage, loud sound, tech and gear, sound editing, reel to reel, archives, old trains, wire recorders ...

Vitiello, a New York native, is an internationally recognized sound artist and mainstay of the New York scene since his early days as a punk guitarist.  He has been influenced by Nam June Paik, has collaborated with Scanner, Pauline Oliveros and Frances-Marie Utti. He is also an electronic musician and visual artist. And, according to Morrow, “an absolute Geiger Counter for places.”

In 1999 he did a residency at the World Trade Center managing to capture the Towers’s swaying in the wind and recorded the creaking and cracking of the building’s skeleton. He has produced countless recordings on various labels such as Sub Rosa and has had many solo exhibitions that combine sound,  installations, photos and drawings at museums and galleries and has been part of many Group shows including Soundings: Contemporary Score at MOMA, the Whitney and the Sydney Biennale. Vitiello serves as a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in the Kinetic Imaging department.

I met Stephen in the 1980s. We worked together on Nam Jun Paik’s Zapping for Swatch watch. Then on some of Paik’s soundtracks, including "Did George Sand Kill Chopin." Stephen curated the show,  New Sounds New York, for the Kitchen in New York. It included the New York unveiling of my patended 3D soundcube with series of commissioned works including his most evocative, “Cinematic, With Crashing Roof,” one of 12 designed for the cube by an array of artists.

Samples Playlist

Pierre Brand began sound mixing and editing for film in 1994 and has made a name for himself on feature films such as Ghosted and Trial by Fire and on international documentaries of note such as Blue Note A story of Modern Jazz, Absolute Warhola, Wildnis Europa and The Hunt for Gaddafi's Billions.

He attended the Berklee College of Music and currently works out of his Primetime Studio in Hamburg He has collaborated with me on planetarium installations using MorrowSound software. We work together on the International Planetarium Society immersive sound committee, which has created a survey on sound practise in Planetariums. 

Playlist iMMERSE! Podcast 26

excerpts of Charlie Morrow trax & examples of Pierre Brand’s sound mixing 

The Fire  Trial by Fire (Henry Jackman) • Pierre Brand

This is a summer interlude, a special remixed iMMERSE! version of the summer of 2022 broadcast of the Wreck This Mess radio show: Wreck the Drowning World 1249 & serves as a reaction to the countless 2023 summer climate catastrophes that have hit far & wide – including the iMMERSE! & Charlie Morrow archive & headquarters in Vermont.

I’ve been researching flooding & other climate crisis extreme weather globally – & notice that governments, companies & individuals talk the talk, especially for the cameras where their self-aggrandizing lies sound genuine until out of view, companies are dumping harmful chemicals into the waterways & individuals are  still buying Hummers, dumping their garbage on the streets under cover of night.  They hold onto their entitled pleasure & comfort-driven habits as if there is no tomorrow.

Electronic music + rain + water & sea + Gavin Bryars “Titanic,” global flooding news  + leftist analyses  + audiobook citations from JG Ballard’s THE DROWNED WORLD to create a mesmerizing sonic pool of beguiling beauty upon which floats the nauseating & heart-wrenching news.

Excerpts :: Base inTRO2final • Charlie Morrow vs bart / Emptied spaces • def / 24H 48 Demo Water  Morrow & Remes / Atlantis • nthng / Svalor • Purl / fld-001.2 rain • .foundation / Ten Years of Rainy Autumn • Raflum / Cool Watery Depths • Rod Modell / FEAR FLOOD • B/art / Relaxing ocean waves & beautiful misty beach • OnSite / Butterfly Remix • Halftribe vs Warmth / Falling Mountain • Mount Maxwell / Sea • Delia Derbyshire / Oceanima • Purl /Warm Rain & Sleepy Water • KeepSleep / Cool Cool Water Alt Mix • Beach Boys / Spring Helsinki • Charlie Morrow / Cool Cool Water • Slim Whitman / Swamp Island Remix • Echo Box vs Volunteer / WHALESONG • DF Tram / Something in the Water • Mt Eden Dubstep & Khadafi Dub /  Hold Dearly • Fuubutsushi / Space 1.8 • Nala Sinephro • WATER • Beat Pharmacy vs Mutabaruka / Waves Coming In, Surf, Seashore • Charlie Morrow / Walking Waves • Miruga / Lights In Window • 110ml / Out of Source • Alphaxone / Drowned World • JG Ballard / Endless Imbalance • Addex / Mind Bypassed • Respira / Floating • Lauge / Floating World • Anne Lockwood / Cascade (The Deluge) • William Basinski / Water Drums • Union Jack + Baka Pygmies / Thirsty • Orb vs Lee Scratch Perry / On Second Thoughts • Halftribe / Wishing Well • Julianna Barwick / fld-001.1 • .foundation / Last Hymn Sinking of the Titanic • Gavin Bryars

LISTEN to the original expansive version: https://www.mixcloud.com/wreckthismess/wreck-the-drowning-world-1249/