Current issue

The Sound Projector Music Magazine 26th Issue
Published September 2022

After a three-year gap, here’s the latest issue. At 292 pages, the longest issue yet. This time we opted for high-quality printing on good quality paper, so the blacks are nice and sharp. Perfect bound paperback with matte covers. It’s also quite highly priced, reflecting the number of pages, the improved printing, and the general increase in prices of everything. But, if you only buy one music book this year…

“What a magnificent publication! Surely it is much, much more than a magazine. It is a catalogue; a survey of the richness of music today. It is a whole library of information about who is making music and how they make it. It covers such vast territory: it is not limited to a particular approach or a style or a genre. The writing is informative and passionate and not at all obscure. It arouses curiosity and invites the reader to explore further and to become involved. Sterling work, Ed. Hearty congratulations.” – Robert Worby

Interviews

Robert Worby of Langham Research Centre, composer and performer and also a presenter for BBC Radio 3. Read about his meetings with Michael Nyman and John Cage, and his ideas about musique concrète, modernism, brutalist architecture, and graphic scores. For post-punk fans, Worby was also a member of The Distributors and The Mekons.

RW: “We tend to overlook the fact that the loudspeaker turns electricity into sound, that’s what it does, and a microphone does the reverse of that. It turns sound into electricity, and once it’s electricity, there’s all kinds of things that can be done with the sound – it can be stored on tape, they can be processed using electronics and stuff, it can be filtered, all kinds of things can be done with it. And then the loudspeaker turns the electricity back into sound. We haven’t really moved on from that; there’s no other way.”

Julien Ottavi, French composer and performer, talks about the Formanex ensemble, group improvisation, members of AMM, and graphic scores. Plus noise, sound art, process art, computers…and why being anti-copyright is an effective way to strike a blow against modern capitalism.

JO: “This is mainly my trouble with copyright music, it’s not music or the artists but the business behind it. In France for example this corporation makes a huge amount of money without a public control on their benefits, it is catastrophic for most of the artists who joined it. After that I personally don’t believe it for my own music because this is not why artists like us make music. It doesn’t get better with the rise of online music streaming industries, and the solution for many artists with Creative Commons, Art Libre, GNuArt and many others copyleft licence, it hasn’t really been an issue for me for years.”

Matt Weston, the American composer, drummer, and electro-acoustic performer. He talks about studying under jazz great Bill Dixon, plus his background as a social activist, and invader of abandoned buildings. Also the language of jazz and improvisation, and his love of Jerry Lewis movies.

MW: “Bill Dixon defined composition as “the assembling of musical materials into a new order,” and improvisation as “the instantaneous realization of composition without the benefit, or detriment, of being able to change or alter anything.” As such, I’ve always felt that all music is improvised – you can’t play the same thing the same way, or in the same time/space, twice – and that all improvisation is composition.”

Bill Thompson – droning solo guitarist talks about modernist composition, use of graphical scores, the Moog guitar, and his ongoing Blackout project.

BT: “With regard to my work, I wouldn’t consider myself a minimalist as most people associate that with the repetitive, tonal, phase orientated aesthetic of Reich, Glass and Riley. That said, Reich’s early tape loop pieces were a huge influence on me when I started out and I still find myself exploring ideas related to these works (exploiting hardware in unintended ways, foregrounding process and emergence, incorporating psychoacoustics etc.)”

Drawings and collages for this issue are by Stephen Woolley (of Joined By Wire).

Contributing writers: Jennifer Hor, Steve Pescott, Stuart Marshall, Paul Khimasia Morgan, and Ian Sherred.

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Record reviews arranged in the usual idiosyncratic sections, with all names fully indexed in the back. Preview of the table of contents below.