Sigur Rós's Heima: An Icelandic Psychogeography

This paper examines the sonic geography of the Icelandic ambient rock group Sigur Rós with particular reference to their documentary film Heima, which documents a tour the group made of remote places in their home country. Known for causing some people to faint or burst into tears during their concerts, Sigur Rós’s music could be said to express sonically both the isolation of their Icelandic location and to induce a feeling of hermetic isolation in the listener through the climactic and melodic intensity of their sound. This is distinguished by lead guitarist Jónsi Birgisson’s falsetto vocals and Gibson Les Paul guitar played through reverb with a well-resined cello bow, heavily amplified drums, and the use of various types of keyboards, including church organ, minimally emphatic bass, and an all-female string section called Anima who play instruments such as xylophone, celeste, a glass of water, a musical saw and a laptop. Singing both in Icelandic and an invented language called Hopelandic (vonlenska), Jónsi, who is gay and blind in one eye, channels a striking form of glossolalia in his vocals which links the group’s music to ambient rock predecessors such as the Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance. As Edward D. Miller has stated, ‘Glossolalia reveals the tension between voice and signification, and exposes the communicativeness of sounds itself. The casual listener to Sigur Rós easily becomes an involved one. S/he is listening to made up words and in accepting the meaning of their arrangement in a melody, imagines what the lyrics might mean. This dual dynamic creates a strong emotional correspondence between the band and its listener’ (2003: 8). The group acknowledges a strong degree of Icelandic animism in their music – they have referred to ‘the presence of mortality’ in the Icelandic landscape, and their links to stories, sagas, magic and ritual in a remote country where ‘the majority of the population believes in elves and power spots … the invisible world is always with us’ (Young 2001:33). In their music they create geomorphic soundscapes which transport the active listener into an imaginary world. As bass player Georg Holm, who is demophobic, has stated, ‘we provide the colours and the frame and you paint the picture’ (Zuel 2005). This paper mobilises Barthes’ ‘jouissance’, Michael Bull’s work on personal stereos, and Daniel Grimley’s work on music and Nordic identity along with various notions of musical affect to discuss relations between Sigur Rós’s music, arctic landscape and its resonances outside Scandinavia

Music and the Production of Place: Introduction

Introductio

Terpsichorean Architecture: Guest Editor’s Introduction

‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture – it’s a really stupid thing to want to do,’ is a statement usually attributed to Elvis Costello in Musician magazine No. 60 (October 1983, 52), which has long been quoted as evidence of the impossibility of writing adequately about the processes of producing and listening to music. Leaving aside the fact that Costello has denied he ever said it, and it has been mistakenly attributed to a number of other musicians over the years, including Laurie Anderson, David Byrne and Frank Zappa (who actually said ‘rock journalism is people who can't write, preparing stories based on interviews with people who can't talk, in order to amuse people who can't read’), this special journal issue sets out to prove the contrary. The papers in this special issue draw on evidence of the volume of important writing that exists about all forms of music, in academic, journalistic and creative fields, and discuss different ways in which music has been ‘translated’ into language. The English jazz writer Paul Savage, for example, describing the music of John Coltrane, refers to ‘a musical monument like that feat of terpsichorean architecture Giant Steps’. And in a 2004 issue of the Architectural Review (vol. 216, August) entitled ‘Terpsichore and the Architects,’ Simon Goldhill notes that in ancient Greek theatre, ‘the chorus danced the architecture of the theatrical space into being’ and ‘the dancer was a storyteller whose body told a story, like a sculpture coming alive or a mobile embodiment of tradition.’ Choreographer Siobhan Davies speaks of the dancer building ‘an inner architecture with volume, texture and rhythm, which allows you to slice up space … Classical ballet and classical architecture share proportion, grandeur, and the idea of being at the centre of the universe … Light and acoustics are very important in dance and architecture: we have to consider how we introduce light to form and how we hear ourselves live in that form.’ This special issue, guest edited by Tony Mitchell, University of Technology Sydney, contains papers that discuss a wide range of different modes and forms of music and music writing in all fields, and in many parts of the world, from a perspective of history, performance, and architecture (including ‘natural’ architectural forms)

Migration, Memory and Hong Kong as a 'Space of Transit' in Clara Law's Autumn Moon

Macau-born and Melbourne-based film maker Clara Law and her screenwriter-producer-director husband Eddie Fong have produced a transnational output of films which are beginning to receive critical recognition as major contributions to contemporary cinema. These ‘films of migration’ explore what Gina Marchetti has encapsulated as ‘the Chinese experience of dislocation, relocation, emigration, immigration, cultural hybridity, migrancy, exile, and nomadism—together termed the “Chinese diaspora”’. The self-imposed ‘relocation’ of Law and Fong to Australia in 1994 was the result of increasing frustration with the rampantly commercial imperatives of Hong Kong cinema and its lack of appreciation for the auteur cinema they wanted to pursue

Mapping Australian Music. Review Essay

Review Essa

Recommending Learning Algorithms and Their Associated Hyperparameters

The success of machine learning on a given task dependson, among other things, which learning algorithm is selected and its associated hyperparameters. Selecting an appropriate learning algorithm and setting its hyperparameters for a given data set can be a challenging task, especially for users who are not experts in machine learning. Previous work has examined using meta-features to predict which learning algorithm and hyperparameters should be used. However, choosing a set of meta-features that are predictive of algorithm performance is difficult. Here, we propose to apply collaborative filtering techniques to learning algorithm and hyperparameter selection, and find that doing so avoids determining which meta-features to use and outperforms traditional meta-learning approaches in many cases.Comment: Short paper--2 pages, 2 table

Local Currencies in Community Development or Too Much Mngwotngwotiki Is Bad For You

This useful resource guide for trainers and community activists discusses alternative currencies as part of creating alternative economic systems at the local level. The guide includes a case study of HOURS in Ithaca, New York and a discussion of the scripts and LETS alternative currency systems and their usefulness to community-development. The Tangu people of New Guinea have a word for what occurs between people when they temporarily suspend their sense of obligation to one another. It is mngwotngwotiki (pronounced nig-what-gwoh-teekee). This study of local currency systems counters too much mngwotngwotiki by offering a concrete way to develop a sense of care and mutual obligation that forms the cornerstone of healthy communities. In Local Currencies in Community Development, Savdie and Cohen-Mitchell have made an important contribution to the literature on local currency systems by clearly situating their study within the context of community development. An overview and history of alternative currency systems by clearly situating their study within the context of community development. An overview and history of alternative currency systems, along with an engaging case study of HOURS in Ithaca, New York and a look at related critical issues such as gender, poverty and ideological diversity make this book a valuable resource for practitioners and educators committed to community development from the ground up

Exploring the Relationship between Big-Box Retail and Consumer Travel Demand in the Greater Toronto Area

Canada’s retail landscape has been structurally transformed by the widespread development of large format (big-box) retail since the mid-1990s. Emphasis placed on convenience, price, and auto-based accessibility, coupled with design elements of big-box agglomerations has produced new modes of consumer retail interaction. In view of these recent changes, it is surprising that little effort has been extended to studying the transportation impacts of big-box retail. This paper explores the relationship between consumer travel behaviour and the expansion of large format retail facilities within Canada’s largest metropolitan region, the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Data have been drawn from the 1996 and 2001 Transportation Tomorrow Surveys (TTS) and combined with a longitudinal retail structural database. Regional travel flows and “big-box” case studies suggest considerable auto-dependence for shopping activities, particularly in the suburban cities of the GTA. Rising retail capacity at case study locations appears to have been matched by a dramatic increase in auto-based shopping travel. Evidence from this research points to a potential gap between consumer activities and the prevailing sustainability objectives of transport and land use policy initiatives

Rauzy fractals of random substitutions

We develop a theory of Rauzy fractals for random substitutions, which are a generalisation of deterministic substitutions where the substituted image of a letter is determined by a Markov process. We show that a Rauzy fractal can be associated with a given random substitution in a canonical manner, under natural assumptions on the random substitution. Further, we show the existence of a natural measure supported on the Rauzy fractal, which we call the Rauzy measure, that captures geometric and dynamical information. We provide several different constructions for the Rauzy fractal and Rauzy measure, which we show coincide, and ascertain various analytic, dynamical and geometric properties. While the Rauzy fractal is independent of the choice of (non-degenerate) probabilities assigned to a given random substitution, the Rauzy measure captures the explicit choice of probabilities. Moreover, Rauzy measures vary continuously with the choice of probabilities, thus provide a natural means of interpolating between Rauzy fractals of deterministic substitutions