cantaudio | catalogue | 001-025

Below is a list of the first 25 cantaudio works, all of which are free of charge with postage to be paid for where possible. Email a.dunn@leedsbeckett.ac.uk for details.


cantaudio001
January 2003
CDR, edition 31

everything you hope from ...
Excerpts from Guided by Voices' Everywhere with helicopter, Mick Harvey's full-blooded intro to The Birthday Party's Sonny's Burning, the post-Temptation drum sound of New Order's Blue Monday, the mid-80s Spectorisms of The Jesus & Mary Chain's Just like honey and field recordings made on a Pontefract to Scarborough helicopter flight.

cantaudio002
June 2003
CDR, edition 25

will tear us apart
Covers of the Joy Division song with the word love removed, 10,000 Maniacs and The Cure, spliced up versions by William Burroughs, Public Enemy and the Beach Boys, New Order's first ever live version of it, on the anniversay of Curtis' suicide, reversed and slowed to 72% and layered with Springsteen's My Father's House. Gifs and images of hanging.

cantaudio003
August 2003
CDR, edition 18

LICHTH(OF) FIRE
Kurt Cobain reworked to sing about the Loch Ness Monster, from an idea originally on cassette for a 1998 exhibition in Cologne's Lichthof der VHS. Contributions from the Loch Ness Monster, Jad Fair, The Alexander Brothers, Courtney Love, Rangers FC, Bikini Kill, Dead Kennedys, Altered Images, Kathleen Hanna, Girls Against Boys and The Velvet Underground.

"Sometimes we have to shut up to listen to others and sometimes we have to make noise to silence others." (Dunn, A., 2012 The sounds of ideas forming, PhD, p44).


cantaudio004
November 2003
CDR, edition 18

grayven
Produced under the influence of the anti-smoking drug Zyban, and a precursor to Grey is the colour of hope. Be careful, a friend warned, Zyban will remove the edge from your creativity, making everything cloudy and grey. grayven examines creative uses of the notion of grey going back to the Old Testament and Shakespeare. It's grim up north. Also inspired by another chat with Pavel, at the Baldessari Cornerhouse opening, about going back to buy vinyl from the year before your first record purchase, when music isn't a product to own but rather a cloud of soundwaves. For me, this is 1979 and LPs such as The Stranglers' The Raven.

cantaudio005
January 2004
CDR, edition 18

faith:drunk:leap:rage
Was blind, now I see. A prototype for tunnelblind, thinking about the use of blindness in sound, as heightening the sonic, as the darkness from which to emerge and as ignorance. Contains the almost legendary and inspired mix of Melt Banana's I hate it! with every mention of the word Rooney from the England-Denmark BBC commentary. Produced in Helsinki and St.Petersburg while listening to Guided by Voices.

cantaudio006
February 2004
CDR, edition 200

SAMPLER
Given away during the Bluecoat exhibition Put your hands where we can see them to accompany the infamous Rooney billboard. Of all the artists in that show, I am the only one who didn't leave. Those who have received cantaudio works to date: Bryan Biggs, Lewis Biggs, Alex Dempster, Paul Domela, Bill Drummond, Douglas Gordon, Clive Gilman, Becky Shaw, Kelly Large, Maria Stukoff, Maria Brewster, Bernadette McGrath, Roger McKinley, Chris Watson, Jeff Young, Kelly Large, John Young, Pavel Büchler, Philip Jeck, Tom Cullen, Duncan Hamilton, Paul Sullivan, Marie-Anne McQuay, Colin Fallows, Roger Hill, Alfons Schilling, Tommi Grünland & Petteri Nisunen, Charles Esche, Otto Berchem, Nick Crowe, Graham Parker and Steve Renshaw.

"During the past decade, it became possible to summon up and command almost any sound as the soundtrack to our everyday lives. Why exactly has this happened with sound? Reynolds suggests that it is all part of a dissolution of community. It is driven by the 'i' generation that asocially blocks out the real world and demands the right to listen to anything, anywhere, anytime. Flanagan instead suggests that a dearth of revolutionary new movements in sound has left a vacuum filled by the encounter itself. He writes: "musical trends are now shaped more by delivery systems than by any act. The next … Beatles may be a technology." (p19)


(    )audio007
March 2004
CDR, edition 13

canny
(    ) get no satisfaction, just (    ) get enough, (    ) take my eyes off you, (    ) buy me love. Remove the word (    ). Includes recordings from the Mersey Tunnel as an audio advance of Soundtrack for a Mersey Tunnel. Cover image is the house across from 60 Canning Street, moments after a grenade is thrown through the door. Time to use that Mersey Tunnel and find a house over the water.

cantaudio008
May 2004
CDR, edition 22

hungary
A five-section imagination of Gloomy Sunday, the Hungarian 'suicide song' once banned by the BBC. Produced on the cusp of moving over the water, hungary includes many of cantaudio's most canny moments including Einstürzende Neubauten's Headcleaner fused with Norah Jones' Sunrise, Ricky Nelson's rare version, The Velvet Underground's Sunday Morning woven inside Carmen McRae's Gloomy Sunday, the emergence of the character called Christine and thirteen one-second compositions originally presented at Greatest Bits alongside Karl Bartos.

cantaudio009
August 2004
CDR, edition 13

full smiles of the deceased
In Off The Wall Calvin Tomkins recounts the period in the 50s in which Robert Rauschenberg produces as many as 50 new works a day. There is beauty in prolific, sustained periods of fertile high-octane creativity. Between 1983-2004 Dayton band Guided By Voices produce around 80 LPs. In August 2004, they release their final LP half smiles of the decomposed. Liz Clayton writes of them “It seems like every song of yours is real short but that’s the good part. In many bands you know, you’ve got a long song, and then there’s a good part here and a good part there. And Guided By Voices songs are just, they are the good part, and then it’s over.” In tribute to the band, full smiles of the deceased is a collection of sixty-eight favourite GBV riffs, snippets, beats, moments, echoes and throwaway lines. The best bits from the best bits.

cantaudio010
September 2004
CDR, edition 100

TASTER
A preview of SIDVICIOUS given away for free during the Assembly group show in the Liverpool Biennial, a 30-minute rumination on The Lord's Prayer and the use of religious imagery in post-1967 pop.

cantaudio011
October 2004
CDR, edition 20

SIDVICIOUS
A cantaudio classic. The work begins by imagining what the infamous Siouxsie, Sid and Marco Pirroni version of The Lord's Prayer represents. SIDVICIOUS captures some big names reciting the prayer, from Sinatra to Presley (with giggles), Mahalia Jackson, Marvin Gaye, Art Garfunkel, Jim Reeves, Barbara Streisand, David Bowie and The Beach Boys, before revealing rare recordings of that very first Siouxsie version.

cantaudio012
January 2005
CDR, edition 18

leaves
Not only did we leave Liverpool for across the water, and the artists from the Bluecoat show left (Duncan, Padraig, Clive, Becky, Ste, Kelly) but folk started leaving FACT, one year into a new building. My 'leaving comps' became legendary (will release Bernie's one day) and leaves is a sad work, stretching only two lines (all my bags are packed, I'm ready to go) from the nearly-Monkee Denver out to 55-minutes.

Kim-Cohen writes about the verb to record as a curious composition of which 'the prefix re means 'again' or suggests a backwards movement. The root 'cor' comes from the Latin for the heart (“le coeur"). To record, then, is to encounter the heart again or to move back to the heart. The romantic implication is that a recording captures and replays the heart of its source.' (p32)


cantaudio013
March 2005
CDR, edition 500

36 compositions for a Woolton jukebox
A collaborative work with Jeff Young from a residency in Woolton in south Liverpool, supporting the installation of Vong Phaophonit and Claire Oboussier's Outhouse glass public artwork. We spoke to locals about glass, transparency, fear and fantasy. We found a gravestone with 'Eleanor Rigby' on it, by the church whose reverend revealed he was Bob Paisley's son and we met a very middle class lady who confessed her lifelong fantasy to smash bus shelter glass. We contacted Pilkington Glass' test facility and made her dream come true.

cantaudio014
July 2005
CDR, edition 15

theend
An 11-track walk around the edges of The Doors' The End from 1967 and the life of Diego Armando Maradona which begins at the very start of the same decade. cantaudio is license to throw up some possible connections between sound art and the everyday, the avant-garde and the popular, all situated in the tunnels described in Paul Morley's Words and Music between Alvin Lucier and Kylie Minogue. This is a fertive time, and I form the idea of a group called 67projects on the premise that I have 67 good projects in me in a lifetime. While working on theend I go to the opening of the Summer of Love exhibition at Tate Liverpool. "It's just like 1967" someone grins. The PV is the day after Liverpool beat AC Milan in Istanbul and the city is awash with red. "It's just like 1977" someone cries ...

cantaudio015
July 2005
CDR, edition 10

midsentence
Produced for playback at Futuresonic in Manchester. Deceptively simple, midsentence splices the very beginning with the very end of various obscure and popular songs. It emerges from thinking about iTunes' ability to chop off the beginning and end of songs to fade them into one continuous (dancefloor) mix. FUCK DANCE.

cantaudio016
January 2006
CDR, edition 11

resolusshhhhhhhh
Born of frustration at 9RPM parts 1 and 2 not being finished. It is New Year. No time for whole songs. resolusshhhhhhhh scoops up every fragment from the cutting room floor, locks itself in a room for one hour and weaves together snatches from a whole bundle of disparate songs. Earworms and notes to self. Make resolutions. Use the rockabilly of Dorsey Burnette. Explore Metal Machine Music and the sound of revolution. Expore the sound of Rangers vs Celtic. Explore People get ready and Alan Bennett.

"In 1968 John Lennon and Yoko Ono take the second half of the song Revolution (1968) and extend it with tape loops and live radio feeds to create Revolution 9. Quantick describes Revolution 9 as "literally subversive, an avant-garde recording that can be found in millions of houses, apartments, wine bars and other settings." In 1971 Lennon himself refers to it as "an unconscious picture of what I actually think will happen when it happens; that was just like a drawing of revolution." Revolution 9 is a collage of spoken word, library recordings and backward sounds, but it does not contain the word 'revolution'." (p26)


cantaudio017
February 2006
CDR, edition 19

9RPM-1
The beginnings of the revolution series that continues to this day. It is also the beginnings of 67projects and DELETER (listed in the un-numbered section) with 9RPM-1 containing a Philip Jeck remix of DELETER. 9RPM-1 starts to unpick The Beatles' Revolution 9 from all angles, as collage, as audio action painting, as Trojan Horse of the avant-garde into living rooms, as anti-social behaviour and as Yoko Ono. Comes in white double-DVD box with free Dorsey Burnette postcard.

cantaudio018
May 2006
CDR, edition 19

9RPM-2
500 uses of the word 'revolution' carefully extracted from popular music and strung together. Tracks 1 and 2 are presented through a surround-sound system at FACT on 27 May 2006 (I say: "the revolutions swarm around your head like packs of insects"), commissioned by Rogue Wave, with thanks to Tim Lambert. Of the 500 uses, I start to criss-cross the obvious with the less so, covering Hendrix, Spice Girls, Robert Wyatt, Kylie, The Police, Earth Wind & Fire, Duran Duran, Billy Bragg, Rolling Stones, Dylan and Public Enemy. 9RPM-2 also contains the classic bastardisation of Bloody Revolutions by Crass and The Revolution by Chris de Burgh as Crass de Burgh. Comes with free 9RPM badge.

cantaudio019
May 2006
CDR, edition 19

revilation
A proposed compilation included with 9RPM-2, featuring material on which no permissions were sought: Paul Revere & The Raiders radio advert, Charles Bronson, Pete Seeger, Bob Marley, Guided by Voices, DJ Vadim, Phil Ochs, Pantera, Rico Garcia, Sarah Marlowe and Robyn Hitchcock. Some of these artists will give permission three years later for Artists' uses of the word revolution.

cantaudio020
October 2006
CDR, edition 16

maniche
A projection of what Metal Machine Music is made of, from disgustingly grumpy Lou Reed interviews to domestic violence, Berlin, Maniche and the critic-artist relationship. Four 16-minute parts mirror the original plus a bonus Life's short, too in which I put out an open call to Sound Network for 16-second tracks but only give a 16-hour gap until deadline, a tactic that I re-employ for Artists' uses of the word revolution. The maniche website includes this self-interview.

"When I am in music class at the age of 12, our teacher Miss Scott allows pupil Graeme Ainslie to bring in some music to play. Ainslie chooses not only the sublime pop of the Velvet Underground's Pale Blue Eyes but also their atonal Black Angel's Death Song. His act of irreverence sets off a complex set of questions in my mind around the connections between two sounds from the one band. Pale Blue Eyes is new, but familiar to someone brought up on chart music or rock'n'roll. Black Angel's Death Song is not. Further research reveals expressions such as experimental, feedback, La Monte Young and avant-garde. In the classroom, an affirmation of a duality has occurred. It is a conceptual space between pop (Pale Blue Eyes and Andy Warhol) and anything else that is, in the words of Morley, "not designed with the thought of creating a soundtrack to youthful energy." It is somewhere between the Velvet Underground's more avant-garde member John Cale and Warhol, between Cale and Lou Reed, fresh from the pop song factory and between Lennon and McCartney." (p17)


cantaudio021
January 2007
CDR, edition 12

9RPM-3
Start a new year with another re(s)(v)olution, edition of 12 for the 12 months ahead. 9RPM-3 is a monster 6xCD opus in heavy black DVD cases with vinyl text and spray-painted discs. Images of Jane Fonda, hanging. 9RPM-3 includes the legendary Returning the screw of slowed down versions of slow cover versions, so loved by Berlin's RADIO ON nearly ten years later. Revolution and liberation. There is a track on 9RPM-3 composed with the speakers off, never hearing it then or since, an experiment in blind (deaf) curating. Also included is Arnold Circus and 800RPM (more details of both in un-numbered).

cantaudio022
July 2007
CDR, edition 15

gallas
In 1968, Johnny Cash recorded a version of the gallows song 25 minutes to go in Folsom Prison. Of the 25 lines, he sang only 20. I found a Cash soundalike and wrote 5 new lines for him to record. While working on gallas I walked into my local Shelter and saw a bundle of obscure Cash LPs. I cut up each sleeve for the sleeves of gallas, exorcising some vinyl demons.

cantaudio023
July 2007
12", edition 20

rev999
Vinyl demons gone, cantaudio moves into vinyl. 999 uses of the word 'revolution' are sequenced together and pressed on to dubplates. Labels and sleeves collaged from cut 7" sleeves.

cantaudio024
September 2007
12", edition 25

mistribution
Short recordings of someone at the counters of HMV and Virgin asking for anything by Guided by Voices or Einstürzende Neubauten. Staff cite "lack of space" or "lack of sales" as excuses for not stocking ANY content by either band, thus denying a whole generation in Liverpool the opportunity to find their own Helikopter-Streichquartett. Presented at Binary Jam at View Two Gallery in Matthew Street (yes, The Cavern one), with thanks to Markus Soukup.

cantaudio025
November 2007
online artwork, edition n/a

obscurer2
CD demons gone, cantaudio moves into online soundwork (without sound). obscurer2 is on a fantastical format that doesn't exist, featuring sounds that pre-date recording equipment, glitches and mathematics that don't make sense, all heard in themed hotel rooms with no official ending.



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cantaudio catalogue | 026-049

cantaudio catalogue | un-numbered