also refer to the two major interviews he has given to Philip Sherburne [Surface Magazine, USA] and Barry Nichols, which can be found here
Various Artists
Spire: Live in Geneva Cathedral
(Touch 2005)
Format: 2 x CD in folder with booklet
Designer: Jon Wozencroft
It’s been a while since we featured any of Mr Wozencroft’s work and he is still ploughing his unique furrow beautifully. There are some great details on this double CD of live recordings of organ music old and new, which included performances by Charles Matthews, Phillip Davidson, BJ Nilsen, Phillip Jeck and Christian Fennesz,. The two CDs and booklet come in a printed card folder, and one of those details is that the outside is uncoated, the inside is smooth and coated. Another is that the dot on the ‘i’ in Spire has been replaced with an asterisk. The front cover features not only the title but the track listing which is, like the rest of the type, all in the same face (Clarendon?). I like the way he sidesteps anything obviously related to a cathedral and the cover photo appears to be just a meadow and some trees hiding a house, until you notice a few gravestones peeking over the grass. On the back, some apparently unrelated winter woodlands, a beautiful shot. Open the folder to find 2 images on the flap. The upper is of sheep grazing in a field that’s laced with scores of their tracks worn into the grass. Below it, a very low-light shot of an extremely crowded graveyard. Inside a pouch opposite we have the colour booklet, printed on a stiff uncoated stock, and two CDs in simple blank white slip sleeves. On the booklet cover, nine sheep on a sunny winter’s day, most alert and looking into the camera. I got the ‘sheep’ idea but it took a few seconds before ‘flock’ and its more positive connotations came to mind; I started looking a little closer, and thinking about the Christian church’s vernacular… Those sheep tracks in the field… The back of the booklet shows cars speeding towards an urban underpass. Taken from the concrete bridge, at the bottom of the frame is the bridge railing, densely packed with layers of scribbled graffiti, which gives an apparently grey and bleak image a rich and human dimension. The only decipherable words are two instances of the name Diana. ‘Diana’ and a tunnel… Inside, a written overview of the concert and its intellectual basis, handily also translated into French if you want to improve yours. Two more images, or rather one, mirrored: reflections in a river. The CDs feature more textural images, combining purple and green duotones respectively with the blank silver of the CD to full effect. Once again Wozencroft uses his straightforward photography to tantalise and invite engagement. The passive viewer will see some nice pictures. Others will find the rewards of a rare metaphorical richness, and more than a few questions. [Alex Crowfoot]
Igloo Magazine (USA) on the 2005 decibel festival:
More shifting of bricks as the stage is readied for Christian Fennesz. He's brought his guitar, an incongruity at a laptop festival until you remember that he's originally a guitar player who has found a series of sounds that he liked in the processor of his laptop. He performs a number of songs from his latest record, Venice, against a gorgeously rendered film of water and reflections. He's as subtle as Hecker was loud, building aquatic church music set against a wandering corrosion of static that chews at all the chords and tones. I was a romantic when I first heard Venice and I'm remade a romantic again as his film dissolves through shots of Venetian buildings and waterways while he creates cascading waterfalls of static-licked sound.
The guitar is transformed into whale song, replete with glitch and reverb echo from the oceanic trenches. These are studies in aquatic noises with endless effervescence, hollow reverb heard through salty water, the splash of crisp waves against sandy shores and the continual drip of atmospheric re-circulation that permeates the buildings that sit in shallow lagoons. This is like listening to a man playing guitar solos in the rain; this is like drowning.
I wander through the tiny park outside the Broadway Performance Hall in a slight daze following Fennesz's set, and my head is filled with static and reverb.
Mutek 2002 (Canada):
The Hiatus program also featured Coda_+47 Degrees (2001) by the illustrious Jon Wozencroft, owner of the Touch record label and whose tirade against the “aesthetics of failure” you can read about at the end of Part Two of this report. Providing the sound are Ryoji Ikeda (whose award at the Arts Electronica festival provided the setting for Wozencroft’s soliloquy) and Christian Fennesz. Indeed, Wozencroft’s video is a celebration of a return to the organic by way of the digital. The work of Ikeda and Fennesz is wonderful in its own right, and also happens to provide half of one of the finer sound/image relationships found in the festival this year.
Coda_+47 Degrees begins with a close-up on the reflective surface of gently moving water. The sound is like shimmering glass. As the sound rings the light reflected on the water bends with the current, taking the form of a sound wave as seen on an oscilloscope. It is a beautiful audiovisual moment in its own right, but also has a lot to say about turning to nature to find reflections of our scientific understanding of the world. A sound wave is not something you can see, but as we turn to our machines for visual representations of natural phenomena, we begin to find patterns emerging that can be viewed in the organic world. Nothing has shown us this more than fractal geometry, where the visual representation of a mathematical formula has shown us the collective unconscious of humanity and the universe in unprecedented ways (3).
As the video progresses, Wozencroft continues to explore metaphorical relationships through the visible elements in and around bodies of water. The fine grains of sand gently shifting beneath a calm tide caressing the shoreline become signs of the myriad micro-units that make up the world, and how they can work together while remaining distinct, part of a whole and stable unit while being constantly in flux. Similarly, close-ups of points in a body of water where multiple currents are visible bring to mind the many layers of sound that flow over one another in the air of the everyday, layers which might look like waves in the air flowing through, over, and beneath one another as they go on their way. The crossing of sound waves is the essence of harmonic resonance, and Ikeda and Fennesz play with the harmonic potential of sustained tones to complement the metaphorical image.
The shifting sands also suggest the process of granular synthesis, a sound processing program that can take a single sound into a universe of shifting textures through gradual and infinite degradation, separating the grains that make up the sound and shifting them around to create ever new patterns and textures. Wozencroft explores this idea by taking the video gradually into increasingly digital domains while the soundtrack follows close behind. At one point, the myriad points of light created by a sunset reflecting off a stirring lake are taken gradually out of focus until they look remarkably like television snow. But the signal failure that this kind of interference indicates on a television screen will not dominate Wozencroft’s aesthetic, and he brings us back to the organic by ending with a series of shots of various objects resting calmly underwater: first large rocks, and then four tiles, the intersection of which makes a cross. This is the last image, and it prompts thoughts of humans crossing with nature, a crossing that is, in one way or another, the subject of almost every piece I deal with here. [Randolph Jordan]
Jon Wozencroft writes for Peter Saville's site here
Lecourrier (Switzerland):
Un disque Touch, ce n’est pas que de la musique. Depuis ses débuts, le label anglais s’est signalé par un travail graphique cohérent et irréprochable. Souvent l’œuvre du fondateur Jon Wozencroft, ces pochettes mariant brillamment naturalisme et abstraction sont immédiatement repérables et collent parfaitement à leur pendant musical. Dans le monde de la photographie et du graphisme, Wozencroft n’est pas exactement le premier venu: après avoir fondé Touch à vingt-trois ans, il travaille sur les visuels de quantité de maisons de disques et d’artistes fort divers, croisant encore la route d’une figure comme Joseph Beuys. Après avoir lancé le magazine Touch en 1986, l’un des premiers à se servir du papier recyclé, il démarre une agence de design avec le renommé Neville Brody, en compagnie duquel il lance l’innovateur magazine FUSE, dès 1990. L’objet (une disquette ou un CD-ROM, plus quelques posters) devient le rendez-vous des graphistes et designers les plus pointus (de Designers Republic à Bruce Mau en passant par Tibor Kalman). A la Cave 12, c’est le co-fondateur de Touch, Mike Harding, qui se chargera de projeter des visuels durant les performances de Fennesz, Philip Jeck et Hazard. Eblouissement garanti. [LMr]
functionensemble (UK):
[at the ICA, London]
..fennesz then played in front of a pair of large screens upon which a jon wozencroft film was twin-projected, inversely mirrored, appearing to constantly be sucked into a point in the center of the two screens from where our man blasted his uniquely beautiful range of sounds. the (somewhat improvised/ arbitrary, i would guess) synchronisation of image and music was at times, very sublime. a veritable audio-visual siren of testament to the union of two fine artist's works. it was for me, a rare epiphanic moment of the effectiveness of a singular audio-visual aesthetic constantly changing and continuously overwhelming perception. to notice that certain others were not nearly as impressed, didn't devalidate anything but the need for any particular fixed point of view, as with the art.