From the Archives #5

Enrico Coniglio’s noWHere Manifesto

Dear Listeners, Yet another archival gem to dust off. I published my English translation of this text by my friend Enrico Coniglio in March 2014, followed shortly after by a long conversation with Enrico and Giovanni Lami. My Italian has improved quite a bit since then, and so here is a slightly revised version of that text, which remains a thought-provoking intervention into the manipulation and diffusion of live electronic sound.

In December of 2012, the Italian sound artist Enrico Coniglio published noWHere – ideale manifesto per sound artists [waybackmachine], an old-fashioned  manifesto articulating a set of core values about how we as artists should approach “live electronics.”  Below you’ll find my translation of this manifesto into English.

The Manifesto will be presented at this page free of comment.  The following installment of Sound Propositions (read here) will feature a discussion with Lemures, comprised of Enrico Coniglio & Giovanni Lami, a duo that came together in part as a manifestation of this manifesto. We discuss their creative process and the concept behind the manifesto, and I reflect upon the history and implications of “live” music.

We gladly welcome spirited discussion below in the comments as well as suggestions of how to improve the translation, here.

noWHere – a manifesto for sound artists

noWHere is a manifesto of principles designed for sound artists working in the fields of electronic, electroacoustic, and ambient music.

noWHere has the expressed goal of recovering the original meaning of the term live electronics as a practice of manipulating sounds—not only electroacoustic sources—in real time.

noWHere has no redemptive aim, but considers, however, the possible therapeutic effect resulting from a free association (in the Freudian sense) of sounds.

noWHere intends to propose a useful guide for live performance to the sound artists who decide to join in this manifesto. The need to write and adhere to the present manifesto comes from the need to achieve a practical discipline on the one hand, and a moral reference on the other.

The term live electronics, as well as on the definition of electronic music, has created far too much ambiguity. Many sound artists hide behind a set of technological devices by staging a “prefab show,” with the consequence of increasing the gap with the audience / listener.

What noWHere considers live electronics is instead a practice of composition, production / reproduction, manipulation and diffusion of sound in real time, such as different steps that coexist in the same time continuum.

I pledge to share the following list of rules and principles confirmed in this manifesto:

• performance is based on a compositional act and the composition itself should be based on total and free improvisation;

• it is possible, however, to establish rules of improvisation based on a default “canvas”;

• the act of composition cannot be a human act, conscious and individual, but the result of a generative and automated process;

• sound can be produced with traditional instruments, audio equipment or be the result of synthesis of analogue and/or digital;

• the sound artist may in all cases make use of samples—it is left to the judgment of the performers to make smart use of pre-recorded material—but in any case all the samples used during the live set should be “raw” (previously untreated);

• manipulation of sound must always be done in real-time;

• the sound artist must act according to one’s ability to listen to one’s emotions and express them, though a minimal approach to performance is still a conceptual horizon to keep in mind;

• the sound is diffused through the performance space to best interact, on a psychoacoustic level, with the audience / listener;

• the sound is diffused so one does not simply overpower the ambiance of the existing
space, but merges them in preserving the natural reverberation and sounds peculiar to it.

Enrico Coniglio, Venice-Padua, July 2010. Revised in October 2012.