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Subscape Annex

...a symptom of the modern culture industry to annex a foreign culture, strip it of its specific social-ideological context and incorporate it into its own culture products...
- Wim Mertens, taken out of context

An ambient/industrial improvisational looping sound project in Raleigh, North Carolina. Send email to join the announcement list for future shows and events involving Subscape Annex.

Thanks,
Steve ( steve@subscapeannex.com )

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Templeball Gallery (Carrboro NC), 13 February 2004 sights/subscape18nov2k5_steve_cut.jpg
Kirk Adam Gallery (Raleigh NC), 18 November 2005

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QR Code http://www.subscapeannex.com

Bio

Steve Burnett performs as Subscape Annex ( http://www.subscapeannex.com/ ) making music describable as ambient/industrial improvisational looping, using Chapman Stick, theremin, and a variety of constructed objects and effects. He has performed in several improvisational, cinematic, and ambient contexts and projects in the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina in the USA, and has done sound design for theatrical productions and film scores.

Active in the local music scene, he was involved with the AIM (Alliance for Improvised Music) and the original 919noise collectives. Steve maintains the NC Goth gothic/industrial website and the NC Prog (progressive rock) mail list, has contributed to the Research Triangle Rock blog on WRAL.com, and hosted house concerts for improvised, experimental and related music at badgerhaus in Raleigh NC.

When not performing, Steve works as a technical writer, system administrator, and author.

Interests: phonography, sonic evocation of physical objects, pattern recognition and creation, exploration of human-opaque perception data to extract new patterning, and collaboration with other musicians and non-musical artists such as working with the painters Nemo and Paul Friedrich.

Statement

All that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints - is noise, the only possible source of *new* patterns.
- Gregory Bateson, "Cybernetic Explorations", 1967.

We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.
Stewart Brand

One interest of mine is shifted perception: for example the infrared spectrum shifted into the human-visible light range, but also time compression or expansion. What scale of time would a tree perceive in if it were sentient? What would a sunset look like if we could see ultraviolet light, or the city sound like if we could hear like a dog or a bat? Anything too fast or transitory for, or outside the range of, human perception is generally dismissed as meaningless noise. From the slow time perspective of a hypothetical sentient tree the actions of humanity, for example hiking nearby through a forest, would be meaningless and brief noise. On a human scale we cannot see neutrinos, at best only faintly hear what dogs hear, and cannot hear the sound of bats honking their airhorns for echolocation. Slowing down sound is a tool that expands our range of perception, and we can find new patterns in what we previously ignored or missed entirely as meaningless noise.

Looping serves for me, especially in a minimalist approach, to magnify the resolution of the presented data set to change the range of time accessible to human perception. Repetition can be subtractive: applying attention over repeated cycles permits the human mind to distinguish new patterns that were previously buried in the "noise".

Current projects:

Events, Exhibits, and Installations:

Online:

Former projects:

  • Shesha - a hundred-headed naga of electroacoustic double bass
  • Cab Caligari - instrumental acoustic cello and electric upright arachnobass, fiddling while the Weimar Republic burns
  • Phasmatodea - cinematic improvisational Chapman Stick duo
  • Audio Arcade - the sound of many
  • Laocoon - solo looping, tangled in the cords and loops like serpents
  • Fukadugalon - improvisational tribal noise
  • Seventeen Cobwebs for Emily (17CFE) - studio project with others, 1999-2000
  • Total Information Awareness - ambient trance

Other Activities and Links:

Former members of Subscape Annex:

Last updated 18 March 2011.