media – Paul Ramshaw

Music Album: A Beautiful Sadness

Under Recording Artist Name : Audible Faun (artist website)

The themes underlying the musical composition process were: doubt, hope, redemption, astronomical cycles and patterns of time, myth and the human condition – spiritual guidance and wrath of the gods.

The album title Beautiful Sadness comes from a comment made about my music from a learned friend Ramunas Motiekaitis, that my music reminded him of the Japanese cultural tradition ‘mono no aware’ which represents an awareness of the transience of things and sadness at their impermanence. Like the feeling one gets on seeing a lotus blossom that has fallen from a tree and will soon fade into nothingness

Selected Short Clips

Title Track – A Beautiful Sadness

After Darkness [I Hope For] Light

Untarnished She Shines With Honor

Perpetual Frieze - Video Installation (2:22 min excerpt of 26 min)

Perpetual Frieze Video Installation (short clip) from Paul Ramshaw on Vimeo.

The video sequence Perpetual Frieze (the above is a short clip) is a 26 minute audio/video installation in three sections. It was created as a collaboration between Paul Ramshaw and Jake Fernandez. Inspired by urban gardens on New York‚Äôs Lower East Side and Miami‚Äôs inner city, jake created a photo collage with photographic fragments collected and compressed over 25 years.

Paul’s work in electro-acoustic sound abstraction and manipulation, coupled with video representation elicits changing emotional contexts over time. This video installation is the first of a number of such collaborations that Fernandez and Ramshaw have planned for the future.

One single original rendered version of the installation is available in any desired format for private collectors or public institutions. Please contact the authors for more information.

Full installation performances will be shown for the first time at The Studio On Gulf and PIne, Anna Maria Island, Florida from Oct 16th-Nov 16th 2012

World Nation (2010)

World Nation – 2012 Olympics – Emotive Audio Visual Installation – P3 Gallery London January 2010 from Paul Ramshaw on Vimeo.

Audio Only

Composed by Paul Ramshaw with abstract video by Olivier Ruellet

This artwork was commissioned by the Faculty of Arts, University of West London, as part of the Creative Campus Initiative leading into the 2010 Olympics in London UK.

World Nation is a generative audiovisual piece that is informed by notions of social and philosophical deconstruction, where shared meanings of culture, nationality and identity from representations of flags and anthems are deconstructed into formant parts of coloured shapes and melodic and harmonic phrases.

The building of this ever-evolving sound and visual ‘scape’‚ of multi-coloured and multi-voiced elements represents a symbol of a unifying process at work, and acts as a symbol of peace and harmonious relations between peoples and as a vibrant monument to humanity.

The flux of these materials becomes the source of an abstraction that fuses together the original media forms in a way that is at first not immediately recognisable to the audience, because of its ambiguity, but progressively challenges them to use affiliating levels of their experience to make sense and apply their own meaning to the work, recomposing and reconstructing meaning on both an individual and shared basis.

Credit Crunch (2008)

An electro-acoustic parody of the credit crisis using the prices from the UK FTSE-100 index to create a descending lament of notes and accompaniment.

Paul’s composition ‘Credit Crunch’ commissioned in May 2008 by the UK organization Sound and Music for the opening of Kings Place Gallery and Performing Arts Center in Kings Cross, performed on 5th October 2008 as part of Lore Lixenberg’s ‘Songs of Kings Cross’ in which Lore sang the original narrative text parodying financial news headlines. This was an experimental music piece for voice and electronics – involving financial data, opera and electronics in which sequential price information for one year of the FTSE100 index dating from the beginning of the credit crunch is translated into consecutive notes using maxmsp and further processed with Ableton Live forming melodies for a narrative song text.

The melody is one continuous section of closing prices on a daily basis scaled into the range of mezzo-soprano and sequenced over time. Each note is one day but Paul decided to choose how long the notes would play for and how long the rests or silence would be between the notes of the melody. The resulting piece, which resembles a haunting lament is then accompanied by an electronically processed audio part created with the same FTSE information that uses harmonic filters and granular delays. In the instrumental version here the violin plays the mezzo-soprano part.

The audio visual version of this with histograms of the UK Stock Market crashing is now on You Tube here

Coil The Zero (2006)

This piece is an electroacoustic manipulation of a performance of an excerpt from Puccini’s La Boheme featuring Zoe Challenor (soprano) with cello accompaniment from (Nick Allen) of the Solaris Quartet. The performance extensively manipulates the source audio to create an entirely new musical artefact with the intention of a mass chorale.

This piece was recently performed live in concerts in May 2011 (Palmetto Art Center FL, USA) in 2009 (The Luxury Goods Festival:The Meaning of Art at The Foundry, Old Street, London) in 2007 at The Million Year Old Man Festival at the Custard Factory in Birmingham (23/24 June), and at Vestry Hall, Ealing, at the London College of Music London (and by Zoe Challenor at St Augustine’s Church in London UK.

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