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User:Filll/Peter Cusack

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This page is about the musician. For Australian rugby player, see Peter Cusack, rugby player.

Peter Cusack is an artist and musician who is a member of CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Art & Performance), and is a research staff member and founding member of the London College of Communication in the University of the Arts London. He was a founding member and director of the London Musicians Collective.

He is perhaps best-known as a member of the avant guard musical quartet, "Alterations" (1978-1986; with Steve Beresford, David Toop, and Terry Day)[1], and the creator of field and wildlife recording-based albums like:

  • Where Is the Green Parrot? (1999) with tracks like "Toy Shop (Two Small Boys Go Shopping)" and "Siren", which is just as advertised.
  • Day for Night (2000), with Max Eastley. This features "duets" between Eastley's kinetic scultpure and Cusack's field recordings
  • Baikal Ice (2003), featuring tracks like "Banging Holes In Ice" and "Floating Icicles Rocked By Waves" and "Falling In"

However, Cusack has been extremely active and productive over his career and has been involved in many more projects. Several of his pieces have been reviewed in Leonardo Music Journal, the annual music Journal published by MIT Press. He has also curated an album for Leonardo Music Journal, and several of his pieces have been reviewed by Leonardo Music Journal and many others.

He is currently research fellow on the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council's multidisciplinary 'Positive Soundscapes Project'.

Interests

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Cusack is particularly interested in environmental sound and acoustic ecology. He has researched the sound properties of areas such as Lake Baikal, Siberia, and the Azerbaijan oil fields. He is interested in how sounds change as people migrate and as technology changes.

In 1998, Cusack started the "Your Favorite London Sound" project. The goal is to find out what London noises are found appealing by people who live in London.[2] This was so popular that it has been repeated in Chicago, Beijing, and other cities. He is involved in the "Sound & The City" art project using sounds from Beijing in October, 2005.

Sounds From Dangerous Places is a project to collect sounds from sites which have sustained major environmental damage. Sites that Cusack is working on include Chernobyl, the Azerbaijan oil fields, and areas around controversial dams on the Tigris and Euphrates river systems in south east Turkey.

Cusack's "performances" are a central part of the book Haunted Weather: Music, Silence, and Memory (Toop, 2004) by his old collaborator and respected music critic and author, David Toop. Toop investigates the use of environmental sound and elecronic instruments in experimental music in his book.

Other performance

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With clarinetist Simon Mayo, he formed the duo known as "A Touch of the Sun". His first "major" recording was part of Fred Frith's 1974 record, "Guitar Solos".

He was one of the first to play the bouzouki in England, which gained him the respect of London's musical avant garde.

As a musician, he has collaborated with artists such as Clive Bell, Nic Collins, Alterations, Chris Cutler, Max Eastley, Evan Parker, Hugh Davies, Annette Krebs and Eastern Mediterranean singer Viv Corringham.

A live performance with Nicolas Collins was released as "A Host, of Golden Daffodils" in 1999.

Selected Reviews

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  • Voila Enough! 1979-1981
Culled from performances in Bracknell, Tilburg, and Berlin between 1979 and 1981, Voila Enough! is a snapshot of a chaotic and intensely creative quartet featuring Peter Cusack, Terry Day, David Toop, and Steve Beresford (principally on guitar, percussion, flutes, and piano, respectively, but also a bewildering number of instruments, conventional and unconventional)...Alterations' music redefines itself from moment to moment, both in terms of its overall structure and the material used to build it. Nearly a quarter of a century on, its power to captivate, infuriate, and have you falling off your chair in hysterics is entirely undimmed. (Dan Warburton, All Music Guide)
  • Baikal Ice
...perhaps his most lyrical work: a documentary recording of nature and life by the lake at the end of winter, when the ice begins to melt. (Piero Scaruffi, 2003)
You can hear the vast spaces, the majesty of the frozen lake, and the pittoresque of the location through the wind, bird, and human sounds, but also through the acoustical features of the recordings. We can hear unusual bird songs, children playing with an outdoor PA system, Cusack in his daily routine (mediated by his very dry sense of humor). The recordings are crystal clear and, if they don't have the kind of suggestive poetry found in Chris Watson's pieces, they do create their own stories and convey a sense of here and now...these recordings disclose a unique soundworld. This reviewer would not be surprised if a compilation album of remixes/reworkings based on these recordings surfaced soon. But as fascinating Cusack's find may be, Baikal Ice remains a bit too much of an audio postcard to have a lasting impact on the listener. (François Couture, All Music Guide)
  • Where is the Green Parrot?
"...Cusack's field recordings are blended and sequenced against a light tracery of studio playing. Two main sections bring a structural cohesion to this grainy collection of 'pieces, recordings and in-betweens'...", (The Wire, 7/00, p.64)
  • Day for Night
"This CD represents a 25-year collaboration between renowned British avant-garde improviser Peter Cusack and instrument builder and sculptor Max Eastley. With numerous releases on ReR and Incus, the two musicians are mainstays of the British improvised music world...The duo creates intriguing delicate compositions with these instruments, abetted by the transformed string instruments and electronics of guitarist Cusack, whose guitar is at times so far removed from its traditional use that it is hard to still call it a guitar."(Skip Jansen, All Music)
  • Your Favourite London Sounds
A new disc from the tireless London Musicians’ Collective embarks on a sonic journey in their own city, asking Londoners, "What is your favorite London sound and why?" They received hundreds of responses, and musician Peter Cusack took it upon himself to hunt down and record those sounds, 40 of which appear here.(Kenneth Goldsmith, New York Press, Vol 15, Issue 9, FEBRUARY 26, 2002)

Outreach

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He co-founded an artist-owned record label called "Bead Records" which has released many previously unavailable pieces in 1972. It had released more than 30 albums, as of 2007.

Cusack produces the monthly radio program "Vermilion Sounds" with Isobel Clouter. Vermilion Sounds explores environmental sounds and is broadcast by Resonance FM in London. John Levack Drever, writing in Soundscapes, comments:

Of significant note is the work of Peter Cusack and Isobel Clouter (from the National Sound Archive who we now welcome onto the UKISC Management Committee), who have done a sterling job producing Vermilion Sounds—a weekly radio show for Resonance FM...[3]

Other projects

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  • Soundlines: City of London Festival educational project on music and environmental sound in East London schools (April to November 2003).
  • Baku, 5 Quarters at the University of Baku, Azerbaijan. This was a collaboration with Swiss video artist Ursula Biemann in 2004.
  • Urban Grime, exhibition at the Museum of London Sept 2003 to Jan 2004
  • Send+Receive Festival performance & workshops, Winnipeg, Canada 2004:
  • LMC Guitar Festival performances, Museum of Garden History, London 2004
  • Frère Jacques et autres pièces à Francis: Expositions. 1997. Saint-Fons, with Ron Haselden, a British artist living in the French town of Brizard, in Brittany. This was a well-known interactive multimedia piece featuring the song Frère Jacques.[4]

International collaborations

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Cusack is particularly unique in that his activities take him far afield. He had done work in Austria, Canada, Turkey, Beijing, in Azerbijan, in Siberia, China's most western province, Xinjiang and France. He also spent 2 years at the STEIM studio in Amsterdam, honing his electronic music skills.

Selected recordings

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Curations

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Selected publications

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  • "Ghosts and Monsters": Contributors' Notes", Alexander Abramovitch Krejn, Christian von Borries, John Cage, Andrew Culver, John Tilbury, Paul de Marinis, Robert Ashley, Henning Christiansen, Alvin Lucier, Peter Cusack, Shelley Hirsch, Jerry Hunt, Michael Schell, Frieder Butzmann, Michael Snow, Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 8, Ghosts and Monsters: Technology and Personality in Contemporary Music (1998), pp. 64-74, MIT Press, 1998.
  • The Positive Soundscape Project: A re-evaluation of environmental sound, Mags Adams, Angus Carlyle, Peter Cusack, Bill Davies, Ken Hume, Paul Jennings, Chris Plack, Research Proposal.
  • Dialogue, Peter Cusack, Soundscape—The Journal of Acoustic Ecology 1 (2) p8, 2000.

Notes

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  1. ^ Alterations released 3 albums.
  2. ^ Kenneth Goldsmith writes a review of Your Favourite London Sounds, Compiled by Peter Cusack (London Musicians’ Collective), Cusack’s Favourite London Sounds published in New York Press, (2002), 15 (9)
  3. ^ United Kingdom and Ireland Soundscape Community (UKISC), John Levack Drever, Soundscape, Volume 4, Number 2, p. 7, Fall/Winter 2003, a review of Vermilion Sounds
  4. ^ Frère Jacques et autres pièces à Francis: Expositions. 1997. Saint-Fons Ron Haselden, Saint-Fons, Centre d'Arts Plastiques, 1997, ISBN:2-9509357-2-9
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