Edições CN, based in Antwerp, Belgium is a feisty little label that releases works of art that transports the listener to different worlds: some of intuitive magnificence, some more intellectual - set in the world of ideas, strategies and other vistas.
Learning is probably one of the latter kind.
This album is two discs - first one is the recording of the choir, the second one is Charlie Usher's works.
Those are only seemingly two different worlds - first disc feels like a rehearsal that is a meta environment -even though that we hear a scene that feels somewhat familiar through the use of the human voice we don't necessarily understand it. There's meanings and elements that dwell on the walls of the corridor that wait to be read and understood. But if it is really possible?
Disc two is 44 small tracks that are named Attachments. They work as small samples and keys to be used to understand the whole commotion of the context in full. They work as little postcards from the inner space of the idea.
How to be present in this whole process? Is it really possible or accessible?
The whole album - right from the start - from the form it has been published towards the break-up into two separate parts helps you to question yourself as a listener. It can be a bit radical, a bit uncomfortable at times. One thing is certain: be more present, be more observant and attentive.
Slow Reading Club is a semi-fictional reading group initiated dancer and choreographer Bryana Fritz (USA) and artist and composer Henry Andersen (AUS) in late 2016. The group deals in constructed situations for collective reading. They do not aim at deconstruction or even comprehension of the texts in hands, but at the production of a kind of excess: to temporarily suspend criticality for intimacy and to negotiate agencies with the text.
Charlie Usher (UK) is a composer working with cultural samples, found recordings, static and rotary speaker installations, and live musicians, his work using structural and formal protocols to interrogate ways we relate to information we hear. Usher mentored with Hanna Hartman, Tom Johnson, Antoine Beuger and David Horne, among others.
LEARNING is a cover version of Cornelius Cardew’s choral piece Paragraph 7, from The Great Learning (1971). It is performed with text from The Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto (2008), by Aaron Swartz. LEARNING was rehearsed by a choir of amateur singers at KASK school of the arts in Ghent, Belgium - as part of a collaborative exhibition of Slow Reading Club and composer Charlie Usher, that took place at BOEKS, Ghent, in spring 2024.
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