Lately, I keep coming across reflections on music that talk about movement. When we hear music, somehow, we’re moving inside – we’re following the lines of Bach counterpoint in our fingers, we’re singing along somewhere deep within to the vocals of Billie Holliday. We’re dancing.
“Until the Quiet Comes” is special for many reasons, in its music by Flying Lotus, in the short film by Kahlil Joseph. It’s a full meal in a Web video world many assume is made of bite-sized junk food.
But it’s special to me partly because of the way it embodies movement.
I hear from Flying Lotus recently when I saw him at SONAR; he was describing a desire for – if I remember what he said correctly – what he called “next-level s***.”
“Until the Quiet Comes” is the perfect figurative portrait of next levels. To me, it’s immensely human. And whether a video has one million view or just one, that seems a good kind of portrait to make.
The record is out now on Warp.
flying-lotus.com
[from which the film is viewable everywhere, including even Germany, where the above is blocked]
Sorry, keys and switches and buttons: it’s all about sponges now.
Using metal sponges, a houseplant (Swedish Ivy, to be specific), and a circuit-bent toy, Cristian Martínez and companion perform whimsically-wonderful music. And, of course, it’s dubbed Kraft Test Dummy and Robert Plant.
Cristian, aka Norman Bates, a sonic artist and musician based in Argentina, explains to CDM:
It’s a circuit bend that originally was some portable-radio type toy with 4 buttons, with drum sounds. I changed the button contacts to metal sponges and car antennas, all tied together with wonderful crocodiles clips. Playing along with it is a 555 oscillator, executed by Isis Abigail, using herself and a Plectranthus Australis plant as variable resistor. Rock on!
Rock on, indeed. Ready for some more handmade goodness from this artist? You can find more on Vimeo; here are my favorites:
First up, an oscillator circuit set against a series of videos becomes beautifully contemplative:
a super simple oscillator -from nicholas collins book [Ed.: That's the superb Handmade Electronic Music] – a 4093 [oscillator] chip with 2 ldrs, reading some videos of my likes collection. The first two from Guido Corallo, and the last one by Moritz Uebele. The three videos were originally silent. Sorry about the really poor quality, got to compress too much the original video to be able to got it under the 500mb restriction for the non plus like me.
un oscilador recontra simple del libro de Nic Collins, un 4093 con dos ldrs, pegado al monitor, “leyendo” algunos videos de mi colección de favoritos. Los dos primeros de Guido Corallo, y el tercero de Moritz Uebele. Los 3 videos eran originalmente mudos. La calidad deja bastante que desear, pero es que tuve que comprimirlo demasiado para que me quede en los 500 mb de límite para los no plus.
Frascus is a simple but beautiful electro-acoustic instrument rig – and benefits from some added effects, it seems.
Beyond the viral-ready novelty, listen to the serenades of defunct hard drives, flatbed scanners, and garage sale-rescue computers and you might just hear a sense of urgency. As the discs whir, the chips bleet, and the solenoids ping percussion, this chorus of obsolete electronics seems to plea, save us from landfill doom.
The latest breakout hit from repurposed retro machines is Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know.” Here, it’s covered by a set of glockenspiel-playing solenoids and an HP ScanJet as the angst-ridden whine of the now-infamous vocals. An Amiga rounds out the band. Even the robotics can be counted as chip music, of sorts – a PIC16F84A (a simple microprocessor) acts as the brains. (Kids, ask your parents. Before Arduino, there was PIC programming.)
Like lovers of vintage cars, fans of vintage electronics face part shortages and repair headaches. (3D printing of physical components holds some promise.) Unlike the cars, the parts shops themselves are threatened – this Toronto-based creator turned to A1 Electronics Parts for help.
The YouTube maestro of this salvaged orchestra, “bd594,” has some other wonders, so now’s a perfect time to revisit the best of those – and the video that started it all.
(And, sorry, it’s just a more interesting song than Gotye’s – or, in fairness, better suited to creative orchestration.)
The same creator’s robot-band take on The B-52′s Rock Lobster is simply insane. He also explains how to make your own inexpensive solenoid motor — using a VCR head.
But this creator, in turn, credits art student James Houston for inspiring the crop of YouTube videos using this sort of gear to make covers.
Houston’s take on Radiohead’s “Nude,” from In Rainbows, is to me achingly beautiful in a strange sense. (Skip to halfway through the video for the song to begin.) The hard disk becomes a surprisingly-fitting, rough, scratchy vocal. The video appropriately takes the alternative title, “Big Ideas (don’t get any).”
Houston told the videos’s story when he released it, back in 2008.
I’m a student graduating from the Glasgow School of Art’s visual communication course in a few days. This is my final project.
Radiohead held an online contest to remix “Nude” from their album – “In Rainbows” This was quite a difficult task for everybody that entered, as Nude is in 6/8 timing, and 63bpm. Most music that’s played in clubs is around 120bpm and usually 4/4 timing. It’s pretty difficult to seamlessly mix a waltz beat into a DJ set.
This resulted in lots of generic entries consisting of a typical 4/4 beat, but with arbitrary clips from “Nude” thrown in so that they qualified for the contest.
Thom Yorke joked at the ridiculousness of it in an interview for NPR radio, hinting that they set the competition to find out how people would approach such a challenging task.
I decided to take the piss a bit, as the contest seemed to be in that spirit.
Based on the lyric (and alternate title) “Big Ideas: Don’t get any” I grouped together a collection of old redundant hardware, and placed them in a situation where they’re trying their best to do something that they’re not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there.
It doesn’t sound great, as it’s not supposed to.
I missed the contest deadline, so I’m offering it here for you to enjoy.
Sinclair ZX Spectrum – Guitars (rhythm & lead)
Epson LX-81 Dot Matrix Printer – Drums
HP Scanjet 3c – Bass Guitar
Hard Drive array – Act as a collection of bad speakers – Vocals & FX
But if these old machines can still sing, perhaps there’s hope for electronics that aren’t disposable, that aren’t mysterious black boxes. Tinkerers might just save all of these piles of machines from an untimely, toxic death.
In this age of maximalist, aggressive productions, the leafy green imagery for Pole’s waldgeschichten (literally, “forest stories”) fits perfectly. The trilogy of releases, the latest arriving at the end of last week, is easy-going and reserved. Each sound is precisely placed, gently shuffling interlaced dub-like patterns set against calm swells, sometimes resembling the cry of imaginary electronic creatures. It’s the much-needed trip out into the outlying forests of sound to find a different pace.
And with each track, you can imagine wondrous six-legged insect creatures climbing up a tree – mechanical machines (see the drum machine notes below) that are somehow organic. (That is, this is a convenient companion to yesterday’s bee music.)
Pole’s precise ear is in fine form here; there’s little wonder that the artist Stefan Betke has been highly in-demand as a producer. But amidst so many sound-alike productions, this is something special; to me, there’s a feeling of detached quirkiness. You can imagine someone seriously conducting finely-crafted sounds with a slight dimple showing; you might not help but upturn a corner of a smile.
The living quality of the rhythms isn’t accidental, though. As Ableton reported on their blog in the fall:
For his latest series of releases, under the name Waldgeschichten (“Forest Stories”), Stefan has worked with a modified analog drum machine. Taking advantage of the unusual timing of the machine, he slaves Live’s tempo to it, and then uses Live to record other parts, both analog and digital, to make his tracks
Few videos online are worth setting aside a half an hour, but this might be an exception. Mr. Betke talks about the origins of the label, and introducing artist Kit Clayton (known to Max/MSP and Jitter fans as developer Joshua Kit Clayton). He actually cautions producers about getting involved in entangling mastering with sound design and losing a compositional idea, advising them to instead leave this to the mastering engineer. He talks instead about concentrating on the idea – and the way in which he’s cross-breeding hardware and Ableton Live in production and live performance. The highlight for me is the tale of a broken filter, the evolutionary potential of oddball and imperfect hardware in music-making that’s so nicely exhibited in these releases.
Music isn’t just syntax; it isn’t just a binary message in our brain. It somehow connects with our body in an intimate way. The music video “limbic” explores this visceral connection right at the level of the skin, at sweat and goosebumps and facial reaction.
“limbic” is both an aesthetic exploration and a statement about some of the science behind the experience. It comes at a good time, too – earlier this month, we were considering the relationship of body to musical interface, in the context of a bio-interfacing show at Berlin’s LEAP Gallery. Artist Marco Donnarumma also released his own open source toolset for working with muscles as input. And, for my part, I have to say that participating in that workshop really made me more aware of my physical being in performance. Related to this film, all of us were working with inputs at the level of the skin – Claudia Robles Angel with electrical impulses from the brain at the surface of the scalp, Marco with a microphone against the skin for “listening” to muscles, and me with galvanic skin response dealing with the conductivity of the skin. (See a recent blog by María Muñoz; more on this topic to come.)
Part of why it was compelling to use these interfaces in performance, though, was that these systems are all bi-directional. Your body may be an input, but it responds to the music, too. So, as musicians, it’s all the more intriguing to consider the film “limbic” as a view into how the body reacts to musical input. As the description puts it:
“limbic” as a Visual Music clip reflects the emotional processing of music in the limbic system and the resulting reactions of the body (the so-called “chills”). It has been proved that musical attributes like the violation of expectations, the beginning of something new, a new cue or a recurring pattern are more often leading to chills. Those can be expressed, among other things, trough a higher heart rate, twitching facial muscles, sweaty hands or even the
well-known goose bumps. The film discusses how far chill-experiences are part of the evolutionary and/or the cultural development.
limbic was produced as a Video 2 exam for Prof. Dr. Heike Sperling and Andreas Kolinski.
At Music Tech Fest in London last month, I gave a talk and did an afternoon-long workshop exploring ways of connecting visuals to sound. We worked with pen and paper, with patching (in Pd), with code (in Processing), and via a survey of some interesting recent work, in this case all connected to drawing. A theme of the conference had been “synesthesia.” But it’s important to note that synesthesia goes beyond just making music visual. It deals with people actually having a sensory experience in which one input (like sound) triggers a different sense (like smell or color). Sure enough, someone who attended had a student who experiences quite strongly that nonvoluntary reaction.
This short film explores the extreme, visceral connection that cross-sensory sensation can produce.
Clinical sensory phenomena aside, the surreal and strange world that emerges is to me a perfect metaphor for all the symbols we use for music and sound, for all the (wonderfully) bizarre feelings that arise as you try to grasp something as unseen and fleeting as music and musical emotion with your brain. It’s long hours in the studio trying to understand what you’re doing, it’s the user interface for computer software, it’s notation. It’s, in a word, impossible.
And basslines are definitely cats.
(Not news, but too wonderful for me to care — found via Meiko Kanamoto.) By Terry Timely:
syn·es·the·sia syn·aes·the·sia (sĭn’ĭs-thē’zhə)
n.
A condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color.
A sensation felt in one part of the body as a result of stimulus applied to another, as in referred pain.
The description of one kind of sense impression by using words that normally describe another.
Experimenting with twinkling timbres made both by acoustic and electronic means, the music of Ritornell (the duo of composer Dr. Richard Eigner and pianist Roman Gerold, Austria) is effortlessly expressive and spontaneous. Little wonder that that spirit could translate even to a small object.
Designer Katharina Hölzl made business cards into both a signature identity for Ritornell and a physical manifestation of how they play their music. They’re not just a physical gimmick, though: audiences get to participate with music making in the production of live, performative loops. (Sadly, no site for Katharina – you just have to get hold of one of her designs!)
Description of the project:
Ritornell’s business cards are inspired by the project’s live show. The improvised concerts evoke a lively atmosphere by the combination of filigree electronics with playful timbres of diverse acoustic instruments and utensils such as egg whisks, toilet brushes, chopsticks or sewing needles. As an integral part of their set list, Ritornell invites the audience to bring along their private musicboxes. Arranged in a big circle, the players’ speed of turning levers is conducted: the results are as shimmering as you would expect.
Katharina Hölzl designed very special business cards to recreate this playful sonic universe. With the aid of laser assisted milling, nine micro compositions consisting of circles, triangles and Ritornell’s contact information were applied onto a long musicbox paper stripe. Before handing out the cards to interested adressees, each individual subdivision is played back via an especially designed musical box – thus providing every business card receiver with a tailor made musical experience.
Punched cards of this kind of a profound relationship to generative music and computer music. For its part, the very genesis of the computer comes from punched cards: the punched cards in early mechanical looms used for textiles would inspire Charles Babbage. It’s possible that Max Mathews’ first digital audio, and other computer music that employed punched cards, would not have done so without the precedent of the textile industry.
And, of course, the music box and player piano also owe their genesis to punched cards, and thus the pre-digital mechanical reproduction of music. In an era before MIDI, composer Conlon Nancarrow made his own piano rolls, punched to his custom specifications, to play parts that would otherwise be impossible – before complex, glitchy, tracker-made electronic music. (Kyle Gann has a great piece on Nancarrow.) Those piano rolls have echoes in the interactive work of digital artist Toshio Iwai, and in the mechanical, push-button simplicity of the falling tracks of gems in music games from developers like Harmonix. By adding hand-cranked audience participation, though, Ritornell brings the mechanism into the realm of jazz.
And speaking of jazz influence, it’s well worth looking at the rest of the music of Ritornell.
Ritornell, the duo. Photo by Mirjam Unger, courtesy Ritornell.
As glowing ambient worlds cross paths with cooly-casual jazz, Ritornell’s music is to me endlessly evocative. Jazz gesture and good humor merge with waves of richly-imagined sonic textures. It’s music that’s both cinematic and improvisatory, dreamlike but well worth repeated listens. (I find it quite hard not to put it on loop, with warm swells of timbre against percussive rhythms, it fits perfectly with the deep mustard and gold hues of the last wave of autumn leaves in November.)
With the slightly-distant allure of Vienna-based vocalist Mimu added to the mix, the music is a kind of ambient pop reverie.
Don’t miss the music videos, shot seemingly through a thick, warm mist. And check out the rest of the music on the site. I hope we hear more from these folks.
Listening: Golden Solitude, an eclectic, jazz-inflected sonic journey of an LP
Experimenting with twinkling timbres made both by acoustic and electronic means, the music of Ritornell (the duo of composer Dr. Richard Eigner and pianist Roman Gerold, Austria) is effortlessly expressive and spontaneous. Little wonder that that spirit could translate even to a small object.
Designer Katharina Hölzl made business cards into both a signature identity for Ritornell and a physical manifestation of how they play their music. They’re not just a physical gimmick, though: audiences get to participate with music making in the production of live, performative loops. (Sadly, no site for Katharina – you just have to get hold of one of her designs!)
Description of the project:
Ritornell’s business cards are inspired by the project’s live show. The improvised concerts evoke a lively atmosphere by the combination of filigree electronics with playful timbres of diverse acoustic instruments and utensils such as egg whisks, toilet brushes, chopsticks or sewing needles. As an integral part of their set list, Ritornell invites the audience to bring along their private musicboxes. Arranged in a big circle, the players’ speed of turning levers is conducted: the results are as shimmering as you would expect.
Katharina Hölzl designed very special business cards to recreate this playful sonic universe. With the aid of laser assisted milling, nine micro compositions consisting of circles, triangles and Ritornell’s contact information were applied onto a long musicbox paper stripe. Before handing out the cards to interested adressees, each individual subdivision is played back via an especially designed musical box – thus providing every business card receiver with a tailor made musical experience.
Punched cards of this kind of a profound relationship to generative music and computer music. For its part, the very genesis of the computer comes from punched cards: the punched cards in early mechanical looms used for textiles would inspire Charles Babbage. It’s possible that Max Mathews’ first digital audio, and other computer music that employed punched cards, would not have done so without the precedent of the textile industry.
And, of course, the music box and player piano also owe their genesis to punched cards, and thus the pre-digital mechanical reproduction of music. In an era before MIDI, composer Conlon Nancarrow made his own piano rolls, punched to his custom specifications, to play parts that would otherwise be impossible – before complex, glitchy, tracker-made electronic music. (Kyle Gann has a great piece on Nancarrow.) Those piano rolls have echoes in the interactive work of digital artist Toshio Iwai, and in the mechanical, push-button simplicity of the falling tracks of gems in music games from developers like Harmonix. By adding hand-cranked audience participation, though, Ritornell brings the mechanism into the realm of jazz.
And speaking of jazz influence, it’s well worth looking at the rest of the music of Ritornell.
Ritornell, the duo. Photo by Mirjam Unger, courtesy Ritornell.
As glowing ambient worlds cross paths with cooly-casual jazz, Ritornell’s music is to me endlessly evocative. Jazz gesture and good humor merge with waves of richly-imagined sonic textures. It’s music that’s both cinematic and improvisatory, dreamlike but well worth repeated listens. (I find it quite hard not to put it on loop, with warm swells of timbre against percussive rhythms, it fits perfectly with the deep mustard and gold hues of the last wave of autumn leaves in November.)
With the slightly-distant allure of Vienna-based vocalist Mimu added to the mix, the music is a kind of ambient pop reverie.
Don’t miss the music videos, shot seemingly through a thick, warm mist. And check out the rest of the music on the site. I hope we hear more from these folks.
Listening: Golden Solitude, an eclectic, jazz-inflected sonic journey of an LP
You know they’re enjoying this. So you will, too. Photo: Ragnar Schmuck Studio, courtesy Modeselektor.
Absorbing the earnestly-nervous urgency of Thom Yorke’s rhythms, Modeselektor dial in a perfect collaboration on “Shipwreck,” a highlight from their latest full-length. Tony T. Datis directs the music video adaptation into a dark narrative. Wandering children set the scene, but keep watching as the cadence of the video begins to gather momentum; Datis finds his way into the phrasing of the music and the story becomes gripping as it moves on.
Thom Yorke, meanwhile, has quietly become a voice beyond his band or even his solo work, effortlessly stepping into extraordinary electronic collaborations in recent years.
And Modeselektor, for their part, have I think a real triumph with Monkeytown. I caught the duo in an intimate setting in Berlin, and was struck as always by their compulsive, sometimes whimsical invention – it comes across in their music, in the gleeful rapport they share together. That’s a fancy way of saying these boys enjoy messing around with music. (They also enjoy, in the show I saw, ripping apart the walls, fiddling with strobe lights, and spraying champagne on people. But that doesn’t stop them from operating their machines beautifully.) The album deserves a track-by-track review – I welcome guest contributions in case I don’t get to it – but in one terrific collaboration after another, Gernot and Sebastian craft perfect, dance-inspiring songs. The PR says something about how they still “assault the dance floor” with songs with “structure” but that doesn’t sound nearly as good as it feels.
Have a listen and let us know if you can put it better. With Busdriver, you get a much … less dark … sound than the one above, with some of the signature humor Modeselektor manages to make eminently danceable. On SoundCloud:
Drink up — just not too much, or your playing could wind up a tad … jittery. Photo (CC-BY) Lali Masriera).
Let’s get together and play music.
The Morning Music & Coffee Consumption series, an informal gathering of artists, aims to do just that. The assumption about digital music production may be very different – the solo artist, holed up in a bedroom alone with a laptop is the default image. But instruments and laptops go together, and laptops can increasingly be played comfortably as instruments, so there’s really no excuse. And Jared Smyth’s mm-cc series, having already produced a volume of music and image, is both an inspiration and a potential model. Creator Jared says he’s hoping others will join in with similar events and share the sonic results – perhaps that’ll be you and your friends, wherever you are.
The series, shot in sumptuous macro video by Charlie Visinic, looked good enough in film that it made appearance on our sister site Create Digital Motion (where I erroneously described the series as being Charlie’s creation, an error I can happily now correct):
With the aim of inspiring (welcome) copycat events, I asked Jared to tell us more about how this series is organized and how it works.
CDM: Tell us a bit about the idea behind mm-cc.
Jared: I started mm-cc as a ritual to reconnect with what made me want to play music in the first place: community. It’s getting together with friends with no pressure to create something marketable, and simply hanging out and creating noise together. mm-cc is my concept (though not that original … people have been getting together to make music and drink coffee long before I called it ‘mm-cc’). I host the website, create posts and also host occasional mm-cc sessions myself at my home in Florida. Charlie also hosts sessions in southern California. The idea is for more people to take part as Charlie does – hosting their own sessions, creating their own visuals and then letting me know about it so I can do a post on it. There’s even an upload form and a forum I built on the site for people to send in samples of audio, or clips of video to be used in other people’s sessions. I really want mm-cc to be as collaborative and eclectic as possible.
How did you organize people to do this?
Some of the time it’s by creating a Facebook event; other times it’s word-of-mouth. With Charlie Visnic and the California sessions, it just sort of happened that he wanted to host sessions at his home over the summer. We met through the monome forums and then became friends as each of us was working on a 365×1 blog goal. (On that note, I started mine over on January 1st, and am now on day 261 – see uprlip.com.
At what point does the coffee kick in?
7am(ish) – people show up around 10am and we play till noon…. I’m usually fairly wired before they show up. I try to buy really good, locally-grown coffee and make it in my French Press.
Are there any special moments or surprises that have happened through the various sessions?
No individual event springs to mind. But it’s always really special for me to look through my studio, where cables are strewn about and there are five or six people drinking really strong coffee and spacing out on their respective instruments, and then into my living room and see my daughter drawing, one friend hand-sewing something, and another knitting, all while listening to the music we’re creating. The chatter and movement of the non-musicians filtering into the room (and often the mic’s) where we’re recording serves as a very natural field recording to accompany us. I love listening back to a session and hearing my daughter giggling or friends talking faintly in the background. It’s a really ethereal experience when that sort of all comes together. That’s exactly what I want from mm-cc – togetherness.
Are you releasing the music separately? If so, where?
There are plans for that in the works. The session that John Keston, David Andree and I did in Minneapolis earlier this year (see video, top) has a much longer recorded form than what’s represented in the video, and we’re very much planning to make that the first (of many?) mm-cc releases. Josh Mason at Sunshine Ltd. has agreed to release it; we’re just not sure of a date yet.
How do you work across coasts?
Well, we’ve only done one session that was ‘trans-coast.’ (video above) For that one we defined a set of notes within a set key that both session’s players would play. I shot the video clips here in Florida and then sent them off to Charlie to edit as he wanted, and he sent me the audio from their session. I then mixed that with the audio from our session, and then sent the final mix back to him, and he cut the video to it. I would like to do more this way – it’s sort of a blind/deaf jam session. We had no clue what theirs would sound like and vice-versa. As for the other sessions that Charlie has hosted, they’re all him. I really have very little to do with them. He just lets me know when he’s going to have one and I then do a post for it when he’s done, and has a video uploaded.
Okay, if this has made you interested in becoming involved, here’s where to go to do it.
Idyllic Amsterdam’s Amstel River, steps away from STEIM, makes nice inspiration. (Cross-processed film photo, which looks more like it feels being there.)
In late September, CDM travels to Amsterdam and the legendary STEIM, a hub for research and experimentation in electro-acoustic music. The Patterns + Pleasure Festival will explore live electronic music practice and more, from controllerist laptop musicians like Edison and Moldover to the likes of sculpture-trained artist Nina Boes working with drawing and video instruments. The afternoon of September 28, we’ll have an open celebration of DIY electronic music culture with a special installment of Handmade Music.
If you’re in the Netherlands or nearby, we hope you’ll stop by. And if you have something you’d like to share, for show-and-tell, performance, and mingling with artists participating in and attending the festival, we have an open call for works.
You can see our video from last time. The video doesn’t really convey what a blast we had. Don’t be afraid by the crackles and whistles, either; I love that there’s a range of sound in electronic inventions, from the crackly experimental to instruments that work in more conventional contexts, too.
This installment already promises to be far bigger. I can’t wait. And if you’re far from the lovely winding canals of Amsterdam seen below, we’re working on extensive coverage so you can feel like you’re there from anywhere on the planet.
Here’s the call for works; feel free to spread it around:
Open Call:
Handmade Music at STEIM
As part of the Patterns + Pleasure Festival
28 September 2011
14:30 – 17:30
Frascati Theater, Amsterdam
Deadline: Tuesday 9 September 2011
Hosted by createdigitalmusic.com and STEIM; curated by Peter KIRN with Takuro Mizuta Lippit
Attention, makers of things that make music! Be part of an open laboratory, a science fair-style show and tell of work. We want to see your creations, including but not limited to:
Custom circuitry
New custom synthesizers
Creative controllers
Open source hardware and software
Audiovisual software
Original acoustic and electroacoustic instruments
Sound art/sculpture
Circuit-bent designs
Instruments and composition and performance tools made with game technology, mobile technology, Kinect cameras, and the like
The essential element is that you’ve built something yourself, in hardware, software, or both.
Please be prepared to show a self-contained presentation of your work. Some display/projection and amplification will be available, but we encourage you to bring your own displays and speakers if you can.
We will setup works for show-and-tell style exploration, as well as brief (5-minute demos) and short (5-10-minute), variety style performances and jams. We’ll also lead a discussion with artists and engineers, and encourage you to meet other makers and exchange ideas and techniques.
We are unfortunately unable to provide expenses for travel, so you will need to provide your own transportation to and lodging in Amsterdam. All projects will be covered on createdigitalmusic.com.
Please submit:
1. Your name, as you’d like it to be listed
2. Your project name
3. If applicable, a link to a project site
4. Photos of your project (a link to Flickr, Picasa, blogs, etc. is fine)
5. (Mandatory) Video and or audio documentation of your project in action (Vimeo, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc.)
6. Space requirements
7. Technical requirements (power / audio / safety concerns if applicable)
8. A brief description (two sentences is fine) of your project.
9. If you wish to propose a performance, please describe in short how you perform with your tool.
10. Your contact information, so we may respond
We prefer to capture information on the submission form, but if you have difficulty with it, please email peter (at) createdigitalmedia [dot] net directly with the subject ‘STEIM HANDMADE MUSIC’
Presenting artists from around Earth to viewers around Earth, a center in Beijing has found a way to do live performance for a sleepless world without waking the neighbors.
Let me start out by saying this: if you read CDM from China, say hello. We’re in the wrong language, we have no translation, and I seriously doubt our Texas data center is delivering this site with any speed (until we upgrade to an international CDN), but the only reason I still run CDM is in order to reach people, and to hear from a wider world that knows things I don’t, and imagines things I can’t. And if you’re not in China, we still get very nice, high-quality video streaming. Think about that for a second: we’re on a planet that has a circumference between poles of about 24,860 miles (40,000 km), and we can share video and recording as if we’re in the same room. That’s pretty ridiculous; almost more impressive than recording itself. (I had similar thoughts a few years ago, somewhere in the jetlag going from New York to its nearly-furthest point on the globe, Perth, Australia.)
Shan Studios is a platform for artist conversations, residency, audiovisual performance, and learning. If you’re in Beijing, China, this center is forging connections between European audiovisual practice and China — and it’s a place where you can go to learn tools like Ableton Live, SuperCollider, and Max/MSP/Jitter. But if you’re anywhere else in the world, tonight/today you can watch a performance of audiovisuals. (That’s 11:59p Beijing time, 4:59p London time, 11:59a New York time).
The best part of this: by broadcasting to the Web but being silent in person, the performance won’t disturb the neighbors.
Using an array of webcams, DIY synthesizers, medical equipment, projectors, busted radios, and many unconventional instruments, the performers will create a completely immersive audiovisual experience in the Shanstudios sound laboratory. But the actual performance space will be silent – as to not wake the neighbors and simultaneously experiment with the best distortion box ever created (the Internet!) – all sounds will be processed digitally and virtually. The event is entirely exploratory and will hopefully lead to greater investigation of the Internet as a viable medium for other such experimental performances.
Shan Studios is the brainchild of multimedia artist Sheng Jie (gogoj), who returned from studying in France with artists and education to share with young people in China.
That pattern is very familiar. In fact, it’s hard to imagine where we’d be now without international exchange. First, research centers exchanged knowledge and technology – think, for instance, American Miller Puckette visiting Paris’ IRCAM to go on to create what would become Max/MSP, but also investigations spanning Brazil, Japan, Australia, and so on. With more democratized access to technology (read: s*** gets cheaper), that’s gone beyond any centralized locations to knowledge and artistic ideas that cross all six populated continents.
Whereas this was once one-directional – even in the US, aspiring artists often headed to Europe – now I think the compass could spin in all directions.
Anyway, I should be quiet so you can go watch the video:
Side note: if anyone is interested in making a Mandarin-native site companion to CDM, do get in touch. We’re not, ahem, sponsored by Intel, but I can see what we can do. Hell, I’d be pleased to have one page, or content in English that does a better job of what’s going on on the other side(s) of the globe.
The Swarmatron, made infamous by The Social Network, is just one of the crazy sonic creations we’ll be seeing this weekend. Photo credit: Joshua Sarner.
This weekend in North Adams, Massachusetts at MASS MoCA, the band Wilco is gathering their very own music and arts festival, Solid Sound. It’s become a real oasis of unique programming, musical and otherwise, and I’m pleased to be a part of it. Wilco’s Mikael Jorgensen and I put together a showcase of some of the best musical builders and DIYers. We’ll be gathering this weekend and talking to all the artists, so any questions you have, we’ll have answers, wherever you are in the world, from Massachusetts to Moscow to Madeira to Macau.
Handmade Music Lounge is presented by Moog Music, who themselves build their instruments by hand in North Carolina, carrying on the legacy of Bob Moog. Dr. Moog, of course, got his start building Theremins while still a student, so we believe that the lifeblood of electronic musical invention – and a great gateway into understanding electronics, physics, math, and culture – is DIY.
Here’s the lineup — and plenty of video inspiration to get you familiar with the broad spectrum of what people are doing in electronic instrument making and invention today! Queue it up and watch…
Todd Bailey, Where’s the Party At 2 The debut of a new open source, 8-bit sampler, in the spirit of lo-fi samplers employed in early hip hop. http://blog.narrat1ve.com/
Peter Kirn, MeeBlip and createdigitalmusic.com A hackable, affordable, open source synthesizer with MIDI anyone can use, backed by a growing community of hundreds of synthesists, new and expert. meeblip.com
Jeff Snyder, Snyderphonics Sophisticated multi-touch homebrewed instruments for futuristic Bluegrass music and alternative tunings. snyderphonics.com
Brian and Leon Dewan, Dewanatron Part sculpture, part solid-state instruments, original analog creations. Recently featured by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross in the Social Network soundtrack.
Travis Thatcher, Voice of Saturn Original synthesizers and sound and performance control creations, as produced for a variety of music including Animal Collective. recompas.com voiceofsaturn.blogspot.com
Christopher Kucinski and Owen Osborn, Critter and Guitari From pocket pianos to video synthesizers, new electronic designs are portable works of art.
Ranjit Bhatnagar Among other creations — the 8-bit violin is an acoustic violin for a digital age, cut from plywood by a laser-cutter but playable as a conventional violin.
And now we hear Ranjit is bringing an instrument packed by JELL-O
Lara Grant, Felted Signal Processing Felted Signal Processing is an arts and research project focused on soft interface design and sensor development (fsp.fm)
Josh Silverman, Synplode Synplode is an interactive, rhythmic dance floor pulsing with light and sound. prettyextreme.com
Brendan Gaffney, Burnheart Synthesizers Crafted in wood and electronics, Casper Electronics collaborator Brendan makes wonderful synths, modulars, and effects.
…and our hosts, Moog Music, are showing off a prototype
The Handmade Music Lounge is made possible with support from Moog.
Chief Engineer Cyril Lance is coming to the Handmade Music Lounge to talk with our other makers about the craft of designing musical instruments. And he’s bringing along the latest Moogerfooger, the Cluster Flux. That means CDM will also get a unique first hands-on with the instrument’s prototype during its first venture out into the wild. Previously: Moogerfooger Cluster Flux: Flanger + Chorus + Vibrato + LFO; Pricing and Availability Details
I’m actually really pleased that readers did ask some tough questions about the new Moogerfooger in comments on that story, and I’ll make sure we get those questions addressed directly to the engineer. Talking to the actual engineer and not just going through the filter of marketing is really important to me.
If you’ve got more – particularly those from an engineering perspective – let us know.
I’m also excited to mix and mingle someone working with a major-name maker and some of the folks on the DIY side of things.
Euphorie live at the Elektra Festival. Photo courtesy Elektra.
When a brainy, abstract audiovisual act can elicit some laughs and cheers, you know something is going right.
Euphorie, the live music and projection act by François Wunschel, Fernando Favier, and stage designer Pier Schneider of the collectives 1024 Architecture and EXYZT, isn’t brand new. But in the cavernous, packed Usine C at Montreal’s Elektra Festival earlier this month, it surely shone. Inside that booming rehabilitated factory, sound and video elements seemed to just click, the happy result of months of development, practice, and iteration meeting a highly appreciative crowd. Projectors and software, props and vocals, laptops and electric sounds were all jamming together like a band should. Part inventors, part musical performers, the duo are finding the sweet spot between technological magic and live jam.
The French duo of François and Fernando start slow, with a somewhat timid doodle on a projection screen. But that doodle grows into squares and boxes, as monochromatic projection across multiple scrims immerse the performers in electric-light scaffolds or showers of pixellated sparks. And then the neon guitars come out, and it’s on.
Conceived as a set of individual songs, each set piece couples simple musical compositions with visual elements, mindful in each of an inventive sound-to-image relationship. The pairings are traditional, but performed with a conviction and charm that’s irresistible.
Eletkra, Usine C. From top: the architecture in 1024 Architecture, as the artists produce a virtual structure on the stage. A “neon guitar” tube becomes an electrified instrument – and part of the light show. Photos courtesy Elektra Festival; used by permission.
The projector-and-laptop, doodle-and-geometry combinations might be as familiar as the instrumentation of a rock quartet; the achievement of 1024 Architecture is making them actually rock. A couple of darker numbers get into some strange lyrics and a creepy talking head, but in more spare, economical moment, the duo manage to hit upon something elusive: wit. There’s a sense of humor and liveness to the whole act, a sense that the artists are comfortable poking fun at themselves, or at least in being ceaselessly sincere and unpretentious. There’s even a sequence that takes on a game mechanic; the silliness paradoxically completes the illusion of being immersed onstage. Tron-style, Daft Punk-like EL wire suits seem slightly tongue in cheek, but in the midst of all this drawing and playing and screaming solos on guitars, you really do get the sense that the players have lept into the computer. It’s a real entry into the digital world, too, minus any Disney Hollywood trickery.
The duo and their set designer are also extremely clever in their use of minimal stage dressings to get a maximal immersive effect. Using three translucent scrims spaced across the stage, combined with basic translation and rotation effects in the 3D software, they produce surprisingly-convincing illusions of onstage depth. It’s not even really quite projection mapping: rather, it takes advantage of fairly conventional stage effects that, thanks to human perception, are also highly effective.
In a late number, shouting the names of programming languages and software tools (Objective-C! MySQL!), the duo almost goes a bit nerdcore – or at least would top my list of “bands to write a theme song for CDM.”
Obligatory EL wire. Eat your heart out, Daft Punk.
None of this really comes across in the videos, which to me is partially satisfying. It really feels like a live act; something happens between audience and performer. That said, it’s worth looking through their documentation and exploring their other, impressively-prolific collaborations.
Here’s a great behind-the-scenes / interview video by Le Cube (French-only):
These videos are rougher, but come closer to the performance I saw:
Tests, early performance documentation, and rehearsal videos get you a bit closer to the work, including this fascinating neon-guitar which I think really stole the whole show. (They’ve obviously been practicing, as they were far better at playing these at the Elektra show than they were in the early test videos or even some of the performance videos online. Touring, practicing, and audiences make a huge difference – it’s a good thing.)
Stay tuned to Create Digital Motion for more on the mechanics behind the projection techniques here. The goal of CDM for me is to have in-depth technical information on music and motion – each of which are fundamentally specific by nature – while the actual artwork straddles the two media.
The wonderful, sometimes-inspiring, sometimes-daunting capability of the computer is to make any sound you like. Give someone an open toolbox, and they really limited only by skill and imagination. Graphical modular environment Reaktor by Native Instruments has a reputation for crunchy granular sounds and elaborate, multi-layered glitches, and those are to some of us certainly a good thing. But here’s some music made in Reaktor that tends in another direction. The creatoors give us some nice tools, to be sure, but they also give us some actual music and sounds to explore.
At top, our friend Peter Dines has been continuing to iterate with his granular tools, Loupe. Here, OpenSoundControl control signals from an iPad running (recently-updated) TouchOSC translate to new sounds. Multi-touch control seems to me perfect for this sort of continuous parameter control. The download updates his $15 patch set, and there’s an extensive tutorial on using OSC and Reaktor on his Noisepages blog:
Even if for some bizarre reason you’re not interested in this patch, the article above is a must-read for any Reaktor user hoping to experiment with OSC.
Via the ever-prodigious Synthtopia comes three other free Reaktor ensembles. For free ensembles, they’re really polished – there’s a 4-oscillator atmospheric pad synth, a 3-oscillator bass synth, and 2-oscillator “pluck” synth. If you don’t own Reaktor, there’s even a free 3-oscillator bass synth instrument for Windows VST. The results produce dreamy, dense layers of sound:
The trio, entitled “The Colorspace,” is the work of Italian-based musician Dario. He makes music under a number of identities, but I’m partial to his ambient projects Kiis and “need a name.” A Kiis release is available as a name-your-price EP on Bandcamp:
There’s also some seriously chilled-own, pleasantly-ambient (even when beats make appearances) music as “Need a Name.”
Whether this music is specifically your cup of tea or not, it’s great to actually hear some music from the person making the tool. You can take it as further inspiration, a chance to be closer to the person who makes the Reaktor patches you use, or even a challenge to make your own work with the same sonic arsenal distinctly your own.
Bonus – back in glitchland… As I write this, I see that there’s an updated TouchOSC control layout for Richard Devine’s GrainCube, a free Reaktor patch built by DevSnd, Rachmiel, TwistedTools, and Antonio Blanca. See previous coverage here on CDM from last year; a different video below, and a picture of the new layout (which looks nice). Of course, no reason you can’t use this same tool to make something that sounds very different…
