Cyber-musician and Berklee faculty member Neil Leonard is organizing another evening of the latest in sonic arts at GASP, a space devoted to promoting collaboration between disciplines and fields in the contemporary cultural landscape. Sonic Arts @ GASP features beat de-constructions, circuit bending noise and realtime video by Berklee Music Synthesis students and alumni. Performers include London laptop maestro Gadi Sassoon, Somerville’s own guitar player and electronic artist Katie Amaral, and New Hampshire-based sound artist Eric Miller.

It all happens this Friday, June 6, at 8:00 p.m. at the GASP Gallery, 362-4 Boylston St., Brookline, just one block from the Brookline Hills stop on the Riverside branch of the Green Line. Suggested donation is $10, or $6 with a valid student ID. Email galleryinfo@g-a-s-p.net or call 617.418.4308 for more information.

Based on his 2006 book, Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking, Nicolas Collins will lead a workshop of intensive electronic experimentation, from which participants will leave empowered, carrying several new instruments and the skills needed to continue inventing and building on their own. The two-day workshop culminates in a group performance by Nicolas and his workshop associates out on Lincoln Road Mall during the Winter Music Conference 08.

Spatial Z is a collaborative composition, jointly written and performed by experimental instrument maker John Bowers, sound artist Ann Rosén and composer Sten-Olof Hellström. The piece explores the spatiality of sound and problematises music as a physical and perceptual phenomenon. What is the connection between music and space? Between instruments and the environments they find themselves in? Between the spaces in which performers interact with their instruments and each other and the audience’s listening space? How wide and high is an abstract sound? What is the relationship between the concert (architectural) space and the (imaginary) spaces suggested in the music itself?

Spatial Z is a composition both in time and space. Sound from the performers will be disseminated through a variety of spaces both real and virtual at varying levels of scale from miniature to the largest imaginable. The concert hall itself becomes a feedback instrument which the audience can engage with by moving around throughout the duration of the piece. By using various unorthodox self-made instruments and techniques such as live coding and circuit bending (where, respectively, hardware and software are manipulated in the performance itself), Bowers, Hellström and Rosén begin to map the ambiguous sonic spaces of Spatial Z.

Ann Rosén: Sound, space, people, meetings, processes and collaborations are all important factors in Ann Roséns art. In her recent works such as Deputy Silences, Schhh and Spatial Silences she explores different aspects of sound and the social context in which it is encountered. As a composer Ann works mainly with EAM (Electr-Acoustic Music) utilizing different surround techniques such as in Surr, IC - first movement, Stress etc. When performing Ann uses a variety of sensor based controllers that she develops and builds herself. In her solo work Ann prefers to work with compositions but together with others such as Hellström and Bowers she often but not always takes on the role as an improviser.

John Bowers is currently a Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Design at Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Music, University of East Anglia, UK. As an improvising musician, John is part of Tonesucker, an improvising noise metal electric guitar duo (CD Slaughterhouse available on Onoma Research), the Gentlemen of Circuitry, a quartet who play antique and homemade electronic instruments, and the electro-acoustic improvisors The Zapruda Trio (CD Live at Smallfish available on vision-of-sound), amongst other collaborations. Solo work includes The Dial: Have you been to Hilversum? (broadcast by Resonance FM, London), Do It Yourself Silence and Silence Silenced (contributed to the CD A Call for Silence, Sonic Arts Network), and Atonement for Violin Quartet (Norwich Gallery, UK), a four day long performance - installation - webcast revisiting the instrument destruction preoccupations of Fluxus artists. John is co-founder of the Onoma Research music label. A monograph specifying John’s characteristic approach to music, social science research and technical affairs, Improvising Machines, is available here.

Sten-Olof Hellström has been active as a professional composer since 1984 and gained a Masters of Music in composition at University of East Anglia, England 1990. He has been employed as a researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) since 1997. As a researcher Sten-Olof has mainly worked in the fields of Human Computer Interaction and sonification (representing data with sound). One example of current work is the construction and development of a computer interface for the visually impaired. Sten-Olof’s main occupation and profession is as a composer working with electro-acoustic music. His music has been performed and broadcast around the world . He is also active as a performer playing live electro-acoustic music on his own and with others such as Ann Rosén, John Bowers, Bennett Hogg and Simon Vincent. Sten Olof is also part of Zapruda Trio, the Aspen Duo, Enscharm and others.

[Image: Spatial Silences by Ann Rosén]

Immersion is a free-entry experimental music / sound-art event featuring a soundtrack of electronic atmospheres, noisescapes, pulses / rhythms and tones / drones. Immersion is an arena for new and established international artists performing live experimental electronic music; using laptops, synthesizers, field recordings, circuit-bent electronics and prepared/processed instruments. All sounds are partnered by stimulating projected visuals processed live and tailored for each performance.

Alex Mein Smith: AMS has been described as “Rhythm n Drone”. Combining lethargic textures with heavy beats, the result is experimental yet accessible. All drums are analogue - all textures are guitar. Having released an album, AMS has had a year off…. this is his first show in many months.

Con Brio is pure electronica - a sound that glitches through heavenly glances of beauty then yanks you back to reality with cut-up beats dirty enough to make a hammer bleed. Direct to the brain quality melodies laced with clever beats.

Gabriel Da Piaz: Sounds and noises are organically produced from the guitar using various objects to ‘prepare’ the instrument, and create immersive soundscapes.

grohs is a sound manipulist - taking basic building blocks of sound and warping them into wild structures. Fragments of moments become swathes of sounds stretching into the distance. Whilst his recorded works tend toward the ambient end of the spectrum, his live shows can range from glistening soundscapes to full on noisefear. grohs is a co-founder of doombience duo Regolith, and prefers to describe his work as sound not music.

SS_R: Presents a series of sound experiments created by building upon non-programmed minimal repetitions of static noise and rhythmic feedback - processed through multiple filters and defined by accidental and reactive parameter interactions.

Suero is not looking for an electronic-perfect-label to describe what it does. Suero does not use computers. Suero builds a real time sound-noise sculpture based on his own sounds, to drive the listener to an analogue extreme and dark field, rather than a “cliche electronic happiness”.

Visual credits:

pixelpusher (Evan.Raskob) is a live video performance artist, or “pixelist”. After a few years of pixel-pushing across New York City, he now plies his trade on the mean streets of London. pixelpusher generates video out of a controlled chaos of photographic images, simple shapes, animations, sounds, and live video feeds. All software is homemade, all imagery is created live; things may go wrong in beautiful ways, and no performance is ever the same. www.lowfrequency.org

Transphormetic & yesyesnono: Oli Laurelle & Paul Prudence are real-time visual performers working with generative systems and processed video to create graphic sound-responsive works. They work separately under the names of yesyesnono and Transphormetic, as well as jam together for a unique brand of abstract experimental visual hedonism.

The performance took place at The Openhouse in SoHo and was born out of a burgeoning DIY music movement where artists take the debris of everyday life, for example an amp made from a Ritz cracker box and instruments made from Gameboys, irons and electronic toys, and turn them into musical instruments to play at events such as Handmade Music Night and Music for People and Thingamajigs. It was cosponsored by Create Digital Music, a webzine and community site for musicians using technology, Etsy, a website selling D-I-Y products and Make Magazine, a magazine devoted entirely to DIY technology projects.

“The course teaches students how to use technology to make art. With simple electronic tricks, students are able to tap into their creative potential and make instruments and music out of their own imagination” said Ranjit Bhatnagar, a faculty member at Parsons who taught the course and who is also an artist creating music out of found objects, such as a wind-up noisemaker and a Theremin-playing robot.

In the course, which has 13 students and is in its third year, students were taught basic electronic manipulation such as circuit bending and encouraged to creatively explore this technology to create instruments. The instruments range from an electric hurdy gurdy (a stringed instrument) made of an old synthesizer and operated by a wooden crank, to an electric cello made from two-by-fours a student found in the hallway of the school. Please visit the course blog for descriptions, images and video of the instruments.

View the Table of Contents and abstracts for LMJ 17

CALL FOR PAPERS: LMJ 18: Why Live? Performance in the Age of Digital Reproduction (2008)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Odt8v8LAAik

There’s lots of information on circuit bending in an October 13 createdigitalmusic.com article,”Want to Get Started Circuit Bending?”, including a link to Reed Ghazala’s Circuit Bending Primer.

Reed Ghazala is the Father of circuit bending. According to Wikipedia, “Reed accidentally discovered the technique [in 1966]… when he left a toy amplifier in his desk and heard it start to emit sounds comparable to those produced by expensive synthesizers of the day. The amplifier’s casing had been opened, exposing its inner circuitry and allowing it to short circuit when placed against the metal desk.” Reed pioneered it, named it, and has taught it ever since.

There are several short videos at createdigitalmusic.com as well, among them the automated drum pad above (my favorite) by Michael Una, who wrote “Want to Get Started Circuit Bending?”

Screen Music is part of the program of the Creativity Festival, an event promoted by the Tuscan Region and organized by Fondazione Sistema Toscana. With an exhibition space of approximately 40,000 square meters, 400 events, 1,600 artists and speakers from over 40 countries around the world, the Festival program includes meetings and debates with great representatives of modern culture, the world of art and design, and the Italian and international music scenes.
In the broad fields of contemporary experimentation, within the new mixed media disciplines / subjects, Screen Music presents a varied group of artists (performers, video artists, musicians and designers) protagonists of the most advanced electronic audiovisual research, in the many of its possible declinations, considering this ear also the possible means of dialogue between “digital” and “material” aesthetics.

The first edition of Screen Music focused on the analysis and description of the most modern forms of electronic audiovisual interaction in terms of projections and live performances; the second edition of this review in the location of the Teatrino Lorenese, wants to point out the need of a reflection on the audiovisual aesthetics of tangible, of effectiveness, of manual character and analogic mechanicalness, in a period of excessive digital over-stimulation and exasperate techno-fetishism. A step backwards, a moment to reflect and stop, a return to physicalness of action, to underline the possible alternative ways of audiovisual creativity that, operating now for many years, assume a reason and a creative and operative value thanks indeed to the deep antithesis that they keep in opposition to the reigning digitalization of artistic instruments and creative aesthetics.

It’s above all the part of Screen Music 2 followed by Marco Mancuso / Digicult, Saturday 27/10 and Sunday 28/10 that focuses on these dynamics, thanks to some audiovisual performances where synaesthesia within music and video is realized through the dialogue between the sound produced with mechanical instruments and electrical and physical processes and the image that visualizes what happens on the stage, staging a direct relation in between the resonant source and the visual perception of the audience.

In this direction moves also the last project Popular Mechanics of the pioneering musician Pierre Bastien produced by Aphex Twin’s Rephlex Label, Italian absolute preview, where a system of motors, filters, paper instruments, pulleys and Mecano pieces build up the rhythmic and hypnotic base of an audiovisual concert in the form of cinema-verité unique in the whole world. And more, the where the electromagnetic camp produced by the two projectors creates the audio backstage when it interacts with the graphical patterns designed by the same artists on special projected slides, for an audiovisual performance in real time completely improvised and absolutely genial. The Americans Lou Objects are instead within the most important representatives on an international level of the circuit bending aesthetics, art of improvising audiovisual situationist performances through circuiting in real time electric and electronic elements, whose screen visualization constitutes a hypnotic element of fascination for the present audience.

The Italian school is represented in Screen Music 2 by Mylicon/En, who characterize themselves visualizing the processes deriving from a set of analogical and mechanical instruments, able to produce sounds digitally sampled and edited in real time. The club part of the two nights is in the end entrusted to two completely different but at the same time fascinating projects: on one side the 8 bit aesthetics of the collective from New York 8BitPeoples, present with its representatives Bit Shifter and Nullsleep with the visuals of the French Otro, that thanks to a wise manual work of hacking and circuiting of Game Boys and old Commodore, Atari and Amiga consoles, will lead the audience to an irreverent dance audiovisual delirium on the sounds and images typical of modern micromusic. On the other side the icon, body art performer and dj Franko B, will measure himself with the software artist and vj Sanch Tv in a live audiovisual set astride between techno music and generative art.

Finally, the opening night of Screen music 2, on Thursday 25/10, followed by Abdrea Mi/Videominute together with the staff of RE::LIFE, will be a night totally dedicated to join and weld the audiovisual connections between the best “old school” of hip hop and dj culture (represented by the sampling percussionist Steinski) and the most promising guard of the electronic scene (excellently represented by the Swiss Dimlite and by our Costa) visualized live by the graphic evolutions of the Spanish Iglesias Heras. Tommy Boy, Antidote, Ninja Tune, Stones Throw, Sonar Kollectiv are just some of the basic labels with whom the artists involved in this project have recorded and this will also be the occasion to verify the creative path that begins in the end of the 70s and arrives to the next future, twining styles an sounds in between cymbals and samplers, laptops and videomixers. From the Hip Hop Old School to the Abstract Hip.

PROGRAM::

THURSDAY 25 OCTOBER - cured by Andrea Mi/Videominuto
23.30-00.15 - Costa (Ita) + Pintaycolorea (Spa)
00-30-01.15 - Dimlite (Svi) + Pintaycolorea (Spa)
01.30-03.00 - Steinski (USA) + Pintaycolorea (Spa)

SATURDAY 27 OCTOBER - cured by Marco Mancuso/Digicult
00-30-01.30 - Mylicon/En (Ita)
23.30-00.30 - Loud Objects (Usa)
01.30-03.00 - Franko B (UK) + Sanch Tv (Fra)

SUNDAY 28 OCTOBER - cured by Marco Mancuso/Digicult
00.30-01.30 - Pierre Bastien (Fra)
23.30-00.30 - Mikomikona (Ger)
01.30-03.00 - 8 Bit Peoples: Bit Shifter & Nullsleep (Usa) + Otro (Fra)

PIERRE BASTIEN - Composer and multi-instrumentalist with transalpine origins, Pierre Bastien creates electro-acoustic sounds using mechanical toy-musicians in strange conglomerations of pulleys and BONGOLETTI, rough spring-loaded gears and little motors, near to the tradition of surrealist bricolage. The final results lead back to improvisation music and to ethnic traditional musicality: click and bass drum, electronic melodies and mutant trumpets as contour to the many micro-percussions, elaborations quite free and released from the usual stylistic standards at the point to thrill also Squarepusher and Aphex Twin that wanted Pierre Bastien with them in the respective English and Italian tours. It is a unique combination of experimentalism, melody and sound-art that even though keeps a happy and suggestive pleasantness in listening. With the new project the cinema-verité of Pierre Bastien is characterized by paper drums, paper organ and by sheets of paper that alternate with the usual Meccano pieces and circuits, for the audiovisual portrayal exalted by the sweet and romantic intervention of the jazz trumpet played live by the same musician.

MIKOMIKONA is a Berlinese duo composed of Andreas Eberlein and Birgit Schneider. Their audiovisual performances, imprinted towards a strict minimalist aesthetic harshness, are real sessions of experimental laboratory during which the duo concentrates on the physical transformations of sound to image and vice versa. Driven experimentalism, liveness and strong scene impact are the uprising characteristics of their works, designed in the balance between deepened theoretic consciousness and technologic research. The instruments that they use in live shows can be overhead projectors equipped with home-built analogical devices that read and transform into audio signals the bedding of optical layers of the slides, or strange machineries with the 16mm.

FRANKO B, born in Milan and living in London since 1979, has created projects using languages such as video, photography, performances, painting, installations, sculpture and mixed media since 1990. his performances have been hosted in spaces such as the Tate Modern, ICA, South London Gallery and Palais des Beaux-Artes, Brussels, while he held lessons at the St. Martins School of Art, DasArt, New York University and the Courtauld Institute of Art. Already two biographies have been written on his artistic career: ‘Franko B’ (Black Dog Publishing 1998) e ‘Oh Lover Boy’ (2001). The most recent publications of the artist are a photographic book titled ‘Still Life’ (2003) and the monograph Blinded by Love while his latest projects are on the web: www.franko-b-mentoring.co.uk, www.de-mentored.blogspot.com. Since 2004 Franko B works as dj.

BIT SHIFTER explores the energy of low definition music composed and performed on a Nintendo Game Boy. The result is an enjoying and evocative sound performed on a platform that everyone thinks technically limited. Bit Shifter’s music, whose realization is allowed by software designed by Oliver Wittchow and Johan Kotlinski (nanoloop and Little Sound Dj), defines a low budget aesthetic where a minimal hardware equipment is pushed further to the limit of its expressive potentialities. Based in New York, Bit Shifter has produced music for 8bitpeoples, 555 Recordings, Mirex, Ketacore e Astralwerks, performing in many live sets around the world.

NULLSLEEP - Co-founder of the collective 8bitpeoples, Nullsleep creates a pop and romantic sound using old electronic devices trying to avoid their technical limits. Sweet melodies and intense rhythmic pulses are produced and lead through small plastic instruments in an evocative audiovisual research but never nostalgic. His recordings with 8bitpeoples, Astralwerks e Aniplex have made of him one of the most famous artists on the international stage. Based in New York, Nullsleep has performed in live shows between America, Europe and Asia, participating also to the dates of the International Chiptune Resistance World Tour in 2006.

OTRO - Otromatic is a vj that creates visuals using old amiga computers and mobile consoles. His artistic research moves in between the 8bit experimentation, science fiction of low cost kind and influences from the historical vanguards to create dynamic and evocative visual catalogue. Very active as a graphic designer, realizes musical covers and projects of coordinate image for many labels.

MYLICON/EN is a duo that rises from the collaboration between the videomaker Lino Greco and the musician Daniela Cattivelli. Since 2002 the duo has started a route leading to experimentation of new ways of interaction between live images and sounds inside a device in the balance between digital dematerialization (referring with it also to the whole experimentation of the last years around the phenomena of VJs and livemedia) and the return to action physicality. Live exhibitions characterizes itself for the use of “analogical” and mechanical sources and instruments of various kinds ad origin. A kind of work that touches different fields and subjects, Mylicon/EN finds space in festivals and reviews of various kinds: from contexts essentially tied up with electronic music to vjing festivals, from art galleries to performatory and theatrical arts. Moreover Mylicon/EN has realized various video that appeared in many international festivals and different video installations.

Sanch Tv is David Dessens a French freelance designer who creates software for meso.net: instruments for video synthesis in real time that use physicalinterfaces and full-developed instruments between motion graphics and audio scores. His live visuals surprisingly react to the music they visualize, and since it generate patterns and sequences of images that adapt themselves to the space and location. His scientific and mathematic studies produced performances that play with 3dabstraction in creating fluid and unexpected shapes.

LOUD OBJECTS - Tristan Perich, Kunal Gupta e Katie Shima are Loud Objects, electronic noise group of musicians, artists and architects that build digital circuits on the stage with welding and microchips. The action takes place directly on an old projector, that makes the assembling smoky and transparent, that runs hand in hand with low level circuits that create the music. The first five minutes of their set are usually characterized by complete silence due to the building of the starting circuit, that explodes in the end in a dens a real sound. But don’t think that these small circuits create light sounds. noise is hard and heavy, modeled and modulated each time with the addition of new chips to the low-fi system.

DIGICULT is a cultural project involved in digital culture and electronic arts. DigiCult project is directed by Marco Mancuso and based on the active participation of 40 professional people about, who represent the first wide Italian network of journalists, curators, artists and critics in the field of electronic culture. And on a multitude of updated strategies around new media communication and networking activities. DigiCult is a web portal but is also the editor of the monthly magazine DigiMag, discussing with a critic and journalistic approach, about net art, hacktivism, video art, electronica, audio video, interaction design, artificial intelligence, new media, software art, performing art. DigiCult produce an electronic music and audiovisual podcast and the newsletter international service DigiNews. DigiCult is involved in side-activities like media partnerships and journalistic/critic reports, consultancy and curatorial activities and artists international promotion.

http://www.digicult.it/digimag_eng/index.asp
http://www.digicult.it/podcast/
http://www.digicult.it/en/Credits.asp

Workshop: Music Improvisation – gadgets and non-traditional instruments :: Presenters: Gayle Young, Jeff Morton, Tina Pearson :: Date: October 29, 7 pm, Open Space. Drop in fee - Focuses on alternate objects, tools and ‘instruments’, and discusses the authority of musical gesture. Gayle Young’s Amaranth and Columbine, tuned tubing, circuit boards, circuit bent electronics, circuit boards, no-input mixer, contact mics, toys, bells and other gadgets will be available to explore – and bring your own stuff.

Workshop: Instrument Building, Design and Practice
Presenter: Gayle Young
Date: November 5, 7 pm, Open Space
Drop in Fee
Visiting sound artist Gayle young will demonstrate the physical requirements for building acoustic instruments, and how to develop unique playing techniques by focusing on enhancing vibration, and offer practical experience designing, creating and listening through tuned tubing.