The Telephone Game: Oil/Water/Ether by the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) is an exploration of a real-time collaborative composition local network. All of the performers have identical performance/composition programs — a custom flexible step-sequencer — that invite play with rhythmic cycles of various lengths and timbres. The real fun starts, however, when the players begin spying on their neighbors, secretly, via the network, and stealing their ideas with the click of the mouse. Unplanned structures begin to emerge, like oil on water, as riffs propagate and evolve, sometimes returning unrecognizable to their creators. Continue reading

April ReSiDeNt Show: New Works, New Instruments, New Artists :: Featuring new works by Dafna Naphtali, Andrew Schneider and Simon Morris :: at LEMURplex, 461 3rd Avenue, Brooklyn, between 9th & 10th Streets :: Friday, May 2nd :: 8 pm - 11 pm :: $5 at the door

Dafna Naphtali is a sound-artist and improviser-composer from an eclectic musical background. As singer/guitarist/electronic-musician she performs and composes using custom sound processing of voice and other instruments. Besides her composing and improvised projects, she co-leads the digital chamber punk ensemble What is it Like to be a Bat? with Kitty Brazelton (http://www.whatbat.org) and has collaborated/performed with Lukas Ligeti, David First, Joshua Fried, Continue reading

Welcome to the April 08 Issue of Furthernoise.org (Roger Mills, Editor). Along with a host of new reviews, we bring you news of upcoming events and performances as well as an audio player stacked with all the best tracks of the issue.

David Tagg - Waist Deep Seas of Milk (review) New York musician, David Tagg, has seen The Future of Modern Guitar. And this sonic seer’s astral projections are sumptuously spread across the ambient expanses of Waist Deep Seas of Milk, though all trace of twang, pluck and strum is dissolved in FX haze and spun out in endless echo returns. Review by Alan Lockett. Continue reading

[’til death do us a part] by Tobias c. van Veen (aka saibotuk) - Dead media unwinds time from its spools. Two electromagnetic machines capture the unfolding of an era in which memory encodes the loving caress of electron imprinted tape. Time out of joint falls in & out of tape sync; more inhuman than human loops the frequency. “I wanted my human experience with machinic love to have the intensity of a hands-on relationship.”

Thus, van Veen turned to reel-to-reel (RTR) tape machines and Konstantin Raudive’s experiments with blank media in which he attempted to record the ‘voices of the dead’. (Little did van Veen know that John Hudak was exploring similar terrain in Voices from the Paradise Network.) Continue reading

Ajay Kapur - Electronic Sitars, Robotic Tablas, and Sarawati’s ElectroMagic :: April 3, 2008; 5 - 7 pm :: Machine Project, 1200 D North Alvarado Street, Los Angeles, CA.

TABLACENTRIC is thrilled to present Ajay Kapur, whose work revolves around one queston: “How do you make a computer improvise with a human?” Using the rules set forth by the north Indian classical tradition, Ajay strives to build new interfaces for musical expression by modifying the tabla, dholak and sitar with added microchips and sensor systems, while building robotic musical instruments which can be programmed to perform along with the human performer. Continue reading

Diapason gallery for sound and intermedia presents Alessandro Bosetti and Christian Kesten’s Mask/Mirror, a performance :: March 29, 2008; 8:00 pm :: Diapason, 882 Third Avenue (between 32nd and 33rd Street), 10th floor, Brooklyn, NY.

A few months ago I wrote a note to myself: “Try to create a mask that that doesn’t have anything to do with anything” and kept wondering what that could mean until I started to imagine Mask/Mirror. Mask/Mirror a sampler to process recordings of spoken language in real time… The sampler follows both sound and meaning criteria in sorting, organizing and processing samples and in formulating utterances. Continue reading

Ossatura with Ensemble Noamnesia :: March 20, 2008; 8:00-9:30 pm :: Slought Foundation, 4017 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA.

Slought Foundation and Soundfield NFP are pleased to announce an evening of new and experimental music featuring Rome-based ensemble Ossatura and Philadelphia-based Ensemble Noamnesia. Ossatura features Elio Martusciello (electronics), Fabrizio Spera (percussion and electronics), and Luca Venitucci (accordion and electronics). They will realize graphic scores by Anthony Braxton, Franco Evangelisti, and others, in collaboration with Ensemble Noamnesia. Continue reading

BLISS :: March 13, 2008, 8.30 pm, Sonic Arts Research Center (SARC), Belfast.

A distributed laptop performance between SARC’s own BLISS (Belfast Legion for Improvised Sights and Sounds) and Göteborg’s Academy of Music and Drama laptop ensemble, Sweden. This networked performance explores techniques and strategies for improvised electroacoustic music over the internet.

The Legion does not prescribe its sights or sounds; they are the product of digital and contra-digital networks of gates, tables, switches, speaker objects, cabling and data… The Legion is not a band – we don’t play weddings – but we like playing in the network! This event is a co-production between SARC and the Siren Festivalen för ny music. The performance will include works by Justin Yang and Alain Renaud. Related article.

Otolab’s Circo Ipnotico - Audiovisual Improvised Session :: February 23, 2008 :: Paradiso (Amsterdam) :: Part of Sonic Acts XII - The Cinematic Experience.

Circo Ipnotico is an audiovisual improvised session with an open performer lineup. The score is given by dub architectures made by a crossing work of synths and laptops. The audiovisual journey evolves from here and the performers (from 3 to 6) use very different tools: from Girello, a rotating support supplied with different surfaces featuring shapes, colours and materials which are modified in real time using paint, to Pepposcopio a Moduli Digitali, to software interventions by other performers. Continue reading

From the website: “The Telematic Circle is an interest group that uses and develops applications for telepresent music performances. The group supports the creation of new art that specifically addresses broadband transmission systems as a new medium.

The interest of the Telematic Circle goes beyond the requirements of mono-located music performances, for example musical solutions that address the unavoidable latency between two co-located sites. Continue reading