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

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

imposition - a language-driven sound installationa - by John Caley and Giles Perring :: April 17, 5:00-6:30 pm (EDT) :: Rockefeller Library, Brown University, Second Floor Computer Cluster (and elsewhere in the building) :: BRING YOUR LAPTOP :: part of Transforming the Student’s Experience as Scholar.

imposition emerges from translation, a series of pieces which were developed, in turn, from overboard, our first essay in ambient poetics. imposition uses the same texts and procedures as translation. It continues an investigation of iterative, procedural removal from one text or language to another. 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.

Kim Cascone received his formal training in electronic music at the Berklee College of Music in the early 1970’s, and in 1976 continued his studies with Dana McCurdy at the New School in New York City. In the 1980’s, after moving to San Francisco and gaining experience as an audio technician, Cascone worked with David Lynch as Assistant Music Editor on both Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart. He has worked for Thomas Dolby’s company Headspace and as Director of Content for Staccato Systems. Since 1980, Kim has released more than 15 albums of electronic music and has worked / performed with Keith Rehberg, Oval, Scanner, Carsten Nicolai, Doug Aitken, and David Toop among others. Cascone was one of the co-founders of the microsound list and writes for Computer Music Journal and Artbyte Magazine. Continue reading

Non-Event presents An Evening of Experimental Music featuring Ikue Mori with special guests Jessica Rylan, Howard Stelzer, Vic Rawlings, and Jorritt Dijkstra :: February 22, 2008; 8:00 pm :: Mobius, 725 Harrison Ave., Boston (South End).

Ikue Mori moved from her native city of Tokyo to New York in 1977. She started playing drums and soon formed the seminal NO WAVE band DNA, with fellow noise pioneers Arto Lindsay and Tim Wright. DNA enjoyed legendary cult status, while creating a new brand of radical rhythms and dissonant sounds; forever altering the face of rock music. Continue reading

Immersion - Alex Mein Smith, Con Brio, Gabriel Da Piaz, grohs, SS_R, and Suero :: February 7, 2008; 7 - 11 pm :: The Flea-Pit, 49 Columbia Road, London.

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. Continue reading

Michel Chion describes the term synchresis as… “the forging between something one sees and something one hears - it is the mental fusion between a sound and a visual when these occur at exactly the same time. Synchresis is an acronym formed by telescoping together the two words synchronism and synthesis”. (excerpt from: http://filmsound.org/chion/sync.htm)

ANAT, the Australian Network for Art and Technology has just launched its latest copy of Filter magazine (issue 66, [southern] summer 2007) with Synchresis the theme, with a special release DVD, and the launch (and xmas party) tonight at the Chauvel cinema in Paddington… Continue reading

TOPLAP (Temporary | Transnational | Terrestrial | Transdimensional) Organisation for the (Promotion | Proliferation | Permanence | Purity) of Live (Algorithm | Audio | Art | Artistic) Programming - TOPLAP exists to promote the writing and modifying of rules while they are followed. This includes the writing of software while it is being executed, allowing programmers to improvise music and visuals live before an audience as well as conduct exploratory research with live source code. Continue reading

Sawako Kato :: Roulette, 20 Greene Street in SoHo, New York, NY :: November 29, 2007; 8:30 p.m.

ishi ~ listening stone– “ishi” is a new work for stone, crystal radio, contact microphone and laptop. The work is based on Sawako’s ongoing interest in soundscape and the invisible signals of the urban environment. In Japanese, “ishi” means “stone” as well as “will” and “intention.” With her piece, Sawako tries to listen to the will of stone through both radio transmissions and other invisible vibrations. The captured signal will then be mutated to create an intimate, poetic sound that forms a tiny moment of quiet in the city. Continue reading