Networked Music Review

David Morneau’s music podcasts to conclude

helen — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:16:36 +0000

David Morneau will bring his composition-a-day project, 60×365, to an end on June 30th. You can hear the conclusion by visiting http://60×365.com

Every day for the past year, Morneau has composed and posted a new sixty-second composition. That’s just over six hours of new music in sixty-second installments. For this project, Morneau explored a wide variety of musical styles and techniques, including musique concrète, sine wave synthesis, digital sampling, 8-bit constructions, process music, acousmatic composition, and post-techno beat manipulations. He found the requirement to make a new, complete piece every day an exhilarating challenge, and reveled in the constant variety of ideas the project embraced. This project began as a challenge to compose more, and ended up as an audio diary of the past year.

Morneau chose to compose specifically for the internet because of an interest in its effect on the creation and dissemination of music and art. One-minute compositions are easy to download. The podcast format encouraged listener subscription. 60×365 was presented as a series of shorter pieces over time, in a particular order. However, this order was only one possibility. Some listeners waited until many pieces were posted and then chose their own path through the archive. Some listened with headphones, some with computer speakers of varying quality, some on a mobile device, some listened with friends, some listened alone.

The entire project will remain online at http://60×365.com where listeners can explore the archive by date, by title, and by category. http://5of4.com
http://60×365.com

Selections from 60×365 will be included in a radio broadcast as part of the 2008 Expo Brighton, a festival of sound art and experimental music in Brighton, UK. The festival will take place July 4-6.

Live Stage: Immersion [London]

jo — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 16:01:58 +0000

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.

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 Legendary 6 hour Breakout Hackathon

jo — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 23:29:25 +0000

game mod from steph thirion on Vimeo.

I’ve just spent a couple of weeks at Visualizar helping out with conceptual and technical development of projects.

In the first couple of days a few people mentioned a video one of the artist’s at the workshop had made. Ben Fry said “you have to see it” and pointed at Steph Thirion.

Ben was right. The video documents a 6hr workshop run by Steph in a Postgraduate Diploma in Graphic Design course at Elisava, Barcelona, in March this year and it is very special.

The workshop concept was simple: take an existing Breakout-like game (made by Steph in Processing), give it to the students and encourage them to simply change numbers and alter code statements until it either breaks or does something interesting.

The result is surprising: as though Breakout has been freed from a need to make sense and is dreaming of its own pure potential.. A warm homage to the game if ever there was one.

Here’s that video.

To quote the project page.

Game Mod was a six hour long workshop with the objective of showing the participants that it is not required to understand code to experiment and play with it.

Although they had no experience in coding, the task of each participant was to make a mod (modified version) of a game built in Processing.

Great stuff, testimony that creative programming can result from an open-minded, truly intuitive manipulation of code.

Grab the original game source-code here, and have a hack at it yourself. The source for the mods you see in the video can be downloaded here. If you come up with something you think’s interesting, let us know.

Check in on Steph’s site for updates on his new project, Cascade on Wheels, made during the Visualizar workshop. If you’re in the Madrid area, come and see it at the exhibition at Medialab Prado itself (28.11.07 - 28.12.07)

Fine work Steph and students. This is going into the archives. [blogged by Julian on SelectParks]

Bioluminescence

jo — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 22:12:41 +0000

Bioluminescence is a collaborative audio/visual project with Lesley Flanigan and Luke DuBois.

The voice has a unique role in our musical culture, bridging the linguistic and the semiotic in a way that transcends instrumentality through a highly personal embodiment of musicianship. The recorded female voice, in particular, has been the subject of academic investigation following its role in aesthetics (Adorno), cinema and psychology (Silverman) and feminist theory (De Laurentis). In electroacoustic music, the voice has a privileged place in our canon, providing a boundless source of material for sonic exploration from the tape works of Berio, Dodge, and Lansky through the composer-performer repertoire of Joan LaBarbera and Pamela Z.

Our collaboration centers around an extensive investigation of the possibilities of the improvised voice in tandem with electroacoustic processing, focusing on the possibilities of detemporalization and memory evoked through the use of looping, time-stretching, and spectral processing. The interplay between the two performers (one singing, one processing) takes the metaphor of the voice as impulse and the computer as filter and creates a dense palette of evocative sounds and images derived entirely from the voice of the singer. Video.

Live Stage: Famous Actors [NYC]

jo — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 15:22:34 +0000

Object Collection presents FAMOUS ACTORS, experimental music / theater :: June 17-19, and 21-23, 2007 :: Ontological Theater, St. Mark’s Church, 131 East 10th Street and 2nd Ave, NYC :: Tickets $12 with code word “cakes” :: 212.352.3101.

FAMOUS ACTORS is a performance / installation that applies the logic of experimental music to everyday human behavior. The actor is re-defined in a clinical context as someone who: 1) alters another’s state of consciousness through scientific means; 2) monitors something or someone closely; and 3) maintains calm in a complex situation. What results is an intricate arrangement of very familiar things. Featuring rhythmically notated gestures and conversations, field recordings and live vocal sampling / processing.

written and directed by Kara Feely
music and sound by Travis Just
production design by Hannah Dougherty
lighting design by Miranda Hardy
with: Ross Beschler, Avi Glickstein, Annie Kunjappy, Daniel Allen Nelson, Jessica Grace Pagan, Zuzanna Szadkowski
assistant director: Kyra Settle
assistant designers: Amelia Freeman-Lynde, Peiyi Wong

Live Stage: FAULTY by Andrea Parkins [NYC]

jo — Mon, 14 May 2007 18:08:02 +0000

New York Electronic Art Festival and Diapason gallery for sound and intermedia present: Andrea Parkins’ FAULTY (per-objective) :: Saturdays May 19 & 26, June 2 & 9; 6 pm - midnight :: Free admission :: 1026 Avenue of the Americas between 38th and 39th Streets, two blocks south of Bryant Park. Subways: 1, 2, 3, 9, B, D, F, Q, N, R, W to Times Square/42nd Street.

FAULTY (per-objective) is a multi-channel audio installation by Andrea Parkins. The work creates purposefully flawed sonic structures, built from a variety of sources, including sound recordings that document the specificity of objects - collected or invented - as they are set into motion. (Upended wine glasses on tilted/greasy mirrors, taut lines of plastic tubing, wobbly plaster forms, apples/potatoes that roll across a bumpy floor, spinning metal washers, stretched skeins of plastic gimp, raspy little snapshots in the wind - these might be performers.) Through the use of Max-based generative processing, multiple chains of audio events will arrive at an indeterminate sonic outcome - an aurality that weaves playful connections between sonified objects, materials and language - and a metaphor for the slippage between object and meaning that occurs through the passage of time (and space).

ANDREA PARKINS is a sound artist, composer and electro multi-instrumentalist who also makes/arranges objects, images and (sometimes) words. Known for her dynamic timberal explorations on the electric accordion and inventive use of generative sound processing, Andrea has appeared on more than 40 recordings on labels including Hatology, Atavistic, Knitting Factory, and Creative Sources. She has performed worldwide as a soloist, and with artists such as Nels Cline, Thomas Lehn, Fred Frith, ROVA Saxophone Quartet, and Otomo Yoshihide. She has also presented her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Kitchen and Experimental Intermedia, among other NYC venues. Currently, Andrea continues to develop and perform a series of Max/MSP-based audio/visual works inspired by Rube Goldberg’s circuitous contraptions, a project realized during artist’s residencies sponsored by the Hamburg Cultural Board in Germany; at Harvestworks in New York City and CESTA in the Czech Republic.

ABOUT NYEAF: The New York Electronic Art Festival is produced by Harvestworks, the New York University Music Technology Program and LEMUR: League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, with support from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, the Columbia University Computer Music Center, Roulette, the Electronic Music Foundation, 3LD Art and Technology Center, Eyebeam, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Institute of Electronic Art. Additional support comes from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, mediaThe foundation, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space @ 38 Park Row, the Experimental TV Center Presentation Program, Cycling 74, Tekserve and Newmark Knight Frank. Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space Program is made possible by the support of the September 11th Fund. Space generously donated by Time Equities Properties. NYEAF is a Harvestworks 30th Anniversary Event.

Please note: this will be the final month-long installation presented by Diapason at this location. New location TBA.

Diapason gallery for sound and intermedia
1026 Avenue of the Americas #2S
New York NY 10018
(212) 719-4393
info[at]diapasongallery.org

Diapason gallery for sound and intermedia was founded by composer Michael J. Schumacher in 2001 and its program builds on the efforts of Schumacher’s previous sound space, Studio Five Beekman, founded in 1996. Diapason is the sole venue in New York City and one of few internationally dedicated to the presentation of multi-channel sound installation where composers and sound artists can realize their work for an interested public. By providing an optimum listening environment, two high quality multi-channel sound systems, a regular audience, and a place for experimentation, Diapason seeks to engage composers and the public in dialogue about the place of contemporary music and sound practice in a broader cultural context.

Diapason is supported by NYSCA, the Phaedrus Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, The Trust for Mutual Understanding, The New York State Music Fund, Meet The Composer’s JPMorganChase Regrant Program for Small Ensembles, Kirk Radke, and by generous individuals. Diapason is a 501(c)3 organization.

Live Stage: Radio Wonderland Duets [NYC]

jo — Fri, 04 May 2007 19:49:26 +0000

RADIO WONDERLAND {–shoes, steering wheel, boombox, laptop–} {-turning live radio into recombinant funk-} :: “Computer sound processing controlled by steering wheel, shoes–do you call that a musical instrument?” Well, check out a couple of actual duets with two astounding downtown musicians. RADIO WONDERLAND MEETS THE MASTERS:

DAFNA NAPHTALI:: Music Technology Open House at Judson Church presented by the Music Technology Program @ NYU :: May 6, 2007; 8.30 pm :: Judson Church, 55 Washington Sq. South (between Thompson & Sullivan) :: Admission by donation (Free for NYU). DUET with Dafna Naphtali, voice and processing –She’s a prodigious processor, audio maven, virtuoso soprano, and a fixture in downtown’s free improv, new music, and laptop / alternative controller scenes.

TODD REYNOLDS :: Composers’ Collaborative Serial Underground :: May 14, 8:30 pm 2007 :: Cornelia Street Cafe, 29 Cornelia St. (near 6th Av & W. 4th) * $15 :: DUET with Todd Reynolds, violin and processing. He’s one of the best violinists I’ve heard, and a longtime member of Bang On A Can, Steve Reich and Musicians and Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project. With short videos curated by Ken Cro-Ken, members of First Avenue, and a “corporate motivational speaker”!

RADIO WONDERLAND–the media-mashing / high-concept / odd-object / cyber-stoked / spaced-out / booty-shaking / new music dance band. And don’t forget “Morning Drive Time”: RADIO WONDERLAND Live Every Wednesday, mangling morning rush hour radio talk on free103point9 online radio :: 9:00am Eastern Time, 14:00 UTC (or GMT/Zulu) time.