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

A chapter on Live Audiovisuals written by Nick Collins and Amy Alexander appears in the recently released book, The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music, edited by Nick Collins and Julio d’Escrivan.

The chapter discusses histories of audiovisual performance, including its ancestry in color organs, visual music filmmaking, light shows, cognitive science, and more - as well as various approaches to current practice including VJ’ing, live cinema, and digital media art performance. This one is not available online, but the book is available from the usual sources. Continue reading

Acoustic Space Issue # 7: SPECTROPIA - On Spectral Ecology and Art :: CALL FOR PAPERS - Deadline for abstracts - April 21, 2007 :: We are seeking manuscripts for the upcoming Acoustic Space journal to be published for the next Art+Communication Festival. Entitled SPECTROPIA, this year festival edition will take place in Riga, October 16 - 19, 2008.

The print journal, Acoustic Space is a forum for net.radio, sound art and creative explorations in the networked electro-acoustic environments. Now in its 7th edition, Acoustic Space - SPECTROPIA issue investigates the rapid transformation of the usage of the radio frequency spectrum that we are witnessing in the 21st century. Continue reading

Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture - Edited by Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid.

If Rhythm Science was about the flow of things, Sound Unbound is about the remix–how music, art, and literature have blurred the lines between what an artist can do and what a composer can create. In Sound Unbound, Rhythm Science author Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid asks artists to describe their work and compositional strategies in their own words. These are reports from the front lines on the role of sound and digital media in an information-based society. The topics are as diverse as the contributors: composer Steve Reich offers a memoir of his life with technology, from tape loops to video opera; Continue reading

“The energy behind the growing practice of audiovisual performance is intriguing; what is it that sparks the passions for creators and theorists working within this art form? The diversity of the concepts, techniques, and aesthetic qualities is remarkable, suggesting that this practice is not rooted in any one particular mindset, but instead, emerges from a wide range of trajectories that are converging within a contemporary form of media based performance art. However, live video mixing performances certainly address a hunger for immersive and synaesthetic sensory experiences where aural and visual elements work together to create a whole that is something beyond the sum of the parts. Continue reading

You can read a review of Paul Hegarty’s Noise/Music A History by Greg Smith on Serial Consign. Noise/Music, as you may remember from our announcement in October 2007, looks at the phenomenon of noise in music, from experimental music of the early 20th century to the Japanese noise music and glitch electronica of today. It situates different musics in their cultural and historical context, and analyzes them in terms of cultural aesthetics. It’s a fascinating book.

And now we have a review, which I hope will encourage you to pick up a copy. As Smith writes:

Noise/Music is most easily appreciated as a “disturbingly succinct” history of 20th century music and perhaps the most appropriate text to compare the work to is Michael Nyman’s “Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond”. Continue reading

“If relational aesthetics and open source were always commercial, can the musical score provide a way of thinking through different relationships between creativity and code? The return to improvisation in ‘livecoding’ draws parallels with experimental practices developed by maverick musicians, programmers and educators from Sun Ra, The Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Scratch Orchestra to Seymour Papert. Simon Yuill argues that these ‘distributive practices’ are worth extending today.

In recent years the foregrounding of ‘collaboration’ in artistic practice has acquired an aura of inherent benevolence and emancipation, as though the very act of working with others in itself ensures some form of resistance or alternative to conventions of cultural production, and confers positive moral value. Continue reading

Listening to Cybernetics: Music, Machines, and Nervous Systems, 1950-1980 by Christine Dunbar-Hester. This text was presented at re:place the second conference on the histories of media, art, science and technology - November 15-18 2007.

From the abstract: This paper explores connections between cybernetics and experimental music from 1950-1980, which was a period of experimentation with electronic techniques in recording, composition, and sound production and manipulation. Examples include musicians, engineers, instruments builders, composers, and cyberneticians who invoked cybernetic themes in their work on electronic or experimental music. “Cybernetics” was used and interpreted in a variety of ways by these actors, from human-machine integration, to Shannon and Weaver’s work on information theory, to the ideas of autopoiesis (self-making), control, and indeterminacy in complex systems. Continue reading

“As Kahn rightly notes, there is no noise without the thought of noise, and ideas about sound can therefore “make an audible event called noise louder than it might already be” [2] - noises come from specific places and specific conceptualisations. At some level, the use of noise is a bid (however unwitting) to master it (at least in Western modernism), and reduce its quality as noise: “avant-garde noise, in other words, both marshals and mutes the noise of the other: power is attacked at the expense of the less powerful, and society itself is both attacked and reinforced” [3].”

Full With Noise: Theory and Japanese Noise Music; Noise Music; The Hallucinatory life of tape [posted on Mediateletipos]

The Digital Artists Handbook [see Working with Sound] is an up to date, reliable and accessible source of information that introduces you to different tools, resources and ways of working related to digital art.

The goal of the Handbook is to be a signpost, a source of practical information and content that bridges the gap between new users and the platforms and resources that are available, but not always very accessible. The Handbook will be slowly filled with articles written by invited artists and specialists, talking about their tools and ways of working. Some articles are introductions to tools, others are descriptions of methodologies, concepts and technologies. Continue reading