Create Digital Music » ambient

Curating Sound: Exploring Performance and Embodiment, in Live Excerpts and Analysis from BodyControlled

Kristin Trethewey — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:44:50 +0000

Continuing our insight into this view into electronic music performance and art through the lens of BodyControlled in Berlin, we’re joined by guest writer Kristin Trethewey. Kristin, a Canadian-born video artist and curator, takes another look at LEAP and BodyControlled, on the eve of its second installment. She gets straight at the question of what “BodyControlled” means, and what it can mean for sonic performance and creation. And I wanted to make sure to subtract myself from this write-up, seeing as I was playing – but see the excellent timelapse of the evening, above. -Ed.

LEAP is one of these spectacular Berlin venues you’ve been hearing so much about. It’s a huge, raw space with a view of Berlin’s landmark TV tower, hosting interesting art events with cheap drinks and the potential for a late-night party. But it’s unique, too, in its focus on electronic arts. And unlike other media arts centers, it’s not filled with computers and half-finished electronic projects. I’ve truly gotten lost trying to find this place (it’s tucked away in a mall), so I would recommend watching the timelapse video LEAP shot that guides you to the entrance before attempting to go there. Tonight is the second edition of BodyControlled, a new bimonthly performance series at the space. This installment, called “matter incompatible,” is held in conjunction with the Transmediale Festival under the satellite program, Vorspiel.

Robert Henke at BodyControlled, somewhere deep into a 12-hour performance. Image courtesy LEAP.

BodyControlled is a series focused on the intersection of performance and electronics. You can expect future programming to focus around ideas of “feedback” and “bio” related electronic performances. In its first installment back in November, a packed LEAP gallery witnessed performances by Robert Henke, Peter Kirn [editor of this site], Stephen Cornford, and Paul Whitty. The event was called “Other Spaces” and took the physical architecture of the gallery as a point of departure. Having the space filled with people made for a secondary concern of space: its use. In a series whose title mentions the body, I witnessed one performance engaging the bodies that were filling the space. Robert Henke’s twelve-hour set activated interactions between the audience, performer, and environment. He moved around, listened and mingled with the audience, even though he had this amazing, souped-up control station complete with ambient lighting.

CDM’s Peter Kirn (neverheardofhim) at BodyControlled in November. Photo courtesy LEAP.

Other artists put more emphasis on the manipulation and dislocation of space through the use and abuse of electronics. Kirn worked with a custom rig with tablet-controlled original software built in open-source software Pure Data (Pd), controlled by a tablet running Konkreet Performer. Excerpt:

Excerpt – LEAP Gallery Berlin, 26.11 by peterkirn

Electronic autopsy: Whitty and Cornford at work. Photo courtesy LEAP.

Whitty and Cornford actively deconstructed electronics in front of the audience:
it pays my way and it corrodes my soul (2011)

Stephen Cornford & Paul Whitty’s performance “it pays my way and it corrodes my soul” seeks out musical material by physically dismembering playback equipment. A reel-to-reel tape recorder is switched on and its mechanism amplified with a variety of microphones while it is taken to pieces. The sounds produced are then fed through an array of pedals: the machine’s belts, gears, switches and casing becoming an instrument subjected to a live audio autopsy

Excerpt:
Excerpt: Stephen Cornford & Paul Whitty, LEAP Berlin, 26 November by cdm

Cornford was also interviewed by LEAP for his installation work, featuring repurposed tape machines:

As João Pais, co-curator of the event with LEAP’s Daniel Franke, puts it:

“BodyControlled means the main direction of the series, to present performance and installation works that have a strong, corporal identity. This can be manifested in many ways, not only implying a “moving performer”. The purpose is to avoid the extreme of abstract performances made by a laptop-er, sitting down as if writing emails. In the first event, this idea was shown by interpreting/filling the space of LEAP through a sound-performance (Kirn, Henke), or an installation (Cornford, Mathy, Oliver).”

See also my write-up for ARTSCARDS from last month:
Other Spaces Generates New Spaces Through Sound at LEAP

The second event, “matter incompatible,” draws reference to the Transmediale theme: In/compatible, acknowledging the less clear, even dark forces at play in the artistic and political climate today. Matter Controlled questions the idea of the object or anti-object within sonification. See CDM’s write-up from yesterday:

Watch Artists Talk About Making Sound From Matter; Thursday Event and Stream in Transmediale Prelude

From the Transmediale podcast, some explanations of the theme of the larger festival:

Jacob Lillemose on the exhibition Dark Drives: Uneasy Energies in Technological Times by transmediale

Kristoffer Gansing elaborates on the festival theme in/compatible, as well as the in/compatible symposium: systems | publics | aesthetics.
Tatiana Bazzichelli is the curator for out new project reSource of transmedial culture and speaks about its concept.
Jacob Lillemose speaks about exhibition Dark Drives: Uneasy Energies in Technological Times which he is curating for transmediale 2012 in/compatible.
Sandra Naumann is the curator for this year’s performance programme The Ghosts in the Maschine, which she explains a bit more in detail.
And Marcel Schwierin tells us about his concept for the video programme he is curating for transmediale 2012 in/compatible.

Performances by Echo Ho, Mario De Vega, Alex Nowitz and Ignaz Schick will investigate this blurry region between the immaterial and material. I am curious to see what objects they will bring to play with. As they potentially seek liberation from the physical objects, by reimagining their sonification, I wonder how they are also reliant and maybe even drawn towards their objectification. Bringing these disparate emotions into play is at the heart of tonights investigation. In today’s climate fractures exist between so many aspects of our lives. These performances seek to bring some of them together, compatible or incompatible as we might discover.

You can watch the proceedings via live Internet stream, for the majority of you not in Berlin for the live show.

www.leapknecht.de

More Photos

About the Author

Kristin Trethewey is a Canadian video artist, cinema performer, and curator. She holds an MFA from Brooklyn College in Performance and Interactive Media. A multi-disciplinary curator and artist for the past ten years, she has recently completed a residency at the Node Center for Curatorial Arts, was co-Director/co-Curator of the INDEX Festival. She currently lives in Berlin.

Richard Lainhart, Prolific Composer and Artist, Dies at 58; Links to His Work

Peter Kirn — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 16:14:53 +0000

Richard plays Handmade Music in 2007; full video at bottom.

I’m saddened to learn of the death of Richard Lainhart, the New York-based composer and artist who has been inseparable from the experimental electronic scene for many years. I knew Richard to be a gentle and imaginative soul, an inventive technologist, someone capable of dreaming up endless soundscapes and auditory worlds. He was also a great contributor to the CDM community, including playing one of the early installments of Handmade Music at Etsy Labs in Brooklyn. (Photo above; full video at bottom.)

I think it’s fitting to illustrate Richard with a terrific self-portrait on Polaroid, one that illustrates his sense of humor and artistic adventurousness:

A self-portrait by the artist; via the wealth of wonder in Richard’s Flickr account.

Richard’s wife Caroline posted a note with the news, which most of us found via Facebook:

Richard Lainhart February 14, 1953 – December 30, 2011

Dear friends of Richard,
It is with a heavy heart that I that I must tell you Richard Lainhart, composer, musician, technologist, filmmaker, and digital artisan died Friday, December 30, 2011.

On December 17, Richard complained of pains in his side and was admitted to the hospital for tests which showed an intestinal cancer. He was operated on on December 21. After the surgery (which showed the cancer had not spread), there were infectious complications which took his life on December 30.

He struggled valiantly to overcome his infection, but it was not to be. We are all in shock and cannot grasp the idea of his not making music, talking music, teaching, posting and playing.

Caroline Meyers
Richard Lainhart’s wife

Richard leaves behind a massive body of work and digital footprints; I’ve selected some of those below, including music, a wonderful set of images working with digital manipulation and Polaroids via Flickr, and his series on creative sound design tutorials.

Playing Messiaen:

Audiovisual work:

Richard’s most recent album, via Bandcamp:

The Deep Blue Of Twilight by Richard Lainhart

Most recent SoundCloud contributions, including the winds after Tropical Storm Irene (that sound certainly is part of my sonic memory of 2011)

Sounds of my World – Post-Irene Winds 8-28-11 by rlainhart

200e-Continuum Percussive Study 2 by rlainhart

Sounds of my world – Rainforest V, New York Electronic Art Festival, 7-30-11 by rlainhart

I adore his photographic work:

A bio:

Richard Lainhart is an award-winning composer, author, and filmmaker – a digital artisan who works with sonic and visual data. Since childhood, he’s been interested in natural processes such as waves, flames and clouds, in harmonics and harmony, and in creative interactions with machines, using them as compositional methods to present sounds and images that are as beautiful as he can make them.

Lainhart studied composition and electronic music with Joel Chadabe at the State University of New York at Albany. He has composed music for film, television, CD-ROMs, interactive applications, and the Web. His compositions have been performed in the US, England, Sweden, Germany, Australia, and Japan. Recordings of his music have appeared on the Periodic Music, Vacant Lot, XI Records, Airglow Music, Tobira Records, and ExOvo labels. As an active performer, Lainhart has appeared in public approximately 2000 times. Besides performing his own work, he has worked and performed with John Cage, David Tudor, Steve Reich, Phill Niblock, David Berhman, and Jordan Rudess, among many others. He has composed over 100 electronic and acoustic works. In 2008, he was commissioned by the Electronic Music Foundation to contribute a work to New York Soundscape.

Lainhart’s animations and short films have been shown at festivals in the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, and Korea, and online at ResFest, The New Venue, The Bitscreen, and Streaming Cinema 2.0. His film “A Haiku Setting” won awards in several categories at the 2002 International Festival of Cinema and Technology in Toronto. In 2009, he was awarded a Film & Media grant by the New York State Council on the Arts for “No Other Time”, full-length intermedia performance designed for a large reverberant space, combining live analog electronics with four-channel playback, and high-definition computer-animated film projection.

quotes

“Lainhart crafts sounds in a tonal, musical fashion – sustained tones, drones, melodic fragments – and electronically manipulates them into beautiful tapestries of sound.” (Waterfront Week)

[His] “music reflects the spirit of possibility that once defined electronic music, bringing with it a sense of past, present and future that transcends time, technology and cultural assumptions. The spell- binding music seemed to evoke feelings that can’t quite be named, and suggest music I might rather imagine for myself in silence than trust most composers to compose.” (The Village Voice).

“He’s evolved a singular vision as a composer, performer and engineer of darkly seductive minimalism.” (Peter Marsh, BBC)

And here is Richard’s performance for us at Handmade Music on the Buchla 200e synth and Continuum Fingerboard, from 2007:

http://www.otownmedia.com
http://www.vimeo.com/rlainhart
http://www.youtube.com/rlainhart
http://richardlainhart.bandcamp.com/
http://soundcloud.com/rlainhart
http://twitter.com/rlainhart
http://www.facebook.com/rlainhart
http://www.downloadplatform.com/richard_lainhart

Richard’s studio; photo (CC-BY-SA) Richard Lainhart.

From a Wide Palette of Sound, Christopher Willits’ Remix Project, Sample by Sample

Peter Kirn — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 16:34:59 +0000

Christopher Willits playing live at San Francisco’s Public Works in October of this year. Photo courtesy the artist.

Sound and light artist, guitarist, Max patcher, and all-around sonically-fascinating guy Christopher Willits has opened up his “Tiger Flower Circle Sun” record on Ghostly to remixing. Halfway through the project, we talk to Chris about what’s going on – and what the results so far sound like. And we share, from earlier this fall, a composition in which you can recharge.

The project begins not with stems, but with samples, the raw materials on which the album was based. Christopher walks CDM through the audio highlights, one sample at a time. Along the way – as with all these samples – you begin to appreciate the process by which Christopher makes his decisions, how he moves from samples like pieces of wood to the finished structure. And of course, by opening these up to remixing, you have an opportunity to hear the work differently in his finished, released form, as well as to find your own, distinct decision-making process. It’s perhaps obvious in a remix project, but what this does is to allow the sounds a life separate from the fixed set of decisions that produced the album.

And that can even change Christopher’s own view of the work, he says. He tells us:

I think it’s fun to play the set like an album. I’ve heard these pieces so many times that it’s really refreshing to me to hear them alone. Now I hear the pieces differently.

That was actually one of the thoughts behind sharing all of these sounds, so people can hear the layers, and if they wish, tune their ears to the subtleties and intention I wanted to create in the mixes.

You can find the remix project at:
http://willits-sample-library-vol1.herokuapp.com/

“The stuff i’ve heard so far is AMAZING,” Christopher tells us. “I can’t wait to feature the best of the best. We’ll be releasing a free comp on [Christopher's experimetal label] Overlap and Ghostly will feature my favorite remix on a free comp, too.” Winning remixes get Ableton and SoundCloud prizes.

Let’s hear a few words from Christopher about the sounds he’s produced.

A Tour of the Sounds

Christophers’ setup at Stanford in October – minimal but effective, with a Mac running sound and a PC running Touch Designer for visuals. And yes, that’s one little Line 6 POD in there, plus some three KORG nanoKONTROL controller devices. Image courtesy the artist, used by permission.

A lot of the samples are about variation of common materials, so there’s plenty to explore. Christopher tells us that just one sample – like this guitar solo – can take on very different meanings with different processing, heard in two variations.

Guitar process solo1-Sun Body-Willits-120 by Willits

Guitar process solo2-Sun Body-Willits-120 by Willits

This tone is created from a custom-made Big Muff > BOSS distortion > Fender Twin with a couple power tubes removed for low volume and max distortion. This is a trick that ted from Flipper showed me around that time, and it created the exact orange laser beam i was hearing in my imagination.

Guitar solo long noise-Sun Body-Willits-120 by Willits

Guitar solo-Plant Body-Willits-120 by Willits

The whole piece “Plant Body” came from this guitar improvisation. With releases like “Folding and the Tea” and “Seven Machines for Summer,”

I set the process to be only the guitar recordings. With this release, I gave myself a new set of constraints and permissions, allowing my imagination to add whatever comes up for me. No judgement on which one is better to me, they are just different. There are infinite possibilities within any process I determine, yet discerning the process that resonates with my true intention is what creates the shapes and forms and colors that feel like love.

Guitar process4 fold-Plant Body-Willits-120 by Willits

The drum samples come from:

…my great friend Jeff Pierre – one of the best drummer I’ve ever worked with, and the youngest, as well. All of Jeff’s takes were one take; this sample is shortened from the original length, but you get the idea.

Drum2-The Hands Connect To The Heart-Jeff Pierre-Willits-120 by Willits

Drums distorted1-You Are Always Surrounded By Stars-Jeff Pierre-Willits-120 by Willits

I just love the lightness and feel of this sound — like the funkiest insects in the jungle, getting down.

Perc1-The Hands Connect To The Heart-Willits-120 by Willits

Someone please make a disco track out of this.

Synth arp-The Heart Connects To The Head-Willits-120 by Willits

Me and my friend Reiko were messing with patterns; then we would find a loop. We were laughing so hard as we were playing this stuff.

Perc-Intend-Evolve-Willits-120 by Willits

Check your volume for this one — probably should have exported it at a lower volume for this set! The heat of this, the crushed distortion, is from a technique called input flipping on the SSL. This is an input flip with the preamps cranked, with odd harmonics.

Ryan (Ryan Kleeman) and I just about lost it when we first input flipped like this for a distorted sound. It became a theme in a sense that resonated with this orange laser beam electromagnetic sound that much of the work stems from.

Synth arp noise-The Heart Connects To The Head-Willits-120 by Willits

You can also hear it here- and a few other places on the record, to a less extreme degree. There is something about this texture that has a cleaning function to me. Washes things off, away, cleans the ears out. Resets your space.

Branches Into Flowers-Willits by Willits

“Could hear many more strings and horns in this piece.”

Guitar2-You Are Always Surrounded By Stars-Willits-120 by Willits

“Love this floating feeling.”
Guitar lasers-You Are Always Surrounded By Stars-Willits-120 by Willits

“This pattern makes me want to get down.”
Perc distorted1-You Are Always Surrounded By Stars-Willits-120 by Willits

“Love this kind of generative sound.”
Subconscious Transmission-Willits-120 by Willits

Two samples that were not used in “Light into Branches.” Made the baritone thing in one mode of listening, came back and asked myself, why did I put a baritone guitar solo in the middle of this song? Did I really think that’s what it needed, or did I just want to play my baritone along with this song for fun? The answer was the latter. But here it is anyway.

The ambient layers sample was to create more depth of field in the mix, have it floating behind at a low volume, but it was not doing was I wanted it to, so I cut it out.

Baritone solo unused-Light Into Branches-baritone-Willits-75ish by Willits

Guitar layers unused-Light Into Branches Willits-75ish by Willits

Videos

From the original record release:

More information:
http://ghostly.com/releases/tiger-flower-circle-sun

Soak in a Sound Bath

Another release from this year revealing Willits’ musical approach, “GOLD” is an ambient piece in you can inhabit, in which you can restore yourself, according to its maker:

GOLD is a 24 minute and 17 second sound bath / ambient piece to soak into. Listen, relax and recharge. This harmonic weaving of sound was created with the vibration of affinity, love.

Made with voice, processed guitar, and a low-frequency oscillation out of a Nord Lead synth, Christopher actually encourages people to share how they “used’ the piece and how they made it felt, a kind of design experiment for spiritual being in sound. Have a listen or pay-what-you-will on Bandcamp:

GOLD – Willits by Christopher Willits

Read up on what he has to say about this release:
New Release – GOLD [Sound + Light - Chris' blog]

Infinite

It seems only appropriate to close with this reflection from Christopher:

After working on this project, I’m realizing so tangibly what I’ve always known — that any mix is a sonic photograph of vibrational affinity, and even with a grounded intention behind any mix, and a very clear outline for a process in which you allow that intention to emerge, there are infinite possibilities of expression. Infinite. It is so beautiful.

Punched-Hole Tunes: Ritornell’s Musicbox Business Cards, as Delicate and Magical as the Music

Peter Kirn — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 17:07:47 +0000

Experimenting with twinkling timbres made both by acoustic and electronic means, the music of Ritornell (the duo of composer Dr. Richard Eigner and pianist Roman Gerold, Austria) is effortlessly expressive and spontaneous. Little wonder that that spirit could translate even to a small object.

Designer Katharina Hölzl made business cards into both a signature identity for Ritornell and a physical manifestation of how they play their music. They’re not just a physical gimmick, though: audiences get to participate with music making in the production of live, performative loops. (Sadly, no site for Katharina – you just have to get hold of one of her designs!)

Description of the project:

Ritornell’s business cards are inspired by the project’s live show. The improvised concerts evoke a lively atmosphere by the combination of filigree electronics with playful timbres of diverse acoustic instruments and utensils such as egg whisks, toilet brushes, chopsticks or sewing needles. As an integral part of their set list, Ritornell invites the audience to bring along their private musicboxes. Arranged in a big circle, the players’ speed of turning levers is conducted: the results are as shimmering as you would expect.

Katharina Hölzl designed very special business cards to recreate this playful sonic universe. With the aid of laser assisted milling, nine micro compositions consisting of circles, triangles and Ritornell’s contact information were applied onto a long musicbox paper stripe. Before handing out the cards to interested adressees, each individual subdivision is played back via an especially designed musical box – thus providing every business card receiver with a tailor made musical experience.

More information on the project:
Ritornell for Musicbox

Punched cards of this kind of a profound relationship to generative music and computer music. For its part, the very genesis of the computer comes from punched cards: the punched cards in early mechanical looms used for textiles would inspire Charles Babbage. It’s possible that Max Mathews’ first digital audio, and other computer music that employed punched cards, would not have done so without the precedent of the textile industry.

And, of course, the music box and player piano also owe their genesis to punched cards, and thus the pre-digital mechanical reproduction of music. In an era before MIDI, composer Conlon Nancarrow made his own piano rolls, punched to his custom specifications, to play parts that would otherwise be impossible – before complex, glitchy, tracker-made electronic music. (Kyle Gann has a great piece on Nancarrow.) Those piano rolls have echoes in the interactive work of digital artist Toshio Iwai, and in the mechanical, push-button simplicity of the falling tracks of gems in music games from developers like Harmonix. By adding hand-cranked audience participation, though, Ritornell brings the mechanism into the realm of jazz.

And speaking of jazz influence, it’s well worth looking at the rest of the music of Ritornell.

Ritornell, the duo. Photo by Mirjam Unger, courtesy Ritornell.

As glowing ambient worlds cross paths with cooly-casual jazz, Ritornell’s music is to me endlessly evocative. Jazz gesture and good humor merge with waves of richly-imagined sonic textures. It’s music that’s both cinematic and improvisatory, dreamlike but well worth repeated listens. (I find it quite hard not to put it on loop, with warm swells of timbre against percussive rhythms, it fits perfectly with the deep mustard and gold hues of the last wave of autumn leaves in November.)

With the slightly-distant allure of Vienna-based vocalist Mimu added to the mix, the music is a kind of ambient pop reverie.

Don’t miss the music videos, shot seemingly through a thick, warm mist. And check out the rest of the music on the site. I hope we hear more from these folks.

Listening:
Golden Solitude, an eclectic, jazz-inflected sonic journey of an LP

Full discography

Richard Eigner also did drums on “German Haircut” for Flying Lotus’ epic Cosmogramma

http://www.ritornell.at/

Versatile vocalist Mimu, right, as Richard looks on. Photo: Nina Divitschek.

Studio photos, Clemens Fantur.

Sonaur, Ambient Android Toy, Built with Free Tools (Processing, libpd)

Peter Kirn — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:03:06 +0000

Sonaur is a US$1.99 ambient toy for Android mobile devices, with on-screen creatures you can manipulate to generate sound. It’s notable not only for being a fun toy – and on a platform that hasn’t had as many fun toys – but because the tools used to create it are also highly accessible and free.

I’ve taught Processing, a code environment popular among artists and designers to people who never before imagined they could be coders. Pd (Pure Data), here in the form of libpd, is a free graphical patching cousin of Max/MSP. You can check out libpd, which allows Pd to run on Android, at our Pd Everywhere group.

Developer Miles describes the app thusly:

I wanted to create an app that lay somewhere between an ecosystem and a musical instrument. The hope is that sonaur requires less attention both, and still provides a reasonable amount of intrigue.

Sonaur contains three distinct lifeforms. You can interact with them individually, or together; creating new sounds and visual patterns for your enjoyment.

I was also curious if he had advice for people exploring this area.

Miles tells us that he found making both the art and sound generative – rather than pre-drawn and pre-recorded – made a big difference. He also suggests reading Andy Farnell’s book Designing Sound (now on MIT Press) as a way of learning both Pd and sound design, saying it “helped me a lot to create the sound of the flying insects.” Another tip: using vectors and not hard-coded pixel values makes your work adaptable to different devices. And, “Matt Pearson’s book Generative Art talks a lot about this but I’ve found too that randomness is great in controlled amounts.” I couldn’t agree more.

It’s really great work, Miles. And by the way, readers should never be ashamed of plugging their work, individual or group, free or for-sale. We love hearing about it, even if we can’t cover it all.

Find this at:
http://app.net/sonaur

Via discussion on Noisepages.

Also on Creative Applications Network, run by our friend Filip, which covers all sorts of these kinds of creations.

From Granular to Free Hadron Particle Synth; Plug-in, Max for Live, and Csound (Plus, Music!)

Peter Kirn — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 22:56:47 +0000

If you aren’t quite ready to delve into the mysteries of granular synthesis and code, a colorful interface guides you through playing in Ableton Live.

Granular synthesis… you’ve heard it before. Famously articulated by experimental composer Xenakis, the process of slicing up sound into tiny bits and reassembling it has produced everything from lovely (or terrifying) synthesized sonorities to the underlying time stretching algorithms in popular music software. But with all the tools competing for your granular synthesis time (one seems to pop up every few seconds on the prolific Facebook page of sound designer Richard Devine), the Hadron Particle Synth promises to be different.

It’s a synth, but also an effect – and, for a twist, can seamlessly morph between the two, going from sound source to sound processor and shades in between. Its layering, parameter control, expression options, and all-around completeness lead its developers to confidently dub it “particle synthesis” and not just “granular synthesis.” And what may really convince you, it’s completely free, open source, runs and runs at release either inside Ableton Live as a Max for Live or within the free, geekily-delicious tool Csound. (Plug-ins for Mac and Windows are coming, too.) Whew. Now you’ve got my attention.

No video is out yet, but the Trondheim, Norway-based creators point CDM to their SoundCloud page for some sound samples.

Oeyvind Brandtsegg shares some delightful demo music for your sonic exploratory pleasure, complete with notes on its creation:

All of them made with Hadron as a primary ingredient.
The “Little Soldier Joe” songs are live recorded duo improvisations (Carl Haakon Waadeland on acoustic percussion and myself on Hadron).

Little Soldier Joe walks home with the sugar by Brandtsegg

Little Soldier Joe throws spoonful of sugar in the air just to hear the sound of it falling by Brandtsegg

Little Soldier Joe throws spoonful of sugar in the air just to hear the sound of it falling by Brandtsegg

Little Soldier Joe wonders where he put his keys by Brandtsegg

Little Soldier Joe walks down to The Future to borrow a cup of sugar by Brandtsegg

“Ramblin”, “Walking” and “SpinSync” were actually made as Hadron demo songs (the programmed drums are the only sounds not made by Hadron).

Ramblin by Brandtsegg

WalkingAndFalling(in progress) by Brandtsegg

“Magnetic Forest” was my first electroacoustic composition with Hadron (three improvised overlaid tracks, recorded as midi and edited/composed)

Oeyvind Brandtsegg has a delightful selection of tracks for your sonic exploratory pleasure, with notes:

MagneticForest (in progress) by Brandtsegg

“FeedingTheCharmQuark” (1 and 2) are improvisations with audio feedback into Hadron, where pitch tracking of the audio input is used to control grain rate, so there’s some organic/unpredictable stuff happening as a result of the feedback loop.

FeedingTheCharmQuark2 by Brandtsegg

FeedingTheCharmQuark1 by Brandtsegg

More on the tool:
Hadron Released [News Item]
Partikkel Audio
The team of creators (sound designers, DSP gurus, and Max for Live aficionados all)
and for the really good bits (including that Csound source): Partikkel Downloads

By the way, if you’re wondering how the business model works here when everything’s free and open source, so far it looks like Partikkel, cleverly, has a Hadron expansion pack of “Time Dilation Effects.” Clever — free and open source software, plus what in gaming is called DLC (“downloadable content”). It could be The Future. Either way, it’s The Awesome for now.

I may fire up Csound this week so I can play with the source version. I also need to dig up the Csound for Pd external so I can use those two tools together. And of course I’ll use it in Max for Live, too, just to make sure there’s no chance my head doesn’t explode.

An Eclectic Mix of Sounds for Joplin, MO Recovery, as Charity Compilations Gain Momentum

Peter Kirn — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 14:57:15 +0000

CDM regular Zaxx Davros sends word of a new, sprawling compilation to benefit Joplin, Missouri in the aftermath of that town’s devastating tornado. Charity compilations seem to be growing in number, but perhaps that in itself is worth mentioning. As social networks and (ahem) blogs spread, increasingly crowd-stimulated micro-donations drive charity. One-click giving is no substitute for getting involved in communities as a volunteer and getting out on the ground, but as a way of keeping charitable organizations funded and engaged, it shows promise. Some readers have pointed to criticism of some of those organizations, like the various entities of the Red Cross, for using funds as discretionary resources beyond the immediate disaster. In this case, the Recession Recordings charity goes directly to the affected area, the City of Joplin and the Community Foundation of Southwest Missouri’s own fund. (That, in turn, may be a sign of a growing trend.)

At a time when musicians ponder the value of their own work, these sorts of compilations have a secondary function. They make the release more of a collective, communal act, and assume that the digital download not only has value, but a value that will be invested back into a communal need. Make of that what you will; we’ll watch to see how such efforts do over time.

As for the music itself, I’d describe it as a delightfully-chaotic, eclectic mix of work, often raunchy and low-fidelity, from experimental sounds to the occasional blip of a chip to music channeling ambient and folk music, noise and IDM. It seems an informal gathering of producers trying lots of different things, which has its own special charm.

This compilation gets sent out manually after a donation; my guess is someone will come up with a site that makes choosing charities easier. A Music Hackday job for someone, perhaps?

While I’m unable to cover every charity that comes across my desk, this one is doubly meaningful to me – my parents lived through and were involved in recovery efforts of the last supertornado outbreak on April 3, 1974; they worked in Brandenberg, Kentucky.

If you’re a CDM reader impacted by flooding or tornadoes in the US, or face the challenge of natural disasters elsewhere in the world – our hearts go out yet again to our friends in New Zealand today — we’d love to hear from you.

Listen below:

http://www.recessionrecordings.com/joplin-mo-charity-album/

No Rapture, But Rapturous Music for the Occasion

Peter Kirn — Mon, 23 May 2011 15:51:31 +0000

New Yorkers weren’t buying the apocalyptic narrative in 14th Street as I snapped this – perhaps because they didn’t want to see the Yankees – Mets series interrupted. But check into Foursquare Rapture? Sure!

A hive mind mentality is quickly infected with a meme, engaging partly consciously, partly unconsciously in a shared hallucination, projecting a common fantasy, as the planet’s population is wrapped up in a single idea. I’m speaking, of course, of myself and the Internet, as I and friends skittered across the Web’s social networking tools giggling over the common joke that May 21 was to be the end of the world, inside joke gone viral. In fact, I’m not sure which was the commentary on religion and faith: the handful of people who believed the world would end, or the far-larger media and Web commentary, “worshiping” at Foursquare check-ins. Thanks be to Facebook. The lesson: it’s fun to play along.

Music can respond to these imagined scenarios in moving ways. (Scientists and atheists are pretty good at conceiving the apocalypse, too, so this doesn’t cease to be topical, at least until the end.) Here are just two examples that, even though the occasion has passed, I know I’ll be listening to this week — an Eigenharp jam and a Loscil mix.

Via Synthtopia’s Sunday Synth Jam, our friend bar|none has a gorgeous live jam on the alternative instrument Eigenharp. (Recently, I pointed to Philip Glass covers and GPL software for the instrument; see also extended commentary from the players.)

The otherworldly sounds come from KYMA, the inconceivably-deep digital synthesis environment. bar|none explains:

This is a bit of noodling with a KYMA sound designed by Edmund Eagan for the Continuum that I adapted for the Eigenharp.

As you can hear, it has a lot of per note expression. Each key controls, velocity, pitch, timbre (reresonation of the strings), volume. phase, pick sound mix using roll, yaw, pressure, velocity of the keys, each key sending all this information INDEPENDENTLY!

There is a bit of bowed cello added which comes in only when I use the strip controller, everything else is one KYMA sound.

I’d like to extend my appreciation to Geert Bevin who designed the new MIDI configuration options for EigenD and made this connection possible. And of course to Edmund Eagan for this amazing sound, and to Symbolic Sound for KYMA.

For more of bar|none’s music, visit the blog of this Washington state-based “software developer by day, music enthusiast by night.”
http://bar0.blogspot.com

In other news, CDM favorite and ambient maestro Loscil contributes an entire mix of end-of-the-world music. It’s streaming on the terrific Web streaming service Mixcloud, with music by the likes of Ben Frost, Tim Hecker, and Max Richter, but also Nick Cave, Estonian composer Arvo Part, and film composers Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, among others.

Mix for Rapture by Loscil on Mixcloud

I believe I owe a Facebook friend the original pleasure of listening, but when I couldn’t find that, I found this on a wonderful music blog. This one post alone could give you great listening for the rest of the day.

Passing by: Dauwd, sgnl_fltr, Adam X, Loscil & Matthias Rock [astrangelyisolatedplace]

There’s an insanely rich set of ambient and electronic mixes, and links to appropriate blogs. Whoever you are, sir, thinks for the great work, described as:

Biosphere’s Norwegian Winter.
Eno’s inspirational airports.
The Orb’s psychedelic London.
Aphex Twin’s Cornish isolation.
The KLF’s American road-trip.
Harold Budd’s Mojave desert humming telephone wires

To me, the power of music remains that it can make you feel better when it seems as though your world is apocalyptic. And if we do ever find ourselves in the midst of an apocalypse and have the strength to make a sound, I imagine the band will play on.

Recommended Listening: Experimental Electronica from Australia’s Enig’matik Records

Peter Kirn — Wed, 11 May 2011 17:18:22 +0000

Image: mindBuffer.

From an Australian curator comes a diverse compilation of “experimental electronica” spanning artists from down under, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. Selected by artist / Enig-matik founder SUN IN AQUARIUS, it’s some finely-produced, “glitch-tinged” music covering a gamut of personalities, a nice sampling of some of the kind of quality work getting made. The compilation is streamable free or can be purchased for AUD$15.

Honestly, I think the biggest challenge with all this music isn’t listening to it or finding it, but deciding what to call it. Electronica? Leftfield? Ambient — no, not really. Glitch? Please. Even the “experimental” moniker seems not entirely descriptive to me. Thoughts?

Of course, acquiring it is very easy – it’s another Bandcamp release:

http://enigmatiksounds.bandcamp.com/: V.A-Painting Pictures on Silence V1

V.A-Painting Pictures On Silence V1 by Enig’matik Records

Mitchell Nordine (Mind Tree), who sent this news, contributes two of my favorite tracks, cut one, “The Caravan,” and as half of the collaboration MindBuffer, “Ghost in the Shell.”

Mitchell shares some of the making of “The Caravan”:

All of the percussive samples were recorded with my little Zoom H2 on a camping trip our group went on when I was 18 (last year) Easter time It makes the track feel particularly close to home for me, and I’m just wrapped in general at the quality of how the end product turned out using custom samples from the little recorder.

Mitchell also passes along some additional notes on his act, some of the geekier details of their creation process behind the scenes (generative melodies, audiovisual granular synthesis), and more:

MINDBUFFER BIO

MindBuffer is the collaborative bi-product between Joshua Batty and Mitchell Nordine after years of submergence deep within the oceans of C++ coding and Max/MSP/Jitter patches… This combined with a fetish for sensory overload, years of collective experience within popular DAW’s such as Logic and Live, and a history of professional performance in jazz trumpet and violin.

MindBuffer thrives on intricacy and innovation, integrating self-generative and prerecorded audio, 3D reactive visuals and crowd interactivity; all grown from the ground up on self developed software. Their custom software is capable of realtime audiovisual granular synthesis by allowing the access and manipulation of single frames of video at 60fps as well being capable of melodic and rhythmical generative compositional processes. <(Ghost in the shell 2.20-3.48, Bell melody is entirely generative)

REVIEW BY INTERVAL

"Deep, thoughtful, and experimental, ‘Ghost in The Shell’ from Mindbuffer explodes an IDM vibe like non-other. A heart wrenchingly soulful expedition, it grooves deep into a carefully created chaos, with hiccups of noise and distortion thrown across the listener, much like a fresh splattering of multicoloured paint over a canvas. Confronting expectation mindbuffer still delivers a poignant narrative that is sure to send goosebumps crawling up your spine."
Review by Interval.

ENIG’MATIK RECORDS

Enig'matik Records sole goal is to blur genre lines, push the envelope and generally bring together like minded artists who are in it for the music, for the emotion it can convey and the unification it can achieve. This release was only possible by the extraordinary efforts of label owner Sun in Aquarius. Our personal favorites include Circuit Bent, Vaetxh and Sun in Aquarius.

Mindbuffer’s performance rig: that’s Max/MSP on Mac OS, just running with the screen reversed for performance use! (Hint: use command-control-option-8. Try it; I’ll wait.) And yes, for control, that’s the sadly now-defunct Lemur. Photo used by permission; via Flickr.

Additional links:
soundcloud.com/mindbuffer

soundcloud.com/mindtree

And lots of other good artists there, as well. Let us know what you think.

Enig-matik Records @ Facebook

Lovely, Ethereal Music, Made from New and Updated Reaktor Patches You Can Download

Peter Kirn — Wed, 11 May 2011 16:28:57 +0000

The wonderful, sometimes-inspiring, sometimes-daunting capability of the computer is to make any sound you like. Give someone an open toolbox, and they really limited only by skill and imagination. Graphical modular environment Reaktor by Native Instruments has a reputation for crunchy granular sounds and elaborate, multi-layered glitches, and those are to some of us certainly a good thing. But here’s some music made in Reaktor that tends in another direction. The creatoors give us some nice tools, to be sure, but they also give us some actual music and sounds to explore.

At top, our friend Peter Dines has been continuing to iterate with his granular tools, Loupe. Here, OpenSoundControl control signals from an iPad running (recently-updated) TouchOSC translate to new sounds. Multi-touch control seems to me perfect for this sort of continuous parameter control. The download updates his $15 patch set, and there’s an extensive tutorial on using OSC and Reaktor on his Noisepages blog:

Loupe 1.5 for Reaktor – now with bidirectional OSC mappings for TouchOS [Modulations @ Noisepages]

Even if for some bizarre reason you’re not interested in this patch, the article above is a must-read for any Reaktor user hoping to experiment with OSC.

Via the ever-prodigious Synthtopia comes three other free Reaktor ensembles. For free ensembles, they’re really polished – there’s a 4-oscillator atmospheric pad synth, a 3-oscillator bass synth, and 2-oscillator “pluck” synth. If you don’t own Reaktor, there’s even a free 3-oscillator bass synth instrument for Windows VST. The results produce dreamy, dense layers of sound:

The trio, entitled “The Colorspace,” is the work of Italian-based musician Dario. He makes music under a number of identities, but I’m partial to his ambient projects Kiis and “need a name.” A Kiis release is available as a name-your-price EP on Bandcamp:

Shine by Kiis

There’s also some seriously chilled-own, pleasantly-ambient (even when beats make appearances) music as “Need a Name.”

Sizzling Plucks by Need a Name

Whether this music is specifically your cup of tea or not, it’s great to actually hear some music from the person making the tool. You can take it as further inspiration, a chance to be closer to the person who makes the Reaktor patches you use, or even a challenge to make your own work with the same sonic arsenal distinctly your own.

The Reaktor patches, for their part, are available free:
http://www.thecolorspace.net/software.html

Bonus – back in glitchland… As I write this, I see that there’s an updated TouchOSC control layout for Richard Devine’s GrainCube, a free Reaktor patch built by DevSnd, Rachmiel, TwistedTools, and Antonio Blanca. See previous coverage here on CDM from last year; a different video below, and a picture of the new layout (which looks nice). Of course, no reason you can’t use this same tool to make something that sounds very different…

Courtesy DevSnd. Click for larger version.

More downloads: http://devinesound.net/

Update info / TouchOSC update [devsnd Blog]