NK Berlin is a planetary hub for wild experiments made with music, technology, and electronics. When you can’t be in Berlin soaking it up in person, you can explore the oddities assembled on their MySpace page. A recent workshop by Andrey Smirnov and Guy Van Belle on Theremins led to these unusual videos, playing a potted plant:

…and a bunch of bananas (footage from the Theremin Center, Moscow).

Via the Pd list, though, it seems that the next NK workshop will go somewhere else altogether: music with microorganisms. Really – you’ll need a USB microscope. It’s electronic music in a Petri dish.

I could try to explain, but I’ll leave it to the description by organizers Marc R. Dusseiller & Kaspar Koenig:

FMOD is a wildly popular sound engine for games, used widely in games for PCs, consoles, and portables alike. FMOD is known for being on the bleeding edge as far as capabilities, but even given that, it’s a pleasant surprise that the engine has now made its way to the iPhone and iPod touch.

It’s got some impressive capabilities going for it, too:

• Mic input
• 3D audio
• DSP effects
• Compressed samples, MOD, and MIDI

And, in good news for indie studios, it’ll cost just US$500 per title to license.

Of course, you can add this to Pure Data (Pd), which found its way to the mobile platform via the (partially open-source) RjDj project. RjDj is a music platform, not a game platform, but Pd has some powerful audio processing capabilities of its own, and I’d count them both in the category of interactive music. The RjDj gang will be having their next “sprint” – a developer intensive to build interactive scenes for the platform – in Berlin, with New York to follow in January. (I’ll be at the New York event, naturally.)

December is the time for the next RjDj sprint: The Reality Jockeys would like to invite you to the Scene composing session on 12-14 December 2008 in Berlin at this nice location:

To me, the ideal kind of music tech writing is when you get to spend quality time with tools for musical reasons – not simply to talk about the technology, but to make stuff. Over the past weeks, we’ve been gradually assembling ideas, sound designs, knowledge, and tutorials into a string of blog-style posts on the CDM Kore site. I’ve organized those into an evolving guide to working with Kore as a musician, from getting a handle on the basics (including some stuff that initially befuddled us when we tried to use it!), to some “experimental” techniques for pushing the envelope.

Using Kore

We’ve been spending a lot of time with Reaktor, too, so expect a follow-up with that. The idea isn’t really to advocate any tool over another one — on the contrary, for me it’s about figuring out, okay, now you’ve got something, what do you do with it?

It’s been great to get all this input from Peter Dines, Eoin, and the readers, as well (particularly Jonathan Adams Leonard) — the guide above is sort of a “collective knowledge” about the tool. Having written a book and various magazine articles, it’s a totally different experience: more learning than teaching.

On the same lines, I’ve also put together a guide to working with the Kore controller without touching the mouse. That’s part of the whole appeal to me of the Kore system, but it may not be immediately obvious how to do it. If you’ve got Kore in front of you, this will walk you in front of how to do it. I’m still learning to assimilate this with my live sets, but when I get it going it makes me really happy — I’m able to focus directly on sound.

Reference: How to Navigate Kore 2 with Hardware – No Mouse!

This is good timing, as I’m just now back from Berlin where I got to do a short set which happened to combine Ableton Live and Kore. So, separate from this other stuff, I do want to say a big thank you to everyone in Berlin who came out. It was great to meet you, and I hope to come back soon — you have a really fantastic town; I loved being there. It was really creatively inspiring.

Several bloggers were nice enough to write up / photograph the evening:
MIDI Mechanics
Hundertmarknow

– both blogs in German, but they look great; just added them to my RSS so I can keep practicing my German reading skills.

Big thanks, as well, to everyone at the DEAF Festival and in Dublin, in another wonderful and energizing town. I’ll be putting together my notes from the DEAF presentation soon to share.

I’m thrilled to be here in Berlin this week, before heading to Ireland for Dublin’s DEAF Festival. (More on that shortly.) Tuesday night, I’m playing a set at Dense Record Shop, a wonderful record store that also does live sets and has its own bar.

It’s a cozy, informal venue so if you are in Berlin, drop by and say hi — it’s a chance for all of us to meet in person. 8p sharp – 10p all over.

Dense Shop

Location

You can also find the event on Facebook

Berliners, I can’t wait! Rest of the world: more on some of the music stuff soon.

Minimal techno pioneer, digital vinyl advocate, DJ superstar, and subject of a surrealist Internet parody and very popular joke t-shirt line Richie Hawtin is now evidently using Traktor and Traktor Scratch. So is Magda (of “make the tea” fame). So is Troy Pierce.

Gentle hint to NI’s DJ marketing: embrace it. Give us a special “Ubercoolische Edition” of Traktor Scratch. Heck, I’d buy one. I assume people in Berlin may also find it funny, given the influx of us Americans into their city. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read on.)

Internet memes aside, the real reason this is big news is that Hawtin was one of the DJs who threw his support behind digital vinyl with Stanton’s Final Scratch — the target market for NI with Traktor Scratch. (More recently, he used NI’s other rival — Serato Scratch Live. Thanks, Mateo.) Says Hawtin, “I find that Traktor is taking further steps forward while still remaining connected to the traditional DJ paradigm.” (Less connected to the traditional DJ paradigm, I think, are things like Ableton Live, which by its developers own admission was never originally conceived as a “DJ” program — for better or worse.) And jokes aside, I’m sure Hawtin can do some fun stuff with Traktor.

Richie Hawtin on Traktor, at Native Instruments

But I want to talk about something even more important: just as Hawtin’s label Minus Records is joining with NI for a world club tour for its 10th anniversary, the hilarious Ubercoolische site that parodies his minimalist lifestyle in Berlin is down. Happily, Google cache has preserved the white-wall apartment jokes for posterity (try a search). And you can still by the reflexive t-shirt. If anyone knows what happened to the site, let me know.

For old time’s sake, I’ve reproduced my favorite episode after the break, on Berthold Brecht. (Expletives left in for …effect.)

For the record, Magda thought it was funny, and apparently it was all in good fun because the authors of the site were fans (and actually booked the crew). You’ll know you’ve made it, too, when you’re the subject of a viral Internet parody.

Now that I’ve gotten this out of my system, next time I talk about Hawtin, Minus, or Traktor, I promise to be serious. But in the meantime: