Sometimes, images and video can say far more than words, and it’s best to stand back rather than ramble on. (Cough, ahem.)

From Björk this year has come two visions of how to make new instruments. The Biophilia software for iOS is an interactive rendition of the album. As apps, you have the curious separation of tracks into individual application icons, available as separate purchases or a bundle. But the effect is one we’ve traced for a while: the music becomes non-linear and interactive, blurring the line between recording as reproduction and dynamic instruments that can transform what you hear. Most notably, it also comes, via an update, with MIDI as observed by Synthtopia. MIDI allows you to then radically transform the output of what you get, and I agree that this is probably the first “album with MIDI output.” (The deeper question: are other sequencers in some sense someone else’s musical/compositional creation?)

In the Gameleste gamelan-celeste hybrid, you also have MIDI, here controlling an otherwise entirely acoustic instrument. (Create Acoustic Music!) Starting with a conventional celeste, the original instrument was “hacked” with hand-built bronze bars made by UK cymbalsmith Matt Nolan, then constructed into the finished instrument with MIDI by Icelandic organ builder Björgvin Tòmasson.

Videos via Shocklee.com.

The videos themselves to me represent the spectrum of possible choice in instrument design on a whole number of levels – MIDI even being one fascinating such level.

Biophilia software [iTunes link]

Excellent reading –
Extended behind-the-scenes look at the release with Damian Taylor at Sonic Scoop

Montreal-based Damian Taylor, music director and engineer for Björk, is the subject of an epic interview on cycling74.com, spanning music, life in Montreal, working with Björk and what makes her special, and what patching in Max/MSP can mean compositionally and creatively.

Damian has some especially nice reflections on what having an open-ended music environment can mean.

If you’re a musician or composer, Max is an amazing tool that will really open up a completely different way of thinking about music. If you’ve been working on sequencers, looking at time lines, working on tape, or reading off musical scores, then without really realizing it you start looking at music in this very linear way and your brain gets formed into a lot of similar patterns.

But the Max environment provides this whole alternate way of thinking, a whole different flow. Suddenly your own ways of thinking about time and harmony and melodies and everything, expands completely. Music kind of changes shape, you see it from this whole different side. So it’s really, really, really, worth putting in the effort!

It’s a great and well-deserved endorsement for Max, but I think it’s deeper than than any one tool — this way of thinking could also be applied to tools like Pd, AudioMulch (saw a great workshop on that last week), Reaktor, or code-based languages like Csound and SuperCollider. Or, for that matter, I think this notion of thinking in non-linear ways can even be applied to playing your acoustic instrument. It really gets at the heart of how to unlock creativity, I think.

In case you’re afraid of Max or other languages, Damian has some advice there, as well:

If you’ve never done any code or computer language programming before, there are a lot of times where you just have to try to absorb things without really knowing what the hell they are for. And I mean that in the nicest possible way!

I just slowly worked my way through all the tutorials, largely without understanding what the hell I was doing, but just absorbing what was going on, trying to follow every step that was presented. And yeah, it really was a case of locking myself in a room. If there was another noise anywhere, I just couldn’t do it. It took really intense concentration; just trying to absorb what was going on and follow a tutorial from start to finish.

But then at some point I figured I needed to speed things up, so I got in touch with Harvestworks, in New York, who I actually was aware of through an interview on the Cycling ’74 web site. I got tutoring from Matthew Ostrowski — and it was amazing, a complete revelation.

But best of all, for folks using Max/MSP, Damian gives you a leg up, with his nice Woodpecker tool available as a free download for MIDI sequencing.

Woodpecker creates fast 16th note midi sequences from your keyboard input. It’s designed to allow you to bring this very electronic feel into a live ensemble, free of set tempos and click tracks. There are options to allow you to vary the feel of the sequence, play triplets, and explore various arpeggiation styles.

(Nice use of Topspin for a Max patch download! Clever!)

Here’s some music for Damian, as well:
Damian Taylor by MissManagement

damiantaylor.com
bjork.com

And absolutely read the full interview – it even has a nice shot of the Max rig in there:
An Interview with Damian Taylor [cycling74.com]

Full disclosure: this terrific interview is by Marsha Vdovin, who’s also CDM’s business development manager. Thanks for the great work on this, Marsha; I enjoyed reading it, anyway!

Digital music is of course created the moment you commit a recording to a file, so it’s fitting to me that we can take musical inspiration from acoustic sources as well as electronic. And one of the album releases I’m most thrilled by this summer is the collaboration between Björk and the eclectic band Dirty Projectors, whose African rhythm-influenced “Bitte Orca” was to me one of the fresher sounds in recent years.

For the digital-only release “Mount Wittenberg Orca,” the coupling return to bare, stripped-down vocals, with harmonies at once folk-influenced and mysterious. Buzz about this new direction started just as the grouping performed live at the diminutive Housing Works Cafe here in Manhattan. (I unfortunately was out of town; see the video after the break below.) There was just something viscerally wonderful about what the ensemble made, something very different from either Dirty Projectors or Björk; those familiar personalities melted away into something new.

The inspiration from the track comes from Dirty Projectors’ Amber watching a school of whales from Mount Wittenberg, outside San Francisco. Accordingly, proceeds benefit the planet, by way of the National Geographic Society. Donations of US$7 and up gets you 320kbps or Apple Lossless downloads and full liner notes.

Here’s the mountain geographic area in question, as a visual aid:

My only regret is that the mountain-inspired work is fit into a hill-sized EP; I hope they release more tracks.

You can have a free taste as a stream below via Soundcloud.

Mount Wittenberg Orca [Official site, download]

I’ve been meaning to point to the release for a couple of weeks, but this comes as I read some reflections by my friend (and very electronic artist) Ezekiel Honig.

http://www.ezekielhonig.com/words.php

At a time when half my friends talk about the demise of the conventional record release (including some with actual resumes in the record business, as opposed to my never-ending study of the arcane), there are reasons to see something else rising from the ashes. A lot of what Zeke is describing fits the mountain EP here, from his ideas about the non-narrative “accumulation of moments” to the meaning of the album. (“A container is needed to define the extent of one’s work, to give it both breathing room and a place for that air to stop,” Zeke muses.) A lot of wisdom about everything from recording fidelity to the album as a business model are becoming the victims of violent change in the music world. But on the other hand, in their place is a new sense of freedom, recording impromptu vocals with an enthusiasm that goes back in this country to much earlier American music, or making records about – and to benefit – whales. At the risk of being overly crunchy, there’s something nice about that new ocean of possibility, even if, like the ecological reality, it’s a fragile one.

“When was the last time you listened to a whole album? Do you do that any more? Do you still go buy albums and EPs?”

Yep.

Dirty Projectors + Björk- All We Are by DominoRecordCo

It helps that Bjork pulls out some of her synthiest, electronicilicious-est tracks, like Pluto:

and Hyperballad:

And, of course, part of what happens is that the computer screen here has become the interface. When it works — when the visuals match the sounds, and suggest some new ways of constructing music — it really does show potential for this kind of instrument. (Even if you don’t buy into the blocks, the way the visualization itself works has a lot of promise.)

That’s the idea behind Microsoft’s Surface, too … but sometimes the gimmick can be a solution in search of a problem. Well, actually, maybe your computer of the future really will be “a big-ass table.” (Thanks, SarcasticGamer.com, for making me laugh so heartily.)

It really does work nicely in action, in terms of expressing to the audience what the performer is doing, and making nice eye candy, to boot.

More details on Bjork’s futuristic touring rig:
multitouched bjork [Byron Scullin blog]

And, of course, a big report from Boing Boing celebrity Xeni Jardin, which I’m way behind on linking as it posted 4/28:
Coachella: Björk’s wild sound machines, and report from the turf [Boing Boing]

It’s funny, but despite endless blog coverage of devices like the reacTable, some dating back before the creation of CDM, it sometimes takes a celebrity like Bjork for other people to notice the instrument. Then again, many electronic instruments have been popularized over the years by big names (Moog gear by Keith Emerson and Wendy Carlos, Fairlight CMI by Peter Gabriel, etc., etc., in a list too long to recount). So, perhaps this is something big for tangible interfaces. I noticed blocks were big at ITP last night. I think these devices just have a long way to go in terms of general accessibility and expressiveness, at least for mass music making; most importantly, they have to work on those two points in ways that can be reproduced by lots of people, if not in a commercial product, in a DIY implementation. But it’ll be interesting to watch, as always. And Bjork certainly demonstrates how to rock the instrument.

All of this bodes well for the new album coming this summer. More press coverage and links on the single:
bjork.com news

The artist is also playing Coachella this year, and in honor of that, Michael Todd takes us on a flashback to a BBC special from 1997 called Modern Minimalists. Bjork makes an impassioned plea for embracing simplicity in favor of intellectual complexity and maximalism, flanked by minimalists from Estonia, Scotland, and Finland (including none other than Arvo Part) as a glass harmonica plays in the background.

It’s good creative/inspirational fuel, and wonderful to have an advocate and unusual personality in Bjork fighting musical blandness. Oh, and Maestro Part fittingly enough looks like as ever like an Orthodox religious icon:

and part two:

For more insanely talented and inspiring women in music as featured by BBC documentaries, see Delia Derbyshire and Alchemists of Sound, as discussed here on CDM last month.

And, BBC, why not officially send this stuff to YouTube and let them carry your bandwidth costs?