MUTEK this year looks to be a tremendous few days of audiovisual performance and art. To get in the mood one day early, we’re working with our friends at New York’s eclectic monthly live electronic party to host a special Montreal edition of Warper. It’s a convergence of New York and Montreal artists (full lineup below), running a full twelve hours. It’ll be totally free (donations welcome), with a cash bar available all day and night.

RSVP on Facebook

http://warperparty.com/

A big thanks to Jazz Mutant, makers of the OSC-driven, multi-touch controllers Lemur and Dexter, for their support.

I’ll be covering both the pre-party and MUTEK and its artists all week long, along with Greg Smith for Rhizome, so stay tuned to CDM for stories, video, and sound.

Meet up in the open lab: At 2pm, we’ll have an open music and visual technological laboratory, a la our Handmade Music series. Artists will bring their rigs, and original hardware and software creations to share what they’ve made and how they play. Confirmed for the lab:

• Multitouch and Open Music Tools: Nathanaël Lécaudé and Eric Andrade will show their open source multitouch table PyMT (built in Python), which works with Max/MSP for sound generation, plus the TamTam musical software suite, an educational music suite powered by Csound that runs on the OLPC (and other platforms), created at the University of Montreal by Jean Piché and his team.
• A Chipsound Premiere: David Viens of Plogue will be on-hand to talk about Plogue’s “chipsound” software instruments, as scooped on CDM – and I hope David brings along some Bidule creations, as well.
• Guitar video instruments: Matt Dickey is bringing his guitar-video rig, powered by Jitter, which allows audience members to conduct his playing and control visuals and … you’ll just have to come see it to fully understand. (See also his guitar-controlled generative visual experiments.)

Bring your cool rigs + projects: If you’d like to join in on the lab and you’ll be in the Montreal area, just fill out this form to let us know what to expect. (We have 1-2 projectors, a PA, and tables; bring extra amps and cables if you can.)

Lemur multi-touch demo: At 5pm, Brooklyn musician Nick Shelestak (White Badger) will demonstrate how he integrates the Lemur multi-touch hardware controller in the studio and on stage using Ableton Live, along with a few other special features unique to the Lemur.

Audiovisual lineup: At 6pm, we get into fully live audio and visuals from our friends in Montreal and in town from New York. It’s a packed lineup – see the full details below. (The Cougarettes and I will each be doing simultaneous audio and visuals…)

We’re inundated with event info, and one of my general rules is to avoid lots of event listings. But the lineup for famed audiovisual fest MUTEK looks simply epic.

Highlights, just for a taste:

• Moderat. Apparat and Modeselektor. Like peanut butter and chocolate.
• A\VISIONS looks, as always, like an essential event in audiovisualism. Wolfgang Voigt will present GAS and Herman Kolgen has a new piece.
• For the first time, Club Transmediale gets its own showcase.
• An unusually eclectic lineup adds dub, acoustic-electronic, and cross-genre collaboration.
• Robert Henke (Monolake) and Christopher Bauder finally bring their 64 illuminated helium balloon installation (ATOM) to North America.
• Akufen returns to live performance.
• For techno lovers, Resident Advisor brings in the likes of Mathew Jonson, Dandy Jack, and Carl Craig to keep you up all night Saturday.
• Not just Berlin: People from all around the world are making sounds, and even events like the Decibel Festival get highlighted, so you get a great cross-section of a lot of scenes. (I have to bring this up, because I’ve already seen stories claiming Mutek is basically Berlin in Montreal, and from the lineup I see below, that’s a misrepresentation. We love Berlin, but glad as always to see representation from scenes elsewhere.)

MUTEK Lineup at MUTEK site (which has also been posting podcasts with the artists)

And, actually, almost everything looks like a highlight. Not only is it Mutek’s one-decade anniversary, it feels like it’s a special moment for electronica and audiovisuals in general, like the forces of goodness are again converging planetwide.

I think even Mutek aside, some good times are ahead – and Montreal could be a great place to celebrate. Speaking of which…

CDM Coming to Montreal – Get In Touch

I was unable to attend MUTEK last year, but this year should happily be different. I know the Warper crew from New York City are planning their own live music party separately, and CDM may be able to put on an event. If you have a venue or are interested in collaboration, let us know. I’m also available to do the workshop thing while in town. Mostly, it’d be helpful to connect with folks in Montreal as I’m in town, since it isn’t my city. If we can get a daytime space, we may be able to do some additional interviews of Mutek artists and Montreal videomusicological citizens.

You can reach me and the CDM gang at our contact page, or email me directly at peter (at) [thenameofthissite.com]

What’s Going On

Heck, let’s break the rules and run the whole press release, as it will have fans of this event salivating:

What if all the technology you loved, everything that ran on electricity, came to life and played one epic musical performance?

That’s about as best as I can sum up the “Emergence” event happening in Ontario and in an online stream. It’s a workshop. It’s a performance. It’s Commodore 64s and surplus parts. It’s cybernetic theory. There’s a robotic singer. It’s at a computer museum. Nerdtastic.

Rod Adlers describes his own setup: “3 Commodore 64’s running Cynthcart and MSSIAH, iPod Touch using Brian Eno’s ‘Bloom’ program, Korg MS2000 and M50, and Fruity Loops.” Nice – it’s like the radio station phrase, “the greatest hits of yesterday and today.”

Valentine’s Day, indeed — if you’re dating a robot / computer / nerd (or robotic computer nerd), you know how to celebrate. There’s an online stream, happily, for all of us too unlucky to be in Ontario this weekend. If you are there, “video, photography and interviews” are all “encouraged.” Please do share with us on planet CDM. Syd Bolton writes:

You can see some newspaper coverage from today at:
http://pcmuseum.ca/media/ExposFeb2009EmergWeb.jpg

The show will be broadcast live the day of at:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/emergent-behaviour

Our page for it is at
http://www.pcmuseum.ca/emergence.asp

Full details:

It’s like Mexican wrestling for people who enjoy, um, patching together interactive tools for music and visuals! And on one fateful Toronto day, the open source challenger took the prize.

As promised, a group of music tech geeks challenged DIY multimedia software environments Pure Data (Pd) and Max/MSP to a mano-a-mano contest of wits. These competing patching environments share interface concepts, code, and even a surprising amount of compatibility, but open source Pd and commercial, more polished-looking Max each have their own loyal converts. I’m pleased to offer the results – though I’m already hearing calls for a rematch in this heated rivalry. And there was DIY pong. And some kind of dancing … koalas?

Co-organizer Dafydd Hughes:

The event was a success – lots of fun, good-natured competition, beer and general nonsense.

Pd won 9-6, but several people pointed out that since there was only one person on the MAX team and two on Pd, maybe the score should have been 6-4.5 in MAX’s favour. Before the final Pong match the score was 4-2 for Pd. We then won Pong 5-4 and added the scores together.

We had a really good time and we’re already thinking of ways we could do it better next time and of variations on the theme.

Pictures here:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/interaccess/
Video here:
http://www.interaccess.org/blog/?p=743
A great blog post, pictures and video here:
http://www.nowpublic.com/tech-biz/anything-you-can-do-i-can-do-better-midi-software-duel-5

Two modular patching software packages for programming multimedia software visually, Pure Data (Pd) and Max/MSP/Jitter have long had a friendly relationship. The tools share code, are reasonably compatible in patches and external objects (sometimes with some adjustment), and are basically open source (Pd) and commercial (Max) cousins of one another. The user bases are likewise friendly with one another. But a certain rivalry hid behind the surface – until now.

Now, it’s personal.

Enough of the diplomacy. A group of dedicated patchers in Toronto have decided to dispense with this “we’re all winners” nonsense and decide which tool is superior. I’ll let them the organizers describe it in their own colorful way: