When we say “handmade music,” we really mean this sense of crafting something , of touching something – not so much the technique or the technology as the intention behind what you do. In a striking film portrait of Nick Zammuto for nakedmusicians.com, the craft of living is spotlighted as much as the craft of music making.

Nick, is known for his role in duo The Books (with Dutch-born Paul de Jong), and their distinctive, rhythmic, homebrewed-original sound. Here, he covers his manipulations of everything physical and temporal. Sound sampling is a tangible process, the poetry of things put together and assembled in surprising ways. So, too, is his life in music, as he talks about raising kids and literally building a home. They are all of these activities a way of stopping and shaping time, of composing yourself and your loved ones into the future. The resulting sounds and stories might just make you want to move around.

You can learn more about Nick on his site:

http://zammutosound.com/

Burlington, Vermont-based filmmaker Matt Day is responsible for this gem.

And if you’re in the Eastern USA, you can catch Nick live:
FEB 3: Mass Moca, North Adams, MA
FEB 4: 92YTribeca, New York, NY
FEB 6:Brighton Music Hall, Allston, MA

Sounds from his new EP, via SoundCloud:
Zammuto – Idiom Wind EP – Make Mine, London UK by zammuto

What is sound? What does it mean, and why does it matter? It’s never too fundamental, too basic a question to ask ourselves again when we make music. So, I’ll leave this trailer otherwise largely without comment, except to say, it’s well worth watching (or re-watching).

Touch the Sound, produced by German director Thomas Riedelsheimer in 2004, focuses on the work and world of nearly-deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie. See a trailer, below, and excerpt, above. Thanks to Morgan Hendry for the tip.

IMDB link

On this topic, and the inspiration for this link:
For a Deaf Artist, The Process of Sound Art, Transformed: Short Film

And I suspect there’s a reader out there who can tell us more about the experience of sound and music (and the technology thereof) for the hearing-impaired?

Updated: Watch the entire movie on Hulu, if you’re in the United States:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/200692/touch-the-sound

And there’s a TED talk, as well:

The Electro Wars Final Trailer from Stephen Alex Vasquez on Vimeo.

The Electro Wars Final Trailer from Stephen Alex Vasquez on Vimeo.

Can a documentary finally tell the story of the electronic music scene? Primus Luta has become a scholar of electronic sounds himself, and joins us in a guest post to examine a film that, like the music itself, is a work in progress. Electro Wars premieres in its current form in New York Friday, but you can get a first glimpse at the movie and the state of music in the Internet – whether wishful thinking might imagine the Web’s age is over or not. -Ed.

Electronic music has always had a love hate relationship with popularity.  Back in the old days of the ‘big five’  setting the music trends for the masses with million dollar marketing budgets, it was an unwritten rule that there could only be one popular electronic act per five years, and they could only be publicly referred to as dance artists.  Those days are of course long over.  The big five aren’t five any more, and by comparison don’t seem that big either.  As for setting trends, they are still a factor, but hardly the necessity they once were.  When you look at the Billboard charts you still see their artists, but now they share space with a wide assortment of niche artists who achieved just as much on shoestring budgets.

The internet has had no small role to play in this.  With album sales down across the board and music industry ‘sales events’ being fewer and further between, popularity has become more about buzz than sales.  Today that buzz is measured in realtime with all of the fancy social networking analytic algorithms, but a mere three years ago blogs were all the rage.  During that time a meme started by internet celebrity Carles of The Hipster Runoff started a buzz that provided inspiration for the latest documentary film on electronic music and its flirtations with popularity.

“[Carles] kept bringing up these different indie bands and these electro bands,” says Stephen Vasquez, the filmmaker behind The Electro Wars as we sit in a Queens Dunkin Donuts, a few blocks from where he was born. “He’s talking about how they are fighting this war to stay relevant.  That’s when I got the idea.  There is a transitional period going on, right now.”  The transition he speaks of is the one which made it viable for small artists with no major label support to break out of their niche.  Through the internet smaller scenes had the means of vying for media attention.  Among those given voice was the tongue in cheek electronic sub-genre which attracted Vasquez – bloghouse.  The niche sound of electro styled house made its way from bedrooms to local clubs, but came alive as the sound traveled via the internet.

“I go to these clubs,” Vasquez says.  ”Nobody is really taking this music seriously.”  It’s been the fate for club music since the end of disco, the club aspect overshadowing the music.  Even with, bloghouse, its embrace of the internet never denied its place in the club where it is generally understood that the music helps set the scene, not necessarily that the scene is the music.  Still, the music is often the introductory point for many club goers to search for deeper musical appreciation, as was the case with Vasquez.

“I always listened to house music but I never understood that house, techno, drum and bass, grime, all these things are different sub-genres of electronic music.  They are not all the same thing.  It was ignorance on my part that I wanted to clarify for myself, so I started researching.  Jeff Mills, Juan Atkins, Bambatta, Kraftwerk and I’m like ‘damn, this thing’s been going on for years.’”

Yet what has happened with it over the past few years has transformed the scope of the music.  The internet has allowed it to break out of the club, or alternately sprout up new club scenes where there were none previously.  ”It’s really going all over the world,” Vasquez explains.   “It’s not just in Europe anymore.  It’s affecting small countries.   Kids around here are listening to that music now,” he says of his immigrant Queens community, “which was unheard of ten years ago.  You had the hip-hop heads, the sneaker heads, then the kids listening to spanish music. Now even the off the boat kids are like, ‘yeah man I’m going to see Tiesto!’”

All of these things led Vasquez to take on the task of documenting what he was seeing.  ”I’m a filmmaker first and foremost.  I DJ as a hobby but film is my passion.  I was just going to do the documentary for myself. If it went somewhere fine, but at least I’d have it as the memories of the scene and what it was, because this scene may not be here in five years.

“The first pinnacle moment for the whole thing was when Steve Aoki agreed to do the interview.  Once he did, that launched a series of other interviews.  At the same time though, I was reaching out to even bigger people.  Gaga and Kanye.”  Gaga was well on her way to the top of the pops, but at the time was  still  just an up and coming artists.    For Vasquez, her rise to stardom and Kanye giving up rapping for autotune over sonic textures pulled from the scene he was most familiar with, was an indication of the heights that sound could achieve.  ”Of course they denied the interviews.  At least Kanye responded to me though.  He said, I’m really busy and don’t have time right now.  But it’s a dope concept and I want to see it when you finish.’”

It is still a work in progress and a lot has changed since he first began work over two years ago.  ”Bloghouse came in really quickly then all of a sudden started dying off just as quickly.  A lot of the artists now are breaking into the mainstream.”  It’s the trend that took Gaga to the top of the pop charts, while earning  her Grammy’s in Electronic/Dance categories.  It’s also the trend that took Vasquez to Costa Rica to screen the film for the growing scene down there.  ”The kids over there (Costa Rica) they mimic our scene, the LA scene.   I find it interesting because it’s that international.”

He credits the LA club scene with a lot.  ”LA was pivotal,” he explains.  ”It kind of started the whole thing.  I say ‘kind of’ because it’s not fair to say it started it.  It came from different parts of the world.  If Justice never came or the canadians with MSTRKRFT, Boys Noize in Germany, if they never came there would have been no scene.  It kind of revived the whole rave culture.  Cobra Snake started the whole photographer frenzy.  Glamorizing it, making you feel like you are the most important person at the party.  It’s always been around but it took off for this scene in LA.”

Despite the modern focus of the film, Vasquez is well aware of the notion that there is nothing new under the sun.  ”I would go as far back as the seventies,” he says.  ”Seventies disco, that whole scene is where I feel it’s going now.  Especially with A-Trak, Armand van Helden, they are doing the new wave disco style.  That sound is big right now because it has a very friendly atmosphere.  People go to a small club, again its a small scene.  They go and they chill and they have a good time.  It’s not about going and looking at a DJ with visuals because a lot of the artists can’t afford all of that.  It’s about listening and dancing to the music.”  Despite the global impact, the relative smallness of the local scenes themselves play into maintaining the feel good aesthetic.  ”In the seventies you had parties in a loft.  You’re seeing that these days.  Especially in Brooklyn.  It’s like I’m living in an era I wished that I had lived in.”

Bridging the history of the new scenes with the broader history of electronic dance music is a motivator for Vasquez.  It isn’t the focal point of the film, but he makes a concerted effort to acknowledge the past.  ”I want to educate people that were in my position a few years back.  A lot of the kids that listen to the music, they have no idea where it came from.  If I can present that history in a nice little timeline and keep it quick for the MTV generation, my generation and the new kids who have even a shorter attention span.  Keep it real quick, and hopefully they’ll take something with them.”  Presented in between interviews from artists ranging from Moby, Aoki and DJ Premier, Vasquez leaves all the context clues needed to broaden perspectives.

As for the electro war itself, perhaps a truce has been reached.  ”Now the indie bands are getting remixed and getting exposed to this sub culture.  Indie and electro really compliment each other but I can see it working for a lot of hip-hop too. Drake and Kudi.  Spank Rock is like the hipster Nas.

“The scene  keeps changing so quickly.  I heard Tiesto made a song with Diplo and David Guetta is working with LMFAO and Fergie on a track.  Now Aoki and all the guys of the electro house scene, are working with big house dj’s like Tiesto and Apple Jack.”  And then there is dubstep.  ”I just got off the phone with Rusko.  He was excited to be in the movie.  I hung up and I’m like how am I going to take this documentary on electro house music into dubstep?  But it needs to be mentioned.”

Indeed Vasquez is still shooting and editing.  Since beginning work on the film, buzz has spread about it and support for it keeps coming in.  While he won’t provide any details, there’s a confidence in his smile that the future for The Electro Wars is bright.

As a way to bring it all back home, Vasquez will be screening the film in its current state with the community that raised him.  On Friday July 9th there will be a special screening at the Jackson Triplex in Queens, NY, 7pm, with music, dance and a one-off opportunity to see The Electro Wars before its next incarnation.

Gestural Music Sequencer from Unearthed Music on Vimeo.

Something as simple as remapping a single knob can give you new musical ideas. So expand that to entire gestures and live video input, and you can help push your performance in new directions and out of old habits. That’s why it’s always great to see projects like the Gestural Music Sequencer.

Built entirely in free tools – tools fairly friendly even to non-coders – the GMS lets composer and musician John Keston explore new ideas through gestures captured in a video stream. It’s easier to see than to talk about, so check out the just-completed documentary short by Josh Klos, with the aid of Julie Kistler and Brian Smith. (And yes, documentation makes a huge difference; we’d love to see more of this stuff!)

The ingredients:

• Processing, the free, multiplatform coding environment [site | cdmu tag | cdmo tag]
• controlP5, a lovely, light, quick-and-dirty library for UI controls
• Ableton Live – though you could substitute other software via MIDI, Live makes a nice, familiar interactive music engine

Lots more information on John Keston’s wonderful Audio Cookbook blog, which is fast becoming one of my favorite reads:

http://audiocookbook.org/category/gms/

And here’s a really lovely video that demonstrates what you can do with video. It uses a string of lights in a jar as the source. Yes, in a way, it’s almost like having a very focused random generator, but I think there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s an almost analog approach to seeing the source, and using that to organically create music.

GMS: Chromatic Currents Part II from Unearthed Music on Vimeo.

I have to observe, while this works reasonably well with MIDI, it reveals why standardizing on networked communication, as OSC does, makes more sense. In a world of software, “controller” can really mean anything you like. Control is increasingly about software talking to software – including when devices are involved, since they generally have a software layer of their own. Also, because sometimes it’s easier to code this with Processing than with Max, I can see some powerful uses of the Python-based Live API, which we expect to mature later this year. (Yes, the project called Live API seems to be in a holding pattern, but we may be able to work up a more complete, Live 8-ready alternative.)

By the way, our goal is to make noisepages a platform and collection of tools for people doing this sort of work (or anything creative with music and motion), even if you host your blog elsewhere. Stay tuned for the details on that.

The appeal of newer music apps for phones, current-generation mobile game systems, and PDAs is portability first. But for the Game Boy music scene, it’s as much about a distinctive sound, and acquiring Game Boys as a kind of unique synthesizer. Our friend and mobile game musician Peter Swimm points us to the new documentary Reformat the Planet. It’s available for a week free on pitchfork.tv, with screenings to follow. It’s a pretty nice survey of the New York corner of the scene, at least. I’m personally getting increasingly interested in tools like PSPSEQ, which have a distinctive sound all their own — think string modeling rather than vintage game glitches — but that puts this in additional perspective.

Reformat the Planet [available this week only, pitchfork.tv]

Cinematographer Asid Siddiky writes:

My partners and I have spent the last few years documenting the Chip Music scene in New York. It is a predominantly underground, but vibrant community in which musicians utilize video game hardware (Game Boy, Nintendo, Commodore 64, etc) to create songs of their own. This footage eventually became the feature-length film, “Reformat The Planet.”

While the movie isn’t being officially distributed yet, it has enjoyed some well-received screenings around the world…premiering at the South By Southwest Film Festival earlier this year…playing overseas at the Melbourne International Film Festival…and over the next few months, it will screen at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle and the International Amsterdam Film Festival.

Paul, Paul, and I are honored to have been selected by such prestigious groups and are pleased to announce that Pitchfork, an online publication devoted to the criticism and coverage of independent music that is hated and revered in equal (i think?) measure, has decided to stream Reformat The Planet, for free, for one week. To date, this represents our most widespread and accessible presentation of the film.

The film will be available for viewing from now until the end of the day next Thursday, August 21.

Current’s Parisa Vahdatinia describes it thusly:

I’d like to share with you a short piece we recently produced here at Current TV all about the MPC–a brief history, how it was created by Roger Linn, and how it’s effected contemporary music, followed with some interviews with Damu The Fudgemunk, P-Fritz, K-Murdock who share their sentiments on how the MPC has shaped their music.

I’m just going to have to imagine how great this piece is as I’m stuck on a train with only phone-as-modem access, so you get to sort of scoop me. As I wait, there are some great comments up there already, haiku-like:

“I mistook them for drum machines….”

“mpc is the hip hop guitar!”

Couldn’t have said it better myself. But it raises the question, given the endless variety of even pre-digital musical instruments, what’s next? That’s a question I know Roger cares about, which is why he helped us judge a design challenge last spring. I’m personally excited by the idea that some designs are already here, and more are likely to come out of someone’s studio, without the major product maker label on it.

Okay, now I’ve seen it. Good to be back off the train and able to download videos. It does come off strangely as an ad for Akai, but there’s another way to look at it — as an executive summary of how MPC users describe their axe. Talk to any MPC user, and you get a case study in why the design of integrated hardware matters to people. I believe those principles are absolutely applicable to the design of software, as well. And the immediacy of the monome is entirely related, as a computer-based instrument, to the MPC as a hardware instrument. It’s easy to get hung up on the philosophy of instruments, but what really matters to people is (surprise) sound and how they manipulate it.

While Moog is a household name, the UK’s Electronic Music Studio is a kind of "forgotten chapter" of electronic music history, as the documentary above suggests. EMS is significant not just for technological innovation, but musical experimentation — not to mention their cheeky British sense of humor and topless nude women crawling toward synths in their ads. (That and the best synth slogan of all time, "Every Nun Needs a Synthi.") For whatever reason, there’s likewise very little online documentation regarding the late Tristram Cary — even though the likes of Pink Floyd, the Moody Blues, and King Crimson made use of the VCS3 synth he co-designed.

Above is a brief trailer for the provocatively-titled documentary "What the Future Sounded Like." (As seen on Music Thing and recommended to us by Christian Haines, lecturer at the Elder Conservatorium of Music in Adeleide.) Tristram and others are featured in this film; I haven’t seen the 27-minute documentary yet but definitely will be picking up a copy whenever I can (it doesn’t appear to be availale yet).

The documentary has a page on MySpace, which has more background on EMS for us Yankees who know so little about it. If you’re really lucky and at SONAR in Barcelona in June, you can catch a live screening. And EMS itself lives on.

What The Future Sounded Like Documentary

What The Future Sounded Like @ MySpace

As this is not the Beatles, you don’t get to watch Thom and Jonny arguing about the arrangements. Sorry.

This certainly gives more insight into the music. Sure, In Rainbows’ pay-what-you-will pricing may have overshadowed the actual music, and the “top album of 2007″ moniker from the music press almost seems too easy. But that doesn’t mean this isn’t great music. In fact, on repeated listenings I think I found what it was about the album that didn’t win over some fans initially: the narrative of the album itself isn’t quite as strong as the songs on it. As those songs sink in, for me at least, the writing stands up to some of Radiohead’s best — and having themselves as competition is hardly a blessing. While the media argues, again, about the future of music, it’s great to know great bands survive.

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?