Osmos Trailer from hemisphere games on Vimeo.

Osmos is a glorious glimpse of the fusion of electronic sound and game design many of us anticipate. It is built around a (challenging!) physics-based gameplay style – in the same vein as float-around-the-world games like flOw (and long before that, Asteroids) with procedural design and a perfect, liquid electronic soundtrack. Osmos became available DRM-free yesterday on Valve’s terrific Steam service for US$10 (on sale for a little less this week), and you can buy worldwide from the developer on Direct2Drive. (The developer has temporarily suspended direct sales from their site. Updated: the game is available again direct from the developer. It’s worth buying direct if you want to get a free coupon for the Mac and Linux licenses when they become available. Steam and D2D are great stores that support indie developers, though, and in the case of Osmos you don’t get any DRM with either one.) There’s also a free demo available. Versions for Mac and Linux are coming soon.

The roster of artists working on the music is simply a dream, including Loscil, Gas/High Skies, Julien Neto, and Biosphere.

I’ve already lost myself in the opening levels, and can’t wait to get deeper. CDM will have an interview with the creators by next week, once they recover from the launch.

And yes, indie gaming looks like a very fertile ground for digital artists and musicians, indeed.

Now, I’m not going to say anything else, because I want some time to play the game.

http://www.hemispheregames.com/osmos/

The imagination of Carsten Nicolai, aka Alva Noto, is a special place. No matter how minimal, there’s always a subtlety to his beats. No matter how dry, there’s pleasure somewhere in the sounds. A love for technology, mundane and otherwise, is something of a cliche in electronic music, but Nicolai manages to throw himself into his work with such infectious enthusiasm that it remains fresh.

And his love for electronics can spread even to vending machines. I have to admit when I first heard this track, I almost had to laugh at the stream of numbers. But, the more your listen, the more you appreciate an aura of style buzzing about everything he does. I spoke to Nicolai in Montreal, in an interview I hope to finally sit down and transcribe this month. He is aggressive about everything he thinks, as he is evangelical about his ongoing mission to fuse music and art into a single aesthetic experience. Audiovisuals may not be new, but if you want someone with the fervor to make people take notice, the Raster Noton label founder should be high on your list.

Via our friend Tim aka the music of sound, an essential blog for sound designers and lovers of hearing.

In the meantime, enjoy Karsten Nicolai, the director as well as (as Alva Noto), the music, top. And from MUTEK, as shot by Landon Speers, with visuals by the lads at Derivative, to give you a taste of his recent live shows:

Play this track:

One of the great creative forces of our time died Sunday, choreographer Merce Cunningham. It would be almost disingenuous to call him one of the leading artistic revolutionaries of the 20th Century, if for no other reason than he remained choreographing past his recent 90th birthday and continued to the end a profound influence on our view of movement and time.

Defining and re-imagining performance with computers and technology is an ongoing theme of this site. In a special guest column, artist Primus Luta goes deeper into that question with some of our favorite artists to look at practical and philosophical dimensions of playing electronics.

Today, the fruits of electronic musical labor can be heard in every corner of culture, from academic to niche to popular. Still, there remains a perceptual disconnect between traditional and electronic music, especially in the context of performance. With traditional instruments, performance proficiency can be measured as a physical accomplishment. Electronic performance, on the other hand, is generally understood as music made by computers. That poses a question: if the music is being made by the machines, what exactly does the musician do? To find out, I talked with some of the best electronic performers on the road, and got a glimpse of what exactly is going on behind the screen.

Live Rig: Mark de Clive-Lowe

From the Studio to the Stage

Historically, performance long preceded recorded music. Early recordings weren’t what we think of today as studio productions, but rather recordings of performances. Electronic music is a bit of an anomaly. While some early electronic compositions were created for live performance, most electronic music today begins with a recording.

As a companion to Primus Luta’s story on artists and live electronic music performance, we’ve compiled a gallery of videos of the artists featured in action live.

Daedelus