You could almost call it Buchlafest.

Led by Manhattan electronic music hub Harvestworks, fans of modular synthesis, composition and performance with patch cords, and Don Buchla’s modular synths are set to gather in New York this summer. In the video below, they introduce not only their event plans but also provide a neat and tidy introduction to what analog synthesis – and the Buchla name, not nearly as well-known among laypeople as Moog – are all about.

The lineup is looking terrific. This event lacks any kind of corporate sponsor or big event production; it’s a labor of love for people who are passionate about modular synthesis and music. In the lineup: Morton Subotnick, Alessandro Cortini, Carlos Giffoni, Mark Verbos, Xeno & Oaklander, and Loud Objects. Subotnick will debut the premiere of a live performance, and there will be a presentation of tape music by the late Richard Lainhart, all in quad sound. There’s also an exhibition of boutique analog synth producers, the likes of which has been more of a rarity on the US’ East Coast. And if you wish to support this from afar, there’s a lovely poster and compilation record in the offering.

The event will be effectively community-produced, with an IndieGogo campaign supporting costs. (IndieGogo is a cousin to Kickstarter, but is a bit better-tailored to the needs of not-for-profits and this kind of event.)

More information:
http://www.indiegogo.com/sourceofuncertainty”>http://www.indiegogo.com/sourceofuncertainty”>http://www.indiegogo.com/sourceofuncertainty

It’s a question so elemental in music, you might forget to ask it: what can you get out of a (music) jam?

Electronic music worldwide is dominated by the DJ, the dance party. That, in turn, often tends to the safe playback and mixing of produced records. So, what happens when you let all of that go, invite your audience to get up and make strange noises with you and not only dance at a safe distance? What happens when you just set yourself free and play?

Jam sessions are nothing new in and of themselves – but the beauty of them is, put unexpected combinations of musicians together in a room, and they can always be something new. Here, I’ve invited one set of guest reports authored by the Berlin-based collective Mindpirates. Their recent set of jam sessions was notable in its varied international artists, covering the gamut from gong artist Jens Zygar to electronic artists like Machinedrum and Kid 606. Since you probably didn’t get to attend, you can experience the results through plenty of photos and videos they’ve shared with us. Californian Lionel Williams, grandchild of film composer John Williams, provides the backdrop for all of this with otherworldy, psychedelic imagery. For that reason, perhaps, the Mindpirates get happily far-out in their reflections on what all of this means, and dub the series “an adventure into the supernatural power of the jam.”

Here’s what the Mindpirates’ Easton West, Owen Roberts and Pauline Doutreluingne, tell CDM about the event and what it’s meant to them:

In January, we opened our new project space, Mindpirates Projektraum, with “Let The Sun Shine In — The Berlin Sessions.” The event included an exhibition of the supernatural collage art from the young California-based artist and musician Lionel Williams. Knowing that Williams was also a talented musician, we decided to bless our new space with a week-long series of jams between Williams, special guests, and ourselves.

The guests included visual artist Manfred Kage, Jens Zygar, Raz Ohara and The Odd Orchestra, Annika Henderson & Nick Henderson (from Anika), Hermione Frank aka rRoxymore, Jochen Arbeit (from Einstürzende Neubauten), Brian Mitchell aka 785, Valerie Renay (from Noblesse Oblige), Travis Stewart aka Machinedrum, Miguel De Pedro aka Kid 606, Verity Susman (from Electrelane), Infinite Livez, Michel Morin aka Sneak-Thief, Antaeus Roy aka Lando Kal and more.

Williams comes from a very musical background. His great-grandfather Johnny Williams was a respected jazz drummer and percussionist who played from the 30s to the 50s for the CBS Radio Orchestra, Raymond Scott, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey. His grandfather John Williams has written some of the most loved and recognized film music of all time. Ed.: Yep, that John Williams. Lionel’s father Mark Williams drummed with Crosby, Stills and Nash, Tina Turner, and Air Supply.

Given the Williams family’s cross-generational success, one would expect Lionel to follow suit in his own musical endeavours. But there’s something of a sunchild in Williams that directs his varied creations. A fascination with the supernatural comes across in his artwork — abstract, yet suggestive windows into a mind filled with cosmic, mystic, and utopian images. Listening to his ambient electronic rock band Vinyl Williams, it’s apparent that Williams inhabits a slightly different artistic realm to his predecessors.

Jamming has always been an indispensable part of music-making across generations and cultures. The immediate connection people make when they combine sounds — instant, unplanned, and unrepeatable — is an incomparable experience. It allows humans to communicate in a language outside of words. The jam creates an opportunity to explore individual sounds and their relationships to one another. While exploring the relationships of tones, we explore our relationships to one another and to our environment. Improvisation demands an amount of personal development and discipline to open up the channels of communication that allow a group to function as one.

From the frequency-drenched opening performance of gong master Jens Zygar and ground breaking visuals of microphotographer Manfred Kage, to the analog dance party rhythms of our friends Michel Morin aka Sneak Thief and Antaeus Roy aka Lando Kal, the week was wildly diverse with approaches to sound, pitch, rhythm, color and texture and from a wide variety of sources.

For us, the main interest in the improvisations was a constantly-evolving relationship between acoustic instruments and digital music technology. This tension was really visible watching the performances. Williams spent a large part of the week hunched over a dizzying collection of guitar pedals while, next to him, he gathered an even more dizzying collection of musical and percussive instruments, effects and processors. Mindpirates became a melting pot of sound, color, movement, and voices, as seen in our film documentation.

Behind everything lay the real pool of inspiration, the seemingly-infinite timbral, rhythmic, and textural possibilities from a relatively small group of attuned musicians. The representation of the supernatural in The Berlin Sessions was achieved by both the organic and digital and the aural and visual. Never was it discernible where a sound began, where it was processed or the nature of that processing. All is One — a beautiful and mystical message realized through the jams.

Archival website on the project:
http://www.mindpirates.org/theberlinsessions/

Session 1: Lionel Williams, Jens Zygar, Manfred Kage & special guests

Session 2: Lionel Williams & Raz O’Hara and The Odd Orchestra

Session 3: Lionel Williams, Hermione Frank aka rRoxymore & Annika Henderson and Nick Henderson (from Anika)

Session 4: Lionel Williams, Jochen Arbeit (from Einstürzende Neubauten), Valerie Renay (from Noblesse Oblige) & Brian Mitchell aka 785

Session 5: Lionel Williams, Travis Stewart aka Machinedrum & Miguel De Pedro aka Kid 606

Session 6: Lionel Williams, Infinite Livez & Verity Susman (from Electrelane)

Session 7: Lionel Williams, Michel Morin aka Sneak-Thief, Antaeus Roy aka Lando Kal, Mindpirates & good friends

We welcome other event reports like this from around the world, particularly as I’m human and can’t be in all places at once. If you can document it, and tell us a bit about what happened, we’d love to hear from you. And we’d love to hear what has made successful – or unsuccessful – jam sessions in your musical experience.

In 1985, Thomas Dolby, Herbie Hancock, Howard Jones, and Stevie Wonder met onstage in Los Angeles to perform a Synthesizer Medley. (See video, bottom.) Can vocalist/electronic music legend Jamie Lidell (and keyboadist Mr. Jimmy), experimental sound guru and producer Tim Exile, champion turntablist DJ Shiftee, and “finger drummer” virtuoso Jeremy Ellis pull off something that epic, backed by visuals from Berlin’s Pfadfinderei?

That’s what music tech vendor Native Instruments is hoping, as it debuts the “superband” Mostly Robot at SÓNAR in Barcelona in June. Now, when you hear something like this backing NI’s products, you might assume the whole thing is a publicity stunt – slash – product demo, but this is an actual performance and official SÓNAR event, not something relegated to a booth or showcase or something. So, while, yes, Maschine, Reaktor, Traktor, and FM8 all figure prominently, the quality of the music will have to fall or fly on the musical performance. And the roster of artists, for their part, are closely involved with these tools, sometimes even directly in development.

The big hook, apart from the artist lineup: the performance will be fully improvisatory. There’s no clock between instruments, no grid in advance. And the artists will be using unreleased material from their own work. The visuals are part of the presentation, too, as Pfadfinderei visualize note and controller data and audio content in projected accompaniment to the show.

We still don’t know exactly what this will sound like – well, apart from knowing something about each of these artists – but I was curious to get more background. I asked the team from Native Instruments that put together the performance to explain themselves. Beyond that, of course, the proof will be in the final performance; we’ll be watching.

CDM: What is the instrumentation for each of these artists?

NI: Jamie Lidell’s main instrument is his voice, which he will use to sing the lyrics but also use to create interesting sounds. On top of this, he will use Maschine to fire off samples and synth sounds.

DJ Shiftee is a turntablist using Traktor Scratch Pro with the new F1 controller, 2 turntables and a DJ mixer.

Jeremy Ellis is using Maschine to play all drum and percussion sounds live.

Mr. Jimmy is a keyboard wizard and the harmonic lynchpin who loves FM8 but will also use a lot of the other instruments and sounds from Komplete.

Tim Exile will have his hands on the controllers which entirely control his self-made Reaktor ensemble.

The visual artists Pfadfinderei will receive note and controller events created by each individual musician on stage to generate motion graphics in real time which then will be projected on the big screens on stage.

Here’s a look at Pfadfinderei’s visual work:

Okay, so Native Instruments is now putting together a superband — how, exactly, did that come about?

We had long been wanting to do something live on stage with the artists that we work closely together with. The video Jamie Lidell did with us for iMaschine last year triggered the idea to come up with more performances in alternative environments. In parallel, Tim Exile, DJ Shiftee and Jeremy Ellis performed an improvised jam session at our 10-year anniversary of the US office in January. So it was a logical progression to bring all those talents
together plus adding the keyboard master and harmonic lynchpin Mr. Jimmy and the visual artists Pfadfinderei.

For us, Sónar is the ideal environment to host this debut show. We actually had the “Native Lab“ at Sonar festival way back in 2001 so the idea of collaborating had long been in the air. At this point it all just made sense, and getting this opportunity to work with such great, creative individuals and being able to put them on a stage at one of the world’s finest electronic music festivals was a no-brainer.

Have these artists done anything like this before?

As mentioned, three of some played together once, but apart from that, no. Of course Mr Jimmy and Jamie Lidell know each other from going on tour together.

Can we see some of the work of Pfadfinderei elsewhere?

The visual show Pfadfinderei create for the Mostly Robot show will be unique. They will be based on a completely new approach using the note and controller events of the musicians to generate motion graphics in real time using Quartz Composer. But Pfadfinderei have of course already done other great shows: on their website you can see other some examples of their work for Moderat, Modeselektor or Paul Kalkbrenner.

Some of these artists have been involved in the development of this technology, too, yes, as well as playing it?

Yes, Tim Exile actually already developed some Reaktor ensembles and even released products with Native Instruments: The Mouth and The Finger are instruments that originated from his mind. On stage he will be using his
unique Reaktor setup. Also, Shiftee is always in close contact with Traktor developers. We always work as close as we can with all of the involved artists.

More information:
www.native-instruments.com/mostlyrobot

I just hope it winds up being like this:

If you’re heading out into the wilderness to find a record store, why not actually head out into the wilderness – the one with trees – and find music there?

Today, a you’ve no doubt heard, is Record Store Day. The official site is a useful resource, today and around the year. Today brings a number of special physical releases, favoring vinyl but also including CDs. A mobile app download will help you locate record stores in your city, both in the US and other countries around the world.

All of this does raise some deeper issues. Record stores can be terrific places, supporting artists with in-store events and introducing listeners to their music. But, more generally, is it meaningful to find ways of making music physical, and then finding a place to go hear it?

That question was asked compellingly this year by Really. Really itself is more than a conventional record label; it’s an inter-media arts collective (design, coding, visual arts, and the like included). Its charter sets out the goal between releases “to focus on the live aspect of music, on the fact that it is made first to be interpreted, by the musician and the audience.”

In a project called “Out of the Woods,” Really took a music release and made it truly locative in the physical sense. Playing with the digital intervention of placing physical USB drops in locations, the artists sent would-be listeners into the woods of the Grunewald. (I’m reminded of my dear friend Dave Karpf, with whom I worked at the Sierra Club, whose favorite motto was “get the f*** outdoors.”)

You need GPS to find the spot, and then, espionage-style, you pick up music from a log. Instructions read, charmingly, like this:

You will find Verspätete Erinnerung close to a path crossing almost the whole forest.
The dead tree, laying on the ground, is burnt from the inside, but blossoms on the outside. Have a look at its heart, we tried to bring our own kind of life there as well!

GPS: 52.486442,13.243954

look carefully for a black cable
inside the tree

We’ve seen other locative works, of course – most recently, a virtual piece employed GPS in locations like Central Park. But here, much like that expedition to your record store, you travel to a location on a quest to get music that you can’t find via other means. You acquire, hunter-gatherer style.

It’s worth considering that the recording itself is an anomaly in the history of music. “Old-timers” talk about recordings as though these strange objects are music, and as such, the perceived assault on their physical distribution and attack on the value of music itself. Yet, travel back in time just a couple of centuries in the millennia-long saga of human music making, and the recorded music object would seem like some dark art, a captured moment in time freezing something that is normally live, in-person, and human.

This is not to say that these strange inventions we’ve created that store frozen time are a bad thing. But, then, maybe that explains the record store: it treats them as something sacred, and restores the sense of place. It requires that you experience music with other human beings.

And while I admire Record Store Day, there is a certain throwback quality to the entire event – Android and iPhone apps notwithstanding. Even the graphic design of the site, complete with retro records, and the contests, with historically-styled record players and commemorative Queen drums, seems tinged with nostalgia.

Nostalgia is one of the things that music can make us feel, but music can also send us out into the wilderness. And if the record industry grew out of absurd ideas – Edison and his imagined technology for recording business memos – maybe music can take on more absurd and wonderful ideas yet.

It’s enough to make you want to wander out in the woods, and off the beaten path. Record store today, wilderness tomorrow.

Really used a collaborative team to make their project (below). How will you figure out how to distribute your next album? Will you try to get it in the hands of lots of people – or make just one, and give it to someone you love?

— Lorenzo Cercelletta – organization, installation, design process & video editing
— Valentina Ciarapica – video shooting & editing
— Katrin Dathe – installation support
— Wiley Hoard – photographs
— Matthieu Pons – organization, installation, design process & coding
— Gino Ruggeri – backstage video shooting & editing
— Juliane Teitge – organization, drawings & installation

http://rreeaallllyy.com/map.php

Music in the woods, as seen on The Creators Project and Sugarhigh

Record Store Day, as seen many places, including our friends at Synthtopia

There are festivals, and then there’s Unsound. While so much in electronic music programming walks the line between club accessibility and more adventurous experimentation, some time falling over one side or the other of that divide, Unsound consistently hits the center of the bullseye with some of the most creative, imaginative music around. It’s just smart music. You can catch Unsound in its home city of Krakow, Poland, or you can find it as it pulls an international roster of artist to the metropolis New York City. And, at the moment, you can enjoy it from the comfort of wherever you call home, thanks to a nice stream from Hype Machine and Unsound that hops to the top of our must-listen queue for Monday.

Who’s in store? Alongside Polish animation and other goodness, expect a night of ladies whose names begin with the letter J working with experimental sounds (LA’s Julia Holter, Norway’s Jenny Hval, New York’s Julia Kent), a reimagining of Herbie Hancock by Poland’s LXMP, Germany’s wonderful Pole and the ongoing tour of Monolake’s visual-sonic masterwork, England’s Demdike Stare, New York’s own ambient imagineer Zemi17, and bass mainstays like Sepalcure and 2562. There are talks on history, explorations of music technique and particularly performance, and even a tribute to (too-often unsung) Manhattan minimal pioneer La Monte Young. (That great herald of experimental sound, The Wire Magazine is involved in discussions.) I’m probably most disappointed myself not to witness the premiere of “TRINITY,” a promising-looking, epic exploration of nuclear testing in New Mexico by Biosphere and Lustmond, bringing together two of the world’s most sonically-imaginative artists.

If you can make it to Poland or Manhattan, I certainly endorse experiencing the festival in person, but in the meantime, let’s enjoy surveying its musical treats:

http://unsound.pl/en

The abundance of music, and the preceived ease of producing it, comes to some as bad news – or even harbinger of apocalypse. But load up a craft with quantity, and quality is what stands out.

Francis Prève is a perfect Renaissance producer. With years of experience as a music technology journalist and sound designer, his own, signature flavor of tech-house is uniquely focused on timbre. His label, Academik Records, debuted last year at Austin’s South by Southwest, but it’s just now kicking into high gear. (If you are in Austin for the world’s best known week of music, be sure to check in on the second party, running downtown from afternoon past midnight, for free.) Sure, a city like Berlin is associated with such things, but in the Internet age, Texas works just as well – minus the vitamin D deficiency.

Academik Contest giveaway
Lanai Rooftop Party, Saturday March 17 3p – 2a

Francis has rounded up a gang of emerging and known artists for Academik, and while age range and style are loose – sometimes dubstep, sometimes tech-house – what those signees have in common is attention to detail. They’re a veritable faculty in how to use Ableton Live and Massive so that you don’t sound like everyone else who’s using Ableton Live and Massive just because everybody else happens to be using Ableton Live and Massive.

The output is nicely represented in a podcast, mixed by Francis, that very much embodies his style:

Alternatively, check out the SxSW 2012 Chart Francis put together for Beatport.

Anyway, party – if you’re in Texas, go there, dance, have a good time.

But if you’re not from Texas, or you’re avoiding it because all your exes are there (okay, darnit, I’ll stop quoting song lyrics), through The Power of The Internet, we have a bunch of music to hear and tips and techniques and samples and loops and Ableton Live Instrument Racks and Sets to download – all free.

That’s because Francis has been as sharing music and techniques for how to produce it as he has the usual label activities (remix, release). Now, disclosure: I’ve known Francis for a long time, as a colleague at Keyboard. But it’s partly because I know him that I have a sense of that quality of attention to detail – because we’ve spent countless hours discussing the fine points of synth design and production technique, because he’ll call me up to talk about some particular I happened to mention writing, because he even spent hours with me and James Grahame talking about the exact organization of knobs and switches on the MeeBlip. I figure part of my responsibility in this world is to get to know people like that really well. (It happens to be a lot of fun, too.)

As it happens, you can be in on the same conversations.

Analog+Digital, Hardware+Software

One ongoing discussion has been ways of bringing in a few, select pieces of beloved hardware into a software studio. Even before talking about sound, the motivation is clear: it can make music making a lot more rewarding. And we’re not talking wildly-expensive modular setups, either – even inexpensive offerings like the KORG MonoTribe can get in on the action.

A lot of people working with software aren’t clear on just how to make hardware and software integrate nicely. Francis wrote a really comprehensive article on that subject, using his own rig as the subject, for Keyboard recently.

He writes about the process of using Live’s brilliant – and sometimes underused – External Instrument and External Effect devices:

The first order of business was to create custom devices in Live for sending MIDI to a specific synth—for example, the Phatty—then routing its audio output back into that same device via the MOTU [UltraLite Mk. 3 audio] interface. I then saved the results as presets. Thus, when the laptop is docked, all I have to do is drag the device I’d created for the Phatty into a track, and the Phatty comes online…

The next thing I did was create an External Audio Effect device that sent audio to a device but didn’t receive any audio back … by setting it up to send audio but not receive, I can drop it at the end of an instrument chain within an Instrument Rack and send any soft synth into the Moog, SEM, Dark Energy, or Monotribe. From there, the combined analog-plus-soft-synth audio runs from the analog synth back into a free input on the MOTU, to be recorded in Live.

By doing this, I can use Operator, Razor, Kontakt or any soft synth as the “oscillator bank” for one of my analog synths. The whole of digital tone generation combined with the warmth and fuzz of analog filters and the snap of analog envelopes is far more than the sum of its parts.

Francis also describes “hybrid” devices, combining Ableton instruments like Operator with outboard ingredients like the Moog Little Phatty filter and amp — all while controlling modulation and step sequences and such on the hardware with MIDI and Live clip envelopes. (He even talks about how to tame the MonoTribe, despite its – cough – lack of MIDI.)

The full article is online:
The Integrated Synth-Based Studio [Keyboard Magazine]

Free Sounds

Apart from being a producer, Francis has long been a sound designer, working for the likes of Roland and Ableton His free-sampling, hardware-loving, sound design-addicted spirit has been gradually developing a vast selection of free sample packs on his blog. Some come from software (NI’s Razor), some from new hardware (Moog’s aforementioned Slim Phatty), and some from oddities (my favorite being the Mattel Synsonics drum machine toy).

But whereas the Academik Records music will be dependent on your personal taste and aesthetic, here these are sound packs that are versatile enough to bend to your will and needs, and to produce something very different from what anyone else might produce. And that, ultimately, is the point.

So here, all in one place, are those great downloads from Fran’s blog:

21st Century Sawtooth Pad [Instrument Rack/Live Set, Live 7+]

The String Machine [Instrument Rack and Live Set, Live 7+]

Arkade [8-bit emulating Instrument Racks, Live 7+]

Ableton Preset: Wavescraper [Simpler-based Instrument Rack using Saturator waveshaping, Live 7+]

Sine of the Times [All sine-wave Instrument Rack, Live 7+]

Mattel Synsonics drum machine toy [Drum samples, Live set]

M-Audio Venom Loops [128 bpm, in C | Raw audio, Live 7+]

Native Instruments Razor Loops [128 bpm, in Cm | Raw audio, Live 7+]

Moog Slim Phatty Loops [128 bpm, in C | Raw audio, Live 7+]

Okay, I may be in Germany (see you next week, Messe!), but if you’re in Austin, Texas, the CDM radar is picking up some strong blips of things you probably want to be doing, starting today, Do. 15 Mär. (Erm, uh, sorry, Thursday March 15!) Highlights include a Neon Indian show paired with visuals, music, and the good folks of Switched On, fine music from Robot Koch, TYCHO, and Sepalcure, a Saturday night dance party with Academik on a beautiful rooftop in the heart of town, and workshops – much of this free and not requiring a badge. A few, select picks:

Daytime plan: Dubspot workshops. If you are in Austin, by all means stop reading this and go to a set of afternoon matinee workshops that starts with Maschine and proceeds to Moog Minitaur and Voyager and wraps up with Livid’s CTRL:R for Live. Friday and Saturday are packed with more free workshops ranging from production and sound design to DJing, theory, and licensing. Faculty DJ Shiftee, DJ Kiva, Martín Perna Chris Petti, Daniel Wyatt, and Pat Cupo – some seriously talented guys – are on-hand. These are folks I feel I learn from every time I’m around them, so highly recommended, and the price is right.
http://blog.dubspot.com/dubspot-sxsw-2012-edu-sessions/

Also during the daytime, if you do have a badge, you should check out Exhibit Hall 5 for a bunch of gear showcases – a bit like being at NAMM, but in the middle of a massive music festival instead of in the middle of Anaheim. (No Disneyland, though.)

Thursday night plan: Switched On / Moog / Neon Indian showcase. Moog Music and Austin’s best music gear store, Switched On, are teaming up tonight for one hell of a showcase. Neon Indian is headlining, but that band’s Alan Palomo is bringing along synth-laden music from his Static Tongues imprint. By the way, 2012 is somehow bringing back the acronym EBM, among other “pinch-me-I’m-dreaming-and-went-to-synth-heaven” aspects of this year. The action runs 7pm-2am.
Facebook event

Thursday night backup plan: high-quality bass. The name’s a bit misleading – SxSWhomp is perhaps to appeal to those American kids – but if you can’t get into Switched On, this nicely-curated range of bass music from dubstep to experimental looks like the perfect ticket. Just after midnight is one of my favorite solo artists and producers at the moment, Berlin’s own Robot Koch (also the guy behind the excellent Jacoozi), alongside the likes of Kraddy and Noah D. It’s no cover, first come first serve.
Facebook event

Friday night plan: Tycho, then Sepalcure. Tycho, aka Scott Hansen, is both one of our long-time favorite artists and favorite taste-makers, as helmsman of the ISO50 blog. His new live show is terrific, and hits at 21:15 at Clive Bar. Then, it’s the team of Machinedrum and Praveen, aka Sepalcure, for some warm beats after midnight.

Saturday night plan: dance with Academik. Academik Records is back on the rooftop of Lanai in the heart of Austin – an ideal way to cap off your week with some actual dancing, courtesy some high-quality electronic dance music. DJ sets from Francis Prève, Jan van Lier, The Chaotic Good, and SecretPandaSociety ensure music ranging from finely-crafted tech house to breaks. (CDM is a sponsor in absentia, and you can win a MeeBlip on the spot, among other analog and digital hardware and software prizes.) There’s a great lineup of tech sponsors (Dave Smith!), no cover, and having DJed the same party last year, just the kind of atmosphere you’ll need Saturday.
Academik Blog Post
Facebook event
Giveaway (including some prizes you can win if you aren’t in Texas)

Don’t miss the Academik podcast, mixed by our friend Francis Prève, on SoundCloud, natch:

I’m sure I’ve missed some stuff, so send it in and I’ll consider adding it to our top picks. (And obviously, there’s the rest of SxSW – but this is just the kind of electronic-leaning material I expect you might otherwise miss.)

You can complain about music events and festivals as they are, dream about what you’d imagine an event could be – or you can go and make it happen. And since the latter category fits friends-of-the-site Chris Gilroy and Lara Grant, it’s well worth an endorsement for this weekend’s In/Out Festival. (For their part, both Chris and Lara have been regulars at our Handmade Music NYC series; Chris as an electronic audiovisualist, and Lara as a textile-and-sound-melding felted signal processing guru.)

If you’re in New York, hope you can make it or even help cover it for CDM. If you’re not – like, for instance, if you’ve recently moved to Berlin – we’ve got some videos here to give you a taste of this particular assemblage of musical makers.

The lineup looks rich and varied on the performance side, coupling emerging artists with known names, all in genre-bending, adventurous sound:

Daedelus, Christopher Willits, Ander, Bit Shifter, tehn (Brian Crabtree), Portable Sunsets, Nick Demopolous’ Smomid, Comandante Zero, Noizmakr, Programs, Sarah Danke: Switched, Ivan Franco

There’s also a great selection of workshops:

• Heatit°C prototyping workshop, which uses a heat-reactive postcard for an analog circuit alongside “thermochromic and conductive inks and batteries, switches and conductive thread,” all made with a Craft Robo for producing 2D and 3D templates. (Wait… wha? Someone definitely go and cover that.)
• How to make a contact mic
• Kinect and movement using free software (Pd) – with Sofy Yuditskaya, who writes about Kinect and other 3D hacking today on Create Digital Motion
• Max for Live with Christopher Willits
• Comandante Zero on integrating live acoustic and digital instruments into performance
• Alternative musical instrument discussion

And here I’ve assembled some of my favorite videos of the artists and past In/Out events:

Stephen McLeod turns an egg-cooking session into a live, improvisatory tune – fried breakfast you can dance to:

There is a certain sense of magic or alchemy in the way a good cook or a good musician can transform raw ingredients into something beautiful. I feel like there is a kinship between these two disciplines, and this series of videos and performances is a meditation on that intersection.

While I prepare for you a meal, I use microphones and a computer to process the sounds. These sounds combine to form an automatic composition, determined by the recipe and improvised on the spot.

A meditative musical creation by tehn, aka Brian Crabtree, creator of the monome, was a highlight for me in 2009. (I played visuals live, using my photography and software I built in Processing. Side note: the bio pic is Brian appearing at one of our first Handmade Music NYC installments, put on with friends at Etsy.com who are now based here in Berlin. Strange, the arc of time and space.)

Here’s protofuse, aka Julien Bayle (French artist also known for his Max development work and protofuse controller), playing Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room with Chris Gilroy on visuals.

Festival co-organizer Chris Gilroy jams at one of our Handmade Music NYC parties from earlier this year.

“Switch” by Sarah Dahnke (here with meredith Blouin) is a far-out dance confrontation, in which bodies augment one another with sound.

And to close out this set with a groove, here’s Switzerland-based artist Ander playing a truly futuristic-looking controller Station, which appears to be ready to operate the Death Star.

Incredibly, all this music runs US$20 a day, or $30 for a limited-edition two-day pass, with workshops priced at $10-15 or free.

In/Out runs at The Knitting Factory and Death by Audio in Brooklyn.

http://www.inoutfest.org/tickets

We’ve followed open source hardware – and generally hardware that is more open to user customization and modification – on this site since the beginning. As I prepare for a talk on the MeeBlip at Berlin’s Create Art & Technology Conference, though, I think it’s time to do a proper survey of the hardware that’s out there.

The ability to modify music gear is something that’s important to a lot of people as musicians. It means the ability to learn how the technology we use works, and therefore to have a deeper musical and compositional understanding of it. And it can mean the ability to make music hardware more expressive of your sonic imagination and creative ideas. Finally, it adds an additional avenue through which you can share your understanding and use and modification of musical instruments with other people.

Explanation below, or just skip to the survey, or live event in Berlin.

A Spectrum of “Open” in Music Gear

Even proprietary hardware can become more “open” in the general sense. In the early days of synths, it was commonplace to include detailed specifications and even circuit diagrams. That arguably furthered the evolution of music gear, as knowledge was shared, and it certainly allowed more advanced users to better understand how that gear worked. We’ve seen a subtle return to those days, with examples like Korg’s Monotron and MonoTribe hardware, for which the company released schematics.

The viral, revolutionary spread of the monome design owes in part a community built around modification, access to critical schematics, and some open sourced software which the community took and modified. The monome, however, focuses on a fully open-source protocol and availability to schematics. Those schematics are not free for use in your own creations, which has sometimes caused friction as makers sell modified or homebrewed variants of the monome. On the other hand, many in the monome community value the handcrafted original hardware and don’t particularly want “clones” and the like, and have found the available information more than enough to fuel their musical needs.

Open Source Hardware goes further, by placing everything under a license that makes it free for use. This would include the software (either running on the device, on an attached computer, or both), the schematics of the design, and even visual elements of the design, as well as the documentation. Projects that give their users the most freedom to work with any modifications they make also allow for unfettered commercial use; that is, you don’t have to worry if you sell a few, or even many, if you run afoul of the project’s original creators. Without going into the debate for or against such an approach, if this kind of sharing is your goal, then it follows it will important for you to make that freedom explicit. This sort of explicit use is also what is described in the Open Source Hardware definition, which our MeeBlip project has adopted because we feel the project and definition fit one another.

Note that there’s a very real debate about whether the ideals of free software are applicable to open source hardware. There’s no debating it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison: copying hardware means physically manufacturing something. (I’m surprised to see, in German, the use of the term Freie Hardware, which has generally been avoided in English. See also the Open Source Hardware and Design Alliance, which goes beyond some of these specific – and possibly not-really-applicable – licenses.)

I’ll say this: I think adding in the issues of economics, materials, sustainability, local manufacture, labor, distribution, and international trade make this question more compelling for discussion. It’s messier than software, yes – but given that all software relies on hardware on which to run, dealing with these messy and often demanding questions means engaging more of the many dimensions in which technology interacts with economics.

Resources:
Open Source Hardware (OSHW) definition / principles
Business models for Open Hardware
Amusingly, the MeeBlip continues flying under the radar as an open source hardware project, but once we actually get our shipping picture in place over the next couple of weeks, maybe we can work on that.

Let’s See the Gear!

But first, we just need to find out what’s out there. And that’s where you come in. If you’ve got a project, or use a project, or just know about a project, let us know. If it’s your own project – especially if you feel we’ve ignored you in the past (trust me, you don’t want to see my inbox or brain) – now’s your chance to tell us about it.

Because it’s the narrowest and most sharply-defined category, I’m most interested in those projects that fit the Open Source Hardware definition – not for philosophical reasons so much as taxonomic ones. But other projects are welcome, too; I’d like to hear about them.

About that MeeBlip…

And we’ll have the first of a series of updates on the MeeBlip project later this week. (The new SE and micro projects, and updated firmware, as well as vastly-expanded documentation, are all due soon, held up only by international shipping, weather, and illness challenges I’ll describe later.)

In the meantime, fire away.

Or Talk in Person!

If you’re in Berlin, this weekend join some terrific discussions on creativity, technology, and DIY, including my talk on the MeeBlip, lots of talks on hardware design and prototyping (including for beginners), and projects like the fantastic libmonome. And if you see me, say hi! (My talk is Sunday morning.)

http://createartandtechnology.de/

Survey

Direct link to Google Docs survey (login not required)

Let’s get together and play music.

The Morning Music & Coffee Consumption series, an informal gathering of artists, aims to do just that. The assumption about digital music production may be very different – the solo artist, holed up in a bedroom alone with a laptop is the default image. But instruments and laptops go together, and laptops can increasingly be played comfortably as instruments, so there’s really no excuse. And Jared Smyth’s mm-cc series, having already produced a volume of music and image, is both an inspiration and a potential model. Creator Jared says he’s hoping others will join in with similar events and share the sonic results – perhaps that’ll be you and your friends, wherever you are.

The series, shot in sumptuous macro video by Charlie Visinic, looked good enough in film that it made appearance on our sister site Create Digital Motion (where I erroneously described the series as being Charlie’s creation, an error I can happily now correct):

Meditative Short Films with Hypnotic Music, Made in the Realm of the Micro

With the aim of inspiring (welcome) copycat events, I asked Jared to tell us more about how this series is organized and how it works.

CDM: Tell us a bit about the idea behind mm-cc.
Jared: I started mm-cc as a ritual to reconnect with what made me want to play music in the first place: community. It’s getting together with friends with no pressure to create something marketable, and simply hanging out and creating noise together. mm-cc is my concept (though not that original … people have been getting together to make music and drink coffee long before I called it ‘mm-cc’). I host the website, create posts and also host occasional mm-cc sessions myself at my home in Florida. Charlie also hosts sessions in southern California. The idea is for more people to take part as Charlie does – hosting their own sessions, creating their own visuals and then letting me know about it so I can do a post on it. There’s even an upload form and a forum I built on the site for people to send in samples of audio, or clips of video to be used in other people’s sessions. I really want mm-cc to be as collaborative and eclectic as possible.

How did you organize people to do this?
Some of the time it’s by creating a Facebook event; other times it’s word-of-mouth. With Charlie Visnic and the California sessions, it just sort of happened that he wanted to host sessions at his home over the summer. We met through the monome forums and then became friends as each of us was working on a 365×1 blog goal. (On that note, I started mine over on January 1st, and am now on day 261 – see uprlip.com.

At what point does the coffee kick in?

7am(ish) – people show up around 10am and we play till noon…. I’m usually fairly wired before they show up. I try to buy really good, locally-grown coffee and make it in my French Press.

Are there any special moments or surprises that have happened through the various sessions?

No individual event springs to mind. But it’s always really special for me to look through my studio, where cables are strewn about and there are five or six people drinking really strong coffee and spacing out on their respective instruments, and then into my living room and see my daughter drawing, one friend hand-sewing something, and another knitting, all while listening to the music we’re creating. The chatter and movement of the non-musicians filtering into the room (and often the mic’s) where we’re recording serves as a very natural field recording to accompany us. I love listening back to a session and hearing my daughter giggling or friends talking faintly in the background. It’s a really ethereal experience when that sort of all comes together. That’s exactly what I want from mm-cc – togetherness.

Are you releasing the music separately? If so, where?

There are plans for that in the works. The session that John Keston, David Andree and I did in Minneapolis earlier this year (see video, top) has a much longer recorded form than what’s represented in the video, and we’re very much planning to make that the first (of many?) mm-cc releases. Josh Mason at Sunshine Ltd. has agreed to release it; we’re just not sure of a date yet.

How do you work across coasts?

Well, we’ve only done one session that was ‘trans-coast.’ (video above) For that one we defined a set of notes within a set key that both session’s players would play. I shot the video clips here in Florida and then sent them off to Charlie to edit as he wanted, and he sent me the audio from their session. I then mixed that with the audio from our session, and then sent the final mix back to him, and he cut the video to it. I would like to do more this way – it’s sort of a blind/deaf jam session. We had no clue what theirs would sound like and vice-versa. As for the other sessions that Charlie has hosted, they’re all him. I really have very little to do with them. He just lets me know when he’s going to have one and I then do a post for it when he’s done, and has a video uploaded.

Okay, if this has made you interested in becoming involved, here’s where to go to do it.

http://mm-cc.org/
Vimeo channel
Community / host your own session