The worlds of sound open to us as musicians seem limitless, endlessly unfolding in variety and possibility. So, even in a series of impressionistic moments from an upcoming film, it’s a delight to see composer Maja Ratkje play with sound.

The Norwegian musician and vocalist, an improviser frequent collaborator with artists like Jaap Blonk, is seen making wild sounds with her voice, experimenting with found sounds from field recordings and music boxes, and playing, too, with electronics and technology.

There’s perhaps not much more to say about this other than to let the experience of exploring sound in music wash over you. (It’s nice to see what I believe is her kid getting in on the action, too!) More background:

some impressions of the footage we filmed in 2010 (Berlin, Suffolk, Switzerland, Bruges, Trondheim, Oslo, and several other places all over Norway).

Edited by Ted Zbozien, Cleveland
Produced by Genesis Film, Haugesund/Oslo in co-production with dffb and IJB, Berlin

For more information please contact http://genesisfilm.no or http://www.ijbiermann.com

The film was promised in 2011, though I couldn’t find anything on it; let us know if you can. Thanks to stkr/Pete for the tip.

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:

Revealing a deeper understanding of what sound means in our world, how it works as “currency” and “ghost,” Performance Artist Christine Sun Kim explores sonic media without the benefit of hearing. She finds how to make its presence more physical, to find greater dimensions of movement, and to make a personal connection beyond what most of us might find in the everyday sense. As she describes it to NOWNESS:

There are social norms surrounding sound that form our speech development and our way of handling sound with care. They’re so deeply ingrained that, in a sense, our identities cannot be complete without sound.

In a beautiful short film, you can watch her process in her studio, thanks to filmmaker Todd Selby:

Cult photographer and filmmaker Todd Selby’s latest short is a revealing portrait of performance artist Christine Sun Kim. Deaf from birth, Kim turned to using sound as a medium during an artist residency in Berlin in 2008, and has since developed a practice of lo-fi experimentation that aims to re-appropriate sound by translating it into movement and vision. “It’s a lot more interesting to explore a medium that I don’t have direct access to and yet has the most direct connection to society at large,” says the artist. “Social norms surrounding sound are so deeply ingrained that, in a sense, our identities cannot be complete without it.” Selby filmed an exclusive performance from Kim in a Brooklyn studio as the artist played with field recordings of the street sounds of her Chinatown neighborhood, feedback and helium balloons, and made “seismic calligraphy” drawings from ink- and powder-drenched quills, nails and cogs dancing across paper to the vibrations of subwoofers beneath. Working with sound designer Arrow Kleeman, Selby carefully choreographed the film’s ambient score to reveal the Orange County native’s unique relationship with sound. “Her work deals with reclaiming sound because it’s a foreign world to her and one she’s not comfortable in,” explains Selby. “I wanted the film to act as an artistic conduit for her to tell her story to the world.”

Interview, via NOWNESS Facebook Page

Via our friend Rucyl on Saturn Never Sleeps, by way of Rashid Zakat’s The Awesome Farm.

Todd Selby x Christine Sun Kim [Nowness.com]

I was once a speaker at DEAF, which stands for Dublin Electronic Arts Festival. Not thinking, I told the customs officer in Ireland that I was a musician attending the DEAF Festival. He had some cheeky comment. In this context, of course, what he took for granted can take on an entirely different meaning. If you have background in understanding accessibility and design, for people with different sense capabilities in vision and sound alike, I’d love to hear them. The world of sound technology most of us inhabit describes a very narrow range of expectations for vision and sight.

In August, the Resident Advisor film on Detroit gave us a chance to reflect on that city’s cultural response to economic catastrophe. To talk about a city that has seen sweeping change and challenge, it’s difficult to beat Berlin. Resident Advisor released the third installment of this series in September, but I missed it as I was traveling … somewhere … and it’s no less relevant today, least of all on a gorgeous, sunny day in the German capital on the eve of the coming winter.

The creators describe it thusly:

For the third edition of Real Scenes, RA and Bench go to one of the most special places for electronic music in the world: Berlin. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, techno became the underground soundtrack to the reunion between East and West. In recent years, it’s become an international destination for ravers—a cheap place to party with clubs that are renowned throughout the world.

Techno has become a business in the meantime. Yet Berlin still maintains a credibility that other cities lack. To understand why, RA and Bench went to the German capital eager to find out about its unique history and the reasons behind its continued relevance.

Like my long-time home of New York, Berlin has to answer regularly whether its place as a hub is all hype, whether its best days are behind it. I’d say some of Berlin’s unimaginably worst days are behind it, so this seems an odd question. In a place that served, more than once, as a backdrop against which humanity itself seemed as though it might tear itself apart, no degree of optimism and hope seems naive. Perhaps the same can be said of the planet. The wonderful thing about the Web age is the proliferation of all kinds of hubs and interconnects, some better-known and denser than others, but all vital and potentially growing. New York has had an ongoing run since the 17th Century; Berlin, longer. I suspect all of these places have more than a bit of life left, because of the generations of people who come through them that make it happen. Don’t believe the hype, true, but it’s our job to cut through that.

And yes, for those who haven’t worked this out yet, Berlin is at the moment my personal home base. So hello to those of you here.

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.

In a Hollywood overrun with remakes, a new Tron has quite a daunting challenge. The original film may be a cult hit for its 80s arcade cool, but it also was a seminal moment in the evolution of computer animation, at the nexus of obsessive-compulsive optical effects that came before and digital effects that came after. (Google Perlin Noise, if you must.) But where the bits of the effects look uneven or dated alongside the brilliant, it’s nearly impossible to top the genius of Wendy Carlos’ score. Her deft blend of choirs, orchestras, organs, and rich electronics wasn’t just forward looking: it’s fresh today, an alternative to some of the signature sameness in today’s games and films.

Perhaps Tron Legacy will do what other belated sequels have not: express love for the original. With Daft Punk helming the score and a reverent, inspired crew ready to make Tron live again, the trailer last week was the real sleeper hit of Comic-Con.

If that’s not enough layers of fandom, though, head to GearSlutz for a lesson in film scoring and a recreation of the trailer in Reason, custom Reaktor patches, and Ableton Live. This is not much of an infomercial for Live: because Ableton’s arrange view doesn’t quite understand frames, scoring with Live is a bit of a beast. (Live 9, anyone?) But it’s a great example of love for the movie and its original score. And hey, everyone need a source of joy, even a film.

Ableton Live for Sound Design :Tron Legacy [GearSlutz forum]

Stripped the original audio and redid all of the sound from scratch using Reason/NI Reaktor/Ableton Live 8. An M-Audio Axiom 49 was used to perform the Lightcycle Engine Oscillations

Wendy Carlos, if you’re out there, we get it. You revolutionized film scoring and electronic orchestration, and we’re all in your debt. It’s not so much that you switched on Bach or switched on Moog or even switched on Kubrick and guys in glowing skin-tight outfits. You switched on sound, and nothing has been quite the same since.

Now, we just have to hope 2010 can show us a good time, too.

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.

Suffice to say, we at CDM discourage pirating music. I should hasten to add, though, that we’re also generally opposed to terrorism, illegal firearms, and narcotics — just in case there’s any doubt. According to a training film produced by the National District Attorneys Association and Recording Industry Association of America, and leaked on the Interwebs (doh!), these things typically go hand in hand.

In the course of the film, the producers do stumble upon an interesting solution to the issue of sagging sales of physical CDs:

“There are some sayings in certain parts of the jurisdiction when you buy a CD, ‘would you like it with or without’,” Walters adds. “The ‘with’ is a CD enclosing a piece of crack or whatever the case may be. We, continually, in working with law enforcement, find that these locations have everything from handguns to large quantities of narcotics.”

Reviewing the RIAA’s “Reefer Madness” for the digital age [Ars Technica]

Wow, free crack with my pirated CD? This lends an entirely new layer to our ongoing coverage of the future of the compact disc.

All of this seems doubly peculiar when mixed with the RIAA’s anti-piracy campaign, which has been largely directed at online music piracy. It’s hard to squeeze in narcotics with a torrent.

But, since I know a lot of our readers are from outside the United States and have a terrifyingly skewed opinion already of, say, life in New York, let me say, for the record, I have never gotten a free handgun with a CD. Really. I am right now not hearing a stream of bullets being fired. I also weigh less than five hundred pounds, and I don’t own an SUV. I can take you to some cool record stores in town, and I promise the discs are both legal and drug-free. And we’re spending CDM’s donation drive proceeds on bandwidth and servers, not my crack habit. Come visit America. Once you clear that whole fingerprinting / retinal scan / whatever, it’s a good time. Okay?

In the meantime, a quick roundup:
Lightsabers recreated with Wii remotes and granular synthesis … and reflections on the more organic, non-digital process that created the original.

Why sound designer Ben Burtt is our hero.

Why Vader makes a great DJ.

Updated: 10 Greatest Sounds from Star Wars, via the wonderful Unidentified Sound Object

(Agree? Disagree?)

Let’s not stop there, though. Let’s help Star Wars celebrate its big three-oh in style. Additions?