Reason number 3,174 why I love Germany: it’s the one nation that has both arcane governmental procedures and the avant-garde musicians to turn them into protest art — with the chops in Pure Data (Max’s open source cousin) to squeeze 70,000+ samples into a tiny space.

Song registration requires citing each sample? No problem — unless you’re an overzealous Pd user. Meet Johannes Kreidler and his work “Product Placement”

product placements (2008)

music piece / performance (”music theater”)

70,200 samples in 33 seconds: nightmare for GERMAN RIAA

If you want to register a song at GEMA (RIAA, ASCAP of Germany) you have to fill in a form for each sample you use, even the tiniest bit. On 12 Sept 08, German Avantgarde musician Johannes Kreidler will —as a live performance event—register a short musical work that contains 70,200 quotations with GEMA using 70,200 forms.

Here he is, causing hilarity with a phone operator for GEMA:

And here’s the actual piece, which sounds as awful (in a good, glitchy way) as you’d expect listening to 70,000 records at once might sound.

I’m not entirely sure what this proves, but now you can say you heard it.

And if this doesn’t mean sampling has jumped the shark, nothing does.

Product Placements Piece Page: English | German

At long last, the Yamaha Tenori-On, the unusual sampling/sequencing instrument bestrewn in light-up buttons, is getting its worldwide release.

And it’s going to be an amazing party.

Launch cities:

• Frankfurt and Berlin, Germany
• Paris, France
• Montreal, Quebec
• New York, NY
• San Francisco, CA
• (most appropriately) Tokyo, Japan

The tour kicks of in Frankfurt first on March 12, then hits the other towns April 8 - 25, finishing where the Tenori-On was born: Tokyo.

Launch artists:

The 5th Annual Linux Audio Conference, March 22-25 in Berlin, looks really cool, even if you’re not a Linux die-hard. Sessions include: an open, XML-based format for time and position in audio files, putting together a Linux studio with expert Dave Phillips, open hardware instruments with Pd, Processing, and Arduino, and plenty of synthesis and livecoding sessions.

Linux Audio Conference (Thanks, Malte — take good notes if you make it, please!)

Conference registration is EUR 1495 — kidding. Free as in beer, except a small charge for the concerts.

The most interesting to me of these is the session on open instruments. The idea of a completely open instrument design that can be customized both on the hardware and software ends is pretty compelling, and certainly not limited in its interest to just Linux users. The team offering this session is called “Recursive Dog”: