Friday we’re pleased to co-host a party with trash_audio and vjkungfu.tv in Mid-City Los Angeles. If you’re in LA or visiting NAMM in Anaheim, you won’t want to miss this – Richard Devine headlining, terrific music and live visuals, and workshops.

If you don’t know the other two sites, by the way, trash_audio (featuring Richard, Justin, and Deep Element) is a fantastic blog that regularly profiles creative workspaces for music. vjkungfu.tv, helmed by VJ momo the monster, has in-depth video tutorials for live visualists; we hope to feature it more on createdigitalmotion.com in the near future.

Here’s the lineup:

1. MAKE + MINGLE. 8:00pm.

• Bring your own DIY music or motion creations and other hardware toys and geek out with an international crowd of hipster-nerdsters! All projects welcome (space first come, first served — think small, bring portable speakers if you can
• Put together free kits to make your own ribbon controllers without soldering
• Learn how Bryant Davis Place (future-tense-cpu) built his own DIY VJ sequencer for M8 using the Lemur multi-touch controller.
• Learn about the wonders of wireless MIDI sync in AV Performance with Acid&Bass&Momo producing a live remix of Karate Kid.

2. MIX + MASH. 9:30pm.

RICHARD DEVINE
The Deep Element
Justin McGrath
Liz Revision (Quantazelle)
Moldover
dj halon (Fake Science, False Profit)

Visuals:
Image8nineteen (Mat Hale)
Momo the Monster
Peter Kirn

CDM is on the road to California! If you’re at NAMM, mark your calendars now.

In addition to our full coverage of the NAMM trade show (covering new and odd music things with video, photos, and sound), we’ve got a party planned. (Whoo!) Attending / playing / organizing: myself, the wonderful audioist Liz McLean Knight, and the also wonderful visualist Surya aka momo the monster, to whom we owe the space and the LA magic. Full details soon, but here’s a teaser:

Where: Basswerks, a hip but comfy gallery/studio at 5411 W Adams Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90016. (Directions)

When: Friday, January 18, eight to late

What:

• a handmade music night, for people to come and show-and-tell DIY music projects informally and just hang out, whether hardware or software, as we’ve been doing with Etsy and Make in NYC.
• a chance to swap demo discs, as seen in Chicago. (don’t forget to check resources for making great demos)
• a lineup of great music and live visuals from LA, CDM, and the world. Cash bar available.

Who: You, if you’re in the LA area for NAMM or local — all are welcome. RSVP will be up soon; stay tuned. And that includes our friends among the vendors, etc., who will be desperate by then to escape Anaheim hotels for the city.

Contact us now if: you have a project you want to bring for handmade music and if you’re interested in playing music or visuals for a short set — no guarantees, but we may have a couple of slots open; if not, there will still be time to play around during the handmade music time.

And we’ll be roaming the NAMM floor, too, so anyone wanting to schedule a meeting, do get in touch.

Contact us

I’ve always been fascinated with the evolution of species. Ever seen those bizarre, short-lived organisms in textbooks, the ones that look like they have twelve eyes and a hundred really tall legs and a spindly tail that serves no purpose? I feel the same way about new instruments, interfaces, and music software. Sometimes it’s the evolutionary aberrations — whether practical or not — that are the most interesting, and that perhaps tell us the most about the more dominant species. (Hello, guitars.) And with an open door policy for DIY instruments, we’ve seen some wonderfully unusual experiments at the Handmade Music event series along just these lines.

Continuing our performance series, with assistance from Make Magazine and Etsy.com, we had some special guests last Sunday at openhousegallery in SoHo, New York: the Mister Resistor Ensemble. Headed by Ranjit Bhatnagar, the inventive sound artist who brought us robotic Theremins and MIDI ironing boards, this group of students from Parsons is lucky enough to spend a whole semester building fun instruments with hardware and software. The results are clearly experimental, but that’s the point. Some informal video clips:

Handmade Music: Mister Resistor from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

A big thanks to our beverage sponsor, Function Drinks, and the lovely venue, openhousegallery New York, for making the event possible!

Tired of conventional instrumentation? How about toy robots named Freddy and Teddy, a violin with a bow made out of cassette tape, and a synthesizer assembled from a 1960s electric guessing game?

We have a special guest performance for the next Handmade Music party, organized by CDM in New York with Etsy.com and Make Magazine. The Mister Resistor ensemble features various musical oddities — electronic and acoustic — created by students at Parsons The New School for Design.

Mister Resistor – the video from ranjit on Vimeo.

Mister Resistor Preview 1 from ranjit on Vimeo.

The course is taught by Ranjit Bhatnagar, who’s been a regular at Handmade Music with robotic Theremins, MIDI ironing boards, and other alternative instruments. Ranjit explains how the course works:

Background: for the last few years I’ve been teaching a studio class in Parsons’ department of Design & Technology (that’s the multimedia & physical computing department). The class is called Mister Resistor, and it’s about making homemade instruments and performing with them. I introduce the students to circuit bending, simple acoustics, synthesis, and the like, and get them making and playing their own instruments. The “final exam” for the class is a public concert. Last year’s class did their concert at the Flux Factory gallery in Queens, in the midst of a giant sound sculpture I’d worked on.

I know we have other instructors out there, so if you use similar techniques in your class (or would like to), let us know about it!

I’ll be flying all the way from Australia back to New York to co-host Mister Resistor on Sunday at another installment of Handmade Music. Various other reasons this one is special:

• I’ll be hosting a free workshop using a ribbon controller electronics kit from PAiA Corporation. Even the kits are free to makers, until we run out. (More on that kit and how to get it wherever you are soon.) You can do the whole thing without soldering, even if you’ve never done this before.
• We’ll have free beverages, supplied by Function Drinks.
• It’s in Manhattan, not in Brooklyn — our friends at Etsy Labs hooked up a fantastic space in SoHo called openhousegallery, 201 Mulberry Street near Spring Street.
• It’s in the afternoon (2-5p), rather than at night. And you can still catch the NYU ITP show Monday. (Just go; you’ll understand.)
• As always, if you’re in town, stop by and bring your own projects for show and tell if you like. (Hint: they don’t even have to function properly. We’re relaxed like that.)

Once again, that’s Sunday, 12/16, 201 Mulberry Street in SoHo, completely free, you’ll hear great music, and you’ll learn to make electronics without soldering even if you never have before.

Invite and ensemble details + music, misterresistor.com
Handmade Music Event on Facebook

Speaking of events, there’s been so much awesomeness and I’ve been so very much in Australia that I’ve gotten way behind, so apologies about some cool events I didn’t get up. I would be remiss, though, in not pointing to another ensemble, partly because you can go while I’m in a 747 over the Pacific, but mostly because I hope by second semester we’ll have massive battle of the band competitions between these things. NYU’s own NIME ensemble after the jump.

Oh, and to the 95% of readers not in New York, a calendar for CDMworld is definitely in the works so we can share the love.

Handmade Music, the semi-regular evening of DIY musical oddities brought to you by CDM, Etsy, and Make Magazine, will mercilessly descend upon yet another peaceful Brooklyn evening. Expect an informal, free party + show and tell + science fair featuring self-made electronic musical projects.

Already confirmed for the lineup:

• The MIDI Pick, a pressure-sensitive DIY digital guitar pick by Roy Vanegas


• Mystery musical controllers from Eric Singer, the mind behind the world-infamous LEMUR, an educational outlet in Brooklyn and collective of musical robot/electronics-creating artists
• Theremin-playing robots and possibly other surprises from series favorite Ranjit Bhatnagar. (See the Theremin robots in action, covering Gnarls Barkley. If we’re really lucky, Ranjit will bring his students. Students, if you’re listening, we’d love to have you there!


• David Brynjar Franzson with a generative piece using custom software built in Max/MSP

And I’ll have a new iteration of my video/gesture-controlled musical creation, which allows users to virtually navigate musical structures via a webcam/DV cam. Going to keep working on that until it develops into something, then share how to do it, hopefully. I may have a surprise or two, as well, in addition.

But that’s just the beginning of the lineup, because part of the lineup can be … you.

Share Your Work in Person

As always, we welcome projects in progress to show off and share. Got something brilliant? Got something partly finished? Got something completely broken you can’t figure it out? Bring it out. I know we had at least one person from the circuit bending challenge in the greater NYC area, so of course we’d love to bring some of that into meatspace / the real world.

Share Your Work Virtually Around the World

I’ve felt bad that we can’t involve the global CDM community, much of whom, as it happens, don’t live in the NYC area. (A remarkable number of you are in Australia and Norway.) So, the circuit bending challenge video submissions worked so well, we’re going to open up the event to virtual projects on the Interwebs. Got an unusual music project — even one in progress — you’d like to share? Send us photos and/or embeddable video links by Thursday morning New York time or so, and we’ll feature it here on the site and hopefully (if wifi is cooperative) even have a “kiosk” going at the party. Best way: drop us a line on the CDM contact form.

Fair game: circuit bending, chiptune – vintage gear, DIY controllers, handmade software (code, Reaktor – Max – Pd patches, SuperColldier, whatever), hacked hardware, the works.

Drop by!

As always…

Where: Etsy Labs (blog)
325 Gold Street, 6th Fl.
Brooklyn, NY 11201
(the building has a big clock tower on it. Do NOT put too many people in the elevator! Read the sign!)

Subway: Take the A/C/F to Jay St. or B/M/Q/R to DeKalb.
Map

When: 8:00pm – whenever

Cost: FREE (light refreshments provided; feel free to bring some more)

Bring stuff if you like, or just come to hang.