From his home in LA to the global scene, John Tejada is a planet-navigating techno ambassador and one of our favorite electronic musicians. He’s one of a handful of artists successful today who has managed to cross eras, whose experience isn’t just of this moment but who has touched the evolution of that scene. We turn to guest writer Alex Brandmeyer, who interviews Mr. Tejada about his own work as well as where the music scene is headed. What I like about Alex’s interview is that he asks some really fundamental questions about the evolution of the international audience for this music and tools – and Mr. Tejada is just the sort of person whose answers are worth reading. -PK

John Tejada’s music has been raising the bar for more than fifteen years. Alongside an intense schedule of performances all across the world, he’s managed a steady stream of high-quality releases on dozens of labels, including his own baby (now fully-grown), Palette Recordings. Add to this some high-profile DJ mixes for outlets like Fabric, along with strong support for his music from top international DJs, and what you’ve got is one of the highest-calibre electronic artists around. Despite this success, he remains a very friendly, down-to-earth guy who’s instantly approachable, and whose love and enthusiasm for electronic music and performance immediately comes across. I caught up with him following one of his recent live shows at Studio 80 in Amsterdam.

One thing that interests me most about dance music, and about house and techno music in particular, is the fact that its appeal traverses national and geographic boundaries. What do you think the common thread is? Psychology? Biology? Culture? And what is it about four-on-the-floor electronic beats and sounds between 120-130 BPM that allows dance music to tap into these things?

I feel these days it has become such a global movement, with everyone around the world linked together through social media and other sources on the net. My experience in the early 90s, however, was much different. These avenues didn’t exist yet, and you had to grab magazines to find out about what was going on abroad and order new releases with your local shop. These days it is so instant. Most of my friends and I still can’t wrap our heads around it. Back then, it was such a treat to find the thing you were looking for or hear an artist you loved live, because you couldn’t just do an MP3 search and have it instantly or watch clips on YouTube from last night’s concert half way around the world. I see all these new developments as mostly a positive.

The sound seems to spread to all cultures at this point. Everyone likes to dance all over the world and many want that moment of hearing a new sound for the first time and wondering what it is. For these reasons, I don’t think it is all that unique that the music is loved the world over now. Many genres of music exist worldwide because people love music and keep all these scenes going.

Of course there are differences, too. As someone coming from California with strong connections to Europe, how do you feel about moving between these places, between the different audiences and cities? Does it matter in the sense that it pulls music and music communities in different directions over time? Or does the music itself make this type of question less important?

I still have a tie to Vienna with my father still being there, and being able to travel to Europe on a regular basis, so I feel connected to both places. I feel when it comes to audiences being different, it’s usually a case of a venue or the people you meet that can have a big impact on your opinion of that place. You may have a good or bad experience in a certain city and your whole experience might rely just on that one club night, when down the street at another club could have been potentially a completely different good or bad experience. It took me repeat visits to cities to realize this and to try not to make up my mind about a place just because of one night. I think the music will keep evolving, as it always does.

Every year, there are new pieces of gear, new bits of software, new labels, new clubs, and new ways of spreading music. Apart from the internet and social media culture you mentioned before, what have been the most important evolutions in your own music making over the years? Have there been specific ideas or techniques which really opened up new creative possibilities for you? 

I feel while technology comes along and makes many things easier and options pretty much limitless, it also turns the same solutions into problems. Music has become more of a “paint by numbers” type of process for many people, which has made lots of new music less interesting for myself. The difference between imposing limitations on one’s creative process and actually having limitations is a different thing. When we were all starting out, the creative process was different than it is now. We now basically have limitless options, which can keep you second-guessing your work. At the same time, sure, it’s great to have new tools working more the way they were intended, and the resurgence of analog has made quite an impact in my workflow and sound. Generally, computer programs have developed mostly in positive ways, making music creation a lot more straightforward.

Again on the subject of evolution… an interesting question is always where this is all headed. People predicted a lot of different outcomes of the digital revolution, but underground clubs, labels, and to some extent, vinyl, all still seem to be doing pretty well, hand-in-hand with the ‘new era’ of Beatport, laptop DJs ,and commercial dubstep. What are your feelings about where the underground dance music scene is headed? Do you have any hopes or fears for the music? Does history repeat itself?

Things do seem to go in circles. I think we’re at the beginning of the next phase in the way music is being distributed. I have a strong belief that physical media will in some form make a comeback, wether it will be records or something else. I just can’t imagine a future where one’s music and book collection are only digital. It sort of misses the point of having a collection. Part of the fun of collecting is finding these physical objects that are tangible. While watching the new Comic-Con documentary, I had this thought that no one values PDFs of classic comic books, or JPEGs of hard-to-find baseball cards. The real physical item has great importance. This is why we love to collect records. I think people will start to miss that the more it disappears. 

The past year I’ve been lucky enough to catch a couple of your live shows, and have enjoyed seeing you perform some of the tracks which I’ve come to love over the years. I’ve also really enjoyed listening to some of your DJ mixes. What for you is the difference between playing out as a DJ and playing using your live setup? Do you have a preference for one or the other? What are the challenges in each type of performance?

DJing can be stressful in the way that I’m looking to make a playlist with the goal of being an entertainer. Sometimes I don’t want to bother with that, and just concentrate on my own art and being creative that way. Playing live limits me to my own ideas which is a little easier for me, but can also be stressful, because if the set isn’t going down well I’ve got nowhere to go, really. I may have the ability to change my set list and arrangements live, but for the most part, it’s just me. At the moment, I’ve been enjoying the live sets quite a bit more. I’d love to bring more gear, but I’m usually shoved in a DJ booth, so for now, it’s a small synth and computer mixer set up.

I think distinguishing between a DJ as entertainer and a live performer as artist taps into something interesting about the way in which electronic music is performed and consumed these days. How important is your connection to the audience when you perform? Do you notice a difference in this connection when you perform live as compared to when you DJ?

When DJing, I have a stronger connection to the audience, because I’m choosing songs based on what I perceive to be their reactions. When playing live, I am really involved making sure I am doing all the right things and controlling the right parameters; I hardly have time to take a look around. That can also be a good thing, as I’m less influenced by people’s reactions. I’m limited to my own compositions, so my main goal is to perform those pieces that as best as I can.

Do you notice differences in the types of crowds that will come to see a live PA as opposed to those who come out for a DJ set? 

The crowds can be different, more in the US I think. In the States you’ll have more “concert” shows, and that’s where people are more open to what a live performer will do. If I’m just shoved into a DJ booth in Europe and asked to make it work somehow, and the crowd is just a party crowd, then there is no difference there. I find in those spaces a DJ set is more appropriate.

You’ve been involved with electronic music for quite a while now. Do you have any particular achievements or peak moments that really pop out from the rest?

I’ve had some really unique opportunities including doing some shows here in LA at the Disney Hall which were really special. Checking out most of the planet has been quite great as well.

Could you tell me a bit more about the shows you did at the Disney Hall? How different is performing in a proper concert hall from performing in a club?

I got to play there twice. Once opening for The Orb at an all night event, where I played a hardware set and covered a table full of synths. The other time was when I got to play my piece “The End Of It All” with a 100 piece male chorus. The piece was reinterpreted by myself as well as adding all the vocal harmonies.

What was it like performing with a choir?

It was quite an experience to be able to do that, especially in that space. 

Did the acoustics kick ass?

The acoustics are really tailored for acoustic performances. It was designed for the LA Philharmonic. While they have a really high-end PA, it is not really geared towards electronic shows. However, the space below the hall, The Red Cat Theater, hosts a big variety of very cool synth shows and avant garde programs. I’ve seen tons of shows at both recently. Definitely LA’s best venue.

Can you amuse us with any anecdotes about bizzare/amusing/plain weird things that have happened to you so far during your career as an electronic musician? No need to name any names.

There’s just so much and of course nothing comes to mind immediately. It’s usually disasters that end up being a little bit funny later on, but at the time they are not amusing, unless someone just says something completely ridiculous at dinner like the Italian promoter who was repeatedly asking Arian (Leviste) and I “don’t you think my wife is beautiful?” I remember in Tokyo, a good friend from Germany was playing and asked if I could start immediately. I said “sure,” and he went off to a corner of the stage and huddled on the ground in fetal position and just stayed there, apparently a bit food poisoned. He was soon OK.

For the coming years, what are the things that keep you motivated to make new music? Do you have any projects or ideas that you’re really excited about? Are you still looking for the perfect beat?

I’m always striving for something, tweaking my technique, my mixdowns, quality of sounds, stripping things away, the list goes on and on. I’ve just completed work on a new full length. Hopefully details on that will be announced soon.

http://www.paletterecordings.com/

Like the modulars themselves, an upcoming documentary on these analog synth beasts has been lurking behind closed doors. But that won’t be the case for long. “I Dream of Wires,” the crowd-funded documentary that probes artists’ fascination with making music by connecting patch cords, will see a public showcase at Montreal’s MUTEK Festival. This and an upcoming film release, atop a big get-together in New York, could make this a proper summer of modular.

In anticipation of their showcase, MUTEK has released two significant excerpts from the film. One talks to Carl Craig, Detroit techno legend, top. Craig describes how this tech has influenced his music, and what inspired him to look at modulars. The other clip – true to MUTEK’s Canadian home base and the origin country of the film itself – looks at Canada’s contribution to electronic music history. Detroit’s place in techno certainly needs no introduction, but it’s about time Canada got its role in synthesis recognized (below), having given the world pioneer Hugh Le Caine and the University of Toronto Electronic Music Lab, among other highlights. This excerpt turns the clock forward to modern-day synth goodness. We’re of course happy to know of a certain digital synth designed in Canada, but here the modular Renaissance gets the spotlight. As the film creators explain:

Recently, Canada has again come to play a significant role with the modern day resurgence of modular synthesizers; it is home to two highly respected manufacturers: Modcan, founded by Toronto’s Bruce Duncan, was the first company to reintroduce modular synthesizers to the post-MIDI marketplace, and Intellijel, founded by Vancouver’s Danjel Van Tijn, is one of the fastest growing and most respected lines of Eurorack synthesizer modules.

The MUTEK showcase will include live modular performances by Sealey/Greenspan/Lanza (Orphx/Junior Boys), Keith Fullerton Whitman (Kranky/Editions Mego), Solvent (Ghostly International/Suction Records), Clark (Warp Records), and Container (Spectrum Spools).

The film itself is a production of director Robert Fantinatto and Jason Amm (aka Ghostly International recording artist Solvent); Solvent is also composing the musical score. This isn’t simply a history of electronic music; instead, it focuses on the modern revival of the instruments. (The history is a subject of a future film, but we’ll let them finish this one first.)

It’s worth saying that modular synths aren’t all pleasure – they bring some pain, too. That’s why it’s worth watching the interviews excerpted in the November promo for the film. In that piece, even as they sing the praises of modular analog’s joys, musicians talk about challenges ranging from live performance setup to tuning. It’s impossible to understand the love for these instruments without grasping some of their idiosyncrasies. In the earlier clip, you see everyone from builder Lori Napoleon to pioneer and custodion of electronic music history Joel Chadabe to composers like the late Richard Lainhart and the legendary Morton Subotnick, as well as builders and the film’s own Solvent.

The filmmakers continue to raise funds from fans. A recent West Coast USA tour, funded by IndieGogo, added interviews with Trent Reznor, John Tejada, cEvin Key, Jack Dangers, Bernie Krause, Richard Devine, Make Noise, Cynthia, The Harvestman, SynthTech/MOTM, Metasonix, Intellijel, and others.

Round 3 funding: http://www.indiegogo.com/IDOW-round3

Keep tabs on the film on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/idreamofwiresdocumentary

Big or small, talk to many music gear makers, and you’ll find they’re in the business largely for love. But it’s still amazing just how many gear makers choose to go it alone. They build equipment in their flats and garages, hand-packing their creations and shipping it to a world of fellow musicians. Koma Electronik is just one of those in the worldwide scene of boutique hardware makers. We’re especially fond of their interfaces and the company of musicians they keep. So, following up on the video that showed what it’s like getting a demo in a van from Koma, complete with champagne, here’s a more serious look at their process. Kristin Trethewey went to their studio to take a look around, and offers this profile – along with, in its entirety, a conversation she had about what it means to be in this business.

The young Berlin-based pedal producers combine effects and technology in sleek, black-and-white cases, with analog Control Voltage I/O. Inspired by the resurgent interest in modular synthesis, their effects combine multiple effects, as in the Gate/Gelay BD101 and the Filter/Sequencer, FT201.

One feature common to KOMA Elektronik is a patch bay that’s accessible on the face of the unit. This allows the user to directly input and output signals, playing with the possibility to generate new sounds easily. Ed.: Models like the Moogerfooger have similar ins and outs, but tucked away on the back of the unit, not on the top where they’re easier to get at. And, of course, lots of modular equipment has these sorts of ports, but not necessarily on a stomp-style effect. An infrared motion sensing system gives musicians the freedom to bypass the knobs, and control the sound with a hand, foot or any other object.

In 2010, the founders, Wouter Jaspers and Christian Zollner, took a pause from musical pursuits to work full-time on making KOMA a reality. Zollner, originally from Linz, Austria, studied social work at school, but consistently played in bands and had an inclination towards building modular gear. He still gets in a show or two with his band, Regolith. And somehow he also fits in an experimental online MIT course for circuits and electronics.

From age 17, Jaspers was dedicated to music. Although he also didn’t study anything related to music – instead working in Dutch and social science — he viewed his formal education as a means to expand his mind rather than his CV. He jumped into forming a record label, Vatican Analog, where he released his own records as well the work of as a growing community of other Dutch “anti-musicians”. This past-time became a full-time profession, taking Jaspers all over the world touring under his own name and different aliases. (Check out his music on SoundCloud.) In 2010, after five years of constant movement and music making, Jaspers decided to switch gears and focus on setting up a base. Soon after he met Zollner, the two decided to work together, and have been happily married to KOMA Elektronik ever since.

KOMA Elektronik’s mandate is to make “pedals for serious players,” but they also want to build a music community. They emphasize that this means more than receiving user feedback about their products. By hosting events and workshops, they seek to connect to a growing scene, playing along with musicians using KOMA pedals. They’ve moved to a larger and cleaner workspace in Berlin’s Neukölln neighberhood – a big step up from their previous home, living and working in a cramped, unfinished apartment. Bringing musicians to the space gives it a special, backstage kind of feeling. Here you could talk not only about gear, but also about music and travelling, common topics regardless of their various musical backgrounds.

This week the whole team made it to Musikmesse in Frankfurt am Main, the world’s largest music show. However, they skipped the booths. KOMA does things a bit differently, and as a young start-up, they often need to find creative solutions. This year they pimped out a rental car, dubbing it the “KOMA cab,” and offering free tours around the Musikmesse convention center. They followed up the tours with a big bash on March 22 at Silbergold. Celebrating their one-year anniversary, fellow KOMA friends Serena-Maneesh, Kaap De Goede Hoop and O Tannenbaum DJs played through the night, bringing a Berlin-style party to the generally-sleepy, buttoned-down Frankfurt trade show scene.

In the coming months, you can expect to see more growth from the small company. Aside from an expanding product line, they have further plans to substantiate their ties to both the Berlin and international music scene. In May they will travel to Poland to present workshops at the Asymmetry Festival.

Ed.: Indeed – the gear is great, but I look forward not only looking closer at that but also getting to know the Koma crew’s musical friends. After all, that’s what all this is about – and it’s the communities that form around all these makers, all you folks we’ve built relationships over the years, that’s why we keep doing it. Enjoy the weekend; go hear and play some live music, wherever you are. I know I will. -PK

Kristin has an extended interview she did for us with the Koma guys, on SoundCloud. (Some audio issue toward the end, but quite listenable.)

More photos inside the Neukölln studio. (All photographs: Kristin Trethewey.)

Koma’s stuff is good. Really good. So good, you might even want to watch a hands-on video where I’m juggling a camera in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other. Their stompable, playable analog effects show well even in the back of a van circling Musikmesse.

How I came to see this hardware in the van is a story in itself. The trade show gig works like this: you pay an enormous amount of money for some sort of trade membership, then an enormous amount of money for a booth, an enormous amount of money to staff that booth in the form of hotels and travel, and then an enormous amount of money for obscure charges like wireless Internet that doesn’t work right and union staff to unpack your gear and so on. Exact details may vary, but you get the idea. For an independent maker, it often just doesn’t make sense.

Berlin-based Koma Electronik had another idea. “Carpet-bagging,” the term for using your badge to sell your product without a booth, is a strict no-no at these trade shows. But the trade show can’t tell you what you can or can’t do outside the convention. So, at Musikmesse, Koma promised demos in their “limousine” or “Koma Cab” – really a rented van outfitted with an amp for live demos of their gear. Since they’d saved some money, they could even offer free champagne and caviar. The system was easy: call them up, and they picked you up for a ride and some music.

Here, we get an in-depth look at two Koma effects, the FT201 filter/sequencer and BD101 gate/delay. On first glance, these may remind you of the superb Moog Music Moogerfoogers. But in usability and sound, the Koma boxes are very much their own beasts. I always loved on Star Trek: The Next Generation when someone would bark “disable safety protocols.” That’s the feeling of the sound here, whether controlled with your fingers, your feet, control voltage, or distance sensors – all appealing to modular synth lovers, computer users, and guitarists alike. In particular, the gate/delay is capable of some far-out effects, so if you’re bored with me and Koma’s Wouter Jaspers (come on, why?), uh, skip ahead a bit for some really wild sounds after a couple of minutes in the second video (below, bottom).

Kristin Trethewey has a separate look at the Koma crew for CDM, but for now, enjoy the videos.

Part one, above, shows the filter; the delay is below. We ask readers: which song fits this scenario better, Dragonette “Black Limousine,” or Ladytron “Back of the Van”?

http://www.koma-elektronik.com/ft201/

http://www.koma-elektronik.com/bd101/

Mouse on Mars’ Parastrophics for Monkeytown has been an early highlight of the year, a record packed with musical ideas in densely-configured arrays of sound. The duo is now taking that music on the road, in ambitious, improvisatory live performances.

Perhaps all of this can be summed up in one word: energy. Their studio and its arrangements of objects has an energy, an energy that’s present in the craft in the record. And talking to the artists, you get a sense of energy, of enthusiasm, crackling away like an amped-up oscillator.

It was therefore a pleasure to get to hear some of the thought and philosophy that produces all that musical energy. Jan Werner talks to CDM about how he and Mouse on Mars think about sound, melody, and the act of listening – and why he hopes people will find a way to listen to this record actively. I was glad to convince Jan to put this into written words, because they take on a dynamic of their own. I overuse the word poetic, but I find what he says poetic and provocative, in how I think of my music as well as his. And unlike a live interview, here those answers had some time to simmer.

It’s fitting to place those words amidst images of the workspace, their studio deep in Berlin’s Funkhaus facility. Against that backdrop, here’s what Jan has to say about music:

CDM: What does your studio setup, and all of this tactile, traditional hardware, mean in your music making? Obviously, sound is important, but apart from sound, what does it mean for you to be in that place and surrounded with those particular objects?

Jan: Our studio is very important to us, because it acts as a workspace as much as a hideout, an archive, and a rehearsal space. Still, we would pretend that we could make music anywhere and even without any electronic tools, if necessary. Maybe this gesture of personal freedom provides us with the artistic freedom to change things at any given
time, in any given direction, and be at ease with our complicated digital protheses.

We collected quite a bit of hardware over the years, too, without becoming collectors, and we are very keen on software applications, plug-ins, Max patches, etc. We like to use as many different sound sources as possible, and then go for the challenge of bringing all these elements together as one consistent idea of music.

You speak articulately about the idea of listening. What did listening mean in the making of the record? How would you like people to listen to the album – or how do you listen to music, when you wish to focus on it?

Listening can happen in any situation that allows your brain to adjust to acoustic sensations in a non-judgmental way. By non-judgmental, I mean taking the sounds for what they are, and not using them as vehicles for pre-set intentions. Also, active listening does not mean to identify and understand a sound’s origin, but to let the idea of what a sound can be in itself evolve to a possible maximum. This maximum of what a sound can become surely depends on your experience, attention, interest, ambition, fantasy, physical condition, etc.

We’re all limited and skilled at the same time, and that’s what makes a difference in how sound appears to us. You could say that ideal listening would be listening without prejudices and even without expectations. But here, a paradox kicks in, because without any preparation or expectation, you might not even be aware of listening to something. Music is a great tool to avoid this paradox, because it attracts a listener’s attention, draws the focus away from the purely physical origin of a sound, but opens up to a vast field of references and emotional and rational responses.

Music, as such, has no purpose, and does not make sense other than offering more or less appealing arrangements of frequencies. The problem is that this definition, which lies within the nature of music, can easily be covered by propagandistic intentions, coming in the form of lyrics, performances, visual stimulations, etc. Blindfolding is not the answer, because all our senses take part in making sense of listening.

I got to see your live performance at Berghain, though admittedly, being in the back of the space I could only listen and couldn’t always see. What I felt was a sense of fresh energy, that this was indeed something new and spontaneous. How are you adapting the studio album to live performance? What elements do you maintain live, versus those that must be prepared in advance? What did you find as you tried that in that first performance?

Each concert is different, and we usually pretend that we don’t care about an upcoming performance as much as we consider all of them to be our first ever performances.

Berghain went well, because the setting up during the day was relaxed, the crew was great, the sound was superb and the atmosphere in the room was concentrated. We also premiered our new visual show, which our long-time friend Karl Kliem had put together, and we were glad that it worked out well.

During a show, we play parts that we’ve rehearsed in the studio. We throw in samples and pre-recorded elements, but also sample on the spot, and use each other as sound sources. Most of the sounds are synthetic and use software to produce and manipulate sound. We play and modulate synthetic sequences a lot, use plug-ins to manipulate and shred sounds or song elements, and add new and unexpected elements on the fly. We also use the drum kit to trigger sounds, use microphones and analog effects and hardware samplers. All in all, it’s more than we can handle at once, which sometimes stresses us out or makes the sound more dense than it needs to be.

How do you approach melodic gesture in your music? There’s much discussion of rhythm in your music, but to me there’s also almost a sense of polyphony across textures, a sense of depth that requires listening on more than one level. How did you assemble this in the composition and production of the music?

There are always various timelines across one song or album. Some sounds appear only once, others repeat and get manipulated throughout the course of a song with every reappearance indicating a rhythmic idea. We try to avoid a strict hierarchy between melody and rhythm, and consider one being as important as the other. That means that a melody can have a strong rhythmic character as much as rhythm can have a predominantly atmospheric or harmonic (balancing?) quality.

Sometimes a melody might stretch over the course of a whole song, so only if you time-stretch the track, you would get the full melodic phrase. Maybe it’s the continuously-changing distance towards a song, like you would quickly twist the zoom of a camera, which makes fun for us. Or, maybe, it’s rather a discontinuously-changing focus, because we allow ourselves to slow down and even suddenly stop the movement as much as we cut elements so fast that they seem to skip. Music for us is a play on time and spacial tension. You can add layers along time as much as you can stack them in depth. And coming back to melody vs. rhythm: there is a blurred border, where one becomes the other, and we have great interest in strolling around this wasteland.

And more from inside and around the Funkhaus on a wintry, Prussian afternoon.

http://www.mouseonmars.com/

Users want more: that much is clear. But for years, Reason has famously (or infamously, depending on your point of view) resisted plug-in formats as a way of extending its production environment. At the moment, plug-ins have been dominate largely by Avid (RTAS), Apple (AU), and Steinberg (VST), as open source alternatives have failed to gain wide commercial traction. Those formats apparently didn’t make the cut with Reason.

That changed officially tonight. Reason’s rack is open to third parties, via something called Rack Extensions, previewed and available by summer for all Reason users. What you’re getting is not so much a new plug-in format as a new set of ideas about what a plug-in should be, in the form of a way of making add-ons for Reason alone.

The ability to get more out of Reason’s rack will clearly mean more for lovers of Reason, who at last will get some favorite sonic toys and tools without switching hosts. But how exactly do the specifics work? I spent some time with Ernst Nathorst-Böös, CEO of Propellerhead, as well as other developers working on the program to try to understand what it’s all about, and trying strange new green sauces known in Frankfurt. (Non mood-altering substances, mind. Just stuff you put on potatoes; don’t read too much into it. German cuisine.)

Before we get to that, though, here are two obvious take-aways for other plug-ins. To me, the benefit for the Reason community is pretty clear. But I think even for Propellerhead, the best thing that could happen here is if other plug-in formats follow the lead. Plug-in formats in general could work better than they do. It’s frustrating that they’ve made little progress since their introduction in regards to some obvious shortcomings, over a range of years. (Don’t believe me? Ask almost any plug-in developer, anywhere.) There are two obvious elements of the Propellerhead announcement that could mean something to competing plug-in formats (AU and VST in particular). Propellerhead aren’t the only ones complaining about them.

Note that given the nature of this being a fresh announcement, we haven’t yet fact-checked this with Propellerhead, and some statements here are interpretive or speculative. And, of course, some stuff is still in the works as this is developed. We’ll cover it as it evolves.

1. Plug-ins shouldn’t bring down hosts. One of the most important point Propellerhead made was widely misunderstood. The idea is this: when a plug-in crashes, the host shouldn’t crash with it. Now, the developers of Reason are obviously very proud of the stability of Reason, but that isn’t the issue here. However stable or instable your host is, the notion is that a plug-in shouldn’t be the reason that host crashes. Some effect you downloaded shouldn’t send your whole session toppling to the ground. Various forms of sandboxing can prevent this. We’ll have to test the Reason solution in practice, but in principal, I know of no reason every plug-in couldn’t support this basic notion. And even if you’ve seen Reason crash, as some commenters have said, the idea here is that a plug-in won’t be the cause.

2. Plug-in developers ought to be able to sell their stuff right in the host. This is a no-brainer. Set aside the obvious success story of Apple’s App Store on iOS and Mac. Plug-in developers have an impossible time these days just selling their work (or, indeed, even giving it away). It’s kind of bizarre that in the Internet age, no other host makes it easy to find and try out the work of other developers. (I was going to give an exception, but … there isn’t one. Seriously. What the heck?)

It’s pretty easy to make an extended argument for either of these ideas without talking about the Reason announcement. And I’m not trying to sell Reason here: believe me, I’d like to see other plug-in formats advance, too. Reason might want that, as well, since they rely on that same developer ecosystem. (Translation: they need devs making enough money to spend the time to keep making plug-ins … for anyone, not just Reason.)

As for Reason, here are some answers to frequent questions and comments from readers.

What will it cost? When can I get it? It’ll be free for existing Reason users, available by end of Q2 (beginning of summer, more or less).

Which add-ons will be available? So far, all we know is the developer list: KORG, SonicCharge (of uTonic and Synplant fame), Peff (Kurt Kurasaki), Softube, and Urs Heckmann (u-he). I also saw iZotope in the crowd, but make of that what you will. Props aren’t saying much more than that; other developers may be involved but aren’t yet public.

Will there be an SDK for any developer? I got a clear answer from Ernst on this: yes. Anyone will be able to download the SDK and make add-ons. There are a couple of caveats. First, you have to have an established business entity (in the EU, with a VAT ID / outside Europe, just some legal entity). Second, it’s just not ready yet. What we saw today was a technology preview, but Propellerhead says they’re eager to open this up to other developers; they’re just not quite prepared to handle that process yet. We don’t yet know to what extent the store you see in Reason will be curated or how, and I wonder if free add-ons might get around the need for a publishing business. What I can say is, there won’t be a developer fee.

Will hardware DSP be supported? Not at this time, or evidently in the forseeable future. Ernst emphasized that Propellerhead feels the current multi-core engine is sufficient. So, no Universal Audio add-ons — but remember, if you really want that, you can just ReWire Reason into a host.

Will you be able to make open-source plug-ins? This seems possible, given you can run DSP code. Your code is your own. I didn’t have time to get an official answer on this; I think it’ll be easier to look at once we can see the SDK.

Can you have UI elements? This came up in the press conference. There are some limitations in the “first release,” say Propellerhead. But there was an impressive demo from SonicCharge with a nice, animated visual display for Bitspeak; suffice to say, you won’t directly port VST UI code, but plug-in devs can work with what Propellerhead is giving them. It’s not so much having to deal with having a new plug-in format as having to work with some new UI requirements – and, quite frankly, that’s a potential issue with any plug-in that has any UI at all. On the upside:

Can you use Reason back-panel routing tools and the like? Yes. You can do all the CV routing and automation and other good stuff a conventional Reason device would have.

These are just more Combinator skins, yeah? No. We’re talking low-level DSP – which also means the DSP portion can be ported really fast. Propellerhead said Softube compiled in 15 minutes – for both Mac and Windows. Most of the time you’ll now wind up investing in UI. (That chuckling sound you hear from developers is because this is generally the case with plug-ins.)

But I can do this with existing plug-in formats. Not quite. There are several elements missing. First, Reason will have an integrated store for this stuff, which also means the ability to move between users, computers, and operating systems more seamlessly. Second, existing plug-ins don’t do things like true host-integrated undo. (Ernst gave the ugly example of tweaking a knob in a plug-in, hitting undo, and undoing the last step – inserting the plug-in – making the whole thing disappear.) Third, and perhaps most importantly, you don’t get sandboxing features in any current plug-in format, meaning a misbehaved plug-in can theoretically crash your whole host.

What’s in it for developers? A 70/30 split — developer/Props — just like Apple’s iOS and Mac stores. And it’s free to join the developer program, so there’s nothing to lose but, uh, time.

But this is just proprietary tech. What experience does Propellerhead have with third-party developers? Oh, just these little things called ReWire and (loop format) REX – which, along with Steinberg’s VST really led the way as far as third-party, cross-platform formats. (REX arguably had a lot to do with the rise of looping software.) Each of these have been used in multiple operating systems and hosts, and require dealing with developers. This is much bigger, of course.

How does this help me collaborate? Propellerhead brought this up with a selling point, so I followed up. Basically, the scenario is this: you’re sharing a track with another Reason user. They don’t have the Squidoodlidoo plug-in you purchased. They can use a 30-day demo, and try it for free. (Otherwise, they have to buy the plug-in, too, naturally.) Also, Ernst tells CDM that the store will maintain every back version of every plug-in. So if you need a previous version, you can revert to that on a set. Reason itself can still open, in version 6, files created in version 1.

So, why would I use an existing plug-in format, if this is The Future? Probably because there’s a host you like better than Reason, or you have one of the many plug-ins that won’t yet support this new thing. But you knew that, right? The payoff here is clearly if you like working in Reason and want more flexibility.

Why a new format? Actually, I’ll editorialize on this one. The kind of integration with Reason here just wouldn’t work with any plug-in format – we’re talking routing control voltage in and out via the back of the rack, integrated automation, and a UI that seamlessly blends with Reason. It’s not a question of formats; you have to write a plug-in for Reason or none of that is possible. As for why existing plug-in formats don’t do some of the things Reason’s tech here does, that’s easy. No one has actually proposed a plug-in format that does that, a handful of vendors control existing formats in wide commercial use (Apple, Steinberg, Avid), and efforts to build a new standard haven’t gotten traction. So, in the meantime, if you want these ideas in practice, you have to build them in your own software, which is what Reason has done. If you want these ideas elsewhere, let’s see it.

Got more questions? I’ll append answers here if I can find them. Expect more once we hear more on what’s actually available to add onto your rack (for users) and once we’re closer to having stuff ready for a wider audience of developers (for you coders). No images or video yet – I know we still owe you a look at the new iOS app – but that’ll get posted when ready.

More details, and ugly speculation about whether or not I was wearing pants, in the live event coverage:
http://createdigitalmusic.com/2012/03/propellerhead-announces-mobile-app-figure-live-announcement-coverage/

A small note based on Part 1: this is no history of dub – no need to create a list of dub forefathers in the comments! But if you’re interested in such things, definitely watch Bruno Natal’s Dub Echos, he talks to everyone under the sun, and it’s fascinating!)

A Quiet Bump [as seen in part 1] has their feet firmly planted in the heavy Rhythm and Sound aesthetic of half-time, head-nodding feel. The second modern dub label I’ve been impressed with over the years, Qunabu, is rooted a little more strongly in two other genres, the clicks and cuts and glitch of Mille Plateaux (which I’m probably more familiar with) and dub techno (to which I’m a relative n00b). The latter is a sound that’s captivated me over the last eighteen months or so, as I’ve gotten into old Chain Reaction, some of the Echospace / Deepchord projects, and everything on Echocord – but I’m absolutely no expert and I’m sure many readers have been following the genre stretching back well into the 90s.

Qunabu is more than just a netlabel; it actually arose as a twinned project of a design firm and netlabel, founded by Piotr Hatti Vatti and Mateusz Qunabu out of Gdansk, Poland. Mateusz and his brother Rafal sit well within a long Polish tradition of innovative visual design, and they offer a pretty stellar portfolio of all sorts of graphic and interactive design, photography, and video work. It’s all on displace, on the main site under the interactive section. I mention it because, unfortunately, right now the actual netlabel part of Qunabu has a placeholder page – it’s being redesigned and wasn’t ready quite in time for this piece. But it’s easy to get excited for how it will look, and in addition to their portfolio, the podcast series and the shop are up and running.

The amazing coincidence is that I was familiar with both Qunabu and Piotr’s work as Hatti Vatti, completely independently of each other. Hatti Vatti totally captivated me with his track “Different Music,” which came out on Indigo’s Mindset label a couple years ago – a song I still play in sets to this day. Fodder for a different article for sure, but I consider every track Hatti Vatti’s ever produced to be 100% awesome and probably be the finest example of what’s good and interesting about dubstep today – it’s the opposite of this. And in hindsight of course I can hear the connection between his brand of dubstep and the experimental and techno leanings of Qunabu.

The label has had an impressive output so far, and includes some ambient work from NN as well as a few pieces that call more on hip-hop and free jazz like The Strait of Anian’s This Wandering Winter release. But the majority of tracks lope along in the 115-125bpm range of slow techno, ranging in feel from fairly driving to almost muffled. Their two strongest releases so far have been the two volumes of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Dub Band”. These are the label’s showcase compilations, akin to the great Staedizism compilations from ~scape (and both put out long before Easy Star All Stars released and album with the same name!) They are both a pretty stunning collection of tracks from producers that haven’t seen many releases elsewhere.

Mateusz and Piotr answered a few of my questions by email below. Also, be sure to check out check out the captivating video of “You” that Qunabu created – showcasing the real love and affection they have for their city of Gdansk, a town that has produced Reza and his CX Digital label among others.

Hatti Vatti feat. Cian Finn – You (HD) from Andrei Matei on Vimeo.

Who is involved in Qunabu, and when did it start?
Mateusz Qunabu [MQ]: It started in 2006. It’s been me, Mateusz Qunabu and Piotr aka Hatti Vatti from the beginning. I’m responsible for the website and technical stuff as well as the first selection of received audio and organizing graphics, etc. Piotr is responsible for finalizing the music and further contact with artists.

If you had to describe your aesthetic to people who didn’t know the label, what would you say?
MQ: Dub Side of the Moon, recently the dub techno side

Hatti Vatti [HV]: We started with dub techno, but right now we are focused on any electronic and experimental minimalistic genre. But dub elements are always somewhere around. HQ open-minded music.

How do you choose which artists to release?
MQ: The first release was from Piotr’s friend from a Polish reggae forum. Then he started to meet people on myspace. It was a time when myspace was full of interesting stuff (2006-2007), so he gathered a collection of tracks for Sgt. Peppers #1. After that we were receiving emails from people around the world. We’ve met a few of them in person, some of them we know only by email. Stendek is the only local friends we have published – I think he is one of the greatest artist in our portfolio.

HV: There’s no rule. We asked a lot of people for EP, but ~50% of our releases are sent as demos… It’s an international netlabel but we are really happy if we will get something cool from our country or city (Gdansk). I’m really proud of our first compilation – it’s 100% polish. All told, Qunabu has released music from 15 countries and 4 continents .

Which project are you most proud of – or was the most difficult?
HV: Making “Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Dub Band Vol. 1″ was hard work. We were a bit unknown as a netlabel at the time… I think it’s my favorite release because of the big response and the feeling that we had done something really special in many ways. But I like every single EP and LP… “Sgt Peppers… Vol. 2″ was our biggest project, but it was much so easier after “Vol. 1″. I think almost 100% Qunabu stuff is still “actual”, fresh and very interesting. Also, QNB004 (77′s Schlummerlieds EP) and QNB005 (Misk’s Pathos EP) both came out in the same moment (2007) – now it seems like a kind of prophecy of dubstep and dubtechno crossover…

What upcoming releases are planned?
HV: Avant jazz experiments meets dub techno EP + “Sgt Peppers…” Vol 3.

http://www.qunabu.com/

Previously: CREATED: Digital Dub for 2012, Part 1 – A Quiet Bump, A Conversation with Peak

Kid Kameleon is a San Francisco-based DJ, promoter, writer, blogger, historian, archivist, and fan of electronic music. Tune in regularly for his CREATED series on new and undiscovered music, including what to hear, and talks with artists.
http://kidkameleon.com

What you’re watching in the video above doesn’t involve cameras or motion sensors. It’s the kind of brain-to-machine, body-to-interaction interface most of us associate with science fiction. And while the technology has made the occasional appearance in unusual, niche commercial applications, it’s poised now to blow wide open for music – open as in free and open source.

Erasing the boundary between contracting a muscle in the bio-physical realm and producing electronic sound in the virtual realm is what Xth Sense is all about. Capturing biological data is all the rage these days, seen primarily in commercial form in products for fitness, but a growing trend in how we might make our computers accessories for our bodies as well as our minds. (Or is that the other way around?) This goes one step further: the biological becomes the interface.

Artist and teacher Marco Donnarumma took first prize with this project in the prestigious Guthman Musical Instrument Competition at Georgia Tech in the US. Born in Italy and based in Edinburgh, Scotland, Marco explains to us how the project works and why he took it up. It should whet your appetite as we await an open release for other musicians and tinkerers to try next month. (By the way, if you’re in the New York City area, Marco will be traveling to the US – a perfect chance to collaborate, meet, or set up a performance or workshop; shout if you’re interested.)

Hypo Chrysos live at Trendelenburg AV Festival, Gijon, Spain, December 2011.

CDM: Tell us a bit about yourself. You’re working across disciplines, so how do you describe what you do?

Marco: People would call me a media and sound artist. I would say what I love is performing, but at the same time, I’m really curious about things. So, most of the time I end up coding my software, developing devices and now even designing wearable tech. Since some years now I work only with free and open source tools and this is naturally reflected in what I do and how I do it. (Or at least I hope so!)

I just got back from Atlanta, US, where the Xth Sense (XS) was awarded the first prize in the Margaret Guthman New Musical Instrument, as what they named the “world’s most innovative new musical instrument.” [See announcement from Georgia Tech.]

It’s an encouraging achievement and I’m still buzzing, specially because the other 20 finalists all presented great ideas. Overall, it has been an inspiring event, and I warmly recommend musicians and inventors to participate next year. My final performance:

Make sure to use a proper soundsystem [when watching the videos]; most of the sound spectrum lives between 20-60Hz.

Music for Flesh II live at Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, Atlanta, USA, February 2012. Photo courtesy the artist.

You’re clenching your muscles, and something is happening – can you tell us how this XS system works?

Marco: My definition of it goes like “a biophysical framework for musical performance and responsive milieux.” In other words, it is a technology that extends some intrinsic sonic capabilities of the human body through a computer system that senses the physical energy released by muscle tissues.

I started developing it in September 2011 at the SLE, the Sound Lab at the Edinburgh University, and got it ready to go in March 2011. It has evolved a lot in many ways ever since.

The Xth Sense wearable biosensors by Chris Scott.

The XS is composed of custom biophysical sensors and a custom software.

At the onset of a muscle contraction, energy is released in the form of acoustic sound. This is to say, similarly to the chord of a violin, each muscle tissue vibrates at specific frequencies and produces a sound (called Mechanomyographic signal, or MMG). It is not audible to human ear, but it is indeed a soundwave that resonates from the body.

The MMG data is quite different from locative data you can gather with accelerometers and the like; whereas the latter reports the consequence of a movement, the former directly represents the energy impulse that causes that movement. If you add to this a high sampling rate (up to 192.000Hz if your sound card supports it) and very low latency (measured at 2.3ms) you can see why the responsiveness of the XS can be highly expressive.

The XS sensors capture the low-frequency acoustic vibrations produced by a performer’s body and send them to the computer as an audio input. The XS software analyzes the MMG in order to extract the characteristics of the movements, such as dynamics of a single gesture, maximum amplitude of a series of gestures in time, etc.

These are fed to some algorithms that produce the control data (12 discrete and continuous variables for each sensor) to drive the sound processing of the original MMG.

Eventually, the system plays back both the raw muscle sounds (slightly transposed to become better audible, say about 50/60Hz) and the processed muscle sounds.

I like to term this model of performance biophysical music, in contrast with biomusic, which is based on the electrical impulses of muscles and brainwaves.

By differently contracting muscles (which has a different meaning than simply “moving”) one can create and sculpt musical material in real-time. One can design a specific gesture that produces a specific sonic result, what I call a sound-gesture. These can be composed in a score, or improvised, or also improvised on a more or less fixed score.

The XS software has also a sensing sequencing time-line: with a little machine learning (just implemented few days ago) the system understands when you’re still or moving, when you’re being fast or slow, and can use this data to change global parameters, functions or to play with the timing of events. For example, the computer can track your behaviour in time and wait for you to stop whatever you’re doing before switching to a different set of funcions.

The XS sensors are wearable devices, so the computer can be forgotten in a corner of the stage; the performer has complete freedom on stage, and the audience is not exposed to the technology, but rather to the expressivity of the performance. What I like most about the XS is that is a flexible and multi-modal instrument. One can use it to:

• capture and playback acoustic sounds of the body,
• control audio and video software on the computer, or
• capture body sounds and control them through the computer simultaneously.

This opens up an interesting perspective on the applications of the XS to musical performance, dance, theatre and interaction design. The XS can also be used only as a gestural controller, although I never use it exclusively this way. We have thousands of controllers out there.

Besides, I wanted the XS to be accessible, usable, hackable and redistributable. Unfortunately, the commercialized product dealing with biosignals are mostly not cheap and — most importantly — closed to the community. See the Emotiv products (US$299 Neuro Headset, not for developers), or the BioFlex (US$392.73). One could argue that the technology is complex, and that’s why those devices are expensive and closed. This could make sense, but who says we can’t produce new technologies that openly offer similar or new capabilities at a much lower cost?

The formal recognition of the XS as an innovative musical instrument and the growing effort of the community in producing DIY EEG, ECG and Biohacking devices are a clear statement in this sense. I find this movement encouraging and possibly indispensable nowadays, as the information technology industry is increasingly deploying biometric data for adverts and security systems. For the geeky ones there are some examples in a recent paper of mine for the 2012 CHI workshop on Liveness.

For those reasons, the XS hardware design has been implemented in the simplest form I could think of; the parts needed to build an XS sensor cost about £5 altogether and the schematics looks purposely dumb. The sensors can be worn on any parts of the body. I worked with dancers who wore them on the neck and legs, a colleague stuck one to his throat to capture the resonances of his voice, I use them on the arms or to capture the pumping of the blood flow and the heart rate.

The XS software is free, based in Pd, aka Pure Data, and comes with a proper, user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) and its own library, which includes over one hundred objects with help files. It is developed on Linux, and it’s Mac OS X compatible; I’m not developing for Windows, but some people got it working there too. A big thumb up goes to our wonderful Pd Community; if I had not been reading and learning through the Pd mailing list for the past 5 years I would have never been able to code this stuff.

The Xth Sense software Graphical User Interface. Built in Pd.

The public release of the project will be in April. The source code, schematics, tutorials, will be freely available online, and there will be DIY kits for the lazier ones. I’m already collecting orders for the first batch of DIY kits, so if anybody is interested please, get in touch:
http://marcodonnarumma.com/contact

I do hope to see the system hacked and extended, especially because the sensors were initially built with the support of the folks at the Dorkbot ALBA/Edinburgh Hacklab. I’m also grateful to the community around me, friends, musicians, artists devs and researchers for contributing to the success of the project by giving feedback, inspiring and sharing (you know who you are!).

Thanks, Marco! We’ll be watching!

More on the Work

http://marcodonnarumma.com/works/xth-sense/
http://marcodonnarumma.com/works/music-for-flesh-ii/
http://res.marcodonnarumma.com/blog/

And the Edinburgh hack lab:
http://edinburghhacklab.com/

Biological Interfaces for Music

There isn’t space here to recount the various efforts to do this; Marco’s design to me is notable mainly in its simplicity and – hopefully, as we’ll see next month – accessibility to other users. I’ve seen a number of brain interfaces just in the past year, but perhaps someone with more experience on the topic would like to share; that could be a topic for another post.

Entirely unrelated to music, but here’s the oddest demo video I’ve seen of human-computer interfacing, which I happened to see today. (Well, unrelated to music until you come up with something this crazy. Go! I want to see your band playing with interactive animal ears.)

Scientific American’s blog tackles the question this week (bonus 80s sci-fi movie reference):
Brain-Machine Interfaces in Fact and Fiction

I’ve used up my Lawnmower Man reference quota for the month, so tune in in April.

The link between dub music and technology is as old as the genre itself – you could even argue that dub is THE purest example of a technology expressed through music. At its best, it’s like magic – when I first saw Scientist run the board for Mikey Dread live, it truly was like watching a magician at work. He had a way of flicking faders so fast but so subtly that they seemed to move with a will of their own.

Although there are some core sonic elements of Dub that have been with it since its inception – echo, reverb, tape effects, etc – it’s also been a genre/ethos that’s quick to embrace new methods and new applications in its 40-year lifespan. One particular thread from Dub’s inception to now goes something like this:

The 70s – the warm round sound of King Tubby and his contemporaries.
The 80s – dub in the digital era, with Prince Jammy and others messing around with 8-bit sounds and new drum machines on seminal recordings like Computerized Dub.
The 90s – dub techniques flourish in every possibly form of dance music, including the icy germanic sounds of the Basic Channel and Chain Reaction labels and artists.
The 00s – that sound expands in new directions with records from Rhythm and Sound, Deadbeat, Pole and the entire long running ~scape label.

(As I said, just one thread through the history – for a much more fleshed-out telling of the story, see Bruno Natal’s Dub Echos or read Michael Veal’s book on the subject. Or if you want to become a dub producer yourself in an instant, you’ve got to check out Infinite Wheel, still as fun now as the day it was released.)

In 2012, two net labels – who so far have given every single one of their releases away entirely for free (!!!) – are unquestionably the proud inheritors of the legacy that runs from Tubby to Scientist to Rhythm & Sound to Deadbeat & Pole. They are A Quiet Bump, from Italy, and Qunabu, from Poland. I’ll cover A Quiet Bump below and follow up on Qunabu in a few days.

A QUIET BUMP

A Quiet Bump is a dub and digital roots label from Italy that’s currently 28 releases deep. They’ve just recently completely redone their website (which is beautiful) and even invented a new double mountain logo for themselves. Founded by Paolo Picone and Carmine Minichiello, the label is home to some of the most innovative dub music on the planet today – following in the vein of their german forefathers but infusing a kind of good-natured Italian warmth that makes the music truly unique and special. They label has been a labor of love since its foundation in 2005 – as Picone puts it “We are very proud in general of A Quiet Bump. We come from Irpinia, a small rural region of midland of Southern Italy… the biggest village only has 15,000 people, so developing an electronic/dub label between the mountains was not easy. A big challenge. Without the label we probably would have stopped playing music many years ago… it’s a survival project, and we are really proud of it.”

To celebrate the relaunch of their website, they’ve released their first CD compilation – UNO, the first thing you can actually buy from the label (as I said, EVERYTHING beforehand from these guys has been given away for free). It’s brilliant, and features many label regulars, the label’s brightest rising star DaDub (who’s gone on to release on Stroboscopic Artefacts) and some new high-profile collaborators like Stewart Walker. Paolo Picone, who records under the name Peak and has recently moved to Berlin, was kind enough to answer a few questions about the label. His responses are best read to a soundtrack of his own music, a captivating sample of which is below.

When and how did A Quiet Bump (AQBMP) start, and how did you chose the name?
The label was founded by me (Peak) and Camine “Gamino” Minichiello (Jambassa) in 2005. It started as just a name and logo to put on the cover of our band MOU’s first CD, a fake label, just to have a greater chance of getting reviewed as an official CD and not just as a demo… a trick! We picked the name to evoke the idea of something without a big clamor, a silent and shy label, a record company for implosive releases … But by the time we’d gotten to our fourth release, we decided just to run it as a label.

Who is part of AQBMP now, and do they have other roles beyond their music work?
Paolo Picone (Mou, Peak, Pantazm) with the contribution of my booking and events agency Soundabbast.
Carmine Minichiello (Mou, Jambassa) with the contribution of his Q-Zone Recording Studio
Giovanni Roma (Black Era, Pantazm, Lich, Voodoo Tapes) with his Blackchannel Mastering Studio
Raffaele Gargiulo “Papa Lele” (Jambassa/Wiseman Dub) the graphic designer of AQBMP
Leo Giso (Mou) the man behind shop, orders and shipping…
Web site design and programming by Nico Vece – the secret sixth man of AQBMP – with his THIN studio.

If you had to choose a word or phrase for your aesthetic for people who didn’t know the label, what would you say?
Digital roots? Contemporary roots? Or maybe in a better way: NON-Conservative Dub … Something connected with ’60/’70 Jamaican roots music and our contemporary culture… just in terms of space and time – places, society, and technologies. What King Tubby would have played now in the XXI century.

How do you choose which artists to release? Are they all friends or from all around the world?
We have no specific method… although usually we personally know the artists before producing them, so the majority of AQBMP artists come from our region of Italy … all friends. But it’s not a rule, everything depends by the music … the artist’s coherence as a producer and his sound are important for us.

Why did you decide to do Uno as a CD?
The main reason was to have a more professional approach to the promotion, and also to give the people a different approach of AQBMP. UNO in Italian means ONE, a number, the first number, just like a new starting point for us… we decide to change and renovate everything.

Plus we were very tired being classified as a “Net Label” – too many times and for more and more people in the net audio scene, the word “net” has become more important than the word “label”… In recent years I think the net audio world has become a fenced-in space – yes, with a lot of nice people, nice networks, situations, and nice ideas – but cut off from the music outside, or at least with a marginal position. The container became more important than the content.

Who are some artists that you might want to work with for the label but haven’t yet?
I don’t know… They don’t yet have names! We don’t have a well-defined idea of the AQBMP sound: we are 5 people with completely different ideas about “sound”. We listen to everything from Dub Specialist to Sonic Youth, from Slayer to Moritz Von Oswald, from David Sylvian to Fela Kuti, etc… Just as some examples! So now we prefer to explore our commonalities based on low bass frequencies and downbeat… and when possible support the idea of research on modern roots.

What upcoming releases are planned?
A new release from PARA as well as VOODOO TAPES (a new dubby project by Gianni Roma/Black Era, the man behind the mastering of AQBMP)… both as digital releases and digital distribution.

To be continued…

Kid Kameleon is a San Francisco-based DJ, promoter, writer, blogger, historian, archivist, and fan of electronic music. Tune in regularly for his CREATED series on new and undiscovered music, including what to hear, and talks with artists.
http://kidkameleon.com

By the 1990s, the notion that computer software could be a means of delivering interactive digital art more personally was enjoying a Renaissance. This was the age of the Voyager CD-ROM, which catered to new multimedia PCs and Macs with titles from the likes of Laurie Anderson and Morton Subotnick, the decade in which Brian Eno released Generative Music as software and Monolake – before Ableton – included a Max/MSP patch with an album. But the reach of these experiments was doomed to be relatively limited.

Now, of course, things are different. First, we saw some widely-available audiovisual toys, coinciding in particular with the debut of the iTunes App Store. But now, those fairly one-dimensional experiments are beginning to blossom into something else. When these particular gadgets and app stores are forgotten, the question is whether those aesthetic adventures, the personalization of the digital art experience, will endure.

Joshue Ott, co-creator of Thicket for iOS, points to a review of that application on Apple’s App Store. “I always want to touch the masterpieces in museums,” a user says in that review. “I’ll use Thicket instead of getting arrested!”

“It’s the democratization of our own performance works,” muses Ott. “It’s a way people can play along with us,” he says. “We’re constantly creating processes to create sound and music; it’s what we’ve done for ten years or so,” chimes in Ott’s creative partner, Morgan Packard. “Now people can own the processes, not just the results.”

Ott and creative partner Packard have long each been visual and music performers, respectively. That meant what it has traditionally meant: the artist gets up in front of an audience, the real work hidden behind an onstage laptop. With Thicket, by contrast, the raw materials of that performance became embodied in the software itself, and thus in the hands of the audience, who can double as performer. At first, this software included only a simple mode or two, each with a specific sound, musical ambience, and visual look. Even in those versions, Thicket made some appearances in an occasional gallery show or performance – the app you download could also be the art.

As Thicket has added modes, though, it has evolved in a kind of platform of its own. Ott and Packard produce new works that can be distributed as in-app purchases (more on how they contend with that in a bit). The sum total of those modes has created a massive audiovisual playground, a compendium of ideas and aesthetic.

A new version released this week adds three new modes, seen in the video at top here, building atop modes added in late December. For the first time, you can use Thicket on an iPhone and not just an iPad; it’s a Universal app. Screenshot sharing is available, too. But the addition of all these modes, unveiled with a “reboot” of the app at the end of last year, represents a shift in thinking as these artists and developers reevaluated what it was they were doing.

“We found that the modes were becoming so different, so much deeper,” says Ott:

We were having such fun using it as a big sketchbook that we decided to ditch the ‘rotate to change modes’ system so that we could handle lots of modes, rather than just four or five. The modes in Thicket reboot are completely new, and each one is a lot more complex than the older modes. They’re all very different, and each have separate methodologies behind how you control them. We’re playing with different concepts in user interaction design, searching for the right intuitive feel to make a true audiovisual instrument (among quite a few other things).

In other words, if you haven’t played with Thicket lately, it’s a different animal. It’s a Long Play album to the first version’s single cut. The work is immersive, too; you can transmit video output via HDMI or VGA on the iPad, and get up to 1920×1200 HD output, with no menu intervening. (One of the many significant current drawbacks of Android for the moment for artists: the move to a soft menu on Android tablets means menu detritus that never goes away. Artists were intensely relieved this week when Apple’s new iPad kept its signature, dedicated hardware menu button.)

Morgan Packard says he has some strong feelings about why this kind of experience has value in his work:

I’d say where we both overlap is our shared interest in how abstract sound and picture, plus interactivity, all can work together. Thicket is a bit of a research sketchbook for us. There’s something very magical about just twiddling your fingers and having sound and visuals spring to life. Frankly, we don’t entirely understand this medium yet. But we like not knowing, trying to understand it in different ways.

The gestural thing is huge with us, and is at the core of what thicket is. It’s partly why I’m a bit resistant to the idea of layering features on to Thicket. Of all the different people who give us feedback, I get the most gratification from parents of special needs kids.The non-fiddly, large-motor interaction style is very accessible to a huge range of minds and hands. I want to explore this more, to give people new ways of feeling expressive and creative with movement and gesture. In my mind, that’s what’s really special about what we’re doing.

The duo did get a chance to try the app with people with different user needs. Ott explains:

Morgan and I actually toured a special needs school earlier this year and observed autistic kids using Thicket. A very special music teacher is using Thicket (among a couple of other technologies) to teach the kids music, and had found that it seemed to really empower them. He offered to let us visit and we happily agreed… really really amazing experience.

As Subotnick hoped years ago in “All My Hummingbirds Have Alibis” for Voyager, the distribution of art as software can create a new kind of “chamber” art, in which the work is personal, enjoyed by a few people. It can be a family or a couple of friends on a couch.

Of course, somewhere in all of this, these artists are looking for revenue in order to be able to devote the massive amounts of development and testing time the application demands. (Neither has quit day jobs, which means finding a way to devote resources to development.) Thicket easily climbed in download counts, but only after the application was made free. In-app purchases have been a tough mountain to climb, but have at least allowed some revenue to trickle in; the challenge was finding a way to make them appealing to users, says Ott:

I think in general people hate In-App Purchasing (IAP), because, in general, I think IAP is usually not handled so well. We have thought a lot about how to show people exactly what they are buying before they buy it, and I’m really pleased with what we’ve come up with. Every mode in the new Thicket has a pre-recorded “demo” of one of us playing the mode. Before you buy a mode you can watch this demo, learn what the mode can do, watch someone use it in an interesting way, and decide if that’s something you’re interested in or not. You can of course watch the demos even after you’ve purchased the mode (and the free Sinemorph mode also includes a demo as well). The demos are a great way for us to show users different tricks and techniques.

So the reboot is really about making Thicket a platform rather than just a single art piece. Something that we can keep adding to (with a financial structure that makes sense for us to keep adding to). Something that we can start collaborating with other artists on – we are talking to a couple of different people about releasing modes within the Thicket system. So yeah, that’s what the platform part is. We’re really excited about it, and what it will become in the future.

But these concerns aside, the developers aren’t just creating Thicket for users; they’re building something they use themselves. As Josh explains:

I’ve performed with Thicket now a couple of times, once at the excellent SONiC festival, and another at Issue Project Room in a program curated by Ryan Lott (AKA Son Lux), and have started to really feel like it has the potential to be a new form of audiovisual instrument. I want to see more stuff like it- things that generate graphics and audio intertwined, and I want to continue to explore these relationships in different ways. I’m actually pretty excited about performing with Thicket more, and I think doing so will push it even further in that direction.

“That’s really what an audiovisual instrument is to me,” says Ott. “It’s something that you can bang on and make something interesting, but you can touch it subtly, as well, to shape it, to express with it. That’s what I want to make. We’re right at the beginning of that exploration, and I think we have something that is a promising vehicle for it.”

You can try out the new Thicket now, as seen in CDM Apps:

Thicket @ CDM Apps
[Says iPad, is actually now Universal. PS - music and beauty flow from my fingers all the time - no app needed - but I'm glad now the rest of you get the chance.]