From John Cage to Radiohead, there are few people in any medium so closely tied to the explorations of experimental music’s frontiers than Cunningham. To understand why music was so important to him – and electronic music in particular – we can listen to Merce himself. He explains that part of this shift in thinking about time came from the eradication of bars and beats in electronic music:

http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/aspen/mp3/cunningham1.mp3

From an interview on UbuWeb.

(Thanks to Benjamin Dauer for the tip.)

That’s just one example, though; there’s quite a lot more we could talk about. I’d like to do a timeline of Merce’s significant sound collaborations and review some of the moments in electronic music history with which he was involved. On Create Digital Motion, we’ll look back at his LifeForms software and the work he did with motion. But I need your help: please send along resources you think may be helpful, any of your own experiences of the artist and his work, and other tips and questions.

On Create Digital Motion:
Remembering Merce Cunningham, Digital Motion, and Digital Portraits

Merce Cunningham Dies [New York Times ArtBeat]
Merce Cunningham Foundation

MCF and MCD will be receiving visitors today. (See site above.)

Claude VonStroke plays Billie Jean, NYC from Dancetracks on Vimeo.

Michael Jackson fever may have already put you into overload, but 24-hour news channels aside, there’s still something powerful about the musical legacy people leave and the way it can become a shared experience. It’s something ineffable, well beyond the reach of words – but it can be something you get from a musical moment.

So you can imagine the feeling in the room Saturday night at New York’s summer-only Water Taxi Beach when Claude VonStroke played his own edit of Billie Jean. dancetracks got some video footage, but they tell us that the feeling in the room barely comes across in the video — a crowd going wild like New York’s clubland hasn’t seen in ages. (VonStroke owns Dirtybird and Mothership and is making his own mark on the American musical scene.)

VonStroke apparently finished his club-friendly edit on Amtrak from Boston down to New York the day of the gig, working entirely in Ableton Live.

It was striking to me, too, to hear from guys like Quincy Jones, whose work had one of the greatest impacts on the sound of the 20th Century of anyone, talking about Jackson’s musical talent. It’s tough to know, sometimes, what to make of Michael Jackson the person – least of all when he’s a distant celebrity. But as the global reach of music spreads further and further down the long tail, and as we even wonder if this kind of superstardom will ever happen again, at least the impact of the music is without question.

Claude VonStroke Plays Billie Jean, Club Goes Crazy [dancetracksdigital.com]

It’s easy to forget how deeply strangers can be connected by music in recordings and performances. Sadly, we too often take this connections for granted until we lose someone. When Telefon Tel Aviv’s Charlie Cooper passed away earlier this year, the loss sent shockwaves through the electronic music community. Because his work was influential for many people here on the CDM community, we certainly welcome musical tributes.

Our friend King Britt of Five Six Media today posted a couple of heartfelt, beautiful tracks from Fhloston Paradigm, a mysterious duo from Philadelphia. They’re described as “songs of love and admiration.” I’ll leave it at that and hope you enjoy them. One thing, happily, musicians do not have to leave behind: silence.

Download / play links on this story require Flash.

Direct link to Five Six Media:
FREE DOWNLOAD: FHLOSTON PARADIGM TRIBUTE TO CHARLIE COOPER

I’m incredibly saddened to learn that Charlie Cooper, half of Telefon Tel Aviv, has died at age 31. His death on January 22 was revealed by Josh Eustis on the Telefon Tel Aviv MySpace page.

We have been so fortunate to tour the world together, while at the same time having a massive amount of laughs at one another’s expense.

Aside from Charlie’s singular genius and musical gifts, I can tell you that he was a total sweetheart of a guy, and a loving friend and confidant to people everywhere. His musicianship was surpassed only by his greater gift to the world – his warmth, his generosity, his unquenchable humor, and his undying loyalty to those whom he loved. In the spirit of honorable mention, however, I should mention that he had a shoe collection that was marvelous, knowledge of hip-hop that was profound, and knowledge of wine that was subtle.

He is survived by a sister, a neice, a nephew, his mother, his stepfather, me, and more adoring friends than the Universe has dark matter. As such, his family and I ask for your discretion and consideration of our privacy during these extremely turbulent waters.

Reflections on the news from CDM contributor Liz McLean Knight:

Fairenheit Far Away: Charlie Cooper of Telefon Tel Aviv will be missed [Liz Revision]

I certainly wish to respect the privacy of his family and friends, but I suspect that his musical celebrity is such that some of the details of this tragedy may inevitably become public. XLR8R.com points to a CBS Chicago report that he went missing last Wednesday night; an autopsy is scheduled.

RIP Telefon Tel Aviv’s Charlie Cooper [XLR8R.com]

Elsewhere:

Our friend Charlie Cooper from Telefon Tel Aviv has passed away. An unstable time caused by concrete facts and when it is decided that things have settled – it is we who have changed.

A Friend Passes [TRASH_AUDIO]

My heartfelt condolences to Charlie’s family and friends. The musical world will miss one of its great innovators and creative spirits.

I’d certainly welcome thoughts and memories from readers and ways in which we can honor his memory. Feel free to leave ideas in comments.

Sad news has arrived via Scott Looney:

I have the sad news to report that STEIM’s founder Michel Waisvisz died peacefully in his home last night "after fighting the mean cells in his body for eight months" – which i assume is a reference to the cancer he had been battling. Michel developed one of the very first alternative controllers in the 1970’s called the Hands and subsequently the Krakdoos – aka the Cracklebox. He subsequently founded STEIM and served as its head for 27 years, and inspired many musicians and improvisers around the globe.

Obituary at STEIM:

Michel Waisvisz

I imagine STEIM will accept gifts in his honor, but haven’t yet seen details. Our condolences to the friends and family of a brilliant visionary.

Tristram is credited by some as the father of tape music, originating tape music techniques in World War II. He’s notorious to the general public and sci fi fans as the composer of the music for the Daleks in Doctor Who (along with other music) — like an evil counterpart to Delia Derbyshire, who built the studio Cary would later use. But he was also a pivotal composer of music for film, electronics, voice, and instrument alike, a well-known Australian music critic, a leading figure in studios and academies, and, oh, yeah, he did the visual design (product design, really) for the legendary portable VCS3 "Putney" synth from EMS, the synth maker of which he was a founding Director.

It’s safe to say that, out of this web of contributions to electronic sound, Tristram Cary is another of those people who charted the course for what music technology is today. From the technology to his extensive music to his work in popularizing musique concrete in England, his impact is felt even by those who don’t know his name.

Christian Haines writes to let us know of Tristram passing, evidently following a long illness.

If you don’t know his work, there’s no time like the present to discover what he’s given us.

Official Tristram Cary Site

Wikipedia article, with lots of references and an extensive composition list

Resources at the Australian Music Centre

EMS, the "Moog Music of England", lives on (apologies to our UK readers, but Americans are just discovering EMS); see also the Synthi blog

And for a little Tristram Cary listening:

Trios LP by Tristram Cary (EMS) is a trio of EMS synth plus turntables; full tracks on the Synthi blog courtesy the composer. Really brilliant sounds:

And, you know, looking at all of this I’m reminded of why things like the Dalek connection are important. For whatever reason, mysterious science fiction worlds have been the entry point for listeners around the world into the sometimes alien and frightening new timbres of electronic music. We’re all lucky enough to have grown up in a time in which we’re challenged to create music that evokes other parts of the universe, real and imaginary.

Christian sends along a complete obituary provided by the Director of the Elder Conservatorium, David Lockett:

Tristram was born in Oxford on 14th May 1925. He served in the Royal Navy from 1943-6, specialising in radar and thereby receiving training in electronics. During his war service he independently developed the idea of what was to become tape music, and began experimenting as soon as he was released from the Navy in late 1946. From 1954 he found himself able to live by score commissions, and from that time produced a large variety of concert works and scores for theatre, radio, film, TV, public exhibitions etc.

He was founder (in 1967) of the electronic music studio at the Royal College of Music, and designed and built his own electronic music facility, one of the longest established private studios in the world. The equipment from this studio was brought to Australia, and most of it was incorporated into the expanding teaching studio at the University of Adelaide. He was also a founder Director of EMS (London) Ltd, and co-designer of the VCS3 (Putney) Synthesiser and other EMS products. He called upon a wide range of resources for generating film, TV, theatre, radio or concert music, special dialogue treatments, or anything in the area of specialised sound. His wide experience as a composer included all aspects of instrumental and vocal ensemble, any facet of electronic music, or combinations of several types.

Tristram played a pivotal role within the Elder Conservatorium until 1986, when he left the University to resume self-employment. During 1988-90, he was largely occupied with writing a major book on music technology which was published in London as The Illustrated Compendium of Musical Technology in May 1992 (Faber & Faber). The American version – substituting Dictionary for Compendium – is distributed by Greenwood Press, Connecticut.

In 1995 and 96 there were performances in London and Adelaide to mark his 70th birthday, and a new suite based on his music for the Ealing film The Ladykillers won The Gramophone Award for best film music CD in 1998.

Apart from composition activity, Tristram was a respected music critic for The Australian newspaper. In recent years he held the position of Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide, in which capacity he continued his computer music research. In 2001 the University also conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Music. In 1991 he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for services to Australian music. In 1999 he received the SA Great Music Award for the year, and Symphony Australia commissioned a new work – Scenes from a Life – to mark his 75th birthday in 2000. He received the Adelaide Critics Circle 2005 Lifetime Achievement Award on December 5, 2005.

Bebe Barron’s work went well beyond Forbidden Planet, however. She went on to produce music for film, tape, and technology well into her later life. She was an early leader of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music, and continued — with her husband, and as a solo composer following his death — to lead the way in finding new compositional purposes for electronic sound. (And apparently even seduction through witchcraft! Viva electronics!)

We’ve seen a lot of obituaries in the three and a half years of this site; there’s no question that a generation of composers is passing into history. Bebe died of natural causes at age 82. I was struck by a quote from Barry Schrader, who called her "the last of the pioneering composers of classical studio electronic music." That may be, but listening to Bebe’s sounds and ideas, I wonder what the next generations might still be capable of pioneering, and who will take up the radical element from 1950s and 60s sound and bring it into the coming decades.

The best insight I’ve heard into the Barron’s work comes from a 2005 interview with Bebe on NPR’s Morning Edition:

The Barrons: Forgotten Pioneers of Electronic Music

Matrixsynth has an enormous obituary with lots of background information — a must-read:

RIP Bebe Barron

And here’s Bebe’s last interview, from the beginning of this year, speaking about Anais Nin. That’s poignant to me — my great aunt and uncle were part of the New York circle that ran with Anais Nin and crowd. It’s a reminder to value your crazy and radical creative friends, to keep supporting what they’re doing to enjoy the short time we all have to make art.

Anais Nin has the best quote — she described the Barrons’ music as sounding like "a molecule that has stubbed its toes."

Few names inspire love from digital musicians quite like Elektron, makers of the Monomachine, Machinedrum, and SIDstation drum machines. So when Elektron’s founder Daniel Hansson passed away in an auto accident last summer, it came as a shock to the tightly-knit, passionate musical community who loved his work and lost him too young. (It didn’t help that it came within weeks of the loss of Argu, the ingenious discoDSP and Image-Line software developer, also in a car accident.)

Tragedies like this are doubly sad, because in that loss we miss the opportunity to celebrate people whose work we love. So I’m pleased to be able to talk about a celebration of Daniel Hansson today.

The artist community who use Elektron’s stuff have put together a really epic compilation of music in tribute to Daniel. It’s all user-driven — Elektron didn’t do the organizing; the musicians did. The lineup has some of our favorite people contributing, famed and obscure alike:

Autechre, Beautiful Planet Earth, Boom Bip, dDamage, Daedelus, Dntel, Erase, Emnine, Future Image, Honey Claws, How Dragons Disappear, John Starlight, Jon Martensson, John Tejada, Kero, Landstrumm, Material Object, Micronaut, Music International, Orsan Kart, Pelektor, Proxy, scutopus, TS3K, and The Brown Moth, Tiga, The Sea and Cake, TreD Grp, Van Basten, AEVSVS, Wanker’s United

Many of these (The Sea and Cake, Boom Bip, Tiga, Proxy, John Starlight and others) are exclusive tracks.

You get 30 songs for US$5, donated to Daniel’s favorite charity, the World Wildlife Fund. (Additional WWF donations are welcome.) You’re even entered to win a SIDstation. (Yeah, I know — some of you are still smarting from not having won a Tenori-On, just as I am from having had to give it away. At least here, you can lose for a good cause, which is what I intend to do.)

45tribute

Another 25 songs are available free — really free, licensed Creative Commons.

(25 + 30 does not add up to 45, it’s true — 45 was Daniel’s favorite number and was in the name of his C64 group, Zone 45.)

Help Spread the Word

The organizers don’t have a PR budget for this, so we’re their PR — and, hey, I’ll bet we can do a better job, anyway. So do spread the word around.

Thanks to Ryan Faubion, the project manager and curator, for putting this together and letting us know about it, and to forum member / compilation contributor Wendell Edwards aka scutopus for the heads-up.

Musician, composer, and musique concrete artist Henri Chopin has died, writes Seth:

he has been and remains a figure whose sound work is very important to me, so i thought i’d share it with you all.

he was a sound poet who used reel-to-reel tape as his paper, performance instrument, and collaborator.

Chopin is lesser-known than some artists even in the concrete world, so if you don’t know his work, there’s no time like the present to discover it — quite a lot is available online.

Videos and comments at WFMU Beware of the Blog

Lots and Lots of Sound Files at UbuWeb

His work spanned more than just experiments with audio tape, as a graphic and visual artist and even a typographer. His poems took striking shape as visual art, like the dagger formed with a typewriter, at right (via the dbqp blog, below). As a magazine publisher, he brought together works by characters from William S. Burroughs to the Fluxus gang. I have to admit, much as I love some of the power of the blog world, I don’t think we have anything approaching the insane avant-garde magazines of the 20th Century. (But, then, maybe we’re just waiting for the 21st Century’s Erik Satie. Or maybe we need to spend more time learning from the likes of Chopin — Henri Chopin, that is.)

So far, I see these obituaries; please feel free as always to add other comments, memories, reflections, or links. Via Harriet, we learn that Chopin died peacefully at home with his family in England at age 85:

Henri Chopin (1922-2008) [obituary by Kenneth Goldsmith, Harriet blog (Poetry Foundation)]

Tribute to Henri Chopin [Soul Sphincter]

When Sound Ends, Vision Endures [words, images, and more following his death, from dbqp: visualizing poetics]

And you think you can do strange things on a mic? Watch this:

Now, some of this makes some sense. Yottamusic itself was a creation of Rhapsody. In fact, the logical next step would be to ditch Rhapsody’s clunky, obnoxious interface with animated album covers and whatnot, and learn from Yottamusic’s cooler social features and sleeker interface. Let’s see, did th– nope. Why kill bad ideas and maintain the good ones when you can do the reverse?

It’s hard not to feel like subscription-based music in general is not long for this world. MTV’s Urge, ironically the service that had been touted for having the best interface, was folded into Rhapsody last year. With the loss of Yottamusic, choices in general are poor. Yahoo Music has poor editorial content and selection and a painfully-clunky music player. Microsoft’s Zune subscription service is tied to that player; you can’t even download the software without a Zune of your own. And even Microsoft is pushing DRM-free downloads for Zune more than subscriptions these days. Rhapsody has Web compatibility, TiVo integration, better editorial, and better selection. But its Web interface is painful and sometimes unstable, and its music player has an overdesigned UI coupled with only bare-bones features. (It’s also still unsupported on Vista.) Napster, like Rhapsody, works in a Web browser, but has some interface and selection issues of its own. I’ve used these off and on, but to be honest, Yottamusic was the only site that really gave me a reason to keep up a Rhapsody subscription, the interfaces on these tools is so bad.

At least the good news is, DRM-free music is rolling along. Amazon.com’s MP3 store now has a whopping 2.9 million tracks, and niche stores like Beatport, Dance Tracks Digital, and the new Deutsche Grammaphon store will give you still more selection within a genre. (Apple has also been adding DRM content, but I can’t recommend the iTunes Music Store because it’s so hard to find that content.)

But I have to say, I’m at least a little sad to see subscription music services in such poor shape. Yes, the native players have worked only on Windows, and yes, people have complained about the DRM portable files from these sites employ. But I think when these services worked, it was as a self-programmed “radio station”, or as a way of sampling tracks and albums before buying without having to listen to short samples or downgraded audio. In either of those cases, you don’t really care about DRM because you don’t need to move the file, or even download it at all — streaming and Web interfaces have plenty of potential. The big difference, and the reason these services require the fee, is that they offered true, on-demand music. I still buy lots of music, but supplementing that with unlimited on-demand tunes is a good thing. Yottamusic proved that it was the implementation, not the concept, that needed to be revisited. For that, I’m sorry to see it go — and I really hope someone aside from me noticed how good it was.

Must-read, as far as the history of this stuff:

Interview with Yottamusic’s Luke Matkins [Getcha Info!]