I think that live streaming will play a big part in the future of music performance. Having spent an entire year of my life driving and flying around just to be able to reach new audiences in a single country, it pains me to think how comparatively simple it would have been to organize streaming shows to reach those fans.
Commencing in about 12 hours, Visionsonic 2009 showcases Audiovisual artists from around the world. The Thursday show is “for Young Audiences”, but I’ll definitely be watching The Odyssey of Rick the Cube.
Autonomous bassline generators? Wireless, modular, infrared sync? Tiny drum machines networking together? Welcome to Texas, and the minds of Eric Archer, Bleep Labs, 4ms Pedals, the Church of the Friendly Ghost, and Andromeda Space Rockers.
One look at a floor full of blinking circuits, and most ladies and gentleman might assume they’ve stumbled upon some alien technology. “Imagine the things we could learn from this civilization – advancements far beyond our own,” as the stock line from sci fi goes. “Man and woman are not meant to learn such things. You’re meddling in things beyond your comprehension.”
In other words, you couldn’t build something like this, right?
Or could you?
In Austin, Texas, Eric, Dann, and Dr. Bleep are launching a new Handmade Music series, kicking it off with kits and classes so that anyone – including beginners – can start building stuff. For the 101 crowd, there’s a free beginner class even if you’ve never touched a soldering iron, so you can build your own analog drum. “I’m no n00b,” you say, “impress me.” Sure – the “upper division” gets to talk more advanced synth design and walks through the full-blown modular, networkable kit.
At the end of it all is an open jam and featured performance.
If you’re anywhere near Austin, Texas – or can find a bargain plane fare – you’ll want to clear your calendar for October 18!
That’s just the first of more events to come, so stay glued to the Handmade Music site for events in Austin, New York, Portugal, Germany, and beyond.
“That’s right / you’re not from Texas / Texas wants you anyway.” For those of us in New York, Lisbon, Rio, Sydney, and Jakarta, there’s still hope. The kits will be online, and I”m looking at ways of putting together a full Handmade Music curriculum of projects online for all of us on the site we’re developing this fall, noisepages – ideas welcome.
I certainly didn’t expect to get deep into these geekier topics in high school while I was busily trying to fail Calculus and screw up science lab results in ways that baffled my teachers. But it’s a glorious age we live in, in which we get to assimilate alien technology as our own. Stay tuned.
Husband-and-wife synth duo — and Moog superfans — Nick and Anna Montoya were helping out at the Moog Music booth this year and NAMM. Their greatest responsibility: making sure synthy good vibrations emanated from all that hardware through the day. We picked up a bit of their performance, which was able to rise above the din of the trade show floor.
Yuri’s Night 2007 makes your head go all Sputink-y. Credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid.
Synths and space: they go together like chocolate and your mouth, like Sun Ra and aliens. So, it was with a heavy heart that I had to report the electronic awesomeness of Yuri’s Night, the party in celebration of space exploration at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Telefon Tel Aviv, Plaid, and circuit-bent Touch & Tells and keytars were there, but I was not. And maybe neither were you.
Enough of that, though. Organized Matt Ganucheau writes to say this year will be bigger, better, “twice the art and twice the music.” 2008 will make 2007 look like a side party at Burning Man. So, in the interest of making sure your calendar is marked and your project is submitted, here’s a call for works — and hope to see you there.
I’ve always been fascinated with the evolution of species. Ever seen those bizarre, short-lived organisms in textbooks, the ones that look like they have twelve eyes and a hundred really tall legs and a spindly tail that serves no purpose? I feel the same way about new instruments, interfaces, and music software. Sometimes it’s the evolutionary aberrations — whether practical or not — that are the most interesting, and that perhaps tell us the most about the more dominant species. (Hello, guitars.) And with an open door policy for DIY instruments, we’ve seen some wonderfully unusual experiments at the Handmade Music event series along just these lines.
Continuing our performance series, with assistance from Make Magazine and Etsy.com, we had some special guests last Sunday at openhousegallery in SoHo, New York: the Mister Resistor Ensemble. Headed by Ranjit Bhatnagar, the inventive sound artist who brought us robotic Theremins and MIDI ironing boards, this group of students from Parsons is lucky enough to spend a whole semester building fun instruments with hardware and software. The results are clearly experimental, but that’s the point. Some informal video clips:
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