NAMM08: Volt Per Octave Play the Moog Music Booth from cdm tv on Vimeo.

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.

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.

 NASA Yuri’s Night Rave: Space is the Place

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:

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

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

We see all kinds of novel controllers and input devices for music on CDM, but don’t always get the chance to see how these are used in actual music making. Uraguay-based Gustavo Bravetti is a master of live laptop performance with alternative controllers. (See previous video of him from Colombia.) He talks to Liz (aka Quantazelle, a laptop virtuoso herself) about the scene on the other side of the Americas and how he’s able to fire up crowds with unusual performance techniques, via three-axis light control and the P5 interactive glove. And, really, we didn’t put him up to all the plugs for this site — I’m much more excited to find out how people are able to use some of these resources in front of an audience! So, Gustavo, we’re thrilled to learn about what you’re doing. Take it away, Liz. -PK

What’s the scene like in Montevideo / Uruguay? How does it compare to other locations? Is it conducive for you to work?

Uruguay is a very small country, we have just 4 million people, and the electronic scene is growing and getting smarter. I think that thanks to the internet, we are updated in what concerns to music and technology, we also are well informed on the global scene, that wouldn’t be possible without the invaluable tool that is the internet. Anyway, the Internet is a double sided weapon, and must be handled with care.

I’m a very positive person. I think that any scene is conductive for my work, especially in “your own city’s scene.” I mean, if they know you from the neighborhood, they will be harder to impress, and therefore will be more people that will criticize you, but if you take the good part of this, it would be positive for your work.

Music itself may be ephemeral, but it’s deeply connected to the spaces in which it’s performed and heard. You’ll notice that space all the more readily if it’s, say, a giant, cavernous grain silo, and you can access the space not only in person but over the Internet. And, really, you can’t call yourself an audiophile if you don’t have a grain silo handy for listening.

JollyRogered writes with this gem from the Audiooddities list. It’s a chance to hear an online performance of the digitally-connected grain silo, the Silophone:

Announcing a special online performance by Lee Rosevere, scheduled for July 16, 2007 at 9:30pm EST.

The performance will be an exclusive live internet event, where Lee will perform new original material from his home studio and stream it to the Silophone.

The Silo #5 is an abandoned grain storage facility in the port of Montréal. From the website:

Yes, the Theremin can sound bluesy. In case you haven’t seen this, here’s a wonderfully-done rendition of Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy, on Moog Etherwave Pro (recently discontinued, sadly, though maybe it’ll come back in some form), iZotope Trash for effects, Akai MPC1000, Moog Minimoog Voyager, and … actually, not sure about the keyboard. Got distracted by the general awesomeness. Theremin musicianship is on the rise!

Cee-lo will like it, I think. Watch to the end for an unusual Google + Wikipedia salute to the genius of Leon Theremin. (Yep, Google is your friend.)

Thanks to (corrected link) Jason at boozhoundlabs.com, and SNAG.

These guys are also doing a whole Theremin video series — we’ll be watching. (Check out their full description at the YouTube page.)

Robosonic Eclectic: Morton Subotnik, They Might Be Giants, and robotic musical instruments on the same bill? That … doesn’t happen very often. But it does happen this weekend, starting tonight.

With a lineup that includes They Might Be Giants, JG Thirlwell, Mort Subotnick, George Lewis, R. Luke DuBois and J. Brendan Adamson, Lemurplex is kicking off what looks like a really packed couple of weeks of music and research into new instruments here in New York this weekend. Check out the TMBG video and JG Thirwell clip for a teaser of what’s to come. I’ll be there, so say hi if you, uh, know what I look like. (And thanks to all of you who’ve been saying hello at various events. It’s always great to know who’s out there reading.)

League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots

Lemurplex, incidentally, is a terrific place to go learn this stuff if you can find a way to come to New York — not only musical robotics, but music tech in general. See also Harvestworks, which regularly has people in from other lands around the world for residencies / learning / etc. Not everything happens in New York, of course; I hope to put together an up-to-date list of educational venues beyond academia around the globe soon.

Flyer after the jump.

MAKE:Magazine and Create Digital Music will co-host the Chips + Fish + Music Maker Faire Party next Saturday in San Francisco. But before we get to that, I have to share the latest design from CDM’s visual artist Nat Jeanneret (the reason CDM looks the way it does, and the blogger behind onetonnemusic):

If you are in the Bay Area, or coming into town for the awesomeness that is the Maker Faire, we would love to invite you to the party.

What: Chips + Fish + Music Party, the Maker Faire “after party”
Brought to you by: MAKE:Magazine and CDM
Who: Anyone making their own music with chips (little chips, big chips, Intel Core Duo chips), or anyone who loves to eat chips and/or fish. Makers from the Faire, locals, visitors all welcome.
When: Saturday, May 19. 7:00 pm - 9:30 pm: featured music sets. 9:30 pm - whenever: hang, DIY musical show-and-tell, eat fish and/or chips.
Where: Edinburgh Castle Pub, 950 Geary St. San Francisco, CA. 415-885-4074. (5pm - 2 am; map.)
Why: Because we love DIY music, whether it’s customized hardware, self-made software, or just lovingly-programmed commercial gear and apps.

And there’s more: I’m looking for a couple of additional featured sets, lots more partygoers, and also have a music lineup to share Friday night at Robotspeak (more performances than party there):

Being an international music superstar means you can tour with whatever fun toys you like. In the case of Bjork’s new Volta tour, that means the JazzMutant Lemur multi-touch interface and, even more fun, the fantastic reacTable, a research project involving projection and multiple objects for a tangible interactive table experience! CDM reader Mike Cohen smuggled this video out of a recent Bjork performance:

It really does work nicely in action, in terms of expressing to the audience what the performer is doing, and making nice eye candy, to boot.

More details on Bjork’s futuristic touring rig:
multitouched bjork [Byron Scullin blog]

And, of course, a big report from Boing Boing celebrity Xeni Jardin, which I’m way behind on linking as it posted 4/28:
Coachella: Björk’s wild sound machines, and report from the turf [Boing Boing]

It’s funny, but despite endless blog coverage of devices like the reacTable, some dating back before the creation of CDM, it sometimes takes a celebrity like Bjork for other people to notice the instrument. Then again, many electronic instruments have been popularized over the years by big names (Moog gear by Keith Emerson and Wendy Carlos, Fairlight CMI by Peter Gabriel, etc., etc., in a list too long to recount). So, perhaps this is something big for tangible interfaces. I noticed blocks were big at ITP last night. I think these devices just have a long way to go in terms of general accessibility and expressiveness, at least for mass music making; most importantly, they have to work on those two points in ways that can be reproduced by lots of people, if not in a commercial product, in a DIY implementation. But it’ll be interesting to watch, as always. And Bjork certainly demonstrates how to rock the instrument.

Adding to our running tally of totally geeky events, electronic musician Chachi Jones writes with a report from the Yuri’s Night party at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Sure, Yuri’s Night events, in honor of the great space explorer cosmonaut, take place all over the world. But when it hits Ames, you get a full-blown rave — and fantastic electronic music, to boot.

Among others, Plaid and Telefon Tel Aviv made appearances. Chachi jumped into his flight suit with his circuit-bent Touch & Tell and Korg Kaoss Pad, which makes a nice mobile music setup. Also spotted: a toy keytar running through a ghetto blaster, our friend Steve Cooley’s space suit and jetpack, lots of space pr0n, and a spaced-out stage anyone would kill to play.

Check out the evidence, and you’ll no doubt be as jealous as I am:

Chachi’s flickr set (as pictured above); full flickr pool

cnet TV: NASA’s Space Rave

Yuri’s Night Coverage Links from the official party site

(NASA didn’t officially endorse the event, presumably in fear we’d see them as really cool, or aligned with the CCCP.)

If you’re looking to hold your own space party, see Create Digital Motion on 3D space video and photos of the sun.