Alex Nowitz for BodyControlled #2 from CDM on Vimeo.

Electronic media artist Mario de Vega (Mexico City/Berlin) says his work plays with the creation of “unstable systems.” As part of the official Vorspiel, or lead-up, to Berlin’s massive Transmediale festival, here we get to visit two artists working with the materiality of live performance, drawing from the festival theme of “in/compatible.” The sonic environments they create seem poised on the brink of sonic chaos, a dance at the edge of entropy.

CDM will again be editorial co-presenter of BodyControlled; you can see the show for free (donation suggested) in Berlin at LEAP, or tune into the live video stream from anywhere in the world, and we’ll be bringing you details of the artwork. We’re a ticket to Alexanderplatz that’s even cheaper than easyJet, in other words. The performances start at 20h CET Thursday, 26 January. (That’s 2p East Coast time / 11a Pacific, so scare your office mates and turn it up loud.) Full details below.

At top, composer/singer Alex Nowitz demonstrates his gestural performance techniques. I got to see his work for the first time at the Patterns + Pleasure Festival in the fall at Amsterdam’s STEIM research center. While at STEIM, Nowitz built on previous work with the Wii remote, and augmented his gestures with a new instrument, entitled the “Strophonion.” You can see that creation in the video above.

With each contortion of his body, Nowitz rips apart sounds, all while sputtering non-lingual utterances with his gymnastic voice. In the Amsterdam performance, one had the sense of following him into the Schwarzwald (Black Forest), an operatic odyssey echoing with forboding birdsong. But the system can also be dynamic and even, at moments, whimsical.

steim.org/projectblog/?p=3715
nowitz.de/

For his part, Mario de Vega’s “unstable systems” flirt even more with this notion of engineered incompatibility, with sounds that seem like they will explode in an earthquake-like tremor.

Mario de Vega for BodyControlled #2 from CDM on Vimeo.

mariodevega.info/

Films by João Pais, co-curator of the series; edited by CDM.

Also on this program, more works engage the idea of what the curatorial statement terms “hidden acoustics”:

Echo Ho (Canada/Cologne, DE)

Tuned to Site #26012012
This title is from a series of concerts, called “Tuned to Site #…”. As a whole, the series formulates the idea of “musification of urban landscapes”.
In the first performance of this series in 2012 Echo Ho will play a set of instruments: a self-fabricated hybrid semblance of the ancient Qin from China, which combines traditional acoustic and digital interfaces in one unique transparent plexiglas body. Like a sensor box, it will enable Echo Ho to make field recordings of inaudible hidden sounds within
the city environment, such as electro-magnetic fields, variation and wind movements. The performance thus marks the process of generating action by outlining situations in which sounds may occur.

http://www.echoho.net/

Ignaz Schick (DE)
Turntablist, sound artist, performer & composer Schick promises, through motors and objects, genuine accidents:

Site-specific performance with transducers, wireless controllers, feedback systems and back tape
Through accidents and their outcomes, actions, processes and objects that conceptually connect with acoustic information, the work of Mario de Vega researches the value of vulnerability, exploring the causes and effects that determine the construction of realities. In this site-specific performance with transducers, wireless controllers, feedback systems and back tape, de Vega is investigating aesthetic and social realms through a multiplicity of mediums.

http://www.zangimusic.de

Co-curator João Pais tells CDM that this installment, in keeping with Transmediale’s theme, will “give the performers a room where they can show their ways of working with the dissociation of matter (through sound, in this case) and expression.” Pais co-curates the event with Daniel Franke of LEAP.

This episode includes two self-made instruments that expand on existing practice, he says, in the case of Nowitz and Ho, and the hacked and modulated machines of Schick and Vega.

More information; where to see the show

26 January 2012, 20h (free/donation)

Show details

Anywhere in the world – all performances will be available from 20.00 CET via live stream:
http://bit.ly/uXRgyq

Facebook: on.fb.me/AmEtO9

LEAP
Lab for Electronic Arts and Performance
(Berlin Carré, 1. Stock)
Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 13
10178 Berlin

How to find LEAP

Revealing a deeper understanding of what sound means in our world, how it works as “currency” and “ghost,” Performance Artist Christine Sun Kim explores sonic media without the benefit of hearing. She finds how to make its presence more physical, to find greater dimensions of movement, and to make a personal connection beyond what most of us might find in the everyday sense. As she describes it to NOWNESS:

There are social norms surrounding sound that form our speech development and our way of handling sound with care. They’re so deeply ingrained that, in a sense, our identities cannot be complete without sound.

In a beautiful short film, you can watch her process in her studio, thanks to filmmaker Todd Selby:

Cult photographer and filmmaker Todd Selby’s latest short is a revealing portrait of performance artist Christine Sun Kim. Deaf from birth, Kim turned to using sound as a medium during an artist residency in Berlin in 2008, and has since developed a practice of lo-fi experimentation that aims to re-appropriate sound by translating it into movement and vision. “It’s a lot more interesting to explore a medium that I don’t have direct access to and yet has the most direct connection to society at large,” says the artist. “Social norms surrounding sound are so deeply ingrained that, in a sense, our identities cannot be complete without it.” Selby filmed an exclusive performance from Kim in a Brooklyn studio as the artist played with field recordings of the street sounds of her Chinatown neighborhood, feedback and helium balloons, and made “seismic calligraphy” drawings from ink- and powder-drenched quills, nails and cogs dancing across paper to the vibrations of subwoofers beneath. Working with sound designer Arrow Kleeman, Selby carefully choreographed the film’s ambient score to reveal the Orange County native’s unique relationship with sound. “Her work deals with reclaiming sound because it’s a foreign world to her and one she’s not comfortable in,” explains Selby. “I wanted the film to act as an artistic conduit for her to tell her story to the world.”

Interview, via NOWNESS Facebook Page

Via our friend Rucyl on Saturn Never Sleeps, by way of Rashid Zakat’s The Awesome Farm.

Todd Selby x Christine Sun Kim [Nowness.com]

I was once a speaker at DEAF, which stands for Dublin Electronic Arts Festival. Not thinking, I told the customs officer in Ireland that I was a musician attending the DEAF Festival. He had some cheeky comment. In this context, of course, what he took for granted can take on an entirely different meaning. If you have background in understanding accessibility and design, for people with different sense capabilities in vision and sound alike, I’d love to hear them. The world of sound technology most of us inhabit describes a very narrow range of expectations for vision and sight.

In performance and art, sound and music constantly pull against the formless abstraction of the computer, to find physical expression and realization. In physical control, in tangible production, and in exploration of space, artists explore techniques new and old to refine the still-youthful medium of electronic and digital sound. That adventure is at the heart of a new series at a gallery space in the heart of Berlin, LEAP – the Lab for Electronic Arts and Performance, at Alexanderplatz.

I’m pleased to announce that CDM will be partnering with this new performance/exhibition series, entitled BodyControlled, as a media partner. In the shadow of Berlin’s Fernsehturm (TV tower), we’ll get the chance to share the work of an international roster of artists with everyone else, both in live streams and other documentation, as we look at some of the more experimental threads in electronic music today. (I like the symbolism there, at least, now broadcast over the Internets instead of via the air.) Berlin, like my previous home New York, is a convenient international crossroads, a place where you can find face-to-face some of the work from other parts of Germany, Europe, and beyond.

And I think we’re going to have a real blast kicking the series off this Saturday night, 8pm Berlin time November 26. The premiere of the series begins with installations and performances that manipulate spaces, real, virtual, and imagined. New works make noises with reel-to-reel tape, code, mechanical percussion, and more. I’ll be playing a live set with Pd, producing granular architectures from the harmonious sounds of piano and synth. And a highlight promises to be Robert Henke (of Monolake and Ableton fame, among other things), performing an epic 12-hour performance from just before midnight to morning the next day. (That leaves ample time for visitors to slip off to Berlin’s legendary club scene – or a nap – then see how things have evolved after dawn, if you so choose.)

Here, we take a first look at some of the artists, whose work can be sculptural, challenging, and adventurous. In the first preview videos, we see artists working with the mechanical qualities of tape and robotically-driven percussion to make sounds in physical space. A diverse program is slated for the coming months, too, so I can promise some diversity in ideas and aesthetic. The lineup:

Performances on the 26th November:
Stephen Cornford & Paul Whitty (UK)
Peter Kirn (US)
Robert Henke (DE)

Installations until 2nd December:
Stephen Cornford (UK)
Julian Oliver (NZ)
João Martinho Moura (PT)
Robert Mathy (AT)

Additionally, a recording of Robert Henke’s performance will be played as part of the installation

Let’s have a closer look at some of the upcoming work:

Stephen Cornford, in Binatone Galaxy, spotlights the strangely-beautiful sounds of the mechanisms of tape players, moving them from playback devices into the realm of being themselves instruments. Listen to the video above to hear what a chorus of recycled tape players sounds like, courtesy amplification.

Playing with Paul Whitty, Cornford also makes tape players into noise-making live instruments. One such performance below, though expect each of these to take on their own identity in Berlin this week.

At top, Robert Mathy’s work effectively becomes a “score” for a space, as percussion sets the environment into a choreographed set of sounds. (See also work like David Byrne’s Playing the Building project, which transformed an old ferry building in Manhattan. Here, Mathy works on a smaller scale.)

Volume consists of 24 electronic motors mounted on surfaces with different materiality, which are part of the exhibition room. Each motor is equipped with a small metal spike. When a motor gets activated, the spike knocks on the surface of the object on which the motor is mounted and produce a specific sound. All Motors are connected to a main control, which consists of an Arduino board and some electronic parts.
The score is composed of a series of varying random algorithms. They are diversified in temporal and spatial coordination, as every sound has his individual origin in space. The score is adapted in a new way for every room where the installation is shown.

João Martinho Moura‘s “Supercollider Shape,” above, is a minimal virtual sculpture of sound and imagined ink.

Robert Henke’s program notes:

The music of Robert Henke is preoccupied with the present: how something sounds in that moment and what color and substance convey a rhythmic phrase? Music as a state. Only later will this condition be formulated over time. The artist’s installations are always explicit and in turn relate to the phenomena of temporal change.

The work Microsphere, developed for LEAP, combines both fields and explores the boundaries between installation and live performance. Acoustic sounds from percussion instruments distributed throughout the room are recorded during the performance, slowed down repeatedly, atomized into tiny particles and distributed to many speakers. Over the course of twelve hours, more and more sounds are produced and the result is an ever-growing repertoire of spatial-tonal gestures. The composer withdraws from the machine and lets it develop and change itself constantly over long periods of time. The structure of the performance arises from many variable and instantaneous decisions during the performance. The possible outcomes may be small and delicate, almost inaudible and static, or loud, brutal and full of complex repetitions.

Watch the performances

From anywhere in the world:

Tune in 8p (20h) Saturday (CET) / UTC + 1. Performances at 9p, 10p, and then 11p – 11a. Livestream link:
http://www.livestream.com/leapberlin

In Berlin:

While we remain committed to covering this for the rest of the planet, for those handful of you in Berlin, of course, we’d love to see you in person.

Facebook event

Opening and Performances | 26th November 2011 – 20.00

Exhibition | 28th November 2011 – 2nd December 2011, 12h-18h

LEAP
Lab for Electronic Arts and Performance
(Berlin Carré 1. Stock)
Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 13
10178 Berlin

FREE entry

LEAP isn’t the easiest place to find. Here’s a video to guide you in the door (add the Benny Hill theme music if you feel it’s appropriate):

And, as I say so often … stay tuned.

Full program notes [English] [PDF]
http://www.leapknecht.de/

“Panzer” is beyond any mobile studio you’ve ever seen. It’s basically a tank with speakers and a cockpit containing beat-making gear. (Mackie mixer, Roland sampler, Akai MPC, Korg KAOSS, as near as I can see, plus … the machinery to drive the tank.)

From the description:

Minidumper, Holz, Stahl, Kunstharz, Glasfaser, Audioequipment, Sound
2011

And to make sure it’ll fit in your garage:
H 250 cm x L 350 cm x B 140 cm

Nik Nowak, born in Mainz and based here in Berlin, has a whole portfolio of re-imagined speakers and motorcycles and flames and I’m glad I’m not a curator or art critic because I would be tempted to use phrases like “installations made completely of awesome.”

Nik, if you’re out there, please tell me you still have this and can drive it out to an event. Otherwise, I’ll come to you. Just don’t shoot … or … boom or whatever.

I was going to add the images to this story, but I’m not sure I want to see a takedown notice from Nik. It might actually set me on fire.

Also, Alesis IO Dock: eat your heart out.

http://www.niknowak.de/
http://www.niknowak.de/images/panzer.htm

Alternatively (thanks, Beetlenaut):

Drasko Vucevic, Toronto- and Santa Monica (California)-based sound designer and artist/composer, is apparently not only interested in playing alone. His upcoming interactive installation at Toronto’s Royal Music Conservatory will have an audience jamming along live via Twitter. And the artistry is crowd-sourced, too – with a range of artists already onboard, Drasko is calling on musical and visual artists (read: you) to be involved with sounds and visuals.

Drasko has sent along extensive notes, so I’m going to let him speak for himself:

I am working through both Drastic Music and Eksperimental (my companies) to create an interactive installation experience for this year’s TEDx Toronto conference taking place at the Royal Music Conservatory.

I am also doing an interactive music performance – an audio visual performance with a complete 3d/visual journey, which allows the audience (physical and digital) to collaborate with me by triggering audio and video elements in real time through their tweets.
So far, I have a few great artists contributing their time to create some beautiful visuals for this first of its kind interactive real-time jam.

Installation [Call for Audio]:
The installation concept is based around redefining collaboration. We are doing this by using real-time data (motion, color, sound, light) and tweets relating to TEDx to trigger, control, manipulate and compose audio elements on our back-end audio library (ableton). This is all happening through Processing, Max 5, Arduino, Ableton.

The massive back-end sound library contains loops, melodies, soundscapes, fx, you name it – produced by some great artists. The beauty of this is also that artists which have never before collaborated, will be remixed and mashed up solely by the audience, in relation to key words, discussions, movement, etc.

So far, the artists contributing audio content are:

Yoko K
Trifonic
Richard Devine
Drumcell
Audioandroid
David Della Santa
Darrin Wiener
Audionerve
Box of Toys
Lodewijk Vos
Matt Davis
Adrian Ellis
Andrew Lauzon
Drasko V

Performance [Visual Call]:

As I mentioned, my performance will be very interactive, musically and visually. Both audio and video elements will be triggered based on tweets in real time. I have some great visual artists contributing their time, such as Murat Pak, Yongsub, Charlie Vicetto, etc, but am looking for more, to create elements for the performance. They would of course get the great exposure of TEDx brand, be mentioned everywhere online, and will be in the final video spread throughout blogs once we launch the digital music version.

So how does the call for works … work?

The TEDxToronto conference is on September 23. Here’s how all the pieces come together for that and how to submit:

Musical system uses a massive library of sound structures – loops, melodies, fx, soundscapes and more – triggered and manipulated solely by tweets (relating to TEDxToronto) and motion, color, sound and light within the RCM venue.

Over 12 compositions will be recorded on the day of the conference. The arrangement, structure and sounds used will depend only on the key words used in tweets, the types of emotional replies, and physical interactivity within the venue.

Beauty of having some great artists be remixed and mashed up by the general public, in a very subliminal way. (again – Through their emotional replies, and physical movement)

This posting is a call to artists who may wish to apply to contribute their audio content and be a part of the soundtrack we will create that day. They should contact drasko (at) drasticmusic (dot) com with a link to their portfolio and we will take it from there.

Our installation progress may be followed on my personal site (drasko-v.com) or via Drastic Music or Eksperimental blogs.

We plan to expand the installation idea and bring it online for an ever-changing musical universe manipulated by truly organic methods (digitally and physically).

Interested to see how this will all come together. We’ll be watching. If you submit, and if you attend, let us know how it goes.

More on Drasko:
http://drasko-v.com/

In a responsive, real-time sculpture, the simple sonic qualities of a rainstick become electronically enhanced. Rainlith, a “kinetic sound art” work by Rui Gato, makes the rainstick itself robotic, its sounds transformed in space in a way that is itself sculptural. Responding to movement in the space using Microsoft’s Kinect, the apparatus is a geektastic brew of just about every tool you could imagine involved in this sort of construction.

The artist shares full details, reproduced here in both English and Portugese – and Rui, thanks for sending this in:

Rainlith 2 – Kinectic sound art piece.

On Rainlith, the primitive naturally granular sound of a big rainstick gets explored in real-time by cyber-age sound manipulation tools.
It’s an interactive piece in witch the movement of the audience’s body activates an electric motor, making a reflex movement on the structure that embraces the instrument.
The sound of the rainstick is captured and processed in realtime, and sent 24 meters above, filling the empty space of a old industrial cereal container. The reverberated acoustic mix is then received back by the audience in the spot right below the opening of the container.

Na peça Rainlith o som primitivo, naturalmente granular, de um pau de chuva é explorado por ferramentas modernas de sound design, em tempo real.
É uma peça interactiva em que o movimento do corpo do público activa um motor eléctrico, provocando um movimento reflexo na estrutura que sustenta o instrumento.
O som captado em tempo real é processado e enviado 24 metros acima, enchendo o espaço de um silo de cereais industrial. A mistura acústica reverberada é absorvida pelo visitante no local imediatamente abaixo da abertura do silo.

hardware:

microsoft kinect
arduino duemilanove
H-bridge (hand made)
24v 6A DC motor
CPU
zoom H4N
FM emitter / receiver
ion ipa3 portable speaker

software:

MAX/MSP
Max for Live
OSCeleton
OpenNI
Nite
toxiclibs

agradecimentos especiais:

Nicola Henriques
Susana Luiz
Luís Pereira
Paulo Carocinho
André Sier
Daniel Coimbra
Ruben Santos

By the way, if you’re intrigued by the potential of Kinect, be sure to read sister site Create Digital Motion for more. Just today, we have news of a new version of EyesWeb that could be relevant to musical use:
EyesWeb, Powerful Computer Vision Software for Windows, Adds Kinect Support, Fixes, More

Digital or analog, the essence of recording and production is the act of representing. One thing becomes another; one medium stores information about another. That representation can also be physical, tangible, and visible. In a sculptural pianola, Akko Goldenbeld turns the Dutch city of Eindhoven into a pianola roll, so that the landscape of buildings and streets acts as a physical musical score. I think it raises some questions about whether translating the one into the other obscures the experience of a city rather than clarifies it, but that would discount the act of watching it: with the visual connected to the sound, one begins to see the topography of the resulting music.

From the description on the video:

The tall buildings in the city centre have a heavy touch; the low-rise villas to the South create considerably gentler sounds. Akko Goldenbeld has a very personal way of looking at, or rather listening to the city.

He has created a scale model of Eindhoven and assigned it the role of sound recorder; the buildings create a score. Placed on a revolving wooden cylinder the buildings set little hammers in motion that play the keys of a piano. And turning and turning, the city makes its voice heard: from loud to soft, long to short, high-pitched to low, traslating the urban developers’s three-dimensional reality into an aural experience. Stadsmuziek (City Music) makes you tune in to the ensemble-playing that is environemental planning.

Via a terrific blog dedicated to data visualization (and, here, sonification) and their relation to design, Infosthetics. (Say that three times fast. Infosthetics sells aesthetic sensibilities by the seashore… Yesth, indeed. I’m glad this is a blog and not radio. It’s eight minutes past the hour. This is CDM.)

Granular synthesis, as described by Iannis Xenakis, imagined sound as constructed from elementary elements. In the work of Zimoun, elementary sonic grains are physical. An undulating wall of cardboard rubs surfaces against one another to form a chorus of sound. Cotton balls roll against boxes in throaty clouds of sound. Wires wriggle like some sort of insect antennae. Below, the newest video of his work, in which cardboard petals form an animated wall of rustling noise.

The results, powered by simple DC motors in kinetic musical action, recall some kind of natural, organic colony. Assembled in structures sculptural and architectural, this is real-world synthesis, constructed mechanically in motion.

The work is elegant, graceful, and witty, not cold and aggressive as are so many sound works. The sounds can be delicate – even assemblages of electric fans.

Zimoun is a Swiss artist whose work has been presented around the US and Europe. He also records music, some of it in surround.

http://www.zimoun.ch/

I hope to see these works in person; if they’re this moving in Internet videos, I can barely imagine seeing them up close. I’ll let the videos speak for themselves.

Like a fresh ingredient in food, sometimes all you need is a good idea. And whether your work is digital or analog, acoustic or mechanical, compositional or improvisational, sound artist and musician Ranjit Bhatnagar can provide ample inspiration. His best idea: forcing himself to come up with one musical idea a day for a month. Of course, having mad chops in instrumental invention doesn’t hurt.

Ranjit’s creations are remarkable partly in that people can pick them up and play them as instruments, as with the 8-bit violin – a pixelated concoction of the lasercutter – seen at top in action with real fiddlers at the Thingamajigs DIY Instruments Tailgate Party.

Other creations are best seen as sound design etudes, one-off timbral amuse-bouche, and all the more delightful for it. This year’s installments, gathered in the (shorter) month of February, included a number of imaginative daily, reflective productions. A rotating corn cob became a score. A speaker cable became impromptu MIDI output. A set of gears became a mechanical sequencer – the ratios producing different tones.

I’ve collected some of my favorites below, but of course the best way to inject some Ranjit-style aural inspiration into your day is to follow moonmilk.com. True, I’m more than a bit behind as these projects were developed in February. On the other hand, only now, fiddlers are picking up the fruits of those labors – and the change of season and coming of summer (or winter, southern hemisphere dwellers) means the timing couldn’t be better.

http://www.moonmilk.com/

Now, some favorite videos – whether strictly “digital” or not being entirely immaterial:

Works For Turntable from Stephen Cornford on Vimeo.

Digital sound, and electronic sound in general, can become abstract. In fact, sound itself can be abstract. So there’s something beautiful about rendering sound as something kinetic, mechanical, and physical. Watch the hypnotic works by Stephen Cornford, top; as the video progresses, the pieces deepen in subtlety. (Thanks to Richard Devine for spotting this one.)

Cornford isn’t the only artist finding new sonic frontiers in the turntable. From a recent event in San Francisco sponsored by our friends at MAKE Magazine, artist Walter Kitundu talks about his own fascination with the turntable and other sonic projects.

Exploratorium multimedia artist, instrument builder, and birder extraordinaire Walter Kitundu talks about his work: he shares the staggering breadth of his work, ranging from a multitude of turntable-based instruments to shadow paintings, and to finish gives a premiere performance on his brand new instruments, a digital kora.

That’s just one video at an event that also included digital music software artist Ge Wang and acoustic instrument maker Krys Bobrowski. Youngsters at the event also got to solder contact mics and go experiment in the space – a nice idea, and one I hope we exploit for an upcoming Handmade Music Night (here in NYC, but elsewhere, too). I have my own preferred quick-and-dirty Radio Shack contact mic procedure, but if anyone has other ideas, pipe up.

Well worth checking out the whole event – and nice that they shot high-quality video.
Open MAKE at the Exploratorium: Exploring sound

Meet the Makers: Walter Kitundu from Learning Studio on Vimeo.