MUTEK this year looks to be a tremendous few days of audiovisual performance and art. To get in the mood one day early, we’re working with our friends at New York’s eclectic monthly live electronic party to host a special Montreal edition of Warper. It’s a convergence of New York and Montreal artists (full lineup below), running a full twelve hours. It’ll be totally free (donations welcome), with a cash bar available all day and night.

RSVP on Facebook

http://warperparty.com/

A big thanks to Jazz Mutant, makers of the OSC-driven, multi-touch controllers Lemur and Dexter, for their support.

I’ll be covering both the pre-party and MUTEK and its artists all week long, along with Greg Smith for Rhizome, so stay tuned to CDM for stories, video, and sound.

Meet up in the open lab: At 2pm, we’ll have an open music and visual technological laboratory, a la our Handmade Music series. Artists will bring their rigs, and original hardware and software creations to share what they’ve made and how they play. Confirmed for the lab:

• Multitouch and Open Music Tools: Nathanaël Lécaudé and Eric Andrade will show their open source multitouch table PyMT (built in Python), which works with Max/MSP for sound generation, plus the TamTam musical software suite, an educational music suite powered by Csound that runs on the OLPC (and other platforms), created at the University of Montreal by Jean Piché and his team.
• A Chipsound Premiere: David Viens of Plogue will be on-hand to talk about Plogue’s “chipsound” software instruments, as scooped on CDM – and I hope David brings along some Bidule creations, as well.
• Guitar video instruments: Matt Dickey is bringing his guitar-video rig, powered by Jitter, which allows audience members to conduct his playing and control visuals and … you’ll just have to come see it to fully understand. (See also his guitar-controlled generative visual experiments.)

Bring your cool rigs + projects: If you’d like to join in on the lab and you’ll be in the Montreal area, just fill out this form to let us know what to expect. (We have 1-2 projectors, a PA, and tables; bring extra amps and cables if you can.)

Lemur multi-touch demo: At 5pm, Brooklyn musician Nick Shelestak (White Badger) will demonstrate how he integrates the Lemur multi-touch hardware controller in the studio and on stage using Ableton Live, along with a few other special features unique to the Lemur.

Audiovisual lineup: At 6pm, we get into fully live audio and visuals from our friends in Montreal and in town from New York. It’s a packed lineup – see the full details below. (The Cougarettes and I will each be doing simultaneous audio and visuals…)

6:00 PM – 2:00 AM – LIVE AUDIOVISUALS

Musicals:
06:00 Kodomo
06:40 Peter Kirn
07:10 Lokey
07:40 !INCLUDE
08:10 [XC3N]
08:50 FreeBassBK
09:30 Friend’s Mens
10:10 The Cougarettes
10:50 ATTN:
11:30 Rhinostrich
12:10 The Materializer
12:50 Atom
01:20 In The Loop

Visuals:
06:00 Holly Danger
06:40 Peter Kirn
07:10 VJ Pocaille
09:30 The Sperm Whale
10:10 The Cougarettes
10:50 VJ DY3KT
11:50 !INCLUDE
12:30 Okus Focus

View Larger Map

It all happens this Tuesday, 2pm to 2am. Hope to see you there.

For live updates, stay tuned to our Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/cdmblogs

We’re inundated with event info, and one of my general rules is to avoid lots of event listings. But the lineup for famed audiovisual fest MUTEK looks simply epic.

Highlights, just for a taste:

• Moderat. Apparat and Modeselektor. Like peanut butter and chocolate.
• A\VISIONS looks, as always, like an essential event in audiovisualism. Wolfgang Voigt will present GAS and Herman Kolgen has a new piece.
• For the first time, Club Transmediale gets its own showcase.
• An unusually eclectic lineup adds dub, acoustic-electronic, and cross-genre collaboration.
• Robert Henke (Monolake) and Christopher Bauder finally bring their 64 illuminated helium balloon installation (ATOM) to North America.
• Akufen returns to live performance.
• For techno lovers, Resident Advisor brings in the likes of Mathew Jonson, Dandy Jack, and Carl Craig to keep you up all night Saturday.
• Not just Berlin: People from all around the world are making sounds, and even events like the Decibel Festival get highlighted, so you get a great cross-section of a lot of scenes. (I have to bring this up, because I’ve already seen stories claiming Mutek is basically Berlin in Montreal, and from the lineup I see below, that’s a misrepresentation. We love Berlin, but glad as always to see representation from scenes elsewhere.)

MUTEK Lineup at MUTEK site (which has also been posting podcasts with the artists)

And, actually, almost everything looks like a highlight. Not only is it Mutek’s one-decade anniversary, it feels like it’s a special moment for electronica and audiovisuals in general, like the forces of goodness are again converging planetwide.

I think even Mutek aside, some good times are ahead – and Montreal could be a great place to celebrate. Speaking of which…

CDM Coming to Montreal – Get In Touch

I was unable to attend MUTEK last year, but this year should happily be different. I know the Warper crew from New York City are planning their own live music party separately, and CDM may be able to put on an event. If you have a venue or are interested in collaboration, let us know. I’m also available to do the workshop thing while in town. Mostly, it’d be helpful to connect with folks in Montreal as I’m in town, since it isn’t my city. If we can get a daytime space, we may be able to do some additional interviews of Mutek artists and Montreal videomusicological citizens.

You can reach me and the CDM gang at our contact page, or email me directly at peter (at) [thenameofthissite.com]

What’s Going On

Heck, let’s break the rules and run the whole press release, as it will have fans of this event salivating:

MAY 27TH TO MAY 31ST: THE DESIGN OF MUTEK’S FIVE DAYS

DAY 1 // WEDNESDAY, MAY 27

A\VISIONS 1: Monument-National Theatre // $25 CDN // 8pm
MUTEK_10 officially gets underway with a showcase that presents two venerated artists whose work seeks to technologically alter the shape and sound of our relationship with nature. Cologne’s Wolfgang Voigt, roundly regarded as one of the greatest sonic experimenters of the 90s, delivers the Canadian premiere of his GAS project, a 90-minute audio-visual dreamscape that invites listeners into the Black Forest of Southern Germany, accompanied only by the haunting manipulations of Mahler and Wagner compositions. Afterward, HERMAN KOLGEN (one half of the multimedia duo Skoltz_Kolgen) will present the world premiere of his new piece "IN/JECT", which takes as its inspiration the prolonged submersion of the human body into a cistern of water and waits for nature’s pressing hands to alter the balance of the brain and, in turn, produce an internal music.

NOCTURNE 1: Society for Arts and Technology // $25 CDN // 10pm
MUTEK’s first-ever CLUB TRANSMEDIALE showcase focuses on the hazy lights of the retro-futuristic French psychotronic scene. The night begins with Montreal’s ORGAN MOOD, before giving way to the ultra-mysterious ZOMBIE ZOMBIE, who arrive for in Montreal for a North American debut. The French duo rev up their otherworldly fusion of psychedelic rock and electronics that raises the ghosts of bands like Suicide and The Residents. Equally mysterious but no less formidable is TURZI ELECTRONIC EXPERIENCE, the solo project of the eccentric Romain Turzi, who fuses krautrock and commune psychedelics while surrounded by a cavalry of vintage synthesizers that brings to mind the heyday of Jean-Michel Jarre. The night wraps up with the D.I.R.T.Y. space disco of Paris’PILOOSKI, who will take Turzi’s synthetic propulsions and embed them with the irresistibly carnal handclaps that drive the duo’s sought-after disco re-edits.

DAY 2 // THURSDAY, MAY 28

A\VISIONS 2: Monument-National Theatre // $25 CDN // 8pm
A showcase dedicated to the control and composition of human collaboration, in which generations of musical masters meet on stage to experiment through an eclectic mix of jazz, metal, krautrock, turntablisms, and of course electronics. Starting off the evening, an American group still unknown to these parts, THE FUN YEARS, one of the discoveries MUTEK has the pleasure of introducing to Montreal. Former CAN drummer JAKI LIEBEZEIT returns to MUTEK with frequent collaborator BURNT FRIEDMAN to perform an exclusive North American show that warps together over five decade’s of experience into one singular presentation. Afterward, the corrosive pairing of two of Quebec’s most uncompromised figures takes the stage. With his mutant turntable in tow, MARTIN TÉTREAULT plays the mad composer who fiercely controls the spastic and irrepressible drumming of his monstrous subject, Voivod’sMICHEL LANGEVIN.
NOCTURNE 2: Metropolis // $30 CDN // 10pm // presented by 33mag
The many factions of dub converge onto one large stage to showcase just how far Jamaica’s roots reggae templates have evolved toward new genres in the hands of some of today’s hottest names. None other than Skull Disco co-founder APPLEBLIM comes to Montreal for his Canadian debut and a DJ set that showcases the many points of fusion between UK dubstep and Berlin techno. A seamless blend of echoes, bass, and delays leads us to the heavily anticipated collaboration between Canadian dub-don DEADBEATand Berlin’s master vocalist of all things dub, PAUL ST. HILAIRE. Next up, MODESELEKTOR and APPARAT join forces for the Canadian premiere of MODERAT, a stunning live audio-visual production accompanied by the striking video work of PFADFINDEREI. And finally, the night winds to a tailspin with the breakneck dubstep assault of the Digital Mystiks’ MALA, in town for a Canadian debut DJ set.
Meanwhile, the SAVOY ROOM fills with the ambient soundscapes of EZEKIEL HONIG, CLINKER, I8U, NOVI_SAD, and AUN.

DAY 3 // FRIDAY, MAY 29

ATOM 1: Théâtre Maisonneuve // $15 CDN // 7pm
MUTEK is especially proud to be bringing ROBERT HENKE & CHRISTOPHER BAUDER’s monumental ATOM installation to Montreal for three showings, a North American exclusive. This project is among the most ambitious undertakings of Henke’s long and distinguished career, in which he has already seen many high points as MONOLAKE and as one of the inventors of Ableton Live. ATOM features a series of compositions played on a matrix of 64 illuminated helium balloons that will be presented at the prestigious Théâtre Maisonneuve at Place des Arts. ATOM will be staged three times throughout the festival, once Friday evening, and then two more times on Saturday.
A\VISIONS 3: Monument-National Theatre // $25 CDN // 8pm
Building on the first two A\VISIONS showcases, this Friday evening set delivers a line-up of artists whose main impulse is to capture currents of electricity and compose them into rhythm. The detached, austere electric neuro-funk of Sheffield’s highly regarded SND gets the ball rolling, following up on their last MUTEK performance in 2002. Following suit is the first of two appearances by Berlin’s Tobias Freund, who here appears alongside Max Loderbauer as the magnificent, enigmatic NSI, a duo whose adventurous spirit and vast musical knowledge allows them to experiment with electricity from perspectives that incorporate a broad swathe of influences, from industrial to European jazz and everything in between. Finally, Montreal electricity-tamers ARTIFICIEL take the stage for the world premiere of their new piece entitled "Power", which creates its own lightning and pulls from those bright, fiery lights the brittle, halcyon sounds of power at its purest.
NOCTURNE 3: Metropolis // $30 CDN // 10pm // presented by MusiquePlus
Friday night begins with a showcase that emphasizes the sheer internationalism of rhythmic attraction and all its regional manifestations. Chile’s ORIGINAL HAMSTER meets Brazil’s NEGO MOÇAMBIQUE on stage to inaugurate this soirée of global funkiness, with the former’s Latinized techno brushing up against the latter’s infectious baile funk. Montreal’s favourite son, GHISLAIN POIRIER, who is ever-interested in evolving the hip-hop template, introduces his new soca soundsystem, while Berlin-basedJAHCOOZI, a group that pulls M.I.A. into Modeselektor, pump up the bass even further. Finally, Mexico’s BOSTICH+ FUSSIBLE, members of NORTEC COLLECTIVE, lead a five-piece norteño band that threatens to be one of the most festive live spectacles at this year’s festival.
Meanwhile in the Savoy Room, Canadian techno veteran MIKE SHANNON heads up a 10th anniversary bash for his Cynosure label, a label that has taken part in many MUTEK events over the years. To celebrate the two anniversaries together, Shannon brings alongERNESTO FERREYRA, MATT THIBIDEAU, and ADAM MARSHALL.

DAY 4 // SATURDAY, MAY 30

MUTEK//PIKNIC 1: Parc Jean- Drapeau // $10 CDN // 2pm
Saturday afternoon promises to be a showcase for those softer, subtler textures of electronic music: dub-techno, deep house, funk, and disco. The day starts off at a relaxed pace, ideal for lying back in the sun, with the Canadian premiere of Berlin’s THOMAS FEHLMANN, who presents his hypnotic brand of dub-techno to early-afternoon revelers. New York’s BRENDON MOELLER is up next, delivering a premiere of his upcoming Third Ear album called "Jazz Junk Safari". Manchester’s TRUS’ME follows suit with a set of rarefied Northern soul feeding the foundation of deep house that has made him an international favourite. The day in the park wraps up with THE MOLE on the decks, spinning a set of disco-fuelled techno.
ATOM 2 & 3: Théâtre Maisonneuve // $15 CDN // 5pm & 7pm
ROBERT HENKE & CHRISTOPHER BAUDER’s monumental ATOM installation continues its residency at the prestigious Théâtre Maisonneuve at Place des Arts with two showings on Saturday, once in the early afternoon and again in the early evening.

A\VISIONS 4: SAT // $25 CDN // 8pm
A very special Raster-Noton showcase, featuring the label’s most durable attractions in their most bristling and conceptual post-industrial guises. The evening begins with the North American premiere of RYOJI IKEDA and CARSTEN NICOLAI’s reunion asCYCLO., the pairing that wowed audiences last in the early 2000’s and has been silent ever since. Uwe Schmidt, the German expatriate currently living in Chile, reprises his role as ATOM^TM. Next, Carsten Nicolai returns to the stage solo to present his much-heralded ALVA NOTO compositions. Finally, Olaf Bender brings the mighty BYETONE to life with the rock-driven Teutonic beats that have made his recent records so collectible.
NOCTURNE 4: Metropolis // $35 CDN // 10pm // Resident Advisor Night
The festival’s marquee all-night event, and for this 10th anniversary we’re pulling out all the stops! MUTEK and RESIDENT ADVISOR join forces to present a line-up featuring some of the most revered names inn electronic music today. Local jazz and funk sample-mavenMOONSTARR gets things underway in the main room, followed by the inimitable antics of French cabaret-house trio dOP. Next up sees the tantalizing pairing of two of techno’s most sought-after names — MATHEW JONSON and DANDY JACK — coming together for a heart-pounding live performance. Berlin’s Tobias Freund return for his second MUTEK_10 appearance, this time in his tobias. moniker and ready to keep the late-night crowds moving. Finally, Detroit techno pioneer CARL CRAIG takes the stage for a 3-hour DJ set that will take audiences well into the morning.
Meanwhile in the Savoy Room, MUTEK pays tribute to Seattle’s Decibel Festival with a showcase of that city’s finest electronic offerings. The breezy ambience of THE SIGHT BELOW gets the evening underway, followed by the dark tones of LUSINE’s contemplative techno. PEZZNER and JEREMY ELLIS pick up the pace and follow through till dawn.

DAY 5 // SUNDAY, MAY 31ST

MUTEK//PIKNIC 2: Parc Jean-Drapeau // $10 CDN // 2pm
The final day starts off in the park with a very special reunion between MUTEK and two of its most beloved contributors over the years. This afternoon picnic features a rare North American appearance by RICARDO VILLALOBOS, who will be tagteaming on the decks for a marathon DJ set with none other than Perlon founder and manager ZIP.

NOCTURNE 5: SAT // $20 CDN // 10pm // presented by Bande à part
The return of the festival finale! For this tenth edition, MUTEK could think of no better way to cap off its decade of growth and innovation than to salute the Canadian artists who have provided the backbone of this festival all this time. Two longtime Montreal collaborators,MATEO & PHEEK, get the finale underway, followed by fellow Montrealer STEPHEN BEAUPRÉ. Next up, the highly anticipated return of AKUFEN, in his first live showcase of completely new material since 2004. The festival draws to a close with the impossibly talented live improvisation of MODERN DEEP LEFT QUARTET. Given the sheer number of other Canadians already in town and the free-for-all celebratory nature of the event, we can only imagine that a few surprise appearances may pop up through the night and join in this final jamboree.

INDIVIDUAL TICKETS & PASSPORTS NOW ON SALE

MUTEK PASSPORTS, WEEKEND PASSPORTS, DAY PASSES, INDIVIDUAL TICKETS and other packages are now on sale throughwww.mutek.org. This year’s passes grant attendees the flexibility to catch more showcases and live acts than ever before, in a number of different packages:
MUTEK PASSPORT – $215 CDN + taxes & service charges
WEEKEND PASSPORT – $135 CDN + taxes & service charges
WEEKEND "LIGHT" PASSPORT – $100 CDN + taxes & service charges
A\VISIONS PASS – $75 CDN + taxes & service charges
METROPOLIS TRIO – $70 CDN + taxes & service charges
DAY PASSES & INDIVIDUAL TICKETS also available at www.mutek.org

Workshops and panels remain TBD. We’ll keep you posted here on CDM.

If you’re interested in audiovisual performance as well as audio, here’s an app to keep an eye on. Resolume “Avenue” 3, announced today, is a ground-up rebuild of a popular VJ app. Now, things like GPU-native video may not mean much to the musical readers of this site. But how about features like this?

• Beat-synced audio triggering alongside video – using the soundtrack inside video clips, or using separate audio files
• VST audio effects, synchronized to visual effects and controls
• MIDI and OpenSoundControl (OSC) support
• Cross-fading of audio and video
• Beat-synced loops

We’ve been playing with an early betas at the live visualist-oriented Create Digital Motion and will have detailed hands-on reports soon. In the meantime, here’s a detailed look at what’s in Resolume Avenue 3:

Resolume “Avenue” 3 Announced: The Audiovisual App to Beat? [Create Digital Motion]

You can see the results above with Missy Elliot, but naturally this could also be used with very different source material as a glitchy audiovisual experimental ambient set, or as a way of triggering videos and audio backing tracks alongside a band.

It’s not without limitations. You can’t yet use VST instruments, so you couldn’t drop a synth or sampler into your visual set and play that – at least not in the first release, due in September.

But it’s clear an audiovisual convergence is happening. You can add this to the recent debut of GrandVJ, a live visual app with a virtual MIDI keyboard in the display and “Synth Mode” for triggering, or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, the addition of VST effects support in the visual patching environment vvvv. And we’ve likewise seen interesting ways of combining Ableton Live and other music apps with live visuals, as in Momo’s tutorial for A/V cutups with Lucifer.

CDM has ongoing coverage from the Mutek festival; see more dispatches at events.noisepages.com. Liz talks to A/V duo Rechenzentrum for CDM — and there’s a bit of a revelation at the end of the interview. -Ed.

Rechenzentrum, which means “data processing center” in German, is a Berlin-based duo who create live audio-visual performances by combining austere film visuals with their own brand of minimal techno, fusing elements of jazz, dub, and early industrial. Marc Wieser handles the music half while Lillevan navigates the visual landscape. Their 2003 DVD release Director’s Cut, originally out on Mille Plateaux, went on to win the Ars Electronica prize. Marc and Lillevan sat down with us after their sound check for A/Visions 2 at Mutek 2008.

Liz: What goes on in a live Rechenzentrum performance?

Lillevan: I do the video; Marc does the music. The video is live in the sense that I determine which image gets shown at which second, but obviously I’m not creating the image in real time because I’m not really interested in that. Real-time-created video usually looks pretty “blocky,” and I don’t really like it that much. It’s a mixture of pre-recorded video coming off a hard disk and live stuff reacting off of Marc’s music. But we’re not connected by any kind of MIDI connections or sound analysis. I just listen to his music and create stuff based on that. It’s a connection between our persons and not between our computers.

Marc Weiser: This way it’s improvised, for sure.

L: [The performance project is] called Silence like the last DVD, so it’s a live re-working of [the A/V album] introducing new elements that Marc has created in the last month. It’s based on the last DVD but it’s an updated, newer version.

M: It’s not 100% the same every time.

In the press release for Silence you said you consider video as an instrument. What do you mean by that?

L: We wanted to make sure people didn’t misunderstand our project — as in one guy’s doing music and there’s visuals accompanying music. We wanted to say it’s equally important; [it's] media being presented to the public. It’s their responsibility to put these two media together in any way they see fit or to ignore one and focus on the other. And so we said that sound can also be a color, music can be a color, music can be a “filmic” narrative element in the same way as film can be an instrument. That’s where that quote came from.

How did you two come together to work with video and music?

M: Totally by accident—we met in a squatted house around 11 years ago in Berlin—we had a club there and were both working there. After that we decided to work together. It wasn’t planned.

L: We were also part of an eleven-piece live drum and bass band which was a lot of fun. But we also realized how tiring it could be with eleven people who have very different focuses in life, willing to dedicate various amounts of time to this. We were willing to take more risks, willing to put stuff in Marc’s car, drive off somewhere, play somewhere, and see what happens — and that’s easier to do when you’re two people than eleven. Then we started actually getting gigs in Berlin for techno parties, where the promoter would have some pretentions to be artistically inclined and wanted to have a chill-out room with some more interesting stuff than just “four [on] the floor,” So they asked us to do it because our influences in those days were incredibly varied. We would play for hours and hours just mixing as much material as possible. Like Lee Perry said, the mixing desk is the instrument—for me it was video, lots of TVs plugged in and stuff. And we played everything—the whole history of experimental media mixed to layers over more layers. And over the years we whittled that down from 11-hour shows to a one hour performance. There was never a concept where we sat down and thought, “What shall we do? Let’s try this.” It kind of evolved over the years.

Along the lines of evolution, it seems that in electronic music there’s been an increasing focus on integrating music with visuals–although within the history of art it’s had a long history in its own right. Why do you think this relationship of music to to video has become so important of late?

L: The history is very long. Hundreds of years ago Leonardo da Vinci tried to make pianos that also create light with candles and colored paper, so this idea of using various media is nothing new. Warhol was doing it in the 60s, by projecting his own film Chelsea Girls on the Velvet Underground as they played. I always found it interesting with him that when he noticed the audience was starting to like it, he would get irritated and immediately change the films. It wasn’t supposed to make people feel lounge-y and happy; it was supposed to be irritating. We never had a concept when we started; it was just that Marc was a musician and I’m a filmmaker, so we said let’s see if these two things work.

Over the years I’ve seen some things where I was surprised that some musicians would allow video [projection] that they hadn’t seen before by artists they’d never met before. At some video festivals I’ve seen stuff where I really felt that the videos destroyed the music, and I’ve felt sorry for the musicians when that happens.

Rechenzentrum at Mutek 2008 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

M: We were never interested in synchronization; maybe it’s a powerful thing that we never thought about things like that. You have to be “this is your part,” “this is [my] part,” be as good as you can, bring it onstage. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes not.

L: It’s interesting for us to watch how people have tried to plan their careers within a certain genre—they go to festivals and see what’s happening now and try to order their set to that. Without trying to sound too punk-ish or rebellious, we were never like that, at the risk of getting less shows at times or more shows other times. You’d see people would be like, “Oh, you’re not really into tech and you’re not programming all your own software,” and we just never did that. I mean now I’ve gotten into programming Jitter and Max/MSP in the last years, and even that bores me and I get someone else to do it for me—a student of computer arts in Serbia, because I just have no interest in programming whatsoever.

I think a lot of what we did was we actually, like, irritated people, as well — it’s in our nature to not always give people what they want because it can be very clinical and very boring. We were invited a lot to play, for example, in museums, museum openings and such. It was very interesting for me to look “OK, why is a museum asking us to do this?” and it was quite obvious that the museum needs street credibility, [needs] youth culture … to get people to actually visit the museums and buy tickets so they get more money. So we thought, in this case let’s not be really arty. Let’s give them really asocial hard techno. And then at other times we’d be invited to play in really techno places and we’d do remixes of Miles Davis, which earned us lots of Coca-Cola cans being thrown at us. And it wasn’t about trying to be bad boys. It was just trying not to be too precious about your career and “oh, don’t make a mistake here, there’s an important curator in the audience, let’s not make a mistake tonight.” You can do that, and maybe you’ll have a successful career doing that, but I find it very boring.

I see that the Silence DVD is out on Weiser music; why did you start your own label now?
M: We were unlucky with all our labels, more or less. The first they didn’t understand what we were doing — the first CD only had music, the second we had only one visual track, the third on Mille Plateaux… it takes so much time from creating the music and the visuals until the release — years. I decided [to do] it by myself, because all the labels don’t exist any more. Kitty Yo, Mille Plateaux doesn’t exist any more. All the other labels in Berlin where we have contacts –- we haven’t talked to them but it’s obvious that they have their own problems, in a way, because they really don’t know what to release. It’s too risky for them. We are not a rock band, it’s not folk, it’s not techno, it’s not club, it’s not art enough, so we ended up sitting beside jazz.

Do you want to tell us about any new projects you’re working on?

L: We’ve got lots of exciting projects coming up, but the sad [news] is that this is one of our last shows as Rechenzentrum—we’re splitting up!

Rechenzentrum at Mutek 2008 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

The lucky attendees at Mutek’s A/Visions 2 on Thursday experienced sets by Freida Abtan
Németh + Hess, Nokami + Sans Soleil as well as Rechenzentrum’s.

Photos by Andrew Lochhead

CDM’s Peter Dines and Liz McLean Knight (Liz literally on her honeymoon) are keeping us posted with the latest events from Detroit’s Movement and Montreal’s MUTEK festivals. You can keep track of their travels and live impressions on our new CDM events blog, and I look forward to some artist interviews planned with some of our favorite people, coming soon.

So far, Peter is getting his synesthesia on with live audio and visuals at A/Visions, while Liz notes the spooky near-ubiquity of UC-33e controllers running Ableton Live at Movement. (Guess they need to invite us with some odder controllers, huh?)

Lots more coming soon — if you’re at either of these events, too, send in your reports and we’ll publish or link them:

events.noisepages.com

The events site will soon feature more information on CDM-hosted events, as well.

The Fairlight CMI, the ground-breaking digital synth created by Australians Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, is well known for its contribution to music. Think names like Peter Gabriel, Hans Zimmer, David Bowie, Herbie Hancock, Kate Bush, Bono, and … hang on, I’ll stop before this becomes a very long list. With tablet input and sophisticated sampling capabilities, the CMI holds up reasonably well against even modern tech, even if it cost as much as a luxury car. (See Keyboard Magazine’s 2006 write-up.)

But less known is the CMI’s influential visual sibling, the CVI — Computer Video Instrument. Introduced to the market in 1984 at around US$6500, the CVI also used a tablet interface, accessing not a hybrid analog/digital design for visual effects and digital painting in real-time.

You may not know the name, but you’ve seen the effects — the ubiquity of the CVI’s distinctive effects, unfortunately, also made it a cliche in 80s design. But the idea of making an integrating visual instrument is still meaningful today.

It’s not really worth reading about the CVI. It’s better to watch it. We’ve been following videos uploaded by co-creator Vogel onto YouTube, as well as from aficionados of the hardware from the VJ community, on our video sister, Create Digital Motion:

State of the 80s: Fairlight CVI Demo Video, BBC on "Tomorrow’s World"

Video: Fairlight CVI Video Instrument Development, Ca. 1984

Glitch, Synthetic and Real: Free Vintage Fairlight VJ Clips, Glitch in Jitter

 The Prevolt has put up some photos of his Ableton Live controller, dubbed Ambassador. I love that it shares a moniker with the AMC Rambler automobile, though I suspect that wasn’t intentional (pictured at right, photo: Ty Sonneil).

Prevolt describes the gear, which features analog-y, arcade-style hardware controls and a custom case:

This is what I’m using to control Ableton now. All arcade hardware, aluminum top panel by FPE, and a nice wood case courtesy of my man Michael Yates. It uses all key commands through a custom driver to handle playback, effects, editing, warping, UI, mouse clicks, scroll messages, and more, with a lot of tweaks (some strobe, some send double messages, etc):

Finished Ambassador Pics (blog for the Aux Armes VJ/DJ collective)

I got to look over Prevolt’s shoulder while he used the Ambassador in an epic music set in Austin at our SxSW party. It’s really remarkable: those controls may look like overkill, but he’s managed to map just about everything th Live software does to hardware control. To anyone who complains Ableton hasn’t yet done their hardware, this illustrates why that might not even be a good idea — Live users seem to come up with endless control schemes, all different.

Not to mention, with this controller you could get a little Street Fighter in between sets on nice, arcade buttons.

And yes, you even get a little trackball.

After the jump, the whole AV collective in action at SxSW’s closing:

Aux Armes at SXSW 2008 from Aux Armes on Vimeo.

I got to get up close and personal with the just-deliver Ohm from Livid Instruments. It’s a new MIDI controller with a 6×6 grid of on/off pads, two times four knobs + four faders (that is, eight total of each), lots of custom buttons, and a DJ-style crossfader with a lovely wooden handle. Price is US$750, but it comes bundled with Livid’s full VJ software, Union, for Mac and PC.

Livid is first and foremost a visual software developer, and the controller is unusually well-suited to visuals, so it was a natural for Create Digital Motion:

Hands-On: Livid’s New Ohm Controller, Custom Control Geared for Visualists

Music folks have been equally interested, though, which raises the question of how to use it.

As a DJ controller, or Ableton Live controller, it looks very interesting. You could use the 6×6 pads as clip triggers or sample triggers, then assign the mixing functions. In fact, while initially it appears to be short on knobs, the fact that you have eight faders means you could assign a combination of effects and mix levels to cross-faders — or just set up a basic two- or four-channel mix and focus on effects and other settings.

Readers were split on its potential when they first saw it last year, as you can see in comments. But I’ll be interested to hear how people actually using it respond. I was very impressed with the physical feel and handcrafted design in my hands-on — not enough to shake me from my own favorite controllers, but then, I think the future of controllers is more choice, not less.

And if you think you can do better than the Livid team, keep your eyes glued for the MIDI DIY. It’s the control board / brain of the Ohm, ready to be turned into any project you desire. (With 128 note contacts and 32 control changes, you can do something pretty hefty.) More on that when it ships. It won’t be for the first-time DIYer, but I know we have some advanced readers out there.

Audiovisual performance has a history stretching back through the decades — from the 90s Japan audiovisual scene to 60s Acid Tests and whole heck of a lot of other places. Heck, I’m fairly certain people were shooting up on morphine or getting happy with the opium and chilling out to magic lanterns and colored lights at the end of the 19th Century. But there’s a new excitement brewing globally around live music and visuals. That’s important, because it could push the scene forward — a critical mass of performers could pressure more venues into better projection, from avant-garde to club, and raise the level of chops and artistry in the medium. And you won’t even need opium.

The growing interest in A/V performance was part of what made us so excited about Serato’s VIDEO-SL, as seen in our exclusive hands-on with dj rndm. It’s unquestionably the best (well, even arguably the only) true, integrated DVJ tool in computer software form, certainly as far as digital vinyl control.

But curiously, one of the tools at the center of this movement isn’t really a DJ app in the traditional sense, has no scratching capabilities for audio let alone video, only limited video support, no live video triggering support, and no projection support. It’d be as though, collectively, the world decided in 1965 everyone was going to build flying moon buggies by first buying themselves Chevy Novas.

That’d make no sense whatsoever, except the app in question is Ableton Live.

And suddenly, it’s a natural choice: Live is a favorite tool for slicing and dicing sound live, so why not visuals — even if only by transmitting MIDI to a dedicated visual app? There are a number of approaches.

Feed MIDI Out of Live

On Create Digital Motion, Momo the Monster details his technique for cutting up sound in the plug-in Lucifer, then feeding that MIDI output to a separate visual app for the eye candy. To me, this is the most logical approach: there’s no reason you have to make Live do everything at once. If you’ve got more than one person playing, you could easily have one person on sound and another person on visuals. But even with one person, it’s increasingly feasible to run both a visual and sound app on the same machine (and I’ve played fairly regularly with two laptops).

VJ Kung Fu – AV Cutups using Lucifer and Ableton Live from momo_the_monster on Vimeo.

Full how-to details and lots of reader discussion at Create DIgital Motion:

AV Cutup Secrets: Using Lucifer & Live

Make Live an AV App

That hasn’t stopped people from trying to get Live to do it all, though — something a lot of users wondered about when they first saw Live’s ability to use video live, full screen. When I first saw Live’s video support, the Ableton crew had started forwarding around a set featuring clips of an ostrich poking its head forward. Uh — okay, you had to be there, but it was hilariously addictive. The trick was to use Location Markers in the Arrangement View to jump around in the video.

That’s all well and good, but the real appeal of Live is its clip-based Session View.

Just Add Music for Live 6 and 7 offers a solution: sync most of the major stuff Live does with sound to video. You get four simultaneous channels of media, video, pictures, and Flash files. Or at least, so it promises — for now, I couldn’t even get a download link to work; word is, JAM is very much in “alpha.” Here’s the site, though, and hopefully we’ll see an update soon:

Just Add Music for Ableton Live

I have another problem with JAM, I have to admit: it feels too much to me like a dumbed-down copy of VJing of the past. Read Create Digital Motion and you’ll see lots of people excited about gorgeous, abstract 3D visuals dancing in time to the music. Sure, chopping up video and syncing it to music is fun — but you’ll forever be in the shadow of the masters, like Emergency Broadcast Network. Now, maybe I’m overanalyzing; it’s still a huge leap forward from playing a DVD in the background for a lot of bands. But I think the ever-evolving state of live visual tools means that ultimately dedicated tools will eclipse the hacked versions of Live.

Of course, the hackier the hack gets, the more interesting things get, like the unique, organic frame-by-frame animation in Live we saw last week from Cousin Throckmorton:

Make Live Scratch

Maybe — as Momo did with Lucifer — the best option is to focus on hacking Live for better sonic capabilities, then sync that to visuals. Which brings us back to Live’s inability to scratch. DVJ crew Cobalt Scratch Bomb from Japan have hacked scratching into a Mac Audio Unit plug-in:

You can’t have this yet, but our friend Terry Church at Beatportal  gets full credit for the scoop on the first preview:

Japanese DVJ crew invent Ableton plug-in

Industrious Max/MSP/Jitter users ought to be able to do things like this, too, exporting to a plug-in.

For full-blown DJ capabilities in Live, there’s also the possibility of running Image Line’s awesome new DJ tool Deckadance as a plug-in.

Watching A/V Performance Evolve

Of course, a lot of this is speculative. I remain, like many, interested in visuals for their own sake, in live visuals with music that aren’t synced, and in whatever crazy stuff evolves next. We’ll check in occasionally here on Create Digital Music, but if you want to keep up daily with live visuals, be sure to subscribe to RSS / bookmark Create Digital Motion.

And keep on hacking. Can’t wait to see what you do next.

… and scratching:

The review isn’t without the odd caveat: for one, you’ll need to pluck down a couple grand to get the complete setup because the Rane mixer employed is required, though rndm ultimately says that’s worth it for the integration payoff. And available transitions and effects are limited in range and prefer to run on dedicated GPUs (think MacBook Pro, or a PC laptop with a dedicated NVIDIA or ATI card). But as you can see, the results are incredibly slick, and there’s no question video on vinyl now has a tool to beat. Check out the complete review and technical details on our visualist sister site:

Hands-on Review: Serato’s VIDEO-SL for Visual Vinyl Turntablism