Some psychedelic HPRIZM sounds to get you through your weekend:
PROJECT-Xmp3 by HPRIZM

And it’s worth revisiting Anti-Pop Consortium’s podcast for our friends at XLR8R Magazine:
http://www.xlr8r.com/podcast/2010/10/anti-pop-consortium

What’s a bit unique about this event is that it couples digital music with visual art (with, you know, actual paint) and teaching. NYU’s Hip-Hop Education Center” is a collaborator, teaching people young and old the craft of hip-hop music.

Invisible Instructions Exhibition + Micro-festival Site
Dubspot Blog Post

Psychedelic solstice Tuesday, anyone?

Summer days and evenings for a lot of us are a perfect time for buying new records, listening to new mixes, exploring new sounds and samples and production techniques. And yes, while pundits worry about the failing value of music, I personally manage to stock up on free downloads and wind up overspending my budget on records, too. It’s good to be an enthusiast.

Here’s just the latest of what’s hit my inbox, for your enjoyment.

Moby recalls the 90s in his “old-school rave mix” for our friends over at XLR8R. It’s good, clean fun, a musical beach book perfect for a retro-tinged, rave-recalling holiday weekend here in the US.

Percussion Lab is a source of endless, fantastic musical mixes, so it’s hard to know whether to begin. For an Atlanta-style take on what summer is about, Sorted prepares an electro/club-style mix. Concept Audio‘s Scafolder goes on a headier, ambient-er journey called “Rain Man,” tinged with pianos and Idhren and Lusine textures – good stuff, as well. And if it’s techno you want, that’s covered, too. Check out the full set lineup on Percussion Lab’s immaculately-designed site.

If certain shirtless werewolfs are starting to make you feel like you need to hit the gym, there’s good news. After Australia decided to hike fitness class music licensing by a whopping 1500%, the good folks at WFMU’s Beware of the Blog prepared a nicely-curated set of Creative Commons-licensed, indie music from Dan Deacon to Mochipet. It’s nice listening, too, perhaps as much of a cure to bad music allergies at the gym as it is bad licensing policy.

Speaking of the Free Music Archive, if you’re in the mood for something a little synthy and dreamy, there’s an excellent mix by Tori y Moi live on dublab.

From Spain, various sonic goodies. Want to catch up on what you missed at SONAR? BBC has a graphical, clickable map of all the artists. Need a little dancefloor-friendly techno, and want it from a high-quality netlabel founder? Thomas Raukamp notes the latest work from Madrid-based Dessben and his Offaudio netlabel, and celebrates their move to SoundCloud.

Downloads for Producers

So, that’s some good poolside barbecue and workout fodder for you… but what if you’re looking for tracks to inspire your producer side? (Working on tracks can be a great way to cool off.)

Ambienteer, whose excellent work I covered last month, has been experimenting with contact mics. Learn about how he made music with an electric toothbrush and plastic wrap and hear the results:
Ambienteer blog

Explore some nice new ambient and minimal tracks from East Peoria, USA-based John Koch-Northrup.

SoundCloud has become a hive of free and Creative Commons-licensed samples, from musical tidbits to hardware and software. You could use it to grab new content and decide whether you really need ElecTribe on an iPad, all at the same time. (Make friends! Grab samples!)

SoundCloud themselves have a nice guide to what’s out there – a badly-needed reference, given that SoundCloud has become so busy, it can be downright overwhelming to the uninitiated.
Sample time! [SoundCloud blog]

Via groups and users, there are full, oddball sample collections, like this pool:

Sample Collections / Instruments / Loops

And there are artists like the wonderful Tim Exile, who live samples his crowds at his shows and uses SoundCloud to gather snippets from fans in advance of gigs. I think it’s my favorite set of this post; have a listen to some of his interactive, sample-generated work:

2006 – Tim Exile’s Nuisance Gabbaret Lounge by timexile

What are you listening to / sampling this weekend? Let us know in comments.

And since far be it from me to be accused of saying all music wants to be free, I hope to follow up soon with albums worth buying this summer. Nominations open … now.

Have a great weekend, and happy 4th of July, USA. (Hey, England’s over it, too — the Queen is visiting my neighborhood this week, celebrating the long history of the English here in NYC, and the great ties between our countries.)

Working with music production today is a bit like science fiction. It’s fitting that visions of technology’s promise, menace, and humanity would inspire electronic music.

Create Digital Music, XLR8R, and Pitchfork got to join together with TV network SyFy to curate a free, 13-track compilation of “Music for Our Future.” Inspired by the world of SyFy’s new TV series Caprica, which is set just before the recently-concluded Battlestar Galactica, this is science fiction as the familiar. It’s the near future, not simply fantasy.

Download the full compilation for free, exclusively at:

http://www.xlr8r.com/musicforourfuture

The lineup, curated by the three publications, includes the likes of Lusine, Willits & Sakamoto, The Field, and Richard Devine, to name a few regular favorites on this site, with exclusive or previously-unreleased tracks by White Rainbows, Nice Nice, and myself.

In addition to the music, several of those artists share with CDM their techniques and process.

The full tracks:

Lusine, “Gravity” – this cut comes from A Certain Distance, a CDM favorite album in 2009. Lusine aka Jeff McIlwain is on Ghostly Internationaland, whether it’s  “abstract” electronica or downright electronic songwriting, always manages to put a unique sonic stamp on his work.

Atlas Sound, “Walkabout (with Noah Lennox)” is by Bradford James Cox of Deerhunter fame, from his album Logos.

Hudson Mohawke, “Fuse” – the Glasgow-based artist just debuted on Warp with Butter, including this track.

White Rainbow, “Raw Shanks a Million” comes from Kranky artist Adam Fornker of Oregon. It was my introduction to his work, but see more on this track below. I love its spare, pulsing beats; it sounds like what I’d listen to while jogging to Caprica City’s cybernetics research institute.

King Midas, Sound “Outta Space (Slow Version)” comes from a project started by London’s Kevin Martin, the man behind The Bug. It’s a future-dub track for people who believe space is the place.

Low Limit, “Turf Day” is by San Francisco producer Bryan Rutledge, whom I knew as half of Lazer Sword, and who seems to be right at the center of the good stuff happening in electronic music in California.

Willits & Sakamoto, “Toward Water” comes from 2008’s “Ocean Fire,” the collaboration between experimental guitarist and composer Christopher WIllits and master composer-musician Ryuichi Sakamoto. If you don’t know that full album already, it’s well worth owning.

The Field, “I Have The Moon, You Have The Internet (Gold Panda Remix) revisits the track off The Field’s latest, “Yesterday and Today” – another top pick for 2009, and nicely reimagined here. You can check out Gold Panda, too; his mixes have become big Internet hits, and I love the quality of his work.

Tyondai Braxton, “Uffe’s Woodshop” is off his solo album Central Market and premiered on Pitchfork. The Battles singer is a Warp artist, composer, looper, and yes, indeed the son of Anthony Braxton. It’s an explosion of acoustic sounds amidst the other works here.

Untold, “Luna” is by London’s up-and-coming Jack Dunning, familiar on dance floors both for his original productions and remixes.

Nice Nice, “See Waves” will be a 7” from Warp Records in February, but you get to hear it here first. I love that it brings an entirely different rhythmic feel to this group.

Richard Devine, “Matvec Interior (Feat. Otto Von Schirach)” really is science fiction, an intricate set of colliding sonic forms from the composer and mad-scientist sound designer. It’s a favorite from his 2005 Cautella, but Richard revisits his sonic process for CDM here today.

Peter Kirn, “Anaxagoras” is my own track, premiering here, named for the Greek philosopher who attempted to explain astrological events through science, and fled after being called a heretic. The music, with some sounds of viola da gamba and others synthesized (or resynthesized), fall on that boundary between re-processed past and imminent future.

Now, some notes from behind the scenes:

White Rainbow

CDM: Tell us about the inspiration for this track. What was the process like?

I don’t get inspired to make something in the sense of looking at a butterfly and then writing a song. For me, it’s more like the act of making inspires where things go. The sounds as they come out inspire me to react and create on top of them.

This track was made by recording about an hour of live improv and then editing and cutting down and doing a few overdubs. My set up is:

INPUTS:
mic, computer running ableton using drum racks to trigger samples with a padkontrol, various iphone/ipod touch drum apps (beat maker, idrum etc), synth, electric guitar

MIXED/OUTPUT:

delay, multi –fx, dd-20 giga delay as looper, kaoss pad kp3 as multi-fx and looper

…and this all getting recorded into ableton on another computer in the studio.

I let that sit for a few months, then came back to it, cut things down and added vocal (with the Ableton Looper…one of the only times I’ve used that) and weird synth pad overdubs.

I’ve been making looper based music for a really long time now (going back to the original boomerang pre turn of the century). It’s really tough to keep it interesting… so I’m always looking and searching for new ways to keep myself interested and inspired to make new music in new ways.

I also play in an improvised electronic group called Rob Walmart, wherein we get very wrong and stupid and on tons of crappy gear. Tons of Casio keyboards, MicroKORGs, iPod Touches, Nintendo DS, microphones, etc.A new 3xLP of Rob Walmart will come out on Marriage Records early this year.

People probably still brand me as a new age or psychedelic ambient guy, and that’s cool but to me there is a direct line between synth future funk from the 70s and 80s and say, tangerine dream or Klaus Schultze. Just technology inspiring different people to make wild, "out there" space sounds. I would like to continue along that line.

Richard Devine

CDM: What can you tell us about this track?

I originally produced it in 2005, in collaboration with my good friend Otto Von Schirach. I was a going for something very alien, futuristic, scifi, scientific and unusual for this piece. The sonic timbres and textures are a combination of hybrid computer synthesis and field recordings. Think Aliens vs. Predator happening inside the world of HR Gigers head=)  The track initially started out in Logic Audio, I began cutting up sections and pieces of various field recorded bits. I went to many locations to get some of the sound sources. Many of them quite unusual and disturbing.

CDM: Your work always has these extraordinary layers of sound. What was the production process like on this track?

I started out on this farm near my house here in Georgia. It was during fall, and we went to this Halloween festival pumpkin patch place with my girlfriend. It was a huge field that had a petting zoo, and various other farm animals. I was intrigued by this fairly large turkey they had in a small metal wired cage. I record several takes of him frantically moving around as I got closer with my microphone. I also recorded the sounds of pigs, breathing heavy into the microphones.

I had a pair of DPA 4060′s Miniature Body Microphones clipped and tucked into my shirt sleeves to capture the animals up in close proximity. I also recorded sounds of water, sand, rocks, trees, leaves and debris in my backyard. I used a lot of these sounds and then imported them into the computer for heavy processing and manipulation. One of the main processing engines was the Kyma system by Symbolic Sound. I took a few sounds and converted them into spectral analysis files in which I morphed and re-synthesized some of the acoustic sounds into synthetic grains, or partials. Creating these very alien artificial sounding sounds to the mix. I also did a bit of FM synthesis for some of the percussion. Lots of intense programming in hundreds of layers of processed bits. You will notice that each bar in the composition never repeats, the same sounds or sequences. This was completely intentional. I wanted the entire sonic experience to be kinda like a roller-coaster ride of audio frequency dynamics. I also tried to experiment with interesting new breaks, and redefine what could be considered song structure adhering to no rules or constraints.

CDM: Given the complexity, structurally, of this music, do you tend to iterate through a track over many layers?

I spend weeks, months sometimes designing the sounds, and trying to get all the pieces to work together. Almost like a complex microsound jigsaw puzzle, but the pieces are very fractalized and tiny. Each sound I painfully program by hand. I take each sound as if it was a sculpture piece. I look at the sound in 3D structure. I often compare the sounds to architectural shapes, structures, and manipulate them one section at a time. I read the waveforms and sculpt them into what I want. I then add the pieces together to work into a composition as a whole. This is the most difficult part in my work in making everything seem fluid and natural. It is often difficult to make the transitions work within a short amount of time especially when you have so many sounds and textures you want to squeeze into a 5 or 6 minute track.

Lusine

CDM: What was your process like, creatively – particularly in regards to the vocals?

It was a very long process. It started off as something totally different. Some sort of downtempo disco type track with much more lyrical vocals. But, after several months I realized it wasn’t working for me, so I approached the whole thing from scratch, resampled everything and made a more minimal downtempo track out of it.

The vocals started off a lot more obviously upfront, but I decided to use them more as a musical layer, so I resampled the completed vocal track and started shuffling the bits around. It felt better to me, like the musical layers in the song weren’t competing with the vocals as much.

Ed.: I’ll be curious to hear your thoughts on the compilation, especially since it represents three very different musical perspectives (which to me wound up making the experience richer). The TV show Caprica, for its part, premieres January 22 with another great Bear McCreary soundtrack (I’ve been listening already, as a fan of his scores).

It’s the most wonderful time of the year in New York. Mark your (advent) calendars. And for non-New Yorkers, let me know – who do you want interviewed? What do you want covered? Whose music do you want us to podcast? Our gift to you will be coverage of these events. New Yorkers and metro-area residents of the Northeast US’ Megapolis, I hope to see you there.

Wednesday, December 2: CDM 5th Anniversary Party. At Love Nightclub, CDM celebrates its 5th anniversary at Love Nightclub with Philly’s own King Britt, David Last joined by Brazilian baile funk vocalist Zuzuka Poderosa, laptronica artist and CDMer Ganucheau, and IJ Catling DJing, all one one of the city’s best sound systems. Compete in Twister and you could walk home with a new laptop yourself (HP Envy 15′s Beats Limited Edition). Free + open bar, Manhattan. (Facebook)

Thursday, December 3: TurboTax. Our friends at XLR8R Magazine continue their monthly with future-bass Dub War resident Dave Q and friends, proof that NYC can do dubstep, too. Free + free beer, Williamsburg.

Saturday, December 5: RjDj + Pd Skill Share @ Eyebeam. Brush up your patching skills in the free and open source patching environment Pure Data (Pd) with some of its best developers, Hans-Christoph Steiner and the team behind reactive music environment RjDj. See also RjDj’s hackshop (hoping we can add some extra sprint time not opposite in/out fest) and a party for their new creation on 12/11. All events at Eyebeam. Free, Manhattan.

Friday, December 11: Saturn Never Sleeps. A live beats lineup wrangled by King Britt hits the new Knitting Factory; I’m doing live generative visuals for the evening. DUMBO, Brooklyn.

Saturday, December 12: in/out Festival at The Tank. A new entry this year, in/out Festival looks to be a packed day of unusual music control. By day, the fest features workshops on Jitter, Reaktor, Max for Live, and … felt. (Yes, the Grant Sisters are back with felt as a music controller.) I’ll talk about OSC and visualizing music and musical messages. By night, we make music and visuals, with a lineup ranging from Lori Napolean on appropriated telephone switchboard to monome creator tehn. Tix are cheap at $10 for the whole day. Tickets. Manhattan.

Thursday-Saturday, December 17-19: Blip Festival. The annual 8-bit music and visual chipfest returns with three nights of events. Gowanus, Brooklyn.

That’s just the fests and special events. I know The Glitch Mob play Webster Hall on December 10, among others.

So we have very little to complain about in NYC, and it’s my duty to bring the goodness to the world beyond our Megapolis.

BLIP FESTIVAL 2009 from 2 Player Productions on Vimeo.

If you’re in the New York area, tomorrow night we have another noise-making get-together at the lovely 3rd Ward. The event is free, and we have free Colt 45.

Amanda Ervin is the featured guest this month; see one of her circuits above. Her designs are intended to be something that other folks can make, so they could be an excellent starting point for the project you’re dreaming of. (And once you get sequenced events down, of course, you can assign them to whatever sounds or visuals you like.)

Thursday, September 17
7:30 – 10:30 pm
FREE
3rd Ward in East Williamsburg; Directions
With the support of Etsy.com, Make Magazine, and XLR8R.com

Full details:
http://handmademusic.noisepages.com/

And on Facebook:
Handmade Music Night

Nice blurb on myopenbar.com

I’ve given up on live streaming from the event because we can’t get a reliable connection, but we will have documentation for CDM on the projects afterward.

There really is something special about Montreal, Quebec’s metropolis just beyond the New York Adirondacks. Having shared our own conversation with Christopher Bauder and Robert Henke with video from their stunning ATOM, here’s what our friends at XLR8R Magazine were up to in May: they were on a tour of Montreal with local Ghislain Poirier.

Poirer’s Caribbean-infused electronica has made him one of Montreal’s hottest exports, but this Ninja Tune artist isn’t fleeing for Berlin (ahem). Wandering around Montreal, you really get a sense of his love for the city and what you can do to make the scene what you want – a great lesson for those of us living anywhere in the world. Poirer is currently touring the UK and Europe, having done a set at the sprawling Metropolis club during MUTEK, but he’ll get back to Montreal in time to play a Piknic Electronik in the park.

I’d love to see more artists showing us around their cities – including hamlets that don’t get so much coverage, or even big-name cities like my own home New York from a different perspective. We do have a chance to have a different view of things on the Internet. I welcome ideas about how to go about that.

Who are the people in your DIY music neighborhood?

Well, quite a few of the DIYers here on Planet Earth are converging this week in New York. Lover of circuit bending, creative electronics, and DIY music hardware are gathering for the massive Bent Festival in Manhattan, complete with performances, workshops, and a book launch. And we’ve got a special edition planned of Handmade Music featuring several artists from Bent, too, in our monthly free event. For the rest of the planet, I hope to share some of these goodies well beyond the borders of the five boroughs.

To give you a taste of the kind of work we’re doing, check out the videos here of Chiptune Marching Band, getting kids making noisy circuits for the first time and the fantastic electronic workings of Peter Edwards’ brain, plus NPR radio coverage of Ranjit Bhatnagar’s hand-crafted “Instrument a Day.”

Here are the highlights of the events.

Bent Festival, April 16-18, The Tank in Manhattan

bentfestival.org

• Nightly performances by Dr. Bleep, VBLANK, Christopher McDonald, Computer at Sea, Rhythmmemory, Playboy’s Bend, Die Schrauber, Peter Edwards/casperelectronics, E-Squared, Family TV, Devgon Ash, Ken Rei, Dr. Rek, Pixel Form, Boring Machine, Burnkit 2600, Anti Social Musik Order, plus Handmade Music veterans Lesley Flanigan, Loud Objects, Tristan Perich, and Don Miller / No Carrier … plus free beer every night at 7p.
• Nic Collins launching a new edition of his book Handmade Electronic Music – The Art of Hardware Hacking. (Can’t wait to read that.)
• Workshops on making your own Noise Box or miniRungler (sounds like Dr. Seuss), working with sensors and networks and big installations of lights that switch on and off, microcontroller programming, circuit bending, circuit design, and other Brainy Topics for beginners. There’s even a family-friendly workshop on making your chiptune marching band instruments.

Chiptune Marching Band from jamie allen on Vimeo.

And from your cheery neighbors here at CDM and our friends –

Handmade Music returns with a special Bent Edition – free, Thursday, 4/16, 3rd Ward in Brooklyn:

• “modular synth meets circuit-bent Barbie dolls. noise, drone, dance party with Peter Edwards of casperelectronics.”
• A surprise mystery instrument(s) from Handmade Music superstar Ranjit Bhatnagar, who promises it’ll be “something weird.”
• Me, with the DIY Radio Shack contact mic and some custom software, showing you how to have fun with cheap impulse-buy contact mics and make music with water
• Hopefully surprise cameos from Bent Festival’s Jamie Allen and Jo Kazuhiro talking about the circuitry, the music, and the magic of the Chiptune Marching Band
• Free beer courtesy Pabst Blue Ribbon, while it lasts

Presented by createdigitalmusic.com with our friends at music trend-setters XLR8R.com, DIY bible makezine.com, and self-made marketplace Etsy.com

Hosted by artists’ facility and happening location 3rd Ward

7:30pm, Thursday, April 16 – FREE!
3rd Ward is located at 195 Morgan Ave., at the corner of Stagg St., in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
(near the Grand St L train)
Directions
RSVP: handmade@3rdward.com

Facebook event page

See also lots more at:

casperelectronics

For more on handmade music and Ranjit’s brilliant, self-motivated hand-crafted Instrument a Day project, NPR did a fantastic piece on All Things Considered:

An Instrument A Day, Crafted By Hand [audio, interviews, and sound examples of some wild and wonderful instruments]

Our Handmade Music series continues this month on Thursday evening, 3/19, 7:30p at 3rd Ward in Brooklyn. Projects are open as always. Bring hardware. Bring circuit-bent stuff. Bring code and patches. Bring works you want to perform. Bring works that don’t work yet. Just, if you can, give us a shout to know what to expect. We have a PA, a mixer, a projector, and some space. It’s a party / science fair-style atmosphere, a chance to have a few beers and celebrate sound and noise with fellow geeks and the musicurious.

I’m particularly interested this month to see if anyone has Java or Processing-based works you want to share, as Sun’s CommunityOne East is in town, meaning lots o’ Java programmers. (Generally, they’re doing serious, work stuff like … um … servers and things. But that doesn’t mean you can’t show off your own, more unusual creations.)

More details of the lineup soon.

Call for Works, Direct Link [Google Docs]
Embedded form below:

My favorite track on YouTube has only a slide show in the background, so you’ll have to use your imagination.

For you New Yorker metro area folks:
Presented by createdigitalmusic.com with our friends at music trend-setters XLR8R.com, DIY bible makezine.com, self-made marketplace Etsy.com, and artists’ facility 3rd Ward

7:30pm, Thursday, February 19
3rd Ward is located at 195 Morgan Ave., at the corner of Stagg St., in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
(near the Grand St L train)
Directions

Facebook event page / RSVP
Join the CDM Facebook Page

Non-NYers, I’m open to suggestions as far as trying to set up a video stream. Mogulus just added a verification process, though I can get up to 50 people there without it.

Since the dawn of time, musicians have crafted their own acoustic instruments. Now, “handmade” extends to electrically-powered, digital instruments, including carved-wood gestural controllers, wearable drum pads, and rescued mannequin parts.

We got to enjoy another edition of Handmade Music in Brooklyn last week, getting together with our friends from XLR8R, Make Magazine, DIY marketplace Etsy.com, and venue host 3rd Ward. A huge thanks to our sponsor Pabst Blue Ribbon.

There are two things I especially love about these events. One is, we get to hang out and just make a racket. Performances are a wonderful thing, but getting to mix it up a little with total sonic chaos is great fun. Two, we connect people who haven’t met – non-musicians, people with no background in this stuff discovering what’s going on, but also people doing related work who may not have met before, even in a city like New York. On this particular occasion, we had two artists working with gestural controllers who were able to exchange ideas.

I think all of this can be replicated, of course, even if just hanging out with friends (in music or other fields). So, since Make Magazine and Popular Science were both nice enough to shoot some footage, here’s a look at what was on offer at this month’s edition of the event. And stay tuned for more for next month, now that we really are on a once-a-month schedule.

Handmade Music – 1/15/09 from make magazine on Vimeo.

Video from Handmade Music 1/15/09 [MAKE]

Brooke Borel of Popular Science’s DIY blog did a great piece on the event:

Making Electronic Music By Hand

Last Thursday’s event had the air of an interactive science fair, and while some attendees sat in the corner drinking, chatting, and soaking in the sounds, most crowded around the projects for demonstrations and the chance to take the controllers and make a little music of their own.

That’s a good point, too — while each of the projects could be an instrument you master over time, practicing and really getting good at, it could also be something a non-musician could pick up and play.

More on the December event and some of the technical details behind the projects — including skills you can apply to your own work and music — coming soon.