. media culture . music
art . music
MR-808: Mechatronic 80s Drum Machine
The Roland TR-808 drum machine is an icon of electronic pop music that has spawned countless software emulators. Tired of making music in the physically constrained but potentially limitless environment of his computer, Moritz Simon Geist has created the MR-808, a physical version
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dvd . music . performance
Anaïs Prosaic - Eliane Radigue
 DVD - La Huit / Potemkine - 2012, French, EnglishVirtuoso Listening is a film which turns out to be a homage to one of the female pioneers of electronic music: Eliane Radigue. Former wife of famous contemporary artist Arman, after their split she started composing avant-garde music (1967). In those early days she met minimalists like Terry Riley ... [ Continue ] email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0) |
book . copyright . literature . music
Eduardo Navas - Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling
Springer Vienna Architecture, ISBN: 9783709112625, 230 pages, 2012, English
The act of remixing, enabled by the technical possibility of sampling, innate in the structural definition of digital technologies, has a seminal contemporary importance. But despite its ubiquitous use, there are very few books that engage with "remix" as a paradigm, beyond its music composition applications and/or copyright consequences
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copyright . music . performance
Compro Auri, the time value of listening
 The debate over the value of intellectual property has been conducted along more or less similar lines since digital file sharing came to the fore in the late 90s. While the industry attempts to equate immaterial products with traditional goods, activists and disobedient consumers struggle to maintain free access to information. A project by Brazilian artist Giuliano Obici proposes a refreshing and radical
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book . music
Stefan Szczelkun, Anthony Iles - Agit Disco
Mute Books, ISBN: 9781906496517, 184 pages, 2011, English
This is a conceptual, readable book with a well-developed and unique theme. Agit Disco, in fact, is a "collection of annotated playlists made by 23 writers documenting how music has politically influenced them." The editors call it an "archive project" and it's doubtless that, but it's also a live archive as the editors have personally involved the contributors in a process of sharing music, thoughts and
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dvd . music . software . sound art
Oval / OvalDNA
Shitkatapult,
CD+DVD
, Strike134, 2011
It took a decade to Markus Popp/Oval to return and release another album ("O") which radically changed its approach towards more classical sounds (with drums, guitar and a cheap computer using only pre-installed sounds and plug-ins). But, collecting together huge quantities of material from times past, now comes the magnum opus "OvalDNA". And it was worth waiting for – sporting, as it does, a twenty-five
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dvd . music . sound art
Mikhail Karikis + Uriel Orlow - Sounds From Beneath
Sub Rosa, Book+DVD, ISBN: 978095 5736117, SR314, 2011
Treating sound as memory and involving a number of different professionals can achieve the most interesting results. "Sounds From Beneath" is the result of the collaboration between composer Mikhail Karikis and visual artist Uriel Orlow on a project exploring the sounds of coal mines and their memory in the British community. This release includes the video the two produced together and a pamphlet with
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art . music . sound art
Atomic Guitar - Pump Up The Fallout
The meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi set off by the Tōhoku earthquake (which occurred despite Japan's sophisticated prevention systems and the country's solid reputation in disaster management) has rekindled a cold-war imagery of atomic Armageddon which had been dormant under a spell of reassuring pro-nuclear propaganda. After the inability of private companies operating in the nuclear
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art . music . performance
Fluorescene - Light Feedback Chain
In the opening pages of Understanding Media, when introducing his most controversial and well-known claim, McLuhan presented electric light as an example of a medium without a message. This concept finds a literal incarnation in the audio domain in the practice of generating sounds directly from a mixing desk with no external input sources, that is to say in the use of a sound system
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book . music
VV.AA. - Störung: Sound & Visual Art
Störung/Cameo, Book+DVD, str009, 2012
Per diverso tempo, la natura effimera dei festival (eventi nei quali è possibile rapportarsi ad opere d’arte, conferenze e live acts che terminano appena la manifestazione si conclude) è stata messa in discussione. Sono stati portati avanti diversi tentativi di fornire esperienze più durature attraverso YouTube e Vimeo Channel, i live streaming, i set fotografici su Flickr e le pagine Facebook, ma
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music . sound art . video . visual
Unnamed Soundsculpture - Dancing With Data And Time
Unnamed soundsculpture is a video produced by onformative and chopchop and realized by Daniel Franke and Cedric Kiefer. A cloud of 22000 points, following the movements of a dancer giving a free interpretation of a track called Kreukeltape by Machinenfabriek, creates the illusion of an ever changing statue of sand. The transfiguration of the human figure into grains of sand has been obtained by
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art . music . sound art
0h!m1gas, biomimetic surveillance for scratching
Relationships between art and nature have been proposed for a long time – although they mostly function on an aesthetic level. The work of Kuai Shen, however, goes far beyond classical observations. His installation 0h!m1gas makes both artistic and scientific advances - creating a closed environment, an artificial ecosystem, defined as "biomimetics stridulation", where a colony of ants lives subjected to
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book . music . sound art
Edited by Caleb Kelly - Sound
Whitechapel Gallery, ISBN-13: 9780854881871, 240 pages, 2011, English
There seems to be a kind of sub-genre in sound art books: the anthology of historical texts. Perhaps because sound art is still a hybrid which lacks a well defined and acknowledged identity, this attitude towards compiling selections of important texts from renowned artists and musicians seems quite peculiar. Somehow it feels like a huge effort to be exhaustive and consistent, as with a comprehensive
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dvd . music . sound art . visual
Simon Whetham & Hugo Olim, Mic.Madeira
Crónica, dvd, Crónica 063, 2011
Field recording exploded as a practice in experimental music during the 2000s. It has been used in the most varied ways, transcending its basic nature of "sampling" the environment, and in some inspired cases evolving a more conscious sense of recording something specific, then trying to preserve the sense of that place in subsequent uses. This video is one of those cases, and it's the revised version of
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art . music . sound art
20 hz, magnetic storm aesthetic
Making the earth's magnetism perceivable is an acquired skill that was originally developed for navigation purposes. Having to rely on the compass for orientation, seamen have been aware of the instability of the earth's magnetic field for centuries, especially when navigating at high latitudes. Semiconductor's Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt have recently completed 20 HZ
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music . net . software . sound
ScratchML, encoding scratches
ScratchML is a project planned by Michael Auger, Jamie Wilkinson and Kyle McDonald with the goal of creating a new markup language for encoding the musical scratches of Dj sets in realtime. Afterwards, the scratches are analyzed, re-created and shared through databases. During the Brooklyn Hack Day 2012 the first prototypes of this project were developed by the planners together with other
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art . music . religion . sound art
Witnesses, spiritual circuit bending
These chant-boxes are electronic devices sometimes provided to help believers pray in Buddhist temples in China. The gadgets, similar to pocket radios and sometimes packaged with images of Buddha, broadcast loops of prayer, helping the believers to follow the rhythms of the litany. In the sound installation "Witnesses" the artist Zach Poff has made use of these devices, but has changed their
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art . music . sound art
Florian Hecker - Speculative Solution
CD + Book, Mego eMEGO 118, Urbanomic UF13, 2010
It's less and less common to find music labels brave enough to release and actually invest in concepts and experimentation, giving them proper form as products. Although realized with support from public funding, this work is a nice exception. Florian Hecker is quite well-known for being a composer both playful and restlessly investigative of conceptual topics, not afraid to delve into fringe fields of
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book . music . sound art
Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life
Continuum, ISBN-13: 978-1441161369, 304 pages, 2010, English
This is a book about "auditory life," exploring the everyday practice of listening and how auditory studies can better interpret and influence society. Systematically divided into chapters which reflect specific urban acoustic environments (Underground, Home, Sidewalk, Street, Shopping Mall, Sky), the text
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art . music . sound
Blackdeath Noise Synth, sounds from the plague
A set of relatively simple rules can often depict the complex patterns found in many natural phenomena. Among these, the relationships between individuals of a living society, like the one of a bacterial colony, have been studied for centuries. The famous Conway's Game of Life is a prime example of how these behaviors can be simulated mathematically, and since its introduction forty years ago, it has given birth
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book . music . preservation
edited by Mario Côté and Brigitte Kerhervé - Archives Sonores
booklet+dvd, 44 pages, Canada, 2009, EAVM/Hexagram, ISBN: 978-2-922392-11-1"Sonic Architecture" is an expression used to describe very different things, from the architectural audio-reflective properties of a building to the structure of a complex piece of music. But within Archives Sonores, it faultlessly expresses architectural spaces that represent pieces of the urban collective memory, through carefully planned recordings. Côté and Kerhervé, researchers at Hexagram ... [ Continue ] email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0) |
art . music . sound art
Idan Hayosh, orderly displays of threat
The work of Idan Hayosh disguises military imagery in simple arrangements of ordinary objects. Walking into his installations one is confronted with symmetrical displays of lamps, cutlery, gas tanks, scooters or fans, neatly spread out in wedge formations. These arrangements are not casual. They reproduce posters of military aircraft that Hayosh collected while
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dvd . music . sound art
Scott Morrison - Ballad(s) For Quiet Horizons
Room40, dvdThis is the first documentation of Scott Morrison's live installation works in the form of a series of compelling audio/visual tracks. Most of them focus on grass set in motion by an inaudible wind. The enchanting single and collective movements are cut in a very precise and specific way: producing a visual depth that is also perfectly synced with the music. The viewer, in fact, is taken aurally by the hand, ... [ Continue ] email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0) |
music . sound art
Vinyl Rally, record's racing
A common issue in presenting experimental music and sound art is finding an effective way to share with the audience the fun of exploring unconventional uses of musical objects. Reinventing, hacking and sometimes destroying instruments, playback devices and other media can provide a good deal of fun, but perhaps due to the gritty, harsh and uncontrolled output these activities tend to generate, their
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art . music . robot . sound art
Versus, sounding dialogues
Versus is a kinetic sound installation by David Letellier. Its functioning is characterized by an interactive dialogic mechanism. There are two kinetic sculptures that are interdependent and they have to be face to face to make sense. Each sculpture is made out of 12 triangular panels, joining at the center in a flower-like shape with actuators to allow slow movement. In the center of this singular "corolla" there's
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book . music
Joanna Demers Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music
216 pages, Oxford University Press, 2010, English, ISBN-13: 978-0195387667The stated purpose of Demers in this book is to find a unifying (strictly speaking) aesthetics for electronic music, despite the very different ideologies the different genres come from. Although the task would seem too vast, she restricts the timespan considered from the 1980s onwards. 1980 has been chosen because it represents a pivotal moment for democratization of electronic music ... [ Continue ] email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0) |
music . sound art
A Piano Listening To Itself, inducing Chopin in chords
Moving across two and a half decades from the windy north Atlantic coast of Canada to the center of Warsaw, the large-scale Aeolian instruments of Gordon Monahan form a temporal bridge between the Fluxus-propelled experimental music of the sixties and seventies and contemporary sound art production. Taking the former’s deconstruction of musical heritage and combining it with an approach
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book . music
edited by Song-Ming Ang, Kim Cascone - The Book of Guilty Pleasures
Song-Ming Ang,
English
, Pages 208
, ISBN 978-9810880699Published on the occasion of the Singapore Biennial, 2011, this book is a collection of "confessions" from a selection of one hundred artists, curators, musicians, and writers about what they think are their aural guilty pleasures. These contributions certainly have a glamorous quality and are potentially scandalous – they are revealing things that would usually not be mentioned. This generates much ... [ Continue ] email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0) |
interactive . music . performance
Sounding Juggling Balls, minimalist music in projectile motion
At Patterns + Pleasure Festival in Amsterdam STEIM presented the premiere of several pieces written by Tom Johnson for the Gandini Juggling company. For these pieces STEIM developed a set of interactive juggling balls that react to movement by emitting sound. Tom Johnson is an American composer and former music journalist, credited with introducing the term “minimalist” into music criticism in the
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hacktivism . music
Sound Tossing, Artificial Urban Crickets
In the urban landscape it can be hard to distinguish a sign from a trace and sometimes even from a piece of garbage. The global popularity of shoe tossing, the practice of throwing worn out shoes over telephone wires, can be partially attributed to this ambiguity. What does it mean when a pair of shoes are seen hanging overhead? While the motives of shoe-tossers remain unknown, they have inspired
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art . music . sound art
Urban Audio, composing with traffic
When R. Murray Shafer conducted the International Sound Preference Survey a few decades ago, traffic noise was categorized as one of the least appreciated sounds in the world, together with dentist drills and chalk squeaking on blackboard. Sound artist Florian Tuercke has been spending the last few years
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media . mobile . music . net . video
TinyRiot, the sound of a thousand (tiny) riots
With most demonstra- tions and street protests it's hard to know exactly who hurled the first bottle. Amidst a sea of people engaged in a collaborative state of mind, the sense of anonymity generated can be very empowering. In the ever-congealing, international abyss of the iPhone (the networks, the users and the apparatus itself) anonymity in this perceived collective is curbed by a registered phone number
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music . sound art
Brandon LaBelle - The Sonic Body: Figures 1-12
Errant Bodies, ebr_06, cd + bookletAre there limits to the sounds that can be packed as a product (i.e. a label release)? Noise, field recordings, silence, disturbing or pure frequencies, sounds from objects or machines have always been welcome in the ample soundscape of experimental music, especially when produced in a conceptually worthy style. The Sonic Body pushes another limit. It records dance movements; the sounds of ... [ Continue ] email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0) |
art . hacktivism . music
L.S.D./Sonic Graffiti – Urban Screen Sonifier
Recyclism aka Benjamin Gaulon offers an original and playful reading of video advertisement displays. Competing for attention in our daily lives, plasma, led and lcd screens have become ordinary elements of the urban landscape, delivering familiar corporate propaganda in a technologically updated form. Gaulon employs his L.S.D. (light to sound device) to
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interactive . music . sound art
. PAGES: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
Disc.o, optical loop temple
Disc.o is a plastic representation of the unit length of repetitive contemporary music: the Loop. The author, Andreas Haider (aka muk), is explicitly referencing the SuperPiano of Emerick Spielmann, invented in 1929 as the first photoelectric sound synthesizer. The installation consists of two parallel circular planes positioned at head height and connected to the ceiling. The lower disc consists of
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Sonic Genoma
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Wicked Style
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Virtual Light (1995)
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Tecnologie di Liberazione (2001)
Resistant Maps (2006)
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editor in chief:
Alessandro Ludovico
assistant editor:
Aurelio Cianciotta Mendizza
contributors:
Josephine Bosma
Ylenia Cafaro
Vito Campanelli
Valentina Culatti
Michael Dieter
Daphne Dragona
Matteo Marangoni
Rachel O' Dwyer
Paolo Pedercini
Paul Prudence
Benedetta Sabatini
production and promotion:
Chiara Ciociola
infrastructure design
and consulting:
Paolo Cirio
translations:
Roberto Orsini
Giuseppe Santoiemma
technical consulting:
Paolo Mangraviti
Alessandro Ludovico
assistant editor:
Aurelio Cianciotta Mendizza
contributors:
Josephine Bosma
Ylenia Cafaro
Vito Campanelli
Valentina Culatti
Michael Dieter
Daphne Dragona
Matteo Marangoni
Rachel O' Dwyer
Paolo Pedercini
Paul Prudence
Benedetta Sabatini
production and promotion:
Chiara Ciociola
infrastructure design
and consulting:
Paolo Cirio
translations:
Roberto Orsini
Giuseppe Santoiemma
technical consulting:
Paolo Mangraviti
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