homogenizer

One of my favorite distractions of late is Soundtoys.net, an assortment of digital art projects mostly created using embedded shockwave or flash, or available as installable programs across a variety of operating systems.

Some of my favorite soundtoys artworks use the entire soundtoys website as a self-referential database. the creators and contributors of soundtoys.net are to be commended for endlessly reinterpreting their site in new ways. take, for example, the “soundtoys.net content nagigator”, which allows navigation through selectable tags on either side of the interface which correspond to nodes on a radar-style screen. the nodes produce bleeps as the radar passes over them, and form curiously awkward beats when enough are present.

I love the aesthetic of such interfaces, but i can’t get over their novelty, since, in almost every instance, the site is far more navigable using the traditional methods. The sole exception to this shortcoming is the “Pond.Code.XMl” application on Levitated.net. It is similar to the various interfaces on soundtoys.net in that it is only useful in navigating the parent site, but its simplicity and linear nature make for far more intuitive browsing.

Every composition on levitated.net is in flash, but what makes the site special is their promotion of open-source material. Every piece is available for download as a flash file, and the site’s moderators encourage the free manipulation of their projects. The site, as a result, is not only a fascinating browse, but can be used as a sort of advanced tutorial for Flash.

other open-source stalwarts include the Ogg-Vorbis file format and the Linux operating system, both of which have grown into free and superior products.

memetics simulation no. 2

EEsstrrrrnnnn meadowlaaaarrrrrrrrrrk

I was fortunate enough to have attended ‘Cinema for the Ears’, the loudspeaker orchestra performance that was organized by Dr. Stephen David Beck and held on Wednesday, March 26 in the Shaw Center’s Manship Theatre. In his lecture, Dr. Beck briefly touched briefly on musique concrete, which, as a genre, interests me greatly, so it was enlightening to hear it in the elastic environment for which it was intended. Though every selection was intriguing in its own way, the highlight of the evening was Dr. Beck’s original composition, “A Little Lightsaber Rattling”. The piece involved the manipulation of a synthesizer that was wired so as to be controlled by the motion of a Wii remote. It was performed with no meager theatricality by a percussion major, since Dr. Beck had a cast on his wrist from some unknown calamity that rendered him incapable of giving the performance himself. I was amazed by the range of sounds that could be produced in this way by any combination of movements, however minute or grandiose. Other favorites included “oN a LaRk”, with its humorously synthetic bird calls, and “Gravity’s”, which was explained by the composer, Rick Nance, as consisting of samples taken while mountain climbing, including the sound of a five foot free-fall with microphones crammed into his ears to capture the sound. The value of the composer’s explanation cannot be understated, since none of the samples could be recognized for what they were without it.

Experimental and electronic (or ‘noise’) music has an extremely long history, dating as far back as the early 20th century, practically as long as we’ve been able to record sound. My own exposure to musique concrete has mostly been through the ‘Anthology of Noise’ series put out by Sub Rosa, which includes a wealth of such pieces and . The series seeks to provide a comprehensive history the manipulation of sound by highlighting the artists who were pushing the technology and trends of their respective eras, which warrants the inclusion of avant jazz auteurs such as Sun-Ra and freak rock like Captain Beefheart, though the majority of the material focuses on the history of synthesized sound.

Sub Rosa’s catalogue includes entries spanning the electronic spectrum from Nam June Paik and Hans Arp to Wesley Willis, whose songs derive entirely from the presets and drum fills on his casio keyboard. As their manifesto declares on the entry page, the label’s self-appointed, painstaking objective is the preservation and ‘rehabilitation’ of music which would otherwise be lost to history.

One of the pieces that Dr. Beck played for us during his class lecture that particularly caught my ear was “Pythagoras’ Curtain”. The piece opens with the rhythmic, clicking sound of chalk against chalkboard, then proceeds to twist the samples through numerous permutations. It begs the audience to ask what is being written, and forces them to consider an . I was instantly enamored with the concept of the speakers as a curtain behind which the audience could never peak.

‘Silver Apples of the Moon’ also piqued my interest. The title was taken from a poem by William Butler Yeats. The piece was fairly standard fare for early avant-garde electronic music. ‘The Silver Apples’ was also the name of a band formed in 1967 that consisted of a drum kit and a cumbersome machine, dubbed ‘the simeon’ after the machines inventor and operator, that was an almagamation of nine military oscillators salvaged from the Second World War and wired together so that Simeon could manipulate the lot of them with various improvised hand and foot pedals, all the while chanting psychadelic poetry no less grandiose than the book after which the band was named. Though the Silver Apples were not the first group to create music by electronic means, they were definitely the first rock band to do so. I had thought that their name was simply a reference to the aformentioned poem, but the correlation between the dates of the piece mentioned by Dr. Beck and the formation of the band surely cannot be coincidental.

simeon interview: http://www.terrascope.org/silver.html

silverapples.com

distraction

http://milov.nl/iambald/

The strength of this project is that it defies description, yet is completely self explanatory. Who am I to interfere with such utopian simplicity? I’ll say this much: 107 is my favorite, but aside from that, just start clicking.

censorship alert. controversy ensues.

Though old news by now, an instillation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of Wafaa Bilal’s “The Night of Buch Capturing: A Virtual Jihadi” was cancelled due to public outcry. The piece was an Al-Quieda created hack of a video game published by the U.S. military in which the player assumed the role of a soldier in Baghdad who is on a mission to assassinate Saddam Hussein. The Al-Quieda version reverses the sides, with the objective of assassinating President Bush. Bilal’s version is a re-skinning of the Al-Quieda version, but the objective remains the same. Participants at the installation were allowed to play the game through to its conclusion on a large projection screen, until the entire show was unexpectedly shut down.

It is regrettable that the work resulted in censorship rather than dialogue. Bilal’s piece is obviously controversial, something he should have considered more carefully before presenting it, but, in my opinion, it serves as a jarring reminder of the near-universal availability of digital technology and reminds the american public that the technology so often taken for granted can be used for equally potent propaganda in the hands of anyone computer-savvy enough to tap its potential, even Al-Queida. it reminds of us of how severely we have underestimated our enemy in this aimless ‘war on terror’.

Bilal is an Iraqi artist whose work examines the consequences of war in the middle east and its people, as well as revealing the nature of torture and cruelty in the modern world. His work was first brought to my attention last summer through an interview on NPR, in which Bilal described another emotionally charged piece. Performed in June of 2007, Bilal’s concept was to lock himself in a room for a month while inviting web-surfers to shoot at him with a remotely controlled paintball gun, which could be aimed through controls on this website, essentially inviting the whole world to shoot him anonymously with yellow paint. Though the site now only shows a still image of a blank wall, you can still easily imagine Bilal’s terror as he would sit and patiently wait for the gun to spring to life, manned by some faceless sadist thousands of miles away or more.

More information on these and other works by Wafaa Bilal can be found at www.crudeoils.us or at www.wafaabilal.com.

creative process

Alright, I know that this blog has been slightly skewed toward music, but i simply can’t help myself, being the audio junkie that i am. William S. Burroughs had heroine, I’ve got music. Perhaps it is a conscious effort on my part to make up for the brevity of the ‘electronic music’ chapter in Christianne Paul’s “Digital Art”.

With that out of the way, i’d like to share a video from npr.org’s “Project Song” feature that lays bare the creative process of the synthpop master craftsman Steven Merrit, of Magnetic Fields fame. The premise of Project Song is that the artist is given six words and six images from which he can choose one of each as inspiration for a song’s style and subject. Merrit chooses a surreal image of a man covered in unclothed dolls, from which he derives his lyrical premise of a “Man of a Million Faces” (the song’s title, click for the link) who can change his face at will, an ability which he uses to commit crimes. I can’t help but to be awed by Merrit’s precision and single-mindedness in the studio, and as a long time fan, I’m still dumbfounded by his seemingly boundless creativity. To craft the song, Merrit employs several drum samples, piano, surf guitar, a vintage Moog synthesizer, and the archaic mellotron, which is an early keyboard that utilized tape loops, effectively becoming something like a more malleable analogue to John Cage’s ‘prepared piano’. The mellotron was also championed by Robert Fripp in his earlier King Crimson work as well as in his collaborations with Brian Eno. Robert Fripp was quick to recognize and embrace tape loops as an entirely new compositional tool, and his ‘Frippertronics’ foreshadowed the technology’s application in electronic music in the eighties and nineties, as well as being an mindblowing display of Fripp’s improvisational ability as a guitarist.

If you listen closely to the first second of the video, you’ll notice that he’s going on after Rick James!

musique concrete

Sound, noise and environment have become my themes of the month….especially visual environments that are augmented by digital sound, or even physical environments that produce audible reactions, such as Christopher Janney’s Sonic Forest at Bonnaroo…

…though it’s not nearly as cool as David Webber, who really takes the idea of a ’sonic forest’ to a wholly new level with his Organic Interface #5. This tree-theremin most of all points back to one of the major themes of this class: interfacing…not to mention imposing a completely different relationship between humans and flora. And since he has proven it possible to use trees as antennae, I look forward to the day when we could wire up a public park as some kind of massive synthesizer grove (groove?).

Another new instrument only made possible in the digital age is the reACTable, whose website provides all of the plans and software necessary to build one of these free of charge (check the software link, and scroll down to “projects based on reactivision” for some interesting and artistic derivative uses of the technology). I expect that the hardware would cost a pretty penny, though i’m definitely building one next time i have a spare projector, laptop, and digital camera lying around:

Apparently, Björk loves it, too:

Since i’m on the subject of Björk, i feel compelled to bump the video for her new single, “Wanderlust”, which is nothing short of a visual masterpiece, and a damn fine song, to boot. Encyclopedia Pictura, the visual studio behind the video and this brilliant visual metaphor:

(which, in my humble opinion, makes any other discourse on the subject unnecessary with its conciseness)

In their videos, Encyclopedia Pictura employ a style of animation whose closest analogue is Terry Gilliam’s animated asides from the “Monty Python” series, except more technically proficient by lightyears (though certainly no more bizarre).

Björk has an amazing back-catalogue of videos, and her work with Chris Cunningham is some of the most revolutionary. The video for All is Full of Love carefully comments on the nature of artificial intelligence by postulating artificial emotion. Cunningham has lent his visual genius to several other musical artists, mostly electronic, and his work with IDM titan Aphex Twin is some of the most fruitful. rubber johnny and Windowlicker are but two of many examples. Be forewarned, though, as Cunningham’s work is extremely dark, with isolation, disfiguration and grotesque irony as major themes.

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