Sonics in South America

Sam Hamilton writes to let us know he's posted 170+ photographs of his recent South American odyssey on Flickr. Sam joined a group of other researchers, artists, and musicians in the Amazon, completing a series of field recordings of the rain forest, as well as workshopping and gigging throughout his trip.

Play it. Make it. Sell it.

Are you a real fan of Beirut, or did you just jump on the bandwagon? Lee Byron's Listening History visualisation reveals the truth, mining hundreds of listening hours logged on social music site LastFM for the answers. In a series of large scale posters that are both intuitive as data and beautiful aesthetically, artists are represented by sinuous waves, "cooler colors represent artists who have been listened to for a long period of time while warmer colors represent artists who are more recent in the user's listening habits."


Sell out so your work reaches millions of consumers, or stay the starving artist in relatively obscurity? Kevin Kelly proposes an alternate solution. "A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living." If a little idealistic, Kellys approach seems doable, and all the more so because of recent technology. Need to print your own book? Go to Lulu.com. Don't have a record label? Monetize it on AmieStreet.com. Need to stay in touch with those 1000 fans? MySpace, RSS feeds, blogs, and Flickr are here to help.


An approach Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor knows all too well. After following in the footsteps of Radiohead's 'pay what you want' scheme with side project Saul Williams, Reznor went even further with his own project last week, offering a stepwise model of cost for NIN's latest album. "Fans bought 2,500 copies of the ultradeluxe edition of the new album, Ghosts I-IV, offered at the same time as free tracks and other music packages that begin as low as $5. The most expensive option sold out in three days, and activity on the website crashed its servers."


Fuyuko Akiyoshi sends word of a videogame she's just produced. Zoo Escape stars you as the brave panda who must help the animals to escape. Reach a certain level and you'll need to fight the zoo keeper himself, an evil Ronald McDonald.


Want to make your own videogame? On March 28th you'll have a chance. Over at Window, we're staging a major experimental videogame exhibition, culminating in a "Play It! Make It!" evening in the Window space. You'll have a chance to play 5 or 6 seminal games, including works such as Bill Viola's surreal meditative Night Journey, the UN sponsored political simulation Ayiti, and ground breaking interactive narrative work, Facade. Talented game designer Jeff Nusz from Custom Logic will be coming up from Christchurch to run the Make it section. Arming small teams with a bevy of musical instruments, craft supplies and one computer, their aim will be to crank out a videogame in under 2 hours. That bizaare whale game with coloured pencil art and a casiotone/rap soundtrack you've always dreamt of playing? Bring it to life on March 28th.

Johnny Chang tonight at Window from 6 - 7

Johnny Chang will be performing a short selection of pieces from his London and Los Angeles compositions in conjunction with a field recording work via radios by Sonya Lacey tonight at Window from 6 - 7pm.

The event kicks off a three-day stint for Johnny at Window, as he'll be conducting less formal performances from 3 - 5pm on Wednesday and Thursday, activating the space with a range of sounds, from delicate amplified paper and dried vegetation to pure tones and field recordings.

Tonight, Tuesday, February 26, 6 - 7pm
Window, General Library Foyer, 5 Alfred Street, Auckland

Seance for Nam June Paik in Christchurch this weekend

“I use technology in order to hate it more properly” Nam June Paik

As part of the ADA Symposium this weekend, Daniel Agnihotri-Clarke presents Séance for Nam June Paik, a screening and performance event featuring Disasteradio, Naomi Lamb, Emil McAvoy & Damian Stewart, Bronwyn Smith, Nathan Thompson, Dell McLeod, Andrew Clifford, Morgan Barnard, and Dan Untitled. Widely regarded as the father of video art, "digital artworks by Aotearoa/New Zealanders will be presented in a new project: to channel (and negotiate with) the spirit of the late Korean artist’s practice".

Saturday 23 February 2008
8pm, SOFA Gallery Basement, Christchurch Arts Centre.
$15/10 or Free Entry with Tending Networks: ADA Symposium Registration

Reciprocity work from Emil McAvoy and Damian Stewart, and Disasteradio.

Powersound at Te Tuhi

Te Tuhi's foyer space reverberated with drones, clattering sticks, and plucked tones on Friday as it played host to a sound and dance performance for James McCarthy's Powersound+. A "sonic wall drawing", Powersound takes the form of a bridge of wires at various tensions, with pickups for amplification. Joining him was members from Auckland's experimental music community Vitamin S, including: Kristian Larsen, Zoe Drayton, Paul Buckton, and Andrew McMillan. The group successfully flowed through a number of phases, from Drew's initial harplike 'activation' of the instrument, through harsh guitar scraping, Dada-like play, and a rich harmonic tone on the verge of feedback to close.


Kristian throws sticks at James in some sort of fishing-baseball hybrid.


Zoe provides noise and soundscapes via a laptop.


James sets up a made instrument of wooden posts at various lengths.

Monolake/Robert Henke 2008

(Editor's note: from guest contributor Melody Watson)
Almost exactly four years after his last memorable performance in Auckland, Robert Henke (otherwise known as Monolake) graces our New Zealand shores once again.

Those of you who went to that 2003 gig will know that it was one to remember, one that people still talk about even now. This year’s performance promises to be no different.

Monolake has been an integral part of the minimal techno scene in Berlin since the early 1990’s and had releases on the groundbreaking label “Chain Reaction” before starting to release music on his on label “ Imbalance Computer Music”


Monolake describes his music thus: “I create music people can dance to, music people want to experience also with their bodies, massive rhythmical structures, temporary sonic architecture with carefully choosen textures, shimmering details, constantly breathing and pulsating objects in time. …Music in which is nothing is static and which wants to exist as a state rather then a story, music which is the result of an intense occupation with detail and which still leaves enough room for interpretation. Music which improves if played loud over giant speaker stacks. Those works are released under the project name Monolake and usually labelled techno, minimal, electro or dub.” He has performed as Monolake a number of times at various prestigious festivals such as Mutek in Montreal (www.mutek.ca) and Transmediale (www.transmediale.de).


Robert has also been involved with a very interesting collaboration with various producers over the world. This is called “Atlantic Waves” and it comprises Robert jamming in real-time with such people as Deadbeat (aka Scott Monteith) and Torsten Proefrock who is associated with the Basic Channel label. He has performed this in such places as the Tate modern and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. I was lucky enough to catch this when I was in Berlin, with Robert jamming with Deadbeat in New York. It sounded really great, and you could also see what was happening due to the interface being projected.

Yet another project (this Robert Henke is a busy boy!) revolves around the use of buddha machines. Here’s what online music magazine Gridface said about Layering Buddha: “Here the lovable FM3 Buddha Machine is his source. The result is a gorgeous ambient album of echoes and crescendos. At times the pieces are soothing (“Layer 001”), other times they are tense and immense (“Layer 002”). The incredible heft of these sounds is a result of Henke’s recording process. Henke used a state-of-the-art A/D converter to record information up to 48 kHz, allowing him to pitch the recordings down to reveal previously inaudible data.”

Robert describes his Layering Buddha performance as “music that needs attention and focus, that slowly builds up intricate and fragile structures, morphing timbres constructed of millions of microscopic sonic particles, cathedrals of filtered noises, dynamic and dramatic processes that grab the listener and throws them into a new state, or music that is almost invisible, floating around like air, music that grows when performed live using multiple channels of audio“. Layering Buddha was awarded an Honorary Mention in the Digital Music category at the 2007 Prix Ars Electronica competition.


Catch Robert Henke perform his Layering Buddha piece in a six channel surround sound environment on the 26th of February at 10/12 Customs St. He will be joined by Rosy Parlane (who releases on Touch), Nigel Wright (who releases on CMR ) and Rose. The performance starts at 8pm and costs $20 ($15 for AF members)

You can also catch Robert performing as Monolake at Coherent the Saturday before (the 23rd). He will be joined by local DJ’s Miles Kuen, Melody and Darin King as well as Wilberforce who will be playing a live dubstep set. This event will start at 10pm and will cost $20 on the door.

In Pictures: Johnny Chang at Gus Fisher

New music, new model

These sounds have a history. Recorded on "the corner of Spring and Flinders Sts on a rainy afternoon, the corner of Spencer and Flinders Sts on a baking hot morning, a train ride from Parliament to Melbourne Central, a stroll through the food stalls at the Queen Vic markets on a Saturday morning, and a visit to the CERES Environmental Park in Brunswick," expat New Zealand duo Montano built their latest album from the ground up from found sounds, or field recordings. But you won't find it in record shops. They've put the whole album on Amie Street.

We've blogged in the past about new ways of marketing, distributing and selling work which is already digital, (Artists give it away with new distribution models). Amie Street goes a couple steps further than a simple "give what you want", or "get it for free" model, taking some tips from the school playground. If you're the first to discover a hot new band and download their tracks, it's free. But once that popularity hits the masses, the price of each song starts rising for every download it gets, capping at 98 cents. Plus - like the playground - if you're the cool kid who recommended the band to everyone from the get go, you're account is credited when they all catchup and start racking up the download count. And artists are taking notice; rappers like Busta Rhymes just put out a mixtape on Amie, Aussie dance kids Justice released their latest single, and Lou Reed dropped a couple one-off tracks that aren't on any albums.

Quicktake: Billy Apple at Auckland Art Gallery

Billy Apple staged a sound performance at the Auckland Art Gallery yesterday afternoon, filling the usually tranquil Albert Park area with roars and smoke from the "The Billy Apple Historic Racing Collection" - a series of classic British grand prix bikes like the 1962 Norton Manx 500cc, once raced by innovative cycle designer John Britten. Reconfiguring the traditional gallery circuit of Kitchener and Lorne streets as a conceptual track, Apple had notable riders deliver their 20 minute sonic barrage in the 'pit'. Apple has a long engagement with sound in previous works, such as Severe Tropical Storm at Window, in which an extended 'soundtrack' was composed from data sourced from a fateful voyage on a freight liner. The usual generic throttle sounds were replaced with a range of throaty roars, pops, and piercing buzzes - demonstrating different attributes of each bike, and reinforcing the artist's statement that "the difference between the AJS and Norton is like the difference between a trumpet and a trombone."

Code snippet: Simple sound visualisation

While United Visual Artists produce ambitious, mammoth installations for artists like the Chemical Brothers (shown above), you can respond to music and sound with some simple Flash code.

With the advent of version 9 of the software, Adobe has introduced a spectrograph tool, capable of reading and responding to the various EQ changes in a song. This enables rich feedback - scripts for example could show deep purple for base heavy techno, and a light pink line for a high-pitched opera sonata. Programmers have responded with an array of experiments, sound toys, and visualisers like the ones from this competition on The Flash Blog.

The only problem is that live sound, either from a microphone or the input on a computer, doesn't have this ability. Programmers are restricted to responding to basic volume changes, which although simple, can still be compelling. From a dozen lines of code....

// construct mic object
import flash.events.ActivityEvent;
import flash.events.StatusEvent;
import flash.media.Microphone;
var mic:Microphone = Microphone.getMicrophone();

// setup mic parameters
mic.gain = 60;
mic.rate = 11;
mic.setUseEchoSuppression(true);
mic.setLoopBack(true);
mic.setSilenceLevel(0, 10000);

// respond to mic volume
function showVolume(e:Event):void {
ring.scaleX=mic.activityLevel/100;
ring.scaleY=mic.activityLevel/100;
}

// run this every frame
addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, showVolume);

....To more complex examples using extensions such as open-source 3d project Papervision:

Quicktake: Compact Listen CD Release

An absorbing sound emanated from Cross St Studios in Auckland on Friday night, heard by the lucky bunch who attended the CD release of Compact Listen, from the label CLaudia.

The launch included a night of performances from three of the groups included on the CD compilation, which surveys some of New Zealand's recent audio explorers.

Praise be to Tim Coster and Nigel Wright who were first up. They lulled their audience with a perfect parabola of noise, a nice complement to sipping shared beers and sitting on a cushion.


Nigel Wright and Tim Coster.
(Apologies to the artists for poor sound in the recording)

Rosy Parlane also produced some wonderfully complicated sounds from his laptop, his music is like wine that gets discussed in terms of its full bodies and citrusy tangs. Yum.

Sweetcakes--an ensemble of three wooden percussive instruments, a drum kit and a laptop--came together to produce a sound that had an air of a 1960s after dinner improv session, plus laptop, although sadly without the visible or audible enjoyment associated, providing an eclectic cap to the night.

Quicktake: Adam Willetts at Whammy Bar

Artist/musician Adam Willetts performed a solo set last night at Auckland's Whammy Bar, moving seamlessly from aggressive, glitch based feedback to melodic pulses and back again. Kneeling shaman-like on the floor, Willetts managed to avoid the cold, impersonal performances of 'laptop' sets where movement is limited to mouseclicks and knob twiddling. Instead, with the typical barrage of wires and effects pedals were a pair of wireless white objects not usually used with music - Wiimotes. Because the Nintendo Wii controllers use accelerometers/gyroscopes, they're sensitive to shaking, tilting and panning, and have been hooked up as MIDI controllers by enterprising glitch kids, allowing musicians to control sonic waves as easily as gamers hit virtual tennis balls. The controllers made for a much more compelling, physical performance as Willetts literally shook out shock waves of noise and bent wrists to overdrive tones. Unfortunately Willetts was the standout of the night, the lineup moving awkwardly from improvised noise and glitch based soundscapes to a Loretta Lynn-like singer songwriter before ending with The Terminals, who cranked through a set of oldskool punk numbers in the spirit of the Sex Pistols.

Note: Photo shown not from performance, although setup was similar.

Second Life and UpStage walkthroughs tonight

The team who run UpStage, which we've blogged about here in the past, are conducting a walkthrough tonight at 9pm New Zealand time. Just click here at the appropriate time to view the performance and be stepped through some of the features of the virtual performance software. If you'd like to be more involved as a participant, just e-mail them for a guest login.


On a related note, programmer and blog member Luke Duncalfe and myself will be taking a tour through some art projects, galleries, and islands in Second Life at around 7pm New Zealand time. Like to join? Signup for Second Life, login, then click here to teleport to Ars Virtua where we'll be meeting. We hope to visit a sound piece by Edo Autopoiesis titled "Resonating with Wind", Sabine Stonebender's Installation at Zero Point in Kelham , DanCoyote Antonelli's Arts & Letters Installation, and some scripted architecture (video shown above).

Sound as art - art as sound

Toshio Iwai stands on the stage holding a translucent digital panel rimmed in steel. Dressed all in white, with a wireless headset, he appears to have stepped from a pure, utopian future. Quickly he generates a rhythm of electronic pulses, then adds a simple melody over the top. He moves sound sources around on a grid, phasing tones in and out, building them to a resonant crescendo. As any electronic musician will tell you, his performance isn't technically difficult. Software sequencers - where the computer triggers a note or sample if a grid node is turned on - have been around for years. The difference lies in the execution and aesthetics. Instead of a performer hunched over a mysterious laptop, Iwai's Tenori On instrument moves with the player, glowing and pulsating, communicating the sound visually.



We enjoy connecting the visual and the aural: the whip crack of a snare as a drummer's stick comes in contact, the tensed face of a singer reaching for a high note. So it's fitting that recent projects seek to bring that connection to the sometimes cold black box of electronic sound. Instruments like Iwai's, visual programming software like Max or Pure Data, and Bjork's recent use of the 'reactable' instrument in her live shows try to address this lack.


A 'tangible music interface', the reactable is essentially a tabletop which senses specially tagged blocks put on top of it and overlays graphical data on them. The typically invisible tempo which lies behind a song becomes a very visible digital ripple, triggering sounds as it touches blocks. Difficult concepts like signal paths are made clear - we can see the original signal emanate out, then become squelched and agitated as it passes through a filter block.

Of course, the type of visual feedback can also take a lo-fi bent. At the last experimental sound night known as Vitamin S, dancer Christian Larsen and a fellow dancer reacting to a looped, overdriven guitar performance.

Quick take: Phil Dadson and Rosy Parlane at Starkwhite

New Zealand sound artist Phil Dadson, and London-based soundscape musician Rosy Parlane performed at Stark White last night to a full house. The pairing was a good one - active versus passive, old skool versus new. Dadson roamed around the room, slamming away on metallic coils, dropping chains and pumping bellows of organs furiously. Parlane was consumer and filter - recording and looping Dadsons efforts, building up soundscapes of drones, glitches, adding Vangelis-like synths into the mix.

The performance worked best when the distinction between the two grew less - one of the high points occured when Dadson placed a simple $2 fan against taut wires, producing a pulsating percussive backbeat. The ability to replay loops from 10 minutes ago created a much more complex, wholistic piece than Dadson could have performed solo. Unfortunately it's all too easy to create monstrous, piercing tones with a laptop, and Parlane overpowered the piece at times, obscuring whole passages of Dadson's sensitive reed organ work.

Note: images of Parlane and Dadson shown were not taken from performance

Gina Tornatore at MIC

The insuperable phenomena of hidden behaviour by London-based Australian artist Gina Tornatore consists of a trio of synchronised projected video, filmed at 300 fps and then dramatically slowed, rewound, and repeated. A friend commented that it was so simple, yet effective, and I have to agree. Tornatore takes the formal rigour and cinematic aesthetic of 16mm film shot at high speed and digitises it, opening up the flexible sampling and playback control inherent in digital video. The dance content of the piece added a visceral, physical quality which curator Louise Garrett aludes to with her description of "action to produce intense psychological moments," and which, in Tornatore's hands, manages to steer a course through the pitfalls of both the dance and video art mediums. Closed now but highly recommended future viewing.

Quick Take: fps live cinema event

A quick take on this years fps experimental film night, which finished moments ago.

Abject Leader presented three performances in what was my standout act of the night. The Australian duo of Sally Golding and Joel Stern combined a range of digital and analogue hardware to stage three mini-shows, Bloodless Landscape, The Gospell According to Johnny's Ghost, and Henri's Hallucinations across Time and Space. Joel provided the soundtrack, running sound from a laptop through live effects, with some a surprise coming from a trumpet he played at random intervals. Sally frenetically worked a group of five 16mm projectors, loading film, skewing and reflecting it off mirrors, and even tinting it via coloured rotating on a household fan. The performance was magical and surprising - frames drifting off into corners of the room, buzzing synths mirroring onscreen insects, it was expanded cinema at it's best.



Next up Stella Brennan showed South Pacific, a long researched (18 months she mentioned) digital video work exploring the legacy of WWII on the region, especially that of island culture. Much of the video plays out as you see below - blown up shots of ultrasounds, ocean waves, and bombs with typewritten text animating across the bottom. More poetry or commentary than any video work I've seen recently, for me it was mixed. Each word and phrase was plucked carefully, delivering a strong statement which was at times poignant (describing how efforts to replant war runways failed), and funny (riffing off pacific myths of steel guitar and khakis) but always retained a personal naturalness ("I'm going to land now"). But the visual side let me down, why use video for a poetic/text based piece? Like a computer or a mobile phone, text isn't particularly suited for the medium. Doable, but not easy.


The next act started mysteriously. The audience came back after the interval to find the chairs and mattresses moved, creating a diagonal aisle down the middle of the space. Loren Chasse, a San Francisco artist, proceeded to unfurl a giant paper banner down this, then scatter a collection of rocks, pebbles, and sand down it, recording the process with a MiniDisc. Loren then moved to creating sound with stones while the recorded sound played back. A colleague (unnamed in the programme) manipulated ferns, twigs, and other NZ flora over a OHP projector, mirroring the sound created by Loren. These two phases were repeated again, with variations - simple shadow making reflecting live sound creation. The piece was interesting, but I was so surprised they didn't do the obvious I became a little disappointed. Why not use concrete, physical actions - like tossing stones down on the ground - to create a live soundtrack? Sand washing down the paper would have been beautiful with effects applied, or as a trigger for other instruments. Instead, the record/playback process was slightly laborious, and the overlong piece - after the main action occured - grew tiring.



Finally we were up to Matt Brennan's Cardboard Cinema, an intriguing piece that was meant to finish up the programme. It never occured. Due to technical difficulties or breakages of equipment, Matt was stuck. Through some tremendous last-minute effort he submitted a short DV piece titled something like 'Matts great movie'. Consisting of a barrage of echoing yells, blasted trumpet and cymbal crashes, the video was fun, and funny. Matt appears in face masks -beating drumkits, running down stairs and playing lead guitar riff next to a toilet. A heroic effort and an easy end to the night, although it would have been interesting to see his billed act - where "audio visual collages emanate from cardboard machines".

Connect the dots: Graphical programming with Max, PD, and vvvv

In in the early seventies, experimental German band Kraftwerk became known for building their own synthesisers. Robert Moog developed his transistorised modular version from 1964 onwards. And while not matching the innovation of these pioneers, I just built a simple Moog type synth in 5 minutes. And I'm not really a programmer.

And that, it seems, is the point. Increasingly, artists, musicians, and those working in the space between media and technology want something that provides some 'under the hood' control without the learning curve. Enter the rise of the graphical programming language - a visual approach that treats media as a series of connections - a slightly geekier version of the classic path from guitar to distortion pedal to amplifier.

Max/MSP, an early prototype for this concept, has been used for over 15 years, by artists, educators, and musicians like Johnny Greenwood from Radiohead and Richard D James (Aphex Twin). Still a popular and well supported tool, it's become commercialised, with the original coder Miller Puckette, going on to develop a very similar, and open source alternative, Pure Data.



But while creating your own sound is easy, the buzz wears off quickly when you realise what you're listening to - a very artifical sounding sine tone which is less interesting that a telephone ring. Pure Data and Max become interesting when their connections extend outside themselves, to samplers, audio triggers or further software. How about running an installation triggered by a footstep, with a constantly unique soundtrack which was played by a string section? Web cam input hooked into PD, which randomly selects part of a score and outputs to orchestral VST (virtual studio technology) plugins.



vvvv follows the same approach, substituting frames, RGB channels, and rendering commands for audio signals. While it's Windows only, the software has quickly produced some fascinating pieces. Seelenlose Automaten outputs a series of MIDI commands to both audio and video at the same time. For example, one note outputs a hi-hat sound to audio, and a 'rotate everything left' to the visual 3d model. The result is a perfectly synced generative composition.

et al: the fundamental practice at Artspace

Sneaked into Artspace on the final day for Et Al's repurposed Venice exhibition, the Fundamental Practice, and thought I'd mention a couple quick thoughts on the digital aspects.

While it has been shown before, the Artspace version has been "reordered, regrouped, restored". This was evident in aspects like the sound - the curatorial intern was kind enough to play a CD of recorded sound from the previous incarnation, which seemed much more solitary and quiet. The expansive concrete rooms of the current space meant that the sound channels boomed and echoed, mixed and collided. CNN style news headlines shifted with white noise and more melodic elements as you moved between areas.

Photographs by Jennifer French provided courtesy of Artspace

The Fundamental Practice also utilised a Google Earth element - playing back a series of waypoints and camera angles generated with the mapping tool. Strangely the locative element didn't anchor the work in a greater spatial context, instead zooming and panning around a collection of tiny village names in an (for myself unknown) Middle Eastern country (Iran, Iraq?). Overlaid in a circular pattern over 5 of these were obelisks, lending the whole thing a totemic, conspiracy theory quality which focused on a single village in the middle. This was reinforced by a second screen constantly scrolling through propoganda text - a mixture of military jargon and religious commands displayed in a raw code (think notepad) type format. As p. mule states, "Fundamentalism was rife throughout the process from all sectors. Is humour important (in the work)? p.mule: Yes. (or) It’s fundamental."

Whisper-ma-phones

Sam Morrison's Whisper-ma-Phones are enclosed sound devices attached to a number of streetlights within Aucklands CBD. These devices operate in rhythm with the streetlights, waking up and going to sleep in unison. During the hours of activity (night time!) the Whiper-ma-Phones are responsive to those that approach, each having it's own unique voice and story to tell. Will do a full review when I check out the Kitchener Street version tonight...

Update: Found one of the phones last night, outside of Parsons on Wellesley Street. Speaking into an orange plastic tube triggers the barrel above, lighting it up and starting the noise-producing mechanics. One of the most interesting features is that - even without the triggered input - the length and acoustics of the plastic tube produce an almost electronic humming tone, distorted and undulating.