Watch List
First Techno (Kraftwerk, 1970) This concert at the “carussel of the youth” from 1970 is the earliest existing concert video of these electronic pioneers. The band was just created this year and could be seen in the original setup.
Meet the Sonic Artist Making Music with Plants: Sound Builders (Imogen Heap, 2014) In this episode of Sound Builders, we went to Los Angeles, to meet with Mileece. She’s a sonic artist and environmental designer who’s developed the technology to give silent seedlings a portal to their own sonic expression. Channeling a plant’s sentience into an instrument is no obvious feat. Mileece’s background as an audiophile and programmer dovetailed to turn a garden into an organic medium for music. She pulls this off by attaching electrodes to leafy limbs, which conduct the bio-electric emissions coming off living plants. The micro-voltage then gets sucked into her self-authored software, turning data into ambient melodies and harmonic frequencies. It’s simply not enough for these green little squirts to just spit out noise. All this generative organic electronic music must sound beautiful, too. As a renewable energy ambassador, Mileece’s larger goal behind her plant music is to enhance our relationship with nature. And if plant music can have a pleasing aesthetic articulation then hopefully we all can give a greater damn about our environment. While some may see the paradox in an organic medium generating electronic music, Mileece does not. She sees this as a symbiotic relationship, a vital one, and one that hints to a larger relationship she’s been trying to unify, which is that between humans and nature. #interactivesoundperformanceinstrument
Meet the Techno-Collagist Who Turns Lasers and Human Limbs into Instruments: Sound Builders After spending the last month feather dusting episodes from season one of Sound Builders, we’re positively tickled to bring to you a fresh batch of sonic-bending episodes. In this latest installment of Sound Builders we meet today’s sonic artists who are pushing the audio experience to a whole new level by harnessing sound and technology to create their own instruments. Hosting this time around is singer, artist and frequent Blood Orange collaborator Samantha Urbani. In episode one, we go to Bushwick to meet with Brooklyn-based, interactive sound artist Adriano Clemente. He’s a DJ, hacker, gamer and music producer but to sum things up, we’ve dubbed him a techno-collagist. It’s the most accurate description for Adriano, since he uses a multitude of existing technology and custom parts whose official purposes are hardly designed for making music. We see this firsthand when our host Samantha had her arm turned into an analog instrument. With a medical sensor strapped to her forearm, Adriano was able to turn her muscle contractions into data to perform and compose music through the rarely explored art of biofeedback. Adriano goes on to explore the relationship between body, sensors and sound by showing us how a piezo contact microphone can be used to transform any piece of backyard junk into a percussive and melodic instrument. Some people call it physical modeling synthesis but we just call it pretty much amazing. Adriano’s objective is clear: to create a new kinesthetic approach to sound design that totally flips our notion that music is made from a traditional instrument or from interfacing with your mouse, keyboard and screen. This kind of research in tactile, computer music embodiment is not only important for reimagining our conventional vision of an instrument, but also for cutting in half the frustration from wanting to perform in front of millions but having no idea how to play a single note. #interactivesoundperformance
Sounds of the Nightmare Machine (Mark Korven) What happens when a horror movie composer and a guitar maker join forces? They create the world’s most disturbing musical instrument. Affectionately known as “The Apprehension Engine,” this one-of-a-kind instrument was commissioned by movie composer Mark Korven. Korven wanted to create spooky noises in a more acoustic and original way—but the right instrument didn’t exist. So his friend, guitar maker Tony Duggan-Smith, went deep into his workshop and assembled what has to be the spookiest instrument on Earth. #soundsoundsculptureinstrument
Joint Breakcore Live Coding Performance Joint live coding performance as Sync Union (Laila Kamil & Niklas Kleemann) using Tidal Cycles in the Troop Editor. In preparation, the track was composed, and it’s sections arranged on paper. Watch the performance: