Vessel Music is worth checking out for electronic music and its design sensibility. Designed by recent Chelsea College of Art graduate, Kit Grill, with a minimalist approach it features mixes from Wooden Shjips, Throbbing Gristle, Luke Abbott, Mogwai, Lali Puna…

[photo: Barrie Sutcliffe]

A quick heads up for any readers here in southern Ontario, Vague Terrain is teaming up with Wavelength and the Music Gallery to present an outdoor concert by William Basinski this Saturday. Basinski is probably one of the most interesting American composers active today and his particular brand of pastoral, loop-based experimentation bridges the gap between old guard minimalists (Reich, Riley, Glass) and the "post-digital" vanguard (Thomas Köner, Carsten Nicolai, GAS, etc.). Basinski's recent 92982 received the following blurb in Marc Weidenbaum’s roundup of the best ambient/electronic albums of 2009:

Slow, lulling ambient pieces by William Basinski, music with the elegant curve of a simple sine wave, the patience of a saint, and the sonic depth of an orchestral arrangement. Ever since the emergence of his Disintegration Loops, he’s become something akin to the Gerhard Richter of contemporary music — creating works that are just out-of-focus enough to compel you to focus on them all the more.

My longtime collaborator and Vague Terrain co-editor Neil Wiernik will also be playing a special opening set. The concert will take place in the courtyard of St George-the-Martyr Anglican Church at dusk this Saturday. Full event info and online ticket purchase is available at the Music Gallery event page.

Hubero Kororo designed this interactive CD cover for the band Uceroz. When you open the CD packaging on the side, ink is set free and bleeds into the cover of the CD. I really like this idea.

found at yatzer

Title: Sound Escapes
Location: Space / Mare street
Start Time: 18:30
Date: 2009-07-24

Co-curated by Irene Revell (Electra) and Angus Carlyle (LCC)

Sound Escapes is an exhibition to mark the culmination of a radical interdisciplinary
research project that brought artists together with acousticians, engineers and social
scientists from institutions across the UK in an endeavour to move beyond the notions
of negative noise towards the idea of positive soundscapes.

Alongside a public interpretation of the central research strands of the project, the
exhibition includes artists who work with soundscapes across a wide range of practices
and whose work is in conversation with the scientific and sociological questions posed
in the research. Significantly, the works have emerged from a listening process that
challenges what counts as positive; work that understands the auditory world in a more
inquisitive way, indeed an interrogation of what even counts as sound.

Image Scanning Sequencer

The Image Scanning Sequencer transforms hand-drawn graphics into music using photo cells. The handheld scanner triggers MIDI notes based on what it’s picking up and plays haunting melodies accordingly.

The location of the detected ‘note’ sets the pitch of what is played, while the darkness controls the velocity of the notes. The scanner consists of a handheld device that holds a strip of photo cells. Between the scanner and the computer is a so-called Arduino, which is an open-source electronics prototyping platform that uses a variety of sensors to sense the environment.

Check out the video of some very strange music.

More info and a do-it-yourself guide can be found on the project’s website.

”

(via digitalexperience.)

Bach arranging and arranged < Hyphen Press

Visible Sound: Graph Stitching Sewing Machine

An electronically enhanced sewing machine [soundsbutter.com], able to represent sound through the height of the stitches it creates. The resulting stitch pattern thus becomes visually similar to an equalizer timeline. Unfortunately, currently a non-working prototype only.

Via SwissMiss.

”

(via information aesthetics.)

[…] This stance is not contradictory: Dj-ing is writing, writing is Dj-ing. Writing is music, I cannot explain this any other way. Take Nietzsche, for instance, whose brilliant texts are almost musical. Obviously, you feel the rythm inside a great poet stanza, but it’s there within the great philosophers’ paragraphs as well. So many media and cultural techniques of interpretation coexist – reading, watching, listening, surfing, dancing – that this textual/sonic synaesthesia demands a great deal from us. Yet in pop culture, that deadly inertia I mentionned earleir can put a stop to the idealism of coexistence. people can become so unreflective n their usual media-habits that any kind of systemic renewal takes a long time to succeed.

WE’VE HOSTED THE VIDEO HERE AS IT KEEPS GETTING BANNED ELSEWHERE DUE TO SOME EXPLICIT SCENES (ALLEGEDLY). WARP AND ERIC WAREHEIM (TIM AND ERIC) WOULD LIKE TO URGE YOU THAT IT’S PROBABLY NOT SAFE FOR WORK – DEPENDING ON WHERE YOU WORK OF COURSE.

Directed by Eric Wareheim (Tim & Eric) in association with Warp Records and Warp Films. The track is ‘Parisian Goldfish’ by Flying Lotus, from the album Los Angeles. Co Directed/ Animation by Devin Flynn. Co Directed/ Edited by Eric Fensler.

Dance Floor Dale – video – Eric Wareheim (Tim and Eric), Flying Lotus and Warp

Via Marc

sound of light data sculpture

a custom-made casing for a flourescent tube light based on recording & graphing 1 second of the ambient ‘hum’ sound produced by the light. the resulting 3D volume consists of a frequency time graph of 50 sequential laser-cut acrylic layers, with each layer corresponding to 20ms of the sound recording

[link: plummerfernandez.com|thnkx Matthew]

see also laser-cut sound analysis sculptures & sound chair data sculpture.

”

(via information aesthetics.)