I will be 100% totally and completely analog from 19-29 December 2009. Click the photo to see where… I wouldn’t even realize it if the internet suddenly ceased to exist during that week, so any holiday greetings should happen before or after. Have a good New Year if I don’t hear from some of y’all by then!

Now Playing

My six hours on the train from Berlin to Cologne today was “Electroacoustic Day”.  I guess the connecting link between all these pieces is a radical sensibility about sound which I think still holds to this day. None of these composers were at all interested in representing conventional sounds, nor using conventional tools to create those sounds. That, and an exciting sonic density and an almost overwhelming amount of detail at a near-microscopic (i.e. microsonic) level.

Bernard Parmegiani–De Natura Sonorum (1975 GRM)
Curtis Roads–Purity & Sonal Atoms (1994, 1998 IRCAM)
Trevor Wishart–Red Bird & Anticredos (1977, 1980 Electronic Music Foundation)
Iannis Xenakis–Mycenae Alpha & Polytope de Cluny (1978, 1972 IRCAM)

And now that I’m back at the KHM with their incredible library, I can start looking up more material from all those academic journals that I could never afford before.

First stop: Dan Slater, Chaotic Sound Synthesis (Computer Music Journal, Summer 1998)

Review: Echelon Teufelsberg by Thomas Ankersmit & Valerio Tricoli

I also had the chance to hear Dutch saxophonist/synth-improvisor Thomas Ankersmit & Italian tape-loop maestro Valerio Tricoli’s Echelon Teufelsberg project last Friday night at Ausland in Berlin. Ankersmit and Tricoli spent a week recording in the acoustic strangeness of the former CIA observatory dome at Teufelsberg, on the far west side of the city. The performance was meant to showcase these recordings, however I found that most of the connection to the specific qualities of the space were lost, and the field recordings themselves could have been made in any reverberant space… or with any studio effect. The pair layered up Revox tape loops, vocals, saxophone and analog synthesizer on top of this, spatializing the sounds across four PA and two desktop monitors as well as around the room via a handheld, hyper-directional ultrasonic speaker, further transforming (and obscuring) the source material. In some ways, I would have preferred that this rather accomplished improvisational duo would have simply dropped the conceptual baggage of the recordings and focused on playing a real-time concert, however some of the bleed-through from the echo chamber did carry some interesting sonic moments.

More info here: http://www.tunedcity.de/?p=451

Ardour is a full-featured, free and open-source hard disk recorder and digital audio workstation program suitable for professional use. It features unlimited audio tracks and buses, non-destructive, non-linear editing with unlimited undo, and anything-to-anywhere signal routing. It supports standard file formats, such as BWF, WAV, WAV64, AIFF and CAF, and it can use LADSPA, LV2, VST and AudioUnit plugin formats.

The “Introduction to Ardour” FLOSS Manual is a free (gratis/libre) tutorial-style book, which introduces the program without expecting a vast knowledge of computers or sound editing from the reader.

This FLOSS Manual can be read online at:
http://en.flossmanuals.net/ardour/

The Ardour FLOSS Manual was largely written by workshop participants learning the software themselves, over a one week period during a session led by Derek Holzer at the moddr_lab/WORM in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Non-profit, print-on-demand paper copies can be ordered from Lulu.com soon. Please check back with the main FLOSS Manuals page in several days for ordering information:
http://en.flossmanuals.net/

The manual is free to use, distribute and remix according to the GNU General Public License. FLOSS Manuals volunteers are currently working on French and Portuguese translations, and anyone is free to add contributions and edits for future versions of the manual at
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Ardour/WebHome

Thanks to Adam Hyde, Walter Langelaar, the workshop participants in Rotterdam as well as those who helped online from the FLOSS Manuals, Ardour and Linux Audio communities, and to all the folks at the moddr_lab and WORM!

Now Playing

bone awl–live KFJC[2004]
ernest hemmingway–for whom the bell tolls [book]
expo 70–psychic funeral 2×3″cdr[2009 ruralfauna]
francisco lópez–buildings (new york)[2001 v2_archief]
iannis xenakis–formalized music [book]
isis + circle-live at postbahnhof last monday (isis encore with circle vocalist!)
krallice–dimensional bleedthrough[2009 profound lore]
liturgy–renihilation[2009 20 buck spin]
merzbow–shirasagi (13 japanese birds part 11)[2009 important]
sylvester anfang II–untitled 3″cdr[2009 luchtrat]
takahashi chikuzan–no shinzui (shamisen improvisations from 1970s)
trevor wishart–on sonic art [1996 book]

Slowly recovering from two and a half weeks on the road! Played four gigs in three different countries, did several workshops and started my fellowship at KHM in Cologne… Video docs from the Cologne and Moers gigs are ready, and I have some great clips of the Bulgarian TONEWHEELS workshop+presentation waiting to get edited, I will post them soon. Enjoy…

TINY NOISE COLOGNE/TINY NOISE CAMP MOERS
15/17 NOVEMBER 2009
Feat.
Tina Tonagel [de]
Saal5 [de]
Derek Holzer [usa/de]
RaumZeitPiraten [de]
RYBn [fr]
FrlLinientreu [de]
Robert Kondorosi [de]
Justice Yeldham [au]
EOSIN [pt]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BK5EQO_8pE

The only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and it can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone can open the mind of a man to all that is hidden to others.

—Inuit shaman Najagneq, recorded by Knut Rasmussen

If you want to build a modular, my advice is not to do it if you want to have any friends, it takes too much time.

—Jessica Rylan

(click photos to make them BIGGER)

My new DIY synthesizer project is getting better and better. Right after I got my residence permit I realized I had almost a month in Berlin without having to get on a plane, train, bus or boat, so I decided to maximize that time by going deep into the modular cave. The Great Loneliness indeed–but with incredible revelations! This is the realization of a dream I’ve had for ten years now, so forgive me if I geek out for a moment…

The modules I’ve built, from top left to right:

TOP ROW
Two Dual Thomas Henry XR-2206 Voltage Controlled Oscillators (Bugbrand PCB layouts, self-etched)
4×4 Bipolar DC Matrix Mixer (Ken Stone CGS 33 & CGS 04 PCBs)
Blank Panel (singlewide)

MIDDLE ROW
Super-Psycho Modulation Source (Ken Stone CGS 21)
Wave Multiplier (Ken Stone CGS 29)
Blank panel for another Dual Thomas Henry XR-2206 VCO (will complete tonight!)
Blank panel (doublewide)
Two channel DC Mixer (three inputs per channel, large jack outputs)(more CGS 04 PCBs)

BOTTOM ROW
Dual Synthacon Voltage Controlled Filters (Marc Bareille PCBs)
Dual Polyvoks Voltage Controlled Filters (Marc Bareille PCBs)
Blank Panel (doublewide)
Blank Panel (singlewide)
Breadboard Prototyping area (= doublewide blank panel)

Besides most of the PCBs, I’m really committed to making every part of this thing with my own hands. Some people in the synth DIY scene send their front panels out to get professionally etched and anodized. I’m not really concerned with having the “professional look”, partly for financial reasons, and partly because it’s really important to be able to rapidly prototype things, get them in the case and make some fucking noise. The fact that it looks handmade separates it from all that store bought crap that people don’t have any clue what goes on inside of anyways.

With that in mind, I found a great “finish” for the metal by using an orbital hand-sander and 100-grit paper. Very Neanderthal, just the way I like it! The top row modules all have this finish. I’ve got some metal-stamps on order for the panel lettering, and then I’ll probably clear-coat each panel to keep the finger-grease out.

Speaking of noise, sounds soon, maybe on the weekend.

Now Playing (…besides the synth that is…)

baroness–blue record[2009 relapse]
coalesce–ox[2009 relapse]
converge–axe to fall[2009 epitaph]
eagle twin–the unkindness of crows[2009 southern lord]
helmut schäfer & zbigniew karkowski–eminent risk factor[2008 ALKU 65]
light–life is meaningless & goes on forever[2009 self released]
pelican–what we all come to need[2009 southern lord]
prurient–rose pillar 11″[2009 heartworm]

Just back from Romania…six 5 hour walks in Carpathian forests, several solar/laser noise experiments, avalanches of grilled meat and (unfortunately) about 151,200 sampled kick drum beats later. Yes, that’s four-to-the-floor kicks at 120 bpm for 12 hours a day the whole week long…

Put another way, the Sound Camp was alright, although I wasn’t too sure most of the people there were interested in anything other than the same trendy club music playing on hipsters’ iPhones & MacBooks all across Europe. I did find a couple guys there interested in some electronic experimentation–including Sergiu Doroftei, who took my laser sound transmitter as a cue to build his own light-to-sound converter, and Paul Popescu, who constructed a “Ruben’s Tube” of sound-modulated propane gas flames! And Bucharest physician/Star Dome architect Florin Dobrescu turned out to be exactly the kind of space-case visionary that I love to have good long rant with.

I also had some interesting conversations with Le Placard’s Eric Minkkinen about the ethics of cracked software, recycling ancient Macintosh computers from the Paris dumpsters and the potential role of “taste making” groups like our hosts Rokolectiv or Belgrade’s Dispatch Festival in getting their respective scenes out of the music-genre-ghettos they may have fallen into (minimal house, glitch idm, yadda yadda yadda) and exposing them to something more challenging. But then a few more carloads of people in Bucharest got wind of the “party in the mountains”, and suddenly it felt like a mini-Ibiza.

24 hour party people forgiven, I definitely want to thank Cosmin Tapu and Mihaela Vasile for their hard work pulling the Sound Camp together and wish them lots of good luck with their next festival in 2010.

Some Synth-pr0n

While the Romanians were busy reliving their 90’s techno childhoods, I got around to editing some videos from earlier this year. Here’s the first one: