Join us on Sunday, February 28 for a very special edition of SPLICE at Webster Hall!
We'll be bringing our brand of eclectic electronics to the first-ever Quarterly Arts Soirée. The QAS is a day-long, all-ages creative festival that will fill the rooms of Webster Hall with live music, art, film, and theater.
The event benefits Orphans International, a charity providing homes and schooling for orphans and abandoned children around the world. OI's projects in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Haiti, and Tanzania support kids who are victims of war, disease, and natural disasters.
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The SPLICE showcase begins at 10.30pm, in the Balcony Lounge (on the top level of Webster Hall). Featured performers:
» GLOBULAR CLUSTER
Globular Cluster is a brilliant, newborn alliance of experimental musicians from New York's electronic underground. Their heart-melting transmissions are a spiraling vortex of audiovisual plasma, bringing light to the darkest reaches of the galaxy.
» MAXX KLAXON
From a secure, undisclosed location in Brooklyn, Maxx Klaxon broadcasts sensual synths, hard beats, robotic vocoders, and video propaganda. Comrade Klaxon's smart, dark songs about love and power are flavored with Italo-disco passion and electro-bass energy. The result: multimedia mind control that keeps the people moving.
» CURRENT_WORKING_DIRECTORY
current_working_directory is the electrogaze pop project of poet-inventor Ted Hayes, who utilizes an array of hand-made electronic instruments to combine the lushness of shoegaze with the texture of the electronic.
» BLACK SWAN
Obsessed with electronics, feathers, Native American art, pagan ritual, fetish, punk rock, and tribal percussion, Black Swan is the brainchild of Phoenix Perry and Margaret Schedel. Connoisseurs of the romantic and ethereal, they create music reminiscent of electronica and punk, steam boats, theremins, and breaking glass.
SPLICE Showcase @ The Quarterly Arts Soirée
Sunday 28 February 2010
10pm-1am
Webster Hall - Balcony Lounge
125 East 11th Street (b/t 3rd + 4th Aves.)
$15 / All ages
The Unsound Festival, a celebration of electronic and experimental music based in Poland, has landed in NYC for a week. The festival mixes well-curated musical events with in-depth panels and presentations about the past, present, and future of electronica.
Tonight I'm headed to a screening of 2 documentaries: The Delian Mode, about unsung genius Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and The Future Is Not What It Used To Be, about Finnish avant-garde electronicist Erkki Kurenniemi.
There's lots more good stuff happening this week as part of Unsound; check out the full schedule here.
Here are La Roux and Heaven 17, performing Terence Trent D'Arby's "Sign Your Name Across My Heart" at the BBC's Maida Vale studio last Tuesday, January 26:
posted by Maximus |
10:04 pm EST |
2010.02.01 |
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SPLASHING IN THE STREAM OF AN UNREMEMBERED DREAM
»General
The 3D film Magic Journeys was one of the star attractions at EPCOT Center when it opened in 1982; it later played at various other Disney parks.
I first saw it when I was about 13. The plotless montage of natural vistas, laughing children, and fantasy scenes, accompanied by syrupy singers, was kind of cornball. But it had a surreal, mystical vibe that transcended the cheesiness.
The sterling production values helped: it was shot in 65mm, at speeds of up to 75 frames per second, and projected in 70mm widescreen. The 3D effects (including aerial and underwater shots, model work, bluescreen compositing, and digital animation) were unprecedented and, for the most part, stunning.
With 3D television technology on the horizon, maybe Magic Journeys will finally be available for home viewing one of these days. Meanwhile, those of us who remember it fondly will have to make do with this super-lo-fi cam video made by someone at a Disney theater:
My favorite sequence, starting at 3:00, shows the main character, a nameless blonde boy, flying across pristine landscapes, as a sweeping, cosmic synth theme booms on the soundtrack. (A progressive trance version of this section of the music could be a dancefloor destroyer.)
This piece, by the Guardian's Simon Reynolds, is a very nice overview of how the electropop of the 1980s was resurrected and transformed in the 2000s.
It traces the musical threads of the last decade, from Adult. and Daft Punk, thru Tiga and Fischerspooner, to La Roux and Lady Gaga... with a sensitive understanding of how each of these artists (and many more) has seized on particular elements of '80s music for inspiration in crafting their own unique sounds and styles.
posted by Maximus |
3:24 am EST |
2010.01.22 |
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Geeta Dayal reviews the book Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear by Steve Goodman:
Goodman analyzes "environments, or ecologies, in which sound contributes to an immersive atmosphere or ambience of fear and dread--where sound helps produce a bad vibe."
Goodman catalogs a litany of military uses of sound that seem like sinister science fiction fantasies. The "Urban Funk Campaign" was a suite of audio harassment techniques used by the military in Vietnam in the early 1970s. ... The Windkanone, or "Whirlwind Cannon," was a sonic weapon planned by the Nazis. The “Ghost Army” was a unit of the U.S. Army in World War II that impersonated other units to fake out the enemy, employing an array of sonic deception techniques with the help of engineers from Bell Labs.
"The Scream" was an acoustic weapon used by the Israeli military against protesters in 2005. That same year, the Israeli air force deployed deafening sonic booms over the Gaza Strip—producing powerful physiological and psychological effects. ...
Last September, police in Pittsburgh utilized a device known as the LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) cannon against G20 protesters -- the first documented use of one of these acoustic cannons against civilians in the United States. ...
Sonic Warfare is a heady, sprawling read, densely packed with detail. Goodman's wide range is, in part, influenced by his background. In addition to being a writer and theorist, he doubles as an accomplished producer of dubstep under the alias kode9, wandering a subterranean world of bone-rattling bass pressure, towering speaker stacks, and crowded rooms.
posted by Maximus |
4:47 pm EST |
2010.01.08 |
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Ta-Nehisi Coates (and commenters) discuss what he calls White Music You Were Allowed To Like -- that is, new wave and synthpop jams from the early '80s that crossed over to gain a big African-American audience:
Despite hip-hop ruling us in the 80s, and the general prohibition on "liking that white sh*t," there were always certain groups that broke through. No idea why. But among them were Tears For Fears. ...
I always loved that part in ["Shout"] after they sing the first hook, and the first verse drops. I don't know why it was OK to like them, but not, say, White Snake. In the early 80s, there were a lot more "white" bands that crossed over to us. But by, say, 1988 it was over. You had to be George Michael to make it through.
Turns out the generally agreed-on groups map pretty closely to the music from that era that I like: Tears For Fears, Kraftwerk, Human League, Pet Shop Boys, Depeche Mode, and certain cuts by Queen, Genesis, and Wham!/George Michael.
On the other hand, I was never much for Hall and Oates (but I appreciate Chromeo's revival of their sound).
Here's a troubling article from the Wall Street Journal about how and why government bureaucrats deny certain artists and entertainers permission to visit the U.S.:
When Jordan Peimer booked an Argentine band that fuses Jewish Klezmer music with tango, he thought he had the perfect act to headline his "Fiesta Hanukkah" concert.
"It is hard to imagine any band more fitting than Orquesta Kef," says Mr. Peimer, the program's director at the Skirball Cultural Center here. The event was designed to attract a Jewish audience and the city's burgeoning Hispanic community.
That was before the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services weighed in with some cultural commentary of its own. The band couldn't travel to the U.S., the agency ruled, because it didn't satisfy a "culturally unique" requirement for a performer visa called P-3.
"The evidence repeatedly suggests the group performs a hybrid or fusion style of music...[which] cannot be considered culturally unique to one particular country, nation, society, class, ethnicity, religion, tribe or other group of persons," read the denial. It was signed by caseworker CSC4672/WS24533.
What I find especially outrageous about this is the idea that "a hybrid or fusion style" or music or art is not "culturally unique". Isn't it blindingly obvious that the exact opposite is true?
Hybrids and fusions of unrelated cultural artifacts and traditions often result in the most unique and original art. Culture grows when things that seem incompatible are brought together by visionary artists.
But the bureaucrats don't see it that way. Here they are again, denying visas for a Mexican indie rock band:
The reason: "The group's biography indicates their music is a combination of music...," said the denial, and fusion music, it said, is not "culturally unique." The group had to cancel its tour.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement seems to be operating under a doctrine of cultural essentialism: An artist or group can be Argentinean or Jewish, but not both; Mexican or indie rock, but not both.
Art, they maintain, is supposed to be divided into rigid, established categories -- and anyone who dares cross or straddle the lines is considered impure and inauthentic. This reactionary mindset comes right out of the 19th century, when each cultural, religious, and ethnic group was believed to have certain immutable characteristics.
Would the Mexican indie band have been allowed in if they wore sombreros and played mariachi music? Apparently that would cater to the bureacrats' preconceptions -- let's be honest and call them prejudices -- about what a Mexican band is "supposed" to look and sound like. But how would a mariachi band from Mexico be "culturally unique"? Haven't we all seen thousands of them already?
In fact, the agency seems to have turned the idea of "uniqueness" completely upside down, so that only acts that are not unique -- that are utterly generic and typical -- can get thru the process. There may as well be an Orwellian proclamation inscribed over the entrance to the visa office: UNIQUENESS IS CONFORMITY.
It's totally unacceptable that the United States -- a melting-pot nation, itself a "hybrid or fusion" of cultures from across the globe -- is imposing this blinkered, bigoted system on visiting artists.
_vectorzero is a mysterious sonic technician currently based in an outer borough of NYC. Using a variety of hacked hardware and software, he generates a landscape of haunted, mutant melodies and broken rhythms.
Maxx Klaxon presents the live debut of "Military Time", a musical collaboration with _vectorzero, followed by an encore performance of his live and sequenced score for selections from "Häxan", the classic 1923 silent film about medieval witchcraft.
Ted Hayes presents "Stan Breakhage", an ambient-industrial music & video performance that warps and manhandles Stan Brakhage's venerable Dog Star Man into visual breakcore, aligned and controlled with custom-designed, live electronic instruments.
The iPhone-as-musical-instrument trend is accelerating. Ge Wang's Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra is getting a lot of buzz. And today in NYC, Eyebeam is hosting a workshop on using the Rjdj platform.
Musician and curator Nick Hallett* (whose oeuvre includes being half of the pseudo-British synthpop duo Plaintains, putting together the amazing electroclash-era Maison du Chic shows, and recently creating a work for Futurist noise intoners) has conducted a great Bomb Magazine interview with visual artist and 1-bit composer Tristan Perich.
Among the topics of discussion: the ways in which musical and mathematical complexity can be built up from very simple rules... and the sound-emitting microchip mounted in a CD case that was Perich's 1st album (a predecessor to the recent Moldover release).
*Nick is also one of the producers of the Darmstadt new music series... and he was the MC at the very first public Maxx Klaxon show!
posted by Maximus |
10:27 pm EST |
2009.11.23 |
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Last week some friends and I were discussing, with some dismay, the announcement of Peter Murphy's cameo in the third Twilight movie. I half-jokingly posited that this film appearance and his scene in 1983's The Hunger could be read as bookends to the goth era.
Of course that's quite arguable. The roots of the modern gothic phenomenon can be traced back well into the 1970s (Joy Division, Siouxsie Sioux, H.R. Giger, etc.). And some would say the "true" goth subculture was commodified into irrelevance long before Stephenie Meyer's Mormonized vampire chronicles became a tween sensation.
But there are still creative, iconic individuals with a dedication to personal style that is essentially gothic: artificial, aristocratic, archaic, eclectic, idiosyncratic, severe, flamboyant, and depressive and/or deviant.
Maybe a mass-marketed goth subculture was bound to fail, because that collection of values is impossible to standardize. If so, then the best exemplars of this sensibility may now be operating outside the confines of the "goth scene".
I've mentioned Matt Sims in the past. Today I'll nominate Lady Gaga, on the strength of her new video, "Bad Romance" -- a Kubrickian vision that seems to unfold in an expensive, sinister, all-white spa-slash-fetish club:
Besides La Roux, there's no other contemporary popular entertainer with such a sharply honed, historically informed sense of personal style, and the ability to project it as an arresting, larger-than-life spectacle.
And while La Roux's sensibility is a kind of nostalgic, androgynous romanticism, Gaga's is more aggressive: luxurious, perverse, maybe somewhat indeterminately gendered, but erotic in a theatrical, high-camp way.
Elly Jackson's a better singer and songwriter. But Stefani Germanotta, despite her mediocre music, smashes more stylistic boundaries, and creates more intensely disturbing images of herself -- although (and, to some extent, because) she comes across as someone you'd probably never want to meet in real life.
UPDATE: I'm not the only one picking up on the gothic vibe that Gaga is putting out.
posted by Maximus |
6:32 pm EST |
2009.11.12 |
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Berna is a software simulation of a late 1950s electroacoustic music studio. Oscillators, filters, modulators, tape recorders, mixers, are all packed in a easy-to-use interface with historical accuracy.
Explore serial, concrete and tape music or create strange new sonic worlds with instruments inspired by the greatest studios of the early days of electronic music.
posted by Maximus |
11:56 am EST |
2009.11.09 |
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Photosounder is a one-of-a-kind image-sound editing program. It is unique in that it opens images and sounds indiscriminately, treats and processes them as images, and synthesizes them as sounds. Sounds, once turned into images, can be powerfully modified to achieve effects and results that couldn't be obtained in any other way, while images of all sorts reveal the infinite kinds of otherworldly sounds they contain. Ultimately, knowing how sounds look and how images sound, you'll be able to create images that sound like what you want to hear, or like what you couldn't imagine to hear.
There's a free demo for download; the full version is $36.
posted by Maximus |
3:14 pm EST |
2009.11.07 |
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Maxx Klaxon performs new music at Monkeytown on Halloween!
Maxx is one of the artists invited to create an original score for the classic silent film HÄXAN, screening on Saturday, October 31 at Monkeytown in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
HÄXAN, a 1922 Danish/Swedish production, is a dramatized account of the practice -- and persecution -- of witchcraft during the Middle Ages. Its sensationalistic depictions of Satanism, torture, and sexual perversion were so controversial that it was banned in the U.S.
Maxx's contribution to the new soundtrack melds 16th-century Latin choral polyphony with 21st-century electronics.
Here's the full lineup of musicians performing at this special screening:
» Jeremy Slater + Tamara Yadao
» Murder of Angels (Bryin Dall + Derek Rush)
» Phil Puleo
» Christopher Russo
» MAXX KLAXON
» Bradford Reed
We heard something about an opera about Charles Darwin. How did that work out?
It's called Tomorrow in a Year and it's a collaboration between The Knife, Mt. Sims and Planningtorock. Danish theatre company Hotel Pro Forma asked us to write the music for their performance. It had its premiere 2nd September and is now touring Europe. In January hopefully we'll release it on an album.
I make extensive use of Google Docs for my notes about music and video production, event planning and promotion, and for all sorts of other personal and business stuff. But I haven't done much else with "cloud" software.
I'm intrigued by web-based image editors, but so far haven't had a need to use them. Now comes Soundation Studio, a loop-oriented audio sequencing program that loads in a web browser.
It's extremely basic; the open-source Audacity is vastly more capable. Still, it's a great proof of concept. Soon something like this will be available that doesn't limit the user to a menu of 9 simple effects and strictly pre-loaded loops.
UPDATE: SonicProducer looks like a somewhat similar concept, but requires a $30 membership fee to use.
posted by Maximus |
4:11 pm EST |
2009.10.14 |
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After hanging up their spurs in 2004, the Brothers Hartnoll have taken to the road again. Sadly, they will be bypassing the USA... at least this time.
But here's a taste of what their live shows were like back in the late '90s and early aughts -- the live version of "Halcyon+on+on":
This was not only their greatest song; for my money, it's one of the most beautiful pieces of electronic music ever recorded. But their concert rendition took it to another level entirely.
After 4 minutes and 20 seconds of intricately layered loops, beats, and bass pulses, an explosion of... Bon Jovi? Yes! And then... Belinda Carlisle! And the crowd goes wild.
By cross-breeding melodic techno, arena rock, and bubblegum pop, Orbital were not only driving audiences nuts (they did this at all 3 of the Orbital shows I went to, and it never failed to blow the top of my head off). They were also anticipating the mashup trend by a good decade. Clever lads.
posted by Maximus |
2:05 pm EST |
2009.10.13 |
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There will be a hands-on workshop with Livid Instruments and Max4Live at 9pm. And Moldover's special edition light-theremin-instrument albums will be on sale!
