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unscharf-an-den-raendern · 4 years

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Translation:

Kraftwerk: We’re a radio station

Photo caption: Kraftwerk, dressed up for rich uncle Alois’ birthday; in the middle Florian Schneider-Esleben (above) and Ralf Hütter.

For almost two years, Kraftwerk didn’t go on stage in this country and you had to go abroad to see them live. On October 10th they played in the well-visited Roundhouse in London where some people even started dancing and enthusiastically singing along to the German lyrics. It was their last concert on a five week European tour through Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, France and England. Asked for a summary of the trip, Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, who always give interviews together, answer with a short “correct”.

Ralf: It was our first European tour, last year we only played in America for three months. Now it’s Europe’s turn because our new album will be “Transeuropa Express”. And this tour was so to speak a mental stimulus for the LP.

ME: What did you find most striking in America?

Florian: It made us realize where we actually come from, who we are and why we affect people so strongly. We noticed a strong effect, a big astonishment.

Ralf: This incredible distance, flying over the transatlantic literally gave us confidence. Suddenly you see yourself standing on stage like an observer.

ME: Did that make you more free?

Ralf: A bit. It was always incredibly hard for us here. While we were accepted, our things didn’t catch on. They always called us weirdos, tinker freaks. While the people in America immediately accepted us, just like we accepted ourselves.

Florian: Even though they were a hard audience to some extent. Rockers...

Ralf: ...they were really into it, started dancing... That brought us further. In Germany, we might have isolated ourselves even longer, would have become paranoid. There we could come out of our shell and now we go even further.

Florian: Our breath became longer, we can blow more into it.

Ralf: We also had a lot of colored people in the audience. In Germany, a lot of people still think our music is just culture. Some people there called it space boogie or techno boogie.

Florian: One guy spontaneously said that one of our songs was like a boogie from a typewriter and a vacuum cleaner gone wild. I agree with some of it, there are real comics going on, the machine plays itself.

ME: You have a lot of new machines, what’s on stage actually?

Ralf: I have a laser light organ. It’s made in America and better than a Mellotron. You have optical records that produce the sound and are scanned by laser light pressure.

Florian: Of course, that system has existed since the film era.

Ralf: I also have a sequencer, an automatic music machine that plays the repeating melodies.

ME: That sounds a bit like a fortepiano?

Ralf: Yes, diddle-dee diddle-dee...and then our two small synthesizers.

ME: Unlike before, one hears a lot of voices and vocals in your songs now.

Ralf: I’m particularly interested in the human voice. We worked with it a lot in the last two years because we sometimes develop certain motives out of the human voice. I only use human vocals on the optical records, sometimes violins...not just instrumental music like before but pre-recorded human voices, speech, words, poetry and that speaking typewriter.

ME: Is that the monster voice announcing you?

Ralf: Yes, that’s a completely artificial voice, a talking machine.

Florian: A speech computer. When you press “a” it says “a”. The keyboard is extended so you can not only enter letters but also diphthongs, brighter, deeper, etc.

Ralf: We also have those two electric drum kits and the light barrier drum kit.

Florian: So, when the light barrier is broken it triggers the contact. It drums. And we also built something ourselves, an electronic flute, a magic flute.

Ralf: All instruments we developed with our engineers are patented. We want to mass-produce them so other people can play on the as well.

Florian: Then you can play eletric drums at home. You can just connect them to your stereo system.

Ralf: These electric instruments are a lot easier to play because you can translate a sound idea much more directly. You can’t reproduce a car on a piano that easily.

Florian: It’s electronic home music, a lot of people are writing to us, saying they’re interested it in.

ME: How are your songs created?

Ralf: In the studio through fumbling around, coincidences or by playing around; through mental drafts, so work on the drawing board, or just sound finds on the instruments. Or at concerts, sometimes we play a song on and on and then a new song grows out of it like a tree branch.

Florian: We’re in state where we could play basically anything. Of course we need some distance between idea and realisation sometimes. But the path has become very short by now.

ME: Would you find it derogatory if I referred to your music as naive electronic?

Ralf: Hard to say, some call it intellectual, some call it naive...

Florian:..simple

Ralf: I think it’s everything at once.

ME: I think that Electronic is particularly transparent and comprehensible in your band.

Ralf: Yes, transparent, that’s better. We also want everyone to be able to recognize what we’re playing right away. We don’t want to convey something else with these means, something behind the stage, but only what’s up front. That’s also why we have the neon lights standing behind us so we’re transparent.

ME: A lot of your songs have environmental sounds as a topic?

Ralf: We’re interested in acoustic phenomena all over the world and that’s something we can convey now. It would be best if the people who walk out after our concerts and no longer consider the sounds around them as noise (of course only those that aren’t damaging to hearing) but consider them to be normal environmental sounds. The world of sounds is music.

ME: Do you always have a specific concept for your albums?

Ralf: We don’t write twelve songs, one about love, the next one about pants, the third one about football. Even when the things are different, cut-ups, there’s always a red line running behind it. It’s always there, latent.

ME: Even when you’re playing tapes?

Ralf: Yes, we also play tapes and cassettes. Then someone presses the button and leaves the stage. We show exactly what we do.

ME: Why tapes anyway?

Ralf: A tape is an instrument too, an acoustic machine.

ME: You have a very differentiated and unusual stage show now. Slides, the metal cage where a head danced up and down in black UV light, the signal play with the hands which trigger the impulses at the light barrier drums at the same time. Are you planning even more?

Ralf: The man in the UV cage is the prototype, we did that for the first time on this tour. But we want to show even more clearly that this is some kind of man-machine, a kind of ballet - dancing and making music at the same time through movement, so making music while dancing.

ME: You are remarkably concerned with Radio. I’m not just thinking about the last LP.

Florian: It’s a homage to the radio, the first electronic studio that existed. Back then, people like Stockhausen always made music directly on the radio.

Ralf: We always listened to it in the past. It was called Nachtmusik (night music). That’s our background too, that’s why we had the idea to form a completely electronic band. In America the people always asked for the reason and we only realized it when we remembered how this Nachtmusik fascinated us. When it was completely dark and we had to go to bed and could listen to the transistor radio from under the sheets. We’re interested in the radio awareness/ consciousness (translator’s note: “Bewusstsein” can mean both of these things, I don’t know which one Ralf meant).

Florian: And everyone can try these things out themself. When you tune in on a station on the radio and hear the pre-formed information, how it’s meant to be, you just have to tune out a bit, for example at night on short wave and you hear the craziest sounds, morse codes, pure sounds, it’s insane. Radio Cairo and so on...This idea, album as radio...

Ralf: That fascinated us immensely. We always wanted an own...we saw ourselves, Kraftwerk, in the Kling Klang Studio as a radio station. But it’s not legally possible in Germany. In America we met guys from our generation with their own radio stations, somewhere out of town in an old mansion. And they broadcast into the night from there, just like they want to, right off the bat...

Florian: They have their own radio programmes.

Ralf: ...and just send their very own thoughts into the ether...and we see ourselves as a private radio station.

#kraftwerk #this was a bit hard to translate #they speak very eloquently

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bentonpena · 3 years

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Surprise – NVIDIA’s AI and graphics news today for big industry is relevant to artists, too

https://bit.ly/3mHQJfP Surprise – NVIDIA’s AI and graphics news today for big industry is relevant to artists, too https://bit.ly/3wIEvZ4

Even as NVIDIA has a keynote with simulated robots making the rounds of a BMW factory, some of the GPU giant’s latest brings industry- and enterprise-grade tools to artists, too. That also could prove relevant as the pandemic has folks looking for work.

Music and live visual work means one thing – stuff has to happen live. And so that makes these chips more interesting. It means that fundamentally what musicians and artists do, which is to work with materials live in time, now matches up with the way graphics (and AI) chips work. Since they’re crunching numbers faster, it means the ability to create “liquid” interfaces. (That was the concept interactive visionary and legend Joy Mountford introduced years ago in a talk we had together on the South by Southwest stage, and it’s stuck with me.)

Now, I won’t lie, some of this is awaiting GDC, the game dev event. That’s because when you don’t have a BMW factory-sized budget, the punk-style approach of gaming has a ton of appeal. (You can see a bunch of gamers complaining on YouTube actually, I think misunderstanding that this is not a gaming keynote and … that’s coming later and … NVIDIA has always had workstation customers. But we know gaming trolls are not the most reasonable folks and – I for one enjoy watching Mercedes Benz simulate the Autobahn. It’s the Kraftwerk in me. GTA: Normal German Life Simulator. The Edeka parking lot is off the chain.)

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But having listened to NVIDIA talk about their new offerings, I think there’s more here than just pro and enterprise applications and the usual workstation / gaming PC divide.

Follow along as there is a ton of geeky machine learning, metaverse, Omniverse, and 3D artistry stuff coming – https://gtc21.event.nvidia.com/

Omniverse

The big pillar here that impacts audiovisual creation is Omniverse. I wrote about this connected platform for collaboration and exchange of all things 3D, built on open tools like Pixar’s very own USD file format (also a subtle hint that y’all can make bank with this stuff):

This week, we get a lot of the questions answered about where NVIDIA was going strategically.

But yeah, if you’re wondering if this could allow audiovisual artists and musicians to connect to big-budget projects – at a time when even the shows you watch at night (Mandalorian, cough) are made with these tools? You bet.

First, the most exciting detail for me was a commitment that Omniverse for individuals and artists will always be free – meaning anyone can get at this platform. That also means that individual 3D artists and AV creators can play with big industry – so it’s a source of gigs.

Also, the Omniverse pricing is not astronomical for those “enterprise” use cases. A small team can buy into it at a per-seat license of $1800 a year, plus a $25,000 cost for a nucleus server. That’s within reach of interactive and design shops, and it seems NVIDIA may even work to adapt to those kinds of small use cases even beyond that.

Omniverse on a shoot? Yes.

I expect NVIDIA may even be underestimating the demand for those individuals – partly because as their tools and partner tools get massively more powerful and easier-to-use, it may not even take an entire team to do great work.

Now, the wait is on just for connectors. 3DS Max, Photoshop, Maya, Substance, and awesomely, Unreal Engine are all supported. But keep an eye out for Blender, Marvelous Designer, Solidworks, and Houdini for even more sign this is on.

It’s an open beta; keeping an eye on the convention is a chance to stay posted:

https://www.nvidia.com/omniverse/

And yes, yes Unreal:

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The new RTX stuff is here

It’s tough to mention anything to do with semiconductors right now, given the global shortage that’s on. But yeah, the new pro RTX architecture looks predictably insanely great, for anyone doing real-time visuals, rendering, graphics, and AI.

So, if you’re planning to make your proud reentry into music festivals in 2022 with that fully immersive 3D opera involving live artificial intelligence, you’ll want to go ahead and write these into the grant application.

Desktops get the A5000 and A4000. Laptops get A2000, A3000, A4000, and A5000.

“But how will I fit them in my case?” the tiny man wonders. “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” And then he stares into one too long and a whole Kubrick dream sequence starts, alas.

Either way, you get all the new technology for tons of creative use. Also, even though there’s the mention of “pro,” these laptop chips fit in low-power, thin and light machines. You could wind up buying them in a reasonably inexpensive notebook computer and using it to run a live stream.

Even apart from all the utterly essential graphics applications, that’s good news for music, because the ongoing pandemic ripples are likely to disrupt at least some international travel for the foreseeable future. Oh yeah, and it also means thin-and-light PCs with NVIDIA architectures to compete with Apple’s own silicon solutions. (I wouldn’t write out Apple from possibly future pro interoperability with these architectures, too.)

Yep, laptops will have these – though keep an eye on the semiconductor shortage to see what’s shipping when, as it’s … a doozy, generally.

But the performance gains are huge – in short:

RT cores with up to 2X the previous generation’s throughput (for tracing your rays, shading your whatever, all that jazz)

Third-generation Tensor Cores, also up to 2X throughput (so you can make a HAL that might open the pod bay doors even before someone has to ask)

CUDA cores (2.5X FP32 throughput) for … everything (and possibly even some audio/music applications, but certainly anything that uses the word ‘render’ in it)

Assuming some pros are the right generation for this, so – “It will be mine. Oh yes.“

Specific to desktop:

Up to 24GB GPU memory (or even 48GB with a two-GPU NVLink rig)

Virtualization (tell the server admin)

PCIe Gen 4 (twice the previous bandwidth – yeah, you might want your actual data transfer to catch up with the chip specs above, so this is essential)

Specific to laptop:

Third-gen Max-Q – so it doesn’t sound like a you’re vacuuming the carpet any more (“whisper” quiet is the phrase you want)

Up to 16 GB GPU memory

Also specific to pretty high-end workstation laptops, the the NVIDIA T1200 and NVIDIA T600 refresh of the Turing architecture is out. (That either means something to you because you use multiple-application workflows, or nothing to you and is a cool name.)

I might note, too, that these don’t look quite like the specs of that Apple Silicon stuff – not at the M1 level. I think it’s safe to say that for now, these are different use cases. But I also wouldn’t worry about it, either – the general scene is that working with 3D, video, AI, and streaming all get substantially easier in 2021 industry-wide, once chips get out there.

I also can imagine making an investment this year that lasts a good while, which is what happens when you do make a generational leap.

AI on the cloud

Without going into too much detail (I’ll leave that to NV), there is also a bunch of news this week for delivering GPU acceleration and (crucially for servers) AI computation via the cloud. There are a lot of “cool demo!” capabilities – machine translation, speech recognition, face recognition, eye contact, and live video processing continue to evolve through machine learning techniques from NVIDIA. (Yes, that also means more uncanny valley stuff and questions about the fabric of society, surveillance, and reality.)

But it means the ability to do stuff with big volumes of data, and in a way that doesn’t actually require you to be a huge enterprise to use.

This also deals with science – meaning artists who do understand machine learning now can make these topics relatable to the public. That’s potentially important, as we live in a world that demands more scientific understanding. (NVIDIA included an AstraZeneca chemistry example – and suddenly our lives are all revolving around that chemistry.)

I’ve been critical of some of the very examples NVIDIA uses here – like Spotify making playlist personalization more “efficient.” That’s nothing new – automating music based on trends and profit is basically as old as the music industry. But to really be able to criticize these things, I think it matters that musicians can understand, re-engineer, explain, and advocate with a solid grounding in the science and technology behind the topic. In the case of music, it’s now more complex to talk about the impact of playlists when they’re AI-driven than when you could point to something as intuitive as “payola.”

But science? Yeah, you can do genome analysis on your laptop.

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And they continue to advance the state of the art in machine learning – even with smaller data sets:

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Watch this space

I realize this was a very niche look at this stuff and will cause anyone not familiar with the area to have their eyes glaze over.

But AI + graphics + 3D + collaboration capabilities will pour into more recognizable use cases soon, powered by this tech.

And watch this space for what this might mean for artists, musicians, and creativity using tools like Unreal. Because there is no question in my mind that Unreal and Blender might well be mentioned in the same breath as Ableton Live and a Eurorack rig more frequently in the coming months and years.

But hey, at the very least, maybe tonight you’ll dream about standing on top of a surrealist skyscraper, gazing up at a King Kong-sized graphics card, and shouting at it “when are you shipping? why do these crypto people keep buying you? I just want to play some video games!“

Giant video card is listening. (Cue 2001-style Ligeti soundtrack… aeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee……)

Also, this is super cute – and great to see what young people are doing with this stuff, especially knowing this is a tough time for them and they deserve some fresh opportunities.

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Tags:

a3000

a5000

artits

chips

cloud

collaboration

CUDA

GPU

Hardware

machine learning

Omniverse

Unreal

Unreal Engine

Music via Create Digital Music https://bit.ly/2N55ART April 12, 2021 at 02:48PM

#IFTTT #Feedly #@b3n70n

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soundguts-blog · 6 years

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Improvisation in the Avant Garde 70s the search for true improvisation

Improvisation in the avant-garde 70s the search for true improvisation

In recent years within my own practice, i have been exploring what i call “true improvisation”, the pursuit of creating sonic works concerning one main goal, the creation of an improvisational environment in which the players are reacting to each other using tools they have never engaged with before. one of the projects i lead with this topic in mind was named “industrial gamelan” and was inspired by musical groups such as Bow Gamelan, as well as artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, and Marcel Duchamp with a focus on gentrification in Hackney Wick. The inspiration i took from fine artists such as Rauschenberg and Duchamp was finding objects which in everyday life may not be viewed as sonic tools, in a sense “readymades” for example large sheets of metal cans,bags dishes,bin lids etc i then set these into a space and invited musicians to improvise with them together, they had never engaged with these materials prior to arriving.

Bow gamelan were a performance troop originally formed in london who’s sound performances where tactile improvised and sight specific, arguably becoming installations in there very nature. The group would often camp out on a sight for weeks at a time using the materials at hand to create and plan performances. one of the aspects of their work which majorly inspired me to work in the way i did for industrial gamelan. During the weeks setting up for the first performance of industrial gamelan i decided that all the found objects(instruments) should be found on fish island where most of the gentrification in hackney wick was taking place. I collected items over the coming weeks which required an intense amount of physical labour, bringing them back to the performance area and setting them up as i saw fit. In the final days before the performance i made the decision that i would not play in the performance as i had spent to much time with the equipment to truly improvise with it. After running this project for several months i realised that the musicians were becoming to comfortable with their materials and the improvisational core of the project was slipping and with limited resources and musicians i decided to move on to a new project.

While studying under david toop in his improvisation workshops i broadened my horizons into what it means to improvise in large groups ,beginning to ask more questions surrounding“true improvisation” such as can a guitarist ever truly improvise with a guitar?. Is there any such thing as true improvisation given the amount of material we are subjected to in everyday life ?. Throughout this essay i intend to tackle these questions through my research into improvisation and avant garde music.

I think an interesting place to start when researching improvisation groups is the birth of krautrock in germany with bands such as can,faust, amon duul Kraftwerk,neu etc. A particularly key figure when it comes to this movement is Hans joachim Roedelius, who was fundamental in the setup of the Zodiac Free Arts lab as well as cluster an ambient electronica group.(YouTube, 2018)14.00 .This space was created with free arts in mind and housed such names as tangerine dream. With many of the groups mixing and playing together taking inspiration from free jazz and avant garde artists such as john cage. Many of the artists including Roedelius did not consider themselves musicians and used tools that were foreign to them to improvise sound, something that has inspired my own practice as well as many before me. As a child Rodelius was in the Hitler youth and was subject to intense forms of discipline i believe this early subjection to the nazi regime is clearly what lead him to break away from structures and create improvisation groups such as cluster.

Also at this time we see the birth of the synthesizer. Klaus Schulze likens his first engagement with this tool as being sent back to childhood “twisting knobs not knowing what will come out” (YouTube, 2018)19:50 so through this we can see again that naivety towards an object leads one to improvise and discover the possibilities it presents sonically.

Hans Czukay of Can met Karlhause Stockhausen in cologne at a lecture and went on to study with him before forming can, Stockhausen's methods of sound creation un doubtley affected the way Czukay created music with can as a heavily improvisation based band they wrote and recorded a multitude of albums. One of the earliest of which is titled “Prehistoric Future” recorded at Schloß Nörvenich in 1968 the album portrays a range of outrageously improvised flurys which came to be the band's signature live sound. Later the group

recruited damo suzuki from the streets when they came across him worshipping/performing in the middle of the day, asking him to play a show with them that night this to me is a possible achievement of “true improvisation” , as Damo would of had absolutely no idea what they were going to play, and merely showed up on the night and attempted to portray the movement of the music totally in the moment. Suzuki describes himself as a nomad and a metaphysical transporter clearly and individual able of entering a subconscious space while performing, although often under the influence of heavy drugs i.e LSD.

We can also begin to draw parallels between krautrock and all other kinds of music and improvisational practices. It influenced artists such as iggy pop and thurston moore, both cite bands like amon duul as influences in an interview for rough trade.

Improvisation can be seen to have touched many genres and art forms through the decades, for example Brion Gysins cut ups in which he would randomly select words from newspapers or cut at random rolls of film to create moving image pieces. But most relevant to my own practice is industrial and noise music, artists such as genesis p orridge whos both written and sonic works encompass a life spent as an improviser, from coum transmissions to psychic t.v. through their work genesis has questioned what it means to improvise sonically and also improvising in everyday life through performance based living in communes in london.” Psychic TVS first album notably themes the possibility of a non-aesthetic”(Hegarty, 2007) Genesis main aim with Psychic tv was to constantly question the relationship between audience and performer, and one on the ways they achieved this was through noisey and intense improvisations, often featuring objects and home built instruments.having seen them live myself many times i can say they hold onto this mantra today.

The work of theses artists and bands heavily inspired another of my own improvisation works titled “anfractuous spasms” ,this project was created again with the idea of pushing sonic improvisation to its limits, however this time i set out to create rules around the improvisations which may allow us to venture deeper into “true improvisation”. Each improvisation was two hours long with no breaks and recorded in single sessions, one of the parameters set was that each musician brought the set up for another musician playing on the day, so none of us would be able to learn or get comfortable with what we would be playing on the day. We also met at the studio to prevent any discussion beforehand, another way we tried to keep the process of creating of these sonic products improvised was the way in which we recorded them, we used basic microphones and left all studio sounds in the recordings as we felt when improvising in groups the sounds which come from the equipment are as much a part of the overall piece as anything else.

this project was tremendously eye opening in terms of sounding in the moment and responding to what your hearing. We came away with 10 hours of recorded improvisations after a months time spent in the studio. We futhred this project by releasing the albums with cards which the listener can use to improvise new methods of listening to the works. the whole project served as an excellent way to prepare for david toops improvisation course.

David toops work spans decades spent in the artistic industry, as both a writer and a composer with his main focus set on improvisation, his works with the laptop orchestra are of particular interest when thinking of how far we can push improvisation within modern sound art practice. In one interview for whitechapel gallery david says “in improvisation its very hard to talk about the music at all,but it has a kind of moment form, whereby each moment has a potentiality, and that potentiality is the way in which the music can move” this summarises all performances based improvisation, by stating the control you as a player have towards the overall sound of an improvised composition. No matter of your playability or musical talent you will always have some degree of dynamic control of how you sound in an improvisation and how you chose to react to other players can dramatically change the whole movement of a piece, particularly interesting when you consider that every player has the ability to completely deconstruct as well as rebuild a piece.

When studying under David on his improvisation course he said to me “were you really listening? Listening is of equal measure to sounding” something i reflected on. And upon discovering his book into the maelstrom: Music Improvisation And The Dream of Freedom something i discovered is of great importance to the way he works as an improviser. Toop pushed me to question everything i do within an improvisation, encouraging to do to things such as down tuning my guitar to a random tuning, leading me to discover ways of viewing the guitar as an object instead of an instrument. As a guitarist of many years i never thought it would be possible for me to achieve seeing a guitar in this new light, but it has shed some truths on the incredible versatility of these objects.

Engaging with his works with the laptop orchestra we see that putting together a total mix of instruments, materials and everyday objects can draw new and fascinating relationships to seemingly non marriable objects and so we can begin to question how we select the objects we play and what this means, for example bow gamelan or myself using playable objects found on site with a sense of chance to what you discover or bringing actual instruments you have had previous engagement with and how this will vary your performance as an improviser and the overall atmosphere of the sound itself. Through his works in the laptop orchestra Toop challenges the very meaning of improvisation itself and brings into light the most modern of playable objects the laptop.in one interview Toop states “one of the most interesting things about playing the laptop is that what happens is concealed in a way it's a kind of secret” (Vimeo, 2018)(4.00) which is a fascinating way of viewing the laptop in an improvisation session it means that for the other players it becomes harder to identify who is playing which sound and creates a space where people are responding to the space as a whole instead of focusing on certain aspects or specific players.

Beginning to timeline improvisations throughout history in this way allows us to see the way in which it has affected many forms of art through the decades we see how much of a clear and powerful role it plays in the past as well as moving forward into the current day. And through Toops teaching i've learnt there is seemingly endless possibilities to what performers can achieve through improvisation deconstructing known objects to find new meaning with in them or applying new methods of playing to pull apart what was formerly known. Improvisation is a method of decoding sonic qualities of sound and shedding light on underlying textures which can be understood in a new way. The pursuit of “true improvisation” for me is a way of furthering my understanding of what it means to perform in an improvised way and continue to push the boundaries and carve new paths and modes of working within this sonic realm. It also seems that improvisation serves as a stepping stone when creating all kinds of work, it's a foundation of which many artists have formed their craft or found there style. When working in this way the performer/artist is forced to constantly innovate and listen, skills which will inevitably further one's abilities as a sound artist .

In the future i plan indeed to move forward by combining the skills i have learnt in improvisation to move into instillation based work. Bringing improvisation into the public eye through gallery style spaces, i hope that through combining these two types of sonic practice i will uncover new depths in the objects i collect in my day to day life,as well as bringing attention to the public about the relationship that objects have with sound, how when used interestingly the seemingly useless objects that litter our streets can be used to create musical composition.

Bibliography

YouTube. (2018). Krautrock The Rebirth of Germany == full length documentary (with Translating tools). [online] Available at: https://youtu.be/lnMhkkgWpG4 [Accessed 22 Apr. 2018].

YouTube. (2018). I'VE NOTHING BUT MY NAME - Iggy Pop in Conversation With Thurston Moore (Episode 1). [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCiic3SXVWk [Accessed 22 Apr. 2018].

Hegarty, P. (2007). Noise/music. 1st ed. New York: Continuum, p.115.

P-Orridge, G. and Jarman, D. (2009). Thee Psychick Bible. 1st ed. New York: Feral House.

YouTube. (2016). Synesthesia Genesis P.Orridge 1997_2001. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1fikvl-Jz0 [Accessed May 2012].(1:27:36)

YouTube. (2016). (TACpschictv) PTV Interview (Genesis P-Orridge & Peter Christopherson). [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjssKDFlBZM&t=248s [Accessed 9 Dec. 2016]. (2:19) (3:30)

YouTube. (2018). FLAT TIME/sounding - An Interview with David Toop at the Whitechapel Gallery - Music & Live Words. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSNcH59UdR8 [Accessed 22 Apr. 2018].

YouTube. (2018). Bow Gamelan - Offshore Rig [1987]. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOEUmFqcqf0 [Accessed 23 Apr. 2018].

YouTube. (2018). Bow Gamelan Ensemble, Concrete Barges. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSQtQ4fFNtk&t=111s [Accessed 23 Apr. 2018].

Cargocollective.com. (2018). unknown devices: the laptop orchestra. [online] Available at: http://cargocollective.com/unknowndevices [Accessed 25 Apr. 2018].

Vimeo. (2018). Unknown Devices - The Laptop Orchestra Promo. [online] Available at: https://vimeo.com/5407659 [Accessed 25 Apr. 2018].

https://www.discogs.com/Can-Prehistoric-Future/release/432897

#writing

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samanthasroberts · 6 years

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6 Bands That Totally Reinvented Themselves To Get Famous

For many people, musical genres are personality-defining lines that can never be crossed. For instance, cool people listen to thrash metal, but anyone who listens to speed metal has their former dungeon master’s head in a freezer. Sometimes it gets complicated, like how emo music is for crying into your diary, while gothic rock is for crying into your cupcake.

However, many genre-defining artists started out playing the exact kind of music their fans are required by social law to loathe. For example …

#6. Kid Rock Was A Hilarious ’90s Rapper

In the popular consciousness, there have already been two versions of Kid Rock. There is the current Kid Rock, who sings country-rock anthems, and there’s the more popular rap-rock/nu-metal Kid Rock of the late ’90s. He has a personality easily summed up by reminding you he’s a man from Michigan who loves the Confederate flag.

“And if black people don’t like it, they can continue to have very little interest in my music!”

The Artist He Was Before That:

We really should just stop the article here.

In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Kid Rock was the funkiest, flyest rapper all the way to the extreme. Admittedly, it was an awkward time for everyone, but Kid Rock’s head looked like a racist Halloween costume. He looked like a Disney film about two boys swapping bodies after a magic basketball bounced into a magic chess tournament.

In Hell, this album art is downloaded for every song in your iTunes.

But Kid Rock’s early stuff wasn’t some trashy chimera of country, rock, and hip-hop. He was trying for the real deal, with songs like “Wax The Booty,” a description of an erotic encounter that seems like it was written by a virgin and performed by an aging sea captain selling breakfast cereal.

Using the term “puddy” for female genitals? Definitely a virgin.

With little to no encouragement, Kid Rock continued to make rap songs like this for seven years. His musical career was already a decade old when he released his breakthrough hit “Bawitdaba,” which was accidentally written when he tried to spell “badminton instructor” on a job application. That song and album blew up, and Kid Rock’s incredible flat top was never seen again.

If it seems like Kid Rock was adopting culture that wasn’t his, it’s because he was. He wasn’t learning how to rhyme on the tough-rhyming Detroit streets like Eminem. Kid Rock grew up in a beautiful suburb in a nice house. So this guy ..

… and this guy …

… all come from the same upper-middle-class childhood spent in one of Michigan’s loveliest homes. His childhood job of selling apples from his father’s orchard sounds like a scene from a Norman Rockwell painting. So he’s gone from rich suburbanite to street rapper to hillbilly rapper to just regular hillbilly. At this rate, Kid Rock should be performing as a Syrian refugee as early as next year.

#5. Radiohead Were A Cheesy Top 40 Band

Radiohead helped define the term “alternative rock” by continually pushing the boundaries of popular music and being forever played by lonely men with acoustic guitars on open mic nights in coffee shops around the globe.

Just because they dismissed “Creep” as juvenile and stupid decades ago doesn’t mean the rest of the universe has to.

They are known for their creative risks and their ability to redefine themselves, even after decades. Albums like OK Computer helped drive mid-’90s music away from traditional pop structure, and Rolling Stone named Radiohead’s Kid A the best album of the 2000s. It should tell you something about Radiohead’s talent and influence when here, in an article making fun of artists trying to redefine themselves, we are praising their ability to redefine themselves. Frontman Thom Yorke even has the courage to spell the name “Tom” with an H.

The Artists They Were Before That:

Radiohead started with the name On A Friday, which they were forced to change immediately after being signed by EMI, presumably because on a scale of band names from Hoobastank to Sex Pistols, On A Friday rates a firm Toad The Wet Sprocket.

“We’re On A Friday, because my mum only allows us to use the garage on Fridays while she’s at the gym!”

It wasn’t only their shitty name, though. Their early music was the exact opposite of “alternative.” It was generic Britpop that sounded like a sloppy karaoke version of U2.

They presumably wrote “How To Disappear Completely” after being reminded that they made this.

Instead of a calculated effort to evolve, On A Friday was locked in a desperate struggle to sound exactly like everyone else. And the transition from “dumb high school band that thinks it’s clever” to “genius new artist” wasn’t an immediate one, either — the band’s first album as Radiohead was titled Pablo Honey, which is the name of a goddamn Jerky Boys bit.

#4. The Songwriter Behind Taylor Swift And Katy Perry Started In A Ridiculous Hair Metal Band

You may not remember how you know Max Martin’s name, but he’s the man behind dozens of the most overplayed pop songs from the past 25 years. He was responsible for Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl,” Britney Spears’ “Baby One More Time,” and Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood.” In fact, that last one was his 20th No. 1 single, meaning — except for Paul McCartney and John Lennon — Martin has more No. 1 singles than anyone who has ever lived.

On top of his three Billy Ray Cyrus lookalike contest trophies.

The Artist He Was Before That:

Before Martin was a hitmaking superproducer, he was a high school dropout named Martin White, which, confusingly, also wasn’t his real name. Karl “Max (Martin White) Martin” Sandberg started a group in the late ’80s called It’s Alive. It’s Alive combined glam metal with grunge in a way that provoked one of two reactions from everyone who ever heard them: “This sucks,” or, “Who?”

“We want the most adorable album cover of all time.”

Somehow, It’s Alive managed to record two whole albums, and their sophomore effort, 1993’s Earthquake Visions, sold only 30,000 copies. More people picked up Bret Michaels’ herpes than It’s Alive albums that year. It was apparent the group wasn’t destined for international superstardom, but it did link Martin with producer Denniz Pop (also not that guy’s real name).

Their moms must be wondering why they even bothered to fill out the birth certificate at all.

Pop heroically saw through all the feathered-hair bullshit of It’s Alive enough to notice that Martin had an incredible ear for catchy melodies, so he put Martin in the studio without the rest of his dipshit bandmates. Martin was trained in pelvic thrusts and nothing else, so he spent his first two years in the studio just “trying to learn what the hell was going on.” He definitely got the hang of it, though. From every one of Taylor Swift’s No. 1 hits to writing every hit single on the Backstreet Boys’ Millennium, Martin knew how to create songs tailor-made to get stuck in millions and millions of heads. So, now you know who to thank for “Blank Space.”

#3. The Go-Go’s Were A Hardcore Punk Band

The Go-Go’s are the most successful all-female group ever, a fact stated definitively on the band’s own website. Their dancey songs about having the beat and going on vacation saturated pop culture in the 1980s, and they’re still used today to detect the number of bachelorette parties inside karaoke bars. If evil scientists found a way to turn liquid cheerleaders into music, it would sound exactly like The Go-Go’s. Now that we mention it, it would sound suspiciously exactly like that.

What are you hiding?

The Artists They Were Before That:

If you clicked the song link above or just have a perfect memory, you may have noticed “We Got The Beat” opens with weirdly pounding drums and staccato guitar sounds. It’s kind of punk rock for a song about clapping and loving to clap, right? That’s because The Go-Go’s actually started as a grimy, fuck-you-in-your-face punk rock band.

The only beat they cared about was beating on any promoters that stiffed them.

The group started in the L.A. punk scene of the late ’70s alongside other seminal punk acts like The Motels and The Germs.

“What makes you think you can just come into The Bronx Upside Downsies turf, Warriors?”

In fact, The Go-Go’s lead singer, Belinda Carlisle, actually started out as the drummer for The Germs. She called herself Dottie Danger while with the group, but ditched The Germs after catching mono, because Belinda apparently doesn’t appreciate willful strokes of cosmic irony.

“I feel really sick. The Germs isn’t just a cute name, is it?”

That’s Belinda wearing the bloody swastika, making the exact face she would make if she saw her future self walk into the club.

“Ahoy, fellow Nazis! Fuck the establishment, right?”

#2. Kraftwerk Were A Terrible Jam Band

Kraftwerk are the godfathers of electronic music. They were the first popular band to utilize nothing but electronic instruments to create songs full of driving, repetitive bleeps, like a Nintendo game you can dance to. Basically, they’re the nerds who made robot sounds into a legitimate musical genre.

When not attempting to exterminate all of humanity, Skynet loves to get funky funky fresh.

The Artists They Were Before That:

Before they switched their sound to C-3PO translating funk for R2-D2, Kraftwerk were a psychedelic jam band. You really, really couldn’t dance to it. It was like a pile of sound an art major would make to start a conversation about what music, like, is, man. It was a sonic port-o-john of flutes, guitars, and random sound effects, with all the focus of a frightened cat scrambling over a piano. Even libraries in the early ’70s categorized it under “Bullshit, Hippie.”

“Oh yeah? Well, your grandpappy’s hippie bullshit didn’t have a traffic-cone solo!”

Founding members Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider were initially interested in creating free-form experimental rock, and that’s what they did, clonking and flooping for several years. Kraftwerk’s music seemed designed specifically for LSD trips and advanced LSD trips, until 1974, when they released Autobahn and defined the electronica genre of robomusic. Apparently, even robots have to go through an angsty phase before they come into their own.

Even the guys in Phish wanted them to get to the fucking point already.

#1. Ministry Started Out As A Synth-Pop Knockoff Of The Cure

Since the mid-’80s, Chicago-based Ministry have been helping angry teens demonstrate their misunderstoodedness, with aggressive heavy metal far too noisy for their parents. Their scrotum-kicking sound includes albums like The Land Of Rape And Honey, which is both an awful pun and a terrible sentiment, and From Beer To Eternity, which is only an awful pun.

They clearly didn’t have time for anything more.

Ministry helped elevate its downtrodden fans with powerful lyrics, letting them know that someone out there understood what it was like to have no one understand you. For instance, here is a selection from their song “Filth Pig”:

Filth pig, filth pig He sleeps with both eyes open Filth pig, filth pig He sleeps all right because he’s a Filth pig

It’s not clear if this was translated into Pig and then back to English, or if this is the first song pieced together from the dying words of stroke victims. The point is, the music of Ministry is better suited for random ax slaughter than slow-dancing.

The Artists They Were Before That:

Ministry started off the 1980s as a new-wave synth-pop outfit. And we don’t mean a little bit ’80s, like every other band at the time. They looked like a Broadway musical about the ’80s.

“Filth pig’s sleeping or something. Psh. Whatever.”

In 1983, Ministry released their first album, With Sympathy, and it was like a greatest hits compilation of every song Joy Division decided was too shitty to record. To put it another way, it’s exactly the soundtrack you hear in your head when you quote Nietzsche to some clueless sheep — dark synth-pop about impotent despair. And lead singer Al Jourgensen performed the entire album with a fake British accent. It’s the official soundtrack for avoiding gym class because it makes your mascara run. A conformist like you just wouldn’t get it, man.

CSI: Gothika

After the band went more industrial and metal, Jourgensen claimed he was pressured by management into making With Sympathy into the fussy wusspop it was, and he seemed determined to keep it out of print. He even claimed to have destroyed the master copies, yet the album was eventually reissued in 2012. It definitely doesn’t have much in common with their modern sound, but Ministry music from any era is always the perfect way to tell a hitchhiker this is the last van ride they’ll ever take.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/6-bands-that-totally-reinvented-themselves-to-get-famous/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/02/17/6-bands-that-totally-reinvented-themselves-to-get-famous/

0 notes

adambstingus · 6 years

Text

6 Bands That Totally Reinvented Themselves To Get Famous

However, many genre-defining artists started out playing the exact kind of music their fans are required by social law to loathe. For example …

#6. Kid Rock Was A Hilarious ’90s Rapper

“And if black people don’t like it, they can continue to have very little interest in my music!”

The Artist He Was Before That:

We really should just stop the article here.

In Hell, this album art is downloaded for every song in your iTunes.

Using the term “puddy” for female genitals? Definitely a virgin.

… and this guy …

#5. Radiohead Were A Cheesy Top 40 Band

Just because they dismissed “Creep” as juvenile and stupid decades ago doesn’t mean the rest of the universe has to.

The Artists They Were Before That:

“We’re On A Friday, because my mum only allows us to use the garage on Fridays while she’s at the gym!”

It wasn’t only their shitty name, though. Their early music was the exact opposite of “alternative.” It was generic Britpop that sounded like a sloppy karaoke version of U2.

They presumably wrote “How To Disappear Completely” after being reminded that they made this.

#4. The Songwriter Behind Taylor Swift And Katy Perry Started In A Ridiculous Hair Metal Band

On top of his three Billy Ray Cyrus lookalike contest trophies.

The Artist He Was Before That:

“We want the most adorable album cover of all time.”

Their moms must be wondering why they even bothered to fill out the birth certificate at all.

#3. The Go-Go’s Were A Hardcore Punk Band

What are you hiding?

The Artists They Were Before That:

The only beat they cared about was beating on any promoters that stiffed them.

The group started in the L.A. punk scene of the late ’70s alongside other seminal punk acts like The Motels and The Germs.

“What makes you think you can just come into The Bronx Upside Downsies turf, Warriors?”

“I feel really sick. The Germs isn’t just a cute name, is it?”

That’s Belinda wearing the bloody swastika, making the exact face she would make if she saw her future self walk into the club.

“Ahoy, fellow Nazis! Fuck the establishment, right?”

#2. Kraftwerk Were A Terrible Jam Band

When not attempting to exterminate all of humanity, Skynet loves to get funky funky fresh.

The Artists They Were Before That:

“Oh yeah? Well, your grandpappy’s hippie bullshit didn’t have a traffic-cone solo!”

Even the guys in Phish wanted them to get to the fucking point already.

#1. Ministry Started Out As A Synth-Pop Knockoff Of The Cure

They clearly didn’t have time for anything more.

Filth pig, filth pig He sleeps with both eyes open Filth pig, filth pig He sleeps all right because he’s a Filth pig

The Artists They Were Before That:

Ministry started off the 1980s as a new-wave synth-pop outfit. And we don’t mean a little bit ’80s, like every other band at the time. They looked like a Broadway musical about the ’80s.

“Filth pig’s sleeping or something. Psh. Whatever.”

CSI: Gothika

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/6-bands-that-totally-reinvented-themselves-to-get-famous/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/170991824677

0 notes

jimdsmith34 · 6 years

Text

6 Bands That Totally Reinvented Themselves To Get Famous

However, many genre-defining artists started out playing the exact kind of music their fans are required by social law to loathe. For example …

#6. Kid Rock Was A Hilarious ’90s Rapper

“And if black people don’t like it, they can continue to have very little interest in my music!”

The Artist He Was Before That:

We really should just stop the article here.

In Hell, this album art is downloaded for every song in your iTunes.

Using the term “puddy” for female genitals? Definitely a virgin.

… and this guy …

#5. Radiohead Were A Cheesy Top 40 Band

Just because they dismissed “Creep” as juvenile and stupid decades ago doesn’t mean the rest of the universe has to.

The Artists They Were Before That:

“We’re On A Friday, because my mum only allows us to use the garage on Fridays while she’s at the gym!”

It wasn’t only their shitty name, though. Their early music was the exact opposite of “alternative.” It was generic Britpop that sounded like a sloppy karaoke version of U2.

They presumably wrote “How To Disappear Completely” after being reminded that they made this.

#4. The Songwriter Behind Taylor Swift And Katy Perry Started In A Ridiculous Hair Metal Band

On top of his three Billy Ray Cyrus lookalike contest trophies.

The Artist He Was Before That:

“We want the most adorable album cover of all time.”

Their moms must be wondering why they even bothered to fill out the birth certificate at all.

#3. The Go-Go’s Were A Hardcore Punk Band

What are you hiding?

The Artists They Were Before That:

The only beat they cared about was beating on any promoters that stiffed them.

The group started in the L.A. punk scene of the late ’70s alongside other seminal punk acts like The Motels and The Germs.

“What makes you think you can just come into The Bronx Upside Downsies turf, Warriors?”

“I feel really sick. The Germs isn’t just a cute name, is it?”

That’s Belinda wearing the bloody swastika, making the exact face she would make if she saw her future self walk into the club.

“Ahoy, fellow Nazis! Fuck the establishment, right?”

#2. Kraftwerk Were A Terrible Jam Band

When not attempting to exterminate all of humanity, Skynet loves to get funky funky fresh.

The Artists They Were Before That:

“Oh yeah? Well, your grandpappy’s hippie bullshit didn’t have a traffic-cone solo!”

Even the guys in Phish wanted them to get to the fucking point already.

#1. Ministry Started Out As A Synth-Pop Knockoff Of The Cure

They clearly didn’t have time for anything more.

Filth pig, filth pig He sleeps with both eyes open Filth pig, filth pig He sleeps all right because he’s a Filth pig

The Artists They Were Before That:

Ministry started off the 1980s as a new-wave synth-pop outfit. And we don’t mean a little bit ’80s, like every other band at the time. They looked like a Broadway musical about the ’80s.

“Filth pig’s sleeping or something. Psh. Whatever.”

CSI: Gothika

source http://allofbeer.com/6-bands-that-totally-reinvented-themselves-to-get-famous/ from All of Beer http://allofbeer.blogspot.com/2018/02/6-bands-that-totally-reinvented.html

0 notes

allofbeercom · 6 years

Text

6 Bands That Totally Reinvented Themselves To Get Famous

However, many genre-defining artists started out playing the exact kind of music their fans are required by social law to loathe. For example …

#6. Kid Rock Was A Hilarious ’90s Rapper

“And if black people don’t like it, they can continue to have very little interest in my music!”

The Artist He Was Before That:

We really should just stop the article here.

In Hell, this album art is downloaded for every song in your iTunes.

Using the term “puddy” for female genitals? Definitely a virgin.

… and this guy …

#5. Radiohead Were A Cheesy Top 40 Band

Just because they dismissed “Creep” as juvenile and stupid decades ago doesn’t mean the rest of the universe has to.

The Artists They Were Before That:

“We’re On A Friday, because my mum only allows us to use the garage on Fridays while she’s at the gym!”

It wasn’t only their shitty name, though. Their early music was the exact opposite of “alternative.” It was generic Britpop that sounded like a sloppy karaoke version of U2.

They presumably wrote “How To Disappear Completely” after being reminded that they made this.

#4. The Songwriter Behind Taylor Swift And Katy Perry Started In A Ridiculous Hair Metal Band

On top of his three Billy Ray Cyrus lookalike contest trophies.

The Artist He Was Before That:

“We want the most adorable album cover of all time.”

Their moms must be wondering why they even bothered to fill out the birth certificate at all.

#3. The Go-Go’s Were A Hardcore Punk Band

What are you hiding?

The Artists They Were Before That:

The only beat they cared about was beating on any promoters that stiffed them.

The group started in the L.A. punk scene of the late ’70s alongside other seminal punk acts like The Motels and The Germs.

“What makes you think you can just come into The Bronx Upside Downsies turf, Warriors?”

“I feel really sick. The Germs isn’t just a cute name, is it?”

That’s Belinda wearing the bloody swastika, making the exact face she would make if she saw her future self walk into the club.

“Ahoy, fellow Nazis! Fuck the establishment, right?”

#2. Kraftwerk Were A Terrible Jam Band

When not attempting to exterminate all of humanity, Skynet loves to get funky funky fresh.

The Artists They Were Before That:

“Oh yeah? Well, your grandpappy’s hippie bullshit didn’t have a traffic-cone solo!”

Even the guys in Phish wanted them to get to the fucking point already.

#1. Ministry Started Out As A Synth-Pop Knockoff Of The Cure

They clearly didn’t have time for anything more.

Filth pig, filth pig He sleeps with both eyes open Filth pig, filth pig He sleeps all right because he’s a Filth pig

The Artists They Were Before That:

Ministry started off the 1980s as a new-wave synth-pop outfit. And we don’t mean a little bit ’80s, like every other band at the time. They looked like a Broadway musical about the ’80s.

“Filth pig’s sleeping or something. Psh. Whatever.”

CSI: Gothika

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/6-bands-that-totally-reinvented-themselves-to-get-famous/

0 notes

clusterfuzz · 7 years

Text

401

Contextual understanding

I was not aware of how my brand was being communicated and received to other people. That was a black box to me. How did people see me? I was very uncomfortable with how I looked, because I was worried I would be perceived as alien. There’s basically not a lot of asian faces in the music industry. There’s Jamie woon who is Eurasian. MIA who is asian. And Steve Aoki who makes terrible EDM but makes it into this list for being asian. Ok there is Rich Chigga and Nosaj Thing. But they’re more fresh faced. And that’s it. In terms of serious artist, there are none. There are some mixing and mastering engineers who are Asian, but that’s about it. Where is the asian Solange? What about the asian Daft punk or Kraftwerk? Obviously I wanted to distance myself from the categorisation of race not only because it is lazy, but I am much more than just how I look.

I like being compared to Flying Lotus, because his music means a lot to me. Madlib. J Dilla. Flying Lotus isn’t just black, Flying Lotus is black AND he makes incredible music.

Image and identity

I didn’t think much of this. But I had in mind, toying with the idea of using my Malaysian heritage. I just thought I wanted to use the sounds of the gamelan because they were interesting to my ears, but I had no clue how to present my brand. In fact, the way I approached my music in the past was very anti-brand. The brand didn’t matter to me. I was very purist in the way I approached music, music was so important to me, almost sacred that people around me did not quite get. I thought that presenting the music in a visual format would dilute the quality. And I really cared about music first at the expense of how it is presented. In my case, not presented to anyone at all beside myself and some close friends.

Creative output

I was just making beats and sounds irregularly without any clear plan. It was a very passive approach, but then again, I was mostly just learning how to use Ableton. So I didn’t do a lot, but was learning how to use my vsts (Virtual softwares). I would sit down and then randomly make a beat, and then leave the project mid air and never look back. My work wasn’t very inspired, also because I was trying to be different and sound different from anything else, instead of working on fundamentals and working toward making good music. I changed radically from that point. I told myself never to work without inspiration.

Also I was very spiteful against works of art that had conventional pop structure, although that structure would have helped organise my thoughts. I was stuck in my head in that sense. When I would make a track, and then it would vaguely sound like the xx, for example, I would just delete the whole file. Because I was so scared of being like everyone else. In other words, I was afraid of not being able to find my own space to express my individuality through my music. For a long time, I felt this strong feeling of being alone, because I was estranged from myself.

Now I work more on sound design and being more thoughtful before making any beats. I am also humbler now in that I have a lot to learn from my masters.

Experience

I gained musical literacy by playing in the orchestra in school, and some wedding bands, but we never performed any original music, it was mostly covers, and I produced little creative output in those tasks. Even in the orchestra, I had to follow exactly what was written on the score, and I always desired breaking free from that. Once I arrived in London I began to entertain the idea of becoming a solo act, so I started getting involved in grime collectives and Roundhouse projects, but I was just mostly the producer behind the scenes. I made the beats and mostly stayed in the shadows. I always felt this strong longing in me to be in front of a live stage, and tear the house down with bass.

Products

Tracks on soundcloud. Nothing beyond that. Even with the tracks on soundcloud, they were not properly mixed, and most did not have vocals on them. I treated my soundcloud as a collection of ideas rather than a place for my product. Also because I didn’t really like using soundcloud, I was a very heavy Spotify and youtube user. It was just a space where I would jot down whatever ideas I had, and it was really fun, but I always felt that I was underselling myself.

I also always had this naive understanding that every single track I released had to be excellent and be worthy of huge commercial success and critical acclaim. I learned that many artists, even successful ones, have had a lot of peaks and troughs in their creativity. Not every track is a hit, but if I keep working every day, I might make something interesting. Today I aim at being prolific, while being inspired.

Market awareness

Again, similar to what I said about image and identity, I didn’t think in depth about what market awareness meant. I always thought it was secondary. That sentiment is true to some extent. Of course now I understand that it’s not just all about the music, as the branding can help reach a wider audience.

Based on my observation on a popular streaming service, Spotify,

For experimental, the demand averages 500k but can go up to at most 1 million plays.

For hip hop beats, the demand averages 2mil, but can increase to up to 10 million plays.

For electronic, the type of electronic I wanted to make, there is a vibrant demand of roughly about 10 million plays, but I can get up to 50-100 million plays on Spotify if I am smart enough.

Client fanbase

Don’t have a fanbase. Mostly limited to emerging artists who record their EP and release single music videos. I have roughly about 20 serious fans who would buy my music. In the context of the 1000 serious fans approach (that you need to make a living off your music). But this is barely any amount at all.

Client relationships

It has moved from amateur boring method of overloading people whatever music activity I was doing to a more active and interesting approach that got people more interested. I don’t have a relationship with my fanbase that I can monetise, both at the start of the course and at present.

Industry awareness

At first I had a naive understanding of the industry. I believed that if you were good enough, you would be discovered. And that you only needed to work toward that one very very good hit or album to break into the market. The reality is more complicated.

The industry now doesn’t care about diamonds in the rough, but artists with a proven track of success, meaning having an engaged fan base, having commercial potential. Of course the music is important, but I learned that being prolific and having a solid work ethic or persistence approach to the industry is better in the long run. Constantly releasing high quality music and video to accompany that. The importance of twitter and facebook to industry people. And how important it is to have a website. And the importance of social media.

I understand that streaming is where people can make money off music. In 2016, Spotify and Apple Music both combined rake up 63% (44% and 19% respectively) of subscribers and 58% of the label revenue share (40% and 18% respectively). So both these services get the majority of revenue from the industry. https://musicindustryblog.wordpress.com/2016/09/16/have-spotify-and-apple-music-just-won-the-streaming-wars/ . This sentiment is also echoed by many of the music industry professionals on the CMU Insights program. I learned a great deal about publishing rights, royalties, live performances and merchandise. The music industry is no simple business.

EVALUATION OF 401

Based on my experience completing 401, I became aware that music is not just about the mp3, wav file (or whatever format you listen on), but it’s much much bigger than that. If you do art properly, you can change the way people think and view their own lives, and that’s a beautiful thing. It’s a cultural statement, in many ways, therefore, there are so many aspects of the brand that I needed to think about, like the music industry and my awareness of the market.

In practical terms, this means building a coherent strategy around working around or reducing my flaws, and accentuating my strengths, which I outlined through my action plans. My weaknesses including my lack of awareness of the business aspects of music, and my general insularity in my approach to making music and generally living under the rock in some fundamental ways. My strengths including my intelligence, intellectual curiosity, easygoing personality and strong sense of self.

Essentially the review of 401 allowed me to not only situate myself on the broader picture of artistic ideas, but also ground myself in the practicalities of the concrete world. I thought the process was incredibly enjoyable despite being emotionally challenging at times. With some meditation, good laughs, and doing lots of introspection, I feel really confident to pursue my artistic vision. The course honestly really changed me for the better.

0 notes

filmdaguardare · 7 years

Link

In 1993 David Bowie compiled a double CD for friends. Titled All Saints it combined instrumentals from Low and "Heroes" with more contemporary tracks and signalled the singer's rediscovery of the electronic sounds that revolutionised his music in 1977. Delving deep into All Saints, Jon Savage examines the impact of Bowie's sonic revolution on post-punk, electronica and, in the end, Bowie himself.

1993 was a fantastic year for electronic music. Six years after Steve 'Silk' Hurley's Jack Your Body - the UK's first house Number 1 - the pure energy of house and techno had diversified into more than just a series of artificially stimulated genres: it had become a whole new sound world that had very little to do with what had gone before, and that meant rock. Despite the best efforts of Suede and Nirvana that year, electronica sounded like the future.

Passing from the irresistible Euro cheese of 2 Unlimited's No Limit - Number 1 in February - to Acen's brutal classic Window In The Sky - collected on the early junglist compilation Hard Leaders III: Enter The Darkside, there were several releases by Richard ]ames/Aphex Twin, including Polygon Window's Surfing On Sine Waves; Richie Hawtin's first album on Warp, Dimension Intrusion as F.U.S.E., Underworld's Rez, Sabres Of Paradise's Smokebelch II and the R&S compilation In Order To Dance 4 - brilliant records all.

1993 was also the year that David Bowie rediscovered his mojo, It had been a decade since Let's Dance - the rock/R&B fusion that launched him into the global mainstream for the first time. The subsequent years saw Bowie blindsided by that somewhat unexpected success: after two poor studio albums (Tonight and Never Let Me Down), an attempt to recapture his rock roots with Tin Machine had been unsuccessful - despite a couple of good songs. So what to do next?"

"A way through the labyrinth was offered by the past: going forward by going back. During 1991, Rykodisc undertook a comprehensive reissue programme of all the albums between 1967's David Bowie and 1980's Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), trailed in 1989 by the successful 3-CD compilation Sound + Vision. The cumulative effect of these fifteen records - including the electronic highpoints, Low and "Heroes" - reaffirmed Bowie's status as modernist and innovator.

Released in April 1993, Black Tie White Noise was Bowie's first solo album for six years. It contains what would, with variations, become his basic template for the next decade: mature, almost crooning vocals; iconic covers, in this case Cream's I Feel Free and The Walker Brothers' Nite Flights; an interest in black dance rhythms (assisted here by Nile Rodgers); and futuristic ideas integrated within a full, enveloping sound. It went to Number 1.

Bowie has always been a synthesist of contemporary modes: unlike many rock stars, he actually likes music. His commercial renaissance in 1993 coincided with a greater receptivity to the world around him and a corresponding reassessment of his achievements. Pallas Athena is a string-drenched baggy shuffle, while the title track, Black Tie White Noise, matches a lyric about the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles with a guest vocal from New Jack Swing singer Al B. Sure!

That November, Nirvana plugged Bowie right into the heart of contemporary rock music with their version of The Man Who Sold The World on MTV Unplugged. A month later, Bowie released his second album of 1993, The Buddha Of Suburbia, an album of all new, subtly electronic material - inspired by his soundtrack work on the BBC Film of Hanif Kureishi's novel, set in their shared south London locale of Bromley - a forgotten gem in his catalogue.

Right from the opening track, which collages the riff from Space Oddity and the chorus from All The Madmen, The Buddha Of Suburbia plugs Bowie back into his avant-garde past. This was deliberate: as Bowie wrote in the linernotes, "My personal brief for this collection was to marry my present way of writing and playing with the stockpile of residue from the 1970s." That meant a list of inspirations that included free association lyrics, Brücke-Museum, Kraftwerk, Eno and Neu!

As if to celebrate the continued influence of Eno on his "working forms", Bowie put together his third release of the year: a double CD compilation called All Saints, produced in an edition of a hundred and fifty and handed out to friends. This was an explicit homage to electronica: mixing all the instrumentals from Low and "Heroes" with stray outtakes like Abdulmajid and All Saints, as well as relevant material from Black Tie White Noise and The Buddha Of Suburbia.

The result is surprisingly homogeneous: sixteen years of material collaged into a flowing whole, with the The Buddha Of Suburbia material, The Mysteries and Ian Fish UK Heir, among the strongest. Which prompts a few questions. If Low and "Heroes" represent Bowie's highpoint of formal inspiration, then how did he get there? Why did they sound so good in the context of their time, and what has their influence been - not just on his own music - but electronica in general? Did that future happen?

It all began, appropriately enough, in science fiction. During the mid to late summer of 1975, Bowie was in New Mexico and other southern locations, filming Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth. His central role required him to play the part of Thomas Jerome Newton, an extraterrestrial visitor on a quest to find water for his dying planet. Newton is charming, cold, and totally emotionless: as Bowie later admitted, he hardly had to act because that's how he felt at the time.

Space travel and aliens have been a constant theme in Bowie's songs, from Space Oddity through Life On Mars?, Ashes To Ashes and Hello Spaceboy. The possibility of other worlds - and the transformation achieved by leaving this one - is a sure-re way of abstracting from any problems that one has on this Earth. Bowie had always felt apart, and much of his work - for instance, his first masterpiece, 1966's The London Boys - centres around the themes of being in or out, between belonging and not belonging.

His first big hit, 1969's Space Oddity, was a trip to nowhere, in the short term. Bowie achieved fusion in his second phase of chart success: he understood and identified with his new audience, a mixture of weirdos, gays, urban stylists and teenyboppers. But superstardom and artistic restlessness drove him into new, uncharted areas: as he continued his sequence of hyper-speed transformations in 1974 and 1975 - from Aladdin Sane to Diamond Dogs and Young Americans - he became more and more remote.

In summer 1975 he was coked-out and fame blitzed. But The Man Who Fell To Earth offered a lifeline. Saturated in science fiction, becoming the alien, Bowie was able to project forward, into his future, into the future - out of a barren, bleak and occasionally terrifying present. (At the time he was living in Los Angeles, beset by demons, imagined or otherwise, and involved in a sequence of paralysing business disputes).

The first sign of this change was all over his next album. Recorded in autumn 1973, Station To Station was a compelling mixture of abstracted disco and contemporary crooning. TVC 15 set to a vicious funk rhythm the famous scene in The Man Who Fell To Earth, where Newton, rendered incapable by alcohol, goggles at a wall of TV sets: "I give my complete attention to a very good friend of mine / He's quadrophonic / He's a / He's got more channels/ So hologramic / Oh my TVC 15."

The title track was a ten-minute tour de force, with as many twists and turns as a 1967 single or a prog epic, that charted a spiritual journey from the darkside ("Here I am / Dredging the ocean / Lost in my circle") to some kind of possibility that life could continue. Whether consciously or not, Bowie was visualising his own escape: "The European canon is here." Here also are the first traces of modern German music: the motorik rhythms, the panoramic sweep of the train sounds.

The idea of a physical journey was stimulated by the most successful German record to date, Kraftwerk's Autobahn - the title track of which aimed to capture the feeling of driving along the German A roads without speed limits. You hear the car starting, a horn toots, and then you're off into a repetitive, hypnotic twenty-two-minute journey that reflects the different, phasing perspectives of travelling fast as well as the boredom of motorway driving.

As important as the idea of simulating shifts through time and space was Kraftwerk's use of synthesizers to express a melodic sensibility that, at various points, suggested distance, loss, cosiness and large horizons. The two wordless versions of Kometenmelodie, on the album's second side, are saturated in deep, warm analogue synth sounds. This was a futuristic, self-generated, distinct European sensibility that had very little American or English influence.

An edited single of Autobahn went to Number 11 in the UK charts in June 1975. The Kosmische Musik was going overground in 1974/5 just as it hit an artistic peak, with records by Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream (Phaedra and Ricochet), Cluster (Zuckerzeit), Harmonia (Muzik Von Harmonia), Can (Soon Over Babaluma), Neu! (Neu! 75), and Faust, whose Faust IV began with an earth-shaking drone that satirised the flip name given to the genre by British journalists - Krautrock.

This was a music born out of a national rupture: Germany's post-war devastation and reconstruction. As Kraftwerk's Ralf Hütter told this writer in 1991: "When we started it was like, shock, silence. Where do we stand? Nothing. The classical music being nineteenth century, but in the twentieth century: nothing. We had no father figures, no continuous tradition of entertainment. Through the '50s and '60s, everything was Americanised, directed towards consumer behaviour.

"We were part of this '68 movement, where suddenly there were possibilities: we performed at happenings and art situations. Then we founded our Kling Klang studio. German word for sound is 'klang', 'kling' is the verb. Phonetics, establishing the sound, we added more electronics. You had performances from Cologne Radio, Stockhausen, and something new was in the air, with electronic sounds, tape machines. We were a younger generation, we came up with different textures."

With a cover that used a still taken from The Man Who Fell To Earth, Station To Station was released in January 1976, followed a couple of months later by the film: a double whammy that kept Bowie at the forefront of popular culture. In February, Bowie began the sixty-four-date Station To Station tour - for many fans, his peak as a performer - which, after forty or so dates in the US, visited Germany in April. He liked it so much that, in late summer 1976, he moved to Berlin with Iggy Pop in tow.

In the late '70s, Berlin was a schizophrenic city, brutally divided in two by the heavily policed wall that separated the two warring super-power systems of the day - Cold War zoning in excelsis. Totally surrounded by the communist Deutsche Demokratische Republik, the Western side was an oasis of capitalist values, half depressed and half manically liberated. (For two contrasting views, see the contemporary Berlin films Taxi Zum Klo and Christiane F..

Berlin had come back from nothing. It allowed Bowie anonymity, a safe enough haven within which to reconstitute himself and an environment that matched his own psychological state. It also had layers of history that went back beyond the Cold War and World War II: always visually stimulated, Bowie was fascinated by the Brücke-Museum, an institution dedicated to the often stark Work of the first expressionists, the 'Brücke', or Bridge, who celebrated spontaneity and raw emotion.

It also allowed Bowie to immerse himself further in German music: that year he met Edgar Froese, Giorgio Moroder, and Kraftwerk - who would write about it in 1977's Trans-Europe Express: "From station to station / Back to Dusseldorf city / Meet Iggy Pop and David Bowie." This was the melting pot that would go into the four key 1977 albums that Bowie began recording that summer: first Iggy Pop's The Idiot, then his next, begun in France and finished at the Hansa Tonstudio ("By the wall") in Berlin.

Low was a major surprise when it came out in early 1977 but it's a perfect record - conceptually and emotionally. Adorned with a treated cover still from The Man Who Fell To Earth, it's split into two halves: a first side of seven tracks - two instrumentals and ve songs clipped brutally short - and a second of almost wordless, hypnotic instrumentals. The entire album is drenched in electronics, used to evoke a variety of emotions - not the least of which is a strange serenity: the curious comfort in near-total withdrawal.

The record fades in on Speed Of Life, a theme that tied into one of the preoccupations of punk; as Bowie stated in 1977, "People simply can't cope with the rate of change in this world. It's all far too fast." This instrumental matches a ferocious Dennis Davis snare drum sound - achieved by Tony Visconti's Eventide Harmonizer, which fed back a dying echo to the drummer as he played - with synthesizer textures that were at once harsh and melodic, uplifting and decaying.

These were provided by Brian Eno, Bowie's principal collaborator, who was already saturated in German music. During the sessions for Low, he recorded with Harmonia, while his 1975 album, Another Green World, had been partly inspired by Cluster's Zuckerzeit, an album of playful, sugary but relentless synthesizer instrumentals, and the oscillation between recognisable, if slightly swerved pop songs and ambient instrumentals were what Bowie was aiming to achieve.

The five songs on Low's first side are almost randomly edited, formally unconventional - the vocal on the hit, Sound And Vision, doesn't come in for a minute and a half - and almost autistically uncommunicative. Normally profligate with words and storylines, Bowie here offers fragments from unpleasant scenarios that thrust themselves up into the consciousness (Always Crashing In The Same Car, Breaking Glass) or almost desperate attempts at connection (Be My Wife).

The excitement of the record's formal innovations - the successful integration of a new electronic sound with pop/rock music: just listen to the popping synth in What In The World - contrast with a mood that is shut down, cocooned. This feeling of remoteness is deepened by the four instrumentals that begin with Warszawa. Mixing minimalism with random elements, like the discarded Vibraphone found in the studio, they remain shape-shifting pulses of great clarity and beauty.

Low might have alienated the Americans, but it reached Number 2 in the UK: at the same time, Sound And Vision was a UK Top 3 single. While not of punk, it seemed to share a similar mood: the clipped feel, the acceleration, the traumatised emotions - on the surface at least. It was quickly followed by another album, this time totally recorded at the Hansa Tonstudio in Berlin: "Heroes". Although sharing the same split format as Low, this was a very different beast.

The first thing that you notice is that the songs are longer. There are synthesizers and randomness - like the flat interjection on Joe The Lion: "It's Monday" - but the feeling is generally more expansive, as though Bowie has begun to open up to the world again. The sound is fuller, and reaches a peak on the justly celebrated title track, inspired by two lovers meeting under the Berlin Wall, which, with a totally committed, if not desperate vocal, celebrates the uncertain possibility that love can transcend geopolitics.

The second side is like a waking dream. The Kraftwerk homage V-2 Schneider begins with a downward sweep - like a jet, or a rocket terror weapon, levelling out - before hitting a heavy motorik groove as relentless as anything on Neu! 75. Sense Of Doubt leaves a descending, four-note theme hanging in atmospherics and synthesizer washes: you can hear the dripping rain and feel the physical and mental as psychology matches environment.

Moss Garden takes from Edgar Froese's Epsilon In Malaysian Pale in mood - that lush, exotic soundscape - and in its repeating synth whorls. Bowie added a deep, machine-like hum that travels across the channels, and an improvisation played on a koto: the Japanese stringed instrument. The final instrumental, Neuköln, features Bowie's saxophone in a strangulated, highly Expressionist evocation of a drab Berlin district then mainly populated by Turkish immigrants.

These four tracks are the high point of Bowie's career, his point of furthest formal and expressive outreach: sound paintings that have all the complexity and power of a feature film, they take you there, right into their emotional and physical landscape. Just as much as the purely instrumental albums that Brian Eno would release over the next few years, they represent the beginnings of ambient music, certainly in the form that would become popular in the early 1990s.

The impact of Low and "Heroes" was immediate. Both albums were signposts to the young musicians who would come to the fore in 1978 and 1979, after punk's fury had dissipated: among them were Gary Numan, whose super-alienated chart-topper, Are 'Friends' Electric, welded TVC 15 with Speed Of Life, and Joy Division, originally called Warsaw after the opening instrumental on side two of Low, who took that album's distinctive drum sound, mixed with a lot of Can, into their vision of rock and electronics.

The influence went even further. Berlin and bleak Mitteleurope became a pop trope in the late '70s, with the cold wave of The Human League, Ultravox's Vienna and Joy Division's haunted Komakino, written after a visit to the city. The Mobiles went kitsch with the melodramatic Drowning In Berlin, while Spandau Ballet, the breakthrough group of the new romantics (true children of Bowie all), took their name from the district to the west of the city.

Part of this was just pop faddishness, but Low and "Heroes" had, by the end of 1977, offered a way out of punk's stylistic cul-de-sac. Electronics had been a definite no-no for punks - "Moog synthe-si-zer" Joe Strummer had sneered on London Weekend Television in November 1976 - but they returned with a vengeance after Donna Summer's I Feel Love and Space's Magic Fly, with great 1978 singles by The Normal, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and The Human League, plus key albums by Suicide and Kraftwerk.

Punk had been the future, but that was quickly superseded by real-time, political events. In the polarising atmosphere of late 1977 and early 1978, it was all too easy to feel shot by both sides. As they had to David Bowie, electronics offered a way of side-stepping impossible demands, while their association with various physical and psychological states - movement late in the night through the city, withdrawal and isolation - were attractive to alienated youth.

In many ways, it was the return of psychedelia, only darker in keeping with the mood of the time. The counter-intuitive analogue synth sound was key: it was deep enough to create an environment and bleak enough to evoke estrangement, while at the same time enveloping the listener in a warm bath of ambience, that "sensurround sound" that would be explored further by The Human League (The Dignity Of Labour Parts 1-4), Joy Division (Atmosphere, The Eternal) and PiL (Radio 4).

Like his post-punk acolytes, Bowie too kept coming back to these albums in the later '70s and early '80s. In 1978, he played Warszawa and Sense Of Doubt on the long Isolar II tour, later collected on the Stage live album. Both also cropped up, together with V-2 Schneider and "Heroes"/Helden on the soundtrack of Christiane F., a stark but overlong depiction of teenage heroin addicts at the central Berlin station that became one of the most popular German films ever.

But apart from Crystal Japan, a Japanese B-side, Bowie retreated from pure electronica thereafter. By the time that he returned with Let's Dance in 1983, the spores he had helped to cast to the wind were beginning to bear fruit in the most unexpected way, as the late '70s white synthetic sound was taken up by black Americans, most notably in rap and techno tracks by Cybotron - 1981's Alleys Of Your Mind and 1984's Techno City - and Afrika Bambaataa And Soulsonic Force on 1983's Planet Rock.

While Bowie busied himself in the mainstream, dance culture proliferated into a myriad forms, assisted by the onset of digital and sampling technology. With such an eclectic, voracious and fast-moving culture, it was hardly surprising that it began to loop back to the analogue late '70s. Just as Low and "Heroes" reappeared on CD in 1991, with several extra tracks, the first products of ambient's second wave were being released: Aphex Twin's Didgeridoo and Biosphere's classic Microgravity.

Reconnecting with his electronic past gave Bowie a burst of energy that has taken him through the '90s and, in fact, the rest of his career to date. During 1992, the year that Philip Glass put out the Low Symphony, he reunited with Brian Eno - on "synthesizers, treatments, and strategies" - for the ambitious 1.Outside. Released in 1995, this was a return to the dystopian landscape of Diamond Dogs with added pre-millennial tension and extra technological weirdness.

The fourteen songs on 1.Outside stretch time and form. Random reappears in the cut-up lyrics, while the constant 4/4 of house phases in-and-out of funk and baggy beats, in the segues Bowie's voice is varispeeded through time and space: one minute he's a fourteen-year-old girl, another a forty-six-year-old "Tyrannical Futurist". The album's big hit, Hello Spaceboy, has hints of Rebel Rebel and Space Oddity. By this stage, in his late forties, Bowie could look back at his catalogue and his obsessions, and still move forward.

The motion was even more extreme on 1997's direct, uptempo and intense Earthling, in which Bowie mixed heavily sampled often squeezed into squalling riffs, as on the opener Little Wonder, with self-generated drum'n'bass rhythms that co-existed with rave patterns (Dead Man Walking). With hints of The Prodigy and Underworld, this was Bowie's most dance-friendly album, adding remixes by Moby, Danny Saber, Nine Inch Nails, and Junior Vasquez.

Both 1.Outside and Earthling made the UK Top 10, as did the more eclectic and uptempo Hours..., from 1999. Two years later, Bowie finally released All Saints as a single disc: dropping the Black Tie White Noise tracks and South Horizon from The Buddha Of Suburbia, and adding Crystal Japan and Brilliant Adventure from Hours.... The result is eminently playable, Bowie's purest, most elemental electronic album.

The extraordinary thing about 2001's All Saints is how well it all hangs together, with nine tracks from 1977 flowing easily in and out of the material from the 1990s, the most recent being the brief, but beautiful Brilliant Adventure. The Mysteries could have segued straight into the second side of "Heroes", and Moss Garden into The Buddha Of Suburbia. That continuity is not a result of standing still, but of being able to retain a love of sound, the wish to move forward.

The long loop of All Saints, from 1977 to 1993 and, finally, 2001, takes Bowie near the close of his musical career to date. In 2002 he released Heathen, an excellent record with tinges of sadness and mortality alongside a surprising cover of Neil Young's I've Been Waiting For You. The next year there was Reality and since then there has been nothing. In a strange way All Saints feels like a closing of the circle: a celebration of an extraordinary breakthrough that remained an inspiration and a talisman.

Just as the prophecies of The Man Who Fell To Earth have come to pass - that bank of TV screens, all showing different channels: if only someone could have told us how boring that would become - then the startling futurism of Low and "Heroes" has been borne out by the events of the last thirty-five years. A radical departure then, seemingly out of their time, they continue to exist in their own world, but they also remain signposts to a future that came to pass.

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bentonpena · 5 years

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Inside the immersive kinetic laser sound world of Christopher Bauder, Robert Henke

Inside the immersive kinetic laser sound world of Christopher Bauder, Robert Henke http://bit.ly/2YQnpLv

Light and sound, space and music – Christopher Bauder and Robert Henke continue to explore immersive integrated AV form. Here’s a look into how they create, following a new edition of their piece Deep Web.

Here’s an extensive interview with the two artists by EventElevator, including some gorgeous footage from Deep Web.

youtube

Deep Web premiered in 2016 at CTM Festival, but it returned this summer to the space for which it was created, Berlin’s Kraftwerk (a former power plant). And because both artists are such obsessive perfectionists – in technology, in formal refinement – it’s worth this second trip.

Christopher (founder of kinetic lighting firm WHITEvoid) and Robert (also known as Monolake and co-creator of Ableton Live) have worked together for a long time. A decade ago, I got to see (and document) ATOM at MUTEK in Montreal, which in some sense would prove a kind of study for a work like Deep Web. ATOM tightly fused sound and light, as mechanically-controlled balloons formed different arrangements in space. The array of balloons became almost like a kind of visualized three-dimensional sequencer.

vimeo

Deep Web is on a grander scale, but many of the basic elements remain – winches moving objects, lights illuminating objects, spatial arrangements, synchronized sound and light, a free-ranging and percussive musical score with an organic, material approach to samples reduced to their barest elements and then rearranged. The dramaturgy is entirely abstract – a kind of narrative about an array and its volumetric transformations.

In Deep Web, color and sound create the progression of moods. At the live show I saw last weekend, Robert, jazzed on performance endorphins, was glad to chat at length with some gathered fans about his process. The “Deep Web” element is there, as a kind of collage of samples of information age collapsed geography. The sounds are disguised, but there are bits of cell phones, telecommunications ephemera, airport announcements, made into a kind of encoded symphony.

Photo: Ralph Larmann.

Whether you buy into this seems down to whether the artists’ particular take tickles your synesthesia and strikes some emotional resonance. But there is something balletic about this precise fusion of laser lines and globes, able to move freely through the architecture. Kraftwerk will again play host later this month to Atonal Festival, and that meeting of music and architecture is by contrast essentially about the void. One somber vertical projection rises like a banner behind the stage, and the vacated power plant is mostly empty vibrating air. Deep Web by contrast occupies electrifies that unused volume.

I spoke to Christopher to find out more about how the work has evolved and is executed.

Christopher and Robert at the helm of the show’s live AV controls. Photo: Christopher Bauder.

Lasers and equipment, from the side. Photo: Peter Kirn.

Robert’s music is surprisingly improvisational in the live performance versions of the piece. You could feel that the night I was there – even as Robert’s style is as always reserved, there’s a sense of flowing expression.

To create these delicate arrangements of lit globes and laser lines, Christopher and his team at WHITEvoid plan extensively in Rhino and Vektorworks – the architectural scoring that comes before the performance. The visual side is controlled with WHITEvoid’s own kinetic control software, KLC, which is based on the industry leading visual development / dataflow environment TouchDesigner.

Robert’s rig is Ableton Live, controlled by fader and knob boxes. There is a master timeline in Live – that’s the timeline bit to which Robert refers, and it is different from his usual performance paradigm as I understand it. That timeline in turn has “loads of automation parameters” that connect from Live’s music arrangement to TouchDesigner’s visual control. But Robert can also change and manipulate these elements as he plays, with the visuals responding in time.

The machines that make the magic happen. Photo: Christopher Bauder.

Photo: Christopher Bauder.

Different visual scenes load as presets. Each preset then has different controllable parameters – most have ten with realtime operation, Christopher tells CDM.

“[Visual parameters] can be speeds, colors, selection of lasers, individual parameters like seed number, range, position, etc.,” Christopher says. “In one scene, we are linking acceleration of a continuously running directional laser pattern to a re-trigger of a beat. So options are virtually endless. It’s almost never just on/off for anything – very dynamic.”

This question of light and space as instrument I think merits deeper and broader explanation. WHITEvoid are one of a handful of firms and artists developing that medium, both artistically and technically, in a fairly tight knit community of people around the world. Stay tuned; I hope to pay them another visit and talk to some of the other artists working in this direction.

You can check their work (and their tech) at their site:

https://www.whitevoid.com/

Christopher also provided some unique behind-the-scenes shots for us here, along with some images that reveal some of the attention to pattern and form.

The Red Balloon. Photo: Ralph Larmann.

Ralph Larmann.

Christopher Bauder.

Peter Kirn.

Previously:

Watch a breathtaking fusion of laser light and sound in the Deep Web

The post Inside the immersive kinetic laser sound world of Christopher Bauder, Robert Henke appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

Music via Create Digital Music http://bit.ly/2N55ART August 15, 2019 at 09:20AM

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