highlike

MARTIN KALTENBRUNNER

reactable
file festival

The ReacTable is a collaborative electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible multi-touch interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving and rotating physical objects on a luminous round table surface. By moving and relating these objects, representing components of a classic modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

ALWIN NIKOLAIS

Noumenon

A truly universal artist, the American Alwin Nikolais (1910-1993) devoted his life to a radical form of staged art he called “dance theater.” Inspired (perhaps unconsciously) by the experiments of Bauhaus members such as Oskar Schlemmer and László Moholy-Nagy in the 1920s, Nikolais devised a style of abstract dance that encompassed costumes, stage sets, choreography, lighting, and music, all under his control. Also in 1963, Nikolais met analog synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog, who was at the time just starting his business in New York. He was fascinated by the sounds of Moog’s machines, and with the money provided by a a Guggenheim Fellowship, Nikolais bought the first ever commercially produced Moog synthesizer. It was the primary sound-source for all of Nikolais’ scores from 1963 to 1975. The instrument is now housed at the Stearns Collection of Musical Instruments at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Yeh Ting Hao

Imagery Resonance
“This work-in-progress piece is about reverse oscilloscope synthesizer. When I used the ilda laser protocol to manipulate the laser graphic, I found it turned the vector graphic to stereo audio first , then the laser point started drawing by X and Y axis coordinates. So I reverse the system and made a live-control set to make 3d model data into sound.” Yeh Ting Hao

kyttenjanae

Soft as Snow

Soft as Snow, auch bekannt als Oda Egjar Starheim und Øystein Monsen, Norwegens beste Anbieter von ungewöhnlichem, kristallinem Pop, sind mit einer brandneuen Veröffentlichung zurück. Die 4-Track-EP “Chrysalis” ist die zweite Originalveröffentlichung des Duos nach ihrem Debüt 2014 – die EP “Glass Body”, die auch als “Glass Body Remixed” veröffentlicht wurde, eine beeindruckende Sammlung überarbeiteter Versionen von Lucy, Gabe Gurnsey von Factory Floor, Maria Minerva und Brian DeGraw von Gang Gang Dance: „Chrysalis ist hart, direkt, frei, emotional. Es bringt uns zum Tanzen, Verbinden, Explodieren. “ – Weich wie Schnee Der Anfangstrack „I Adore“ zeichnet sich durch abrasive Synthesizer und schimmernde Beugungen aus, während sich „Fluid“ von glasiger Zurückhaltung zu einem Synth-Freak-Out entwickelt. “Mouth” ist eine bedrohliche Absichtserklärung, alle Stammes-Percussion und Ur-Yelps, die an die beunruhigende Produktion von Mica Levis Soundtrack für “Under The Skin” erinnert. Die EP geht mit dem energiegeladenen, skitternden “Her Blood Is Gold” zu Ende, wobei Odas seltsame, jenseitige Stimme alles zusammenhält.

MARK HANSEN & BEN RUBIN

Марк Хансен и Бен Рубин
마르크 한센과 벤 루빈
Listening Post

Listening Post is an art installation by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin that culls text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are read (or sung) by a voice synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a suspended grid of more than two hundred small electronic screens.Listening Post cycles through a series of six movements, each a different arrangement of visual, aural, and musical elements, each with it’s own data processing logic.Dissociating the communication from its conventional on-screen presence, Listening Post is a visual and sonic response to the content, magnitude, and immediacy of virtual communication.

Guy Ben-Ary

CellF
“CellF is the world’s first neural synthesiser. Its “brain” is made of biological neural networks that grow in a Petri dish and controls in real time it’s “body” that is made of an array of analogue modular synthesizers that work in synergy with it and play with human musicians. It is a completely autonomous instrument that consists of a neural network that is bio-engineered from my own cells that control a custom-built synthesizer. There is no programming or computers involved, only biological matter and analogue circuits; a ‘wet-analogue’ instrument.”Guy Ben-Ary

morton subotnick

silver apples of the moon
image detail : Buchla 100 synthesizer
Morton Subotnick helped bring the modular voltage-controlled synthesizer to a state of readiness for performance and  recording and was the first composer to take advantage of the new instrument’s potential. Composed in 1967 specifically for release on Nonesuch, Silver Apples of the Moon was Subotnick’s first full-length LP of electronic music, and the album became an international sensation.

TANIA CANDIANI

CINCO VARIACIONES DE CIRCUNSTANCIAS FONICAS Y UNA PAUSA
Órgano [Organ] is a large-scale and site-specific interactive installation of a talking machine resembling a musical church organ. Originally installed at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda (LAA)–a former 17th-century church in downtown Mexico City–the device features two inputs: a musical keyboard and a typewriter. Each time users move to another line by striking the carriage-return lever on the typewriter, the words that have been typed are played back by means of a voice synthesizer. The musical keyboard, on the other hand, features a more complex system in which each key, music interval, and chord has been programmed to sound a specific syllable, comprising more than 2,000 syllables that make up the Spanish language. The latter programming has been translated into English, and more recently into Russian, for international exhibitions.

Florian Schneider

Kraftwerk
Florian Schneider
Electronic Poem
Poem dedicated to synthesizer Doepfer A-100
” Analogsynthese mit system
klanglich, optish angenehm
technisch, logisch, funktionell
prototypisch und speziell

modular und variabel
leicht, kompakt und transportabel
für ein musikabenteuer
A-100, nicht zu teuer
midi-kontrolle vom computer
A-100 to the future! ”

STOCKHAUSEN

Cosmic Pulses
COSMIC PULSES is the 13th “hour” of Stockhausen’s originally-planned 24-part cycle KLANG (“SOUND”) which is based on the 24 hours of the day. This electronic work is composed of 24 layers of synthesizer-generated melodic material, with each layer having a different speed and pitch register. The layers enter one by one, starting from the lowest/slowest layer, and go up in sequence to the highest/fastest layer. After a period of several minutes where all 24 layers are active, the layers begin to individually drop out, again starting from the lowest layers and moving upwards (gradually leaving just the higher/faster layers). This “draw down” is about twice as fast as in the “build-up”.

LUMEN

Homage to B. Franklin
File Festival
Homage to B. Franklin is an interactive sound installation. Like Franklin, we also got inspired by the glass harps, so popular in the eighteenth century and still enjoyed nowadays. With this reference in mind, we aim to realize a dialogue between the past and the approach to explore sonority from elements of everyday life -like simple crystal glasses filled with water- and the present, in which we use electronic synthesizers and tangible digital interfaces to generate music. In both cases, there is something magical about being able to generate music without necessarily being an instrumentalist, without making use of classical or conventional instruments. In both, the resulting sound is different from what these instruments can generate, but still music. Participation from the audience is essential for this work to make sense. This is not an artwork of mere contemplative character. We are interested in motivating the participation and the dialogue work-individual and between individuals, since this is a project in which one can interact in groups.