These Days

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These days I’ve been helping sound artist Micah Silver with his upcoming installation, The End of Safari, at MassMoCA. It’s part of an exhibit called These Days that opens on Saturday 4/4.

Micah asked me to build a way to aim a Holosonics Audio Spotlight speaker on a pan/tilt head using MIDI messages. I worked with a MidiTron he already owned, a handful of relays and the usual baling wire, duct tape and chewing gum. The setup provides an uncanny sense of localization–much more ghostly than panning a sound around an array of speakers.

Here’s a shot of the altogether messy electronics.

MidiTron pan/tilt controller

Al Tharp on WFMU’s Beware of the Blog

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Go find some delightful Al Tharp clawhammer banjo at WFMU’s Beware of the Blog. I haven’t listened to Tharp enough to discern the secrets of his style, but I love the heavily accented thumb-picked slides in his version of Boatin Up Sandy. (At least, that what they sound like to me…)

Thanks to Eric Hardiman for bringing this to my clawhammer-crazed attention.

10% True

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I found some images in an archive from an old project of mine called 10%. The idea is to take 10 well-known (likely copyrighted) photos and slice and dice them together to create 10 new images. Fair Use laws recognize the right to use a portion of a copyrighted work under certain conditions, though that portion is rarely explicitly stated or agreed-upon. 10% takes this Fair Use provision to its illogical extreme. See the rest of the images after the break.

#2 of 10

#2 of 10

#8 of 10

#8 of 10

Continue reading →

Big Ears 09

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I just read about the Big Ears 09 fest in the NY Times. Sounds like a great series of events, made even better by its location. Having all the concerts in Knoxville TN makes such perfect sense to those of us who have played unconventional music in non-metropolitan centers for much of our lives. I’d love to see similar events in other “unlikely” places. (Happy to see the Shakin’ Ray Levis get some home crowd love, too…)

Max Neuhaus: Sound Art Pioneer

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Just heard through the webvine that sound artist Max Neuhaus has died. Neuhaus was a pioneer of sound installation work and will definitely be missed.

I remember being pleased to hear that his quasi-official Times Square installation had finally been granted permanent status. It’s invisible, sometimes inaudible, but still the best reason to visit Times Square.

Read an obit from the Houston Chronicle.

Sound Art in Geometer

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Geometer Magazine has published an essay by James Wyness: Sound Art – the Politics of Representation, Truth and Listening. Wyness provides a good overview of the many art practices that fall under the Sound Art rubric with special attention given to Environmental Sound Art. A nice read–let’s hope Geometer and Wyness add links to sound files soon.

Note: sound files are here.

ASAC Presents Trauma, Herons, Sleepy Demons, Twilight of the Century

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Albany Sonic Arts Collective presents Trauma, Herons, Sleepy Demons, Twilight of the Century.

Wednesday, January 28
Upstate Artists Guild
247 Lark St. Albany
Doors at 7:30 pm: show at 8:00
$5 suggested donation at the door

More on the musicians from the press release after the break. Continue reading →

Live Gets an Edit Button from Max

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Cycling ’74 and Ableton have provided a peek at Max for Live, the fruit of their partnership announced a few years ago. No specific release date or pricing information is available.

Cycling 74’s David Ziccarelli writes about the origin of the project and reasons for both Live and Max users to be interested. Read it here. My favorite quote:

Ultimately, it came down to this: my Cycling ’74 co-workers and I have come to believe the unique thing we have to offer the world is fundamentally about programming. In other words, we want to make edit buttons, and if we can put them in places where they have never existed before, all the better. It was clear to me that Ableton understood what it meant to have the Max environment work with their software. They weren’t just talking about more plug-ins.

Turns out that many of the new features in Max 5 were a result of Cycling’s collaboration with Ableton, such as the new timing system and presentation mode.

Check out the teaser video here.

I’m not a Live user but I have long admired the Live interface. So Max for Live may be just what I need to finally give it a try.