This is Thomas Fang speaking about circuit bending in advance of the Bent Festival, to be held this weekend in Manhattan:
The spirit of circuit bending is random effects — fucking with the electronics system until you get something you never anticipated.
Fang’s specialty is mashed-up Furby toys. More at nypress.com.
He’s one of electronica’s great Doctor Moreaus, and there’s an hour-long performance from early 2005 available for download. His name is Pierre Bastien, and he makes automaton orchestras that plink and pound, scratch and hum, like a collective of Pinocchios grasping at the fainest hint of sentience. His recordings may not always pass a Turing […]
The artist Ray Lee uses the Theremin as a starting-off point for his sound-rich sculptural installations and performances. His “Choir” places 16 spinning devices in a single space. The setup looks like a compact windfarm, and the resulting sound is a rapturous, churning cloud of tones (MP3).
A more recent iteration of that practice, “Siren” nearly […]
With its pulsating beats and wispy bits of melodic phrasing, the eight tracks on the free album 7 Days Microsleep, available at the website of musician Norman Fairbanks, normanfairbanks.com, are the sort of pulse-settling, introspective music that could give existentialism a placid name. Though the steady electronica sounds like the sort that attends artful drive-by […]
John Cage loved his toy pianos for good reason. Those instruments, with their simple construction and even simpler range, invite chance with every plink — sour notes, rusty mechanics, and so on. And the one-man toy-piano band known as Twink (born Mike Langlie) milks those industrial-design eccentricities for all their textural value.
Just check out his […]
Last night in San Francisco at the Herbst Theater, Kronos Quartet performed two sets of pieces arranged or composed for them, including several with electronic, prerecorded backing tracks. The concert, the second of two nights, was part of the San Francisco Jazz Festival’s 25th anniversary.
The evening opened with “Bloodstone” by the great drum’n’bass/breakbeat figure Amon […]
News, Quick Links, Good Reads: (1) Art by Orb/KLF member James Cauty was removed by municipal workers in Brighton, England, when it was mistaken for graffiti (nytimes.com, ink-d.co.uk). … (2) The Guardian on noise abatement and urban soundscapes: “Visual aesthetics are a major part of the planning system with strong guidelines determining what is acceptable […]
There’s a substantial exhibit of boxes, prints, photographs, short films and other work by Joseph Cornell at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibit is titled Navigating the Imagination and a number of the featured items touch on musical themes:
“Bel Echo Gruyère” (ca. 1940) is a “Box construction with inoperative toy bellows.” […]
No WWII-era composer’s work so closely mirrors the mechanization and industrialization inherent in the war effort as that of Conlon Nancarrow. It will always be a repertoire of virtually unplayable player piano roles (well, unplayable by human hands) for which he is best remembered. Not that some human performers haven’t risen to the challenge. Margarent […]
It’s no doubt in poor taste to make a Three Tenors joke the day after Luciano Pavarotti passed away. Sorry. In any case, the Tenori-On has, as of this writing, nearly 700 friends on myspace.com. Tenori-On is not a band or an individual. It’s a musical device, created by Toshio Iwai, best known for his […]