Quick News, Links, Bits, Reads: Playing catch up on links I’ve accumulated. … Is the Nintendo DS video game Electroplankton out of print? Someone’s selling it for over 70 bucks, used, on amazon.com. (Thanks, Jeff.) … Speaking of which, amazon.com has updated its underacknowledged free-download service, now as part of the blue-light specials at amazon.com/mp3deals. […]
The San Francisco Symphony’s 2008-2009 season seems lighter on contemporary fare than was the previous year. Five events stand out, chief among them the world premiere of the SFS-commissioned The B-Sides by Mason Bates (May 20, 22 and 23, 2009). Bates performs electronic music under the name Masonic; more info on him at masonicelectronica.com. (Bates […]
For 40 minutes, a series of bell-like tones cycle through. They’re heard as a simple riff that’s played out in minutely differing permutations, against a slowly transforming backing track. The tones are seemingly artificial, in that they don’t truly resemble actual bells, but they’re fairly organic, in that their textures bleed into the background in […]
The same evening that Kranky Records solo laptop artist Chris Herbert opened for the duo Stars of the Lid in Birmingham, England, Ted Laderas was doing his electronified solo cello stuff in Portland Oregon, playing with the duo Unrecognizable Now. And 24 hours later, as with Herbert (see the Memorial Day disquiet.com entry from earlier […]
On May 21, Chris Herbert opened for Stars of the Lid in at a concert in Birmingham, England, and the very next day he posted a 45-minute MP3 of the set — “I managed to record the indistinct buzzing noises from my laptop,” as he put it on his myspace.com/chrisherbert blog entry. The file is […]
The pastorally minded electronic musician Greg Davis played a show at the Knitting Factory in Manhattan back on April 30, and within days, on May 5, he’d posted news of a publicly available MP3 of the set. The recording opens with him welcoming the audience — “Feel free to get comfortable again, and sit on […]
Due to some impending travel, I could only stay for the first set at Friday night’s Meridian Gallery triple bill in San Francisco. Meridian co-founder Anne Brodzky opened the show by commenting on how the evening’s performances served as kind of a fourth partner in the current exhibit that Lawrence Rinder, Dean of the College […]
The group EA has more computer equipment than do many Silicon Valley startups. Despite which, they rummage amid some of the most lo-fi sounds around: radio static, synthesized vocals, field recordings, and nearly sub-aural bass rumbles.
EA consists of André Gonçalves (laptop), Andy Graydon (laptop), Ben Owen (laptop, objects), Gill Arno (laptop, objects, FM radio), and […]
A flyer arrived in the mail from a San Francisco performing arts organization, listing upcoming shows featuring work by Darius Milhaud, Osvaldo Golijov, Laurie Anderson, Michael Nyman and David Lang, among others. And it wasn’t a new season of the San Francisco Symphony. As it turns out, those are just some of the composers […]
Videos Worth Streaming: Robot orchestra made of ping pong balls and glasses (engadget.com). … And a band whose instruments are a Nintendo DS (with Electroplankton) and two handheld Apple products (dhadm.com). … Music made only from sounds from the Windows OS (youtube.com — easily six or seven people sent this link to me separately, and […]