HARVESTWORKS Digital Media Arts Center :: Presentation by STEIM’s Takuro Mizuta Lippit :: 596 Broadway, Suite 602 (at Houston St), New York, NY 10012 :: Tel: 212-431-1130 :: http://www.harvestworks.org :: Subway: F/V Broadway/Lafayette, 6 Bleeker, W/R Prince :: July 17, 2008;6:30 pm.

Takuro will introduce the general history of STEIM, from its start in the late 60s as a collective of composers, improvisors and musicians to a research lab, artist in residence and venue for adventurous live electronic arts. Later he will demo his own performance set up consisting of a turntable, dj mixer, self-built USB controller and Max/MSP. Crossfader-triggered sampler “cut n play” and right-hand usb interface “audile” are some of the unique modules that he has designed to seamlessly integrate live sampling into the flow of turntable performance.

BIO
dj sniff (Takuro Mizuta Lippit) believes in the instrumental autonomy of the turntable and the musicianship of the DJ. He is a turntable musician working in the field of improvised and experimental music. His music focuses on the live reconstruction and narratization of the phonographically amplified – the music, the sound, the technology and the past. To achieve this, he uses a unique setup consisting of hand-made hardware interfaces and a custom Max/MSP software along with one turntable and DJ mixer. He is also a concert/event curator for electronic music and a researcher of music technology.

While studying Art History and Philosophy in Tokyo, he was active as a DJ in the underground electronic music scene and formed a collective called smashTV productions which organized genre-mixing events such as anti-Gravity and bistro-Smash!. In 2002, he moved to New York to pursue graduate studies in computer music and physical computing at NYU’s ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program).

Since 2005 he has been involved with STEIM’s (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music, Amsterdam) R&D lab and is currently its Artistic Director.

dj sniff regularly performs with computer musician Yutaka Makino as Audile and with saxophonist Keir Neuringer.