Vague Terrain 19: Schematic as Score; curated and edited by Derek Holzer: Over the past few years, a strong reaction against the sterile world of laptop sound and video has inspired a new interest in analog processes, and a fresh exploration of the pioneers of the electronic arts during the pre-digital era of the 1960s and 1970s. Artists and inventors such as Nam June Paik, Steina & Woody Vasulka, Don Buchla, Serge Tcherepnin, Dan Sandin and David Tudor all constructed their own unique instruments long before similar tools became commercially available or freely downloadable — through a long, rigorous process of self-education in electronics. John Cage once quipped that Tcherepnin’s synthesizer system was “the best musical composition that Serge had ever made”, and it is precisely Cage’s reformulation of the concert score from a list of deterministic note values to a set of indeterministic possibilities that allowed the blurring of lines between instrument-builder and music composer that followed. Continue reading

Quartet With Pyramid Scheme by Jordan Topiel Paul, Eric Laska, Richard Kamerman, Reed Evan Rosenberg:

Quartet With Pyramid Scheme is a streaming online sound installation whose audio content is collected through a sixteen-week pyramid scheme structure. Every two weeks, a new set of participants (recruited by prior participants) submits sound samples that the quartet will selectively work into the stream. The samples are played continuously in unpredictable variations through a Max/MSP patch. By the end of the process, 512 participants will have been asked to contribute. Continue reading

Variable 4 by James Bulley and Daniel Jones :: May 22-23, 2010; noon-noon :: Dungeness, Kent, TN29 9ND.

Since the earliest civilizations, a complex relationship has existed between human society and the weather systems that define the world around us. We make sense of seasonal cycles through rituals and folklore, passing down ways of harnessing the natural elements whilst constructing defenses against those which threaten our existence.

Variable 4 transforms these weather patterns into a living musical composition with the same unpredictability as the elements themselves. Using meteorological sensors connected to a custom software environment developed by the artists, the wild weather conditions of the Kent coastland act as composer, navigating through a map of 24 specifically written movements. Every aspect of the piece, from broad harmonic progressions down to individual notes and timbres, is influenced by changes in the environment: wind speed, rainfall, solar radiation, humidity, tropospheric variance, temperature, and more. Continue reading

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot at London’s Barbican from The Wire Magazine on Vimeo.

The Anarchy of Silence - John Cage :: until May 30, 2010 :: Henie Onstad Art Centre, 1311 Høvikodden, Norway.

John Cage (1912-1992) defined a radical practice of “experimental” composition that not only changed the course of modern music and dance but defined a new conceptual horizon for artistic practice in the late-20th century. Illuminating the relevance of Cage’s contribution to contemporary art, Henie Onstad Art Centre presents the most extensive exhibition to be devoted to the artist since his death, and the first to focus on the historicization of the composer’s oeuvre and its impact.

The Anarchy of Silence - John Cage tracks systematically the critical developments in Cage’s career: from his work with percussion (1930s), to the prepared piano (1940s), to chance and indeterminacy (1950s), to new media (1960s onward), through to the political focus that ever more explicitly informed the work in the last decades of his life. Cage ushered in formal, structural, temporal, and media innovations that now form cornerstones of contemporary consciousness. Continue reading

MUSICfor.one [byTEN] is a live “concert” improvisation created for the Chatroulette social network. Audio in the performance is generated from screen grabs taken of the first 10 people that appeared during a previous visit to the website. These pictures in turn became the graphic notation that loosely scores the work. Through this process Jason Sloan becomes the conductor while the anonymous Chatroulette users become the unaware orchestra.

The individual scores are created using software that reads the RGB pixel information across the X axis of the image and assigns a unique tone to each colored pixel. Two 20 minute movements of MUSICfor.one [byTEN] will be performed live on the Chatroulette network March 20, 2010 at 10:00 pm EST [-5GMT]. Click through and see if you can find the performance. Documentation of MUSICfor.one [byTEN] will be made available.

Kunstradio - Radiokunst presents Radio No-Man’s Land: A Radio Performance by Concha Jerez and José Iges — Celebrating 20 years of Ars Acustica :: May 27, 2009; 8:00 - 9:00 pm :: ORF Funkhaus Studio 3, Argentinierstr. 30a, Vienna, Austria.

One of two authors-performers play rolling a virtual dice over the board of a Parcheesi game, projected on the screen, and moving the counter on the board is activating different behaviours. In some squares there are soundfiles of well-known Radio Art works, in some other the performer receives audio instructions to play, other squares have links with webpages of freeradios or with radio stations belonging to Ars Acustica group, in other squares some colleagues give their personal definition of Ars Acustica. Continue reading

[Image from Variations VII: FishNet commissioned by Turbulence.org] Variations VII by John Cage with Mobius Artists Group (MAG) members Margaret Bellafiore, Lewis Gesner, Larry Johnson, Tom Plsek, and Alisia Waller; and guest artists Joshua Jade, Forrest Larson, David Miller, and Landon Rose :: April 18-19, 2008; 8 - 9:30 pm :: Mobius, 725 Harrison Ave., Boston, MA.

Variations VII is the most recent installment in the Mobius Artists Group’s exploration of John Cage’s eight compositions, titled Variations. Beginning in 1996 with Variations I, in a version for two voices performed by David Miller and Larry Johnson, MAG members and guest artists have studied and performed this series in chronological order. Continue reading

WITCHin flux — by Mark Cooley — is an experimental remix of Yoko Ono’s 2007 release Yes, I’m a Witch and an attempt to apply classic Fluxus concerns to the context of an entirely hip yet somewhat conservatively staged reinterpretive retrospective of Yoko Ono’s musical works. Moving away from typical remix theory that re-authorizes the internal content of a piece the goal here is to deconstruct the structural constraints of the album / cd form itself and to recast some of the constants of that essentially analog form to the concepts of variability and random access apparent in Fluxus works and common to digital culture.

Once launched, WITCHin flux plays continuously while randomly accessing and remixing samples from Yoko Ono’s Yes, I’m a Witch. Technical requirements - high-speed connection, flash player installed.

[Image: Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, ca. 1941] Song of Solomon — by Ralph Borland and Julian Jonker — is an aleatoric audio collage and 8-channel installation that samples many versions of Mbube, aka Wimoweh aka The Lion Sleeps Tonight, in a sonic tribute to the song’s dead author Solomon Linda. By fragmenting and reordering compositional fragments of this ’song of songs’, the installation questions the assumptions about compositional innovation and imitation that inform Western intellectual property law. In this jungle of sounds, the dead Author rests.