rotorbrain.com: "The Micro Rhythm Orchestra is an update on the venerable music box tradition. I made it from a wooden cigar box and head-park solenoids scavenged from old disk drives. The solenoids are controlled by a microprocessor. Instead of playing a conventional melody, the solenoids are sequenced to click in rhythmic patterns. If the whole business wasn't quite such a dorkfest, the sound could almost be considered funky." More
via interaction design
NPR.org: "Often hailed as the world's first reggae poet, Linton Kwesi Johnson was born in Jamaica in 1952, but moved to London in the '60s to study writing and poetry. He started releasing albums of his own poetry in 1978 with Dread Beat an' Blood. From there, he went on to release numerous collections of poetry and writing, and also to expand his horizons in the music industry, exploring the concept of poetry, spoken word and a cappella reggae." Listen here
Kyoka Izumi (4 November 1873 - 7 September 1939) is the pen name of a Japanese author of novels, short stories, and Kabuki plays who was active from the late Meiji era to the early Showa periods. His real name was Kyotaro Izumi. Like Natsume Soseki and other Japanese authors with pen names, Kyo-ka is usually known by that pen name rather than his family name.
Kyo-ka first gained acclaim for his “The Operating Room” and “Night Watchman” ; his most famous work is “The Holy Man of Mount Koya”. Known for a characteristic brand of Romanticism preferring tales of the supernatural heavily influenced by works of the earlier Edo period in Japanese arts and letters. Works translated into English include "The Holy Man of Mount Koya", “A Song by Lantern-light” , and "A Tale of Three Who Were Blind" , though a majority have yet to be translated. His plays are particularly popular in Japan, and his Demon Pond is still performed." Read on
detanicolain.com: "Digital typeface that portrays the mixture between the modernist architecture of Oscar Niemeyer and informal occupation of the urban space that shapes major brazilian cities"
Radiohead Gets a Cuban-Style Makeover
npr.org: "The idea behind Rhythms Del Mundo: Cuba is high-concept simplicity: Alt-rock meets the Buena Vista Social Club. Assorted '80s and ‘90s rock songs and pop standards are remade within a Cuban aesthetic, though some songs are more like remixes."
Radiohead VS Mozart
theprogram.net.au: "Christopher O’Riley is a man of two passions: he’s nuts for Radiohead and he’s a damn fine classical pianist."
Radiohead Meets Reggae
npr.org: "Easy Star All-Stars' latest album, Radiodread, gives a track-for-track reggae treatment to Radiohead's OK Computer, featuring a dozen different reggae artists."
guardian.co.uk: "It's not a film, it's not a game and it's not a book ..." muses Kate Pullinger. Digital fiction is certainly a tricky beast to categorise, as Pullinger well knows. She is co-creator of an award-winning online multimedia novel, Inanimate Alice, which tells its story through a combination of photography, illustrations, video, music, animation, and narrative text overlaid on the visuals. "It's a kind of hybrid," is what she plumps for in the end, adding "I think that when a new form emerges, part of the problem is how to figure out what to call it, how to describe it - but what I do know is that I like to make it and people like to read it when they find out about it..." More
npr.org: "A British street artist known as Moose creates graffiti by cleaning dirt from sidewalks and tunnels -- sometimes for money when the images are used as advertising. But some authorities call it vandalism." Listen here
An Audiovisual Performance & Installation for Voice and Interactive Media by Golan Levin and Zach Lieberman with Jaap Blonk and Joan La Barbara Created Summer 2003. Messa di Voce (Ital., "placing the voice") is an audiovisual performance in which the speech, shouts and songs produced by two abstract vocalists are radically augmented in real-time by custom interactive visualization software. The performance touches on themes of abstract communication, synaesthetic relationships, cartoon language, and writing and scoring systems, within the context of a sophisticated, playful, and virtuosic audiovisual narrative." More
wnyc.org: "Bob Dylan's new album, "Modern Times," is earning praise for its minimalist arrangements and brooding lyrics about romance, faith and mortality. It's also being criticized for what at least one critic calls its outright thefts of other music – snippets of old blues songs and Chuck Berry. Today, we parse Dylan's sources and inspirations with Rolling Stone editor Joe Levy, and Wall Street Journal music critic Jim Fusilli. Also: British scholar Michael Gray joins us to talk about "The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia," the culmination of over thirty years of dedicated research and scholarship" Listen here
wikipedia.org: "Fallingwater, also known as the Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr. Residence, is a house designed by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1935 in rural southwestern Pennsylvania. The house was built partly over a waterfall in Bear Run at Rural Route 1 in Mill Run, Fayette County, Pennsylvania, in the Laurel Highlands of the Allegheny Mountains." More
wikipedia.org: "Half-Life, often abbreviated HL, is a science fiction first-person shooter computer game developed by Valve Software and published by Sierra Studios. Released on November 19, 1998 for PCs running Microsoft Windows, the game was based on a heavily modified version of the Quake game engine.With eight million copies sold since release, Half-Life is the best selling PC first-person shooter to date." More
fondation-langlois.org: "Latin American electroacoustic music has a long, interesting, strong and prolific history, but it's a history that is little known even within the region itself. Many composers born or living in Latin America have been very active in this field, in some countries as far back as some 50 years, but the availability of electroacoustic music recordings and information in Latin America has been a problem for educators, composers, performers, researchers, students and the general public. In an effort to preserve, document and disseminate at least a portion of the electroacoustic music created by Latin American composers, an archive has been developed at the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology and is now open to the public. Listen to some pieces
handelsblatt.com: "Lang genug haben langweilige Barcodes Verpackungen verunstaltet", sagte sich eine kleine japanische Design Barcode Agentur und hat den schnöden Strichen neuen Glanz verliehen. Dafür hat sie 2006 den Titan Löwen in Cannes überreicht bekommen." Weiter
Beim Stimmenfestival in Lörrach gab der Percussion-Virtouse BURHAN ÖCAL einen Überblick über traditionelle wie auch moderne Musikströmungen in der Türkei. Jenseits von Orientklischees, präsentierte er sowhl traditionelle Sufi-Kompositionen als auch zeitgenössische Elektro-Fusionen und Oriental-Hiphop mit sozialkritischem Anspruch." Hier anhören
Joseph DeLappe is possibly the first artist performing in online games. He joins online games like America's Army, not for fun, but to enter all the names and time of death of soldiers who died in Iraq into the games text messaging system.
"Yokomono consists of 10 small car-shaped record players, a corresponding set of FM radios and two mixing desks. The cars, known as "vinyl killers," have been customised with wireless FM transmitters. As they spin around the vinyl, they transmit their signal to the FM radios tuned to a special Yokomono frequency. This transmission is then mixed, edited and manipulated in real-time by members of the Staalplaat Soundsystem." Read on. Found via vvork.com
npr.org "Two years ago, a group of singing herdsmen from Mongolia traveled to Elko, Nevada, for a musical exchange with a group of singing cowboys from the American West. In September, the herdsmen hosted their American counterparts on the Mongolian steppe. Hal Cannon of the Western Folklife Center went along on a road trip to Genghis Khan's ancient capital of Karakorum." Listen here
npr.org: "A collection of music from Afghanistan climbs to No. 12 on iTunes' World Music bestseller charts. Adam Gouttierre and Chris Becherer are two MBA students who recorded traditional music during a trip to Afghanistan and distributed it online." listen here
wikipedia.org: "Tine Plesch (* 1959 in Nürnberg; † 4. November 2004) war eine deutsche Musikjournalistin und feministische Autorin.
Sie beschäftigte sich schwerpunktmäßig mit dem Thema Gender in der Popkultur. Tine Plesch war Mitherausgeberin der Zeitschrift Testcard – Beiträge zur Popkultur und Radiojournalistin beim freien Radio Z in Nürnberg. [...] Seit 1999 war sie Mitherausgeberin von "testcard – Beiträge zur Popgeschichte". Im Lauf der Jahre diverse freie journalistische Tätigkeiten, sie arbeitet u.a. für die Abendzeitung Nürnberg, Melodiva, Superstar, Jazzthetik, junge Welt, Raumzeit, Yot-Infozine, Intro.
Sie war eine gefragte Sprecherin bei Fachveranstaltungen zu Frauen und Musik. So war sie u.a. mit ihren Vorträgen beim Musikerinnensymposium des Frauenmusikzentrums Hamburg, der Evangelische Akademie Tutzing, dem Frauenreferat des Asta Münster, dem Radiocamp Bodensee (jährliches Treffen der freien Radios aus der BRD), mit Christiane Erharter bei der Reihe R4 Zoom, der Galerie im Taxispalais Innsbruck: „Elektronische Musik und weibliche Repräsentation“, zur Gesprächsleitung im Roundtable „Utopien/Dystopien in der elektronischen Musik“ bei Musik Didactique, Zürich eingeladen worden.
Sie verstarb an den Folgen eines septischen Schocks." Mehr
Die österreichische Gruppe "gelitin" hat, als sie noch "gelatin" hieß, Salzburg verärgert, bei den Festspielen 2003 war sie aus Versehen mit einer Skulptur beauftragt worden, heraus kam die Figur eines Mannes, der sich sportlich selbst in den Mund strullt, woraufhin das unsalzburgische Werk mit Brettern den Blicken der Öffentlichkeit entzogen wurde. Die war damals gespalten: Mancher fand die Idee lustig, andere waren empört. Jetzt ist im Kunsthaus in Bregenz eine Schau von "gelitin" zu sehen. Weiter
wired.com: "He's a punk, a provocateur, the bad boy of Web design. They call him the Jackson Pollock of the Internet age. He calls them a few choice four-letter words. But everyone from BMW to the Tate Modern wants a piece of him." Read on
dradio.de: "Wann ist ein Mann ein Mann? Oder eigentlich eine Frau? Oder gibt es ein drittes Geschlecht? Terre Thaemlitz ist auf der Suche nach Antworten. In Tokio ist Thaemlitz schon lange eine Untergrundikone. In Berlin hat er jetzt auf dem MaerzMusik-Festival für aktuelle Musik sein Projekt "Trans-Sister-Radio" vorgestellt." Weiter
NPR: "Last year no fewer than eight bands from Monterrey, Mexico, were invited to play at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas. Some have called Monterrey the Seattle of Latin Alternative music, in reference to Seattle's role in the early 1990s as the incubator of grunge rock." Listen here
Marcel Duchamp Speaks
npr.org "Two years ago, a group of singing herdsmen from Mongolia traveled to Elko, Nevada, for a musical exchange with a group of singing cowboys from the American West. In September, the herdsmen hosted their American counterparts on the Mongolian steppe. Hal Cannon of the Western Folklife Center went along on a road trip to Genghis Khan's ancient capital of Karakorum." 