Hackship Lineup Additions
We are pleased to announce some awesome additions to our already bursting Music Hackship event:
Alo Allik is confirmed to play on the main stage!
Allik has a musically and geographically restless lifestyle which has taken him through diverse creative environments half way around the northern hemisphere, including eclectic DJ sets, live electronic jams, electroacoustic composition, free improv and multimedia performances all over the US and Europe. He has been hooked on SuperCollider for over 10 years and is currently based in the UK.
Tim Murray-Browne will give a presentation on The Hackspace Ensemble, http://mhproduction.wpengine.com/residency/
Tim Murray-Browne is a sound artist and creative coder who works primarily with installation and performance pieces that investigate themes of discovery, self-expression and how they relate through action, movement and sound. Tim will talk about his residency project: the Hackspace Ensemble; and present the work done so far and some of the ideas behind it.
Jag Bot is presenting his latest work on his amazing DIN project, a bezier curve sound synthesiser:
After 6 years of continuous development on GNU/Linux, DIN Is Noise makes its debut on the Mac OS X on April 1, 2013 🙂 DIN is a software musical instrument that uses Bezier curves for almost all aspects of sound production – waveforms, beats, modulation & FX. DIN is fully microtonal with notes as mere favourites. Users can play DIN with their mouse like a traditional bowed instrument or create masses of drones on any microtone, edit their timbre and visually modulate them all in realtime. DIN supports OSC and MIDI for input. Jag will talk about demons slayed (both philosophical and technical) in bringing DIN to Mac OS X, why DIN will be Free software on GNU/Linux, and how to harness social media for marketing independent software. Attendees with Macs can leave the room with a free beta release of DIN!
Additionally we will have an exciting site specific sound installation by Kacper Ziemianin, MS Soundbnitz:
Kacper uses microphones that allow us to listen to sounds that are not normally perceptible to human ears (hydrophones for underwater sounds, contact microphones for sounds of solid objects, telephone pick up coils for sounds of electromagnetic fields). Interesting sounds are amplified, and the audience is encouraged to interact and ‘play’ MS Stubnitz.
Tickets are available now, at an early-bird price of only £10 for the whole day; £8 for hackspace members, students and OAPs!
There are also spaces still left for the two workshops, but please book early to avoid disappointment!
Music Hackship Big Band Rehearsal
Thursday 21th of March 2013
7.00 pm
Troyganic, 132 Kingsland Road, London
As part of the lineup we have the famous Hackspace Big Band. If you would like to play with the big bad band on the night, or want to hang out and get a preview of what’s to come, join us at Troyganic this Thursday at 7pm for a rehearsal (read: jam!).
Details of the Hackship event are available on the Hackship webpage. We also have a Facebook event page, and tickets are available here!
Artists talk: Riz Maslen and Alo Allik
Thursday 14th of March 2013
7.00 pm
Troyganic, 132 Kingsland Road, London
This Thursday we welcome artists Riz Maslen and Alo Allik.
Riz Maslen (http://neotropic.net/) is an electronic innovator and multi-instrumentalist.
British producer, singer and multi-instrumentalist Riz Maslen, who records as Neotropic and Small Fish With Spine has been described as one of the most prominent women composers working in post-techno experimental electronics. In addition to her warm electronic programming, Maslen’s music also embraces folk, psychedelic pop and her interest in experimental film-making.
The media has warmly received her albums on Ninja Tune, Oxygen Music Works, Mush Recordings, R&S and Squids Eye. She’s performed globally over the past decade at events including LA’s Coachella concert series and Montreaux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.
Neotropic’s live shows have always focused on creating a cinematic journey for the audience with the inclusion of her dark photographic and film imagery.
Alo Allik: Live coding evolution by artificial selection
Alo Allik (http://tehis.net) is an artist and a programmer with an aesthetically and geographically restless lifestyle, which has enabled him to traverse a diverse range of musical worlds including DJ-ing electronic dance music, live electronic jam sessions, electroacoustic composition, free improvisation and audiovisual performances. His interests include how to model natural processes by programming and use these models in live performance. In this presentation, he will first investigate an evolutionary programming approach to sound synthesis and then attempt to use this system in a live-coded audiovisual performance.
Since the first ingenious artificial life experiments in the 1950ies, evolutionary computing has inspired numerous problem solving and model building techniques including ways to evolve sound synthesis algorithms inspired by processes of evolution by adaptation and natural selection. In our attempts to understand these natural algorithmic processes, which are purposeless and devoid of any intention, but nonetheless directly responsible for all the complexity and intelligent behaviour in the natural world, we keep developing increasingly more powerful technology that enables us to model and simulate, albeit on a vastly simplified scale, the power of cumulative selection.
Alo Allik will explore this idea through a relatively novel concept of gene expression programming, a method of evolutionary computation that provides an alternative to the established paradigms of classic genetic algorithms and genetic programming, and apply it to sound synthesis in the SuperCollider programming environment. He’s hoping to reveal creative applications of evolutionary computation which do not necessarily presume a definite solution to a problem, but rather an open-ended option space to be explored for aesthetic experimentation.
4th of January: a night of performances with Leafcutter John, Lady Hackspace, and more…
Please note, this event will happen exceptionally on Friday 4th of January 2013, instead of the usual gathering on Thursday.
A night of sonic, visual acts and improvisation. The first event of 2013 includes performances by:
Tamer Karaman
Dor Wand
raxil4
David Agudelo Bernal
Cassiel
Lady Hackspace
Leafcutter John
Left hands cut off the Right
Dr. Benway
Visuals by whiteemotion
Entrance: suggested donation £5
Available Limited screenprinted Music Hackspace T-shirts by Blanca Regina
Supernatant Seminars, Robert Tubb and Gordon Charlton,
Thursday 7th of March, 7pm
Troyganic, 138 Kingsland Road, London
The Music Hackspace is proud to invite the Centrifuge and Supernatant Laboratories, for a seminar with two guest speakers, Robert Tubb aka Cursor Miner (Queen Mary, University of London) and Gordon Charlton (aka Beat Frequency) to talk about mathematical approaches to rhythm sequencing and advanced theremin techniques.
Robert Tubb / Cursor Miner (Queen Mary, University of London)
Mathematically Inspired Approaches To Live Rhythm Sequencing
Robert Tubb is a London-based musician and programmer best known as his artist alias “Cursor Miner”, and currently researching towards a Doctorate in DSP at Queen Mary, University of London..
The bulk of midi style sequencing is carried out in a piano-roll type representation. This descends from traditional score which has evolved to suit western classical music. However for modern electronic genres such as dance music, driven by repetitive rhythms, this layout is rather unwieldy. In the case of live improvisatory performance, a piano-roll is pretty much impossible to manage.
This session will explore that the way we approach rhythm sequencing is lacking. We hear audio in the frequency domain, we play musical instruments in the frequency domain (i.e. the notes in a scale are frequencies). Rhythm is an equally cyclical, harmonic phenomenon so why then should we be specifying everything as points in time? The central idea here is that all aspects of music are driven by repetitions in time, not singular points in time. A linear-time based approach: where every note in the piano roll has to be specified by hand, is inferior to the circular-time (aka frequency) based approach, where patterns are constructed by overlaying simple “basis functions” that “add up” in some way to produce satisfying structure.
A new type of sequencer will be presented that ties all these ideas together and uses the concept of a Fourier Transform (which views patterns as the sum of pure sine wave oscillations) to generate meaningful patterns and, perhaps more importantly, transitions between these patterns.
http://www.rootnot.co.uk/
Gordon Charlton / Beat Frequency (Supernatant)
Exotic Theremin Techniques
Gordon is an unrepentant theremin enthusiast, the brains behind the successful Hands Off series of theremin events, which ranges from the world’s largest gathering of thereminists to landmark performances at the Royal Festival Hall as part of the Southbank Centre’s annual Ether festival.
Gordon records and performs under the nom de guerre Beat Frequency as, he explains, “The theremin is more than an electronic instrument, it is a cybernetic instrument both in the science fiction cyborg sense, and also the technical Norbert Wiener sense; the player being, electronically speaking, part of the instrument, and, lacking any tangible reference points, utterly dependant on an audio feedback loop. The beat frequency is at the heart of the theremin. My aim is to rediscover the theremin as an instrument of the third millennium, informed by the physics of the instrument and based on a fundamental understanding of psycho-acoustics rather than applying it to common practice music, which makes as much sense as a didgeridoo in a classical orchestra.”
His visceral sonic excursions are reminiscent of the early days of Industrial Music, and his fluid, evolving soundscapes have been likened to the music of Raymond Scott, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Gyorgy Ligeti, Nurse With Wound and Throbbing Gristle. The third Beat Frequency album, The Invisible Horn, was released recently by White Label Music.
Gordon’s sessions will include a demonstration and discussion of the “Beat Frequency” method and the use of effects to process theremin audio as well as an opportunity to have “hands off” experience of playing a theremin.
http://beat-frequency.blogspot.co.uk/