Special performance by Dr. Benway

Visuals live art by
whiteemotion

Available Limited screenprinted Music hackspace T-shirts by Blanca Regina

Thursday 20th of December 2012 from 19:30 to 00:00

at TroyGanic, 132 Kingsland Road, E2 8DY London, E

The Music Hackspace welcomes you to its last event of the year 2012, a night of performances. To celebrate an abundant year of music, improvisation, hacking, sound and visual arts, we invite you to join our biggest night to date, featuring a record number of acts.

There will be food, drinks and the convivial atmosphere of our beloved Troyganic Cafe in Hoxton. From 19:30 to 24:00 improvisation, unusual constellations and unexpected acts include the following:

Burat

Bioni Samp and Tom Webster

John Garcia Rueda

Martin Klang and Blanca Regina

raxil4 featuring King Sara on musical saw

Cassiel

Murat, Abu and Blanca Regina

Left Hands Cut off the Right

Tasos Stamou & Martin Klang

Ladyhackspace & Hackman

Bas Vellekoop

David Kaplowitz

Dinnoise

Visuals by : whiteemotion , VJ Hash and Jai Rafferty

Master of ceremonies: Jean-Baptiste Thiebaut

Unexpected constellations and participants

Limited edition of Music Hackspace t-shirts screenprinted by Blanca Regina

Free Entrance

Thursday, 22nd Nov 2012 , 7-11pm, free entrance

The Music Hackspace is proud to welcome OpenLab , a collective of artists and developers promoting OpenSource work. All artists performing on the night have released part or all of their tools as open source software or hardware.

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Thursday 15th of November 2012, 7pm.

Troyganic, 132 Kingsland Road, E2 8DY London

xname is a multimedia artist born in Milan and currently based in London. Her live performances are developed through the use of artificial lights and home-made micro-oscillators which generate sound waves. The light, transformed in electric current, passes through the circuit and exits in the shape of a sonic frequency, while the sound, modulated by manipulating the light sources, becomes tactile and synesthetic.

The result is an hypnotic spectacle dominated by stroboscopy and industrial and noise-techno frequencies. Recently she has been experimenting with the effects of network lag and time delay on amplified sounds that, streamed to different servers, feed back to the speakers after travelling through the Internet.

This presentation is about the pleasure to listen to sound and generate it with unconventional instruments.

A night of performance

Thursday 8th of November 2012

Troyganic

132 Kingsland Road, Corner of Cremer Street, London E2 8DY

Start at 7:30pm.

Yps Mael (Electronics, voice and objects)
Les Hutchins (Supercollider)
Blanca Regina aka whiteemotion (Electronics, objects, voice and visuals)
Jean-Baptiste Thiebaut (Solaris)
Andrew Ostler (modular synths) + Darkroom
Tom Webster (modular synths)
Bioni Samp (hive synth)
Kacper Ziemanin (modified toys/hacked and bent toys/circuits)
Tasos Stamou (hacked toys and more) and Martin Klang
Ivaylo Chichanov aka Electronic Element
Andrew Page (cd players & reverb)
Visuals by nullØbject

Music Hackspace Big Band

Thursday 1st of November 2012, 7pm, at Troyganic, 137 Kingsland Road, E2 8DY, London.

Andrew Ostler is a developer of software plug-ins and hardware modular synthesisers, active  under the company name Expert Sleepers. On November 1st, Andrew will present his products, and how they integrate with Soundplane, a touch controller developed by Madrona Labs.

Andrew will explain how the Soundplane communicates with host software using MIDI or OSC. He will also allow people to try it out to give a feel of the interaction with the instrument.

Andrew will  also talk about how he integrated the Soundplane client’s OSC output into his own software (Expert Sleepers Silent Way), and possibly with hardware modular synth too.

Finally, all being well we’ll have Randy Jones, the creator of the Soundplane, available for Q&A over Skype.

Artist talk 18th of October 2012, 7pm. At Troyganic, 132 Kingsland Road, London.

Originally from Tennessee, Leslie Deere is a London based artist working with a variety of media. She comes from a performing arts background as a trained dancer of 14 years. She studied for a BA Honours degree in Sonic Art and holds a Masters Degree in Communication Art & Design from the Royal College of Art.

Leslie works with sculptures and sound, and creates installation such as “Amplified Time”, where the environment is amplified and accompanied by the sound of a ticking pendulum.

Leslie is also active as a sound and visual artist and has released short experimental films and recordings.

London Music Hackspace first anniversary event – an evening of performances

Thursday 11th of October 2012, 7pm until 12pm, Troyganic.

The Music Hackspace celebrates its first anniversary with an evening of performances. The event is taking place on Thursday 11th October 2012 at Troyganic Cafe (132 Kingsland Road, Corner of Cremer Street, London E2 8DY), 7pm to 12 pm. Confirmed artists:

Blanca Regina and Matthias Kispert performing Banquet, a Live Cinema Performance mixing sound and visual material collected and produced by the artists on stage, together with footage from advertising, to create a poetic investigation of food and its manifold cultural relevance.

John Bowers and Jean-Baptiste Thiebaut: duo. Homebrew electronics, reconstructions of antique technologies, SOLARIS project.

Bioni Samp and Tom Webster, Hive synthesiser and Modular synths

Arthur Carabott (musician, guitarist, improviser, programmer, interactive music developer, SuperCollider) and Dom Aversano (jazz drummer & composer, Pure Data instrument maker): duo.

Daniel Lopez, ZS-1 Amen, Algorithmic Composition and GUI design.

Tasos Stamou, Circuit bent toy-instruments, analogue modular synthesizer utilities and audiovisual synchronizations.

Enrico Bertelli and David Ibbett performing Concentric Mantra.

Visuals by Sus – Letra Ruido. The A E E I I I L L N S T session in B/W.

Presentation on Thursday 4th of October, 7pm.

Alex Allmont’s playful LEGO musical sculptures draw upon the tipping points in nature. Exploring the boundaries between dissonance and consonance, stability and instability, his pieces offer an opportunity to consciously untangle complex systems. They aim to capture and sustain the moment of realisation, where overwhelming detail melts away into simplicity.

His current research at Oxford Brookes focuses this attention to complexity onto rhythmic structure, in particular the moments of synchrony when the brain determines that a rhythm is ‘consonant’ as opposed to a dissonant flurry of events. An exploration of polyrhythms in traditional drumming and phasing effects of composers such as Reich has led to the development of mechanical, software and electronic tools to engage with rhythm indirectly. These playful approaches allow a performer to explore and sculpt rhythm freely, relaxing the boundaries between them and the audience.

This in turn led to questions about the relationship between the audience and performer, and in recent work this is  addressed by removing the performer altogether. The music is generative but the character of performance comes through; the artist existing as a meta-performer with the audience picking apart the music by mechanical proxy.  By being absent there is no rallying into context, the audience is not confronted by ego and is allowed a more personal exploration of sound.

Alex’s LEGO work has shown at BEAM, Raven Row, the Museum of the History of Science, the Mechanical Art and Design museum, Kinetica and Festival of the Spoken Nerd.  His most recent work is being developed for Kinetica 2013.

Alex will be talking about the practicalities of developing machines within the constraints of LEGO and how this playful constraint can lead to happy accidents.  Examples of various actuators and means of introducing pseudo-randomness will then be used to demo the electronic and software principles used to connect these machines to instruments, using transducers and AVR microcontrollers.

This early work-in-progress is being developed for Kinetica 2013, so Alex will talk about some earlier work and it’s motives and how this relates to his current research and his non-LEGO projects.

Videos

Presentation on Thursday 20th of September 2012, 7pm.

My name is Tim Murray-Browne and I’m greatly honoured to have been invited to spend the next ten months within the Music Hackspace as resident composer under Sound and Music’s embedded composer residency programme. During this time I am proposing to explore the concept of ensemble within the musical hacking culture. In Thursday’s talk I will introduce myself, discuss why I think ensemble and hacking are ideas that should be explored together and invite members of the space to be involved in creating an installation-ensemble of musical interfaces over the next ten months.

My background mixes engineering, art and music. I recently completed a PhD at the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London researching what drives us to make, spectate and play with new musical interfaces and interactive sound works. I believe that music hacking is an act of musical expression in much the same way as composition or performance. New musical interfaces provide us the opportunity to compose not just in the medium of sound but as action causing sound.

But with individuals designing, composing for and performing their musical instrument, where does this leave the art of ensemble composition? Can a composer unite the divergent and idiosyncratic voices into the unity we hear from a string quartet? Or does the hacker culture show up the very idea of a composer dictating who may do what as an outdated relic of the industrial age? Music hackers often appear mavericks trying to escape established conventions. But they are near universal in their desire to share what they have created, listen to each other and perform together. It is as much a collective activity as any other musical practice.

Making music together provides a space to explore our relationships with each other, what happens when we unite into a collective and our identity within that group. Over the next ten months I will be forming a Hackspace ensemble of musical interfaces created together with the ultimate aim of being harmonious components within a single installation. Musical hackers have a slight tendency to be mavericks. But just as the different parts within an ensemble form their own voice and role, I hope that the different personalities of those involved and the dynamics of the group will be reflected within final installation that we create.

I’ll be spending ten weeks spread over the next ten months working within the Music Hackspace and hope to have the opportunity to work with the whole spectrum of its members. Throughout, I’ll be seeking to find and further points of cohesion within the group without imposing upon each individual’s creative space. We will undoubtedly learn a lot from each other but I can also be more actively involved where people need help (musical or technical) to make things happen. I don’t anticipate that everyone will be able to make strong time commitments but I’d like to persuade everyone who might be interested in exploring new ways of creating sound with others to get involved early on. There aren’t too many conventions for what we are doing and I think the format gives us flexibility regarding how extensive anyone’s involvement is.

Hope to see you there on Thursday!