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

We’ve been invited by the Shoreditch Sisters Women’s Institute group to participate in one of their monthly events, in this occasion a music and science themed meeting (https://www.facebook.com/events/121138904700346)

So next Tuesday 25th of September, we’re having a Music Hackspace presentation followed by demos.

The event also includes a talk by Guerilla Science about the evolution of music.

Tuesday, 25 September 2012 at 19:00
Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club
42 Pollard Street London Borough of Tower Hamlets, London E2

 

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!

We went to the seaside on the weekend to show our stuff at the Brighton Mini Maker Faire. Zoë Blade caught us on camera.

After the faire, exhausted but happy, we performed with the Music Hackspace Big Band at the after party, along with a bunch of other acts.

Great times were had by all, not least thanks to the fantastically helpful volunteers – big thanks to you all and the organisers!

Netaudio London & Music Hackspace present

Artist Talk with Robin Fox

Sunday, 16 September 2012, 2pm, duration 1hr.

Free to attend, but limited places. Please RSVP.

Robin Fox Laser Show from Robin Fox on Vimeo.

From neurobiology to cochlear implants, from analog synthesizers to audio controlled lasers, Robin Fox’s work knows no boundaries and no borders. He works across the spectrum from live interactive computer music performance to the creation of synaesthetic audio-visual environments.

He’s made soundtracks and video/light works for numerous dance companies, has exhibited large-scale photographic works and recently conducted a residency with the Bionic Ear Institute in Melbourne. Currently Robin Fox is working on a giant Theremin style public interactive instrument installation.

Far from a simple description of his practice Fox’s artist talk serves to contextualize his work through the lens of synaesthesia, audible and visible electrical signal equivalence and the history of electronic and visual musics.

Synesthesia and Netaudio London present Robin Fox live, alongside Sally Golding and Tom James Scott at Cafe OTO on  Sunday, 16 September 2012, 8pm.
Full info and tickets available at
http://cafeoto.co.uk/robin-fox-sally-golding-tom-james-scott.shtm

Robin Fox – Biography
Robin Fox is an artist straddling the often artificial divide between audible and visible arts.

As an audio-visual performance artist his work has featured in festivals worldwide. Recent appearances include a commissioned performance for the Henie Onstad Kunstcenter, Oslo (March 2010), Mois Multi Festival, Quebec City (Feb 2010), Steirischer Herbst Festival, Graz (Nov 2009), Musica Genera Festival, Warsaw (June 2009) and the Yokohama Triennale (September 2008).

His audio visual films for the cathode ray oscilloscope are documented on the DVD release Backscatter (2004) with more recent works Volta and 5 Creation Myths being exhibited as video works at the RoslynOxley9 gallery in Sydney, The Asian Art Biennale in Taipei, the Miniartextil International exhibition in Como Italy and most recently at the Gesellschaft für Kunst und Gestaltung in Bonn as part of Geometric Form seen in Recent Sound.

His groundbreaking work with Chunky Move has contributed to the recent piece Mortal Engine winning a Helpmann award for Best Visual Production and an Honorary mention at the illustrious Prix Ars Electronica. He also scored the critically acclaimed work Connected with Oren Ambarchi and has produced two works, RGB and Drift, with groundbreaking new choreographer Antony Hamilton.
http://robinfox.net/

Thursday 6th of September 2012, 7pm.

Musician Steve Beresford discusses his use of low-grade electronics on the context of decades of free improv.

Internationally known as a free improviser on piano and electronics, Steve Beresford has also composed scores for feature films and music for various TV shows and commercials.

Steve has worked with hundreds of musicians, including Derek Bailey, The Slits, Han Bennink, Christine Tobin, Ivor Cutler, Prince Far-I, Alan Hacker, Ray Davies, Ilan Volkov, Christian Marclay, David Toop, Najma Akhtar, Evan Parker, Adrian Sherwood, The Flying Lizards, Otomo Yoshihide and John Zorn.

He was born in Wellington, Shropshire in 1950. In 1974 he moved to London, playing piano with improvisers like Derek Bailey and also trumpet with the notorious Portsmouth Sinfonia, which included Brian Eno and Gavin Bryars.

 

He has had a long association with Swiss artist/musician Christian Marclay, performing realisations of Marclay’s ‘Screen Play’, ‘Ephemera’, ‘Graffiti Composition’, ‘Shuffle’, ‘Pianorama’ and ‘Everyday’, sometimes solo and sometimes with groups.

 

This year sees the second tour of ‘Indeterminacy’, in which comedian Stewart Lee reads one-minute stories by John Cage whilst Beresford and fellow pianist Tania Chen play music.

 

He plays with and conducts the London Improvisers Orchestra every month. He also regularly collaborates with musicians such as Elaine Mitchener, John Butcher, Satoko Fukuda and Shabaka Hutchings, playing at venues like Café Oto in Dalston, London.

Beresford has an extensive discography. Recent releases include a quartet convened by saxophonist Evan Parker – ‘Foxes Fox’ – (which includes drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo, bassist John Edwards and guest Kenny Wheeler on trumpet) and new solo recordings on CD and cassette, following up 1980’s ‘Bath of Surprise’. He is also producing a series of CDs of material from the archives of guitarist Derek Bailey.

This Thursday we chronicled the evolution of ZS-1 Amen. From an experiment in instrument design, to a dynamic live audio visual experience.

Originally written by Ziad in 1998, Amen started as GUI design experiment. In 1998 most music software was written to emulate existing hardware. Ziad’s aim was to start with a prevalent compositional technique, then design software around it.

The compositional technique chosen was the beat making popularised by the Drum and Bass genre. Here drum loops are chopped into smaller parts and resequenced. Originally this was a laborious process as there was no dedicated software for it. Amen was designed to remedy this.

Algorithmic composition is a major part of Amen. In our presentation Ziad explained the motivation for and approach behind this functionality. Algorithmic composition is also a great catalyst for experimentation and can produce some very surprising results.

Amen was left in the public domain. Several years later the project was picked up by Daniel.

Amen was redesigned and rewritten for the Nintendo DS. The Nintendo DS inspired a generation of audio hackers. Daniel was one of those hackers. He re-imagined Amem, reworking the GUI to take advantage of the DS’s unusual hardware configuration. Notably the touch screen.

Daniel went on to implement Amen’s most requested feature; a live performance mode.

Daniel walked through his realtime-focused changes using a new Flash version of Amen, made specially for this demonstration. Often he got sidetracked, filling the room with funky beats and delighting the audience. Daniel’s Amen is a dynamic live audio and visual experience, multichannel sequencer and a ton of fun!

The future of Amen is exciting… watch this space…

 

Daniel Lopez and Ziad Khouri

http://www.sonicspot.com/zs1amen/zs1amen.html

http://www.samplestation.net/forum/zs-1-amen-rearrangement-de-boucles,topic27807.html (in French)