skynoise

How many ultra minimal Japanese electronic music composers does it take to change a Melbourne light bulb? Just one it seems, the slow arrival of Melb-spring coinciding with the presentation of a grand total of 3 separate stroboscopic events by renowned glitchmeister, Ryoji Ikeda.

Vat Ist Ryoji?
Let’s try an elevator pitch to get it out of the way quickly. Between floors blurt for would-be film producers:

Aye, the annual gathering of media-mutants returns. From Sep29-Oct3, Newcastle again hosts several thousand artists, writers, MCs, zine-makers, hackers, musicians, film-makers, eco-thinkers, gadget tweakers and trouble makers. ( Such as Doddodo from Japan pictured left) www.thisisnot.art.org has the full multi-festival low-down, these are some of the Electrofringe highlights.

Electrofringe Music
Sat 1st sees Ove Naxx (www.accelmuzhik.net/ovnx ) bringing the (Japanese) noise, loud and plenty – with many a glowing live and recorded review under his belt. Ove Naxx plays as part of a 2 storey gig of vast proportions, feasting festivallers also rewarded with performances by Conrad Newholmes ((US) – www.snakebirdrecords.com), Funckarma (Holland), morceauxdemachines (Canada), Combat Wombat, Severed Heads, Dsico, Collapsicon(Bris), Future Eater(Melb), Toy Death, Ollo, Dave Noyze & more. $15 Saturday 8pm– 2am / Newcastle Leagues Club

Fri Sep 30 is one for fans of the ever eclectic dualpLOVER label, featuring : Spazmodics , Botborg (bris), Eric Kuhlman, Pure evil trio, vialka (Canada), Toxic Lipstick (Bris), Anal Cookie(Bris), DODDODO ( (Japan) – who like like fun – just from their photos… ) , gulpepsh (Japan), justice yeldham. At the festival club, 9pm – 2am. $10

Thu Sep 29 kicks the festival off in style with Dj Wasabi ( in very fine turntable mutation form of late, and returnign to native Newcastle from Melb), Keir, Wake Up and Listen ( ripped a fine set at recent Liquid Architecture), lieutenant colonel spastic howitzer, Ele-mental, re cursor, 8 ball, mute-till-late(Bris) , SuckaPish P Jonez ( Brisbane’s noisiest self-producing MC ) & Noise Machine. And probably the sound of ginger beer kegs being emptied every 10 minutes or so, if it can be heard under the chatter of hundreds of interstate relationships being renewed. @ Ze Festival Club – 6pm – 2pm Free

Sun Sep 2 has an ‘Elec~Sonic BBQ’ cooking from 6pm– 12pm @ The Batcave, with a range of field recordists, experimentalists, film scratchers and more >> Abject Leader (Bris), Lloyld Barrett, Gail Priest and Sam James, Simulus, Scot.d.Cotterell, Jodi Rose, Miha Ciglar (Slovenia/Austria) , xNoBBQx, Monika Brookes, Soul Mirage.

Electrofringe Films
ElectroProjections – Attention Deficit Power Hour, ElectroProjections – The Remix Suite, ElectroProjections – International Ear Candy including; Robert Seidel (Germany), Otolab (Italy) and Takagi Masakatsu (Japan), + Cronica Electronica, A Short History of Machinima, dLUX – Retroscreen, Thailand Media Art Festival Screening Program, Recent Indonesian Video Art Screening Program, Mr Catra The Faithful by Andreas Johnsen ( a film about the one of the most notorious members of the huge ‘Baile Funk’ music scene emerging from the Brazilian shanty towns) , First Fleet Back; Tallstoriez Productionz. And probably more mini-DV cams in the one place at the one time than anywhere else in Australia that weekend.

Other Festival Bits
There are of course huge amounts of Panels, Workshops, gallery exhibits ( eg Otakuculture ) for frying the collective brains, and stacks of other Electrofringe highlights – including an appearance from Mark Amerika (US). And there are also 5 other festivals happening! www.thisisnot.art.org details the programs for Sound Summit – the Independent electronic music label gathering, EAR the Environment Awareness Raising festival, Strike – a national aerosol and visual artist project ( 40m x 7m), the National Student Media conference, and the National Young Writer’s Festival. While there, read about the temporary radio station being created for the event, the new camping facilities in place this year ( book now via the web to join the tent-city madness ), and a host of other simultaneous events, installations, jam-spaces and happenings. Woot~!

Sun Ra’s classic Space is The Place is now a director’s cut DVD, so you can watch an extra 20 minutes of afro-psychedelia from the 1970’s via the evergrowing Plexifilm DVD label.

Don’t know Sun Ra? A few hints in my old ‘Absynth vs Sun Ra’ review of the native instruments synthesiser software. And monkeys, well – after reading this article on the melting artic circle, their desire to climb seems a lot more logical. ( plus // wanted to test out how this ‘blog a photo from flickr’ function worked… ) Climate change eh?

On the flipside to Soft Cinema, try get your hands on the rare ‘minidisc’ from Gescom (Autechre side project) on Warp Records. The first ever minidisc only release, it was designed to take advantage of the format’s zero seek time: Minidisc contains 88 tracks which are intended to be played in shuffle mode, creating a quasi-unique, aleatoric arrangement every time it is played. Some of the 88 tracks have been specifically compiled to optimise functions, such as shuffle and loop, which are unique to the minidisc player.

Let’s remember too, Brisbane sound artist Andrew Kettle, who produced a mini CD for playing Lotto: “Place CD in player. Press Play, then Random. Choose your numbers to play or have random forecasts of your Lotto numbers. Track length average 15 seconds.” And for fans of the John Cage inspired explorations of chance and randomness in composition – try this free OS X software version inspired by one of his rule sets: http://www.essl.at/works/fontana-mixer/download.html

Lev Manovich is brimming with ideas about ‘new media’ – he wrote the seminal ‘Language of New Media’ academic best-seller after all. But is the electronic arts emperor wearing no clothes? Let’s take his latest DVD offering for a spin, ‘Soft Cinema’ – which aims to interrogate how software and databases might shape cinema in new ways ( www.softcinema.net).

The Language of New Media
A century after the introduction of cinema, Lev Manovich tried to make sense of the current blossoming of media technologies, trying to find their commonalities, their unique traits, and generally trying to ‘articulate the actual prrocesses of digital creation’ and theorise about what was actually ‘new’ about ‘new media’. His rigorous dissection of various electronic art forms, and attempts to define underlying principles of ‘new media’ resulted in the book being alternately pitched as “the first textbook for the next generation of media makers”, or as a book that is too obsessed with cinema to actually understand the possibilities of today’s media. Or just plain dreary by those weary of the academy’s need to categorise. It’s influence is undeniable though. One of the central themes of the book is the database and the ways this allows information/content to be manipulated in new ways, an exploration now manifested in Lev’s DVD and installation project.

Database Cinema?
“How can our new abilities to store vast amounts of data, to automatically classify, index, link, search and instantly retrieve it, lead to new kinds of narratives?” – Lev Manovich.

Given that search engines have become so integrated into sifting through the white noise and bureaucracy of the 21st century, inevitably somebody would want to cinematize our increasing use of the database to navigate media, to find out way in the world. Arguably this has been happening for some time already, with the use of non-linear editing on a computer to provide a more fluid capacity for editing. Lev is interested in deeper aspects of the information architecture than this, and with the DVD presents a series of 3 ‘films’ – each seeking to interrogate a particular aesthetic territory related to the database, and each utilising clips of footage Lev himself shot on travels around the world. (Below an Eisenstein diagram showing early 20C editing ideas… )

Texas
Using both a database of 425 video clips and a parallel music database created by composer George Lewis, Texas explores the relationships between clips and the capacity to allow software to edit by linking clips with similar parameters. Each video clip is described by 10 parameters ( eg perspective, brightness, camera motion etc ) and with custom software, the clips unfold in seemingly random combinations based on this. They also appear at different places on the screen, and usually at least 2 at a time, although in different sizes and places. Music from Dj Spooky & Scanner adds to the mix, and the combined effect of sound and cityscape visuals manages to convey a certain type of mood.

Mission To Earth
A loosely science fiction styled piece, this ‘film’ includes a database of motion graphics to complement the video database, which are juxtaposed alongside each other in a range of ways. ‘Window size’ and the number of windows showing video are constantly adjusted to supposedly suit the main character’s feelings at different times. This has the closest ‘feel’ to a traditional film of the 3, a little more engaging by the continuity possible because of a central character appearing in many of the shots.

Absences
The most abstract of the 3 ‘films’ uses algorithms to determine the editing, which delivers a montage of black and white cinematography, spitting out a range of urban and natural landscape film fragments ( up to 5 at a time on screen at once ). The soundtrack for this is derived from analysis of the screen-imagery, coder for the DVD and Soft Cinema software Andreas Kratky utilising his created tools to provide a continuous sequence of abstracted audiovisual rhythms.

And The Emperor’s Clothes?
While this is a provocative stab at new cinematic terrain by a celebrated theorist, it remains a gently underwhelming viewing experience. It may work better in it’s native installation spaces on larger screens, but it’s not exactly rivetting viewing, despite the often hypnotising sections that can emerge from the databases. Moviegoers want storytelling of some form ( even abstract visual storytelling) , and gameplayers want interactivity and control of their environment. This DVD lies in the murky and somewhat unsatisying area somewhere in between.

Tangent trigger from the ‘Made In Sheffield’ disc just reviewed, but seems relevant enough given the low scores most of us city-dwellers would get in the ‘bioregional quiz’ recently posted online by author Kevin Kelly.

What’s a Bioregion? – ‘An area that shares similar topography, plant and animal life, and human culture – with boundaries defined by natural features rather than political borders’. Yeah, yeah – but rather than jump on the bioregionalism bandwagon ( there is actually a googlable movement of ‘em out there ), what this quiz is useful for is pointing out how disconnected most of us are to the surrounds that sustain us. The full 30 questions are available here (www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/000957.php ), as well as recommendations on how to find out the answers. And if these samplers aren’t enough, ( http://ecofoot.org & www.rco.on.ca/ecofootprint_print.html should satisfy any remaning eco-quiz appetites )

1) Point north.
2) What time is sunset today?
3) Trace the water you drink from rainfall to your tap.
4) When you flush, where do the solids go? What happens to the waste water?
5) How many feet above sea level are you?
10) Name five native edible plants in your neighborhood and the season(s) they are available.
11) From what direction do storms generally come?
20) Name five birds that live here. Which are migratory and which stay put?
23) If you live near the ocean, when is high tide today?
27) Where does your electric power come from and how is it generated?
28) After the rain runs off your roof, where does it go?

Music from small industrial towns ( eg Newcastle 2300 ) often cuts it’s own path – in response to the local smear of haze, to the ‘giant steelworks as metronome for a city’, and in defiant juxtaposition to the music of more glamorous cities nearby. Post-punk era Sheffield in the UK, gave birth to The Human League, ABC, Heaven 17 & Cabaret Voltaire in the early 80’s, another aspect of the late 20th century now documented on DVD ( via plexifilm.com, or www.stomp.com.au in oz).

Lest We Forget
Top of The Pops in the UK enjoyed a cult status in the 80s, and although it’s still kicking now ( www.bbc.co.uk/totp ), it’s notoriety ( and hairspray budgets ) loomed larger on the world stage back then (yes, yes – nostalgia ain’t what it used to be), the ultimate place for aspiring small town pop stars desiring to flaunt hair & lip-synched moves. The punk movement was still fresh in the air ( mmmm, smells like?), and it seemed viable for anyone to have a go making whatever sort of music they wanted. For much of the UK this meant slavishly aping the same 3 chords as the Sex Pistols, but in Sheffield the locals were carving out their own DIY electronic niche.

“Punk was the end of world war II - don’t tell us what to do, the war is over now….punk enabled anything to become acceptable.” explains one Sheffield muso in the film, from some act who didn’t make it on to Top of The Pops. Unlike The Human League, who were talked about as ‘the future of music’ by one David Bowie after he saw them live. Their lead singer Phil Oakey, is probably most remembered for co-writing ‘together in electric dreams’ with Giorgio Moroder, and if you saw him prancing about on Top of The Pops – would be surprised to hear him reveal on film:
“We thought we were the punkiest band in Sheffield. We were laughing at the bands that had learned to play guitars. ‘Cos they bothered learning 3 chords – we didn’t even do that – we used one finger.”

Aside from the self-styled electronic pop acts, Cabaret Voltaire were another Sheffield act who went on to achieve world fame – for their wildly experimental electronic pursuits. Only one of the early members of the band agreed to be in the film unfortunately ( it’d be interesting to know why the others refused ), but his anecdotes and attitudes are fun – recounting times of travelling around Sheffield playing their music and recording experiments out the back of a panel van with the doors open, playing in public toilets and other odd locations. All of the electronic pop acts get plenty of interview time, and nostalgia footage, and we also get some words from the late John Peel ( BBC Radio), and Jarvis Cocker from Pulp (also Sheffield ). The film is fun enough, but short at 52 minutes, padded out on disc with a range of extended interviews, a photo gallery, and rare live footage.

“People ask me about programs they watched in the 70s – we didnt watch tv – we were out, we were out 6-7 days a week…”

Also Made In Sheffield
-Steel apparently. – www.lovebytes.org.uk – A quite respectable, and world renowned electronic arts festival. – www.thedesignersrepublic.com – Quite respectable and world renowned graphic designers, who of course, designed the sleeves and DVD menu bits. Not that they’ve done anything extraordinary with it, so don’t expect anything crazy.

Not Made In Sheffield
Although former Steeltown label Bloody Fist has closed it’s doors, fans of new and secondhand breakcore, heavy drum n bass, gabber and experimental releases can now get a fix at Mark N’s newest record emporium “www.noisexchange.com“, set up in Melbourne beside Synaesthesia records ( www.synrecords.com ).
jp

Monday: Rolf Harris crying on TV about his parents. Tuesday: Drunken graves and mortality chat with one of my own parents. Wednesday Morning: A call from Alice Springs tells me a friend has died. After an hour of solid outpouring to each other about the girl we thought had died, she rings us to let us know about a girl with the same first name – Anna, a young spritely forest activist from Newcastle, who has unfortunately passed away. Jolting relief, mixed with sadness. Death, inevitable, is always around, yet somehow only rarely do we pick it up with our everyday radar.

Mid-Week Motivation Tip 763:
Nothing gives perspective like mortality. It’s somehow still surprising to remember we have limited time. And limited interactions with each other. Old Harriet Beecher Stowe knew this, and probably wanted us to soak up this phrase sooner rather than later:
“The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.”

Other People Who Also Purchased Death:
“I am just going out. I may be some time.”
Lawrence Oates, on Scott’s illfated Antarctic expedition, while suffering from frostbite and sheltering from a blizzard, Oates felt he was reducing his companions’ chances of survival and he ended his life by leaving the tent.

“I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis.” – famous last words of one Humphrey Bogart.

“Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh,”

– George Bernard Shaw

“Why reflect on death? When you start preparing for death you soon realize that you must look into your life…now…and come to face the truth of your self. Death is like a mirror in which the true meaning of life is reflected,” – Sogyal Rinpoche

Death On The Web
It’s a technology column after all. And emotional content should probably be limited when your insides are shaped like rock ballads. Plus, people spend so much time online, invest so much of their identity and energy, so much of their life online, that inevitably there should be a flipside. And yes, death is a dot com, alongside coffins, already commodified long ago by entrepreneurial URL farmers. deathpenaltyinfo.org is self-explanatory, and www.near-death.com profiles a large number of Near Death Experiences and deals with related psychic and religious phenomena. deathonline.net is made by the Australian museum and features all manner of information about ways we identify death, what happens after death physically, how the dead are disposed, and how we remember the dead. All flanked by the encouraging quote: “Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die”.

Obesity Terrorism
There’s no doubt figures out there somewhere which would compare military and health expenditure in the States, but approximately 280,000 adult deaths in the United States each year are attributable to obesity. Australia is probably not far behind per capita.

Lung Terrorism
Smoking kills about five million people every year. In Australia, smoking caused the deaths of 19,429 Australians in 1998-9. Or 53 preventable deaths every day. Smoking resulted in over 900,000 hospital bed days and cost over $700 million in hospital costs alone. One in five deaths occurred in the 35-64 years age group. Lung cancer is expected to overtake breast cancer as the leading cause of cancer death in women in the next couple of years. Anthony Burgess, Lucille Ball, Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, Bette Davis, Sammy Davis, Jr., Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Jerry Garcia, Groucho & Zeppo Marx, Roy Orbison and presumably everyone else who has ever starred in a black and white film, and Mr.Addicted to Love, Robert Palmer – have all died from tobacco-related diseases or smoking addiction.

The Dead Holt’s
Doesn’t have the same ring to it as the ‘Dead Kennedys’, but not many Australian politicians have been assassinated, had a plane drop out in the Bermuda triangle, or ski-ed drunkenly at high speed into a tree while looking through a video camera. Harold Holt however, Australia’s Prime Minister in 1967, is one of the world’s most famous drowning victims, diving into the surf on 17 December, 1967 at Cheviot Beach south of Melbourne, never to be seen again. Rumours that he had faked his own death in order to run away with his mistress, or that he was an agent for the People’s Republic of China and picked up by a submarine off Portsea and taken to China, are probably unfounded. Somebody at the Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Pool might have a better idea though:
www.stonnington.vic.gov.au/lifestyle/sport/aquatics/haroldholt

Bullet-Time
Remember Christopher Walken in ‘The Dead Zone’ – who would’ve thought that the utterly spooky character in that would be running for President of the United States in 2008? ( www.walken2008.com ). Undoubtedly he’ll be seeking to avoid assasinations as practiced in that film, and as suffered by J F Kennedy in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, Martin Luther King Jr in 1968 and John Lennon in 1980. And more than likely, Christopher Walken won’t be applying for residency in Iraq where 20-30,000 Iraqi civilians have died since the second Gulf Attacks started ( www.iraqbodycount.net ). Either way, am sure Mr.Walken is talking and spending time, with those he needs to most right now.

jean poole

Human Nipple Counter At Time Of Writing = 12.928115686 Billion Nipples~! With 18 Billion Nipples predicted by 2050, what does the hacking community have to offer to help slow our rapidly swelling nippledom?

DIY Hardware
It seems the nerds did get revenge after all – hacking and other mundane modifications of information technology have somehow had a sheen of glamour attached to them in recent years. Beyond wandering the networks, hacking into telephone systems for free calls, and copying your grandmother’s credit card numbers, todays hacking community often targets hardware – prizing open all manner of consumer devices for modifying, tweaking and reassembling.

The circuit bending folk take apart old electronic toys to make musical instruments out of them. Linux-heads labour intensively over ways to install the linux operating system on ipods, xboxes or just about any vaguely electronic appliance. Photographers figure out how to attach cameras to kites and take pictures remotely. Case-Modders go to ridiculous ends to house computers inside spaceship replicas, alien-heads, toasters, old ataris or one of my personal favourite mods – submerging a running computer motherboard inside a fish-tank full of oil (see oilcomputer.com – oil doesn’t conduct electricity apparently ). Many of these hardware hackers flock around sites like hackaday.com or makezine.com ( & stacks others ), but in the end, no matter how complex their machines are, they are still playing with relatively simple levels of complexity compared to the ‘wetware’ we might call our flesh.

While hunter gatherers of yesteryear would marvel at the collective amount of time we spend at exotic tasks such as sorting spam, deleting spyware and performing computer maintenance updates, what their primitive minds wouldn’t fully appreciate is just how much machines save us from mundane, repetitive everyday tasks.

Quickly following their 2D coverage of the world with maps and satellite imagery ( http://maps.google.com ), the recently launched ‘Google Earth’ ( http://earth.google.com ) highlights the sheer ambition of our global search engine overlords. There are more ways to make maps of course, than 3D fly throughs of the entire planet, with topographical data, satellite imagery and integrated search data overlays.

Body Maps
‘You are here’, it might say on a map of some CBD, some campus, some airport. ‘We’re on the road to nowhere,’ your headphones might be blaring,

If synthesizer’s were superheroes, Captain Moog would be fluffy, shapeshifting and beanie-clad, with secret powers no doubt including close-range lightning and other forms of wobbly terror. With an impressive Moog breeding program in place since 1963, an eventual documentary film was inevitable. ‘Moog’ by Hans Fjellestad is that film, now being distributed on DVD in Australia by Stomp Films.

Theremin-itis
The theremin was invented in 1919 by Russia’s Leon Theremin, as the first musical instrument designed to be played without being touched. The instrument consists of a box with two projecting radio antennas around which the user moves his or her hands to play, and tra-la : instant spookiness of sound. Watching performers such as Jon Spencer perform with a theremin, it can be observed that moving the left and right hand between each antenna controls either the pitch or volume of the sound, and even small movements of the hand can create a tremelo or vibrato effect. Smitten with the elegant engineering ingenuity of the theremin, one x Robert Moog constructed his own theremin in 1949, then later published a DIY theremin kit, and from such inspirations grew aspirations for creating a musical device capable of being played in the widest variety of ways. And so in 1963 Moog created the first modern, realtime playable and reconfigurable music synthesizer in 1963. Today, Moog Music not only makes the infamous Moog synthesizers, but is also the leading manufacturer of performance-quality theremins.

Dr.Robert A.Moog
“It rhymes with vogue. That is the usual German pronunciation. My father’s grandfather came from Marburg, Germany. I like the way that pronunciation sounds better than the way the cow’s “moo-g” sounds,”

— from the horses musical mouth, Dr. Robert Moog.

One of the joys of the Moog film, is seeing the fluffy white-haired creator of the machines, every bit the mad but noble scientist, interacting with a wide variety of contemporary musicians, very obviously overjoyed with seeing

3 separate factoids, choose your own connections:
1. The Melbourne International Film Festival happens Jul 20- Aug 7, including much experimental animation, digital hi-jinx, foreign film showcases & live audiovisual performances including a large new work by renowned composer David Shea.
2. A large rat currently terrorises the sharehouse of a 3DWorld writer.
3. Cinemas are very dark places.

Buddhist Wrestling
For anyone with the merest interest in buddhism, animal welfare, or just the sanctity of life, a large invasive rat in a sharehouse makes for a pretty hairy ethical wrestling partner. Generally though, the brutality of trap or terminator technology ramps up quickly to match any increase in rat weight or boldness. New York on the other hand, is full of rats, and has one less buddhist now that composer David Shea has re-located to Melbourne. Presumably keen to transcend dealing with rodents, David now channels most of his time and energy towards finding the interconnections and compositional possibilities of collaged samples, written scores, wildly varied forms of audible and visible media, and live musicians.

When Douglas Adams finally left the building, he left behind the Hitchhiker series, the Long Dark Tea-Time of The Soul, and Last Chance To See – an inspiring book about his travels to the ends of the earth to try and catch an actual glimpse of some of our most significant endangered species. A task that is getting harder for human eyes supposedly, because the amount of light in the world is decreasing.

Global Dimming
Throw ‘Global dimming’ in your google, and you’ll get a rash of science pages that outline a gradual reduction in the amount of sunlight observed reaching the Earth’s surface since the 1950s. Apparently we had 5% less light in the 1990s, than in the 1950s. The good news is that this trend has supposedly reversed during the last decade. The bad news is that Global dimming creates a cooling effect that may have led scientists to underestimate the effect of greenhouse gases on global warming.

Global dimming is mainly attributed to pollution

Seems a good time for signposts to free audio ticklers online – given all those empty winter hard-drive mp3 appeals going around, and the difficulty of walking a city block without running into an ipod owner with tampon strings hanging out of their ears.