Articulação sees avant-garde electronic musician Florian Hecker continuing the collaborative work he began with author/philosopher Reza Negarestani on the 2012 album Chimerization. The album’s three lengthy pieces see different manipulations and the electronic processing of human voices reading texts by Negarestani that explore themes of nature and the culture man creates around it, interrupted and often side-lined by Hecker’s blasts of digital noise and skittering, computer-generated mayhem. Opening track “Hinge” features two stereo-panned readings by noted poet and sound artist Joan La Barbara, known for her groundbreaking work with the human voice as instrument. A second, much noisier track breaks ...

The conversations which form the basis for this interview took place in March 2002 (email interview by Anna Ramos) and July 2008, during Yasunao Tone’s visit to Barcelona, coinciding with his performance at MACBA, and were continued by email with Tone, Fell, Hecker and Held during February-March 2009. Tone’s work has also been featured on issues 1 and 7 of the Ràdio Web MACBA programme Lines of Sight.

Developed by ambient pioneer Brian Eno and musician / software designer Peter Chilvers, Bloom explores uncharted territory in the realm of applications for the iPhone and iPod touch. Part instrument, part composition and part artwork, Bloom’s innovative controls allow anyone to create elaborate patterns and unique melodies by simply tapping the screen. A generative music player takes over when Bloom is left idle, creating an infinite selection of compositions and their accompanying visualisations. “Bloom is an endless music machine, a music box for the 21st century. You can play it, and you can watch it play itself.” – Brian Eno Features – 12 ...

In this Quadern d’àudio we publish the complete series of 17 graphic scores that Barber created in Yokohama (Japan) in 2005. This previously unpublished series brings together the visual exercises and/or pastimes that the composer compiled in a small notebook as he worked on Pocket Naumaquia, the closing concert of the International Triennale of Contemporary Art (ITCA) in December 2005. For this publication Barber has used these graphic notations as inspiration to write 17 texts that, like a game, readers can link to any score they wish.

“Bifurcating a Resounding No!” compounds a variety of prepared acoustic situations, computer synthesis & field recordings developed in the software bidule. It strives to create a multidimensional listening experience both subtle & engaging. It is intended for listening in quiet environments through headphones or monitors with little distraction. The photograph is a book (The Queen’s Gambit), a bookmark (acid) & one of Ingmar Bergman’s favorite quotes “We come into this world with sealed orders”. All of this is inspired by smothered mate (chess) which is a checkmate delivered by a knight in which the mated king is unable to move because ...

RHSM is a crystallization of MSHR’s live performance- an electronic ceremony that glides through four movements. Each movement acts as a virtual scape, defined by a distinct system for improvisation between the players and their handmade analog electronic instruments. MSHR’s pathway through the possibility matrix of each scape was mapped to an 8-track tape machine and digitized multiple times per track. These tracks were interwoven to create the iridescent effect of tape phasing as a compositional element, augmenting the psycho-acoustic content of the original improvisation. Scape 1: Unfolding Hyper-Shape Alap This track was recorded live in an electronics array in our bedroom ...

“yoooooowhatuhoe” was developed on a tour of the American West Coast in February 2015. The macro form of the piece was predetermined with special attention paid to temporal ratio between sections, while the material filling out the different sections was generated by procedures ranging from retyping the content of a G-Chat conversation on the Computer MIDI Keyboard to capture the typing habits of the composer and thereby generating pitch and rhythmic data, to using weighted random processes to build dense stacks of pitches. The sound sources used in the piece are the following: General MIDI (10. Glockenspiel; 38. Slap Bass 2; 54. Voice Oohs; ...

Yeah, I have tinnitus by now but it’s not so bad.. I’ve DJed a lot of parties and made a lot of mixtapes over the years… And now you can listen and download most of them right here. The best place to begin is 2001’s game-changing live 3-turntable mix, Gold Teeth Thief. This influenced a lot of people & opened many ears; over a decade later, the world sounds a lot more like I was hearing/blending it back then. Here’s a list of most of my mixes in chronological order for free download as V0 mp3s. After the list you’ll find cover ...

In her translator’s note for the 2012 edition of Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H., Idra Novey recounts an anecdote told to her by a friend in Brazil of a Lispector reader who was sure that if she and the author were able to meet, they would feel a profound connection to one another. The young woman managed to get in touch with Lispector, who agreed to meet with her. When she arrived at Lispector’s apartment, the writer sat and stared at her in silence until the reader finally left out of discomfort.

In 1903, novelist, film director, and anti-communist Robert Hughes published ​The Musical Encyclopedia​, a broad survey of the pronunciation and definition of terms from classical music. Throughout editions printed between 1903 and 1954, the encyclopedia’s ultimate term is “Zzxjoanw.” Purportedly a Maori word, zzxjoanw means, according to the 1903 edition, alternately a “drum,” “fife,” or “conclusion.” In any case, zzxjoanw conjures a sound, even if a receding sound…

At the turn of the 20th century, Julius Blüthner’s factory in Leipzig was the largest piano manufacturer in Germany. Despite the death of its founder in 1910 and the economic slump that dogged Germany after the First World War, the company continued to grow throughout the first half of the century. Blüthner grand pianos remained in favor among concert pianists across the globe. Sergei Rachmaninoff, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Claude Debussy numbered among their proponents…

Anecdotes of inner music abound in the mythos of Western classical music. As a child, Pyotr Tchaikovsky weepingly begged to be “saved” from music heard in his head. Clara Schumann’s diaries record her husband’s overwhelming end-of-life musical hallucinations that finally resolved into an unceasing and “terrible” A note…

Certain human recipients of the bite of a tarantula local to southern Italy fall into states of confused torpor. The spider’s venom strains victims’ respiration and blackens their hands and faces. Untreated, the spider bite results in death. Fortunately, there is a treatment, which constitutes the object of our attention here. Francesco Cancellieri summarizes the cure in an 1819 epistolary treatise on the ailment: “Sweat and antidotes relieve the sick, but the sovereign and the only remedy is Music.”†

Sing Sing Penitentiary opened in 1826 to serve New York City’s growing population and crime rate, and was known in its early days for its stringent code of conduct. In the prison’s early days, warden Elam Lynds invented the lockstep style of moving inmates in closely interlinked lines, as well as the striped inmate uniforms used for easy identification — both of which would come to define the popular view of prison aesthetics for centuries.

Taking the term soundscape as a starting point, this essay by José Manuel Berenguer addresses a number of concerns relevant to understanding the listening experience within art and everyday life. Tackling questions such as phenomenology, cognition, new media, aesthetics and the overlap between art and science, Berenguer engages in a critical analysis of recent sound art practices, using both significant historical examples and his own experience. Intermedia artist, composer, teacher, curator… The many labels that can be applied to the career of José Manuel Berenguer (Barcelona, 1955) reflect the multidisciplinary drive that has always guided his professional activities. Aside from producing ...

Pop-accelerationist DJ Huysmans offers a selection of synthetic gems from around the world.

The Berlin-based producer and artist Steven Warwick presents a unique audio-visual ‘mixtape’ on PAN, compiled of a series of darkly lyrical and sonic musings, as well as personal snapshots, written stories and videos taken across trips whilst residing in LA and Berlin. Arriving as his first musical release under his own name, Warwick (aka Heatsick)’s latest venture also utilises a new sonic repertoire allowing for a new route for his music, “It’s a reset in a way, creatively and emotionally”. Titled ‘Nadir’, the release reflects on a somewhat sardonic, and at times melancholic and unsettling mood. Recorded in both Los Angeles, ...

Induction Burners interview with Marina Rosenfeld (1:37:00″)

In this second episode, Florian Hecker discusses the idea of sounds as objects and the notion of decomposition in his recent chimerical pieces, and Erick Beltrán addresses different aspects of epistemology, the self and identity that have been part of his artistic practice.

In this essay Dr Tony Myatt describes how processes and systems were applied in early experimental music, and contrasts two approaches to the use of systematic and algorithmic processes in experimental computer music. He distinguishes two practices, one based on the evolution of historical models which emphasize a rationalist position, and another more radical contemporary approach based on the material substance of computer sound and technological processes. Dr Tony Myatt is the Director of the Music Research Centre at the University of York, UK. He is the principle investigator of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s New Aesthetics in Computer ...

“Radio Music” connects three examples from the history of the potential of the radio receiver as musical instrument, from its early beginnings in the twenties as captured on a comedy record, to formal art experiments in the forties and fifties, to its nostalgic presence in one of the very first song-based pop music collage albums, which heralded the now familiar practice of sampling. Since 1990, Jon Leidecker has performed appropriative collage music under the pseudonym Wobbly, improvising live with prerecordings to coax the harmonies out of the recorded sounds of individuals from disparate cultures. Previous and ongoing projects include the bands ...

In “The road to plunderphonia” Chris Cutler looks at the critical role of memory – on which both the origination and reproduction of music turns – and attempts to unpick to what extent the specific nature of a memory system shapes the music that it mediates, with reference, especially, to the third and newest of these systems: sound recording. Chris investigates how the fact and the practice of sound recording have transformed every aspect of production and reception in the field of organised sound, creating wholly new genres and understandings. If the medium is the message, this essay is an ...

THROAT’ is the new album by composer/producer Aaron David Ross (ADR). Arriving as the New York artist’s second release on PAN, ‘THROAT’ is made entirely from vocal sounds. It could only be crafted in the ultra-present; an age where the poetry of songwriting is flattened into catchy hooks. As words are sliced into sounds, ideas are reduced to sibilant syllables that still contain a range of emotional power, but deliver it in subversively different ways. ‘THROAT’ exploits these ways, borrowing vocal fragments from everywhere to collage a choral congregation of singing servers; pinging one another to create open-source equal-opportunity electronic pop music. Reichian ...

In this discussion from the 2009 Urbanomic event Sound Out of Line, Florian Hecker discusses the evolution of his work, sound synthesis, and the nature of collaboration