Other Minds (based in San Francisco) welcomes you to radiOM[ray-dee-om].org - the website that brings you the sounds of revelationary new music and the voices of the revelationists themselves. Our offerings include interviews with some of the most influential composers of our time including Lou Harrison, Brian Eno, John Cage, Laurie Anderson, György Ligeti, and Anthony Braxton.

We also offer concerts, sound poetry performances, lectures and documentaries in classical music, jazz, experimental music and other forms. The material you will find here is gleaned from thousands of hours of audio recordings from KPFA-FM radio in Berkeley (1949-1995), and concerts and talks produced by Other Minds in San Francisco (1993-2005). Continue reading

Splice Re-Mixes the Music Mashup.

A new social music mixing site is re-thinking interactive audio. Splice, which is still in beta, is a community site that encourages users to submit raw sounds. Users can then build songs out of each other’s sounds. Each creation can be remixed, rearranged, deconstructed and completely re-worked by anyone else in the Splice community.

Splice’s coolest feature is the browser-based sequencer. Songs are assembled and mixed without ever leaving the browser. You can also see details about the users who contributed each track as you mix. Continue reading

SoundTransit is a collaborative, online community dedicated to field recording and phonography. In the “Book” section, you can plan a sonic journey through various locations recorded around the world. And in the “Search” section, you can search the database for specific sounds by member artists from many different places. If you are a phonographer, you can also contribute your recordings for others to enjoy. The Creative Commons Attribution license encourages the sharing and reuse of all sounds on this website.

“David Bowie calls sound and vision a «gift» in his 1970s song, written in Berlin. It was anticipated with pleasure then, but now it has become an almost everyday phenomenon in contemporary (media) art and in pop culture. Current examples include video clips, techno-visuals, video/audio art and sampling techniques used by DJs and VJs… The «Sound and Image» module takes the striking presence of audio-visual strategies in current (media) art projects as an opportunity to clarify concrete links with historical developments and thus reveal similarities with and differences from conceptual predecessors. This applies particularly to examples of abstract film («visual music») and early forms of radio play («radio film without vision») in the 1920s, anticipating the far-reaching perspectives of an artistic synthesis right at the beginning of the century. Continue reading

“This is just a brief rough cut for a documentary I began shooting in 2002. Originally a documentary on LA guitarist Nels Cline (Geraldine Fibbers / Destroy All Nels Cline / Wilco, etc.) that turned into a documentary about NYC electric harpist Zeena Parkins (Phantom Orchard / Bjork / Matmos, etc.), the film evolved into a piece about a community of musicians from around the world who represent radically different ideas about what music is and can be. Continue reading

The complete documentation of Kunstradio’s Art’s Birthday 2007 and 100 years of Radio is now available online. Lectures, performances, streamings and audiovisual birthday gifts can be viewed and listened to on http://kunstradio.at/PROJECTS/AB/artsbirthday.php.

Art’s Birthday is an annual exchange-art event celebrated on January 17th by a loose collection of artists and artist organizations around the world. It was first proposed in 1963 by French artist Robert Filliou.
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Site-hearing is a website that logs places that have interesting acoustics all over the world. All these sites are plotted on a Google map, and can be sorted by type.

tree wave is a Dallas based band that makes shoegazy pop music and video using obsolete 70′d and 80’s computer and videogame gear, accompanied by female vocals. The code to drive the music and video is our own, and it’s all dirty assembly language. Music comes from Commodore 64s, an old PC FM sound card (OPL3), and a dot matrix printer, and video is all Atari 2600. Our music is noisy pop, often with unusual song structure, and the video ranges from abstract color noise to actual hacked and deconstructed Atari 2600 games.

may banners mp3 (5.1MB)

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Music Tables

This overview on tangible musical interfaces is focussing on table-top controllers, such as music tables and audio building blocks, mostly chosen for their relation to the reacTable* project. It also includes a few additional projects, which we think are somewhat closer to the concept of tangible interfaces rather than simple musical controllers. This page is maintained by Martin Kaltenbrunner. Please report any suggestions, updates or changes to mkalten_at_iua_dot_upf_dot_edu. If you are looking for more non-musical table interfaces, you could have a look at this collection at pasta & vinegar. Continue reading

“…The concept of the “new” that most of us carry with us is one in which something that has existed (the old) is replaced with something that has come into existence only recently. It’s a sort of “either-or” model. Digital media, however, are about intermingling and fusion. They are about “both-and”. As a colleague recently remarked, the overlapping of differences [and similarities] that Digital Media allow [makes for] a staggering hybridity of not only art forms but of just about everything amenable to the digital. This activity, however, creates its own ruptures, its own “newness” and unrecognizables.

Is this new? Well yes and no. Anyone familiar with the work of Dick Higgens will remember that while he did not use the word “hybrid,” he did identify “fusion,” not only as a basic hunger in us all, but as a characteristic of the new arts of his time: He spoke of happenings, for instance, as a three-way fusion between theater, music and visual art. He suggested that “art performances, so prevalent just now,” might be a five way fusion, between theater, literature, music, visual art, and life?”" From Music, Sound and the Networked_Performance Blog [PDF] by Helen Thorington.