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Putting the Voice Through a Moog

Belgian Art

Sculpture That Refuses to Stay Rigid

Tapta began in textile art, but gradually pushed weaving away from the wall.

Ropes were twisted, knotted and extended into space. Viewers could move around them and, in some installations, enter the structures themselves. During the 1980s she made an even stranger material shift, replacing woven fibres with neoprene, the synthetic rubber more commonly associated with industrial and protective applications.

Yet the underlying idea remained remarkably consistent.

Tapta called attention to flexible sculpture.

That phrase seems almost contradictory because sculpture has historically been associated with solidity: stone, bronze, wood, objects expected to maintain their shape.

Tapta chose materials that bend.

A neoprene form can sag, curve, lean or respond visually to gravity without pretending to be permanent in the way marble does.

I like that because it changes the relationship between material and authority.

Rigid sculpture often seems to declare exactly what shape it is.

Flexible material leaves open the possibility that another configuration exists.

Tapta spent much of her career teaching in Brussels, yet her international recognition remained more limited than that of many artists exploring related questions of space and material.

Recent exhibitions have started correcting that imbalance.

The work did not become more relevant.

The history around it finally became more flexible.

https://www.luca-arts.be/nl/tapta-flexible-forms

#Tapta #BelgianArt #Sculpture #Neoprene

Sculpture That Refuses to Stay Rigid Sculpture That Refuses to Stay Rigid LUCA Tapta: Flexible Forms | LUCA Tapta: Flexible Forms is the first large-scale retrospective dedicated to the Polish-Belgian artist Tapta (1926–1997) outside of Belgium, the country to which she fled in 1945 and where she developed her artistic career from the 1960s onwards.
Bell Labs

Computer Animation Before Personal Computers

Lillian Schwartz began working at Bell Laboratories in 1969, decades before computer graphics became ordinary creative tools.

Her 1970 film Pixillation combines computer-generated black-and-white imagery with microscopic structures, oil, water and optical printing. Colour filters add another layer, while Gershon Kingsley’s Moog-generated electronic soundtrack connects the film to the expanding world of electronic music.

What interests me is how hybrid the process already was.

It would be easy to imagine early computer art as a purely digital historical curiosity: primitive graphics generated by enormous machines.

Schwartz did something less predictable.

Computer output became one material among several.

It could be combined with photography, physical liquids, optical techniques and colour added elsewhere in the process.

That feels surprisingly contemporary.

Digital artists still move constantly between systems. Render something in software. Film a physical object. Feed one process into another. Distort it again.

The tools change.

The useful attitude does not.

Schwartz understood that a computer did not have to replace older visual techniques in order to transform them.

It could enter the chain and contaminate everything around it.

The most interesting computer art may begin when the computer stops being the subject.

https://archive.transmediale.de/content/pixillation

#LillianSchwartz #ComputerArt #ExperimentalFilm #BellLabs

Computer Animation Before Personal Computers Computer Animation Before Personal Computers archive.transmediale.de Pixillation | transmediale Lillian Schwartz began working at Bell Laboratories in 1969, decades before computer graphics became ordinary creative tools. Her 1970 film...
Contemporary Classical

A Forgotten Composer Keeps Returning

Julius Eastman died in 1990 after years of increasing instability, homelessness and professional isolation. Much of his music might easily have disappeared with him.

Instead, it keeps returning.

In June 2026, the ensemble Wild Up released the fifth volume of its continuing Eastman project, centred on Gay Guerrilla, the 1979 composition whose title deliberately connects sexuality with resistance.

The piece can be performed by any number of similar instruments and is commonly associated with multiple pianos, although new arrangements continue to expand its possibilities. Eastman builds enormous intensity from repeated musical cells that gradually accumulate, shift and collide.

What interests me is that repetition here does not produce neutrality.

Minimalist techniques are sometimes described as if they remove personality from composition.

Eastman does the opposite.

The repetition becomes political because the music keeps insisting on itself.

The current Wild Up project is important for another reason. Rediscovery is not simply finding an old recording and putting it back into circulation.

A score has to be played.

Decisions have to be made again.

Musicians have to decide what this unfinished or partially transmitted information means now.

The archive provides evidence.

Performance gives the work another life.

Eastman’s growing presence today demonstrates how dramatically the canon can change when performers decide that forgetting was a mistake.

Wild Up Julius Eastman Anthology

#JuliusEastman #GayGuerrilla #ContemporaryClassical #MusicRediscovery

A Forgotten Composer Keeps Returning A Forgotten Composer Keeps Returning eastman.wildup.org Eastman Anthology – Wild Up – Composer Julius Eastman Julius Eastman died in 1990 after years of increasing instability, homelessness and professional isolation. Much of his music might easily have...
Experimental Electronic

Breaking an Instrument Until a Song Appears

Klara Lewis’s Opening is due for release on 4 September 2026, making it one of the explicitly contemporary subjects in this Art Notes series.

What interests me is not simply that it is a new electronic record.

Descriptions of the album repeatedly return to the way Lewis treats recognisable acoustic sources. Ukulele, piano and field recordings are processed, cut and reconstructed until their identity becomes unstable, yet the results often remain unexpectedly close to song form.

That is a difficult balance.

Experimental processing can easily become an end in itself. Destroy the original sound sufficiently and the technique becomes the subject.

Lewis seems more interested in what can survive destruction.

A piano does not have to remain recognisably a piano.

A field recording does not have to continue documenting its location.

But a trace can remain.

The source becomes something like a memory of itself.

That is increasingly interesting in contemporary electronic production because software now makes extreme transformation effortless. Granular processing, spectral manipulation and time-stretching can erase the origin of almost anything.

The harder decision is knowing when to stop.

Sometimes sound design becomes stronger when enough of the original object survives that we can still feel what has been lost.

https://www.deejay.de/Klara_Lewis_Opening_EMEGO325V_Vinyl__1132778

#KlaraLewis #Opening #ExperimentalElectronic #SoundProcessing

Breaking an Instrument Until a Song Appears Breaking an Instrument Until a Song Appears deejay.de Klara Lewis’s Opening is due for release on 4 September 2026, making it one of the explicitly contemporary subjects in this Art Notes series...
Acoustics

The Room Became the Loudspeaker

Maryanne Amacher did not simply compose sounds for rooms.

She wanted the rooms themselves to behave acoustically.

In her Music for Sound-Joined Rooms installations, she worked with sound transmitted through architectural structures, using walls, floors, corridors and connected spaces to shape what listeners heard and physically felt.

Her own description is wonderful: rooms, walls and corridors that sing.

That idea changes the normal relationship between music and architecture.

Usually we build a composition somewhere else, bring loudspeakers into a room and then try to minimise whatever the architecture does to the mix.

Amacher did almost the reverse.

The building became part of the signal chain.

Earlier, beginning with City-Links in 1967, she had already experimented with microphones transmitting remote environments over telephone lines, effectively connecting distant places into one listening system.

Decades before networked performances became easy, she was treating telecommunications infrastructure as musical material.

What stays with me is the scale of her thinking.

The instrument could be a room.

Or several rooms.

Or a city connected to another city.

Electronic music is often imagined as something generated inside machines.

Amacher kept asking what would happen if the machine was only one component inside a much larger acoustic system that included architecture, distance and the listener’s own ears.

https://www.foundationforcontemporaryarts.org/recipients/maryanne-amacher/

#MaryanneAmacher #SoundArt #Acoustics #ExperimentalMusic

The Room Became the Loudspeaker The Room Became the Loudspeaker foundationforcontemporaryarts.org Maryanne Amacher | FCA Grant Recipient Maryanne Amacher did not simply compose sounds for rooms. She wanted the rooms themselves to behave acoustically. In her Music for Sound-Joined...
Annette Peacock

Putting the Voice Through a Moog

Around 1970, Annette Peacock was doing something with synthesizers that still feels surprisingly modern: using a Moog modular system to process her voice in real time.

The Bob Moog Foundation documents how Peacock and pianist Paul Bley toured Europe with an ARP synthesizer and Moog modules, with Peacock using the Moog specifically for vocal modification.

That is quite different from simply singing alongside a synthesizer.

Her voice itself entered the electronic system.

By the time I’m the One appeared in 1972, Peacock had developed a music in which jazz, electronics, rock, improvisation and manipulated vocals refused to settle into a comfortable category.

What interests me is how early this was.

Today a vocalist can open a laptop and choose from pitch correction, spectral processors, vocoders, formant shifting, granular effects and hundreds of plug-ins designed specifically for the voice.

Peacock was experimenting when electronic processing still meant understanding patch cables, oscillators and signal paths well enough to make the equipment cooperate.

The voice is usually treated as the most human element in a recording.

Peacock seems to have realised very early that this made it the perfect thing to make strange.

Electronic music history remembers many synthesizer players.

It should remember more clearly the people who asked what would happen if the synthesizer started playing the singer.

https://www.universalmusic.fr/artistes/20000043831

#AnnettePeacock #Moog #VoiceProcessing #ExperimentalMusic

Putting the Voice Through a Moog Putting the Voice Through a Moog universalmusic.fr Annette Peacock - Universal Music France Tout sur Annette Peacock : news, biographie, discographie, photos, clips, vidéos, paroles, boutique...
Crime Nine Inch Nails

Recording Inside the Scene of a Crime

Nine Inch Nails recorded much of The Downward Spiral at 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles, the house where Sharon Tate and four others had been murdered by members of the Manson Family in 1969. Trent Reznor installed a studio there and called it Le Pig.

It is the kind of fact that can overwhelm discussion of the actual recording, so the more interesting detail for me is what happened inside that temporary studio.

The album moves constantly between programmed electronics, guitars, sampled material, processed drums and sounds that are difficult to identify at all. Adrian Belew is credited with “texture generating guitars” on “Mr. Self Destruct” and ring-modulated guitar on “The Becoming.” Flood contributed programming and production, while Alan Moulder handled much of the mixing.

The boundaries between instrument and treatment become deliberately unclear.

A guitar does not necessarily need to sound like a guitar.

A drum can become an impact.

Noise can become rhythm.

This is where industrial music becomes more than distorted rock. The studio is not reproducing a band standing in a room. It is constructing a psychological space from pieces that may have been performed, sampled, processed or destroyed.

The building eventually disappeared from the album’s identity.

The sound did not.

https://www.nin.com/music/the-downward-spiral/

#NineInchNails #TheDownwardSpiral #IndustrialMusic #StudioProduction

Recording Inside the Scene of a Crime Recording Inside the Scene of a Crime nin.com Nine Inch Nails recorded much of The Downward Spiral at 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles, the house where Sharon Tate and four others had been...
Electronic Music

Radiohead Used an Instrument From 1928

When Radiohead moved away from guitar-centred rock on Kid A, Jonny Greenwood became fascinated by the Ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument invented by Maurice Martenot at the end of the 1920s.

Its eerie continuous tones are usually associated with early electronic composition and composers such as Olivier Messiaen. Radiohead placed that sound inside a completely different musical environment.

One of the stranger examples appears on the title track.

In a BBC interview, Colin and Jonny Greenwood explained that Thom Yorke sang through a vocoder while the notes controlling that vocoder were triggered from the Ondes Martenot.

Think about that signal chain.

A human voice enters a vocoder.

An electronic instrument designed almost seventy years earlier determines the pitches through which that voice is reconstructed.

The result sounds futuristic.

That reversal interests me. New music does not always come from new technology.

Sometimes an old instrument becomes radical again simply because nobody expected to find it in that context.

Electronic instruments age differently from acoustic ones. A violin rarely becomes obsolete. A synthesizer often does, at least commercially. Then enough time passes and its limitations become interesting again.

The future occasionally needs equipment that everyone else has already left behind.

https://citizeninsane.eu/media/uk/bbc/04/i11a_2001-01-20_bbcrad3.html

#Radiohead #KidA #OndesMartenot #ElectronicMusic

Radiohead Used an Instrument From 1928 Radiohead Used an Instrument From 1928 citizeninsane.eu BBC Radio 3 'Mixing It' When Radiohead moved away from guitar-centred rock on Kid A, Jonny Greenwood became fascinated by the Ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument...
Bowie Put the Drums

Bowie Put the Drums Through Time

One of the defining sounds on David Bowie’s Low came from a piece of technology Tony Visconti had only recently acquired: the Eventide H910 Harmonizer.

Visconti used the processor on Dennis Davis’s drums while recording the album in 1976. The H910 could alter pitch and timing digitally, still an exotic possibility at the time. Instead of using it gently, Visconti pushed the device hard enough to transform the drums into something sharp, compressed and strangely mechanical.

That choice matters because Low sits at an interesting point between rock performance and electronic thinking. Davis was still physically playing a drum kit, but the recorded result no longer had to behave like an acoustic kit.

The studio could redesign the performance afterwards.

We now take this freedom almost completely for granted. A snare can be stretched, pitched, gated, distorted or replaced without anyone considering the process unusual.

In 1976 the distinction between recording a sound and designing it was much less settled.

What I like about the Low drums is that the technology does not disappear politely behind the musician. You can hear the processing becoming part of the identity of the performance.

The drummer plays the instrument.

Visconti plays what happens to the instrument.

Somewhere between them, a third instrument appears: the recording studio itself.

https://www.davidbowie.com/blog/2017/8/23/anciant-album-focus-low

#DavidBowie #Low #TonyVisconti #Eventide

Bowie Put the Drums Through Time Bowie Put the Drums Through Time David Bowie ANCIANT Album Focus: Low — David Bowie “Don’t you wonder sometimes...” Ahead of the release of the David Bowie: A New Career In A New Town (1977–1982) box set (ANCIANT) next month, here’s the second instalment of our album focus on Low. This is Tony Visconti’s introduction from his superbly informative notes (from the ANCIANT book), re
MIA

A Pop Song Built From a Political Sample

M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” takes its central instrumental loop from “Straight to Hell” by The Clash, but the sample does not behave like a nostalgic quotation.

It is pulled into a completely different musical and political environment. Gunshot sounds and a cash-register effect punctuate the chorus, while the track’s lyrics turn attention toward migration, suspicion, money and the stereotypes attached to outsiders. Diplo later described the Clash sample as successful precisely because its new context changed its flavour so completely.

That is what good sampling can do.

The source remains recognisable, but recognition is not the destination.

Context changes meaning.

A melancholy guitar pattern from a British punk record becomes the foundation of a global pop track by a British-Sri Lankan artist whose work repeatedly dealt with borders and displacement.

Sampling is often discussed as ownership of sound.

Artistically, I find the more interesting question to be ownership of interpretation.

A sample can preserve the original recording while completely changing what that recording now seems to say.

#MIA #PaperPlanes #Sampling #PopProduction

A Pop Song Built From a Political Sample A Pop Song Built From a Political Sample YouTube M.I.A. - Paper Planes Subscribe: https://MIA.lnk.to/Subscribe Watch more: https://MIA.lnk.to/WatchMore Connect with M.I.A. Online:Follow M.I.A. on Instagram: https://MIA.lnk.to/I...
Abstraction

A Mountain Reduced to Color

Etel Adnan spent years returning to landscape, especially Mount Tamalpais in California, yet her paintings rarely behave like conventional descriptions of scenery. Colour blocks, simple geometric forms and compressed spaces can reduce a mountain to something almost symbolic.

Adnan once described beginning a painting with one mark, such as a red square, then allowing that first decision to determine what had to happen next. Her work moved between painting, poetry, drawing, tapestry and writing, with colour functioning as something that did not require translation into language.

That last point interests me because Adnan was also a writer.

Someone who spent so much of her life with words found another form precisely where words were unnecessary.

A mountain in a painting does not need to explain itself.

It can become red.

The sky can become green.

Scale can collapse.

Colour can carry the emotional information instead.

Painting then becomes less like describing a place and more like remembering how that place occupied the mind.

https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2024/abstraction/etel-adnan

#EtelAdnan #LebaneseArt #LandscapePainting #Abstraction

A Mountain Reduced to Color A Mountain Reduced to Color La Biennale di Venezia Biennale Arte 2024 | Etel Adnan Beirut, Lebanon, 1925 – 2021, Paris, France