When Moonlight Becomes Voltage

For The Sirens, Geologist and visual artist Kyle Simon did not use the night sky as a theme added after the music was made. At Simon’s Farrington Observatory in Joshua Tree, light from the moon, stars and planets entered a telescope fitted with optical sensors and photodiodes. An analogue amplifier converted that changing light into control voltage for Geologist’s modular system, where it could affect pitch, filtering, rhythm and other parameters in real time.

The distinction matters. This is not a recording of space, and the stars are not secretly composing a melody. Light becomes one influence inside a human-built chain: telescope, sensor, amplifier, patch and performer. Every stage translates the previous one, so the final sound is neither a neutral scientific reading nor an arbitrary musical illustration.

The album, due on 16 October 2026, grows from a single composition recorded in 2024. What stays with me is the modest role assigned to the celestial data. It does not replace musical judgement. It behaves more like an unstable control source, comparable to an envelope or low-frequency oscillator whose movement originates far beyond the instrument. A modular synthesizer is usually praised for precise control. Here its value lies in making room for a signal the musician can guide but cannot fully author.

https://pitchfork.com/story/geologist-reveals-new-album-the-sirens

#Geologist #ModularSynth #Photodiode #ExperimentalMusic

When Moonlight Becomes Voltage Pitchfork Geologist Reveals New Album The Sirens The LP, made with visual artist Kyle Simon, consists of a single composition manipulated by the “light of the full moon”

11 Sep 2026 Akoma

Rhythm as a Problem to Solve

Jlin has described composition as something close to a mathematical proof: the answers seem to be present, but the question still has to be discovered. It is an unusual way to explain music that feels so physical. Her percussion can arrive in hard clusters, sudden gaps and patterns that appear to turn away from a predictable downbeat, yet the detail never sounds casually scattered.

On Akoma, released in 2024, collaborators including Philip Glass, Björk and Kronos Quartet enter that rhythmic language without turning the album into a conventional crossover project. Their identities remain audible, but Jlin’s construction determines the space they occupy. Collaboration becomes another compositional constraint rather than a decorative guest appearance.

Thinking of rhythm as proof shifts attention away from loops alone. A pattern can establish a rule, interrupt it, return with one element displaced and make the earlier version newly legible. The pleasure comes partly from movement and partly from recognising the internal logic after the body has already responded.

Complex electronic rhythm is sometimes discussed as a display of programming skill. Jlin’s description points somewhere more interesting. Precision is not the subject of the music. It is the method that allows surprise to remain coherent.

On “Akoma,” Jlin Fuses Technical Precision with Boundless Imagination

#Jlin #Akoma #RhythmicComposition #ElectronicMusic

Rhythm as a Problem to Solve I CARE IF YOU LISTEN On "Akoma," Jlin Fuses Technical Precision with Boundless Imagination Tristan McKay speaks with composer/producer Jlin about her new album, and why she considers composition to be an exciting musical puzzle.

10 Sep 2026 ARP2500

A Synthesizer Moving Almost Imperceptibly

Éliane Radigue worked with one ARP 2500 for roughly three decades. She called it Jules. The instrument’s matrix switching system let her see signal paths without the dense patch-cord curtain found on many modular synthesizers, while its filters and feedback paths allowed extremely small changes to unfold over long durations.

The slowness of this music can initially suggest that very little is happening. Listening closely produces the opposite impression. Harmonics move in and out of focus, beating patterns form between neighbouring frequencies, and a tone that appeared stable several minutes earlier is no longer quite the same. The composition is not carried by a sequence of obvious events. It exists in the thresholds between them.

This is a useful counterpoint to the way synthesizers are commonly presented. Demonstrations tend to favour immediate contrast: open the filter, increase the resonance, change the waveform. Radigue made the smallest available movement carry structural weight. The machine was not used to generate an abundance of sounds, but to examine how much life could be found inside one slowly changing field.

That kind of attention cannot be automated by simply making an envelope longer. It depends on hearing when a minute adjustment is enough.

https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/maerzmusik/stories/2022/story-eliane-radigue

#ElianeRadigue #ARP2500 #DroneMusic #ElectronicComposition

A Synthesizer Moving Almost Imperceptibly berlinerfestspiele.de The Universe of Éliane Radigue MaerzMusik sees itself as a place for artistic experiences, encounters and collective reflection. Developed from the perspective of listening and supported by contemporary music, the festival opens up a space in which life, art and theory can converge with concerts, performances, installations, music theatre, film presentations and discourse formats.

9 Sep 2026 Buchla

Space Was Part of the Patch

Suzanne Ciani did not treat quadraphonic sound as a larger stereo image. In her account of working with Don Buchla’s instruments, the four speakers were equal, and the position of a sound could be controlled with voltage. The Buchla 227 output module even included a function called Swirl, which could send sound continuously around the listening space at a controllable speed.

That distinction matters. Spatial audio is often added after a piece has been composed, as though location were another finishing effect beside reverb or compression. In Ciani’s setup, movement through the room could be linked to the same voltages shaping pitch, rhythm and timbre. A sound did not have to exist first and acquire a position later. Its trajectory could belong to its musical behaviour from the beginning.

This also changes what performance means. Turning a knob is not merely balancing loudspeakers. It is deciding how quickly a tone travels, whether it circles or remains fixed, and how one electronic gesture approaches the listener while another recedes. The room becomes part of the patch.

Today, immersive audio is often described by counting channels. Ciani’s work suggests a more useful measure: whether spatial movement has been composed with the same care as the sound itself.

https://www.womeninsound.com/issue-6/suzanne-ciani

#SuzanneCiani #Buchla #QuadraphonicSound #SpatialAudio

Space Was Part of the Patch Women in Sound Zine Suzanne Ciani - Issue 6 — Women in Sound Zine Electronic music pioneer and composer Suzanne Ciani reflects on her 45 year relationship with Don Buchla and his instruments: “These machines are responsive. They communicate. They’re warm. They talk back.”

6 Sep 2026 Daphne Oram

Drawing the Synthesizer

In Daphne Oram’s Oramics system, electronic sound began as marks on transparent film. Waveforms and control shapes were drawn across 35mm strips, then read by photoelectric cells inside a machine that occupied much of a room. Ten strips could run at once, turning lines into instructions for pitch, rhythm, timbre and volume.

The fascinating part is not simply that Oram anticipated the graphic interfaces of later music software. Her machine kept the physical gesture visible. A curve was not decoration added after the sound; it participated in producing the sound. Composition, synthesis and drawing briefly became the same act.

https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co8242581/waveform-slide-for-oramics-machine

#DaphneOram #Oramics #ElectronicMusic #SoundDrawing

Drawing the Synthesizer collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk In Daphne Oram's Oramics system, electronic sound began as marks on transparent film. Waveforms and control shapes were drawn across 35mm strips...

3 Sep 2026 Art Archive Molly Soda

A YouTube Account Becomes an Art Archive

Molly Soda has been uploading herself to the internet since before “content creator” became a normal job description. Her archive contains webcam performances, makeup videos, singing, dancing, crying, fragments lasting only seconds and projects developed explicitly as artworks. Instead of separating these categories neatly, she has largely allowed them to accumulate together.

On 28 September 2026, MoMA will turn that accumulated YouTube history into a roughly 75-minute screening. Some works are formal video performances, others resemble the everyday debris of early social media. Soda rarely deletes material from her online past, so the archive documents not only an artistic practice but successive versions of a person performing herself through changing platforms.

Her own website reinforces how strange the scale of that archive has become. Inbox Full lasts more than ten hours. That’s Me in the Corner documents an Instagram Live performance. There are Tumblr archives, zines, web series and videos whose durations range from a few seconds to half an hour.

Twenty years ago it was easy to think of an online post as disposable. Now early YouTube clips, Tumblr pages and webcam recordings can function like notebooks, photographs or Super 8 reels from an earlier generation. The difference is that these records were often made publicly, while the identity they documented was still being constructed.

The archive did not begin after the work.

The archive was happening at the same time as the life.

https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/11667

#MollySoda #InternetArt #VideoArt #DigitalArchive

A YouTube Account Becomes an Art Archive moma.org Molly Soda has been uploading herself to the internet since before “content creator” became a normal job description. Her archive contains webcam...