A Piano Playing Beyond Human Hands

29 Aug 2026 Artwork James Turrell

Building an Observatory as an Artwork

James Turrell has spent decades transforming Roden Crater, an extinct volcanic cinder cone in northern Arizona, into an artwork built around direct observation of light, sky and celestial movement.

What interests me is that almost nothing about the central material is manufactured.

The sun already exists.

The moon already moves.

Stars were visible long before the architecture arrived.

Turrell changes the conditions under which we see them.

Interior chambers, tunnels and openings frame portions of the sky, turning natural cycles into events with almost architectural precision.

This reverses a familiar relationship between artwork and lighting.

Museums usually design lighting so we can see the artwork.

At Roden Crater, the architecture exists so we can see the light.

That distinction becomes important.

A rectangular opening can make a piece of sky suddenly appear flat, almost like a painted surface. A tunnel can isolate an astronomical event that would otherwise disappear inside the enormous scale of the landscape.

Nothing has been added to the sky.

Attention has been engineered.

Perhaps that is one of the strangest powers architecture possesses.

It cannot change the universe outside the building.

But it can change how large a piece of that universe we are capable of noticing.

About

#JamesTurrell #RodenCrater #LightArt #LandArt

Building an Observatory as an Artwork Roden Crater About James Turrell has spent decades transforming Roden Crater, an extinct volcanic cinder cone in northern Arizona, into an artwork built around...

29 Aug 2026 16mm

Making a Film Without a Camera

Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight is one of those works that makes a basic technology suddenly seem optional.

He created the 1963 film without photographing anything.

Instead, moth wings, flower petals and pieces of grass were arranged directly onto transparent film material and passed through a projector.

The objects become the images.

There is no photographed representation of a moth wing.

Light literally travels through its physical trace.

Brakhage later continued making films by painting, scratching and drawing directly onto film stock.

From a contemporary perspective this feels almost like the opposite of digital image production.

Normally we begin with an image and manipulate the data representing it.

Brakhage begins with the material carrying the image.

That difference matters when the film is projected.

Every tiny object becomes enormous.

A fragment that could fit on a fingertip suddenly occupies an entire screen for a fraction of a second.

Cinema usually uses technology to reproduce the visible world.

Mothlight uses cinema to reveal what the naked eye would probably never stop long enough to examine.

It reminds me that moving-image technology does not necessarily need a camera, a lens or even a conventional image.

Sometimes all it needs is something small enough to pass through light.

https://www.criterion.com/films/731-by-brakhage-an-anthology-volume-one

#StanBrakhage #Mothlight #ExperimentalFilm #16mm

Making a Film Without a Camera criterion.com Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight is one of those works that makes a basic technology suddenly seem optional. He created the 1963 film without...

29 Aug 2026 Compose With You Raymond

The Machine That Was Supposed to Compose With You

Raymond Scott is remembered by many people without them knowing his name. His earlier compositions were adapted extensively for Warner Bros. cartoons, but another side of his work took place inside a private electronic laboratory.

During the 1950s and 1960s Scott built machines with names such as the Circle Machine, Rhythm Modulator, Bass-Line Generator, Clavivox and Electronium.

The Electronium is the one that interests me most.

Scott did not conceive it simply as a synthesizer that waited for a musician to tell it which notes to play. He imagined a system in which electronic circuitry could generate and develop musical patterns while the human operator guided the process.

That sounds remarkably close to later ideas of generative music.

The machine was unfinished, constantly evolving and never became a normal commercial instrument. Scott later worked for Motown, where an Electronium was installed.

This may be part of why his place in electronic music history feels strangely unstable.

Successful products leave thousands of physical copies behind.

Experimental machines can disappear almost completely.

Yet sometimes the abandoned machine contains an idea more important than the product that actually reached the shops.

Scott was asking a question that musicians are still asking:

What should happen when the instrument starts making decisions too?

Available Recordings

#RaymondScott #Electronium #ElectronicMusic #GenerativeMusic

The Machine That Was Supposed to Compose With You Raymond Scott (1908-1994) Available Recordings | Raymond Scott (1908-1994) Recordings by Raymond Scott which are commercially available on CD, LP, or as digital downloads.

28 Aug 2026 Experimental Music

Laurie Anderson Built Her Own Duet Partner

Laurie Anderson’s Self-Playing Violin from 1974 contained a speaker and amplifier inside the instrument. A prerecorded violin part played from the body while Anderson could perform another part live on the strings.

One violin effectively contained two performers.

That idea seems simple now because looping is everywhere. A pedal can record a phrase in seconds and immediately turn one musician into an ensemble.

Anderson’s instrument feels different because the playback system is physically embedded inside the object that originally produced the sound.

The violin appears to remember itself.

She later used the instrument in Duets on Ice, a performance in which she stood on ice skates frozen into blocks of ice and continued performing until the ice melted enough that she lost her balance.

Time was therefore not only musical.

It was physical.

The concert duration was determined by temperature.

I like how several systems meet here: recorded loop, live performance, instrument design, body weight and melting ice.

None is simply decoration.

The technology creates a duet.

The ice creates the clock.

The performer exists between both.

It is the kind of work that makes the boundary between music and visual art feel completely unnecessary.

https://www.nonesuch.com/artists/laurie-anderson

#LaurieAnderson #PerformanceArt #ExperimentalMusic #InventedInstruments

Laurie Anderson Built Her Own Duet Partner Nonesuch Records Official Website Nonesuch Records Laurie Anderson Laurie Anderson’s Self-Playing Violin from 1974 contained a speaker and amplifier inside the instrument. A prerecorded violin part played from the body whi…

28 Aug 2026 Electric Guitar

Rock Guitar Before Rock Was Supposed to Exist

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was combining gospel singing with amplified electric guitar long before rock and roll had settled into a recognisable genre.

By the late 1930s she was already performing outside the church circuit, and her guitar playing eventually became one of the clearest bridges between gospel, rhythm and blues and the music that would later be called rock.

The remarkable part is not simply that she was early.

Listen to the physical attitude of the playing.

The guitar is not background accompaniment.

It answers the voice.

It pushes rhythm forward.

It distorts.

It becomes theatrical.

This is behaviour we now associate automatically with rock guitar.

Historical categories can hide relationships because we name music after the fact. Once “rock and roll” exists as a category, it becomes tempting to search for its beginning only among musicians already labelled as rock musicians.

Tharpe makes that impossible.

She was working inside gospel while producing gestures another generation would recognise as rock.

That is a useful reminder that genres rarely begin on the day somebody gives them a name.

The sound usually exists first.

History catches up afterwards.

https://rockhall.com/inductees/sister-rosetta-tharpe/

#SisterRosettaTharpe #ElectricGuitar #Gospel #RockHistory

Rock Guitar Before Rock Was Supposed to Exist rockhall.com Sister Rosetta Tharpe | Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Rock & Roll Hall of Fame 2018 Inductee Sister Rosetta Tharpe was the first guitar heroine of rock & roll.

28 Aug 2026 Algorithmic Music

A Piano Playing Beyond Human Hands

Conlon Nancarrow spent much of his working life composing for player piano because the machine could perform rhythmic relationships that human pianists could barely reproduce.

Between 1948 and 1984 he created more than fifty Studies for Player Piano. Instead of writing music and hoping performers could realise it, Nancarrow punched the musical information directly into paper rolls.

That changed what composition could demand.

Several independent tempos could accelerate or decelerate simultaneously. Rhythmic canons could unfold at ratios too exact and too fast for ordinary performance. The limitation was no longer the pianist’s hands.

The machine became the performer.

Nancarrow even permanently altered his pianos, modifying their hammers and damping systems to make the complicated textures clearer.

I find this fascinating because it anticipates something electronic musicians now take for granted.

A DAW can execute an impossible MIDI sequence without asking whether a person can physically play it.

Nancarrow reached that freedom through mechanical technology decades earlier.

But there is an important difference.

His player piano is not silent computation. Pumps, motors, paper rolls, keys and hammers are physically struggling to execute the information.

You can hear the machine working.

It is algorithmic music with muscles.

https://www.paul-sacher-stiftung.ch/en/research/1-2-Conlon-Nancarrow-Edition-project.html

#ConlonNancarrow #PlayerPiano #AlgorithmicMusic #Composition

A Piano Playing Beyond Human Hands paul-sacher-stiftung.ch Paul Sacher Stiftung - 2016-21 Conlon Nancarrow: Towards a Critical Edition Conlon Nancarrow spent much of his working life composing for player piano because the machine could perform rhythmic relationships that human...

28 Aug 2026 Album Stored

An Album Stored as DNA

For the twentieth anniversary of Massive Attack’s Mezzanine, researchers at ETH Zurich translated the album’s digital audio into DNA.

The process sounds almost absurdly futuristic. The music was first compressed using the Opus codec. Its binary information was then converted into sequences based on the four DNA building blocks A, C, G and T. Around 920,000 short DNA strands were produced and encapsulated in microscopic silica spheres.

The whole album effectively became biological data.

What interests me is not the novelty of putting music into DNA. It is what this says about the idea of a recording.

We usually associate an album with its carrier.

Vinyl record.

Cassette.

CD.

Hard drive.

Stream.

But none of these is actually the music. Each one is simply a temporary system for storing instructions that can later be turned back into sound.

DNA makes that fact impossible to ignore.

Mezzanine can exist without grooves, magnetic particles, a waveform on a screen or even an object recognisable as music.

At that point an album starts resembling a genetic recipe.

Nothing inside the tiny glass particles sounds like Massive Attack.

The music only returns when another machine knows how to read the code.

A record is therefore not necessarily sound.

Sometimes it is the possibility of sound waiting inside information.

https://fml.ethz.ch/research/research/storing-mezzanine-in-dna.html

#MassiveAttack #Mezzanine #DNAStorage #MusicTechnology

An Album Stored as DNA fml.ethz.ch For the twentieth anniversary of Massive Attack’s Mezzanine, researchers at ETH Zurich translated the album’s digital audio into DNA. The process...

28 Aug 2026 Björk

Björk Replaced the Band With Bodies

For Medúlla, Björk stripped away most conventional instrumentation and built an album almost entirely from human voices. The recording involved Icelandic and London choirs, throat singing, vocal percussion and beatboxing by Rahzel, alongside layers of Björk’s own voice.

What interests me is that this is not really an a cappella album in the traditional sense.

The voice is treated as raw production material.

A mouth can become percussion.

Breathing becomes texture.

A choir can behave like a synthesizer pad.

Individual syllables can be arranged almost like samples.

That changes the usual hierarchy between singer and accompaniment. Instead of placing a vocal on top of an instrumental track, Medúlla asks what happens when almost the entire track is made from the same physical source.

There is also something quietly radical about choosing the oldest instrument humans possess at a moment when digital production technology was becoming increasingly powerful.

The album does not reject technology. Editing, layering and processing remain essential.

But technology is used to enlarge the body rather than replace it.

The result makes synthesis feel less like inventing an artificial sound and more like discovering how artificial a familiar human sound can become.

Björk – Medúlla

#Bjork #Medulla #Voice #ExperimentalPop

Björk Replaced the Band With Bodies Björk Official Store Björk - Medúlla "Almost entirely a cappella, and recorded with choirs from Iceland and London, a throat singer and a human beat-box (Rahzel from the Roots), Medulla has little precedent in popular music. There is, though, an esoteric lineage to be traced back, from Kate Bush's work with the Trio Bulgarka to Donald Byrd's collaboration

28 Aug 2026 ARP2600

Oxygène Came From a Kitchen

Jean-Michel Jarre recorded Oxygène in 1976 in the kitchen of his Paris apartment. He has described the setup as a modest home studio built around only a handful of instruments, including an ARP 2600, Farfisa organ and Korg Minipops 7 drum machine.

That matters because Oxygène now sounds like one of those records that must have required a futuristic laboratory.

It did not.

The scale came from arrangement, layering and imagination rather than from a huge inventory of equipment.

Jarre has spoken about limitations as something creatively useful, and this record is a convincing argument for that idea. A small group of machines had to perform many different roles. Instead of endlessly searching for another sound, the producer had to keep discovering another possibility inside the instruments already there.

There is a strange reversal in modern production. We now have access to thousands of synthesizers and effects inside one laptop, yet it can become harder to commit to a sound precisely because another option is always available.

Oxygène suggests that abundance is not automatically freedom.

Sometimes a limited studio creates a larger musical world because the producer has nowhere else to go except deeper into the machines already switched on.

https://www.electronicbeats.net/how-jean-michel-jarre-directed-a-cast-of-superstars

#JeanMichelJarre #Oxygene #ARP2600 #ElectronicMusic

Oxygène Came From a Kitchen Telekom Electronic Beats How Jean-Michel Jarre Directed a Cast of Superstars In 1977 when the Sex Pistols were spawning angry three chord reactions against the pomp of prog, a young Jean-Michel Jarre was enjoying the success of…

27 Aug 2026 Experimental Film

Visual Music Before Computers

Mary Ellen Bute wanted abstract images to possess something painting could not give her: actual duration. She turned to film and, between the 1930s and 1950s, created abstract animations in which shapes, light and movement were organised in close relationship with music. Her work also included technological experiments involving oscilloscopes and electronic imagery. Several of her films reached audiences at places such as Radio City Music Hall, an unusual level of public exposure for experimental abstraction.

What interests me from a VJ perspective is how familiar the ambition feels.

We now open Resolume, TouchDesigner or After Effects and assume that sound can be translated into movement almost automatically.

Bute was asking similar questions before digital graphics existed.

What does a musical phrase look like?

Should a visual form follow rhythm literally?

Can colour behave like orchestration?

How can movement produce something equivalent to musical tension?

The technology changes dramatically, but those questions hardly change at all.

That is why early experimental film can be more useful to a contemporary VJ than another software tutorial.

Software teaches us how to make an effect.

Bute reminds us to ask why an image should move in the first place.

https://www.eastman.org/mary-ellen-bute-rhythms-light

#MaryEllenBute #VisualMusic #ExperimentalFilm #VJHistory

Visual Music Before Computers eastman.org Mary Ellen Bute wanted abstract images to possess something painting could not give her: actual duration. She turned to film and, between the...

27 Aug 2026 Electronic Pioneer

The Blind Synthesist Building Other Worlds

Pauline Anna Strom recorded a remarkable series of electronic albums during the 1980s, much of it released independently in tiny vinyl and cassette editions. Her work later disappeared into collector culture before being gathered in Trans-Millenia Music, an archival collection drawn from music made between 1982 and 1988.

Strom was blind from birth.

I mention that carefully because it is tempting to turn disability into a simple explanation for an artist’s work. Her music does not need that story in order to be interesting.

What fascinates me instead is the scale of the worlds she created inside a home-produced synthesizer practice that received little mainstream attention at the time.

The titles alone suggest imagined geography: “Virgin Ice,” “Spatial Spectre,” “Rain on Ancient Quays,” “Cruising Altitude 36,000 Feet.”

There is something very modern about this kind of independent world-building.

One person, synthesizers, recording equipment and no requirement for a large institution.

Today Bandcamp and digital distribution make that model ordinary. In the early 1980s, self-releasing cassettes could mean almost disappearing.

The strange thing is that obscurity preserved the music from being fixed to one fashionable moment.

When listeners rediscovered Strom decades later, the future she had imagined was still waiting there.

Pauline Anna Strom – Trans-Millenia Music

#PaulineAnnaStrom #SynthMusic #ElectronicPioneer #MusicRediscovery

The Blind Synthesist Building Other Worlds RVNG Intl. Pauline Anna Strom - Trans-Millenia Music (RVNG Intl.) Otherworldly and anomalous, hushed and hallucinatory, Pauline Anna Strom’s unique style of inner space music reaches across time to futures and pasts far from our own. Trans-Millenia Music compiles eighty minutes of Strom’s most evocative work, composed and recorded between 1982 and 1988, for the first authorized overview of the enigmatic Bay Area composer.