A Synthesizer Moving Almost Imperceptibly

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...

3 Sep 2026 Album Composed Between Train

An Album Composed Between Train Stations

Brussels producer Le Motel made much of Pozo de Agua outdoors or while travelling, especially on trains. The album, due on 15 September 2026 through Constellation Tatsu, treats environmental recordings such as water, movement and air with the same compositional weight as more conventional instruments. Those materials drift through ambient electronics and overlapping rhythmic structures rather than sitting behind the music as documentary decoration.

That approach interests me because portable production has changed what a studio means. A laptop and headphones make it possible to compose almost anywhere, but most mobile production still tries to recreate the controlled conditions of a room. Noise is something to isolate yourself from. Le Motel allows the place he is moving through to enter the work.

A train is an especially good studio if you stop expecting silence. It supplies periodic impacts, vibration, changing landscapes and a rhythm that belongs to the journey rather than to the sequencer. Even concentration changes when the physical location keeps moving.

Field recording is sometimes treated as a separate discipline, as though one first collects the world and later turns it into music. Pozo de Agua suggests a softer boundary. Composition can happen while the world is already passing through the microphone.

https://ctatsu.com/

#LeMotel #PozoDeAgua #FieldRecording #AmbientMusic

An Album Composed Between Train Stations ctatsu.com Constellation Tatsu Home page of Constellation Tatsu, a label from Oakland. adventurous with spiritual artistic sensibilities

3 Sep 2026 Audiovisual Art

The Album Belongs to a Video Artist Too

Solari, arriving on 25 September 2026, is the first release under the Courant Zéro name by Montréal sound and video artist Maxime Corbeil-Perron. His background in electroacoustic composition remains audible, but the album moves between ambient passages, rhythmic electronic music and dense digital structures rather than presenting itself as academic electroacoustics. It was recorded and mixed across Montréal, Morelia, Mexico City and Stockholm.

Corbeil-Perron is interesting for LumLux Art because the separation between music and moving image is already unstable in his practice. Sound does not simply accompany visuals, nor does video function as packaging added once the music is finished. Both come from a way of thinking about structure, texture, digital processing and time.

That matters in electronic work because the tools themselves increasingly overlap. A modulation curve can control brightness as easily as frequency. A rhythmic event can trigger a sound, a cut or a change in geometry. The difference between an audiovisual artist and an electronic musician can sometimes come down to which output cable is being watched.

Solari can be heard entirely as an album, but knowing that its maker also thinks through moving images changes the way its rapid transitions and spatial textures read. Some music feels composed not only across time but across an imagined screen.

CST194 Courant Zéro | Solari

#CourantZero #Electroacoustic #ElectronicMusic #AudiovisualArt

The Album Belongs to a Video Artist Too Constellation CST194 Courant Zéro | Solari Courant Zéro is the new moniker of Montréal multi-media installation artist and Kohlenstoff label co-founder Maxime Corbeil-Perron, signalling his return to purely recording-based electronic music production following several years focused on award-winning experimental film and audio-visual works. Solari channels his c