Chasing Storms Through Screens

3 Sep 2026 Details di

Memory as a Production Technique

Carmen Villain’s new album Memoria, released on 4 September 2026, uses an unusually broad palette: clarinet, piano, synthesizers, field recordings, percussion, flute, trumpet and strings.

Yet the most useful clue may be the title.

Villain describes her work as moving through memory and transformation, with sounds eroding, repeating and returning in altered forms. On Memoria, instruments rarely feel isolated into clean roles. Acoustic and electronic materials occupy the same atmosphere until identifying the original source becomes less important than hearing what has happened to it.

That feels close to how memory actually behaves.

We do not retrieve an event like opening an untouched audio file.

Every recollection has already passed through time.

Details disappear.

Others become exaggerated.

Something from the present enters the past without permission.

Production can work the same way.

Repeat a sound.

Filter it.

Record the processed version.

Return to it later.

Eventually the copy may carry more emotional weight than the original.

The studio becomes less like an archive preserving sounds accurately and more like memory itself, constantly rewriting what it stores.

https://carmenvillain.bandcamp.com/album/memoria

Memory as a Production Technique Carmen Villain Memoria, by Carmen Villain 7 track album

3 Sep 2026 Experimental Music

Twenty Microphones for an Organ

Kali Malone recorded her forthcoming album Burning Song during two late-night sessions at Leipzig’s Thomaskirche, the church where Johann Sebastian Bach served as cantor.

Malone became the first musician to perform contemporary works on the church’s Bach Organ, an instrument completed in 2000 and designed around historical Baroque tuning principles. Engineer Francesco Donadello placed more than twenty microphones around the church for the recordings. Lucy Railton adds cello, while Stephen O’Malley plays bowed acoustic guitar. The album is due on 30 October 2026.

The microphone count interests me because an organ already turns architecture into part of the instrument.

Its pipes fill the building with sound, but the room determines how those sounds return to the listener.

One microphone gives you one relationship with that space.

Twenty microphones create many.

Close.

Distant.

Direct.

Reflected.

The recording process therefore becomes partly a decision about which version of the church should survive on the album.

You cannot record architecture completely.

You can only choose where to listen from.

https://ra.co/news/85911

#KaliMalone #OrganMusic #SoundRecording #ExperimentalMusic

Twenty Microphones for an Organ Resident Advisor Kali Malone announces new album, Burning Song · News ? RA The LP of solo compositions is out October 30th and features Stephen O'Malley and Lucy Railton.

2 Sep 2026 Future Haruomi Hosono

Hosono Writing to the Future

Haruomi Hosono turns 79 this year and is about to release his 23rd solo album.

Yours Sincerely, arriving on 11 September 2026, is his first collection of new music in more than seven years. One of its advance tracks, “Sincerely,” reworks the 1950s doo-wop song by The Moonglows with new Japanese lyrics written by Hosono. The album title itself grows from the idea of omoiyari, a Japanese concept connected with compassion and sharing another person’s feelings.

What interests me is the direction of the exchange.

Hosono spent much of his career absorbing and transforming Western musical forms, from American roots music to electronic pop. Later, Yellow Magic Orchestra and his solo work became major reference points for younger Western musicians.

Now he returns to a 1950s American song and writes himself back into it.

Influence is often drawn as a straight arrow.

One artist affects another.

One country exports a style somewhere else.

Hosono’s career looks more like circulation. Music leaves one culture, changes elsewhere, returns, and finds that neither side is quite where it started.

At 79, that exchange is still moving.

https://www.sonymusic.co.jp/artist/HaruomiHosono/info/585890

#HaruomiHosono #JapaneseMusic #YoursSincerely #Songwriting

Hosono Writing to the Future ????? | Sony Music ???Yours Sincerely????2nd???????Sincerely??????????? ??????????????????PLAYBACK SESSION?????????????????????????????? | ????? | ?????????????????? Haruomi Hosono turns 79 this year and is about to release his 23rd solo album. Yours Sincerely, arriving on 11 September 2026, is his first collection of n…

2 Sep 2026 Digital Ecology

A Pond Controlling the Gallery

Rae-Yen Song’s new installation at FACT Liverpool contains something unusually literal at its centre: a living pond.

The exhibition •~TUA~• ?? •~MAK~•, opening on 18 September 2026, combines sculpture, sound and moving image within an imagined subaquatic world shaped partly by the artist’s family histories and diasporic mythology.

Cameras observe microscopic life and movement inside the pond. Activity within that ecosystem then affects the lights and sounds of the installation.

I like the reversal.

Interactive digital art usually waits for a human visitor.

Walk here.

Touch this.

Move your hand and the system responds.

Song gives some of that control to organisms that have no interest in being performers.

The gallery becomes responsive, but humans are no longer the only meaningful input.

That changes the idea of interactivity itself.

A living system is not a button.

It does not repeat the same response because somebody requests it.

The artwork has to share control with processes it cannot completely predict.

For a digital installation, that is a surprisingly biological kind of uncertainty.

https://www.fact.co.uk/event/rae-yen-song-%E5%AE%8B%E7%91%9E%E6%B8%8A

#RaeYenSong #MovingImage #InteractiveArt #DigitalEcology

A Pond Controlling the Gallery FACT Rae-Yen Song ???: •~TUA~• ?? •~MAK~• Rae-Yen Song ??? draws on the flux and resilience of the immigrant experience to reimagine the world. For this exhibition, the gallery is transformed into a darkened abyss, suspended somewhere between the deep sea and the skies above. Moving through this landscape, Rae-Yen invites us to reconsider…

2 Sep 2026 Ali Cherri

The Soldier Outside the Monument

Ali Cherri’s new film The Sentinel places a French military recruit between two very different kinds of routine.

By day there is the ordered structure of military life. At night, encounters begin to disturb the stability of that system. The film appears in Soul Witness, opening at WIELS in Brussels on 5 September 2026, alongside sculptures and installations concerned with the ways institutions shape bodies and historical memory.

What interests me is how far this is from the traditional image of the soldier as monument.

Public sculpture often turns military bodies into symbols: upright, permanent, certain.

Cherri focuses instead on vulnerability and suspension.

A real body gets tired.

It waits.

It doubts.

It exists inside rules it did not invent.

Moving image is useful here because a monument tries to freeze meaning, while film allows behaviour to remain unresolved. A character can contradict himself from one moment to the next.

Perhaps that is why institutions like statues.

Still images are easier to control.

A moving body is always capable of becoming something else.

https://wiels.org/en/exhibitions/soul-witness

#AliCherri #TheSentinel #VideoArt #BrusselsArt

The Soldier Outside the Monument WIELS WIELS | Soul Witness WIELS, the contemporary art centre in Brussels offering exhibitions with new ideas, practices and perspectives.

2 Sep 2026 Chasing Storms Through Screens

Chasing Storms Through Screens

Shuang Li’s Alliance begins with storm chasing, the deliberate pursuit of tornadoes, hurricanes and other extreme weather.

At Kunsthalle Basel, where the exhibition runs until 13 September 2026, that pursuit expands into an immersive environment of video, sound and architecture. Roads, weather forecasts and meteorological imagery appear within a visual world that connects physical storms to the less visible systems shaping contemporary digital life.

The comparison works because both kinds of systems are difficult to see as a whole.

A storm can be tracked on a screen, measured and predicted, yet standing inside one is completely different from reading its data.

Digital infrastructures behave similarly. Algorithms, networks and platforms surround daily life while most of their operations remain invisible.

What I like here is that weather is not reduced to a metaphor pasted onto technology. Both involve prediction, control and a point where prediction fails.

The storm chaser moves toward instability in order to observe it.

Most technology is designed to do the opposite. It promises to remove uncertainty.

Li seems interested in the moment when that promise begins to break down.

https://kunsthallebasel.ch/de/exhibitions/shuang-li

#ShuangLi #VideoInstallation #DigitalCulture #ContemporaryArt

Chasing Storms Through Screens Kunsthalle Basel Alliance · Kunsthalle Basel Seit 1872 zeigt die Kunsthalle Basel nicht nur Kunst – sie hat sie immer wieder neu definiert. Mit unerschütterlichem Engagement für aufstrebende Künstler:innen rückt sie deren bahnbrechendes Schaffen ins Rampenlicht – oft lange bevor diese international bekannt werden.

2 Sep 2026 Its Own Economy Karimah

The Body as Its Own Economy

Karimah Ashadu’s MUSCLE follows bodybuilders training in Lagos, but the film is not really about bodybuilding as spectacle. It looks at the body as something that can be worked on, displayed, disciplined and turned into a form of personal capital.

The 22-minute film is part of Tendered, Ashadu’s exhibition opening at the Renaissance Society in Chicago on 12 September 2026. Her camera stays close to the men she films, avoiding the detached distance often associated with documentary observation. The result places physical training beside a much larger question about labour and autonomy in contemporary Nigeria.

What interests me is the overlap between sculpting a body and building an economic position.

Muscle is usually understood as physical strength. Here it can also represent time, discipline, aspiration and self-invention. The gym becomes a workplace even when nobody is formally paying for the hours spent there.

Video is particularly effective for this because effort has duration. A photograph can show the finished body. Moving image can show repetition, fatigue and the small routines required to produce it.

The body is not simply what the camera records.

It is where the work is happening.

https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/6787762/karimah-ashadutendered

#KarimahAshadu #VideoArt #MovingImage #Lagos

The Body as Its Own Economy e-flux.com Karimah Ashadu: Tendered - Announcements - e-flux The Renaissance Society and Fondazione In Between Art Film present Tendered, a solo exhibition by Karimah Ashadu.

2 Sep 2026 BBC Radiophonic Workshop

The Woman Between Oram and Derbyshire

The history of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop tends to settle quickly around a few famous names.

Maddalena Fagandini is one of the people who can disappear between them.

She joined the Workshop in 1959, after beginning her BBC career in the Italian Section of the World Service, and worked there until 1963. Her electronic output included radio drama, interval signals and experimental pieces such as “Timebeat,” later released commercially in a reworked version with George Martin.

Yet only a small part of her work remains easily available today. The surviving documentation itself acknowledges that much more may have existed than can now be securely identified.

That interests me because institutional anonymity creates a strange problem for art history.

Radiophonic sound was often produced to serve another programme.

A few seconds between broadcasts.

An atmosphere behind dialogue.

A signal.

The audience heard the result without necessarily knowing who had made it.

The work therefore succeeded precisely by disappearing into broadcasting.

Decades later, that invisibility makes the maker difficult to recover.

Electronic music history is full of famous machines.

The people operating them were not always given the same visibility.

Sometimes recovering a forgotten composer begins with listening again to sounds nobody originally thought required a signature.

https://rws.bbcrecords.co.uk/staff/maddalena-fagandini/

#MaddalenaFagandini #RadiophonicWorkshop #ElectronicMusic #ForgottenComposer

The Woman Between Oram and Derbyshire rws.bbcrecords.co.uk The history of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop tends to settle quickly around a few famous names. Maddalena Fagandini is one of the people who can...

2 Sep 2026 Dacapo Records

The Tapes Almost Disappeared

Else Marie Pade became one of Denmark’s earliest major electronic composers during the 1950s and 1960s.

Yet parts of her electronic catalogue came surprisingly close to disappearing.

Dacapo Records’ recent reconstruction of her Complete Electronic Works 1955–2012 includes newly digitised pieces, previously unavailable material and works that remained overlooked for decades. The archive survived partly because a Danish Broadcasting Corporation technician contacted Pade when tapes were at risk and asked whether she wanted to preserve them. More boxes of tape were still appearing as recently as 2024.

I find that frightening.

Electronic music can feel technologically permanent because it belongs to machines.

In reality, magnetic tape is fragile.

A tape can deteriorate.

A machine capable of reading it can disappear.

A label can forget what is stored on a shelf.

The composer can fall out of cultural memory.

Then the music effectively stops existing even though the physical reel remains.

Digitisation therefore does more than improve access.

It can change history.

A work that was absent from the story can suddenly re-enter it.

The strange thing about forgotten art is that rediscovery often makes it seem newly created.

The sound has not changed.

The present finally caught up with the archive.

https://www.dacapo-records.dk/en/recordings/pade-complete-electronic-works-1955-2012

#ElseMariePade #ElectronicMusic #TapeMusic #MusicArchive

The Tapes Almost Disappeared dacapo-records.dk Else Marie Pade became one of Denmark’s earliest major electronic composers during the 1950s and 1960s. Yet parts of her electronic catalogue...

2 Sep 2026 Guitar Sound

The Guitar That Would Not Hold Its Pitch

Kevin Shields’ characteristic My Bloody Valentine guitar sound is often described as if it came from an enormous collection of effects.

One of its essential gestures is much simpler.

Shields loosens the tremolo arm of a Fender Jazzmaster, holds it while strumming and continuously moves the pitch slightly during the chord. Combined with open voicings and reverse reverb, the guitar stops behaving like a stable harmonic object.

The technique is sometimes called glide guitar.

What interests me is that the sound depends on instability at the source.

A normal approach would record a stable guitar and add modulation afterwards.

Shields physically changes pitch while the string is sounding.

Every strum therefore contains movement that cannot be completely separated from the performance.

That makes the famous wall of sound less complicated than it appears.

The ear hears layers because one chord contains several slightly shifting pitch relationships.

A guitar can begin sounding like several copies of itself drifting across tape.

There is an important production lesson hidden there.

Complexity does not always require more tracks.

Sometimes one unstable sound contains more information than ten perfectly stable ones.

https://www.fender.com/articles/fender-performances/my-bloody-valentines-kevin-shields-on-the-jazzmaster-and-his-iconic-albums

#MyBloodyValentine #KevinShields #Shoegaze #GuitarSound

The Guitar That Would Not Hold Its Pitch fender.com Kevin Shields’ characteristic My Bloody Valentine guitar sound is often described as if it came from an enormous collection of effects. One of...

2 Sep 2026 Drum And Bass

Fourteen Seconds Built New Forms

Roni Size made some of the music that helped move drum and bass from underground clubs toward a much wider audience, but the studio behind New Forms was surprisingly restricted.

One of his main tools was the Roland S-330 sampler.

It gave him only around fourteen seconds of total sampling time.

Fourteen seconds.

Yet Size preferred it to contemporary Akai machines because its screen and editing functions allowed him to manipulate those seconds in unusual ways. Samples could be reversed, stretched and reorganised while ghost notes helped construct increasingly detailed rhythms.

This is a useful reminder of what early drum and bass production actually involved.

A breakbeat was not an unlimited audio file sitting on a modern timeline.

Memory had a price.

Every sound competed for space.

If the sampler was full, something had to disappear or be shortened.

That restriction encourages another kind of listening.

You stop thinking in complete recordings.

A hi-hat may only need milliseconds.

A snare needs slightly more.

The useful part of a break may be smaller than the break itself.

Modern producers can load gigabytes without noticing.

Roni Size could build an album around seconds.