Desert Guitar Without Standing Still

24 Aug 2026 Audiovisual Art

When Image and Sound Share Structure

Ryoichi Kurokawa’s syn_ is an audiovisual performance built as a diptych with 2.1-channel sound. First created in 2011, it has been performed internationally in spaces ranging from Tokyo’s Studio Coast to festivals and arts centres in Europe and North America. Kurokawa describes his broader practice in terms of constructing audiovisual phenomena from field recordings and digitally generated structures.

What interests me from a VJ perspective is that the image does not appear to be decoration placed behind finished music.

Sound and image seem to belong to the same organisational system: fragmentation, rhythm, interruption, density and sudden precision appear in both.

That changes the role of synchronization. Matching a visual flash to a kick drum is the most obvious way of connecting image and sound, but it is only one possibility. Both media can instead share behaviour.

A visual texture can become dense when the sound becomes structurally dense without literally following every beat.

The strongest audiovisual work may happen when you cannot easily decide which medium is leading the other.

https://www.ryoichikurokawa.com/project/syn_.html

#RyoichiKurokawa #AudiovisualArt #LiveVisuals #ExperimentalFilm

When Image and Sound Share Structure Ryoichi Kurokawa’s syn_ is an audiovisual performance built as a diptych with 2.1-channel sound. First created in 2011, it has been performed international…

24 Aug 2026 Cascade

Producing an Album on Headphones

Floating Points made much of Cascade away from his normal studio. Sam Shepherd has described working in the Californian desert with a laptop and headphones rather than the larger collection of equipment available at home. The 2024 album nevertheless became an expansive return toward dancefloor-focused electronic music, with long tracks, Buchla-inspired rhythms and detailed electronic structures.

That limitation interests me more than the equipment he did have.

A fully equipped studio offers possibilities, but possibilities can slow decisions. Remove most of the hardware and the problem changes from “what can I use?” to “what can I make this do?”

Electronic musicians often accumulate tools because every synthesizer promises another colour. Yet some of the records that sound most carefully designed emerge from much narrower conditions.

Cascade is a useful reminder that complexity in the finished sound does not require complexity in the working environment.

Sometimes restricting the studio does not reduce creativity. It concentrates it.

https://ninjatune.net/release/floating-points/cascade

#FloatingPoints #Cascade #ElectronicMusic #MusicProduction

Producing an Album on Headphones Ninja Tune Cascade by Floating Points Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points has announced his new album Cascade will be released on 13 September via Ninja Tune. Along with the announcement Shepherd has shared lead single 'Key103' which comes with visuals continuing his ongoing collaboration with Tokyo based artist Akiko Nakayama.Cascade is a...

24 Aug 2026 Field Recording

Listening Before Making Sound

KMRU’s work repeatedly begins with recording environments. Joseph Kamaru has built compositions from field recordings gathered in Nairobi and many other places, treating apparently minor environmental sounds as material worthy of sustained attention. His practice has expanded into installations, performances and long-form ambient works in which place is not simply captured but reshaped through processing and composition.

I find the order of operations interesting.

Music production usually begins with making a sound: play a synth, strike a drum, choose a sample. Field recording can reverse that relationship. First you listen. The world has already generated the material.

That produces another question: when does documentation become composition?

A recording of traffic, wind or machinery may initially describe a place. Once it is edited, layered, filtered and placed beside another recording, it begins constructing a place that never actually existed.

The microphone therefore becomes more than a device for collecting sound. It can be an instrument for noticing what most of us have trained ourselves to ignore.

https://kmru.info/

#KMRU #FieldRecording #KenyanMusic #SoundArt

Listening Before Making Sound KMRU’s work repeatedly begins with recording environments. Joseph Kamaru has built compositions from field recordings gathered in Nairobi and many other pl…

24 Aug 2026 Afrofuturism

History Mixed Like a Sound Collage

Moor Mother’s The Great Bailout approaches Britain’s relationship with colonialism, slavery and commerce through something closer to a sonic essay than a conventional album narrative. Camae Ayewa combines spoken language, electronics, jazz-derived textures, noise and contributions from musicians including Lonnie Holley and harpist Mary Lattimore. The music moves between fragility and abrasion rather than settling into one genre.

That instability feels important.

Historical subjects are often presented to us as completed information: dates, locations, documents, statistics. Sound works differently. A voice can overlap another voice. Noise can interrupt meaning. Something from the past can suddenly feel uncomfortably close.

I like the idea of an album behaving less like a timeline and more like an archive whose boxes have been opened simultaneously.

Music cannot prove historical facts by itself, but it can change the emotional distance at which we encounter them. Sometimes confusion, repetition and collision describe the persistence of history better than a perfectly ordered chronology.

https://moormother.net/

#MoorMother #ExperimentalMusic #SoundCollage #Afrofuturism

History Mixed Like a Sound Collage Moor Mother Moor Mother | The Great Bailout Moor Mother's 'The Great Bailout' (Deluxe) Out Now On ANTI- Records

24 Aug 2026 Ambient Music

Sampling as a Memory Machine

Susumu Yokota’s Symbol is assembled from fragments of classical recordings by composers including Debussy, Ravel, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky, alongside material connected with John Cage and Meredith Monk. Yet the 2004 album rarely feels like a demonstration of clever sampling. The fragments are transformed into an atmospheric world where the historical source can become difficult to identify.

What interests me is what happens to time inside a sample. A digital fragment may last only seconds, but it contains an older performance, an older recording technology, another room and another interpretation. Yokota places those pieces beside one another until musical history stops behaving chronologically.

Sampling is sometimes discussed mainly through questions of borrowing. Symbol suggests another possibility: sampling as memory construction.

The original recording survives, but its function changes. A piece of orchestral music can become texture. A voice can become architecture. Something created decades earlier suddenly occupies the same musical present as everything surrounding it.

The sampler does not merely repeat history. It changes the room in which history is heard.

Symbol

#SusumuYokota #Sampling #AmbientMusic #ExperimentalMusic

Sampling as a Memory Machine Susumu Yokota’s Symbol is assembled from fragments of classical recordings by composers including Debussy, Ravel, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky, alongside mate…

24 Aug 2026 Desert Blues

Desert Guitar Without Standing Still

Tinariwen’s 2026 album Hoggar continues a musical language rooted in the Tuareg culture of the Sahara, but the group has never behaved as if tradition means refusing outside contact. Their earlier recordings already connected electric guitar, Tamashek poetry and cyclical desert rhythms with encounters involving rock, folk and experimental musicians. Hoggar, released on 13 March 2026, adds collaborations including José González and Sudanese singer Sulafa Elyas.

That ongoing openness is what I find interesting. Tinariwen’s guitars can sound instantly recognisable, yet recognisability has not forced them into repeating one historical version of themselves.

There is an important difference between changing a tradition to make it fashionable and allowing it to continue meeting the world. Tinariwen seem closer to the second possibility.

A musical identity can remain strong without becoming sealed. Perhaps the clearest evidence that a tradition is alive is that it can absorb another musician without disappearing behind them.

https://www.tinariwen.com/

#Tinariwen #TuaregMusic #DesertBlues #Mali

Desert Guitar Without Standing Still tinariwen.com Tinariwen The official website for Tinariwen. New album 'Amatssou' out now.

24 Aug 2026 Chernobyl

Recording the Reactor Itself

For Chernobyl, Hildur Guðnadóttir did not simply compose music inspired by a nuclear power station. Part of the sound world was built from recordings made inside Lithuania’s decommissioned Ignalina nuclear plant, whose RBMK reactors were similar to those used at Chernobyl. Industrial resonance, machinery and the acoustics of the building became raw musical material alongside voices and instruments. The soundtrack was released in 2019, but its production method still feels unusually direct.

What interests me is the decision to begin with the physical environment rather than imitate it later with synthesizers. A metallic drone generated by an actual industrial structure carries a different kind of information than a preset labelled “dark ambience.” The building already contains irregularities, resonances and mechanical histories that a composer can discover rather than invent.

Field recording is often treated as background texture. Here it becomes closer to orchestration. The place itself is one of the instruments.

https://www.deutschegrammophon.com/en/catalogue/products/chernobyl-soundtrack-gunadottir-7130

#HildurGudnadottir #Chernobyl #SoundDesign #FilmMusic

Recording the Reactor Itself Deutsche Grammophon CHERNOBYL Soundtrack / Guðnadóttir | Deutsche Grammophon Chernobyl is a five-part miniseries by producer Craig Mazin, which premiered on HBO on May 6 2019. The series deals with the nuclear disaster which occurred in

24 Aug 2026 Air Gego’s Reticulárea

A Sculpture Made Mostly of Air

Gego’s Reticulárea, first created in 1969 for the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas, is constructed from networks of aluminium and stainless-steel wire suspended through space. Different densities of mesh connect into a structure that viewers could originally walk among rather than simply observe from outside.

That makes it difficult to decide where the sculpture ends.

Traditional sculpture often begins with mass. Stone, bronze or wood occupies a volume and pushes the viewer outside it. Gego works almost in reverse. The lines are physically thin, but they organise enormous amounts of empty space.

What I find interesting is that the air does most of the visual work. Every wire creates relationships with other wires, but also with the gaps between them. Move your head slightly and the geometry reorganises.

It has something surprisingly close to generative art. The system is fixed, yet the image is never completely fixed because your position continually calculates another version.

The sculpture does not need to move. The viewer supplies the animation.

https://fundaciongego.com/catalogo-razonado-old/glosario/

#Gego #Reticularea #VenezuelanArt #Sculpture

A Sculpture Made Mostly of Air Gego’s Reticulárea, first created in 1969 for the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas, is constructed from networks of aluminium and stainless-steel wire susp…

24 Aug 2026 Audiovisual Art

Thirty-Five Speakers for One Album

Ryuichi Sakamoto and Shiro Takatani’s async–immersion transforms an album into something closer to an audiovisual environment. The installation was first shown in 2023 inside the basement of the former Kyoto Shimbun newspaper printing plant. Sound engineer ZAK remixed Sakamoto’s async for a 35-speaker system, while Takatani’s imagery occupied a 26.4-metre-wide LED screen.

What interests me from a VJ perspective is the shift from synchronization to space. Sound and image do not merely meet on a timeline. Their physical scale changes the relationship. A sound can arrive from somewhere in the room while the visual field extends far beyond the proportions of a normal cinema screen.

That makes the architecture part of the audiovisual composition.

On a laptop we usually build visuals inside a rectangle and mix audio between left and right. Installations like this expose how arbitrary those boundaries are. Once the room becomes available as material, composition can include direction, distance, movement and the viewer’s own position.

The timeline is no longer the only place where sound and image can meet.

https://www.sitesakamoto.com/artworks/23/

#RyuichiSakamoto #ShiroTakatani #AudiovisualArt #LiveVisuals

Thirty-Five Speakers for One Album Ryuichi Sakamoto and Shiro Takatani’s async–immersion transforms an album into something closer to an audiovisual environment. The installation was first s…

24 Aug 2026 Arooj Aftab

Night as a Production Tool

Arooj Aftab has described night as a major source of inspiration for Night Reign. But what catches my attention is how that idea enters the arrangement rather than remaining only a lyrical concept. The album moves among jazz, South Asian musical traditions, electronics and carefully controlled space. Her voice often occupies the centre without needing a dense wall of accompaniment around it.

The record also treats older material as something that can remain alive through rearrangement. “Na Gul” works with poetry by eighteenth-century Urdu poet and musician Mah Laqa Bai Chanda, while “Bolo Na” returns in a form that places an older love song inside a different emotional and political context.

What I like here is the refusal to make tradition sound preserved behind glass. Material can move between centuries because musicians keep changing its surroundings.

The studio becomes part of that process. Space, breath, bass, electronics and silence can alter how an old text reaches us without requiring the text itself to become contemporary.

Sometimes production is interpretation.

About

#AroojAftab #NightReign #MusicProduction #ExperimentalMusic

Night as a Production Tool Arooj Aftab | Home About - Arooj Aftab | Home Official Site

24 Aug 2026 Album Waiting Fifty Years

An Album Waiting Fifty Years

Brazilian group Grupo Um formed in the mid-1970s while its members were playing with Hermeto Pascoal. Their music pushed contemporary jazz, improvisation and Afro-Brazilian rhythm into increasingly experimental territory. Their first album, Starting Point, was recorded in 1975 but remained unreleased for almost half a century. Far Out Records later recovered that material, while another archival release, Nineteen Seventy Seven, appeared in January 2026.

There is something strange about hearing experimental music decades after the moment that produced it. We naturally interpret a recording through everything that came afterwards. Ideas that might have sounded radical in 1975 can now resemble techniques we already recognise.

But the recording itself has not changed.

That creates an interesting reversal. Instead of asking whether old music still sounds modern, perhaps we should occasionally ask how much supposedly modern music has been quietly following paths that earlier musicians already discovered.

An archive can change musical history simply by opening a tape box.

https://www.faroutrecordings.com/artist/396914-grupo-um

#GrupoUm #BrazilianJazz #ExperimentalMusic #BrazilianMusic

An Album Waiting Fifty Years Brazilian group Grupo Um formed in the mid-1970s while its members were playing with Hermeto Pascoal. Their music pushed contemporary jazz, improvisation a…