Blog - Lumlux Art

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.

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 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

3 Sep 2026 Bruce Haack

Bruce Haack Wired People Into Synthesizers

Bruce Haack spent much of his career building electronic instruments rather than waiting for manufacturers to invent the ones he wanted.

One of the strangest was the Dermatron, an instrument that used the electrical conductivity of human skin as part of its control system. Haack demonstrated versions of it on American television during the 1960s, at one point using performers’ bodies as part of the circuit.

At the same time, he was producing electronic music for children, theatre, advertising and his own increasingly unusual records. The Electric Lucifer appeared on Columbia in 1970.

What I like about the Dermatron is that it makes the word “interface” very literal.

Modern electronic instruments usually place something between the body and electricity.

A key.

A pad.

A touchscreen.

Haack wondered whether the body itself could become part of the control voltage.

That idea no longer seems entirely eccentric. Sensors, conductive materials and biofeedback now appear regularly in interactive art.

Haack reached similar territory using homemade electronics at a time when the commercial synthesizer industry had barely begun.

Sometimes technological history looks cleaner than it really was because we remember the products that survived.

The homemade machines are easier to forget.

https://www.brucehaack.com/biography

#BruceHaack #ElectronicMusic #InventedInstruments #MusicTechnology

Bruce Haack Wired People Into Synthesizers Bruce Haack Biography — Bruce Haack Bruce Haack spent much of his career building electronic instruments rather than waiting for manufacturers to invent the ones he wanted. One of...

3 Sep 2026 Born Slippy

The 909 Under Born Slippy

“Born Slippy .NUXX” became enormous through Trainspotting, but the track’s rhythmic foundation is surprisingly straightforward.

Rick Smith has explained that the kick is a Roland TR-909 pushed hard through a mixing console. The familiar chords came from a Juno-106. Karl Hyde’s vocal was based on fragments he had written after nights spent drinking in London, and the vocal heard on the record was essentially captured in a single take.

Those ingredients explain why the record still feels divided against itself.

The machines are controlled.

The voice is not.

The 909 keeps moving forward with almost physical certainty while Hyde’s words arrive like fragments from somebody struggling to remain inside the same timeline.

This is more interesting than treating the track simply as a rave anthem.

Electronic repetition can sometimes make emotion stronger because it refuses to respond.

The beat does not slow down because the singer is exhausted.

The sequencer offers no sympathy.

That tension is part of what gives the track its force.

A machine repeats exactly.

The person standing above it cannot.

Roland Artist Interview – Underworld

#Underworld #BornSlippy #TR909 #ElectronicMusic

The 909 Under Born Slippy Roland Indonesia Blog Roland Artist Interview - Underworld “Born Slippy .NUXX” became enormous through Trainspotting, but the track’s rhythmic foundation is surprisingly straightforward. Rick Smith has explained th…

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...

1 Sep 2026 Electronic Music

When 0.8 Seconds Felt Enormous

The Fairlight CMI helped change recorded sound from something musicians played back into something they could play.

Developed in Australia by Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie and released at the end of the 1970s, the system became one of the first commercially influential digital sampling instruments. The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia describes it as the world’s first polyphonic digital sampling synthesizer.

By modern standards its early sampling capacity seems tiny.

Jean-Michel Jarre has recalled working with a maximum sample length of roughly 0.8 seconds at 8-bit resolution on an early Fairlight.

Yet that fraction of a second was enough to change composition.

A voice could become a chord.

A broken object could become percussion.

A sound recorded somewhere in the world could be mapped across a keyboard and played at pitches that had never existed in the original recording.

Today we can load hours of high-resolution audio into a laptop without thinking about memory.

That abundance makes it easy to forget how radical 0.8 seconds once was.

The important technological breakthrough was not duration.

It was separation.

For the first time, a tiny recorded fragment could be detached from the event that produced it and treated almost like an oscillator.

Less than one second of memory was enough to introduce an entirely different idea of what an instrument could be.

https://www.nfsa.gov.au/collection/item/sampling-sounds-fairlight-cmi

#FairlightCMI #Sampling #MusicTechnology #ElectronicMusic

When 0.8 Seconds Felt Enormous nfsa.gov.au The Fairlight CMI helped change recorded sound from something musicians played back into something they could play. Developed in Australia by...

1 Sep 2026 Blue Monday

Blue Monday Needed a Homemade Circuit

New Order’s “Blue Monday” now sounds like a piece of electronic music whose machines must have known exactly what they were doing.

They did not.

The group had a sequencer and a drum machine that could not communicate properly with each other. Bernard Sumner has recalled taking the equipment to Martin Usher, who designed an electronic circuit that allowed the two machines to synchronise.

When they connected everything and pressed start, the drum machine and synthesizer finally began running together.

That technological connection became part of the session from which “Blue Monday” emerged.

I like this because synchronization is now practically invisible.

Connect MIDI or load a plug-in and every machine immediately knows the tempo.

In 1983, getting two electronic devices to agree about time could itself require invention.

The song therefore sits at an interesting point in electronic music history.

The composition was partly enabled by somebody solving an engineering problem.

A homemade circuit became a musical collaborator.

This also says something about technological limitations.

We tend to imagine that earlier electronic musicians achieved interesting results despite primitive equipment.

Sometimes they achieved them because the equipment was incomplete enough that musicians had to invent new relationships between the machines.

Before the groove existed, somebody had to build the wire that allowed the groove to happen.

https://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/new-order-how-we-wrote-blue-monday-762505

#NewOrder #BlueMonday #Sequencer #ElectronicMusic

Blue Monday Needed a Homemade Circuit NME New Order - How We Wrote 'Blue Monday' New Order released their first new album in a decade in 2015 – reason to celebrate indeed. However, ‘Blue Monday’, a track that 30 years on, remains as powerful as ever, will always be considered their defining anthem. In 2012, we asked the Bernard Sumner and since-departed bassist Peter Hook how they wrote the classic […]

31 Aug 2026 Electronic Music

A Trumpet That Forgot It Was a Trumpet

Jon Hassell transformed trumpet playing by combining techniques influenced by Indian classical singing with electronic processing.

On Vernal Equinox, first released in 1977, the trumpet can become difficult to locate inside the music. It bends between pitches, passes through effects and sits among percussion, synthesizer drones, environmental recordings and other textures. Hassell later developed the term “Fourth World” for the broader musical territory he was pursuing.

What I like is that the electronics do not simply decorate the trumpet.

They destabilise its identity.

We still recognise breath and phrasing, but the instrument begins behaving like something between voice, wind instrument and synthesizer.

That seems more interesting than using effects to make an acoustic instrument merely larger.

Hassell used processing to make the source ambiguous.

Contemporary software gives us endless tools for transforming recorded instruments, but the artistic question remains the same.

How much identity should survive?

Process too little and the source remains predictable.

Process too much and its physical origin disappears completely.

Hassell often seems to occupy the unstable space between those extremes.

You hear a human breath entering the system.

What comes out no longer belongs entirely to the trumpet.

Discography

#JonHassell #FourthWorld #Trumpet #ElectronicMusic

A Trumpet That Forgot It Was a Trumpet Jon Hassell Discography - Jon Hassell Discography

31 Aug 2026 Electronic Music

SOPHIE Designed Materials That Never Existed

SOPHIE often talked about synthesis in physical terms.

Rather than asking how to imitate a conventional instrument, the producer thought about materials: bubbles, latex, metal, liquid, plastic. Sounds could behave as though they possessed weight, elasticity, friction or surface.

That approach is part of why tracks such as “BIPP,” “LEMONADE” and “HARD” still sound so distinctive. Much of the percussion does not convincingly resemble acoustic percussion at all. It suggests imaginary objects being squeezed, struck, stretched or shattered.

SOPHIE’s brother and studio engineer Ben Long later described the same way of working: sounds would be discussed in terms such as needing more fizz or more bubbles. He also noted that SOPHIE preferred working deeply with a relatively small set of tools rather than endlessly collecting plug-ins.

That seems important.

Synthesis is often taught as reconstruction.

Here is how to synthesise a kick.

Here is how to synthesise brass.

Here is how to reproduce a bass guitar.

SOPHIE’s work points toward a more interesting question.

What if the object producing the sound has never existed?

Then synthesis becomes almost sculptural.

You are not reproducing reality.

You are deciding what an impossible material would sound like if somebody hit it.

#SOPHIE #SoundDesign #Synthesis #ElectronicMusic

SOPHIE Designed Materials That Never Existed Apple Music - Web Player Product by SOPHIE on Apple Music Album · 2015 · 8 Songs