Blog - Lumlux Art

3 Oct 2026 Aether

One Projector, Three Dimensions

Max Cooper and Architecture Social Club built Aether from an unexpectedly economical illusion. Thousands of lines of string hang in space while a single projector sends light through them. From a distance, the illuminated intersections resemble a three-dimensional matrix of LEDs. Up close, the material construction becomes visible.
The installation turns projection into an object that can be entered and viewed from different positions. Visitors walk below and around a changing lattice while Cooper’s music is mapped to waves, surfaces and symmetrical forms. Image and sound share spatial behaviour rather than matching through a sequence of obvious beat triggers.
Its strongest lesson may be material rather than digital. Projection mapping is often discussed as a software problem, but the receiving surface determines what the software can achieve. String catches only fragments of the projected image. The empty space between the threads does as much work as the illuminated material.
For small installations, this suggests testing cheap physical structures before adding more projectors. Mesh, translucent fabric, fishing line or layers of scrim can divide one beam into several apparent depths. The projector remains flat. The material teaches the light to occupy space.

https://maxcooper.net/aether

#MaxCooper #Aether #LightInstallation #ProjectionArt #ElectronicMusic

One Projector, Three Dimensions Max Cooper Max Cooper – Aether light installation The light installation created in collaboration with Architecture Social Club

23 Sep 2026 Electronic Music

A Record Sold With Houseplants

Mort Garson’s Mother Earth’s Plantasia was not initially distributed like an ordinary album. Customers received it when they bought a plant from the Mother Earth shop on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, or a Simmons mattress from Sears. Its intended listener was described in the subtitle: “warm earth music for plants…and the people that love them.”

The claim that plants benefit from music is not what makes the record endure. More interesting is how the imagined audience affected the composition. Garson’s Moog pieces are melodic, gently animated and full of rounded attacks, small upward figures and bright changes in register. Titles such as “Symphony for a Spider Plant” and “Concerto for Philodendron and Pothos” give each piece a domestic setting before a note is heard.

A synthesizer was often introduced as a machine of the future. Garson placed it beside leaves, soil and routine household care. The record did not ask the Moog to imitate nature convincingly. It used electronic sound to address something that could not answer back. That odd premise produced music with none of the aggression or technical display often attached to early synthesizer demonstrations.

Mother Earth?s Plantasia

#MortGarson #Plantasia #MoogSynthesizer #ElectronicMusic

A Record Sold With Houseplants Sacred Bones Records Mort Garson: Mother Earth's Plantasia The first authorized reissue of Mort Garson's legendary 1976 album, 'Mother Earth's Plantasia.' Subtitled “warm earth music for plants…and the people that love them,” it was full of bucolic, charming, stoner-friendly, decidedly unscientific tunes enacted on the new-fangled device called the Moog.

20 Sep 2026 Caine’s Dripsody

One Drop Became an Orchestra

Hugh Le Caine’s Dripsody begins with one recorded drop of water. Made in 1955, the piece was also a practical study of his Special Purpose Tape Recorder, a machine that allowed several tape tracks to be played at different speeds. Le Caine changed the pitch of the drop by changing playback speed, repeated it in loops and layered the results until the original splash became a dense, rapidly moving texture.

Le Caine called the work an étude, a form normally used to test what a performer can do with an instrument. Here he was also testing the recorder. Slowing, reversing and layering the tape turned one acoustic event into playable material. The method now resembles ordinary sampling, but its clarity still holds: every layer can be traced back to the same brief drop.

https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2016/09/hugh-le-caine-feature/

#HughLeCaine #Dripsody #TapeMusic #ElectronicMusic

One Drop Became an Orchestra daily.redbullmusicacademy.com Hugh Le Caine The inventor, scientist and composer is one of the most important figures in Canadian electronic music.

17 Sep 2026 Electronic Music

A Machine That Suggested Music

Raymond Scott’s Electronium was not simply an early synthesizer. It was conceived as a system that could generate and perform musical material automatically, using electronic circuits and algorithmic processes. Scott described the relationship as a collaboration between a person and a machine. The operator did not have to enter a finished score and press play. The machine could propose musical events while the composer adjusted, selected and redirected them.

That makes the Electronium difficult to place in the usual history of electronic instruments. A keyboard waits for instructions. A tape machine reproduces decisions already made. A sequencer repeats information placed into it. Scott was trying to build something less obedient: an instrument with enough internal behaviour to surprise its maker without removing the maker from the process.

The surviving machine was never turned into a stable commercial product, and descriptions of its capabilities changed as Scott continued developing it. That incompleteness is part of the story rather than a flaw to hide. Musical tools are often presented as finished solutions, while actual creative practice is full of unstable patches, provisional controls and systems that are never quite complete. The Electronium makes that unfinished state visible. Its most durable contribution may be the model of the studio as a place where composition can emerge through negotiation with a system, not only through commands given to it.

https://artsandculture.google.com/story/the-electronium%E2%80%94a-cockpit-of-dreams-raymondscottarchives/vgVRMrpuDa3FnQ?hl=en

#RaymondScott #Electronium #ElectronicMusic #MusicTechnology

A Machine That Suggested Music Google Arts & Culture The Electronium—A Cockpit of Dreams - Google Arts & Culture The Electronium, conceived as a collaboration between man and machine, could instantaneously compose and perform music automatically using algorithms that were precursors of artificial intelligence. It is undoubtedly the magnum opus of Scott's electronic music career.

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.