Blog - Lumlux Art

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.

30 Aug 2026 Acoustics

The Room Became the Loudspeaker

Maryanne Amacher did not simply compose sounds for rooms.

She wanted the rooms themselves to behave acoustically.

In her Music for Sound-Joined Rooms installations, she worked with sound transmitted through architectural structures, using walls, floors, corridors and connected spaces to shape what listeners heard and physically felt.

Her own description is wonderful: rooms, walls and corridors that sing.

That idea changes the normal relationship between music and architecture.

Usually we build a composition somewhere else, bring loudspeakers into a room and then try to minimise whatever the architecture does to the mix.

Amacher did almost the reverse.

The building became part of the signal chain.

Earlier, beginning with City-Links in 1967, she had already experimented with microphones transmitting remote environments over telephone lines, effectively connecting distant places into one listening system.

Decades before networked performances became easy, she was treating telecommunications infrastructure as musical material.

What stays with me is the scale of her thinking.

The instrument could be a room.

Or several rooms.

Or a city connected to another city.

Electronic music is often imagined as something generated inside machines.

Amacher kept asking what would happen if the machine was only one component inside a much larger acoustic system that included architecture, distance and the listener’s own ears.

https://www.foundationforcontemporaryarts.org/recipients/maryanne-amacher/

#MaryanneAmacher #SoundArt #Acoustics #ExperimentalMusic

The Room Became the Loudspeaker foundationforcontemporaryarts.org Maryanne Amacher | FCA Grant Recipient Maryanne Amacher did not simply compose sounds for rooms. She wanted the rooms themselves to behave acoustically. In her Music for Sound-Joined...

30 Aug 2026 Annette Peacock

Putting the Voice Through a Moog

Around 1970, Annette Peacock was doing something with synthesizers that still feels surprisingly modern: using a Moog modular system to process her voice in real time.

The Bob Moog Foundation documents how Peacock and pianist Paul Bley toured Europe with an ARP synthesizer and Moog modules, with Peacock using the Moog specifically for vocal modification.

That is quite different from simply singing alongside a synthesizer.

Her voice itself entered the electronic system.

By the time I’m the One appeared in 1972, Peacock had developed a music in which jazz, electronics, rock, improvisation and manipulated vocals refused to settle into a comfortable category.

What interests me is how early this was.

Today a vocalist can open a laptop and choose from pitch correction, spectral processors, vocoders, formant shifting, granular effects and hundreds of plug-ins designed specifically for the voice.

Peacock was experimenting when electronic processing still meant understanding patch cables, oscillators and signal paths well enough to make the equipment cooperate.

The voice is usually treated as the most human element in a recording.

Peacock seems to have realised very early that this made it the perfect thing to make strange.

Electronic music history remembers many synthesizer players.

It should remember more clearly the people who asked what would happen if the synthesizer started playing the singer.

https://www.universalmusic.fr/artistes/20000043831

#AnnettePeacock #Moog #VoiceProcessing #ExperimentalMusic

Putting the Voice Through a Moog universalmusic.fr Annette Peacock - Universal Music France Tout sur Annette Peacock : news, biographie, discographie, photos, clips, vidéos, paroles, boutique...

28 Aug 2026 Experimental Music

Laurie Anderson Built Her Own Duet Partner

Laurie Anderson’s Self-Playing Violin from 1974 contained a speaker and amplifier inside the instrument. A prerecorded violin part played from the body while Anderson could perform another part live on the strings.

One violin effectively contained two performers.

That idea seems simple now because looping is everywhere. A pedal can record a phrase in seconds and immediately turn one musician into an ensemble.

Anderson’s instrument feels different because the playback system is physically embedded inside the object that originally produced the sound.

The violin appears to remember itself.

She later used the instrument in Duets on Ice, a performance in which she stood on ice skates frozen into blocks of ice and continued performing until the ice melted enough that she lost her balance.

Time was therefore not only musical.

It was physical.

The concert duration was determined by temperature.

I like how several systems meet here: recorded loop, live performance, instrument design, body weight and melting ice.

None is simply decoration.

The technology creates a duet.

The ice creates the clock.

The performer exists between both.

It is the kind of work that makes the boundary between music and visual art feel completely unnecessary.

https://www.nonesuch.com/artists/laurie-anderson

#LaurieAnderson #PerformanceArt #ExperimentalMusic #InventedInstruments

Laurie Anderson Built Her Own Duet Partner Nonesuch Records Official Website Nonesuch Records Laurie Anderson Laurie Anderson’s Self-Playing Violin from 1974 contained a speaker and amplifier inside the instrument. A prerecorded violin part played from the body whi…

26 Aug 2026 Arthur Russell

The Cellist Who Walked Into Disco

Arthur Russell arrived in New York as an experimental cellist and composer. Then, in 1977, an unexpected visit to a disco changed the direction of his work.

Instead of treating club music as intellectually inferior to experimental composition, Russell became fascinated by repetition and by what happened socially when people shared it on a dancefloor. He went on to make influential disco recordings while continuing to work with cello, voice, improvisation and the downtown avant-garde.

By World of Echo, the borders had almost disappeared. Cello and voice pass through echo and feedback until the processing feels inseparable from the composition itself.

What I like about Russell is that he makes our genre categories look unnecessarily rigid.

Disco and experimental music are often placed on opposite sides of an imaginary wall. One supposedly belongs to bodies and clubs, the other to listening rooms and ideas.

Russell seems to have heard repetition in both.

A cello phrase repeating through delay can become as hypnotic as a dance groove. A disco record can be as formally strange as an avant-garde composition.

His career is a useful reminder that experimental music does not need to sound difficult.

Sometimes the experiment is simply refusing to respect the border everybody else has agreed to keep.

https://www.laphil.com/people/arthur-russell

#ArthurRussell #WorldOfEcho #ExperimentalMusic #Disco

The Cellist Who Walked Into Disco laphil.com Arthur Russell Arthur Russell arrived in New York as an experimental cellist and composer. Then, in 1977, an unexpected visit to a disco changed the direction of his work…

26 Aug 2026 Deep Listening

Listening Below the Music

Pauline Oliveros developed Deep Listening from a deceptively simple distinction: hearing happens continuously, while listening involves attention. Her practice expanded from experimental composition and electroacoustic music into exercises that asked musicians and non-musicians to listen not only to performed sound but also to environments, thoughts and sounds normally filtered from awareness.

The idea feels increasingly relevant in a culture where almost everything competes for attention.

Music production can encourage the opposite behaviour. We solo tracks, isolate frequencies and decide which sound matters. Deep Listening widens the frame again.

What happens outside the track?

The ventilation system. Traffic through a wall. Someone shifting in a chair. Your own breathing.

None of these sounds needs to become a sample. Sometimes simply noticing them changes how you understand silence.

Oliveros described listening as going beneath the surface while remaining aware of the whole field of sound.

That makes listening itself feel like a compositional tool.

Before deciding what a piece needs, perhaps there is another question:

What is already sounding?

Deep Listening

#PaulineOliveros #DeepListening #ExperimentalMusic #SoundPractice

Listening Below the Music deeplistening.rpi.edu Deep Listening – The Center For Deep Listening Pauline Oliveros developed Deep Listening from a deceptively simple distinction: hearing happens continuously, while listening involves...

26 Aug 2026 Bendik Giske

The Saxophone as a Drum Machine

Bendik Giske takes ideas associated with electronic and club music and tries to produce them physically with saxophone, breath and microphones. He has described his approach as playing the building blocks of electronic music live, without layering or looping wherever possible.

That limitation immediately changes the sound.

A sequencer never runs out of breath. A human body does.

Giske uses circular breathing, key noises and contact microphones so that the mechanism of the saxophone becomes audible alongside its conventional tone. Fingers hitting keys can begin to function almost like percussion.

I like how this reverses the normal relationship between acoustic and electronic music.

Instead of processing an instrument until it behaves like a machine, the performer trains his body to approach the repetition and endurance associated with machines.

But the imperfections remain.

Breath changes. Muscles tire. Timing shifts slightly.

Those supposedly unwanted differences may be exactly what keeps repetition alive.

The machine becomes the reference point, but the body refuses to disappear.

https://www.bendikgiske.com/

#BendikGiske #Saxophone #ExperimentalMusic #ClubCulture

The Saxophone as a Drum Machine Bendik Giske Bendik Giske Bendik Giske takes ideas associated with electronic and club music and tries to produce them physically with saxophone, breath and microphones...

26 Aug 2026 Experimental Music

One Pulse for Forty Minutes

Oren Ambarchi’s Quixotism unfolds as a single long composition divided into five parts. At its foundation sits double-time electronic percussion by Thomas Brinkmann. Around that pulse, guitar, strings, electronics and other contributions gradually enter and disappear. The transitions can happen so slowly that the listener notices the new state before noticing exactly when the change occurred.

That is what fascinates me.

Most electronic arrangements announce their structure. Breakdown. Drop. New section. Fill. Return.

Quixotism works more like a landscape changing while you walk through it.

The pulse provides continuity, but almost everything around it can evolve.

This makes repetition feel less like looping and more like a measurement device. Because one element remains relatively stable, tiny changes elsewhere suddenly become important.

It is a useful production lesson.

You do not always need another chord progression or another section to create movement.

Sometimes the strongest arrangement decision is to keep one thing almost stubbornly unchanged while the entire world around it moves.

https://www.blacktrufflerecords.com/

#OrenAmbarchi #Quixotism #ExperimentalMusic #Minimalism

One Pulse for Forty Minutes blacktrufflerecords.com Black Truffle Records | Releases Oren Ambarchi’s Quixotism unfolds as a single long composition divided into five parts. At its foundation sits double-time electronic percussion...

25 Aug 2026 Album Made Almost Entirely

An Album Made Almost Entirely From Voice

Hatis Noit’s Aura was constructed almost completely from her own voice. She recorded the principal vocals in Berlin in only eight hours. Layers were then looped, edited and eventually re-amplified inside St John of Jerusalem Church in London so the recordings could absorb a real architectural ambience.

The exception is “Inori,” which includes a field recording of the sea made about one kilometre from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2017.

What interests me is the re-amping process. Digital production makes it possible to create almost any imagined acoustic space through convolution and reverb, yet the team chose to send the recorded voice back into an actual building and record what the room did to it.

The architecture became an effect processor.

There is something beautifully circular about that. A voice enters a microphone, becomes data, leaves a loudspeaker, touches stone and air, and becomes a recording again.

Sometimes the most interesting signal chain includes a building.

https://www.hatisnoit.com/works

#HatisNoit #VoiceArt #ExperimentalMusic #SoundProduction

An Album Made Almost Entirely From Voice hatisnoit MUSIC | hatisnoit Hatis Noit’s Aura was constructed almost completely from her own voice. She recorded the principal vocals in Berlin in only eight hours. Layers...

25 Aug 2026 Egyptian Music

Improvisation Inside a Twelve-Piece Machine

Maurice Louca’s Elephantine was recorded in Stockholm with a twelve-piece ensemble containing two percussionists, bass, vibraphone, saxophones, bass flute, tuba, clarinets, voice, oud, violin and Louca himself on guitar and piano. Released in 2019, the record moves between written composition and improvisation while drawing musicians from Egypt, Iraq and several European countries into one ensemble.

That line between composition and improvisation interests me.

With twelve players, complete freedom could easily become chaos. Write everything down, and the individual personalities might disappear. Louca seems interested in the unstable area between those extremes, where enough structure exists for a large ensemble to move together but enough space remains for musicians to change what happens inside it.

Electronic production has a similar problem. A sequencer can organise almost everything with absolute precision, but precision is not automatically life.

Sometimes the most interesting musical system is not the one with the most control. It is the one that controls exactly enough.

https://northernspyrecs.com/product/elephantine/

#MauriceLouca #EgyptianMusic #Improvisation #ExperimentalMusic

Improvisation Inside a Twelve-Piece Machine Northern Spy Records Northern Spy Records Northern Spy Records — official site and store. Browse the catalog, artists, news, and tour dates.

24 Aug 2026 Experimental Music

Fifty-Two Strings Becoming Noise

Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima was composed in 1960 for 52 string instruments. Instead of treating those instruments primarily as carriers of melody and harmony, Penderecki pushed them toward clusters, glissandi, extreme registers and unconventional methods of producing sound. Players strike or bow unusual parts of their instruments, while blocks of sound expand and contract almost like physical objects.

The piece was originally titled 8’37” before receiving the name by which it became famous.

What interests me is how radically the identity of the string orchestra changes.

We know what a violin is supposed to sound like. Penderecki uses fifty-two familiar instruments to construct something that can initially seem electronic, industrial or impossible to locate.

No synthesizer is required.

That is useful to remember when thinking about experimental sound design. New timbre does not always require new technology. Sometimes it comes from asking an old instrument to perform an unfamiliar physical action.

The instrument has not changed.

Our definition of what counts as its sound has.

https://penderecki-center.pl/en/krzysztof-penderecki

#KrzysztofPenderecki #Threnody #Sonorism #ExperimentalMusic

Fifty-Two Strings Becoming Noise penderecki-center.pl ?ycie i twórczo?? - Europejskie Centrum Muzyki Krzysztofa Pendereckiego (en) Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima was composed in 1960 for 52 string instruments. Instead of treating those instruments primarily…