Trying to Hear Light

25 Aug 2026 Electronic Music

The Subway Became Part of the Synthesizer

When Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles travelled to Hong Kong in 1996 for the International Computer Music Conference, Henke carried a recorder through Hong Kong and Guangzhou. Those field recordings later became part of Monolake’s Hongkong. The closing track, “Mass Transit Railway,” is based on sound captured inside a Hong Kong subway train. The album was produced with instruments including a Prophet VS, Yamaha SY77 and TG77, Ensoniq ASR-10, Waldorf Microwave and an Atari running Notator, alongside a step sequencer Henke wrote in Max.

What interests me is how naturally the city enters the electronic system. The subway recording is not simply atmosphere placed behind a track. It becomes another component in a studio already built from samplers, synthesizers and code.

Sampling a city does something strange to geography. A train journey becomes repeatable. A moment that happened once can be filtered, looped and reorganised twenty years later.

Electronic music can sometimes feel completely synthetic. Hongkong reminds me that a machine-made composition can still contain a very specific street, vehicle and moment in time.

https://www.roberthenke.com/releases/ml-000.html

#Monolake #RobertHenke #FieldRecording #ElectronicMusic

The Subway Became Part of the Synthesizer roberthenke.com Monolake - Hongkong When Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles travelled to Hong Kong in 1996 for the International Computer Music Conference, Henke carried a recorder through Hong…

24 Aug 2026 But the

A Painting Made for a Ritual

Nepalese paubha paintings can look astonishingly dense to someone encountering them simply as images. Deities, architectural forms, geometric structures and repeated motifs occupy almost every part of the cloth. But the tradition was not developed merely to create something visually impressive.

The Nepal Academy of Fine Arts places paubha among traditional arts closely connected with religion, narrative, ritual and everyday cultural life. The Nepal Art Council continues to present the form as part of a living Himalayan artistic tradition rather than only an archaeological inheritance.

That changes how I think about composition.

In contemporary art we often assume that an artwork exists primarily to be looked at. A ritual painting may also function as an aid to devotion, storytelling or contemplation. Its organisation therefore follows another logic.

The density is not necessarily decorative excess. Information has to be located, recognised and revisited.

A screen interface also organises symbols so that a viewer knows where attention should move next. Paubha painting reminds me that complex visual information systems existed long before we started calling anything an interface.

https://www.nepalartcouncil.org.np/publications/paubha-scroll-paintings/

#Paubha #NepaliArt #HimalayanArt #TraditionalPainting

A Painting Made for a Ritual nepalartcouncil.org.np One moment, please... Nepalese paubha paintings can look astonishingly dense to someone encountering them simply as images. Deities, architectural forms, geometric structures an…

24 Aug 2026 Cabaret Crusades

History Performed by Clay

For Cabaret Crusades: The Path to Cairo, Egyptian artist Wael Shawky reconstructed episodes from the medieval Crusades using approximately 120 handmade clay puppets. The larger trilogy draws on Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, shifting attention toward historical narratives recorded from an Arab perspective.

The choice of puppets makes the work stranger than a conventional historical reconstruction.

A puppet cannot pretend that we are watching reality. We constantly see the mechanism of representation. The figures are obviously artificial, yet they perform events whose consequences were violently real.

That distance interests me.

Film normally tries to make historical reconstruction convincing through costumes, locations and actors. Shawky removes that illusion almost completely. History becomes theatre, and because the manipulation is visible, we start thinking about who is moving the characters.

Perhaps that is appropriate. Historical narratives are also constructed. Events happened, but every retelling involves selection, framing and perspective.

The puppet strings are simply more visible than the ones inside a history book.

https://www.lissongallery.com/artists/wael-shawky

#WaelShawky #EgyptianArt #CabaretCrusades #ContemporaryArt

History Performed by Clay Lisson Gallery Lisson Gallery Wael Shawky tackles notions of national, religious and artistic identity in contemporary art through film, performance, and storytelling.

24 Aug 2026 Audiovisual Art

Visuals From Particle Physics

Herman Kolgen’s ISOTOPP grew from a residency at GANIL, the French heavy-ion research facility. Rather than using particle physics simply as futuristic decoration, the Montréal multimedia artist developed an audiovisual work around molecular abstraction and energy transfer. The project eventually became a black-and-white audiovisual performance.

That starting point interests me from a VJ perspective.

Visual performance often begins with images that already look interesting. Film fragments, generated geometry, typography or textures are then synchronised to music. Kolgen’s approach suggests another possibility: begin with a process that is normally invisible and ask how it might acquire both image and sound.

The scientific phenomenon is not automatically the artwork. Transformation is still required.

But it gives the audiovisual system a shared conceptual source. Sound and image do not have to be connected only because a visual event happens on the beat. They can behave like two different outputs generated from the same underlying idea.

That feels much closer to composing audiovisual work than simply decorating music with moving pictures.

https://montreal.mutek.org/en/artists/herman-kolgen

#HermanKolgen #AudiovisualArt #LiveVisuals #VJCulture

Visuals From Particle Physics MUTEK Montréal Herman Kolgen | MUTEK Montréal MUTEK is a Montréal-based festival dedicated to the promotion of electronic music and the digital arts.Edition 27, from August 25 to 30, 2026.MUTEK…

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…

24 Aug 2026 Experimental Music

Trying to Hear Light

For The Gleam, South Korean composer Park Jiha started with something that cannot actually be heard: changing daylight. The album moves from “At Dawn” through pieces concerned with sunrise and daytime before reaching “Nightfall Dancer.” She performs the music herself using instruments including piri, saenghwang, yanggeum and glockenspiel.

One piece, “Temporary Inertia,” grew from a performance in a meditation space designed by Tadao Ando, where a strip of daylight moves gradually across the interior. Park wanted to translate the changing texture, intensity and warmth of that light into sound.

I like the impossibility of the task.

There is no correct sonic equivalent of sunlight. You cannot measure a certain brightness and conclude that it should become one specific note. The translation has to remain subjective.

That is where the idea becomes interesting. Instead of illustrating nature, music becomes a way of paying closer attention to something we normally experience without noticing.

The album also reminds me that silence can function like shadow. Without space around a sound, its brightness is much harder to perceive.

The Gleam by Park Jiha

#ParkJiha #KoreanMusic #ExperimentalMusic #TheGleam

Trying to Hear Light For The Gleam, South Korean composer Park Jiha started with something that cannot actually be heard: changing daylight. The album moves from “At Dawn” thro…

24 Aug 2026 Computer Singing Its Own

A Computer Singing Its Own Farewell

Jóhann Jóhannsson’s IBM 1401, A User’s Manual began with an object that most composers would probably never think of as musical material: an old mainframe computer. His father, Jóhann Gunnarsson, had worked with the IBM 1401 in Iceland and recorded the machine on reel-to-reel tape decades earlier. Those recordings eventually became part of a composition first written for string quartet and dance, then radically expanded for the 2006 album into a score for a sixty-piece string orchestra, electronics and the original tapes.

What stays with me is that Jóhannsson did not imitate a computer. He let the actual technological past enter the music.

That changes the emotional weight of the electronic sounds. They are not futuristic effects. They are recordings of a machine already becoming obsolete. Strings surround those fragile traces with something almost elegiac, turning computing history into memory.

Electronic music often celebrates the newest machine in the room. This piece does the opposite. It asks what happens when a machine becomes old enough to be remembered.

IBM 1401, A User’s Manual

#JohannJohannsson #ElectronicMusic #IBM1401 #ContemporaryClassical

A Computer Singing Its Own Farewell Jóhann Jóhannsson’s IBM 1401, A User’s Manual began with an object that most composers would probably never think of as musical material: an old mainframe…

24 Aug 2026 Archives

The Archive Looking Back

Brook Andrew works across photography, installation, moving image, performance and museum interventions, frequently questioning the systems through which historical images and objects are collected and interpreted. His practice is informed by Wiradjuri and Ngunnawal cultural perspectives as well as sustained engagement with archives, colonial histories and the politics of visibility.

What interests me is the idea that an archive is never simply a storage room.

Someone decided what deserved to be collected. Someone wrote the label. Someone chose which photograph represented a person, culture or event. Those decisions can survive long enough that we begin treating them as neutral facts.

Andrew’s work often turns attention back onto those structures.

That changes the position of the viewer. Instead of only asking, “What does this historical image show?”, another question appears: “Who constructed the way I am seeing it?”

Museums traditionally ask objects to explain history. Artists can reverse the relationship and ask the museum itself to explain how it has been producing history all along.

https://www.brookandrew.com/ngadhi/me

#BrookAndrew #AustralianArt #IndigenousArt #Archives

The Archive Looking Back Brook Andrew works across photography, installation, moving image, performance and museum interventions, frequently questioning the systems through which h…

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…