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Twenty Microphones for an Organ

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 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
Beatriz Ferreyra

She Composed With Her Ears First

Beatriz Ferreyra entered the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris in 1963 after hearing musique concrète for the first time.

She later worked with Pierre Schaeffer on the Solfège de l’Objet Sonore, but her own description of those early years is refreshingly different from the mythology surrounding institutional electronic music.

Ferreyra has said she arrived without an academic composition background and had to learn tape editing, filtering and recording directly through practice. She was fascinated less by traditional notes than by the physical character of sound itself. She has described hearing sounds as forms and colours, almost as though composing were another kind of painting.

That feels important because electronic music is often taught backwards.

First understand the technology.

Then make something.

Ferreyra’s story begins with fascination.

A sound was interesting enough that she needed to discover how to work with it.

The technical knowledge followed the desire to listen more closely.

That may be why early musique concrète still has something useful to teach producers surrounded by sophisticated software.

A new plug-in does not automatically produce a new way of hearing.

Sometimes the more difficult skill is noticing that an ordinary sound was already interesting before anyone processed it.

https://brahms.ircam.fr/en/composer/beatriz-ferreyra/biography

#BeatrizFerreyra #MusiqueConcrete #ElectroacousticMusic #SoundArt

She Composed With Her Ears First She Composed With Her Ears First Ressources IRCAM Biographie - Béatriz Ferreyra La biographie du compositeur Béatriz Ferreyra
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 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...
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 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…
Details di

Memory as a Production Technique

Carmen Villain’s new album Memoria, released on 4 September 2026, uses an unusually broad palette: clarinet, piano, synthesizers, field recordings, percussion, flute, trumpet and strings.

Yet the most useful clue may be the title.

Villain describes her work as moving through memory and transformation, with sounds eroding, repeating and returning in altered forms. On Memoria, instruments rarely feel isolated into clean roles. Acoustic and electronic materials occupy the same atmosphere until identifying the original source becomes less important than hearing what has happened to it.

That feels close to how memory actually behaves.

We do not retrieve an event like opening an untouched audio file.

Every recollection has already passed through time.

Details disappear.

Others become exaggerated.

Something from the present enters the past without permission.

Production can work the same way.

Repeat a sound.

Filter it.

Record the processed version.

Return to it later.

Eventually the copy may carry more emotional weight than the original.

The studio becomes less like an archive preserving sounds accurately and more like memory itself, constantly rewriting what it stores.

https://carmenvillain.bandcamp.com/album/memoria

Memory as a Production Technique Memory as a Production Technique Carmen Villain Memoria, by Carmen Villain 7 track album
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 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.
Future Haruomi Hosono

Hosono Writing to the Future

Haruomi Hosono turns 79 this year and is about to release his 23rd solo album.

Yours Sincerely, arriving on 11 September 2026, is his first collection of new music in more than seven years. One of its advance tracks, “Sincerely,” reworks the 1950s doo-wop song by The Moonglows with new Japanese lyrics written by Hosono. The album title itself grows from the idea of omoiyari, a Japanese concept connected with compassion and sharing another person’s feelings.

What interests me is the direction of the exchange.

Hosono spent much of his career absorbing and transforming Western musical forms, from American roots music to electronic pop. Later, Yellow Magic Orchestra and his solo work became major reference points for younger Western musicians.

Now he returns to a 1950s American song and writes himself back into it.

Influence is often drawn as a straight arrow.

One artist affects another.

One country exports a style somewhere else.

Hosono’s career looks more like circulation. Music leaves one culture, changes elsewhere, returns, and finds that neither side is quite where it started.

At 79, that exchange is still moving.

https://www.sonymusic.co.jp/artist/HaruomiHosono/info/585890

#HaruomiHosono #JapaneseMusic #YoursSincerely #Songwriting

Hosono Writing to the Future Hosono Writing to the Future ????? | Sony Music ???Yours Sincerely????2nd???????Sincerely??????????? ??????????????????PLAYBACK SESSION?????????????????????????????? | ????? | ?????????????????? Haruomi Hosono turns 79 this year and is about to release his 23rd solo album. Yours Sincerely, arriving on 11 September 2026, is his first collection of n…
Digital Ecology

A Pond Controlling the Gallery

Rae-Yen Song’s new installation at FACT Liverpool contains something unusually literal at its centre: a living pond.

The exhibition •~TUA~• ?? •~MAK~•, opening on 18 September 2026, combines sculpture, sound and moving image within an imagined subaquatic world shaped partly by the artist’s family histories and diasporic mythology.

Cameras observe microscopic life and movement inside the pond. Activity within that ecosystem then affects the lights and sounds of the installation.

I like the reversal.

Interactive digital art usually waits for a human visitor.

Walk here.

Touch this.

Move your hand and the system responds.

Song gives some of that control to organisms that have no interest in being performers.

The gallery becomes responsive, but humans are no longer the only meaningful input.

That changes the idea of interactivity itself.

A living system is not a button.

It does not repeat the same response because somebody requests it.

The artwork has to share control with processes it cannot completely predict.

For a digital installation, that is a surprisingly biological kind of uncertainty.

https://www.fact.co.uk/event/rae-yen-song-%E5%AE%8B%E7%91%9E%E6%B8%8A

#RaeYenSong #MovingImage #InteractiveArt #DigitalEcology

A Pond Controlling the Gallery A Pond Controlling the Gallery FACT Rae-Yen Song ???: •~TUA~• ?? •~MAK~• Rae-Yen Song ??? draws on the flux and resilience of the immigrant experience to reimagine the world. For this exhibition, the gallery is transformed into a darkened abyss, suspended somewhere between the deep sea and the skies above. Moving through this landscape, Rae-Yen invites us to reconsider…
Ali Cherri

The Soldier Outside the Monument

Ali Cherri’s new film The Sentinel places a French military recruit between two very different kinds of routine.

By day there is the ordered structure of military life. At night, encounters begin to disturb the stability of that system. The film appears in Soul Witness, opening at WIELS in Brussels on 5 September 2026, alongside sculptures and installations concerned with the ways institutions shape bodies and historical memory.

What interests me is how far this is from the traditional image of the soldier as monument.

Public sculpture often turns military bodies into symbols: upright, permanent, certain.

Cherri focuses instead on vulnerability and suspension.

A real body gets tired.

It waits.

It doubts.

It exists inside rules it did not invent.

Moving image is useful here because a monument tries to freeze meaning, while film allows behaviour to remain unresolved. A character can contradict himself from one moment to the next.

Perhaps that is why institutions like statues.

Still images are easier to control.

A moving body is always capable of becoming something else.

https://wiels.org/en/exhibitions/soul-witness

#AliCherri #TheSentinel #VideoArt #BrusselsArt

The Soldier Outside the Monument The Soldier Outside the Monument WIELS WIELS | Soul Witness WIELS, the contemporary art centre in Brussels offering exhibitions with new ideas, practices and perspectives.
Chasing Storms Through Screens

Chasing Storms Through Screens

Shuang Li’s Alliance begins with storm chasing, the deliberate pursuit of tornadoes, hurricanes and other extreme weather.

At Kunsthalle Basel, where the exhibition runs until 13 September 2026, that pursuit expands into an immersive environment of video, sound and architecture. Roads, weather forecasts and meteorological imagery appear within a visual world that connects physical storms to the less visible systems shaping contemporary digital life.

The comparison works because both kinds of systems are difficult to see as a whole.

A storm can be tracked on a screen, measured and predicted, yet standing inside one is completely different from reading its data.

Digital infrastructures behave similarly. Algorithms, networks and platforms surround daily life while most of their operations remain invisible.

What I like here is that weather is not reduced to a metaphor pasted onto technology. Both involve prediction, control and a point where prediction fails.

The storm chaser moves toward instability in order to observe it.

Most technology is designed to do the opposite. It promises to remove uncertainty.

Li seems interested in the moment when that promise begins to break down.

https://kunsthallebasel.ch/de/exhibitions/shuang-li

#ShuangLi #VideoInstallation #DigitalCulture #ContemporaryArt

Chasing Storms Through Screens Chasing Storms Through Screens Kunsthalle Basel Alliance · Kunsthalle Basel Seit 1872 zeigt die Kunsthalle Basel nicht nur Kunst – sie hat sie immer wieder neu definiert. Mit unerschütterlichem Engagement für aufstrebende Künstler:innen rückt sie deren bahnbrechendes Schaffen ins Rampenlicht – oft lange bevor diese international bekannt werden.
Its Own Economy Karimah

The Body as Its Own Economy

Karimah Ashadu’s MUSCLE follows bodybuilders training in Lagos, but the film is not really about bodybuilding as spectacle. It looks at the body as something that can be worked on, displayed, disciplined and turned into a form of personal capital.

The 22-minute film is part of Tendered, Ashadu’s exhibition opening at the Renaissance Society in Chicago on 12 September 2026. Her camera stays close to the men she films, avoiding the detached distance often associated with documentary observation. The result places physical training beside a much larger question about labour and autonomy in contemporary Nigeria.

What interests me is the overlap between sculpting a body and building an economic position.

Muscle is usually understood as physical strength. Here it can also represent time, discipline, aspiration and self-invention. The gym becomes a workplace even when nobody is formally paying for the hours spent there.

Video is particularly effective for this because effort has duration. A photograph can show the finished body. Moving image can show repetition, fatigue and the small routines required to produce it.

The body is not simply what the camera records.

It is where the work is happening.

https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/6787762/karimah-ashadutendered

#KarimahAshadu #VideoArt #MovingImage #Lagos

The Body as Its Own Economy The Body as Its Own Economy e-flux.com Karimah Ashadu: Tendered - Announcements - e-flux The Renaissance Society and Fondazione In Between Art Film present Tendered, a solo exhibition by Karimah Ashadu.