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Visual Music Before Computers

Album Stored

An Album Stored as DNA

For the twentieth anniversary of Massive Attack’s Mezzanine, researchers at ETH Zurich translated the album’s digital audio into DNA.

The process sounds almost absurdly futuristic. The music was first compressed using the Opus codec. Its binary information was then converted into sequences based on the four DNA building blocks A, C, G and T. Around 920,000 short DNA strands were produced and encapsulated in microscopic silica spheres.

The whole album effectively became biological data.

What interests me is not the novelty of putting music into DNA. It is what this says about the idea of a recording.

We usually associate an album with its carrier.

Vinyl record.

Cassette.

CD.

Hard drive.

Stream.

But none of these is actually the music. Each one is simply a temporary system for storing instructions that can later be turned back into sound.

DNA makes that fact impossible to ignore.

Mezzanine can exist without grooves, magnetic particles, a waveform on a screen or even an object recognisable as music.

At that point an album starts resembling a genetic recipe.

Nothing inside the tiny glass particles sounds like Massive Attack.

The music only returns when another machine knows how to read the code.

A record is therefore not necessarily sound.

Sometimes it is the possibility of sound waiting inside information.

https://fml.ethz.ch/research/research/storing-mezzanine-in-dna.html

#MassiveAttack #Mezzanine #DNAStorage #MusicTechnology

An Album Stored as DNA An Album Stored as DNA fml.ethz.ch For the twentieth anniversary of Massive Attack’s Mezzanine, researchers at ETH Zurich translated the album’s digital audio into DNA. The process...
Björk

Björk Replaced the Band With Bodies

For Medúlla, Björk stripped away most conventional instrumentation and built an album almost entirely from human voices. The recording involved Icelandic and London choirs, throat singing, vocal percussion and beatboxing by Rahzel, alongside layers of Björk’s own voice.

What interests me is that this is not really an a cappella album in the traditional sense.

The voice is treated as raw production material.

A mouth can become percussion.

Breathing becomes texture.

A choir can behave like a synthesizer pad.

Individual syllables can be arranged almost like samples.

That changes the usual hierarchy between singer and accompaniment. Instead of placing a vocal on top of an instrumental track, Medúlla asks what happens when almost the entire track is made from the same physical source.

There is also something quietly radical about choosing the oldest instrument humans possess at a moment when digital production technology was becoming increasingly powerful.

The album does not reject technology. Editing, layering and processing remain essential.

But technology is used to enlarge the body rather than replace it.

The result makes synthesis feel less like inventing an artificial sound and more like discovering how artificial a familiar human sound can become.

Björk – Medúlla

#Bjork #Medulla #Voice #ExperimentalPop

Björk Replaced the Band With Bodies Björk Replaced the Band With Bodies Björk Official Store Björk - Medúlla "Almost entirely a cappella, and recorded with choirs from Iceland and London, a throat singer and a human beat-box (Rahzel from the Roots), Medulla has little precedent in popular music. There is, though, an esoteric lineage to be traced back, from Kate Bush's work with the Trio Bulgarka to Donald Byrd's collaboration
ARP2600

Oxygène Came From a Kitchen

Jean-Michel Jarre recorded Oxygène in 1976 in the kitchen of his Paris apartment. He has described the setup as a modest home studio built around only a handful of instruments, including an ARP 2600, Farfisa organ and Korg Minipops 7 drum machine.

That matters because Oxygène now sounds like one of those records that must have required a futuristic laboratory.

It did not.

The scale came from arrangement, layering and imagination rather than from a huge inventory of equipment.

Jarre has spoken about limitations as something creatively useful, and this record is a convincing argument for that idea. A small group of machines had to perform many different roles. Instead of endlessly searching for another sound, the producer had to keep discovering another possibility inside the instruments already there.

There is a strange reversal in modern production. We now have access to thousands of synthesizers and effects inside one laptop, yet it can become harder to commit to a sound precisely because another option is always available.

Oxygène suggests that abundance is not automatically freedom.

Sometimes a limited studio creates a larger musical world because the producer has nowhere else to go except deeper into the machines already switched on.

https://www.electronicbeats.net/how-jean-michel-jarre-directed-a-cast-of-superstars

#JeanMichelJarre #Oxygene #ARP2600 #ElectronicMusic

Oxygène Came From a Kitchen Oxygène Came From a Kitchen Telekom Electronic Beats How Jean-Michel Jarre Directed a Cast of Superstars In 1977 when the Sex Pistols were spawning angry three chord reactions against the pomp of prog, a young Jean-Michel Jarre was enjoying the success of…
Drawing

Drawing With Almost Nothing

Nasreen Mohamedi developed an extraordinarily reduced language of lines, grids and empty paper in post-Independence India. During the 1970s her drawings became increasingly rigorous, often using ink and graphite to create geometric structures that seem to hover somewhere between architecture, landscape and pure abstraction. Her photographs and private diaries reveal another side of the same attention to structure, shadow, repetition and space.

Mohamedi followed a path quite different from the figurative and narrative approaches that dominated much Indian modernism around her. Her work only gained sustained international visibility much later.

What interests me is how much tension she could produce with so little material.

A few diagonal lines can suggest depth.

A small change in spacing creates acceleration.

An empty region of paper can feel more active than the marks surrounding it.

That economy is difficult.

Adding another element is easy because it gives the eye something new.

Removing elements means every remaining decision has to work harder.

There is something close to music in that discipline.

Silence does not weaken a composition when the sounds around it justify the space.

Mohamedi’s drawings make empty paper behave the same way.

https://archive.knma.in/nasreen-mohamedi-museo-nacional-centro-de-arte-reina-sofia-madrid-spain-0

#NasreenMohamedi #IndianModernism #GeometricAbstraction #Drawing

Drawing With Almost Nothing Drawing With Almost Nothing archive.knma.in Nasreen Mohamedi developed an extraordinarily reduced language of lines, grids and empty paper in post-Independence India. During the 1970s her...
Abstract Painting

A Painting That Moves While Staying Still

Bridget Riley’s Current from 1964 is physically static: synthetic polymer paint on a flat board. Yet the repeated black-and-white curves appear to vibrate, bulge and shift when viewed. MoMA notes that Riley hand-painted the lines and was deliberately interested in creating perceptual disturbance between the surface and spectator.

I find that remarkable because no mechanism is hidden behind the work.

There is no motor.

No video.

No code.

No animation.

The movement happens in the viewer.

That makes Current a kind of generative artwork in an unexpectedly literal sense. The painting provides fixed rules. Your visual system generates the unstable result.

Move closer and the pattern changes.

Move away and another structure becomes dominant.

Look too long and the eye begins producing sensations that the paint itself does not contain.

Digital artists often use enormous amounts of computation to create movement. Riley demonstrates another route.

You can create the conditions for movement without moving anything.

Sometimes the most powerful processor in an artwork is the nervous system of the person standing in front of it.

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79998

#BridgetRiley #OpArt #Perception #AbstractPainting

A Painting That Moves While Staying Still A Painting That Moves While Staying Still moma.org Bridget Riley’s Current from 1964 is physically static: synthetic polymer paint on a flat board. Yet the repeated black-and-white curves appear...
Experimental Film

Visual Music Before Computers

Mary Ellen Bute wanted abstract images to possess something painting could not give her: actual duration. She turned to film and, between the 1930s and 1950s, created abstract animations in which shapes, light and movement were organised in close relationship with music. Her work also included technological experiments involving oscilloscopes and electronic imagery. Several of her films reached audiences at places such as Radio City Music Hall, an unusual level of public exposure for experimental abstraction.

What interests me from a VJ perspective is how familiar the ambition feels.

We now open Resolume, TouchDesigner or After Effects and assume that sound can be translated into movement almost automatically.

Bute was asking similar questions before digital graphics existed.

What does a musical phrase look like?

Should a visual form follow rhythm literally?

Can colour behave like orchestration?

How can movement produce something equivalent to musical tension?

The technology changes dramatically, but those questions hardly change at all.

That is why early experimental film can be more useful to a contemporary VJ than another software tutorial.

Software teaches us how to make an effect.

Bute reminds us to ask why an image should move in the first place.

https://www.eastman.org/mary-ellen-bute-rhythms-light

#MaryEllenBute #VisualMusic #ExperimentalFilm #VJHistory

Visual Music Before Computers Visual Music Before Computers eastman.org Mary Ellen Bute wanted abstract images to possess something painting could not give her: actual duration. She turned to film and, between the...
Electronic Pioneer

The Blind Synthesist Building Other Worlds

Pauline Anna Strom recorded a remarkable series of electronic albums during the 1980s, much of it released independently in tiny vinyl and cassette editions. Her work later disappeared into collector culture before being gathered in Trans-Millenia Music, an archival collection drawn from music made between 1982 and 1988.

Strom was blind from birth.

I mention that carefully because it is tempting to turn disability into a simple explanation for an artist’s work. Her music does not need that story in order to be interesting.

What fascinates me instead is the scale of the worlds she created inside a home-produced synthesizer practice that received little mainstream attention at the time.

The titles alone suggest imagined geography: “Virgin Ice,” “Spatial Spectre,” “Rain on Ancient Quays,” “Cruising Altitude 36,000 Feet.”

There is something very modern about this kind of independent world-building.

One person, synthesizers, recording equipment and no requirement for a large institution.

Today Bandcamp and digital distribution make that model ordinary. In the early 1980s, self-releasing cassettes could mean almost disappearing.

The strange thing is that obscurity preserved the music from being fixed to one fashionable moment.

When listeners rediscovered Strom decades later, the future she had imagined was still waiting there.

Pauline Anna Strom – Trans-Millenia Music

#PaulineAnnaStrom #SynthMusic #ElectronicPioneer #MusicRediscovery

The Blind Synthesist Building Other Worlds The Blind Synthesist Building Other Worlds RVNG Intl. Pauline Anna Strom - Trans-Millenia Music (RVNG Intl.) Otherworldly and anomalous, hushed and hallucinatory, Pauline Anna Strom’s unique style of inner space music reaches across time to futures and pasts far from our own. Trans-Millenia Music compiles eighty minutes of Strom’s most evocative work, composed and recorded between 1982 and 1988, for the first authorized overview of the enigmatic Bay Area composer.
Environmental Music

Tokyo Ambient Without Escaping Tokyo

Hiroshi Yoshimura’s GREEN was recorded during the winter of 1985–86 in his home studio. The music uses Yamaha FM synthesizers, machines often associated with the bright and precise digital sound of the 1980s, but Yoshimura uses them to create something restrained, spacious and remarkably soft. He explained that “green” referred not simply to a colour but to the comfortable scenery of a natural cycle.

Yoshimura is interesting because ambient music for him was often connected to actual environments. He made music for museums, galleries, public spaces, television, fashion and other commissioned situations.

That makes ambient less like a genre and more like environmental design.

The composer is not only asking what sounds should occur.

He is asking what sound should do to a place.

I also like the contradiction inside GREEN: digital FM synthesis producing something that feels organic.

There is no attempt to disguise the synthesizer as birds, wind or water. Instead Yoshimura creates an electronic environment gentle enough that the listener begins making those associations independently.

Perhaps natural sound does not require imitation.

Sometimes it requires leaving enough room for the imagination to finish the landscape.

GREEN

#HiroshiYoshimura #JapaneseAmbient #FMSynthesis #EnvironmentalMusic

Tokyo Ambient Without Escaping Tokyo Tokyo Ambient Without Escaping Tokyo Light in the Attic GREEN Barely known outside of his home country during his lifetime, the late Japanese ambient music pioneer Hiroshi Yoshimura has seen his global stature rise steadily in the past few years. This edition marks a reissue of the highly sought-after and impossible-to-find album. It features the original mix preferred by Yoshimura himself, previously available only on the initial Japanese vinyl release (a limited edition remixed version of the album, with added sound effects, was released on CD in the US).
ARP2500

One Synthesizer for Three Hours

Éliane Radigue spent years working with the ARP 2500 synthesizer, often producing changes so gradual that they can initially seem almost motionless. Her Trilogie de la Mort consists of three extended works: Kyema, Kailasha and Koumé. Kyema, premiered in 1988, lasts more than an hour and was produced with the ARP 2500 onto magnetic tape. The trilogy developed through Radigue’s engagement with Tibetan Buddhism and the states of consciousness described around death and rebirth.

What interests me technically is the patience.

Synthesizers are often demonstrated through change. New patch. New modulation. New sequence. Another oscillator.

Radigue discovered how much can happen when almost nothing appears to happen.

A sustained electronic tone is never completely still. Frequencies interfere. Small changes alter beating patterns. Harmonics emerge and disappear according to listening position, volume and the acoustics of the room.

The listener begins doing part of the work.

After enough time, attention becomes more sensitive.

That makes Radigue’s music almost the reverse of contemporary digital culture. It does not compete for attention by introducing another event.

It removes events until attention itself becomes audible.

https://elianeradigue.bandcamp.com/album/trilogie-de-la-mort

#ElianeRadigue #ARP2500 #DroneMusic #Electroacoustic

One Synthesizer for Three Hours One Synthesizer for Three Hours Éliane Radigue Trilogie de la Mort, by Éliane Radigue 3 track album
Black Ark

Four Tracks Were Enough for Black Ark

Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Black Ark studio in Kingston became one of the most influential recording environments in reggae despite being technically modest. The studio, built behind Perry’s home in 1973, worked with relatively limited equipment, including four-track recording, yet Perry produced extraordinarily dense records through layering, saturation, echo, re-recording and unconventional studio manipulation.

That feels almost absurd when compared with contemporary production.

Ableton can give me practically unlimited tracks. Perry had four.

Yet Black Ark recordings rarely sound small.

This is where track count becomes misleading. A recorded track is not necessarily one musical event. Something can be recorded, processed, bounced together with something else and returned to tape as new material. The studio becomes recursive.

Dub made the mixing desk creative rather than administrative.

Mute something.

Send a fragment into echo.

Bring it back unexpectedly.

Let saturation accumulate instead of cleaning it away.

The Black Ark is a reminder that a studio does not become powerful because it preserves every option.

Sometimes the opposite happens.

When options are scarce, every destructive decision matters more, and destruction itself can become part of composition.

https://jamaicanmusicatlas.com/entity/studio/black-ark

#LeeScratchPerry #BlackArk #Dub #StudioAsInstrument

Four Tracks Were Enough for Black Ark Four Tracks Were Enough for Black Ark jamaicanmusicatlas.com Black Ark Lee "Scratch" Perry's studio behind his home at Washington Gardens, Kingston, built in 1973 and running until its destruction by fire in 1979. Working with modest four-track equipment, Perry produced a sound nobody has convincingly reproduced — layered, saturated, drenched in echo and unexpected noise — on records for Max Romeo, Junior Murvin, the Congos and The Heptones, and on his own productions. The Black Ark years are the strongest argument that the studio itself, and not only the players, is an instrument in Jamaican music. The studio's 1979-80 destruction followed a period of personal crisis for Perry: his wife Pauline left him, taking their children, and he began covering the walls with dense, handwritten graffiti before eventually trashing and burning the building. People who knew him at the time attributed the breakdown to accumulating strain, extortion, drink and drug excess, and an open-door policy that let hangers-on take over the yard. Twenty years later, Perry gave Bradley a different, more deliberate explanation directly: that he had come to believe everyone around him, family, friends, peers, his record company, was stealing his music, and that destroying the means of making it was the only way to stop them.
Bach Had

Bach Had to Be Built Note by Note

When Switched-On Bach appeared in 1968, the Moog synthesizer was still far from the convenient polyphonic instrument we now associate with keyboards. Wendy Carlos worked closely with Robert Moog and used multitrack recording to construct Bach’s polyphonic music from an electronic instrument that could produce only limited musical information at once. Carlos even built her own eight-track recording machine.

That means a piece that a pianist can perform with ten fingers became something closer to architectural construction.

Voice after voice had to be recorded and fitted together.

Today we can place an orchestral sample library on one MIDI track and play an entire arrangement immediately. Carlos faced almost the reverse situation: extraordinary control over timbre but painfully limited simultaneous performance.

The limitation forced listening at another level.

If every line has to be built separately, orchestration stops being an abstract concept. You have to decide what every note actually is.

Switched-On Bach is often remembered because it helped bring the Moog into popular consciousness. I find the production process more interesting.

Carlos was not using technology to make music easier.

She was using an impossibly cumbersome machine because it allowed music to sound like something that had barely existed before.

https://www.wendycarlos.com/biog.html

#WendyCarlos #Moog #SwitchedOnBach #ElectronicMusic

Bach Had to Be Built Note by Note Bach Had to Be Built Note by Note wendycarlos.com Wendy Carlos Biography A biography of the composer and electronic synthesizer pioneer.