When Film Invades the Room

26 Aug 2026 Drums Recorded

Drums Recorded in Single Takes

Nihiloxica’s first recordings brought musicians from Uganda’s Nilotika Cultural Ensemble together with electronic musicians Peter Jones and Jacob Maskell-Key. Their 2017 EP was recorded live at Boutiq Studios in Kampala, with each piece captured in a single take. Traditional drums, shakers and long drums sit beside synthesizers and a conventional drum kit.

The single-take detail matters.

Electronic music can be edited almost without limit. Timing can be corrected, sections moved and individual hits replaced.

Recording an ensemble live removes much of that safety net.

The musicians have to build the architecture collectively while the tape is already running.

Nihiloxica later described their work in terms of Bugandan techno, but the interesting part for me is not whether acoustic percussion can sound like techno.

It is that techno’s intensity can emerge without reducing all rhythm to a programmed grid.

Several musicians can create repetition together while every cycle remains slightly different.

A groove does not need mathematical perfection to become hypnotic.

Sometimes the instability is what gives it force.

https://nyegenyegetapes.bandcamp.com/album/nihiloxica

#Nihiloxica #UgandanMusic #Percussion #ElectronicMusic

Drums Recorded in Single Takes Nyege Nyege Tapes Nihiloxica, by Nihiloxica 4 track album

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...

26 Aug 2026 Field Recording

Listening Through the Hands

Taiwanese experimental composer Yang Cheng describes abandoning a conventional field-recording setup while travelling around Taiwan. Instead, he attached microphones to his palms and listened through his hands.

That small technical decision completely changes the idea of recording a place for me.

A normal field recorder encourages distance. Point the microphones toward an environment, remain quiet and collect what happens.

A microphone attached to the body cannot pretend the recorder is absent.

Movement becomes part of the recording. Touch becomes part of it. The distance between body and object keeps changing.

Yang also works with radio, Bluetooth speakers, electromagnetic fields, found objects and environmental recordings. But the microphones on the palms are the detail I keep returning to because they turn listening into a physical action.

We usually describe microphones as devices that capture sound.

Here they behave almost like sensory organs.

Perhaps field recording becomes more interesting when it stops asking, “What does this place sound like?” and starts asking, “What does my presence inside this place sound like?”

https://yangcheng.one/

#YangCheng #FieldRecording #TaiwaneseMusic #SoundArt

Listening Through the Hands yangcheng.one YangCheng cargo.site

26 Aug 2026 Buchla

Playing the Space Itself

Suzanne Ciani’s relationship with the Buchla synthesizer goes beyond generating unusual electronic tones. In her quadraphonic performances, space itself becomes part of the instrument. Four-channel output allows sounds to move around the audience rather than simply sit between a left and right speaker. Ciani has described spatial placement and movement as integral parts of the composition.

That interests me because stereo production trains us to think mainly from the front. Pan something left, move something right, create depth with reverb. Quadraphonic sound changes the geometry completely.

A sequence can rotate around the room. A gesture can disappear behind the listener. Two sounds can occupy physically different territories even when their frequencies overlap.

Ciani’s work makes me think that electronic composition has an additional parameter we often ignore: location.

Pitch, rhythm, timbre and volume can all change over time.

Why not position?

Once sound can move through architecture, the room stops being the container for the music.

It becomes another part of the synthesizer.

https://www.sevwave.com/

#SuzanneCiani #Buchla #QuadraphonicSound #ElectronicMusic

Playing the Space Itself Suzanne Ciani Suzanne Ciani | Diva of the Diode Suzanne is a five-time Grammy award nominated composer, electronic music pioneer, and neo-classical recording artist. -Suzanne Ciani -composer -Buchla -synth pioneer

26 Aug 2026 Expanded Cinema

When Film Invades the Room

Ho Tzu Nyen’s The Cloud of Unknowing begins as moving image but refuses to remain simply a film on a wall. Created for the Singapore Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, it was filmed inside a public housing block shortly before demolition. Eight characters encounter different manifestations of a mysterious cloud, with references ranging across Eastern and Western art history.

But the installation extends beyond the image.

Multiple screens, multichannel audio, theatrical lighting and smoke transform the viewing space itself. The cloud can effectively leave the projected world and appear to enter the room occupied by the audience.

That interests me from a VJ and expanded-cinema perspective.

Projection normally creates a clear border: reality here, image there.

Smoke destroys that certainty because projected light suddenly has volume. A beam that was invisible in the air becomes a physical-looking object.

The simplest atmospheric effect can therefore change the grammar of cinema.

The image stops being something we look at.

For a moment, we are standing inside it.

https://www.chanel.com/us/chanel-next-prize/ho-tzu-nyen/

#HoTzuNyen #ExperimentalFilm #VideoInstallation #ExpandedCinema

When Film Invades the Room chanel.com Ho Tzu Nyen’s The Cloud of Unknowing begins as moving image but refuses to remain simply a film on a wall. Created for the Singapore Pavilion at...

26 Aug 2026 Caterina Barbieri

One Sequencer, Thousands of Possibilities

Caterina Barbieri built Patterns of Consciousness from an intentionally restricted electronic system. Her liner notes describe an Indexed Quad Sequencer and harmonic oscillator generating permutations from a small collection of predetermined harmonic material. Addition, subtraction, jitter and changing gates allowed patterns to keep transforming without requiring entirely new musical material.

This interests me because complexity emerges from restriction rather than abundance.

Modern music software presents thousands of instruments, presets and effects simultaneously. Barbieri’s approach asks almost the opposite question: what happens if you decide on a small system and explore it until its internal possibilities become audible?

The gate is especially interesting. A stored sequence may contain more information than we actually hear. By altering which portions are allowed through, the same underlying pattern keeps revealing different versions of itself.

That is close to sculpture by subtraction.

The material already exists.

Composition becomes the decision about what is temporarily allowed to appear.

https://caterinabarbieri.com/Patterns-of-Consciousness-Liner-Notes

#CaterinaBarbieri #ModularSynth #Sequencing #ExperimentalElectronic

One Sequencer, Thousands of Possibilities caterinabarbieri.com Patterns of Consciousness Liner Notes — Caterina Barbieri Sound as an agent of change A pattern creates a certain state of consciousness. Once it is created, the pattern stands as an object exactly like the sound waves...

26 Aug 2026 Already Playing Ruby Solly’s

Recording a City That Is Already Playing

Ruby Solly’s P?neke treats Wellington not simply as the place where an album was recorded but as an active participant in the composition. Solly, a K?i Tahu, Waitaha and K?ti M?moe musician and taonga p?oro practitioner, connects cello, voice and traditional M?ori instruments with environmental recordings and histories embedded in specific locations.

On “Koukou,” for example, the recording includes a resident ruru, or morepork, heard from the porch of her home. The bird is not added as a decorative nature sample. Its call is tied to family names, memory and the waterways that once shaped the area.

I like the distinction.

A field recording can merely tell us, “this happened outside.”

Or it can belong structurally to why the piece exists at all.

Once place enters composition at that level, removing the environmental sound would not simply produce a cleaner mix. It would remove part of the subject.

The landscape is no longer behind the music.

It is one of the musicians.

https://rubysolly.bandcamp.com/album/p-neke

#RubySolly #TaongaPuoro #AotearoaMusic #FieldRecording

Recording a City That Is Already Playing Ruby Solly P?neke, by Ruby Solly 11 track album

26 Aug 2026 Andean Music

Folklore Inside a Digital Grid

Nicola Cruz’s Prender el Alma was built through a process his label describes almost literally as layer by layer, instrument by instrument and drum by drum. The Ecuador-based producer connected electronic production with Andean and Afro-influenced musical ideas, acoustic guitar, percussion and voices. The resulting approach has sometimes been described as “Andes Step.”

The phrase matters less to me than the production question underneath it.

Electronic music software encourages everything toward a grid. Notes can be corrected, percussion quantised and loops copied perfectly. Traditional musical practices often contain timing, tuning and phrasing that resist that kind of standardisation.

The interesting part is what happens when both worlds remain audible.

Technology does not automatically modernise traditional sound, and traditional instruments do not automatically make electronic music culturally deeper. The real work is in deciding what should remain irregular.

A grid becomes much more interesting when some sounds are allowed to push against it.

https://zzkrecords.com/album/prender-el-alma

#NicolaCruz #EcuadorianMusic #ElectronicMusic #AndeanMusic

Folklore Inside a Digital Grid zzkrecords.com Prender el Alma | Nicola Cruz Following his collaboration with Nicolas Jaar's Clown & Sunset label, Cruz has self-produced and self-recorded this landmark album. 'Prender el Alma' is a new strain of Latin American music Cruz calls ‘Andes Step’. Influenced by new digital technology, blended with local influence, Cruz builds his tracks layer by layer, instrument by instrument, drum by drum, exploring local indigenous and Afro-cosmologies in a modern setting. From atmospheric opener ‘Sanacion’, the 10-track album journeys…

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 Gambian Music

Breaking a Seven-Century Pattern

Sona Jobarteh comes from one of the West African griot families in which the kora tradition has been transmitted across generations. Her grandfather Amadu Bansang Jobarteh and cousin Toumani Diabaté belong to that lineage. What makes her position historically unusual is that she became the first woman from such a griot family to establish herself professionally as a kora virtuoso.

Yet I find the instrument itself more interesting than the milestone alone.

A kora combines 21 strings with a calabash resonator and allows melody, bass movement and repeating patterns to exist simultaneously. In the hands of one performer it can sound almost like several musicians negotiating with one another.

Jobarteh also studied Western classical composition, cello, piano and harpsichord. Her work therefore does not fit comfortably inside the idea that preserving tradition means avoiding other musical languages.

Perhaps preservation is strongest when the knowledge is deep enough that change no longer feels like a threat.

https://sonajobarteh.com/biography

#SonaJobarteh #Kora #GambianMusic #WestAfricanMusic

Breaking a Seven-Century Pattern Sona Jobarteh Sona Jobarteh Sona Jobarteh comes from one of the West African griot families in which the kora tradition has been transmitted across generations. Her grandfather Amadu…