At Wikipedia.
At 120 Years of Electronic Music.
At Peter Pringle’s site.
Category: {music}
Music
The Photophonic Experiment
Electric light orchestra
Light bulbs. Biscuits. A 10,000-volt charge. The only thing you won’t find making music at a Photophonic Experiment gig is guitars and pianos, says Maddy Costa.
Maddy Costa
Friday, October 20, 2006
The Guardian
Ceinws in north Wales is the kind of tiny, bucolic town where nothing unusual is supposed to happen. And possibly it didn’t before Mark Anderson moved in. A sound-artist, instrument-maker and pyrotechnic with the performance group Blissbody, he has a workshop opposite the village pub that appears perfectly innocent from the outside, but inside could pass for a laboratory from a Frankenstein movie. Glass tubes and dangerous-looking electrical contraptions clutter the floor. Wires coil across a table. A standing lamp looms in the corner. “Watch this,” says Anderson, as excited as a five-year-old setting fire to a box of tissues. He points a mysterious black cone at the lamp and turns a dimmer switch to activate the bulb. Slowly, the lamp illuminates, and a sound fills the room: a low buzz at first, but growing painfully high-pitched as the light reaches full brightness. This really is white noise.
Remarkably, what Anderson is demonstrating isn’t an instrument of torture but a “photo-synth”, a device that converts light into sound. It’s a key element of the Photophonic Experiment, a bizarre, potentially fascinating collaboration between Anderson and like-minded musicians Pram and Kirsten Reynolds that tours the UK from next week. And if the people of Ceinws think Anderson is odd, they should hear what his associates get up to.
Arthur Nights
Arthur Nights in LA this weekend—wish I was there. Last year’s Arthur Fest was one of the best music events I’ve been to.
Ys by Joanna Newsom
Joanna Newsom‘s extraordinary new album, out on November 14th. Recorded by Steve Albini, mixed by Jim O’Rourke, orchestral arrangements by Van Dyke Parks.
Ys is the mythical city supposedly sunken off the coast of Brittany. It’s also the name of a piece on Alan Stivell‘s celebrated 1971 folk album, Renaissance of the Celtic Harp. Since Ms Newsom plays the harp, it’s a safe bet that there’s a reference here back to Alan Stivell.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jake Shears likes Van Dyke Parks
• Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, and Chanteys
New things for October
Two new pieces of work appear this month. The cover for the Emissaries CD by Melechesh was something I did earlier this year but the album release was delayed. Melechesh are Sumerian Thrashing Black Metal maestros and their website is here.
And finally this month, Jon Farmer’s book, Sieg Heil Iconographers, arrives from the printers. At 608 pages this is by far the largest book I’ve designed to date. Featuring illustrations and photos on nearly every page, it was a lot of work, so I’m very pleased that Anthony Rowe have done their customary excellent print job. The book is softcover and I was worried that the binding might be too tight to allow for easy reading but it falls open very easily. Savoy will have this on sale later this month, details at their site.