Category: music

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music

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“This guide is rated [M] Mature. It is a love letter to underground counter-culture. 90% of the music here is enjoyed by freaks wearing crazy outfits, consuming copious amounts of drugs, and engaging in 3-day sex benders with indeterminate genders. It is not for children. I am not going to sanitize things just so your precious little Jeighden can locate the latest tweenwave ringtone they ripped off Twitch…

Q: What literature did you read to learn all this stuff?

A: I have 30 years of back issues of Electronic Music and Keyboard magazine, with an ungodly number of books also collected over the decades…As for modern literature, a better answer is what I don’t read: For starters, any magazine, blog, website, newsletter, flyer, TV show, podcast, record label, chart, press release or bathroom graffiti that uses the acronym ‘EDM’ is complete donkey balls and should not be relied on as a source for anything…

Q: What makes you the authority on electronic music?

A: You may know some of it more than me, but I know all of it more than you.”

—http://music.ishkur.com/#

This guide is not complete donkey balls. Even if you have zero interest in electronic music, the frequently unasked questions page, some of which is quoted above, is hilarious.

h/t Openculture.

nimiia vibié, by Jenna Sutela

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“Aspiring to connect with a world beyond our consciousness and our planet, nimiia vibié sounds the interactions between a neural network, audio recordings of early Martian language, and microscopic footage of extremophilic space bacteria. Here, the computer is a medium, channeling messages from entities that usually cannot speak. However, it is also an alien of our creation.

Drawing on nimiia cétiï, Jenna Sutela’s project on machine learning and interspecies communication, the record manifests a more-than-human language. This language is based on the computer’s interpretation of a Martian tongue from the late 1800s, originally channeled by the French medium Hélène Smith and now voiced by Sutela, as well as the movement of Bacillus subtilis, an extreme loving bacterium that, according to recent spaceflight experimentation, can survive on Mars. The bacterium is also present in nattō, or fermented soybeans, a probiotic food considered as a secret to long life. Beyond Bacterial-Martian culture, or Martian gut bacteria, the project attempts to express the nonhuman condition of computers that work as our interlocutors and infrastructure.

—https://jennasutela.bandcamp.com/album/nimiia-vibi

Pocket Operator

~ cafebedouin ~ 4 Comments

“[A]ll pocket operator models perfectly complement each other.from drum machine, bass and lead synthesizers to noise percussion,the various unique units allow you to start a pocket band.use them separately or connect them together, the choice is yours.”

–Teenage Engineering

A band in your pocket for $49-$89 per device. The best gift for children in other people’s families since the 120 decibel toy fire truck, and bonus, it runs “for months or even years on two AA batteries.” Thanks, New York Times Magazine!

Holly Herndon Sits In For Iggy Pop

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American composer, musician, and sound artist Holly Herndon sits in for Iggy Pop as part of our coverage of the Manchester International Festival.

She’ll be spinning two hours of vocal music that has inspired her own work of late.

Since her arrival in 2012, Holly has successfully mined the edges of electronic and Avant Garde pop and emerged with a dynamic and disruptive canon of her own.

On her third full-length album PROTO, Holly fronts and conducts an electronic pop choir comprised of both human and A.I. voices over a musical palette that encompasses everything from synths to Sacred Harp stylings.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0006n41

Only 28 days left to listen. Most of this set is probably unlike anything you’ve heard before in choral music.