The strange story of Soviet music on the bone.
The iconic images of gramophone grooves cut onto x-rays of skulls, ribcages and bones have captured the collective imagination way beyond the music scene. Now for the first time, the complete story of the Soviet x-ray record has emerged, as told by the people who made it happen.
For more information on bone music and the x-ray audio project and book, visit x-rayaudio.com
40 Minute documentary by Popmusic according to COIL, Scraping Foetus off The Wheel (!), Current 93, Test Dept.
“A Dutch documentary (around ’88) originally aired on Dutch television, as well as shown at the 1988 Rotterdam International Film Festival, with Interviews with J.G. Thirlwell, John Ballance, David Tibet and the guys from Test Dept and parts of live performances of the bands. In case of Foetus the featured tracks are: “Anything”, “DI-1-9026” and “Boxhead” from the tour ’86.” – Description haken from LiturgieApocyphe.com
Update August 2016 – This is now available to buy as a DVD from coldspring.co.uk and thus has been removed from Youtube. The following is a trailer for the DVD:
“Something I’m working on at the moment. It’s early days but I think it could turn into something really nice. Light falling on 4 sensors controls all the sound in this clip. Lights controlled by an Arduino which also sends the light sensor data back to Max/MSP which deals with the audio generation.”
Live performance using the light interface at the Beam @ NIME night at XOYO in London 1st July 2014.
[Previously fat] Rab and [Previously fat] Ryan are back for another series of the video game review/discussion/shredding/eccles-cake show. Here’s some exculsive behind the scenes hashtag content to raise awareness of the topics we should be talking about in the gaming world today
Full episodes available at BBC Scotland
Inspiring Creativity is a short film created by Liberatum, directed by Pablo Ganguli and Tomas Auksas, and presented by illy, featuring 21 artists and cultural figures from art, fashion, film, design, technology and music. The film is an insider’s perspective on inspiration from the minds of leading creative personalities.
These are 3-D printed sculptures designed to animate when spun under a strobe light. The placement of the appendages is determined by the same method nature uses in pinecones and sunflowers. The rotation speed is synchronized to the strobe so that one flash occurs every time the sculpture turns 137.5º—the golden angle. If you count the number of spirals on any of these sculptures you will find that they are always Fibonacci numbers.
For this video, rather than using a strobe, the camera was set to a very short shutter speed (1/4000 sec) in order to freeze the spinning sculpture.
John Edmark is an inventor/designer/artist. He teaches design at Stanford University.
For more details on how the piece was made, click here – instructables.com
For electric guitar, bass clarinet, percussion, violin, live-electronics and animated light.
“Abstract: Cats were reared in a light-tight box in which the only source of illumination was a 9-psec strobe flash every 2 sec. This allowed them to experience visual form but they did not experience visual movement. Most sampled signals are not simply stored and reconstructed. But the fidelity of a theoretical reconstruction is a customary measure of the effectiveness of sampling. Sensate focusing is a term usually associated with a set of specific sexual exercises for couples or for individuals. Each participant is encouraged to focus on their own varied sense experience, rather than to see orgasm as the sole goal of sex.”
More info available on Alexander Schbert’s site – alexanderschubert.net
Post-war Britain rebuilt itself on a wave of scientific and industrial breakthroughs that culminated in the cultural revolution of the 1960’s. In this atmosphere was born the Electronic Music Studios (EMS), a radical group of avant-garde electronic musicians who utilized technology and experimentation to compose a futuristic electronic sound-scape for the New Britain.
What The Future Sounded Like colours in a lost chapter in music history, uncovering a group of composers and innovators who harnessed technology and new ideas to re-imagine the boundaries of music and sound. Features music from Pink Floyd, Hawkwind, Roxy Music and The Emperor Machine.
Porthmeor Productions/Produced by Claire Harris/Written & Directed by Matthew Bate (Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure)
THE DIATOMIST is a short documentary about Klaus Kemp, master of the Victorian art of diatom arrangement.
Diatoms are single cell algae that create jewel-like glass shells around themselves. Microscopists of the Victorian era would arrange them into complex patterns, invisible to the naked eye but spectacular when viewed under magnification.The best of these arrangements are stunning technical feats that reveal the hidden grandeur of some of the smallest organisms on Earth. Klaus Kemp has devoted his entire life to understanding and perfecting diatom arrangement and he is now acknowledged as the last great practitioner of this beautiful combination of art and science. THE DIATOMIST showcases his incredible work.
Soundtrack by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Bernard Herrmann and Cults Percussion Ensemble.
MATTHEW KILLIP is an English filmmaker living in New York. His documentaries have been broadcast on UK television and exhibited in festivals including Sundance and True/False.