BMB con. returns to STEIM!
They are legendary at STEIM for dwelling in the basement experimenting with retro gear and turning the studio spaces inside out during their performances with water, fire, sparks and of course sound. This time was no exception. They locked themselves in the studio for 4 days to prepare for this performance and the result was a fantastic sound theater. The performance consisted of different sound events taking place in different parts of the room. The audience were welcomed with the beautiful sound of water dripping on to a heated metal plate. Wireless microphones mounted on each performers head created a howling sound scape as they moved about controlling the feedback between the speakers. Car horns in buckets of water occasionally squirted at the audience while it produced its muted sound that was processed by a computer. My favorite was the two laptops placed sideways on the floor facing each other. They interacted through the built-in mic, speakers and camera creating a fascinating dialog of sound and light in a dark room. The final piece was like a thunder storm in hell, with light bulbs blowing up while connected to a piezo mic and Joel Ryan creating a dense sound wall reacting to bowling balls smashed on to metal plates. My ears are still ringing from this.
This was definitely in the top 3 best concerts at STEIM this year, and we hope to see them around again!

Text from our mailing list:
BMB con.
BMB con. was founded by Justin Bennett, Roelf Toxopeus and Wikke ‘t Hooft in 1989.
They were residents at STEIM (in the cellar) during the early 1990’s and have performed here
on several occasions.
Since 2006 BMB con. consists of a core duo working together with a changing group of invited artists / performers.

BMB con. incorporate electronic and acoustic music, film, video and physical theatre in their performances and installations.
As well as these fleeting, sometimes unique actions, BMB con. make and publish audio CD’s, videos and photography.

For more information and namedropping see http://this.is/bmbcon

At STEIM.
BMB con. is even thuis voor onderzoek in het lab.
Het trio (Joel Ryan is dit keer nr. 3) presenteert wat zij hier ondergingen.
We zijn overigens onze notities kwijt!

BMB con. is home again – messing about in the lab.
If the trio (Joel Ryan is #1 this time) survive the 4 days of grueling experiments, they will present the results.

You are advised to bring an umbrella.

Bas van Koolwijk is obsessed by the analog tv signal – yet he realizes his work in the digital domain. This clash results in beautiful, sensitive audio-visual material. A similar clash is sought for by 3A&E: three acoustic players and a fourth routing their analog sounds through the digital domain. Layering both worlds and trying to bring them together.

For this Local Stop I was looking for the combination of / juxtaposition between analog and digital.

3A&E
Seamus Cater, Nate Wooley, Audrey Chen and Robert van Heumen will present initial results on their STEIM residency project. Working with 3 acoustic instruments (cello, trumpet & harmonica) and one electronic instrument (laptop + controllers) they travel through sound.
http://hardhatarea.com
http://seacater.com
http://www.natewooley.com
http://audreychen.com

Red Flag
Bas van Koolwijk will perform the audio-visual live improvisation Red Flag. Red Flag is produced with software applications that were developed for the live performance FDBCK/AV. The `flagging` seen in this work is of a digital nature entirely, but its logic is based on analogue video processing. The same logic applies to the computations by which FDBCK/AV creates a feedback control circuit between audio and video signals.
http://www.basvankoolwijk.com

In September & October 2007 SKIF++ toured NL, UK and the US Eastcoast. The schedule:

• Sept 18: concert @ STEIM / SuperCollider Symposium in Amsterdam NL
• Sept 23: lecture & concert @ Modulate / Sonic culture salon in Birmingham UK
• Oct 3: lecture @ Princeton University / concert @ ffmup (free form mash up) in Princeton, NJ, US
• Oct 4: concert @ Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, NY, US
• Oct 5: concert @ Pixilerations festival in Providence, RI, US
• Oct 7: concert @ Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, US

SKIF++ is Jeff Carey on laptop (audio: SuperCollider), Robert van Heumen on laptop (audio: LiSa) and Bas van Koolwijk (visuals: MAX/Msp/Jitter). More info on SKIF++ on hardhatarea.com.

The visit to the Modulate collective (5 people) in Birmingham was special: the collective is very tight, but also very isolated from other media culture in Birmingham. Their Sonic culture salon took place in an old warehouse, with a huge wall for projections and a great soundsystem. Modulate is also the home of Higher Intelligence Agency, a 90’s IDM group making ambient in the Pete Namlook / Biosphere tradition.

Princeton was very different: naturally a very academic environment, the SKIF++ instrumental electronics seemed far removed from the usual gigs at ffmup. We were received with open arms though - staying at the beautiful campus that was originally build in the 1700’s.

The concert in Issue Project Room was a challenge: failing equipment and a tiny audience - probably due to the fact that the current IPR space is quite remote. You have to give it up to the people at IPR though: with the current politics in New York it is not easy to run an experimental music venue in the city that never sleeps…

In Providence it was like coming home. It was my third time there this year, and this time we were playing at the Pixilerations festival. The venue was a beautiful white gallery, the equipment was great, and there was a good audience. Staying there during the one day off was no punishment either - sleeping in, going for a heavy brunch with the friendly people we stayed with, and strolling along the shore.

Finally Dartmouth College. Playing a matinee in the recital hall was a little surreal - when we were done at 5pm it was almost as if it never happened.

All in all a great tour. During the rehearsals for it we revisited an older piece, and defined a new structure - more timide than the usual crackly thunderstorms, and especially the new piece was received very well.

Soon I’ll add soundclips and more text to hardhatarea.com.

I remember when I first saw the designs for the wiimote controller thinking how stupid it was to make something that looks like a TV remote, one of the worst designed interfaces that we know of. I also just thought of it as nothing more than an accelerometer device, something that people make around here all the time. I admit that I was quite wrong and had underestimated a company that had defined my generation’s childhood with their games and ideas.

STEIM has always been a place about practicality for musicians, so when we realized how cheap and accessible these controllers were it didn’t take much time for the software team to implement a wiimote extension into our JunXion software. We also noticed that residence who come to STEIM and people in our community have also been experimenting with this controller. So we decided to host a Wii meeting. We invited composer/performer Tom Tlalim, the Netherlands one and only WiiJ Tim Groeneboom aka DJ Timski, a collaborative working group of Australian artists Ross Bencina, Somaya Langley, Danielle Wilde and our software R&D Frank Balde and Saskia Dedenbach.

To much of our surprise the evening was packed with an enthusiastic group of people. Frank and Saskia opened the evening by demonstrating the new wii extension patch in JunXion and also talked about development issues concerning bluetooth stacks and ppc vs intel mac issues. Tom talked about his wii-suit using 8 wiimotes to read positions of each limb and mapping that to different parameters in his SuperCollider granular synthesis patch. DJ Timski showed his wiimote + Ableton Live + Max/MSP DJ setup and demonstrated how he can use the controller to apply different effects while he dances among the crowd. Ross/Somaya/Danielle talked about how they used the wiimotes as prototype sensor interfaces to explore new gesture-sound mapping techniques. It was a very energetic evening, and I wonder if as many people would have showed up if we announced the night as “applications and discussions on wireless 3 axis accelerometers.”

Saskia and Frank from STEIM

DJ Timski (both pictures taken by Somaya Langley)

text from our mailing list:

wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

wii is a small revolution.
wiiiiii is a movement about movement.
wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii is leaving the desktop and moving into sonic space.
wiiiii is made for gaming but hacked into a music instrument.
wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii is this rare moment where a mass produced object is recycled into a tool for both experimental and mainstream practice.
wiiiiiiiiiiiiii is supported by STEIM’s junXion and pd, maxmsp, supercollider etc.
STEIM’s wii evening is not sponsored by nintento, but we hope they get it and continue making brothers and sisters of the wii.
wiiiiiiiiii(h)ero’s from all over the globe will present their wiiiiiiiing and perform at STEIM on September 24, Monday.

One of this year’s Artistic Advisers Atau Tanaka curated his first concert program with an interesting line up. As Atau wrote in his text for the mailing list it was all analog music with no laptops, samplers nor effects. However, the musical approach and musical result was extremely different between the two groups.
Kapotte Muziek made their music mainly through amplified objects and some electrical noise. It was really a “you see what you get” type of performance where the sounding object is always present with the sound event. A rare experience these days in electronic music. They seemed serious about this approach to music until one of the performers started playing a water sample from his ipod. This was quite puzzling.
Jerome and Lionel’s performance was rather the opposite, “you see what you don’t get.” They each used an open-reel tape console and manipulated numerous sounds that they recorded live during the performance. What I found fascinating was that every sound that you heard was a electro-magnetically mediated version of a sound that was produced a second before and really existed in its own sonic reality. They were extremely physical in there live manipulation of the reels and even did some turntable like scratching.

Kapotte Muziek

Jerome Noetinger & Lionel Marchetti

Jerome & Lionel’s instruments

text from our mailing list:

When we think of live electronic music of the sort done at STEIM, we often think of digital systems with sensors, shaping sounds coming out of computers. Looking a bit further, we quickly find that this approach existed well before sensors and all that is digital, in direct contact with electrical circuits as represented by the well known CrackleBox. Some less known facts that I only myself learned recently was that Michel Waisvisz imagined a kind of pre-cursor to the LiSA software by controlling and “scratching” on open reel Revox recorders with foot pedals. This evening`s program shows that the spirit of direct manipulation - with sound producing objects and analogue tape - is alive and well.

STEIM hosted a workshop and concert for the SuperCollider Symposium that took place in the Hague and in Leiden. Robert van Heumen’s SKIF++ represented STEIM in the lineup along with primitiveFailed and KuzB. The Netherlands has an incredibly strong SC user group and it was nice to see those people bring together an international meeting like this. This concert sort of represented the physical performance aspect of SC with each performer using different types of interfaces to control the software. I must say that the physicality of the performances were not as crucial to the actual music, especially compared to regular STEIM concerts, but nevertheless it was interesting to see how people take different approaches to the same tool. It was also the first time that I saw two people in audience open their laptops during a performance!

SKIFF++

KuzB

(Photos taken by Gregorio García Karman)