Music • Sound • Video • Art

I was just lamenting to a good friend that the DC Music scene offers few options for viewing the kinds of artists we regularly listen to and whom we hear are performing elsewhere at places like Mutek or the Decibel festival. In fact, except for very occasional visits by David Sylvian (every 15 years or so), Robin Guthrie (about 5 years ago), or a recent stop by some members of Hammock and Stars of the Lid back in May, pretty much what you get around here are Pop, Country, cover bands, and “flavor-of-the-season-alternative-but-actually-pretty-mainstream-and-owned-by-the-labels” acts.

Where are Loscil, Sakamoto, SND, Murcof, Richter, BOC, AES Dana, Brook, Kiln, Noto, Budd, Isan, Eno…? Well, they aren’t around here. (Hell, most of them don’t come to the States now that I think about it…or if they do it is to New York, San Francisco, maybe LA or Seattle.) 

Anyway, I just came across some info today about a “Festival of Experimental Music” right here in DC!

The emphasis seems to be on Noise and Avant Noise Experimental type stuff. It’s not of the stature of a Mutek or Decibel (except for Matmos, I don’t recognize the names listed on the site), but, hey, you gotta start somewhere and it’s GREAT that there even IS something like this around here.

More info is available here.

Artificial Audio has released Obelisk, its new spectral multi-effect for Mac OS X. It is a combination of a Spectral Delay, a Spectral Filter and a Spectral Gate.

Obelisk puts many, many effect parameters under easy graphical control. It has 2-dimensional LFOs for setting up interesting modulation possibilities to enable endlessly changing sound layers of the processed signals. It is also CPU-friendly.

It costs €99, and is available in the Artificial Audio webshop in VST and AU plug-in formats for Mac OS X.

Obelisk Main Screen

Functionally it reminds me of iZotope’s Spectron, but a lot more intuitive. Be sure to check out the cool video tour. I’ll report back in a few weeks on what I find.

Due largely to Peter Kirn’s occasional series of articles over at Create Digital Motion (a daily stop of mine by the way and highly recommended), I’ve had my eye on taking the plunge into learning about Processing. For those unfamiliar, Processing is an open source programming language and environment for programming images, animation, and interactions. It allows you to create your own code to realize computer generated visuals — digital art and video if you choose — for use in your own projects. The programming language is supposed to be fairly accessible to non-programmers…

Today Kirn featured an article about Glen Marshall’s new Processor realized video Metamorphosis. Totally generative and set to Boards of Canada track Corsair from Geogaddi, it is beautiful. And according to Kirn, Glen considers himself a “noob programmer”.

“i can just about understand my own source code, let alone others, i’m still a noob programmer believe it or not.”

I might have to go with the “or not”. Glen’s newest creation is absolutely, positively, unquestionably beautiful. And it is all generative. He programmed the parameters then let it run free. A M A Z I N G.

And it is precisely this type of thing that makes me very very curious about Processing and making the plunge to get to grips with it. Which brings me back to to the last half of my title…