Recombinant Art 01: Artists Using Kyma is a surround sound DVDA disc created entirely by artists using Kyma. Each track was mixed in surround sound and is presented as a high quality uncompressed DVDA 5.1 mix. Available from
CDeMUSIC.
Dream machine
16 Dec 2010 — "Bring your 'dream machine'," Andy Moor is reported to have nudged
Yannis Kyriakides, lest he should decide to get lazy about bringing extra luggage along to their recent live improvisation gig in Florence, Rebetika, at Complesso Le Murate. Moor, an electric guitarist who notoriously eschews all manner of FX pedals, nonetheless loves the sound of Kyma, as you can hear on a new CD
Folia produced by the duo. Kyriakides also used Kyma on two of the tracks of his new electro-acoustic chamber music CD,
Antichamber.
more...
Threshold & A Bell Above the Clouds
04 Jul 2010 — Ex Ovo, "Music For Minimal Matters," will be releasing
Richard Lainhart's first collection of music for the label later this year. In the meantime, though, Ex Ovo has produced a special limited-edition release to coincide with his performance at Avantgarde Festival Schiphorst. The Schiphorst edition contains two tracks from the up-coming release, along with two other exclusive tracks, never heard before. Frans de Waard of Vital Weekly has this to say about it: "Lainhart is a master of drone music from the end of modern classical music. Playing a Steinway grand piano with nine e-bows, or the Kyma System on the electric guitar... Lainhart works extensively with the overtones generated by these 'simple' actions..." The new release contains two guitar/Kyma tracks: "A Bell Above The Clouds" and "Threshold."
more...
Outersect Modeler and New CD
20 Apr 2010 —
Rob Rayle's second Outersect CD,
God Love the Fool, was released April 20, 2010 on
Beats and Pieces records, Israel. The CD makes extensive use Kyma and of the
Outersect modeler, a set of microsounds for the Capybara that were coded by Rob Rayle to emulate the expressive characteristics and modes of acoustic instruments using a small number of simple parameters that relate directly to the actions of real-world players.
more...
Music from the Future
08 Jan 2010 —
Richard Devine utilized Kyma processing on his track for
Music for Our Future, a compilation of music inspired by the world of SyFy's
Caprica, curated by
XLR8R,
Pitchfork and
Create Digital Music. Processing sound sources ranging from water and leaves to giant turkeys and pigs' breathing, Devine layered spectral analysis, morphing, granular processing, and FM synthesis to create a "roller-coaster ride of audio frequency dynamics." For more details and photos, see Create Digital Music
site. Devine also mentions his Kyma set up in his video with
Electronic Musician (EM).
more...
Migration
31 Sep 2009 — In
Migration,
HamiltonSterling and Jimmy Haslip take us on a journey that begins in Senegal and ends up on another planet. Using Kyma timbre-scapes and live performances on bass and percussion, Haslip and Sterling create an immersive soundtrack tracing humankind's restless and inevitable journey out of Africa and outward to the stars. Inevitable in part due to what Huntington Ellsworth calls human kind's "innate migratory tendency" and partly due to "Nature's stern urgency" (COP15?). The best listening is in surround-sound with the lights dimmed: Side 1 (white band) of the DVD is a 5.1 Dolby Digital version and a 2 channel PCM 24-bit 48 kHz version. Side 2 (red band) is a 5.1 24 bit 48 kHz DVD-Audio 5.1 version; this is definitely a 'hi fi', 'audiophile' type experience. It's a soundtrack that creates its own visuals inside your head. Listen to a preview and order your own copy from
Helikon Sound ,
CDBaby, or
Amazon.
more...
Being Dufay
01 July 2009 —
Ambrose Field's Being Dufay, released worldwide this month on ECM/Universal and mixed in analog at Oslo's Rainbow Studio, features Kyma throughout. Field took fragments of music by the 15th century composer, sung by tenor John Potter, and placed them in new digitally modified settings. Kyma was used to create a flexible, digital model of Potter's voice. Using Tau synthesis, Field was able to morph Potter into female backing singers and a haze of new medieval choirs.
Being Dufay received 5 star ratings for both music and production in the June edition of
BBC Music Magazine, with allaboutjazz.com dubbing it "one of the most hauntingly beautiful records of the year" and concluding: "...this is music created by the heart as much as the mind." Read the full review at
BBC Music Magazine.
A schedule of live peformances of Being Dufay can be found here. more...
JOMO!
24 Apr 2009 — JOMO (aka
Luddy Harrison and Pan Luoyi) have released their first album under the Dong Music International label, celebrating the release with a live show at
Star Live in Beijing on April 24, 2009. Instrumental sounds on the album were created using a Virus TI for the bulk of the ordinary electronic sounds, Kyma for special or difficult sounds, and a V-Synth for fills. Pan Luoyi's airy-yet-precise vocals are in English (she plans to release the same songs in Mandarin at a later date) blending with Luddy's lush, densely layered, calmly-paced instrumental parts, peppered with intriguing sound-effects.
Break Your Heart could be the theme song for a film noir remake of a Bond film. You can hear excerpts from the new album at the
Dong Music's website.
JOMO is available on Amazon China with an international release planned soon (watch the Jomo website for updates). While you're there, be sure to check out Luddy's blog on his experiences as a new immigrant to China. more...
One
09 Jan 2009 — Composed while lucidly dreaming and realized using a Tenori-on controlling Kyma,
AC's latest album,
One, was influenced both by his studies with Karlheinz Stockhausen and his experiences DJ-ing. Described as "pure ambient bliss," the album bathes the listener in gentle binaural landscapes. AC describes Kyma as "the perfect tool for the imagination." One is available from
666 ZipCode Town Rekkids.
more...
Lucibel Crater: The Family Album
01 Jul 2008 — Kyma is detectable on several tracks off the new album,
Lucibel Crater: The Family Album (Searching Eye Records), reviewed in the July 2008 issue of
Buzzbin magazine and available on iTunes or at Lucibel's
website.
Threadbare Funeral (with guest artist Lou Reed on guitar), features Kyma-synthesized tabla-esque drums and metal-bars, and a monkish vocal that was synthesized from a glottal-pulse. You can also hear the effects of Kyma's stereo plate reverb and the input-output compressor.
more...
Mitterer meets Schubert
09 Jun 2008 — Re-experience the idea of the 'Schubert song cycle' and 'pop music' through the subtle and sophisticated filter of composer/organist
Wolfgang Mitterer's musical imagination in two new releases from
col legno. In
Im Sturm, a baritone song cycle is delicately punctuated with electronic chittering and pianistic jabs that evolve into entropically decaying clock chimes. Although billed
the exceptionally gifted organist, composer and specialist in electronics Wolfgang Mitterer's...first foray into pop: Sopop is not pop music, but rather Mitterer's experience of and reflections on pop music: English lyrics, action-verb titles, beats, and a universe where anything and everything is sampled and re-imagined.
more...
Costey and Black Holes
13 May 2008 — Producer
Rich Costey described Kyma as "unbelievably deep" in an interview he did last year with
EQ Magazine. Discussing a track called
Supermassive Black Hole from the recent
Muse album
Black Holes and Revelations, Costey wrote:
"...I processed a whole bunch of samples through a Kyma system which I have, which is basically just an open architecture sound designer box and you can build whatever you want. It's unbelievably deep - it's like a black hole of sound design. It's similar in context to Reactor, but I think it's much deeper and it sounds incredible. A lot of the drums on that track were processed by a Kyma. The sounds that are jumping out, and the fills and stuff, that's all processed by the Kyma."
more...
Vogel + Jobin = Double Deux
17 Apr 2008 —
Cristian Vogel's Double Deux / Delicado is now available on
Last.FM. Known for his work on experimental techno labels such as Tresor, Novamute and Mille Plateaux, Vogel's music has more recently been electrifying a different kind of dance floor. When Franz Treichler (Young Gods) introduced Cristian to Swiss choreographer
Gilles Jobin it was, as they describe it, "love at first sight". Since then Cristian has scored the music for four of Jobin's creations including
Double Deux (2006) and
Delicado (2004).
more...
Hum
14 Apr 2008 —
Taylor Deupree used Kyma to do the processing on NYC/Tokyo artist Sawako's CD
Hum. In
Hum, Sawako starts with sounds of everyday life, processes them, and works them into melodies and arrangements employing piano, voice, roomtones, field recordings, and DSP processing by Deupree.
more...
Whispers from Mercury
20 Dec 2007 —
Melissa Stark's Voices is a CD of evocative soundscapes realized in Kyma and mixed in Pro Tools. You can listen to excerpts from this work in progress on
bMuze where you can also vote for your favorites. In the track titled
Fall of Mercury we hear the whispers of a race of Mercurians even after their planet falls into the gravitational field of the sun.
more...
Ghost Strings by Patricia Strange
07 Dec 2007 —
Ghost Strings, audio CD by Patricia Strange, violin (2006). A collection of five compositions for violin and computer processing including
Ghost String by
Jeffrey Stolet (2005) and
Lyra by
Brian Belet (2002). IMG Media CD-02-01, 2006.
more...
AARDE Day
27 Oct 2007 — If some of the tracks on
AARDE A Whole Day (DirtyCDR 025) seem to evolve like slow surges of the deep sea or suggest the mesmerizing thrum of engines, the rush of water or screeches of gulls, the explanation could lie in this one unusual fact.
Lois Laplace is both composer and a professional sailor.
Aarde is a collaboration of
Laplace on Kyma, and
Guillaume Gargaud on computer and prepared guitar. Laplace, who describes the sound of Kyma as "very pure," has a talent for revealing subtle and delicate details in the midst of an industrial environment like a commercial ship. Whether focusing intently on the minutest variations of light reflecting off the surface of the water or constructing soundscapes of soothing engine drones with in-your-ear glitches and mysteriously delicate noise bands that evolve at just the right pace, Aarde's music is simultaneously vast and delicate: truly minimalist without ever becoming boring. You can listen to some of the tracks on
Virb and order the CD from
Dirty Demos.
more...
The NeverEngine
08 Oct 2007 —
Cristian Vogel's
The NeverEngine is a collection of recordings synthesized using his own custom sequencing algorithms in Kyma for interpolating between data-states, sliding beats into bleeps and tones into drones. Vogel has been overseeing the refinement and evolution of these interpolating state engines, and in
tresor.321, he presents the first chapter documenting the sonic results of this concentrated
research and development.
more...
Outersect with Caldera
13 Aug 2007 — On August 13, 2007, Outersect (
Rob Rayle) released his worldwide debut solo album,
Caldera, nine tracks combining acoustic vocals, instruments, and electronics in a variety of psychedelic downtempo styles ranging from dub to ethnotechno.
Caldera is a spiritually motivated album intended to reach out to people using spiritual psychedelic music in order to help them move towards a higher understanding. You can hear lots of Kyma on the CD (including some new synthesis algorithms that Rob programmed for himself using DSP assembly language). In particular, listen to Track 7 (almost everything is Kyma or Kyma-processed) and Track 9 (the pedal-steel lead sound is Kyma), plus there are various Kyma sounds interspersed throughout the album. Check
http://www.outersect.net for more information on the album and upcoming live dates. The name of the album comes from a free event Rayle hosted inside the caldera of an extremely large volcano in the
Eastern Sierra.
more...
Night of the Brain - Wear This World Out
22 Jul 2007 — Lots of Kyma applied in the mixing and performance of the debut album from
Cristian Vogel's latest band endeavour,
Night of the Brain.
more...
Why do you want to come to Santa Barbara Graduate School?
07 Jun 2007 —
David Mooney and Maxine Heller's collaborative piece,
Why Do You Want to Come to Santa Barbara Graduate School?, has been selected for inclusion on elektramusic's CD,
Electroacoustic Music Volume 02, scheduled for release on June 7, 2007.
more...
Christus and the Cosmonaughts
08 Jan 2007 —
Scot Solida's new
Christus and the Cosmonaughts album has just been made available as a digital download from
Beta-lactam Ring Records as the full CD version of the original LP plus two additional bonus tracks. Solida describes the album as "utterly chocked to the brim with Kyma goodness." One of the tracks, "The Fractured Faithfull" was done entirely within Kyma, but no track was untouched by the Kyma/Capybara combo. Solida warns that
"spinning the artwork on a turntable has been clinically proven to cause lethargy in children and dust mites."
more...
Kyma rocks
23 Sep 2006 —
Scott Holden's debut album,
SCOTT, demonstrates that Kyma is not just for sound effects. Kyma was used throughout the album for subtle processing that enhances rather than contradicts the raw bluesy style. Kyma connoisseurs will appreciate the chopper applied to the guitar part on "Spooky" and the swarm-following harmonizer on "No Stone Unturned". More subtle and more pervasive is the Inverse Compressor that Holden designed and applied to all the drums, and the multiband compressor with random settings that he employs as a permanent part of his guitar effects loop. His lightly processed vocals are routed through cascading compressors and delay filters in Kyma and his custom-designed harmonizer is so realistic that most listeners will assume it is multi-tracking.
more...
Unidentified Sound Object
14 Jun 2006 —
Matteo Milani and
Federico Placidi have released
USO (Unidentified Sound Object), an exuberant journey through spaces (literal and abstract) populated by elementary particles organizing themselves into increasingly complex structures. The sound quality is superb and it's obvious that Placidi and Milani share a genuine love for sound exploration. Listen on your DVD player or with
VLC media player for the 4-channel surround sound experience! You can hear an excerpt on
U.S.O. Project, and order the
DTS Music Disc from
CDeMUSIC or
Music Zeit Download Platform (formats: mp3/flac).
more...
Magic Stones
5 Jun 2006 —
Robert Jarvis handed marbles to school children telling them, "This is a magic stone. When you hold this stone in your hand and close your eyes, you will hear something." Magically, the children did hear things--sounds in the environment they had never noticed before.
Magic Stones the CD is itself a magic stone; once you've heard the "environmental" sounds on this disk organized as music you hear the world in a new way. Jarvis' music exemplifies
Jacques Attali's prediction that the future economy of music will be based on the process of composing, not on finished pieces or objects; Jarvis always engages the "audience" (ranging from professional musicians to children) in the process of composing. Available on
Motile as a download or as a physical CD.
more...
Storm
22 May 2006 —
Ambrose Field’s new studio album
Storm has been awarded an Honorary Mention at the 2006
Prix Ars Electronica in Linz Austria. Sargasso describes the album as "High impact, over-the-top sonic grandeur meets blistering metal guitar solos..."
more...
Junkie XL Today
18 Apr 2006 —
Tom Holkenborg was interviewed in
Remix in connection with his new album,
Today. When asked about Kyma, he describes it as:
...basically a complete empty box, and it can be whatever you want it to be—you can program a patch that turns a guitar into a vocal, or you can morph in between four, five or six different sounds, in real time, to make new sounds. I definitely took the processing of my guitars and vocals to a whole new level that I've never been to before. more...
Dubsaharan
10 Feb 2006 —
Arcana, a compilation album soon to be released by
Interchill, features two new tracks by
Greg Hunter (Dubsahara). Of interest to both world music enthusiasts and psy-oriented listeners, the Dubsahara remix of Kaya Project's
One God Dub is the result of a recent collaboration between East-West fusion genre producers Seb Taylor and Greg Hunter. And the Dubsahara tune,
Harmonic Density features Kris Weston (formerly known as Thrash) who worked with Greg during the early days of the Orb.
more...
Disappearing Magic Stones
23 Nov 2005 — Composer
Robert Jarvis has a new CD coming out this month on the
Motile label. Entitled
Magic Stones, it comprises a series of compositions related to time and place, including the
Disappear installation soundtrack and the eponymous Irish installation: Magic Stones.
more...
Blue note
17 Nov 2005 —
Edmund Eagan's
Distance Blue (a series of live performances on Continuum controlling Kyma) is now available on a CD, appropriately disguised in packaging that resembles a tin of mints! To audition mp3 excerpts and place your order, go to
http://www.twelfthroot.com/recordings and click on the link to
Distance Blue. While you're there, check out the link to the audio samples from
Recombinant 01, Eagan's all-Kyma compilation DVD featuring 5 channel surround mixes of music by a variety of artists using Kyma.
more...
Fell Between Octavia and Laguna
13 Sep 2005 —
Fell made heavy use of his Wacom tablet to control Kyma in restructuring the timbre of some drums on
Crashed Emotionally, a track from his latest release:
Between Octavia and Laguna. Several other songs on the album feature Kyma manipulation and mutation of source samples. You can purchase the 64k mp3 album for $2.00 at
the website. All releases are delivered via a ZIP file including album tracks in MP3 format plus PDFs of album artwork.
more...
Chaos-surfing in Ottawa
01 Sep 2005 —
Distance Blue, a new album by Continuum-virtuoso
Edmund Eagan, serves up some cool blue sounds for the end of summer. With each track named after a shade of blue from a paint sample chart, the sounds range from airy string-like harmonics to delicate reeds, electric guitars, plucked strings with vocal formants, thereminish swoops, underwater piano pings, metallic grains, alien sitars, computerish blips, and microtonal scales of unknown ethnography, all drenched in delicious reverbs and mysterious ambiences.
Eagan's combination of Kyma with
Continuum comprises a new musical instrument in its own right. The sound-generating algorithms are variations on a plucked harmonic resonator run through Johnston-CrossFilters mixed and sometimes processed by additional Crossfilters. Eagan writes: "Having this Continuum/Kyma system allows me to write music in a much more improvisational way then I normally would in the structured environment of typical computer music generation. The result for me is a very gratifying musical experience, akin to surfing (riding the waves on the edge of chaos)."
more...
Ex nihilo sub rosa
29 Jul 2005 —
Fred Szymanski's Flume is a new work that was commissioned by Sub Rosa for inclusion on the compilation:
An anthology of noise & electronic music / Third / A chronology 1952 - 2004 on
Sub Rosa SR220. Utilizing iterative, nonlinear synthesis techniques, Szymanski continues his earlier investigations into the manipulation of sounds at the particle level (the Nozzle series) and expands to include convergent-divergent motions at the macro-level.
Guy Marc Hinant describes the music in this anthology as "The first traces of an inevitably revolutionary music: electronic music, created ex nihilo, out of nothing (and therefore to be entirely invented)."
more...
Hö in Berlin
12 Jul 2005 — A CD of
Agostino Di Scipio's Audible Ecosystems,
Hörbare Ökosysteme, is now available on
Edizion RZ, Berlin. All featured works involve live signal processing or synthesis with Kyma. The full title is
Hörbare Ökosysteme: Live elektronische Kompositionen 1993-2005 Edizion RZ 10015.
more...
Every Still Day
01 Jun 2005 — a reconstruction of the album "Awaawa" by the japanese band Eisi. (noble records). Eisi is a 3-piece outfit consisting of vocals, guitar, trumpet, upright bass, and some synthesizer. sort of dreamy, experimental pop. using extensive track and soundfile data from the original album, i recreated the entire thing using my own digital style and practices.
more...
Lisboa.Reloaded
01 Jun 2005 —
Carlos Alberto Augusto's new piece
Cine-Lisboa will be included on
Lisboa.Reloaded, a new DVD to be released this summer on the Real Ambient label. For more background on Augusto's work, visit
his website.
more...
ISKRA3
08 May 2005 —
ISKRA3 (psi 05.02) is scheduled for release at the beginning of May, 2005 on
Evan Parker's Psi label. Described as "revolutionary improvised music for trombone and live computer processing," the album features Robert Jarvis (Kyma) improvising with Paul Rutherford (trombone). Himself a trombonist, Jarvis performs regularly with Rutherford as part of the
London Improvisers Orchestra, but on this particular CD, Jarvis performs only on Kyma, using it as a musical instrument. The entire album is strictly improvised—no discussion about the music before or during the recording. You can order it online at
EMANEM: "compact discs of unadulterated new music for people who like new music unadulterated".
more...
Recombinant Art 01: Artists Using Kyma
01 Mar 2005 — In
Recombinant Art 01: Artists Using Kyma (RA01), producer
Edmund Eagan has created a true 5-channel DVD-audio disk that you can listen to in stereo on your computer or play on a 6-channel DVD-player for the full surround audio experience. Beautiful both visually and sonically, RA01 was created entirely by artists using Kyma and is now available at
CDeMUSIC.
more...
Scratching the ol tablet in Denver
24 Feb 2005 — Have a listen to Scot Solida's first experiments with the Graphire tablet as Kyma controller at
http://www.olscratchrecordings.com/Sounds/Tablets_in_the_Timeline.mp3. The track was created using Kyma, a lap-steel guitar played with an E-bow, and the voice of Scot's son, Nigel. This track (along with a full-side-length track done entirely in Kyma) is to be released under the project name Christus & the Cosmonaughts by Beta-lactam Ring Records (
http://www.blrrecords.com). Scot also used Kyma (along with Dotcom modular, Waldorf Microwave XTk, Moog Rogue, Nord G2, Hammond organ, and slide guitar) in the following track on Beta-lactam's MP3 site:
http://blrrecords.com/mp3/blurr03_christus.mp3 more...
Christus and the Cosmonaughts
12 Oct 2004 —
Scot Solida is participating in a gallery showing of art by underground musicians (other contributors include members of Coil, Current 93, Nurse With Wound and Legendary pink Dots). Along with the gallery showing is a special limited edition 10" acetate record. Kyma was used to do the vocal treatments on Solida's track under the project name "Christus and the Cosmonaughts."
more...
See Beyond the Music EP
01 Sep 2004 — A five minute "mini-epic" called "No Chance to Dream" appears on the compilation EP
See Beyond the Music, released by Beta-lactam Ring records. This very limited edition acetate disc is being issued to coincide with the gallery exhibit of the same name. Tracks by Edward Ka-Spel, Armchair Migraine Journey and Romulus/Remus are also included. My track appears under the project name "Christus and the Cosmonaughts". Kyma was used extensively to process vocals for a sort of "concret collage" effect.
more...
siliconectar
29 May 2004 — Greg Hunter's remix of "siliconectar" (
Greg Hunter and
CarlaScaletti) is being released on Dakini Records on May 29, 2004 as part of the LIVE@DAKINI NIGHTS compilation). Constructed as a continuous culture-morph from Celtic harp (Scaletti) to Egyptian harp and back again through an electronic space in between (with a rhythm track that evokes images of belly dancers holding candles), "siliconectar" was in fact accompanied by belly dancers holding candles when Greg performed it live in Japan last year. It opens with a Celtic harp (one with preternaturally long trills and infinite decay times care of Kyma's
SampleCloud processing), evolves into hip-swaying tablas, through bubbly synths, into the Egyptian harp, back through resonant filter sweeps to a dream-harp-plus-breathy-flute-clouds (Hunter), and finally echoes backwards into filter sweeps and a supernaturally long reverberated decay. The CD comes with lots of images from the live event and includes contributions from artists Puff Dragon, Makyo, Karsh Kale, Ochi Brothers, Sevda, Ishq, and Rasiya in addition to Greg Hunter. (A "dakini" or "sky-dancer" is a goddess, a ghost, or an angel, depending upon where you grew up).
more...
Livin' Large
06 May 2004 — Musician/Remixer/Producer
DC used Kyma for synthesis and processing on
Confidential, the latest release by smooth jazz guitarist Peter White, and on
Livin' Large, the latest release by saxophonist Euge Groove (Eros Ramazzotti, Tina Turner, Joe Cocker). On Peter White's album, listen in particular to Track 6:
Lost Without Your Love, and pay close attention to Track 3:
XXL on the Euge Groove album. DC's credits include the recent Grammy-Award-winning
Just Chillin' by Norman Brown.
more...
WTC.XTC
25 Feb 2004 — After two years of work, Aurélia-Djehan Derungs and
Laurent Mialon are releasing this CD+DVD project (begun on Sept 11th). Both versions offer a total of 2H20 of acousmatique electronic hardcore (with a 5+1 track), and more than 35 minutes of dreamlike videos, combined for a strange psychedelic travel that aims at bending the curve of space-time.
The KYMA platform was used extensively to manipulate live-recorded natural sounds such as thunder, flies that landed on the microphone, fallen rocks or the grating of ski lifts.
more...
Get It Together
14 Feb 2004 — Bill Hamel's remix of Seal's
Get It Together (Warner Bros. Records) was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Remixed Recording category in February 2004. According to Hamel, "It had tons of Kyma treatments in it. I feel that this is why it stood out so much above most remixes last year!" Read more about Bill Hamel's work at the web site.
more...
Many Times...
01 Feb 2004 — Joel Chadabe's CD,
Many Times ... (the ellipsis is the name of the performer), features Benjamin Chadabe (bowed cymbals and gongs), Chris Mann (recitation), David Gibson (cello), Jan Williams (conga, djembé, and hand-held percussion), and Esther Lamneck (tárogató). Each performer interacts with different versions of Chadabe's Kyma live processing algorithms.
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january
01 Jan 2004 — "january" is a continuation of the ideas of my cd "stil." (12k, 2002). Where "stil." made extensive use of repetition, "january", with a base built from short loops and fragmented sounds, adds a layer of randomness and live elements. Kyma was used extensively in the sound design for creating odd harmonics, fragmenting, chopping and looping.
more...
Invisible Architecture #08
01 Nov 2003 — This music grew out of a late November 2002 performance and studio improvisation in NYC. Deupree's
Stil. and Willits'
Folding and
The Tea had just been released on 12k, and a release party had been scheduled at Tonic in NYC. Willits flew in town for the show. The night was beautiful, and music was recorded. Later that week, Willits and Deupree set up a processing system in Taylor's Brooklyn studio. It consisted of Willits' guitar, folding through his own software system, and then resynthesized through Deupree's Kyma processing. Jamming late into the night turned into hours of raw material. Deupree and Willits then edited the recordings into 10 track foundations, and finalized the tracks individually, 3000 miles apart. The final CD contains excerpts from the live recordings at Tonic in NYC, and their favorite finished pieces from the original studio collaboration. You can trace each artist's solo approach to performance in their respective live sets, and hear how those methods, sounds, and processes blend together within the studio improvisations. The collaboration is a hybrid of Deupree's keen timing and sensitivity to the microprocessing of sounds, and Willits' folded guitar playing and flowing harmonic sensibilities. The CD drifts into new sonic territory for both artists, and establishes a foundation for Willits' new melodic arrangements and Deupree's growing interest in live instrumentation.
more...
Spectrality
10 Aug 2003 — With
Spectrality, Disney animator Marcus Hobbs continues his use of Kyma to create microtonal melodies using ancient scales against a backdrop of acid techno beats.
more...
Compilatione
19 Jul 2003 — Lorenzo Brusci announces an MP3 version of a timet compilation called
COMPILATIONE: Classicism Meets the Beat: An Electronic Tuscan Scene, available on the web. (Kyma was used on two of the pieces). You may freely use this music under a EFF legal license. To support the timet project, order their CDs!
more...
Left to His Own Devices
15 Feb 2003 — New World Records announces the release of Eric Chasalow's
Left to His Own Devices (catalog #80601-2), featuring seven of his electro-acoustic works. Two in particular,
Left to His Own Devices and
Suspicious Motives, pay homage to his Columbia-Princeton mentors; the former is built from vocal samples of Milton Babbitt and the sound of the RCA synthesizer while the latter incorporates two motives from Mario Davidovsky's music — primarily the opening to
Synchronisms #6. Chasalow writes, "In spite of my long history with electronic music, the technology is not my focus." Of related interest: #80440-2
Eric Chasalow - Over the Edge.
more...
Vision Quest
29 Jan 2003 —
Cliff White used the mastering Sound posted to the Kyma Forum by
David McClain as part of the mastering process on Deovolente's latest CD,
Vision Quest. Powerful and uncompromising in their lyrics, Deovolente's musical style could be described as a form of heavy metal, progressive rock, experimental electronic, new wave alternative rock.
more...
Flat
18 Dec 2002 — Oded Streigold recently released a CD that he says is "quite strange music." He calls it
Flat. Two songs from the album:
Breathing and
Untitled use Kyma for generating synthesized sounds based on the pitch and amplitude of a vocal input. The song
Breathing is available on the website.
more...
Corrosion
06 Dec 2002 —
Music tells us who we are and it can change us... To me, the most powerful music moves me to a new understanding, it's something that I could not imagine. —Paul Doornbusch
In his new album
Corrosion, released on Joel Chadabe's EMF Media label, Paul creates extraordinary and unusual sounds for instruments, computers, and electronics. In
Continuity 3 for percussion and computer, for example, a china cymbal, a circular metal plate, and a tam-tam are transformed electronically into decisive gestures of sound that seem to float in a musical space, or swing through it like powerful birds of sound, or explode spontaneously. In
Continuity 2 for recorder quartet and electronics, the sounds of a recorder are translated into thin, floating strands of sound, articulated by sudden movements. Each composition has its own distinct drama. The CD also includes
act5 for bassoon and electronics; "g4" electronic sounds; and "strepidus somnus" for voices and electronics. You can order the album from CDEMusic at the web site.
more...
Persepolis Remixes Edition I
09 Sep 2002 —
Laminar (Fred Szymanski) is one of the featured remix artists on Iannis Xenakis
Persepolis Remixes Edition I. In the spirit of Xenakis, Laminar's contribution,
Whorl, contrasts balanced static sections (generated using an analysis/resynthesis of the main body of Persopolis) with powerful dynamic sections, punctuated by deliciously crispy crackly Function Iterative Synthesis. Released under Naut Humon's
Asphodel label, the two-disk set includes the original 55 minute work by Xenakis on the first disk followed by the remixes on a second disk.
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SPL-22001
03 Aug 2002 — Sunao Inami has released a new album with Masayuki Akamatsu and Kauya Ishigami called
SPL-22001 on the electr-ohm label, featuring the three composers kneeling shrine-like before their laptops on the cover. Living up to its billing as "massive DSP based experimental computer music," the album features about 20 minutes of each composer using Powerbook G4s with MAX/MSP, Kyma, and Reaktor to generate an amazing range of timbres. Inami's work emphasizes delicate, highly resonant filters just on the edge of breaking into oscillation punctuated with silences and crackling, sustained pads with resonant details popping in and out, and shimmering reverberated pads of sustained pitches along with what sounds like a massively granulated train whistle. The sounds are imaginative and varied, sometimes (but not always) with a slow pulsing beat.
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Tone Casualties
20 Jul 2002 — Nirto Karsten Fischer used Kyma for processing and synthesis on the new CD he has just completed with Paul Browse.
Visions of Excess | Sensitive Disruption has been released in the U.S. under
Tone Casualties. Kyma can be heard processing the voices of Robert Anton Wilson and Paul Browse and processing raw material for the evolving background pads. Kyma's granular synthesis is audible in the deconstruction of the groove at the end of the track
Clockwork Universe.
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9-11-01
15 Jul 2002 — Doug Masla, creative director of
One-O-Eight Music & Sound, has just completed the mastering and soundscape sound design for recording artist Jessie A. Cooper's CD,
9-11-01, a tribute documenting the first four days following September 11, 2001. Masla was given a stereo mix on CD and asked to overdub as many as fourteen stereo channels of sound design and then to interleave it back into a stereo mix. He accomplished this by importing the CD, one track at a time, into his Pro Tools rig where he has Kyma on the first 4 AES I/O busses and an H4000 on channels 5 and 6. Most of the sounds used were chosen by reviewing 8 hours of video from 9/11 and extracting the audio from eyewitness accounts. The remaining sounds came from Masla's library.
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ve palor
03 Jul 2002 —
Arovane has finished a new album,
ve palor featuring lots of Kyma sounds and realtime effects. The release is on the Berlin-based label din.
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Rhythmiconic Sections
21 May 2002 — David Mooney's 24-part work
Rhythmiconic Sections has been released by Arizona University Recordings (AUR). The work was inspired by Leon Theremin's rhythmicon, built in 1931 for Henry Cowell. Selections have been performed at festivals and concerts in the U.S., Belgium and Cuba (ICMC2001 listening room) and have been broadcast in North America and France. The work uses a mixture of synthesized sounds and samples, all of which were created and/or processed entirely within Kyma. The CD can be purchased online at EMF's CDemusic site (search for "mooney&") or directly from AUR. For historical background on the rhythmicon, technical info, and RealAudio samples visit Mooney's web site,
http://www.city-net.com/~moko/.
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The Thunderthief
13 Feb 2002 — There was a news report a few years ago about a raven in Japan that would perch by a playground every morning and watch the kids play. As soon as the kids would leave to go to school, the raven would fly over and play on the equipment all by himself; they even had a photograph of him going down the slide.
It makes me think that the cover art drawing of a raven dancing with a conductor’s baton on the cover of
The Thunderthief is really supposed to be
John Paul Jones. Like the raven in Japan, Jones’ approach to his second solo album is intelligent, surprising, playful, and not without a hint of darkness. Biding his time and observing carefully before swooping in for some clever play with an astonishing array of musical instruments, sounds, signal processing, recording techniques, and musical styles as if they were the toys in a children’s playground, he sounds as if he’s genuinely having fun. And the feeling is infectious.
One of the biggest surprises (at least in light of his former protestations) is that the multi-instrumentalist/arranger/composer also sings on this album. Not surprisingly, he uses his voice in a way that is similar to the way he plays his other instruments: directly and unpretentiously, as a tool for conveying the music without distracting attention from it. It’s a voice that sneaks up on you, seemingly quiet and simple but in fact rife with invisible little Velcro hooks that remain in your brain afterwards.
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Pump on Mille Plateaux
16 Nov 2001 — Matt Haines aka
The Rip-Off Artist, releases his seventh album,
Pump on Mille Plateaux. The album features a custom Kyma sound developed by Matt. Called the "decrapulator," it uses a looped sample's waveform crossings to trigger samples in a non-random but non-intuitive manner. The output is then edited into lurchy beat fragments and worked into tunes. The result: electronic music that is beat-friendly yet rhythmically subversive. Excerpts from the album and other releases are available at the web site. Also, a track from this album, called
Hydrocracking, can be found on the
Mille Plateaux compilation
Electric Ladyland: ClickHop, Version 1.0.
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Fragments for Tiresias
01 Nov 2001 — Agostino Di Scipio's
Fragments for Tiresias, a work co-authored with poet Giuliano Mesa, has been included on the CD Music / Text vol.2, Capstone records (CPS8693). The musical part was generated by interacting in the studio with a granular-based "rhythm machine" designed with Kyma, then recursively granulating the rhythmic material. Hidden in the sonic texture is a "sonic quotation" from the percussion parts of Varèse's score,
Déserts. The voice of Giuliano Mesa, uttering Tiresias' oracles (predicting disasters that had already happened) is left untouched by the electronics and matched against the rhythmical texture.
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Automatic Inscription of Speech Melody
26 Oct 2001 —
Automatic Inscription of Speech Melody is a new CD on the Deep Listening label by Carrier Band (Peer Bode, Pauline Oliveros, Andrew Deutsche and Dick Robinson). Included on the CD is
Earth Orbit, a quartet improvisation that Dick Robinson describes as being "the most fun he's ever had performing." Loops and text are drawn from Harald Bode's notebooks and data sets generated by Deutsch
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Trilogy
12 Oct 2001 — After two years of work, Otto Laske has completed a new composition for loudspeakers called
Trilogy. The work (duration of 30:54) comprises three pieces
Erwachen (6:29),
Echo des Himmels (13:41), and
Ganymed (10:34). The pieces derive their title and content from poems by the German poet, Hoelderlin, but use no texts. They are based on scores computed by Koenig's Project One program for algorithmic composition, and are rendered by using Kyma's TextfileInterpreter module. The musical esthetics and technique of
Trilogy is discussed in Chapter 6 of Tom Licata's forthcoming book,
The Analysis of Electro-Acoustic Music, to appear at the Greenwood Press early next year.
Trilogy is dedicated to Otto's German and American teachers.
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Repeater
28 Sep 2001 — Sunao Inami's new album,
repeater, is now available under the
electr-ohm label. Awash in ambient sound design, BPM delay lines, and Waldorf-Wavey beats, astute Kyma users will also be able to pick out the sounds of Kyma's granular synthesis.
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Carpenter Ant Blues
13 Aug 2001 —
Preston Wright's album,
Carpenter Ant Blues was released in November, 2000, and produced by Sonic Circuits 8, innova Recordings. It was performed at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington DC, on August 13, 2001. The concert was produced by the Washington Chapter of the American Composers Forum.
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Synched up
19 Jul 2001 — BT's Kyma-processed 'N SYNC track "Pop" is currently the #1 most-requested song in the US. BT produced the new single in which he "irreverently treated ALL their vocals using Kyma for the whole song..."
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Many Very Fine Songs
15 Jun 2001 — Working under the name MVFS, Danny Zelonky (
Low Res /
Crank) and Dimitri Fergadis (
Phthalocyanine) used Kyma in the production of their
Many Very Fine Songs album, coming out June 15th on the Belgian
Aim Records imprint. This “vividly tasteless” collection traces their doomed collaboration from 1995 until its demise in 1999, when the two artists, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, permanently dissolved their partnership. The music is acrimonious, too, except the tender
Aftermarch, which also appears on the new Intermissions compilaton on Plug Research.
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Feeder #8
25 Apr 2001 —
Feeder #8 by Laminar (Fred Szymanski's project) is featured on a new CD of Sound works from the BitStreams exhibition JdK Productions / Creamgarden records.
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the kids are alright / brain salad surgery
15 Mar 2001 — Matt Haines' fifth album (his first under the Rip-Off Artist name) was released on March 15, 2001.
the kids are alright (QS-105) is now available from Sub Rosa/Quatermass [Belgium], and retailers will have it at the beginning of April, 2001.
the kids are alright includes Kyma vocoding, analog synth emulation, FM synth weirdness and other spectral manipulation.
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Transmission
08 Feb 2001 — Oivind Idso used Kyma to do a remix of a track by Needle on
Transmission0014 released on the Beta Bodega (USA) label. Listen to a RealAudio version of his track at
http://www.mdos.at/ralink.php3?rid=157.
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Unhearlded Communications
16 Dec 2000 — Dorsey Dunn /
Unhearlded Communications/Encountering the Magnetosphere on 3000ce label, recorded live at BACCA1010 on December 16, 2000.
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Larva3
13 Dec 2000 — It's not often that you get to hear music that sounds truly different from any you've heard before, and David Mooney's new
Larva3 CD presents you with just such an opportunity. Composed using his Kyma-based implementation of the
Rhythmicon (Henry Cowell's theory of composition based on the harmonic series), the entire CD is a self-similar structure from the harmonic content of a single timbre, to the rhythmic patterns, and even to the arrangements and durations of each section. But just because it is meticulously structured doesn't mean it isn't also liberally sprinkled with humorous elements! Visit David Mooney's website or go direct to the Rhythmicon.
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Aliens On Line
05 Dec 2000 —
Aliens On Line, recorded at Alien Head Studios and mastered at Capitol Records, is the album from The Away Team. Featuring complex layering, intricate modulations, and lyrics dealing with the role of extraterrestrials in our collective future, the album is also a virtual compendium of what can be done with Kyma's granular synthesis, granular processing, vocoding, additive and pseudo-analog synthesis.
NikGreen and Penny Little Savage are veteran musicians as evidenced in their mastery over the wide range of styles heard on the album—everything from radio-friendly synth pop, to abstract musique concrete, to dark orchestral scores that would make suitable soundtracks for the next X-Files movie. The music is intelligent and humorous, too.
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Deovolente: In the Distance
30 Nov 2000 — Cliff White and Chris Chillier have just released a new album
Deovolente: In the Distance (visit the web sitefor a Real Audio taste of what the album is like). The darkly industrial, nine-inch-nailish music-with-a-message has lots of recognizably Kyma bits sprinkled throughout. Notice the morph between tracks 4 and 5, a modulated "sandy guitar" sound on track 5, the electronic wind on track 10, and mysterious outro on track 17, and numerous other smaller Kyma touches. Cliff is already at work on the next album and intimates that it will include even more "Kyma tinkering."
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The Crimson Twins
08 Jul 2000 —
The Crimson Twins (one of whom you may remember as Randy Stack, whose parrot interacts with Kyma through the live microphone) are now on-line with 38 songs in modem-friendly 32 Kbps stereo mp3 format.
CT is an experimental group who use a variety of peculiar technologies and alternate MIDI controllers in the creation of their "aural amusements." Included among these aural amusements is
Aunt Helen's Bath, a dance piece produced with Kyma. Randy says he was inspired to create the
CT mp3 site by another Kyma user. Visit the web site for the all-you-can-eat
CT buffet with over 3 hrs of mp3s.
With musical tools ranging from Buchla and Kyma synthesizers to scissors and glue, this band has been exploring curious aural amusements and esoteric electronic instruments since the early 80s.
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Movement in Still Life
06 Jun 2000 — Sound designer Bill Rust's guitar/vox vocoding, miscellaneous vocal freeze-framing & time scaling mutations, bizarre re-synthesis of drum loops, Doppler-ized atmospheric extremism, and a slew of other Kyma-generated soundfiles sliced'n'diced in ProTools can be heard livening up nearly every track of BT's new album
Movement in Still Life. It was released in Europe first on Pioneer, and then in the US on June 6, 2000 on Nettwerk Records.
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Live in Ibiza
09 May 2000 — Bill Rust's Kyma madness has infected Sasha's 2 CD set,
Live in Ibiza (Studio K7/Global Underground) on the track called
Fibonacci Sequence, a collaboration between BT and Sasha. They used Kyma for all sorts of extremely aberrant vox/drum loop/cross-synthesis/processing and as the perfect tool to sonify the text,
Mathematics is the Language of Nature.
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Second Wave
02 May 2000 — Greg Hunter used Kyma to process the audio on one of the tracks on the album
Second Wave for his band
Alien Soap Opera. Greg is now working on another new album using recordings made of the Himba tribe in Namibia. The Himba are under dire threat due to a proposed dam, which, if it goes ahead, will basically wipe them out, and he is hoping that this album will raise awareness of their situation. When not travelling between Capetown and London or working with his band, Greg relaxes with his new hobby—welding (perhaps because it reminds him of constructing new sounds in Kyma?)
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Heftibag
23 Nov 1999 — Danny Zelonky's
Crank album,
Heftibag on Mille Plateaux (Germany), features extensive use of Kyma, and expands upon the ideas heard in the recent
Wanton Phenomena (Mille Plateaux), and
Approximate Love Boat (Plug Research, under artist name Low Res) albums. If you imagine yourself as a jazz musician strung out on ketamine, passed out in an alley behind a sleazy venusian bar, then this just might be your mental soundtrack! Orders accepted at mainstream online retailers like Amazon.com and CDNow.
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Hello, Ola and Overload
15 Nov 1999 — Describing himself as 'kymatose,' Lance Massey built a new studio in New York's East Village, complete with ProTools MixPlus, MAX/msp, Roland modulars, and of course, Kyma! He had a single released in Germany on BMG called
Hello, Ola with a remix by Anastazia. BMG also bought his Overloaded remix.
His first
Overload project is now complete.
Overload is an experiment in using sound to physically alter the listener's state of consciousness (currently, it's a club thing and requires major sub-woofers).
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Just Hearing
01 Nov 1999 — Interested in training your ear so you can sing and play in just-intonation? Larry Borden's
Just Hearing, Volume 1, tutorial eartraining CD is now available from Vanderbilt University. The programming, voice-overs, sound generation, and tuning were all done in Kyma! For more information on the CD series, email Larry and start perfecting your intonation!
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Zooma
14 Sep 1999 — Humorous, passionate, complex, energetic, eclectic, and uncompromisingy honest, it's one of those CDs best listened to at full volume the first time through. Then be prepared to listen again and again at different levels with different EQ settings, because there's a lot more there than first meets the ear...
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L.S.G. Into Deep
13 Jun 1999 — Oliver Lieb has a new album on the Superstition Label in Germany (distributed in the US by K7) entitled
L.S.G. Into Deep. Pick up a copy and listen to see if you can identify which sounds were made in Kyma!
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Approximate Love Boat
30 Mar 1999 — Danny Zelonky used Kyma on the first full-length
Low Res CD
Approximate Love Boat (mistaken alien interpretations of earth music).
Also on Plug Research, in what may have been Kyma's debut in the genre,
Low Res and
Mannequin Lung team up as
Trash Aesthetic to produce fractured hip hop featuring two MC's known as the Shadow Huntz (
DJ Screams Medic).
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Licht-Klang-Meditationen 1
17 Mar 1999 — Pieter Volger's CD
Licht-Klang-Meditationen 1 is now available. These soundscapes for meditation include mantric expressions that are heavily processed in order to create different sound-energy from only one vocal expression. Nearly all processing, time-stretching, delays and vocoder-effects were done with Kyma.
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Salvatore Martirano Retrospective
01 Mar 1999 — The Consortium to Distribute Computer Music has announced
Volume 22 of the CDCM Computer Music Series, a Salvatore Martirano Retrospective, including L'sGA (better than MTV even if it was done in the 70s), improvisations on the
SalMar Construction (the most beautiful, phantasmagorical electronic instrument ever built), Underworld ("...yeah..."), and some of Sal's work using Kyma in live performance (not to mention the ultimately cool portrait of Sal on the cover!) For ordering information, contact cdemusic.org.
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Ante-chamber
01 Feb 1999 — "What does the evaporation of water sound like?" This is the kind of sound explored in Laminar's new album
Ante-chamber (SOL92CD) on the Soleilmoon label (Portland and Amsterdaam). Described as "acoustic material fed into an aural thrashing machine," this is an entirely new form of music in which second order sonorities are derived from the original material through the use of iterative wavetable distortion. The results, at time surprisingly delicate, at other times explosive, are both unique and beautiful.
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CDCM Computer Music Series
05 May 1998 — Brian Belet and Mickey Helms have music on the CDCM COMPUTER MUSIC SERIES VOLUME 26 / Centaur Records, CRC 2404 /Music from CREAM: Center for Research in Electro-Acoustic Music. And Phil Winsor is featured on CDCM COMPUTER MUSIC SERIES VOLUME 27 / CENTAUR RECORDS CRC 2047 / Music from CEMI: Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia.
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[MUTE]ation
23 Apr 1998 — Brian Belet goes wild with Kyma-warped samples of trombone virtuoso Scott Mousseau playing nothing but his mute in "[MUTE]ation" on
Music from CREAM: Center for Research in Electro-Acoustic Music, CDCM, Vol. 26 Centaur (CRC 2404).
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Minute Variations
14 Sep 1997 — Lawrence Fritts has the first track
Minute Variations on the American Composers Forum CDSonic Circuits. Each year the American Composers Forum curates a program of electro-acoustic music by composers around the world.
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Life Music
21 May 1996 — John Dunn and Mary Anne Clark used Kyma to help realize an entire CD of music "based" (no pun intended) on DNA sequences! Featured proteins include beta-globin sequences from human, whale, bat and echidna, the protein in spider's silk, lysozyme C from human, echidna, mouse and green monkey, and collagen. Ranging in style from a quasi-renaissance motet with a woman's voice chanting the names of amino acids, to a complex imaginary landscape based on Collagen, this well-engineered CD can be heard in Real Audio on the web or purchased as a one-off CD-R signed by the two composers.
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Collaborations
05 Feb 1996 —
Collaborations is a double CD from Frog Peak featuring several cuts that were created using Kyma. To produce this CD in honor of poet Chris Mann, Larry Polansky, Music Dept. Darmouth, put samples of Mann reading his own poetry up at an FTP site and invited composers to create a short piece using Mann's voice as the only source material. Kyma-warped examples that made it onto the CD include:
Dennis Miller's
5 Frog Pieces
Brian Belet's
difference (no doubt it queues) and an abstract (difference (queues))
Mickey Helms'
Technicolor, Galactic Bar, and
Phantom
Paul Rosas'
Depth Perception
Bob Pearson's
Adaptive Parasites
Paul Luevano's
sitarbirds
Doug Michael's
Radio Sky Part II
For more information, contact Frog Peak
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Soft Ballet's FORM
11 Jun 1995 —
Maki Fujii used Kyma to provide some unique sounds for
Soft Ballet's album,
Form. A high-energy mix of synthetic sounds, guitars, drums and pop-style vocals,
Form covers a range of styles from Ken Morioka's upbeat dance music to Maki Fujii's dark, stream-of-consciousness musique concrete pieces. Fujii's
U swings moodily from a random-walking analog synth bass to distorted fed-back screaming punk, to abrupt silence, to heavily reverberated brooding electronic organ--bipolar love?
No One Lives on Mars —featuring a jazz guitar solo and an interesting doubling of the sung parts by a soft female speaking voice—is a sad and lonely rap on being the only living things in the solar system, and Jail of Freedom has a British industrial sound with distorted or phasing narration alternating with singing and sequenced rhythm tracks. On the CD single
Fujii's Eye (as the twin to
Morioka's You) is a deeply layered musique concrete piece with live bass, noise, synthesized sounds (granular synthesis?), and heavily processed samples. And the cover art brings back memories of SIGGRAPH93—the year they figured out how to make waterfalls. Mixed by Dillon Gallagher and Maki Fujii, the album and an accompanying CD single were recorded under the Victor Entertainment (JVC) label, and
Soft Ballet did a thirteen-city tour of Japan to promote the album. For more information and a complete list of tour dates and locations, browse the news on Maki Fujii's home page and Soft Ballet's home page.
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100 Ansichten vom Berge Fuji
17 Apr 1995 — Composer, pianist, and erstwhile movie star Bruno Liberda has a CD out under the Signum label (of MusiContact in Heidelberg), entitled
100 Ansichten vom Berge Fuji 1.buch/11 featuring Christina Ascher, mezzosoprano, and Bruno Liberda, live electronics. In English, the title would be 100 Views of Mount Fuji, and if a mountain had a voice, it would sound like this music: low, creaking, unfolding at geological time scales, reverberating with the ghostly voices of all the humans who ever lived and died in its shadow. Notated graphically on opaque paper with transparent and translucent overlays, the score allows for several possible interpretations including live performances and studio recordings like the one on this CD.
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Switchblade
03 Dec 1994 —
Maki Fujii's group
Schaft (Maki Fujii, Hisashi Imai, and Raymond Watts) have released an industrial-techno album called
Switchblade with a companion remix album called
Switch, both under the Victor Entertainment label (J.V.C.).
Switchblade is highly varied and imaginative, ranging from the vampiric trance-eroticism of
Olive to a darkly humorous rap mocking the glories of the InfoBahn called
Information.
Switch Remix includes remixes by Dillon Gallagher, Logic Freaks, Reload, and Meat Beat Manifesto, and even lets you remix the cover art (by rearranging images printed on mylar).
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yonder
07 Oct 1994 — Kyma is featured in two pieces on Frank Tveor Nordensten's album
yonder, produced by audio attic productions. Despite what the liner notes identify as Nordensten's "ambivalent relationship with electroacoustic music," the completely electronic
try to enjoy the daylight and the antonymously-named
boring for percussion and tape combine perfectionist production values with surprising, original, highly-spatialized sounds and a dramatic narrative structure.
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Islands in the Stream
15 Jun 1994 — Composer/Keyboardist Nick Peck used Kyma to produce "Prelude," the first track of his album
Islands in the Stream. If you were to ignore the high-quality, digital audio production values, you would swear that "Prelude" came straight out of one of the classical electronic music studios of the 1950s, even down to the accompanying graphic score. Delightfully raucous layers of granulated noise bands, bursts of random-frequency wavelet blips, a low C minor third played with a nice buzzy waveform (or is it processed piano?), backwards-envelope bells, bursts of crowd noise, and an overall formal structure based on gestures or sound objects rather than notes characterize this first track, described as "opening the door to Riverworld." Peck is not afraid to use silence or short, stacatto gestures, giving the piece a fresh, original sound.
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