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. For more of Marcus' music visit http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/537/perfect_buzz.html
Lorenzo Brusci announces an MP3 version of a timet compilation called COMPILATIONE classicism meets the beat: an electronic tuscan scene now available on http://www.timet.org. (Kyma was used on two of the pieces). You may freely use this music under a EFF legal licence. To support the timet project, order their CDs!
Jonathan Sager got a credit for "additional sound design with Kyma" on John Wilson's second Pig in a Can album: You Can't Poison a Pig (Fedora FCD 8002). Sager also shot the photos used on the album. Described variously as "the future of Nu-Blues, Nu-Blooze, Techno-Blues, and Avant-pop," this collection of "De-mixes" pairs blues legend Harmonica Slim (http://iowablues.tripod.com/harmonicaslim.htm) with Meat Beat Manifesto's John Wilson on a journey through speech rhythms, blues, trip-hop beats and inside tips on how to kill a pig and which parts taste the best (the eyeballs). Each track begins with the voice of Harmonica Slim telling a story from his childhood on the farm or life on the road. Wilson picks up the rhythms of his speech, transforming it into an almost-rap. For a review of the first Pig in a Can album, see http://pulse.towerrecords.com/contentStory.asp?contentId=636.
NEW WORLD RECORDS (http://www.newworldrecords.org) 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.
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 (http://www.commiepinkorecords.com/musicframeset.html). 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.
Kyma can be heard in the vocal effects for Twilight, in the "devil dog" middle section of Goodwilling, and as the underlying basis for Hanged Man. In Looking you can hear Kyma coming in over the last part of the song and floating above it. In Metamorphosis, after the drums, bass, and guitar come in, there's a depth charge and a morphing into the water sound followed by another Kyma Sound dubbed "the parasite sound" by one of Cliff's colleagues and Kyma vocoding on one of the voices towards the end. Cliff recommends listening to the "parasite sound" over headphones, saying "it causes you to open your jaw real wide like you are clearing your ears." The last two songs, Circles and Providential, use the Kyma Sound called Watery Vox for vocal effects. Other electronic sounds on the album were generated using Propellerhead's Reason softsynth and guitar tracks with feedback.
Cliff has also been using Kyma in Deovolente's live performances, controlling it from an electronic bass drum (tempo calculations for amp mod), and a Behringer FCB1010 MIDI foot pedal controller for triggering samples and sounds for switching between songs in his compiled sound grid. The band is doing a lot of playing in the Austin, Texas area. Check their calendar at http://www.commiepinkorecords.com.
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. — pd
Paul Doornbusch creates extraordinary and unusual sounds for instruments, computers, and electronics in his new album Corrosion, released on Joel Chadabe's EMF Media label. 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 http://www.cdemusic.org/artists/doornbusch.html.
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. Visit his page at http://www.sadglad.com.
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 (http://www.din-records.de).
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. (http://www.asphodel.com/doc/news.whatsnew.html)
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 (http://cavestudio.com/electr-ohm/index_E.html). 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 with what sounds like a massively granulated train whistle. The sounds are imaginative and varied, sometimes (but not always) with a slow pulsing beat.
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.
During production, Kyma was used as what Masla describes as "the best real-time plugin in the world." As he describes it, "Kyma was used for real time re-synthesis, reverbs, and grain wave manipulation under Motor Mix control, making it possible to do vastly different adjustments on each pass."
After a final mix (matching FX and dialog with a stereo mix already containing voice-overs etc), the mix was re-imported into his computer and mastered using sonicWORX power bundle 2.5. Thus ended 3 weeks of 20-hour days and many heated artistic discussions (not to mention what Masla describes as "too much REDBULL and Earl Grey--but not mixed!"). The CD will be released July 15th on CSW Records (and Kyma was given a credit under Doug's name on the CD jacket).
Nirto Karsten Fischer (http://www.forcedmedia.com) 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 US under ToneCasualties (http://www.tonecasualties.com>www.tonecasualties.com). 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. More information on the CD is available at http://www.minushabens.com/MHCD041.html.
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 <http://www.cdemusic.org/> (search for "mooney") or directly from AUR <http://www.aurec.com/classicallisting.html>. For historical background on the rhythmicon, technical info, and RealAudio samples visit Mooney's web site <http://www.city-net.com/~moko/>.
John Paul Jones : The Thunderthief (DGM 0104)
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.
The songs are arranged as a journey: beginning where Zooma left off, venturing through territories of rage, melancholy, meditative resolution, infectious delight, humor, and ending with unassuming love. Stylistically it ranges (even within a single song) from Jones’ own brand of post-Zeppelin rock, to Stravinskian neo-classicism, to Reznoresque voice processing, to raga-ish classical Indian, to bluegrass, to singer/songwriter ballad, to acousmatic timbre-painting, to blues, to punk, to Irish folk. Even Ralph, the voice of the Macintosh computer, gets a turn.
In Jones’ new post-Zeppelin rock tradition (and reminiscent of some of the tracks from Zooma and Sporting Life), the obsessive repetitions, insane solos, and alternating 4/4, 5/4, 3/4 groupings will have you nodding your head and counting on your fingers while the infra sub bass + drum rocks every cell in your body. It stops abruptly and dissolves into a swirling synthetic reverb.
Who is the "thunder thief"? Everyone knows the "thunder thief". He’s that guy with the really bad memory. You know, the one who goes around telling everyone about this great new idea he came up with, "forgetting" that you’re the one who told it to him originally. Or that woman who stepped in at the last minute and took over your just-finished project after you’d spent years laying the groundwork and "forgot" to share the accolades with you. I think you do know the "thunder thief" because he manages to get around a lot. Why? Because it’s hard to break into truly new territory, and it’s easy for lots of people to rush in once the hard work has been done. Sometimes he’s not even such an evil guy. He just happens to be thinking along the same lines you are and beats you to the solution before you’ve had a chance.
Anyone who has been around for any length of time is familiar with the "thunder thief". If he’s ever stolen your thunder, then take heart; The Thunderthief, the song, is your revenge. With pure crazy energy and abandon, JPJ exorcises the demonic "thunder thief" on behalf of every one of us!
Opening with a deliciously flanged sample of a distant thunderstorm, it quickly segues into a relentless 16th note drum pattern and thinly Reznorish bandpass-filtered vocals intoning Peter Blegvad’s catalog of the "thunder thief’s" sins. In each variation of the chorus, the voice and bass double each other in quarter notes in different octaves, interrupted by wild outbursts of neo-classical sounding octave doubled arpeggios on electric piano.
Cracks us open like a bookReads us with a single lookIs the man in raven’s clothing depicted in the cover art supposed to be the "thunder thief"? In some Native American mythology, a bird is supposed to cause the thunder, not steal it. That’s why I think the raven-man is not the thunder thief but JPJ himself, doing battle with the thunder thief, stealing back his own thunder, and unleashing it anew as a thunderous infra-audio sub bass line!
A continuous musical style-morph from live computer-processed Indian classical, to off-the-beat prog rock rhythmic trickery, to bluegrass, to Irish folk, to a lovely delicate outtro on solo mandolin (and autoharp?). During the intro, the haunting forward/backward echoes give the plucked strings a reedy quality and the ornamentation suggests an Indian raga.
A quietly mournful watery wash of granular synthesis containing hundreds of tiny dolphin-like cries sets the tone for a ballad sad enough to put you right off eating seafood ever again until you realize it’s probably an allegorical tale of illusory hope of renewal in the face of ultimate death. Then you really have a reason to feel melancholy. Apart from the delicate computer-generated intro and outtro, this song is straight-ahead composer/songwriter at the piano (oh, and one swipe of a bell tree). Lovely and sad, it gives you a chance to catch your breath between Hoediddle and Daphne. I hope he might be considering the possibility of doing some additional, alternate arrangements of this one for future recordings or performances. There’s a lot going on in the inner voices of the piano chords that might be interesting to hear in an orchestral or synthesized arrangement, and additional processing on the voice could lend the song an even bleaker, colder feel to match the meaning of the words.
Bouncy, energetic and fun, replete with vinyl surface noise, analog-synthy parallel 5ths with portamento and a shuffle-my-feet drum beat. Ralph the talking computer makes a cameo appearance during Jones’ infra-sonic sub-bass solo with rhythmic interjections like "Yes!", "Hello?", "Why are you talking to me? I’m a computer" and other unspeakable items.
This one had me laughing out loud. An unsubtle jab at the self-absorbed, self-pitying, self-indulgent, self-righteously angry and obnoxious. One of the things that makes it so hilarious is the contradiction between the sentiment and the vocabulary ("I’m so irate!"). In a voice that sounds like it might burst out laughing at any moment, Jones throws a parody of a childish tantrum, threatening to stamp his foot, be obnoxious, commit road rage, etc, and then run to hide before someone calls his bluff, all to a rapid-fire punkish beat. It’s almost as if someone encouraged him to do a song that expressed all of his deepest rage and he just couldn’t manage to do so with a straight face. For all those who have ever lost control of their tempers and then suddenly burst out laughing at themselves, you’ll love this one. The next time I feel like I might be about to lose my temper, I think I’ll sing Angry Angry instead of counting to ten. Better to laugh at myself than to cut someone off in traffic.
Live multitracking to build layer upon layer upon layer played on Jones’ new Manson-built tripleneck mandolin, charmingly amplifying every breathlike finger noise, and building to a climax that sounds like it’s played on a room-sized, wire-strung harp. Each phrase plays out like a single breath followed by a silent intake of air before being repeated mantra-like with new layers, louder and more elaborated on each succeeding breath: A meditative resolution to all the previous angst.
Kotos rock!
Something about the way this song is sung and recorded brings to mind one of those Folkways historical documentary recordings.
After hiking for several days in the Appalachians, we found the last known survivor of a rich oral tradition extending as far back as the earliest Irish immigrations sitting with his home-made ukulele on the porch of the wood frame house his grandfather built in the 1800s. Sing something for us in that nasal Appalachian traditional historical curiosity folk music kind of voice you have, old-timer.Incongruously, though the timbre and miking style speak of autodidactic folk music, the words speak of popping over to visit the Whitney Museum and escaping from interactive television, faxes, and taxes. It has a sweetly genuine feel to it. One can almost imagine Jones playing this one for his executive producer who, laughingly assenting says, yes ok, let’s call this one finished and take a little break before starting on the next album.
Where Zooma felt a little like JPJ was announcing, "Hey, here I am!" The Thunderthief seems to be saying, "Now that I have your attention, allow me to introduce myself." More varied, more surprising, more playful, more experimental, demonstrating a greater mastery of recording/mixing techniques, more relaxed and confident than the first album, it leaves the listener intrigued enough to eagerly await the next installment and inspired enough to do battle with their own private thunder thieves.
A selection from David Mooney's 24 part work Rhythmiconic Sections has been released in the UK on expanding records. expanding records is run by Paul Merritt (who DJs as Tench) and fellow Kyma user Ben Edwards (who records as Benge). The selection is part of expanding's beautifully produced and packaged evs series of seven inch vinyl discs. A compilation CD from the evs series will be released soon. For info: http://www.expandingrecords.com/evs.htm.
2001
Agostino Di Scipio's TIRESIA was performed as part of the L'Aquila Corpi del Suono festival on 12 December 2001 featuring Agostino Di Scipio on live electronics with Kyma. An excerpt of this piece was recently published under the title Fragments for Tiresias on the Capston Records CD "Music / Text vol.2".
Matt Haines aka The Rip-Off Artist, releases his seventh album Pump on Mille Plateaux. Street date for the release is November 16th, 2001. The album features a custom Kyma sound developed by Matt, called the "decrapulator," that 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 http://www.ripoffartist.net. Also, a track from this album, called "Hydrocracking," can be found on the Mille Plateaux compilation Electric Ladyland: ClickHop Version 1.0.
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.
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.
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. CD's are available from Otto via oelaske@earthlink.net.
Sunao Inami's new album, repeater, is now available under the electr-ohm label (http://www.cavestudio.com/electr-ohm). 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.
BT has produced the new 'N SYNC single in which he "irreverently treated ALL their vocals using Kyma for the whole song..." (No wonder that Logic Audio ad shows him getting to work before the crack of dawn every morning!)
There was a performance of Agostino Di Scipio's string quartet + Kyma (interactive live processing) on June 10th as part of the Bourges Synthèse festival. Performance by Quartetto Bernini. The piece is also included on the ICMC2000 CD.
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 http://radiantslab.com/jdk. The CD is available from http://www.whitney.org.
Agostino Di Scipio's "parasite work" Paesaggio Scalare n.1 (Rome, Cantor set) will be featured on the same concert as Zlatko Tanodi (29 April in Zagreb, 21st Music Biennale). This work was commissioned by Goethe Institut for Michael Rusenberg CD "Roma modulare," Notework, Koln and a section of it is on-line at http://www.artspace.org.au/autonomousAudio/discipio.html.
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 (http://www.aim-records.com). 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 (http://www.plugresearch.com).
Autechre has released an EP from the John Peel sessions that includes extensive use of Kyma (including the infamous sample of Kurt "I am the cephlaphage" Hebel's voice). Recorded on Warp Records http://www.warprecords.com (Warp/Nothing, PO Box 474, Sheffield SI3BW). John Peel is a radio DJ for UK Radio One, known for his impromptu recording sessions.
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 http://www.city-net.com/~moko or go direct to the Rhythmicon at http://www.city-net.com/~moko/rhome.html.
Oivind Idso used Kyma to do a remix of a track by Needle on Transmission0014 released on the Beta Bodega (USA) label http://www.betabodega.de. Listen to a RealAudio version of his track at: http://www.mdos.at/ralink.php3?rid=157.
Matt's sixth album, brain salad surgery, will be out on Hot Air [UK] http://www.simplesampling.com in April, 2001. brain salad surgery relies HEAVILY on Kyma, using a custom patch to generate partially-random percussion and tonal fragments. The best combinations were then edited and assembled into wildly percussive tunes. You can check out samples of his work at http://www.ripoffartist.net, and you can order directly from the label by sending an email to fw@subrosa.net.
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 on Pioneer. It has been released in Europe already and is slated for late spring release in the US (under a different label).
Rust's Kyma madness has also infected Sasha's 2 CD set, Live in Ibiza on 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.
Dorsey Dunn / Unhearlded Communications/Encountering the Magnetosphere, on 3000ce label, recorded live at BACCA1010 on December 16, 2000. Contact info@itnerantstudio.com.
Preston Wright / released in November, Track #4 –– Carpenter Ant Blues –– Sonic Circuits 8, innova Recordings.
http://www.soniccircuits.com/select/prgmnotes.html#carpenter>http://www.soniccircuits.com/select/prgmnotes.html#carpenter
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 32Kbps 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. The URL for the all-you-can-eat CT buffet with over 3 hrs of mp3s is http://208.15.73.52/ct/.
Greg Hunter used Kyma to process the audio on one of the tracks for his band Alien Soap Opera's album Second Wave, released in September, 2000 under the Electric Melt label. 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?)
Matt Haines (aka the rip-off artist) released the album Why Do Birds Sing as a 7 EP on the Hot Air [UK] label #AIRMILE712 on January 27th. He describes it as "all very loungy and electronic" and hints that it also features his artistry as an accomplished whistler. http://www.simplesampling.com/airmiles.htm.
Cliff White and Chris Chillier have released Deovolente: In the Distance. (Visit http://www.commiepinkorecords.com for a RealAudio 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."
atom™'s production of "señor coconut": "expo2000" ("mambo" style cover version of Kraftwerk's new single) to be released as a bonus title on the first single outtake of the "baile aleman" album. Release in Europe (multicolor recordings). May.
Aliens On Line, recorded at Alien Head Studios and mastered at Capitol Records, is the album from The Away Team (Ordering info at http://www.theawayteam.com/studio.html) or mailTo:theawayteam@cox.net. 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. Nik Green 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.
Bill Rust's Kyma madness has infected Sasha's 2 CD set, Live in Ibiza on 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.
"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 (mailTo:soleilmoon@aolcom). 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.
Agostino Di Scipio "Paesaggio scalare n.1" on Roma—a Soundscape Remix NoteWorks (NW 5101-2). Sonic parasites, emergent properties, subversive rationalization, and iterated nonlinear functions... http://www.artspace.org.au/autonomousAudio/discipio.html to read the words and hear the music.
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, contact mailTo:Lawrence.Borden@Vanderbilt.edu and start perfecting your intonation!
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 and up for sale at http://www.Aaxle.com/. 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).
John Paul Jones — ZOOMA — 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...
Jones' use of electronics is unlike anything else you've heard. Don't expect vintage analog, repetitious sequences, or sampled string pads. Imagine instead a dark maelstrom of human/animal/machine cries swirling and crackling just beneath the surface of an unrelenting beat and obsessive bass line, occasionally breaking to the surface only to immediately disintegrate and disperse into subatomic particles, and you'll begin to get some inkling of what Zooma sounds like.
Interspersed, are some quieter, reflective moments, some fun moments, some contrapuntal moments (care of the London Symphony Orchestra's string section) and even the slightest touch of bluegrass at one point, so you do get some chance to recover your equilibrium.
Don't expect to be coddled with a sweet and peaceful resolution, though. The final track makes you feel like you're just barely hanging on by your fingernails as it plunges headlong through metric modulations that you just can't quite latch onto and ends abruptly—not with any kind of cadence or slow fade—but with a sound like the gasp of a machine spinning down prematurely. The message here is quite clear: More to come!
For ordering info visit Discipline Global Mobile; for tour dates and other info (in the form of a computer game!) visit http://www.johnpauljones.com.
Oliver Lieb has an album released in June 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!
EMI/Right Stuff Records recently released a compilation CD of lounge remixes, featuring people like Martin Denny, Dean Elliot, Louis Prima, Yma Sumac... all remixed by techno/electronica artists. Included on the disc is a track called sway, combining versions sung by Dean Martin and Julie London, and produced by Kyma user Matt Haines (aka The Rip-Off Artist).
Matt was interviewed in an online chat session for The Wherehouse record chain http://www.wherehousemusic.com/ on August 26th, where he will talk about how he made the track as well as other things.
Danny Zelonky's Crank album on Mille Plateaux (Germany), heftibag, 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.
Wanton Phenomena, the first album released by Danny Zelonky under his Crank monicker, received high praise from The Wire magazine: “a staggering album of cavernous, ever shifting electronics..... [a] stunning advance for US electronica.”
Marie Clare magazine is flying Greg Hunter, together with a journalist and a photographer, to Egypt for an interview/photo-spread to appear in the August issue just prior to the release of Greg's latest album Second Wave under the Electric Melt label. One of the cuts on the album will be familiar to anyone who visited the SSC booth at the San Francisco AES show—Artificial Dream, combines Kyma vocoding and rhythmic granulation with traditional Egyptian vocals and instruments in a completely seamless and natural way. Marie Clare wants to ask Greg about the influence of Egyptian music on the new album and also to delve into some of the personal motivations behind his very expressive music.
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.
1998
Danny Zelonky used Kyma on the first full-length Low Res CD Approximate Love Boat (mistaken alien interpretations of earth music) which can be purchased at http://www.thebarrio.com.
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"). 12" vinyl also available at http://www.thebarrio.com.
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). http://www.cdemusic.org .
Music from Atom™ is never boring (maybe that's why his record label is named Rather Interesting). It's real I-love-computers music that doesn't try to imitate acoustic instruments. Check out his CDs Naturalist , Schnittstelle and DSP Holiday for some Kyma-induced time stretching and freeze-framing, and uncompromisingly digital broad band clicky beats. http://www.hyperreal.org/music/labels/rather_interesting/
Marcus Satellite released From On High available from PerfectBuzzMusic at http://www.marcussatellite.com. Dark soundscapes, dripping with Kyma sounds and processing, quadruple-time beats, and exotic tunings. Buy two and give one to your favorite DJ so everyone can dance! The MPEG-3 of the track Feel Good reached numer 78 on the MP3 techno charts. Listen at http://www.mp3.com.
Greg Hunter used Kyma to process the audio on one of the tracks for his band Alien Soap Opera's album Second Wave under the Electric Melt label. 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?)
Matt Haines' Spinyl records has joined with StreetBeat (North America) and Airdog (Europe) in releasing the debut album from Mental Blox. Release date was 11/10/98. The CD contains material previously released as 12" singles on Spinyl, as well as all-new material recorded specifically for the album. Check it out! By the way, Airdog will be releasing their version of the disc sometime in January, so for you Euro-types, look to !K7 as the distributor.
Other projects by Matt Haines currently available or coming soon: Front BC album coming in February 99, plus single #3 (drum-n-bass) on City of Angels Grand Theft Audio EP #1 (odd electronic music) out 11/20, limited-edition CD-EP in a few weeks, on City of Angels Expect a new Mental Blox 12" single in January 99.
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 http://www.cdemusic.org.
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. For details: http://www.music.unt.edu/CEMI/CDCM.htm or mailTo:cdcm@sndart.cemi.unt.edu
1997
Lawrence Fritts has the first track "Minute Variations" on the American Composers Forum CD Sonic Circuits. Each year the American Composers Forum curates a program of electro-acoutic music by composers around the world. For more information see http://www.composersforum.org or innova@composersforum.org.
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 at http://algoart.com/dnamusic.
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:
For more information, contact Frog Peak at frogpeak@sover.net
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.
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.
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. Nordensten is not afraid of silence, nor is he afraid to let things evolve quickly; the dramatic contrasts and clearly delineated sections in his music betray his classical, concert pianist roots. try to enjoy the daylight , one of the rare Nordensten pieces with "lyrics," is anti-pop music, evading any hint of repetition and unable even to remain patiently fixed on single-pitches of the almost-melody, instead choosing to glide and bend and slide so that there is never a static, unchanging pitch. A phrase that sounds something like "It is the look in her eyes that makes the difference," is always heavily obscured and processed in a way reminiscent of some industrial music, and different subparts of it are looped throughout the composition, leaving the listener always straining and just on the verge of being able to understand what is being said--creating tension that builds to the end of the piece (and is never satisfied).
Maki Fujii's group Schaft (Imai Hisashi, Maki Fujii 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 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).
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.
The album is arranged as a sonic progression through an imaginery mindscape called Riverworld, with the tracks arranged in a continuous, attacca "stream" alternating between tracks evoking different aspects of the stream and tracks that seem to represent "islands" or locations in the stream. The composer invites us to experiment with listening to the CD in the linear order he has chosen or, by shuffling the tracks on the CD, to create our own paths through the Riverworld.
The liner notes are extensive, providing essential background on the composer's intentions, complete equipment lists (fun for the tech-boffins in the audience) and even includes a graphic score for "Prelude." (Although I must confess to have had a difficult time following the score and would have appreciated some hints on making a one-to-one relationship between each icon and the sound object it represents). In the liner notes, Peck writes that the music on Islands represents for him a continuum from the rational to the creative, from totally structured to abstract and nonlinear. The equipment lists read like an encyclopedic compendium of every tool currently available in electro-acoustic music production, ranging from FM synths, samplers, to hybrid synths, to signal processors, DSP software, and to older analog synths and the even older high technology of a Steinway baby grand piano.
Islands in the Stream was performed, recorded and produced by Nick Peck and recorded at Perceptive Productions in Mill Valley California and the San Francisco State University Electronic Music Studio in San Francisco.
For ordering information and/or a free subscription to the Episode newsletter, send email to Nick Peck c/o Episode, or write to Nick at:
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