Official organ of the Symbolic Sound Corporation
Andrew Bird has released a couple of fun little EP’s this month, both with plenty of Kyma touches throughout. “Keep Climbing The Mountain” features plenty of Euverb, Granulated Guitar and Subtractive Synthesis sweeps and hits to create the atmosphere behind the energetic “In My Skies”.  And on the Robotronic EP, Kyma is doing all of the vocal harmonising and vocoding.
Both EPs will have you smiling and on your feet dancing within nanoseconds, and both are available on iTunes.
There’s a fascinating piece by Mel Lambert on the Editor’s Guild web site, giving details of every aspect of the sound—from dialog to Foley, to mixing, to creative sound design— for JJ Abrams new science fiction film, Super 8.
In it, master sound designer, Ben Burtt details how he used his own voice to control a bank of sounds in Kyma, performing it like a musical instrument to create the voice of the alien.  Burtt says that he wanted to create a character who, although alien, had an expressive soul, purpose, and rationality.  Once Industrial Light & Magic, which handled visual special effects, heard Burtt’s vocalizations, they were so inspired that they added a tongue to the creature’s mouth! One of the few times that they created picture to sound, instead of the other way around.
Full of insider tips and tricks ranging from how Burtt sustained the tension in a long train crash scene to how Matthew Wood compensated for young actors’ voices changing over the course of the shoot, the piece is essential reading for anyone who’s serious about sound design!
(Thanks to Matteo Milani for spotting this article and sharing it with us!)
Rumors of a secret Metallica recording project were finally confirmed on June 15, when Metallica announced on their web site that they’ve just finished recording a full-length album with the legendary Lou Reed. Â In the photo (http://www.metallica.com/images/Metallica_LouReed_wide4.jpg)Â you can see Lou Reed (seated on the left) and Sarth Calhoun (standing on the right) with his Continuum and Kyma + Paca setup.
Everyone is looking forward to hearing the final result (with the possible of exception of one evil psychopath).
On Friday, June 24 at 10 pm, Scott Miller will be performing live on Kyma along with British vocalist and sound artist Viv Corringham and members of Zeitgeist as part of the Twin Cities Jazz Festival‘s Free Studio Z concerts in Minneapolis/St Paul Minnesota.
Electroacoustic music with some terrific vocal and instrumental improvisers!
Yasuski (aka Yasushi Yoshida) has just posted a series of videos of his handmade Mbiraski instrument processed live through Kyma and his Audio Hologram (a 3D performance space of his own design). Â Etheral, calming, and deceptively organic, it’s the perfect music for a summer day.
Here’s one where Yasuski goes Medieval on us with a closer view of the Mbiraski and Delora Software’s vKiP controlling Kyma from an iPad:
And another where the Kyma processing almost sounds like frogs on hot, humid summer night:
Detroit Underground‘s DJ Kero and Twisted Tools have released a free sample library drawn from Kero’s vault created entirely with Kyma/Pacarana, Machinedrum, Virus TI, Monomachine, Nord3 and Monome.
Included with the sample pack is a free Kyma Sound that lets you access any of Kero’s twisted loops, processing the mid and side differently. Just roll the dice to create your own “DJ Pacarana”.  There’s also a Sound that randomly selects from the single-hits library for endless entertainment on those long summer nights.
Amon Tobin & Tessa Farmer ‘ISAM: Control Over Nature’ Preview from Ninja Tune on Vimeo.
Amon Tobin has just launched ISAM — an album, audio-visual live performance tour and art exhibition — pairing Tobin’s original and evocative music with Tessa Farmer’s intriguingly organic sculptures. Both artists, Tobin in sound and Farmer in sculpture, explore the rearrangement of the “familiar” in disturbing, playful and highly original ways. Imagine opening the specimen drawer in a darkly lit Victorian-style natural history museum in a parallel universe while a steampunk science-fiction-meets-Sgt.-Pepper score plays in the background and you’ll start to get the picture.
In ISAM, Tobin uses Kyma to successfully blur the distinction between sound design and music: transforming sound effects into drippy, gurgly beats that sound like they were emitted from steam-powered machines; continuously gliding pitches seamlessly morph into harmonic anthems; and repeating rhythmic and harmonic patterns with endlessly changing orchestrations and backgrounds; glockenspiel fairy tales juxtaposed with aliens bursting unexpectedly out of bubbling tar pits. The music is evocative, cinematic, and highly original: chopped spectra with hints of vocal resynthesis; Klangfarben rhythms; electronic insects encountering R2D2, repeating distortion patterns; the soundtrack from a childhood nightmare set to a swinging 6/8 nursery rhyme beat; sitars followed by glass beads flung across a frozen pond at midnight; aliens dancing heavily & deliberately at BPM = 76; and those ubiquitous miniature skeletons dancing so wildly that tiny bones fly off at right angles, making tinkly sounds as they hit the floor.
The audio quality is superb, always crisp, clean and masterfully mastered.
Despite all the little skeletons, the overall atmosphere of ISAM is playful, rousing, and at times downright cheerful—and the BPMs hovering between 76-88 make it the perfect iPod soundtrack for strutting in the city or skipping your way through a crowded airport.
ISAM: Control over Nature will be shown at the Crypt Gallery in London (26 May – 3 June 2011) followed by a showing at L’espace Art Roch in Paris (13 – 23 June 2011). Live tour dates so far are:
01.06.2011 Astra, Berlin, Germany
09.06.2011 AB Club, Brussels, Belgium
10.06.2011 Bataclan, Paris, France
11.06-17.2011 The Roundhouse, London, UK
GVA Sessions is an interdisciplinary research and international exchange platform organized by the Gilles Jobin Company, geared to respond to the ever-changing artistic environment of the performing arts, primarily contemporary dance, music and related creative technologies.
In 2011, the GVA sessions have been focusing on one of the longest established collaborative partnerships in the performing arts: that between choreographer and composer, choreography and music. This year, GVA Sessions is offering a mixed format providing a collaborative space for different types and levels of knowledge, artists research and production.
In April, as part of the Electron Festival, Cristian Vogel and Gilles Jobin discussed their collaboration on Spider Galaxies, and Vogel presented an introduction to Kyma and the Pacarana.  The next installment in the series will be “Dialog: Sound and Movement“, a collaborative workshop for composers and choreographers that will take play in 16-23 July 2011 (the deadline for registration is 30 May 2011).
Since 2007, the GVA Sessions have led knowledge exchange gatherings inviting international creative arts practitioners to Geneva (Switzerland) with the goal of sharing in artistic inquiry, thinking  and creating together, all in an informal, collaborative yet rigorous setting.Â
Poem 88 announces a concert on May 15 at 3 PM by the famous Cullum-Robinson duo and their infamous HALLUCINATION SEXTET (two live and four virtual), a freely improvised, nonidiomatic, quadraphonic, quasichaotic performance jamboree…
Featuring (live) poet, Jerry Cullum and (live) composer Dick Robinson doing live Kyma processing, the concert will take place at the Tanner-Hill Gallery Project Space, Suite 111 of the White Provision Building, 1170 Howell Mill Road., Atlanta, GA 30318 (14th St and Howell Mill Road). Admission is free.
Gilles Jobin‘s Spider Galaxies, featuring a Kyma-generated score performed live by Cristian Vogel, is embarking on the next leg of a world tour with performances at:
In his May 3rd review of the Beirut performance of Spider Galaxies for L’Orient du Jour, Critic Edgar Davidian wrote:
The music is intense, rhythmic, percussive, and populated by noises of all kinds, from the tuf-tuf of trains and hissing of bullets, sirens roaring or speeding decibels, cries of a tropical forest, or the noises of a bustling city; the dancers are like air traffic controllers giving signals and weaving a web (is that the spider?) by way of gestures and unforeseeable pirouettes, free, impulsive, fantastic, at the same time having often an almost machine-like precision in obeisance to rigor and discipline.
The richness of the sound score is due to two modern composers, Cristian Vogel and above all Carla Scaletti, a pioneer and intrepid avant-gardist of electronic music. Â An amazing score (all the more so in that the steps of the dance fit perfectly with the notes that spring forth from synthesizers and computers) where the sense of melody is deliberately ignored in favor of cadences, of rhythms, and above all strange groupings of sounds like roars, gun shots, deafening landslides, organized noise.
Read the full review in the original French.
In The Daily Star, May 3rd edition, Matthew Mosley wrote:
Some audiences might have seen resonances with the beguiling behavior of subatomic particles when the Gilles Jobin dance troupe came to town Saturday with “Spider Galaxies,†their brand new creation.
With an electronic soundtrack that makes use of data from the LHC, “Spider Galaxies†is an hour-long stream of non-repeating dance sequences performed by a team of four, a continually mutating bodyscape of interaction and divergence that generates an intense hypnotic power.
…
As a subterranean rumble resonated through the Madina’s sound system, algae-hued light revealed dancers Susanna Panandes Diaz, Isabelle Rigat, Louis-Clement da Costa and Martin Roehrich dispersed across the stage.
…
Randomness was built into the soundtrack, too, mixed live by longtime Jobin collaborator Cristian Vogel. At several moments Vogel deployed random number generating programs to dictate the specific texture of the soundscape.
Spread over a number of channels, Vogel’s incidental music blended sampled sounds, electronic melodies and tracks from composer Carla Scaletti, whose pieces incorporated LHC data. The resulting soundtrack veered between Kraftwerk-like electro, industrial clankings and ominous hummings.
At times Vogel [and Scaletti] used multiple speakers to create marvelous Doppler effects, giving audience members the sensation of sitting at the center of the LHC itself, with particles whizzing round at increasing speeds, preparing to impact.
…
Investigating the elusive notions of beauty, meaning and human behavior, Jobin provides us with a reminder, if one were needed, of the essential mysteriousness of the world.
