Category: Release

Zul Zelub: Ultimaton

Ultimaton, an experimental electro-acoustic album featuring prepared piano and Kyma X processing, was released in December 2012 by Jorge Lima Barreto (piano & percussion) and Jonas Runa (Kyma X).

Zul Zelub (zul = luz or light, zelub = Boulez) is described as unrealized musical energy, the unexpressed, the force which does not generate matter, a virtual formulation as in a dream or a cyber journey.

Barreto’s piano performance is an experimentalist improvised flow, unfolding in various concepts and dynamics of time (slowed-down or accelerated, asynchronous and synchronous) creating new sound spaces. Digital musician and composer João Marques Carrilho (aka Jonas Runa) captures, interferes, superimposes timbres, and participates in a real-time musical conversation with the piano.

The duo explores the questions: What lies behind an act of musical creation?  What precedes it?  What enables its actualization in sound?

To Barreto and Runa, musical improvisation is a living force that induces an action and maintains a momentary state of the body.  “Improvisation lives in the unknown, at the mercy of the Creative Energy and Open Form; in it’s aesthetic stance, improvisation is possibility and performance (corporal action) – it is an ephemeral state pointing to the unrealized.”

Ultimaton is available as an immediate download or in a limited edition cardboard double-sleeve wallet that includes photographs and background on the project and its creators. Listen to a preview of the complex, delicate and shimmering textures on bandcamp.com where you can also order the full album.

Matteo Milani: sound designer for Genesis Project

What if it were computers who invented humans (and not the other way around?)  In director Alessio Fava’s new film Genesis Project: the real story of creation, it seems an almost plausible and decidedly amusing hypothesis.  Sound designer Matteo Milani put his Kyma sound design workstation to good use generating the ambiences.  Highly entertaining for all computer users (or is it the other way around?), Genesis Project begs the question, “But what if humans develop self-awareness?”  Be sure to check out the Human User Manual on the official Genesis Project site.

The Book of Sarth

Is it a graphic novel? A concept album? An animation? An App? A book?

The Book of Sarth is all of these things plus a narrative about an ear worm that is, itself, an ear worm! The Book of Sarth is the first example of an entirely new art form for the early 21st century.  The initial offering of the Gralbum Collective, a self-described group of musicians, artists, and programmers working to establish new forms for creative expression, The Book of Sarth is available now in the App Store and has to be experienced, more than described, but an attempt at a verbal description follows:

Imagine discovering an ornate leather-bound book abandoned in an attic; when you pick it up, a voice says “Open the Book”.  Cradling the iPad in your lap like an old tome, flipping through parchment pages with colorful watercolors, it really does feel as if you’ve discovered a magical story book, one where the drawings come alive and music fills the stereo field (headphone listening is strongly recommended for the experimental, Kyma-drenched score by Sarth Calhoun).

Like the tracks on the album, the animated paintings come in “chapters”, each having its own style and character: the storybook water colors of “Discovery”, the ink-on-glass Japanese photo/drawing colorized loops of “Transmission”, the stark black and white ink images of Occupy-like mass protests for “Awakening”, psychedelic pattern loops for “Access”, symbolic poker-hands and other cryptic numbers (4 X 7), beautiful iridescent ghostly animations on black-inked stark background images of the police state, and so on, concluding with an Epilogue of beautiful geometric patterns, sometimes occluded by human silhouettes.

Born into an angular world with no color, two children discover a sound-generating device that enraptures the world, introducing color, movement and shapes; the epilogue hints at ancient technologies that were known to resonate with sounds of a healing nature and reveal hidden order and patterns.  The rest of the narrative is a struggle between the black-and-white (or “the brown and grey”) police state who shut down the transmissions, and the rioting crowds who learn to make their own underground sound-generating devices.

The musical narrative can accompany the visual or not and is an uncompromisingly experimental mix of vocoding, heavily processed poetry, ear-worm inducing loops, exquisitely glitchy electronics, and Euclidean rhythms.  It ends, not with an ecstatic out-of-body experience, but with a warning: “the black days are coming.”

 

Musical score for Unfinished Swan

Imagine yourself surrounded by nothing but a featureless whiteness, a world in which the only way to discover objects or people around you  is to splatter black paint in the hopes of revealing their outlines and shapes.

Giant Sparrow’s The Unfinished Swan is a new kind of game, and composer Joel Corelitz has taken a new approach to scoring the music for the new PlayStation title.  Seeking to blur the line between the real and the synthetic, Corelitz chose to imitate electronic sounds with acoustic instruments and to imitate acoustic instruments with electronics.  He used Kyma for the electric harpsichord sounds in the ‘switched-on’ type pieces, and he used the Kyma CrossFilter on the pads.

The Unfinished Swan, slated for an October 23, 2012 release, is already earning rave reviews for its unique approach and focus on creativity, exploration, and discovery.

Shackle unshackled

Anne La Berge and Robert van Heumen are Shackle: a performance duo featuring Anne on flute processed through Kyma and Robert on Supercollider. In August 2012, they will be releasing The Shackle Stick, a USB stick containing music and video of their live performances (a portion of the cost for which will be covered by their successful Kickstarter project).  Following the release of the Shackle Stick, the duo will be touring New Zealand, Australia and Brazil in September 2012.

Tomorrow you’re gone

Hamilton Sterling at Helikon Sound has just completed the sound for David Jacobson’s new film, Tomorrow You’re Gone, a story of psychological vengeance and real-world redemption. The film stars Stephen Dorff, Michelle Monaghan, and Willem Dafoe.

As sound designer, supervising sound editor, and re-recording mixer, Hamilton created a sonic world that functions almost as a musical score.  Aside from guitar and drums (used by the composer), almost every scene in the film is inflected by sounds generated in Kyma (appropriately enough, since most of the film may or may not take place from a point of view inside the main character’s head).

Micro-Cinematic Essays on the Life and Work of Marcel Duchamp dba Conceptual Parts, Ink

Artists Mark Amerika and Chad Mossholder‘s Micro-Cinematic Essays on the Life and Work of Marcel Duchamp dba Conceptual Parts, Ink will be premiered soon as an installation at  The Centre for Creative Arts in La Trobe. Described as “a collaborative ‘conceptual art’ album featuring the writing and vocals of Mark Amerika and the sound design of electronic music composer Chad Mossholder,” about 90% of the sounds were crafted in Kyma. The work is divided into nineteen tracks, each focusing on the work, language, notes, and influence of Marcel Duchamp on contemporary forms of remix practice. An exploration of glitch, microtonality, and the spectral analysis of recorded voices over time, Mossholder and Amerika challenge us to rethink the interrelationship between critical writing and critical listening.  This work was made possible thanks to a visiting artist residency for both artists at the Centre for Creative Arts at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

Disney Film Features Speech to Wolf Howl by JED Sound

During the final mix for Disney’s Treasure Buddies, director Robert Vince asked sound designers Pat Haskill and Jean-Edouard Miclot to morph the voice of a puppy named Mudbud (voiced by Ty Panitz) from a human voice to the howl of a real puppy.  After a frantic and ultimately unsuccessful search of their sound libraries for a domestic puppy howl, the sound designers finally located a recording of a wolf pup that sounded close to Mudbud’s speaking voice, and they cross-faded from the actor to the wolf howl.  Unfortunately, the result still sounded like two independent layers. That’s when Jean-Edouard had the idea to load the two samples into Kyma’s Time Alignment Utility (TAU) where he could experiment with morphing using a tablet until he got the smooth transition he wanted. Re-recording mixers Gord Hillier and Samuel Lehmer mixed the sound in and, according to Jean-Edouard, “everybody in the studio loved how natural the transition from human to animal was made.” You can hear the morph in the scene starting about 36″ into the following clip:

Kyma International Sound Symposium 2012

The Kyma International Sound Symposium is  four inspiring days and nights filled with sound design, ideas, discussions, and music, and it offers a wide range of opportunities to increase your Kyma mastery: from introductory master classes, to hands-on question-and-answer sessions; from thought-provoking presentations, to inspiring concerts and after-hours discussions with new-found friends and colleagues.

This year’s symposium KISS2012 will be on banks of the mighty Mississippi River, September 13-16, organized by St. Cloud State University School of the Arts and Symbolic Sound. The KISS2012 theme, reel time || real time, puts the spotlight on reel time (sound for picture), real time (live performance), and all timescales between, including sound design for games, live cinema, live improvisation ensembles, live performances from a score, sound design for live theatre, live signal generation for speech and hearing research, interactive data sonification, interactive sound art, and more!

A force of pure imagination

Electronica: Zlatko Tanodi, the new album of Croatian composer Zlatko Tanodi‘s highly imaginative electo-acoustic music has just been released under the Cantus label. Tanodi is a true musical eclectic; as adept at writing orchestral and chamber music as jazz and pop arrangements and scoring films, he tours internationally, performing keyboards with his jazz ensemble Opus X and also serves as the Head of the Department of Composition and Theory at the Zagreb Academy of Music. All of these experiences are evident in the music on this disc which slips easily from the classical avant-garde to a cinematic dramaturgy worthy of a Hollywood space fantasy and even includes brief snatches of DnB. Throughout, Tanodi has woven a surprising and delightful thread of pure sound design and a fascination with the human voice (both speaking and singing). Even more impressive than Tanodi’s masterful command of an astonishing variety of musical styles, though, is the force of his unspoiled, almost child-like imagination. Sounds transform themselves in a seemingly inevitable way from operatic diva to demonic baby; string quartets, frogs, and abstract sine wave modulations receive equal amounts of loving attention to detail and craftsmanship.

For a little foretaste of the sonic delights you’ll enjoy in the full album, check out Tanodi’s introduction to his contributions to the Recombinant Art compilation, produced by Edmund Eagan. Electronica is a must-hear for anyone who enjoys the pure physical pleasure of being immersed in sound and music and is eager to be transported to another world, at least for the duration of this CD. You can order the full album from the Cantus web site (100 HRK is approximately USD17).