1,571 days, 2,407 entries ...

Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
● 21/03/2024
“The room itself comes close to feeling like an instrument that is being played in real-time, one that sounds better the more bodies there are in the space to absorb its waves.”
– Critic and curator Mariana Fernández, lauding A Harmonic Algorithm, electronic music pioneer Laurie Spiegel’s exhibition at Mexico City’s Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC). “[It’s] as if Spiegel were pushing the sonic fragments around with her mouse behind the walls,” writes Fernández, referring to Spiegel’s Music Mouse software (1986).
Momus
● 21/03/2024

Presenting physics-informed work-in-progress, Carsten Nicolai’s HYbr:ID opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (MACRO). A listening lounge featuring a sound piece that “oscillates between more stylized, dilated rhythms and dreamy atmospheres generated by low frequencies” inspired by Hermann Minkowski’s 1908 model of spacetime takes centre stage. Also presented are related drawings and graphics in which the German artist pushes the limits of musical notation.

MACRO
● 29/02/2024
OUT NOW:
Tristan Perich
Pseudorandom
Composer Perich complements his new conceptual circuit album Noise Patterns, Pseudorandom with a hefty 1024-page printout of the 16,777,215 numbers that comprise one complete cycle of its central 3-byte random number generator.
Physical Editions
● 28/03/2023
Ryuichi Sakamoto
(1952-2023)
Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto dies after a battle with cancer. Co-founder of Yellow Magic Orchestra in the 1970s, his film scores earned an Oscar and a Grammy, and he was a fierce post-Fukushima disaster climate activist. Collaborator Carsten Nicolai lauds Sakamoto for recognizing “conversations between different and unusual styles may be the future.”
New York Times
● 21/03/2023
“Wanna talk about ‘PC music?’ It’s one cello sample and a computer, baby.”
– 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady and Laura Les, enthusing about the origins of the THX deep note, the characterful chord that sounds before many motion pictures. Gushing about getting clearance to use it to kickoff their new album, Les describes the soundmark as “beautiful and terrifying.”
Switched on Pop
● 23/08/2022
OUT NOW:
DeForrest Brown, Jr.
Assembling a Black Counter Culture
A critical reframing of Detroit techno as a unique (and vital) form of Black musical and cultural production
Primary Information
U
● 28/03/2022
Chantal Passamonte
(1970-2022)
Electronic musician and sound artist Chantal Passamonte dies at 52. Creator of genre-defying experimental releases under the moniker Mira Calix on Warp Records, she also collaborated with theatre groups and worked in installation, contributing a sound sculpture to the Cultural Olympiad for London’s 2012 Summer Olympics.
Wikipedia
● 23/03/2022
“When I was pregnant, I had this powerful experience of understanding myself as a vessel or a container for another voice.”
– Sound artist Aura Satz, reflecting on Ventriloqua (2003-4), a performance in which the artist played the electromagnetic waves of her (late pregnancy) belly using a theremin
Barbara London Calling
● 06/09/2021

Alex Schweder’s “The Sound and the Future” opens at Clifford Gallery in Hamilton, New York. Its name borrowed from its lone work, the exhibition offers a fun glimpse into Schweder’s world of “performance architecture”—dynamic architectural and sculptural forms. Here, a made-to-order very Detroit installation, first shown at Wasserman Projects in 2016, sways again; a homage to Motor City’s dance music genre, silvery nylon inflatables undulate, animated by blown air, to a slowed down techno soundtrack.

Clifford Gallery
● 10/03/2021

A project linking the ISM, MESS, the Moogseum and 50+ museums and cultural organizations, “Music, Makers & Machines” launches. The Google Arts and Culture online exhibition offers “a brief history of electronic music“ through an innovative archival interface; visitors can explore nightlife oral histories, inventor biographies, music technology timelines, and musician influence maps (image: Daphne Oram, of BBC Radiophonic Workshop fame) as a way to sidestep histories of genre, and blur the lines between music making and engineering.

Music, Makers & Machines
● 04/02/2021
“We will always choose a lesser home-brewed tool tailored specifically to our own needs, over a better generic tool that we have not built and do not understand.”
– Nomadic programmers Hundred Rabbits, describing the DIY ethos behind their software (image: the duo’s livecoding “procedural sequencer” Orca)
Esoteric.Codes
● 22/01/2021
“Normally, good parties have people in them. The smells of sweat, the sticky limbs, the flânerie, the dopamine just gushing.”
– Critic Shiv Kotecha, on Party/After-Party at New York state‘s Dia Beacon. Authored by Detroit techno luminary Carl Craig, the installation lays bare the symbiosis between electronic music and empty postindustrial space.
4Columns
● 22/11/2020
“There are people who say ‘I spend all day behind a computer; the last thing I want to do after work is look at a computer again,’ but for me, the computer is more like water. I don’t think I’m alone in that regard.”
– Electronic musician Renick Bell, on the burgeoning livecoding and generative art scenes. “As familiarity with coding increases, more people will use that skill to produce music or art,” Bell says.
3/4 Magazine
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