Sonic in Holland
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Sonic in Holland
According to his website sonic boom will be playing in Haarlem and Amsterdam on the 18 and 19th Jan respectively. I'll be in Amsterdam and will post a review.
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Just got back from Amsterdam. Sonic's thing was a Q+A session in which he revealed that among others his inspirations were Delia Derbyshire and ENO. He played a couple of things made with tape loops and software that converts bitmap images into sound. He also got into a discussion with a Dutch guy about the series number of a synthesizer. It was interseting to hear him reminisce about his childhood listening to the drones of mowers and his parent's fridge. Then he played a 20 minute or so piece. Had a short chat afterwards when he revealed that he's currently working on the new Spectrum record. An enjoyable night, though the weather was awful.
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Pretty much all audio software will do this if it can open "raw PCM" (the free version of Cool Edit does this). It can make anything from a low hum to a Metal Machine Music-like shriek. Gives new meaning to the term, "Sound painting".Jasonsmith wrote:He played a couple of things made with tape loops and software that converts bitmap images into sound.
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Sonic Boom (hello Mrs Boom, can Sonic come out to play today?) seems quite fond of this machine music. But what is the point? You put something in one end, turn the handle and wait for it to come out the other end. The credit for the results lies with the person who designed the machine if that’s all you’re going to do (true, there is the creation of the material to put into the front, but this is reduced to half the importance of the machine…).
This would be beside the point, except that our friend’s activities these days seem to consist of (the equivalent of) standing in front of his Theramin while it goes “whoooooooooo” and grinning, instead of, say, writing “Good Vibrations”.
What I am saying is that the pioneers of experimental music had the excuse that the experiment was into a genuinely novel arena, with proper rigorous reasoning behind it (science, mathematics, rationalism), as well as a meaning (whether that be a response to the senseless slaughter at Flanders, Stalingrad etc, to embroider upon the essence of machine-age alienation, or to disguise the singularly un-scary nature of a new monster on Dr Who), rather than a banal trip into ‘psychedelic’ music for suburban smack addled dropouts with too much time on their hands.
Still, it’s a living.
This would be beside the point, except that our friend’s activities these days seem to consist of (the equivalent of) standing in front of his Theramin while it goes “whoooooooooo” and grinning, instead of, say, writing “Good Vibrations”.
What I am saying is that the pioneers of experimental music had the excuse that the experiment was into a genuinely novel arena, with proper rigorous reasoning behind it (science, mathematics, rationalism), as well as a meaning (whether that be a response to the senseless slaughter at Flanders, Stalingrad etc, to embroider upon the essence of machine-age alienation, or to disguise the singularly un-scary nature of a new monster on Dr Who), rather than a banal trip into ‘psychedelic’ music for suburban smack addled dropouts with too much time on their hands.
Still, it’s a living.
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