Cyberpunk Cyberstream

3CD - Medama
Textures, rhythms and audio layers mix in this work, following the many forms of an experimental and abstract electronica, in the first of the three volumes of this series of "test tones". It's an anthology that draws inspiration from the music scene of the SuperDeluxe, in Tokyo, a club that represents the more trendy and digital side of the Japanese nightlife. Located in the Shibuya district, the minimalist lounge bar hosts a myriad of small events, with DJ's and radical performances, and is the meeting point of a very non-conventional group of sound manipulators. This triple release is a very effective representation of such fertile musical practices, by virtue of a radical nature never expressed in similar European works. In the second volume, too - in fact - between steelpans, kalimbas, bells, tuning forks and metronomes, we can perceive slight murmurs, steps and other environmental influences. Recordings that, by capturing the immediacy of live performances, do not seem to encourage - however - an inattentive and meditative or scarcely involved listening experience. The selections - edited by Cal Lyall - finally come together in the third and latest CD, in tumultuous drifts towards noise-rock and jazzy leftfield: it could not be otherwise, after presenting so many rarefied styles.
Aurelio Cianciotta

Les Films d'un Jour, 2009, France, Francaise, English
Prélude au sommeil (Prelude to sleep) is a documentary film catching the spirit of Jean-Jacques Perrey, an eclectic electronic music pioneer who began his impressive career in the fifties. The film reconstructs the trajectory of a free spirit who flew to the USA with his early Ondioline electronic instrument (sponsored by Edith Piaf and Jean Cocteau). Perrey is often briefly interviewed, but the documentary is also letting him speak through his colleagues and friends. His approach is light-hearted and funny, yet technically innovative and extremely accurate. And he's an artist who possesses, as Badalamenti notes in his interview, a strong "young exuberance", while simultaneously having an endless curiosity for research. He can be considered a hero more than a myth for different contemporary communities of electronic musicians, as is largely acknowledged through different tributes and collaborations. And this film, named after his first album, also describes Perrey's research into music as a means to cure insomnia. Directed by Gilles Weinzaepflen, the film features Gershon Kingsley (half of the Perrey-Kingsley duo and author of the world famous Moog anthem "Popcorn"), Angelo Badalamenti (David Lynch's buddy soundtracker), Michel Gondry (the cult music video maker), Air (the famous French pop group), Jean-Emmanuel Deluxe and Joel Chadabe (another pioneer in interactive music systems).

We're accustomed to being under surveillance. We've taken for granted that cameras are everywhere "for our own safety". And we don't care anymore of being recorded in the street 30, 60 or 100 times (or even more) everyday. How has it happened? One of the reasons is that all these cameras around us are "passive". They're there, they record their memory, then they delete it, again and again. We can be there, but not forever (maybe). So this passiveness is making them disappear in our landscape. But what if they would start to act or react to our presence? And what if they would have a different shape than the usual neutral white ones? "Desire of Codes" by Seiko Mikami is a large scale installation commissioned by YCAM (Yamaguchi Center for Art and Media). It's made of different elements: ninety mechanical moving "objects" that sense a visitor and start to flicker and to record him with small built-in cameras; six robotic "search arms" equipped with cameras and projectors, suspended from the ceiling, they are pointing and recording the visitor as well as projecting images of him/her on the floor; all the images plus more retrieved from surveillance camera from around the world are combined in a "compound eye" constantly updated. The soundtrack is made by mixing sounds recorded in this big room, including servo-motor noises and the whispering of visitors. The database is made of data, and so, Mikami says, of "desire", accumulated in an automatic memory, potentially omni-comprehensive and combing parts of the bodies the machine is interested in. In front of belly of the surveillance beast, we are not indifferent anymore, but targeted, and so fulfilled by an attention that is dangerous, but satisfying.

The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262013727, 2010, English, U.S.A.
There's an ethereal legacy between the nineteenth century (most of it was the so called Victorian era), science and technological innovation and the current digital age, almost two centuries after. Beyond recognizing the ancestors of technologies (the telegraph as the "Victorian Internet") and the subcultures producing fascinating atypical machines and settings (the steampunk movement), there's probably some kind of thrill-sharing between these two historical moments, involving living in quickly changing and dangerous times. ThermoPoetics is a book focused on a specific relationship: the tensions between science and literature when both were facing major changes in Britain. Physics was tremendously reinforced by the new law of thermodynamics and attendant cultural impacts: it was closely followed by a number of poets, while a few scientists were dealing with creative language to talk about their new discoveries. It's fascinating to read the great poetry written by Maxwell about force, and in turn to discover "Bleak House" a novel by Charles Dickens which he treats as a series of engines. Other famous writers are mentioned in this painstaking research: Alfred Tennyson, Herbert Spencer, Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde, and their contributions are genuinely impressive. Scientific literature and literary science are here interwoven in a way that is never boring, but mutually stimulating. Maybe in a couple of centuries (or less), somebody else will connect blogging writing styles with global warming, in another astonishing piece of research.

Speakers are neutral. They carry the sound from its decoded source to our ears, but they are firm, static and impartial. They can be adjusted to create a better listening experience, or multiplied and singularly managed to enhance it even more, but they are meant to stay where you placed them the first time they were used. RHFID Speakers by Ulrik Andersen Hogrebe, Filippo Cuttica and Jacek Barcikowski are basically questioning this neutrality. Equipped with RFID tags their classic hi-fi speakers are sensitive to their positions, changing the sound they are playing accordingly. Instinctively they remind of old FM radios that would change their output because of their new reception/location, and "R" stands for "Radio" in RFID... When placed close to each other they play the same song, this time in stereo. But their relationship between sound and position opens different possibilities and generally speaking is significant of how radio waves can carry sound, data and data influencing sound. That old FM radio, if properly modified, would now play a different song, depending on its neighborhood.