The Automatic Trio

Tom Moore is a musician playing traditional music, contemporary acoustic music and sound art. He’s primarily a violinist, but also plays other instruments and works with assorted electronics and hardware.

For his latest performance “Automatic Trio”, Tom performs with simple “kinetic” or animatronic instruments which play themselves. By attaching a bow to a simple bicycle wheel, he’s able to simulate the bowing of a violin or cello, making for some automated accompanyment to Tom’s playing. The set-up is quite simple, but really works with the ambient string loops and improvisation that he’s playing over the droning of the mechanical instruments. The fact that it’s part “installation piece”, part performance makes for something that is also visually compelling.

SOUND X SOUND

Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard is a Danish composer who, in his series SOUND X SOUND has been working with multiplying instruments to make the sound transcend itself, creating a pure new sound without references to anything.

The SOUND X SOUND series consists of a cycle of 7” vinyls where each release is an exploration of one single instrument, multiplied. The first release consists of music composed for 8 recorders. The aim is to get the instrument to exceed its own familiar sound and be transformed into a new and clean sound, by multiplying it. It was released on the 25th of november on Hiatus.

Currently, Niels is running a crowdfunding campaign for his next 7”, a fantastic spectral piece based on 30 chromatic tuners. You can watch the Kickstarter video below.

In these two cases, Niels uses the strengths of the instruments very well, treating the recorder as a single frequency and the tuner as a spectral building block. This tickles my curiosity; what will be the next instrument in the SOUND X SOUND series?

Music for Forgotten Places

Wandering around a city we might encounter these forgotten places - a vacant lot, an old ruin, a building no one lives in anymore. These spots always fascinate me, make me fantasize about their history and former inhabitants. Inspired by their mystique, Oliver Blank composed pieces of music for them - Music for Forgotten Places. 

Visitors and residents can call a phone number found on a sign at the forgotten place they pass, and listen to its music. A mindful moment in a busy city. The project is created in Coruña, Spain, but Oliver will visit cities across the world to discover and compose for their forgotten places as well. 

Find out more and listen to a piece of music at musicforforgottenplaces.com.

Orchestra Da Camera

We’ve seen work of the Quiet Ensemble before. Now I don’t like the use of animals in art installations, but the mice in Orchestra Da Camera seem to have quite some space, and while they run around they can play a lullaby by Brahms, Schubert or Mozart. 

Visit the Quiet Ensemble website to have a look at more of their work. 

Bach on an Enormous Wooden Xylophone

OK, I normally don’t post any advertisements on Everyday Listening, nor do I publish two posts on one day, but it’s time for an exception. Check out this huge wooden xylophone playing a part of Bach’s Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben in the middle of the forest. 

The video is made by Japanese mobile operator NTT Docomo to promote their Touch Wood phone. This video sure grabs the attention. 

Stadsmuziek

If you can’t play the piano, you can build a machine that will play it for you. Maybe that’s what Akko Goldenbeld was thinking when he created Stadsmuziek. The installation resembles the system of an old hand-operated street organ, but now the resulting music is certainly a bit more ‘experimental’. 

I like the idea, and the fact that the system isn’t perfect. The screeching sound of the turning wheels complements the sound of the piano nicely. If only it could be played with a bit more expression..

Stop/Run

Stop/Run by Ed Devane is a collection of nine strange, hand-made instruments. He asked seven composers to create a piece for this ensemble, to be performed at the opening of a week long installation in Severed Head gallery, Dublin, Ireland.

The combination of acoustic and electronic means give the composers a wide range of sonic possibilities. Listen to the pieces recorded on during the opening event:

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Ice Music

More icy sounds of winter, made by Terje Isungset from Norway. Since 1999 he has been working with ice the main material to build his instruments. His first Ice Music album was recorded in the Ice Hotel in Sweden in 2001.

The sound of the ice instruments is never the same, as the material changes and changes in temperature change the timbre of the instruments. And apparently, the colder it gets, the better the ice sounds. For a list of concert dates visit Terje Isungset’s website.

Journal de Nîmes - The Sounds of the City

Cycling through Amsterdam in the fall might well plant the seeds for the melody of a new song in an artist’s mind. Crossing the Vondelpark, the colorful leaves of fall set the mood. They sound crispy under your bike’s tires, creating an unpolished background sound while you pedal a little slower to get the rhythm right. The sounds of the concert you visited the night before are still reverberate in you ears. They mingle with the inspiration from the colorful world around you.

To find out in which way Amsterdam inspired them musically, I asked Dutch artists: 
I - What was the most inspiring concert your attended in Amsterdam?
II - What was the nicest venue in Amsterdam you ever played yourself?

Read the answers in the new Dutch-themed issue of Journal de Nîmes. You can read the digital version on Isuu by clicking on the article above. 

Inanimate Life by Mark Peter Wright

I like making field recordings, recording and archiving a moment in time, to travel back to while listening to it on some later day. The field recordings Mark Peter Wright made for his album Inanimate Life are not the same though. They take the listener a little closer to their sources. 

Mark Peter Wright made his field recordings along the North East coast of England, inspired by the voice of the coastal winds. Other than what you might expect from field recordings, it is never really clear what I am listening to. While listening to Inanimate Life on my headphones the sounds rumble through my head, evoking images in my mind of what might be the source of those haunting soundscapes.

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