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This video shows Berlin-based Frank Bretschneider performing live on the Generator.x concert tour, with excerpts from Trondheim, Oslo and Fredrikstad. Bretschneider creates his own visuals using a highly reduced vocabulary of shapes and colors to create a precise visual representation of his music. More information about his work can be found in his profile.
Video: Frank Bretschneider live on the Generator.x concert tour. (~ 5.5 MB)
Generator.x Tour: Frank Bretschneider live on the tour (more photos on Flickr)
A veteran of electronic music, Frank Bretschneider is currently based in Berlin but was born in 1956 in East Germany, growing up in what was then Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz). He originally trained as a graphic designer and painter, but in 1984 started experimenting with electronic music through tape loops, a Korg synth and treated guitars. In 1986 he founded the now-defunct AG.GEIGE, an experimental group mixing popular music with avantgarde performance strategies, borrowing from Dada and the Surrealists.
In 1995 Bretschneider formed the Rastermusic label with former bandmate Olaf Bender, releasing experimental electronic music. Rastermusic merged in 1999 with Noton Archiv für ton und nichtton (run by artist and musician Carsten Nicolai), creating the now renowned Raster-Noton label. With artists like Bretschneider, Nicolai and Ryoji Ikeda, Raster-Noton is famous for releasing uncompromising musical abstractions. The label also focuses on the interaction between music and visual art, with its artists frequently producing audiovisual performances or art installations.
Bretschneider’s music is often described as minimalist, but when asked he prefers to describe it as simply economic. Whatever the term used, his music is highly structured, marked by pinpoint precision and micromanagement. His raw materials are sine waves and white noise, resulting in a sound which is clearly digital and synthetic, although not without warmth.
As strategies for composition Bretschneider emphasizes accidents and the intentional misuse of software. Claiming to be “lazy”, he experiments with connecting modular synthesis systems until he gets interesting sequences. These are then saved and processed further. The final track is then constructed using these elements as building blocks, with looping and filtering applied to introduce further unexpected results.
Bretschneider’s interest in visual representation of sound comes naturally from his background in visual work. Using spectral analysis and custom software, he takes visual cues from music software (dots, lines, bars etc.) and turns them into representations of musical structures. The visuals mirror Bretschneider’s sound perfectly, with hypnotic repetition and precise micro-events drawing audiences into a synthetic visual space. Again, he claims that his use of a limited visual vocabulary of shapes and colors is a matter of economics rather than a minimalist statement.
To watch one of Bretschneider’s audiovisual performances is to be placed inside the logic of the composition, seeing and hearing it simultaneously. While this highly structured environment somewhat restricts possibilities for improvisation, the result is immensely precise in its connection of sound and image. To overcome the improvisational challenge, Bretschneider is currently working on new software solutions for realtime visuals.
Frank Bretschneider is touring with the Generator.x concert tour for 7 performances all over Norway. The tour is produced by Rikskonsertene and co-curated by Alexander Rishaug and Marius Watz.
Related links:
Generator.x: The concert tour (Phonophani, Lia vs. Emi Maeda)
Generator.x: The concert tour – 19-29 April, 2006
Phonophani (NO) / Marius Watz (NO)
Emi Maeda (JP) / Lia (AT)
Frank Bretschneider (DE)
This week sees the beginning of the Generator.x concert tour, with 7 dates all over Norway – we’ll even go north of the Arctic Circle. The tour is produced by Rikskonsertene, and presents a selection of artists working with generative strategies in the intersection between sound and visual performance. Co-curators are Marius Watz and Alexander Rishaug, the latter also known for his music and his RandomSystem festival projects.
Norwegian Phonophani (aka Espen Sommer Eide) will play glitchy improvisations using Max/MSP, accompanied by generative visuals by Marius Watz. Helsinki-based harpist Emi Maeda will play harp combined with electronic sound manipulations, with Lia doing visuals. Finally we are pleased to be joined by Frank Bretschneider from Berlin, one of the founders of the renowned Raster-Noton label and a veteran of minimalist beats and sine wave abstractions. In what could be seen as a continuation of the Gesamtkunstwerk tradition, Bretschneider also produces visuals from his sound works.
Photos from the tour will be put online on Flickr.
Generator.x: Tour dates
Our thanks go to Rikskonsertene, Alexander Rishaug and local organizers like TEKS, BEK and Tou Scene for making this tour possible.
For information about the concert that took place during the Generator.x conference in Oslo, please visit the Generator.x Club page.
This is an experiment to see if posting videos on the blog would be feasible (or even desirable). The video format of choice is Flash Video, since it’s light-weight, most users have the necessary plugins and the plugin doesn’t stop the browser for several seconds while initializing. We’re using the WP-FLV WordPress plugin by Roel Meurders to embed the FLVs. WP-FLV in turn uses Jeroen Wijering’s Flash Video Player.
Please give feedback on how this is working for you. It shouldn’t slow down the normal blog use, since it doesn’t load the video until you ask it to. Without further ado, here is the clip.
Video: Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai) live at AV.06. (~ 6 MB)
Soundtoys.net | Stanza:amorphoscapes | Hoyle/Baker: Soundtoys.net navigator
Soundtoys.net, the brain-child of UK artist Stanza and veteran survivor of online interactive art, has relaunched in new glory. Retooled by Karsten Schmidt (aka toxi) in a new “web2.006 framework” called @emitter, Soundtoys has made the jump overnight from old-school semi-static site to being all-dynamic, tagged and blogged.
Soundtoys contains a wealth of old and not-so-old works, including more than a few gems from the productive period of Shockwave experimentation in the mid-to-late 90s. To get a good idea of the scope of the project, have a look at the artists page. It reads almost like a who’s who of a cross-section of new media art and experimental design.
Adam Hoyle and Julian Baker have contributed a soundtoys.net content navigator, which allows interactive navigation of the project database using the tags. Users can combine individual tags to combine them as a search, get a short description of the piece and launch it directly from the navigator. Although some of the pieces may make your browser complain about Shockwave’s brutish ways (or even crash outright), persisent browsers can expect (re-)discovery of particular gems.
Many props to Stanza for starting this community and keeping it alive, and to Karsten for his good-looking but über-functional publishing platform.
Update: Karsten just blogged a detailed description of the magic behind the scenes of the new Soundtoys.net. Read it over on toxi.in.process.
Some highlights:
Sequencer
Holidays are in effect, so like most of the blogsphere Generator.x is quieter than usual. To compensate, here is a non-denominational, animal-related bonus project:
Intelligent MIDI Sequencing with Hamster Control was created by Cornell University student Levy Lorenzo for his Master of Engineering (Electrical). It uses 6 hamsters as an input device to an “intelligent” MIDI sequencer, presumably mapping parameters to sensors triggered by the hamsters moving around in a cage-like box.
From Lorenzo’s abstract:
The resulting music sounds generic, but not very hamster-like. On first listen, it is reminiscent of Brian Eno’s experiements with the algorithmic composition tool Koan from SSEYO. For a more complete description of the process, Lorenzo has provided a full report in PDF on the project page.
Sound art is big in Norway. Now there is even a gallery dedicated exclusively to sound art, called Lydgalleriet. The gallery has no permanent physical space, but is unsurprisingly based in Bergen, which for now seems to be the center of the Norwegian sound art universe.
This Saturday 11 Dec Lydgalleriet will have a one-day exhibition / event at Landmark in Bergen, curated by Erlend Hammer and Steinar Sekkingstad. Artists include Bjørn Askefoss, Bjørnar Habbestad, Leif Inge, Jørgen Larsson, Nicholas Møllerhaug, Maia Urstad and Jana Winderen (producer for the Generator.x conf). Full announcement in Norwegian follows:
Read the rest of this entry »
Seth Hunter has posted a short tutorial on how to integrate Processing and Supercollider, using Open Sound Control to send messages back and forth. This means that even if you can’t afford a Lemur controller, you can at least build yourself a spiffy experimental interface in Processing. Seth’s tutorial uses oscP5, an OSC library by Andreas Schlegel.
Caveat: Supercollider is free, but is primarily for MacOS. There is a Windows port of Supercollider, but I’m not sure how stable this is. See also: SourceForge page for Supercollider.
Software: MadTracker
Software: ModPlugTracker
It seems that tracking is a topic of interest. Marisa Olson reblogged the previous G.X post on tracking on Rhizome, and now Tom Moody has posted a followup. Tom had posted on the tracker phenomena and its historical relevance in two posts earlier this year (see post #1 and post #2), with questions about the origin of the scene. Most people might find a discussion on whether tracking was pre-, post- or proto-jungle a bit obscure, but as an examination of different tools and methods for producing music it’s pretty interesting.
For those of you who prefer action to theory, here are two more trackers: MadTracker and ModPlugTracker. Both are Windows-based, but ModPlugTracker is Open Source. And if you should want to make your sound deteriorate as though it had been recorded on warped vinyl and played a thousand times, check out the “ultimate lo-fi weapon” – the free Vinyl plugin (VST etc) from Izotope.
Art of Tracking: Renoise GUI
Want to be a digital breakbeat artist? Forget 303s, MIDI keyboards and software synths. If you want get down and dirty with sequenced music, tracking and MOD files is where it’s at. Often thought of as a hacker’s approach to music, tracking started in the Amiga demo scene as a barebones way of programming sound. It’s a bit like writing MIDI files by hand.
Kuro5hin has a good article and how-to on cutting up breakbeats with tracking. It lists possible software (such as Renoise) and gives a step-by-step breakdown of how to go about murdering the Amen Break (the biggest drum’n'bass break of all time…) For more insights into the origin of tracking culture, Salon.com has an article called MOD Love.
The Salon.com article points out that the analogy that tracking is to music what code is to software is a bit of an overstatement. Tracking, which involves writing notes and effects in hexadecimal code, is still much like sequencing. Its true significance seems to stem from the fact that tracking started as a DIY culture, by kids who had no access to professional equipment (and frequently, no musical training). But tracking also allows a mechanical approach to music that makes it attractive to practicioners of drum’n'bass, breakcore, digital hardcore or plain old noise.
Go forth and track.
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