"Cloud Tenders (Techno Version)"

"Cloud Tenders (Techno Version)" [mp3 removed -- please listen on Bandcamp]

160 bpm minimal techno -- the pad is a chord from a Battery kit and the drums are Ableton's TB-606 kit. The rest is modular synth (especially the Doepfer A-112 sampler) given various effects treatments. I find this kind of a sinister, yet fun.

MuLab 7

I mentioned MuLab a few posts back as a low-cost music DAW for, say, a laptop when you are traveling. Version 7 has been released: [YouTube demo] As you can see, it's a sequencer with Reaktor-like modular synths. Easy to learn, fun, reasonably cheap, and the synths sound good!

lucy-as-performance

1462472409425-dumpfm-tommoody-modern_furniture Lucy-gif

 

On the left, random photo-detail-crop of Cally Spooner performance work at the NewMu (hat tip helvetica12); on the right, a clip from Luc Besson's Lucy, depicting Scarlett Johansson telekinetically flinging a mobster into a wall. Caught on the fly, Spooner's work resembles standard Trisha Brown-style gesture art but there's so much more. As the press release tells us, this is "a group of dancers who respond to conflicting choreographic instructions: to stay intimately bound together while remaining fiercely separate." Moreover, "trained by rugby players and a movie director, [their work follows] the logic of a 'stand-up scrum' -- a daily meeting often used in collaborative, responsive practices such as software development." Darn, that's a lot for one work of art.

Scarlett Johansson may or may not have had a rugby coach, but she is definitely guided by a movie director. Cally Spooner perhaps didn't need the theoretical overkill to institutionally legitimize her dancers' movements. In our current critically relaxed state where Laura Poitras and Tim Burton are shown in museums as "artists" it's only fitting to consider Johansson's genetically enhanced superhuman Lucy as form of po-Mo body practitioner. Semioticians may have already noted that the name Lucy is a trans twist on Luc, etc etc.