I’m moved by the planetarium: I travel to the stars I cannot see, struggle with the scale of what I cannot fathom. Modern planetariums demonstrate the grandeur of God’s creation, but in a secular scientific context. They bring the distant close; make the visible the imperceptible; make manifest the abstract.
Franziska Schroeder and io 0.0.1 beta++ (Ó Riada Hall, Cork, May 25, 2010)
At the io 0.0.1 beta++ ’site, I’m posting short excerpts from the liner notes to ‘io 0.0.1 beta++’ (SLAMCD 531). Written by the California-based interactive media artist Sara Roberts, here’s the second excerpt:
io 0.0.1 beta++ is rather special in being both an instrument and a player. And given the two attributes it has a very particular sound, ‘sound’ here referring to both timbral quality and the broader sense of having an indelible identity, a style, having its own sound. [2]
io has an extravagant range of sounds made with superhuman amounts of air, and superhuman articulations of air resistance: a hummingbird trill that can go on without the limit of breath, bleats, blats, a grainy slur, shifts between piping and sandy sounds, elephant-like trumpeting, a faint spitty-sounding purr, slushy trills, a hoarse blast of full-spectrum noise, scumbling, whispery hisses ramping up to loud razzing. It can make delicate birdlike chirpings then abruptly sound like a power tool under duress, or render sounds reminiscent of emergency vehicles. [Original post at io 0.0.1 beta++…]
[2] George E. Lewis, ‘Interacting with Latter-Day Musical Automata’, Contemporary Music Review, Vol.18, No.3, 99–112 (1999).
From the local free tabloid, the Cork Independent. My first (last?) fluff piece…
From the Cork Independent March 26th 2009
How many members of the (semi-fictional) trans-national tribe of latter-day improvising musicians can say they’ve done a fluff piece, huh? (Not counting the blindfold tests.) Braxton? Crispell? Parker? Ha! I don’t think so….
The newspaper piece was by Graham Lynch, with a photo by John Hough.
