Category: visiting practitioners

Bishi is a daughter of rangoli immigrants from Calcutta, his mother is a respected singer, and his father was a political activist and poet that won a Nobel prize. Her mother created the first classical music festival in India. The way Bishi uses the Sitar is controversial. Her roots were previously discussed in an article written by Louise gray on the platform Norient. Leigh Bowery inspired her, and she took part in numerous classical music DJ sessions with him. Bowery inspired the LGBT and Queer community and allowed her to encourage herself to explore her femininity. In her early career, she was into popular music and being a pop star. Call of the tiger, a performance directed by Mathew Hausen, is an audiovisual piece where Bishi wears a sensor suite that controls the entire audiovisual environment. Diati di Maria, a later work, guided to the production of Albion Voice LP, where she talks about the intersection of Indian and British ancestry. She used colonial imperialism as a leitmotif and primary visual aesthetic. She considers that the British presence in Calcutta is unerasable as so in her life. This project went worldwide: BFI, Brazil, Australia, being herself the executive producer and allowed herself to learn the world of spectacle and cinema industry. She managed to sell out in Queen Elizabeth’s Hall, and for her, dealing with all this success was complicated.

WITCiH, is a project where she explores polymath women and empowers them. She is the artistic director and co-founder of this hub for women in technology. She helped to develop the Creative Passport project founded by Imogen Heap and many other projects. WITCiH also allowed the spawn of the Creative Women in Tech podcast available on iTunes and Spotify.

Let My Country Awake is her upcoming album that explores her duality as British and rangoli identity, fusing also intersectionality and technology. It is her 3rd album to be released and is co-produced and mixed by herself and Jeff Cook. She firstly released a single under the same name, where she gets inspiration from Rabindranath Tagore’s poem.

During this quarantine, she collab with Volta to stream her single produced alongside Toni Visconti on Amazon Music. In this performance, she set a live improvisation with an electric sitar and voice in a VR/AR created by the company she reached out to. Improv was something that she got to practice a lot during the pandemic. Another project popped out of this thinking process, and in December 2020, she performed a live improv for Peabody Essex Museum to celebrate the opening of their South Asian Galleries. Her most recent work came out a few days ago, entitled Axis Mundi, on the 7th of May.

Bandcamp description:

“Axis Mundi is the Latin term for the axis of the earth between the celestial poles. This track was inspired by the science of trees’ communication with each other, the drawings of Carl Jung, and lockdown walks in Victorian cemeteries in London. It was composed through improvising with voice, Sitar, electronics and experimenting with Spitfire LABS.” This same song was part of an exhibit in the Museum of Design Atlanta called “The Future Happened,” where she got to collab again with Volta. 

DeForrest Brown Jr. started his research on American Techno Music around 2009/10. He recently co-developed a project called Make Techno Black Again, where he celebrates the genre’s origins. Throughout the class, DeForrest explained the context of his project and shadowed the history of black people on techno music. He used the city of Detroit as a case of study that could be applied to the rest of the United States:

Detroit is a Settler colonial Industrial Capitalist State run on human labour exclusively and uses the land itself as a resource to fuel itself. (…) You can’t separate Detroit Techno from the rest of Detroit Music. The music from this city is century-long continuous thought that was disrupted by various points by white supremacist violence. He later jumps to a chart designed by the collectors and techno duo Drexciya, consisting of James Stinson and Gerald Donald, made in 1997 for their upcoming album The Quest, where they explain the relationship between the primitive slave market in the XVII century to modern and cultural aspects of techno music. DeForrest explains how and when Detroit was founded: in the American territory expansion (a period recognized for many wars inside the existing country or its borders, such as the Mexican American War or even the American Civil War) gold in the now Californian State. That same gold was the firestarter to build the New World in the USA, being Detroit one of the cities built in that era, becoming one of the most industrious cities to ever exist. Following his research, the American Civil War was a matter of slaveocracy, where the north and south were fighting to maintain slavery. According to DeForrest Brown, Abraham Lincoln was not fully planning to free the slaves and make black people as equal as white American because there were quotes where the same clarified the need for a separate living between the two (blacks and blacks whites). This might not be something relevant to techno music yet, but it’s a slow build-up into the conditions under which a 19-year-old black kid in the middle of a city that’s crumbling under the weight of its own bloated excess and arrogance.

The second image on the graph provided by Drexciya shows the migration, from the south to the north, of black people in the ’30s and ’40s due to white supremacist violence. He uses the example of Sun Ra music, which is a response from the place he was from – he moved from Alabama to New York. He also refers to the Bombingham incident in Birmingham, Alabama, where the Ku Klux Klan bombed a church, making 4 girls dead. I should say that my aunt, the daughter of my Great Grandfather, was supposed to be the fifth young girl in this bombing, but that day just so happened to move to Detroit that morning. That’s my personal connection to Detroit – understanding why black ended up North. These types of violent white supremacists manifestations happened in many other industrialize ecosystems where both blacks and whites couldn’t live together, which inducted a series of riots at the end of the ’60s, after the death of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, to protest against these adversities.

According to Alvin Toffler’s perspective of western society, the ’80s was essentially a part of the Information Era. The Detroit High Tec Music appeared, being it a response to the city’s history in the modern days. 

Make Techno Black Again also reflects on how black culture was kept being stolen from them and appropriated by white Americans throughout history and how that has to do with European colonialism and systemic music industries. What colonialism are many white men who start businesses without having concrete rules and conversations about distributing what they’re calling products? It’s not even about techno, it’s literally about stopping colonialism, and our weapon of choice, for now, is music and counterculture, said Brown Jr to HoneySuckle magazine.

In the previous visiting practioner lecture, I had the opportunity to research the legacy of Tatsuya Takahashi’s on the world of synthesizers and music technology. It was unbelievable for me that he is considerably young and yet made a significant impact in electronic music. The way he talks disarms his professional aura in a way that makes you feel you are interviewing a youngster that is about to apply to college. Tatsuya introduced himself by throwing two ways of talking about one’s life: the selfish and capitalist. He went with the first one, allowing himself to contemplate his capitalist view of his life sporadically.

You know, I’m a boring middle-class guy born in 1982, in Shizuoka, Japan, where Mount Fuji is. He left Japan to Frankfurt at a very young age, and later to London, for all you Londoners, you know zone 6 isn’t London. I had no choice where I grew up, said while describing the middle-class suburban area where he lived with his family for a long time. That lifestyle allowed him to become what he understood as a geek, staying all day at his workshop in his garage, where he built his first speakers as a kid. He made his first synthesizer at the age of 15 – I was a proud geek. For me, he was a hyperactive kid who learned so much by wanting to do a lot – an ADHD young prodigy. At that age, he taught himself about electronics, acoustic engineering, and many other things that “you are not supposed to do with 15”. Looking back to myself with that same age, I can only remember the many hours spent with my friends playing Minecraft, and which they now make me feel inadequate compared to Tsatsuya’s adolescence. Although, when discussing his moving to college to study general engineering, he said: “my course was so boring, your’s way cooler. You all are way cooler than me”. He specialized in analogue electronics to keep up with his passion for electronic music and synthesizer building.

At the end of his course, he first came with the idea to later change the perspective over music-making and electronic music practices. He wanted to make the process more accessible. With all the digital era swelling the analogue era, he came up with his first-ever portable synthesizer, which came with a strip band intended to use as an acoustic guitar. But, because his achievements wouldn’t take him that far, he “sold” his idea to a proper job at Korg’s in Tokyo. The company finally heard all his aspirations and beliefs towards synthesizers, and throughout the ’10s, he would release the following apparatus under his name:

• 2009: MicroKorg XL (digital)
• 2010: Monotron (pocket size analogue synth)
• 2011: Monotribe (bigger and louder) 
• 2013: Volca’s (finished state of his first synth)
• 2014: Synth Kit for kids and education
• 2015: MS-20
• 2016: Arp Odyssey
• 2016: First Keyboard Product that he comes up with – Minilogue Polyphonic synth. First experiment with a piano interface. Great product. He had his team at this point. 
• 2016: Last Volca. (Volca Kick) – the most abstract one.
• 2017: Arp Odyssey FS + Korg Monologue

After the Korg Monologue project, he moved from Tokyo to Cologne, Germany in 2018. He got a job at YADASTAR gmbH, which spawned 2 important career-changing projects related to Red Bull Music Academy. 

The first project was a collaboration with Ryoji Ikeda called A (For 100 Cars). In this audiovisual composition, was made 100 sine waves generators, each with a different frequency, and played them back through 100 cars with extensive sound systems, which turned into a big drone piece.

The second one was developing a new synthesizer concept called Granular Convolver, built alongside Christoph Hohnerlein and Maximilian Rest on the 20th anniversary of the event (Berlin), given to every contestant. This device juxtaposes two concepts on electronic synthesis: granular synthesis, the manipulation of tiny signals, and convolution synthesis, the conjoining of two movements.

Talking to Tatsuya was very inspiring. I never expected to dialogue with someone who made the synths I usually work with or dream of having. In my opinion, the Volcas changed the way I used to look at synthesizers – they always seemed unreachable, expensive, and uncompressible pieces of technology. My first synthesizer was the Korg Monologue, his last achievement with Korg Japan, and it allowed me to develop my first drone experimental tracks. His legacy might be one the most generation-defining ones. I think the availability of music for people characterizes the ’10s. Many considered non-musicians were allowed to make their first steps into music using ready-to-use and straightforward software, such as Ableton, FL Studio, or Logic Pro. The digital era provides music to people and even to kids who can now play these analogue-digital instruments. “Music Has The Right To Children,” said Boards of Canada. Still, music also has the right to be part of our lives, without exclusively listening to it, but also making it, without being pressured by this huge codified background language called music theory. Music has the right to the people because it is there where it all started and where it should all end.  

In the second term of the Visiting Practitioners series, Kate Hopkins was the first to introduce the year.

Being one of the most knowledgeable sound editors in the UK, working with a lot of genres and broadcasts, specialized in the sounds of nature. Since her home is located in Bristol, and this same place is recon to be also the home for the BBC Natural History Unit. “Blue Planet II” and “Frozen World” are only two titles where Hopkins stars her name in the world of sound. You can also find her in Wildlife on Ones, Natural Worlds, Life in Cold Blood, Life in the Undergrowth for the BBC as well as films in National Geographic and the Discovery Channel. Throughout her career, she managed to collect a Prime Time Emmy for Sound Editing, the Technicolor Creative Technology Award for Women in Film and Television, 3 BAFTAs + 19 nominations, and 4 Emmys and 2 RTS awards. What an amazing career it must have been for Kate.

The lecture

(Hopkins is constipated.)

She started the session by revealing her first steps in the film industry. her first role was being a receptionist in a small film company in Bristol. “Endless cups of tea” (*sniff*).

She then moved to assistant editor and then to sound editor by the pass of the years. Kate fell in love with sound because of “Its capability to give so much power and drama to the image.”. 

“The sound of air conditioning, for example, is fun because different tonalities mean different emotional approaches.”. 

Then the digital era appeared. Hopkins had never touched a computer till that time. Editing software’s were miserable. She referred to the existence of another editing program apart from Pro Tools which was as simple as a grabbing and cutting tool. There was one of her first projects that were endorsed in Idaho (USA), where she had to work with very “clunky” pro tools on Windows 94 and she was by herself. The difficulties of those works were massive, considering Pro Tools is software for sound engineering made by sound engineers – it is not very intuitive compared to nowadays DAW’s.

Later, she got the opportunity to work with Dolby Atmos and Natural History. Apart from reality documentaries, where the sound that is heard is the representation of what the microphones capture, Natural History takes sound editing to another level, where everything counts because of every sound guides to a different end. The feeling of movement and deepness transcends reality itself, but at the same, it locates the spectator in the same place where the animal stands. ” Dolby Atmos started to come in (…) Surround sound (…) Full range of all frequencies. What the producers wanted to happen was for you to feel in that place”.

Her work is the definition of being totally in charge of the spectator’s feelings. She not only sculpts sound but emotions as well. With that comes a job in which every touch has to be meticulously applied.

“The best thing for sound is getting the best quality to be placed in the right spot.”. I reviewed this to be her principal methodology: Quality + Placement. Without one, you won’t get a good Natural History film.

Another interesting discussion was the workflows between the sound crew in the postproduction development. Kate referred: “There’s always a bit of a fight between the composer and the sound editor. It is always fun to win against them and win a little bit of silence” – both jobs have their art on a big screen like in the band there are roles to accomplish a final product, where sometimes one gets to have a solo and the other not, but Kate referred after that is all a matter of dialogue or, and this last one is more definitive production goal. Sometimes composers win territory in the image by having a full sequence with music, but sometimes the same ones give space to sound editors with silence. Nevertheless, some productions demand the imperative existence of music throughout the whole film. “It’s important to know when the sound editor can have their solo like, for example, a sandstorm. it is important to have a dialogue between both.”.

Finally, she showed us a scene from her work mixed in Atmos, called Dynasties: Meerkat for BBC, by sharing a pro tools project. For me, it wasn’t a surprise to see a lot of tracks because I’ve worked with this type of project in the past – we could say I am still working on a Spanish experimental documentary. In the last few years, I’ve been studying to be a film sound editor in ECAM (Escuela de Cinematografia y del Audiovisual de Madrid), a place focused on the production of films that correspond to industry’s standards. There I found that my preference to work with experimental and documental cineasts because of the production size. My voice as a sound artist has more importance, and teamwork is more intimate. The final result is always more satisfying. I’ve also worked in big productions, but the feeling is different. The figure of the réalisateur is more noticeable than the others, almost like a cult. 

This is how the ’90s was described for a person in the comment section of an electric indigo video. And this is maybe what it should have been for most of the people that lived in that moment, either in Berlin, Chicago, Detroit, or wherever there was an electronic music night club. A few days ago, I had the opportunity to talk with Susanne Kirchmayr, and throughout the whole conversation, I felt identified with our career beginning stories. she started as an enthusiast of what was called back in the day black music – hip hop, jazz, groove, disco, funk – and she would play music on the radio in Vienna. One day, by scavaging in the record store, she found discovered a 1991 single by the Chicago artist Dj Rush from Saber Records (sub-label of Trax Records – referring to the name given to techno in that time: Beat Trax). She immediately fell in love with its sounds. It was provocative for someone who was used to hip hop or disco. She presented it to the radio where she worked, but unfortunately, they didn’t see the same qualities that she saw, calling it nazi music, because of its marchy pace.

Later, underground resistance enlightened her, but this time it wasn’t only because of its musical capabilities. it was about the message. ur were a group of 3 DJs – Jeff Mills, Mad Mike Banks, and Robert Hoods – from revolution for a change label, and they were often considered “the Public Enemy of techno“. She had the opportunity to meet them and, in a conversation, Mike Banks said “techno for us is a fusion and inspiration from combining George Clinton (funk musician) and Kraftwerk.

From the incomprehensiveness of Vienna radio to gathering friends that would support her new phase in her career was DJ Hell – he was the bridge to the German techno scene and for her first time experiencing the producing methods of techno. she Dj’ed for the first time in Ultraworld club in Munich – “now that I think about it, maybe I wasn’t prepared for it, but in that time I ran out of money; I was constantly hitchhiking for gigs and didn’t have anywhere to practice but the club. The same applies to production. I didn’t know anything about it and back in the day, there wasn’t the accessibility that you have today. I was constantly trying to absorb as much information as possible of all the drum machines and digital devices used”. She showed us her first track made in her room with DJ hell (Wolkenkratzer was the b-side of the Ultraworld ep. vol. 1).

In 1993, she moved to Berlin, “the mecca of techno. this phenomenon happened because, after the fall of the wall, there was a lot of space for Berliners to use and create art “. She was apart of the Mayday in Berlin rave:” It was a huge rave that might have thrown techno into the mainstream level”. she would find herself being signed to a label based in New York called Experimental and from there the release of a new track was on sight – “No Headroom”. ” Me and him (a guy from the label) started to produce together in my room and released it”. is that how easy things were? this is something that I am constantly asking myself when producing “how much effort should I give to my pieces?”. sometimes I don’t even finish them because everything just seems saturated. I don’t know what is the production level of her, but it sounded very easy for her, which is not for me.

In 1997, she was already a busy DJ – “I started to have 3 to 4 gigs in the same week. sometimes in different cities, sometimes even in different continents. I started to become saturated because of all the time spent djing. I couldn’t find time to produce. i also started to feel pressure from more and more people because of the fact of being a woman. they all wanted me to have an opinion about it”. She decided to open that window by creating female:pressure in the same here – a network for gender equality.

By the end of the conversation, and after the explanation of her contemporaneous work, which is based on experimental music and composing for short-films, my idea of one’s artistic career changed. I am not saying that previously I had a deranged view towards the way artistic careers should flow, but was certainly like Susanne’s career. She was never prepared to do whatever came in front of her. She didn’t have the material to practice her djing skills, but she managed to be one of the icons of that era, by practicing in front of a crowd. She didn’t have music production gear as well, but she was labeled and had her tracks running around berlin. I thought one’s career should be supported with a cohesive and solid background in art doing. With her testimonial, my perspective changed to a more free and open. We don’t have to be Macgyver of electronic music to become one. The learning process takes time, patience, dedication, mixed with a little bit of luck and a sense of opportunism.

“Technology must be looked at as a comprehensive human-led practice akin to domestic culture or democracy.”. Darsha Hewitt, a Canadian based in Berlin, is an artist that works with media and sounds, but her interest that most describes her duty is technology. She’s interested in the recollection of old electronics for posthumous rework and experimentation. 

Before meeting her, I imagined her as an introvert that avoids contact with humans, always surrounded by wires and antique gear from the ’50s and ’60s. but, impressively, she appeared to be the opposite – she’s cheerful, funny, very active. This aspect changed my perspective towards this underground area of music and sound. now I look at hacking technology as something fun and satisfying. 

Above all this, it is Darsha’s capacity in looking at raw materials like old technology and gives them a new life almost deranged from the previous they had. For example, her electrostatic bell choir is a genius piece of art and seems for me very unique. She empowered one little aspect of old tv’s, that most of us probably already noticed it and our grandparents house or somewhere else – the electrostatic phenomena that they possess when switched off. She added to that a pre-technological apparatus that was used in the 1700s to show the potential use of such type of electricity. Together, they produce a relaxing sound, but yet very electrical, provoking, and incredible atmosphere. Yet, visually, it looks cyberpunkish – cheerful punk is a good term to describe Darsha modus operandi.

Darsha Hewitt has this peculiarity of making something negative and concerning into a more positive and engaging belief – she turns garbage, which is environmentally bad, into art, which is theoretically and practically good in every way and has a very lasting meaning. This is present in another work of hers where she takes a deep understanding of a socialist-communist german generic lawnmower from the 70s. The looks are very robust. She dived into the history of that machine and came out with another astonishing piece of art. She exponentiated the capacities of a particular piece of it – the casket – and turned it into an exhibition and later in a compilation of speakers.

The only person I’ve seen doing similar things was another digital and technological obsessed (are an enthusiast? passionate? obsessed? – interesting question about the relationships that we have of things), the one and the only devon Hendryx, also known as Jpegmafia. Hope to get my hands in the wires soon as long as I can afford electrician gear.

Last week, in the visiting practitioner session, I had the opportunity to understand better the work of Lisa busby. She’s a Scottish vocalist and improviser, either with the body and vocal instrument. She’s intrigued with small artifacts and fragments of sound and noise. She’s also an experimental turntablist and sampler.
Her work is very diverse between performance and composing, making her projects intangible, as she mentioned to hardly pre-meditate a performance before its execution.
The project that I found to be more fascinating to me were “proposal of a song” – a musical piece inspired by Kim Gordon’s “proposal for a story” poem:  

This poem, to my eyes, reflects a dirty realism vibe as well as an automated and surrealist poem that touches the exquisite cadaver type of lyricism. In “proposal for a song”, we get the same sensation, once the style is very related to the plunderphonic genre and everything sounds related and not related at the same time. Although, you get to feel some very interesting percussion patterns and melancholic harmonic sounds.

This type of production really absorbs me as it provokes some real good brain chemistry – good vibrational synapses. You feel engaged and connected to the organized and yet trashy elegance of the music. Her voice reminds me of Mimi Parker (Low’s vocalist) and Björk (Björk), which made me formulate these two questions to Lisa:

1) Q: Do you think of voices, and their timbre, as something sampleable? A: yes! I’m very interested in small sections of things and how they can be repeated and can that power be affected.

2) Q: Do you see your vocal instrument as a DAW? A: No and that’s because I’ve never thought about it before.

To be frank, I’m not very happy with the outcome that my questions took, but I’m happy to know she looks to the vocal instrument in the way I thought about them. I was imagining that she would take the timbre of a specific voice and try to manipulate it afterward. In addition to this topic, I highly recommend Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica (album). It is a plunderphonics record made out of samples of American ads from the 80s and the 90s. The album talks about “The idea of the replica in culture as a way we deal with the decline of knowledge, or human knowledge going to waste because we’re not immortal”.