Phonograph CD Player

The Phonograph CD Player has been around for a while, but I had never seen it before. In these days most music we play cannot even be touched anymore, and the CD is slowly becoming obsolete. This Phonograph CD player created by Yong Jieyu & Ama Xue Hong Bin brings us back to the world of vinyl and the phonograph.

The player is made from the insides of a portable CD player. The CD has to be put on the player upside down, so the laser on the ‘tone arm’ can access it and it moves fron the inside out. This is what the player looks like with no disk: 

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Silophone

Remember Tank-FX? Here’s another one in the same category, and this one has been around for more than ten years already! For those of you who don’t know it already, this is the idea: go to www.silophone.net and upload a sound file.

The file will be send to the speakers in a huge empty silo - the Silophone - somewhere in Montreal, then the sound gets broadcasted back to you via the website. Sadly that last part didn’t work for me, as the stream didn’t seem to work. 

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La Chambre des Machines

Have you ever heard of Luigi Russolo, the writer of the manifesto The Art of Noises? He was the one who in the first half of the 20th Century introduced noise as a musical element. To create this noises he built his Intonarumori, instruments that produced noises similar to the machines that came into being during the industrial revolution. 

 

La Chambre des Machines, created by Martin Messier and Nicolas Bernier shows us a nice contemporary version of those noise makers. 

Tim Franco

Photographer Tim Franco put a camera on a record by the Doors (but any other record would have worked just as well) and left it recording during a song. This is the result, pretty amazing. 

Found on SynthGear

Les Souliers

It’s a weird sight, thirty pairs of shoes, stamping and scraping the floor, without anyone attached to them. I’ve seen a similar ‘shoe stamping machine’ used in a musical way when I watched BOT perform live last year in Amsterdam, but not in such a clean setting as with Les Souliers, created by Arno Fabre.

Circulator

Jim Blashfield kindly sent me a message about his video and sound installation Circulator now being finished, and scheduled for installation at the Brightwater Environmental Centre north of Seattle’s Lake Washington, in Spring. 

It’s amazing to see the detail of the visual material. This realism is fortified by sound, which plays an important role in Circulator. We hear a nice combination of realistic sounds and dream-like musical sequences. 

The installation shows the artists impression of the water cycle. Watch the video to hear Jim Blashfield explain the installation and if you want to know more about the artist and his work, visit his website at www.blashfieldstudio.com.

Cryoacoustic Orb

Yes, another project dealing with the sound of ice. There’s something magical about the ever changing, granular sounds of melting ice we hear in Cryoacoustic Orb, by Jonathon Kirk and Lee Weisert. As the melting process takes several hours, the sounds slowly evolve until there is nothing left but water. 

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.

Vatnajokull

Just over a year ago, in December 2009, I found out about Katie Paterson’s Ice Records, a wonderful piece of environmental art. It seems like she has been fascinated by ice, and the sound of it, for a longer period of time, as she made Vatnajokull a year before the Ice Records.

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