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hcmf// 2019: Friday 15 – Sunday 24 November 2019
Featuring 60+ events, over 50 premieres and a whole day of free music, hcmf// 2019 offers one of the festival’s subtlest and most curious programmes ever: 10 days of diverse musical exploration, celebrating a multiplicity of voices – a chorus of artists, all playing at their own pitch.
Music is another filter for perception of the world we exist in and our subjectivity governs what we make of ourselves within it. You can be deeply affected when you move even a tiny bit closer to the things that drive you in life.
This book doesn’t try to provide an in-depth analysis or a comprehensive history of the last 40 years of ambient music. Rather it provides a series of ‘provocations, observations and reflections’. Best of all is that it can be obtained as a free PDF download (see below) making it accessible so that more of us can read and consider its contents, and perhaps discuss them.
Music Beyond Airports is a collection of essays, developed from papers given at the Ambient@40 International Conference held in February 2018 at the University of Huddersfield.
As suggested by the title, the essayists don’t focus on the original Brian Eno recording but consider the development of the genre, how it has permeated our wider musical culture, and what the role of such music is today.
The pieces in the volume vary widely in terms of scope, subject, and voice, and – I think – sketch out a lot of useful topics for personal reflection and public discussion.
Here is a summary of the chapters:
David Toop: How Much World Do You Want? Ambient Listening And Its Questions
Ambrose Field: Space In The Ambience: Is Ambient Music Socially Relevant?
Ulf Holbrook: A Question Of Background: Sites Of Listening
Richard Talbot: Three Manifestations Of Spatiality In Ambient Music
Simon Cummings: The Steady State Theory: Recalibrating The Quiddity Of Ambient Music
Monty Adkins: Fragility, Noise, And Atmosphere In Ambient Music
Lisa Colton: Channelling The Ecstasy Of Hildegard Von Bingen: “O Euchari” Remixed
Justin Morey: Ambient House: “Little Fluffy Clouds” And The Sampler As Time Machine
Axel Berndt: Adaptive Game Scoring With Ambient Music
Published by The University of Huddersfield Press, the book is available as both a print edition (£30 from Gazelle Book Services and Amazon; currently only £26.70 from Wordery) and a free ebook download (PDF/EPUB/MOBI) from the Huddersfield University website
Another Oblique Strategy
Roland TR-808
The 808 is probably the most iconic drum machine ever made. Even if you’ve never heard of it, you’ve definitely heard it. It’s in dozens of hit songs -- from Usher to Marvin Gaye, Talking Heads to The Beastie Boys -- and its sounds have quietly cemented themselves in the cultural lexicon.
20 Thousand Hertz have just releases a Podcast episode about the iconic machine. Must be worth a listen.
I’m pleased to give you a new work using some sounds from a new Native Instruments Kontakt library I’m putting together for the studio. The work features some dialog from the Barry Burmange & Delia Derbyshire piece - There Is a God from the “Amor Dei: A Vision of God” work.
Barry Bermange said that he himself thought of Amor Dei as ‘rather in the manner of a Renaissance painting with the believers in God in the foreground or centre and half-hidden disbelievers looking out from shadowy places round the edge of the painting’.
A new piece of music and a new short film. Enjoy.
Software modular VCV Rack just hit a major milestone – it’s now officially version 1.0, with polyphony, full MIDI, module browsing, multi-core support, and more. And since it’s a free and open platform, you don’t want to sleep on this.
VCV Rack browser
VCV Rack is an open-source software modular platform, featuring a Eurorack-inspired user interface. VCV Rack is available for Linux, Mac & Windows as a free download. Additional modules for the platform – both free and commercial – are also available.
Here are the features new to V1.0
Polyphony. Use up to 16 voices with the full flexibility of modular patching. Cables automatically turn polyphonic when requested by MIDI modules, sequencers, etc.
MIDI output. Control MIDI hardware with Rack modules. New modules include CV-GATE for drum machines, CV-MIDI for desktop synths, and CV-CC for Eurorack interfaces.
MIDI mapping. Control knobs, buttons, and sliders directly from a MIDI controller. Using the new MIDI-MAP module, click a virtual parameter and move a hardware control to create a mapping.
Module Browser. Search, filter, and view modules in your collection. Click and drag to directly place modules in the rack.
Multi-core engine. Use multiple CPU threads to maximize the number of modules. Accelerated polyphonic engines on many VCV and third-party modules.
Dozens of other new features and fixes, including manual parameter entry, module disabling, module “force” dragging, module expanders, easy zoom gestures, and more.
VCV Rack is available now as a free download