The Analog Girl at the FILTER Magazine's Culture Collide Festival in Echopark, Los Angeles) by Kian-peng Ong

The Analog Girl describes her music on her website as:

“It is the analog feeling, sprinkled with electronic noises and fairy dust, that creates The Analog Girl sound. Her unique application of the laptop, vocal, effects boxes and odd synths can be heard on her albums she likes to call collectively as the Pink Bento Boutique. “

Songs on The Analog Girl’s new album Tonight Your Love sound like a cosmic synthesis of the future with the hauntingly vintage. They were recorded over the course of 3 years and mastered by Paul Gold at Salt Mastering in Brooklyn, New York, who’s previously worked with LCD Soundsystem, Animal Collective and Washed Out. The Analog Girl played at a couple of well-known venues such as New York’s Knitting Factory and Paris’ avant-garde Cirque Electrique.

The Analog Girl bought the AudioCubes about two years ago, and has integrated the AudioCubes into her live performances:

“The AudioCubes are like magical boxes that send signals to my laptop to fire up the music and its colours pulsate to the beat of my songs. The sensors inside them react to my hand movements and manipulate effects real-time. I feel like I am conjuring up musical gods that participate in my performance as I spin these cubes around. And that is what I love about them – their mystical ability to transport my performance to a higher state of aural freedom and visual expression.”

Last month she performed at the Filter Magazine’s Culture Collide Music Festival in Los Angeles alongside other international super indie stars like CSS, Lindstrom, Gang Gang Dance and Datarock.

The Analog Girl at the the FILTER Magazine's Culture Collide Festival in Echopark, Los Angeles (picture by TinyMixtapes http://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/culture-collide-2011)

Saturday the 5th of November The Analog Girl played a live set at mixtape + confessions in Singapore using the AudioCubes, a Tenori-on, and some other gear. Check out the video which was made during the live performance below.

The lastest album of the Analog Girl “Tonight Your Love” is now available at bandcamp via her website www.analog-girl.net.

Bio of The Analog Girl

Named by TIME magazine as one of 5 Music Acts To Watch in 2008 alongside Japanese multi-instrumentalist Cornelius is Singapore-based electro-rock chanteuse The Analog Girl.

A pioneer in the regional scene who helped define the genre that is laptop rock, The Analog Girl first sprung into the international spotlight when American sportswear giant Nike featured a track off her debut self-released, self-produced album The TV Is On on their European ad campaign Changing The Game in 2005.

Since then her unique yet catchy brand of electro pop has been featured on NYLON TV for episodes featuring Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth) and Ladytron, been on award-winning creator of graphic novels Warren Ellis’ recommended playlist, landed her a support slot for German-Norwegian musical group The Whitest Boy Alive in Hong Kong, and a series of live shows around the world.

Armed with her sexy MacBook Air and slew of fascinating machines, The Analog Girl has taken her music to a variety of venues ranging from clubs to concert halls to art spaces, having headlined The Knitting Factory in New York, performed for top British photographer Nick Knight’s SHOWstudio in London, Worldtronics Festival at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, the Cirque Electrique in Paris, gift_lab in Tokyo, Labella in Shanghai and at the MTV Asia Awards Voting Party in Singapore.

More information about The Analog Girl:
website: http://www.analog-girl.net/
music: http://theanaloggirl.bandcamp.com
youtube: http://www.youtube.com/theanaloggirl
twitter: http://www.twitter.com/theanaloggirl
facebook: http://www.facebook.com/theanaloggirl

Mark Mosher ‘s albums “I Hear Your Signals” and “REBOOT” are finally available as Physical Audio CDs.

As you all know Mark Mosher is a very active AudioCubes user from the US. “I Can See Them” is one of the tracks of the album “I Hear Your Signals” which is 100% played on AudioCubes.

You can order the CD’s online the Reverbnation shop. Each CD comes with a 4-panel booklet with original artwork and photography including liner notes and credits.

Mark Mosher's albums "I hear your signals" and "REBOOT" now available as audio CDs

Mark Mosher’s music is still available for digital download here.

More information about Mark Mosher:
website: http://markmoshermusic.com
blog: http://modulatethis.com

Tralala Blip at Liquid Architecture 12 (Brisbane, Australia)

For those of you who don’t know Apple University Consortium, it is a consortium which was created when Apple first released the Apple Macintosh in 1984. Apple entered into a partnership with nine Australian Universities to create the Apple University Consortium. The goal of the consortium consists of supporting Apple technology in higher education through a fund that offers several grants.

The consortium also hosts the Create World Conference 2011. It is a “3 day performance, presentation, and professional development event, specifically for academic and higher-education technical staff in the digital arts disciplines.” This year the conference took place in Brisbane, and Tralala Blip was invited for a live performance during the conference.

This week, Tralala Blip did a gig with Sky Needle (from Brisbane) and Mad Nanna (from Melbourne) at the Lismore Regional Gallery.

Even though the holiday season is almost there, Tralala Blip keeps on working very hard. Next week, they’re doing a live performing for the opening of “Not What They Appear” exhibition together with their friends at Red Inc.

Of course, we’d like to congratulate the “Blippers”. Again they’ve been granted funding and support for 2012 from the Regional Arts Fund NSW!

More information about Tralala blip:
Homepage: http://www.tralalablip.com/
Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/tralalablip

Sound Design Live Podcast of Nathan Lively

Last week Mark Mosher was being interviewed by Nathan Lively for the podcast “Turning Technology into Performance“.

During the interview Mark Mosher explains how he got into performing, blogging, how he’s using social media, and of course, he talks about the AudioCubes.

“A single AudioCube in sensor mode acts like a Theremin with 4 sides on it. The difference is when you’re moving your finger closer and further away from the sensor, it is transmitting midi instead of analog signal, and you can use this midi to open the filter or change the gate time on an arpeggiator.

“The unique thing about the AudioCubes is that you can control 4 parameters at the same time, which you can’t do with knobs”

Besides talking about the AudioCubes, he’s also talking about PatchLab, a mini site where people can download Mark Mosher’s patches and sound sets.

Mark is also a very active Twitter user:

“I can meet interesting people based on the conversations they’re having. The conversation is what connects you. This is how I find people who’re doing what I’m doing.”

Please click below to listen to this very interesting interview.

The Signal: Kickstarter Project Chris Reynolds

For those of you who don’t know Kickstarter. Kickstarter is an online platform where people can raise money for their creative projects (music, film, technology projects) through crowdfunding. Anyone can fund the project, and decide how much money they’d like to invest. In return for their investment they don’t receive shares, but get a copy of the product or something special in return.

The Signal is a project about “communication, technology, conspiracy theories and community” as Chris Reynolds describes on his Kickstarter page.

Starting point for his project is UVB-76, as Chris explains.

“UVB-76 is an arcane, shortwave radio frequency based somewhere in Russia that has been broadcasting a steady stream of beeps, blips, buzzes and chirps since the Cold War. And no one knows what it is (except possibly whoever is broadcasting it).”

“The Signal project is an attempt to communicate the experience around listening to an encoded stream of information and trying to decipher it, and the community of individuals around the world who are actively trying to do that with UVB-76 through instrumental electronic music.”

To create the music for the album Chris wants to use the AudioCubes:

“The AudioCubes would be highly adaptive to this type of sound design and music composition that I want to use for this album”

To buy a set of 4 AudioCubes, and have the album mastered by Colin C., Chris is looking to raise money by January the 9th. The writing, producing, and recording of the album is planned around February.

More information about Chris Reynold’s project on Kickstarter can be found here.

More information about Chris Reynolds:
website: http://www.jazzsequence.com/
music: http://music.jazzsequence.com

Mark Mosher made a very interesting sound design experiment video with Aalto synthesizer of Madrona Labs and AudioCubes. The video is also published on the website of Madrona Labs

First, Mark made a couple of drone patches using the Madrona labs Aalto synth in Ableton Live. You can easily do this in Ableton Live by using the configure button on the Ableton device holding the Aalto synthesizer, and selecting a couple of paramaters.

If you’d like to learn more about the Ableton mapping, check out the video tutorial Mark Mosher made a couple of years ago.

Mark then mapped the parameters to the faces of two AudioCubes using MidiBridge. In MidiBridge Mark assigned both of the cubes as sensor cubes, and then assigned each face to a parameter of the Aalto synth.

Mark Mosher about his video :

“…watch how fluid the control is and how many parameters I’m managing at the same time. You’ll also see I’m getting visual feedback in the form of light intensity and color. After you perform with AudioCubes for a  while your brain starts to fool you into thinking that there are pressure bubbles around the sensors. In other words, even though the throw is about three inches when using your fingers with cubes, you can become quite accurate with control – especially when you combine visual feedback and audio feedback.”

“Because you can configure and map cube function differently with each patch, set and instrument, you start also thinking of each combination as an instrument on to itself”

You can read Mark Mosher’s blog post about the AudioCubes and Aalto here.

More videos made by Mark Mosher:
Youtube Channel: Newechoproductions

More info about Mark Mosher:
Website: http://markmoshermusic.com
Blog: http://modulatethis.com
9box: http://9box.modulatethis.com

The Unsound Festival is an annual music festival about advanced music, and takes every place in Krakow, Poland. Last month, 12th of October 2011, the 9th edition of the festival took place.

During the 9th edition of the Unsound Festival, Zeb Schulz and Lawrence English gave a presentation concerning “Disability Art, Performance and Professional Musicians with Varying Abilities“.

They talked about recent developments in musical interfaces, and the possibilities they create for people with disabilities to compose music and to perform live. While traditional instruments such as keyboards and a computer mouse are hard for them to use, these new interfaces offer a wealth of possibilities for them.

As an example, they showed the video of Tralala blip’s live performance at the Liquid Architecture festival.

Tralala Blip at Liquid Architecture 12 (Brisbane, Australia)

The AudioCubes are one of the electronic musical instruments Tralala Blip is using to compose their music and perform live.

The audioCubes can help disabled artists overcome barriers, as Jeremy from Cascade Services, an organization that helps artists with disabilities, explains in one of our blog posts from last year.

“The audiocubes are an amazing piece of hardware! The great thing about it is that its enabling people who can’t use conventional controllers to add depth and dimension to their recordings themselves.”

Thanks Randolf for sharing this information with us!

A couple of weeks ago we reported about the Electro-Music 2011 conference in New York. Mark Mosher as well as Paul Harriman and his son, Ian, performed live using the AudioCubes and Eigenharp. We already shared some great pictures taking during their performances, but we haven’t shared any videos about the performances at electro-music with you guys. The performance of Paul Harriman and his son was recorded by Mark Mosher.

While Paul Harriman is playing on the eigenharp alpha, his son is using the AudioCubes and our latest application, IMPROVISOR.

Paul Harriman explains the setup:

“Our performance was ultimately a combination of flow arts and evolving themes, accompanied by solo EWI, Eigenharp and Ian’s processed trombone. The two Macbooks shared clock through networked MIDI, and Ian played the IMPROVISOR using a couple of TAL AU plugins and Madrona Labs Aalto, which is a sort of Buchla-esque plugin (and a lot of fun to modulate using the AudioCubes). We bridged some of the thematic changes with my iPhone running Mixtikl, also a generative environment, and backed with some environmental loops using Resonance and some of our own environmental loops. The Eigenharp was configured using 10 of the 13 internal host instruments, including some sequencing with the Arrangers. Sounds were supplied via Omnisphere, Aalto, and a couple of the TAL AU plugins, along with a custom impulse file for the Eigenharp cello model. Ian’s laptop uses a MOTU Microbook, which we then mixed to my Ultralite Mk3 to get the house mix. Our performance was about 27 minutes, and went through 5 separate vignettes including Ian using his contact balls instead of the AudioCubes, and switching back to identically coloured AudioCubes, just to contrast the differences between the two performance modes. Although one can let IMPROVISOR loose, we elected to limit the generative aspects to keep it more or less in 2 keys, which made the live performance a bit more predictable. The set was well received and we spent much of the weekend discussing various visual and interactive performance techniques with other artists who were there. A high point for Ian was attending Mark Mosher’s AudioCubes Jam where the 9-box (times 2) method was used.”

About Paul and Ian Harriman

“I have been playing electronic music instruments since the early 1970s, and I have long had a fascination with alternatives to keyboards as controllers, despite being a fairly well trained (and practiced) keyboardist. My son Ian, also a musician, is keen on flow arts (contact juggling, fire-staff spinning) and we have a wide circle of acquaintances who are either musicians, kinetic and flow artists, or both. In addition, I have associated myself with the web community centred around electro-music.com, where I help administer the site, the Internet streaming radio, and the interactive chat room. I also produce two radio shows on the electro-music.com radio, one to showcase interesting and new experimental electronic music, and one to experiment with my own music online. My association with electro-music.com has additionally brought me in touch with many more experimental electronic and electro-acoustic performers, and Ian and I enthusiastically attend, play at (and volunteer our time to help with) these festivals.

In 2010 I met Mark Mosher at the electro-music 2010 festival. Mark was performing with these little cubes that were fascinating, and within a couple of months I had acquired 4 for myself. The idea I had at the time was to attempt to integrate flow and dance art interactively with my music. Over the course of 2011 I experimented with the AudioCubes, occasionally collecting kinetic artists together and putting together these sort of dance/music jams to explore what is possible using the AudioCubes. My son Ian was most interested – contact juggling and object isolation turns out to be a compatible performance art form, and Ian quickly started forming performance ideas for the AudioCubes. As we were already booked to go to EM11, we worked together to compose and produce a set which drew together the AudioCubes, Eigenharp and ambient environmental sounds. We settled on the IMPROVISOR software ultimately as the control interface for the AudioCubes, using Ian’s Macbook Pro as mine gets pretty loaded down running EigenD and the AUs.”

More information about Paul and Ian Harriman:
Website: http://www.harriman4.com/
Music: http://electro-music.com/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/paul.harriman

Last weekend was a busy weekend for Mark Mosher: He did three concerts in 2 days. Check out: Mark Mosher Halloween 2011 Concerts for more information.

We’re happy to share some audio/video material made during Mark Mosher’s Halloween Concerts Below you can listen to his performance which was recorded at electro-music.radio:

Mark Mosher’s live performance at electro-music.radio is available on soundcloud and download mp3. A detailed overview of all the songs he played can be found on Mark Mosher’s blog.

Next to performing at electro-music radio, Mark also did an audio/video broadcast from Boulder to the Pacific Northwest Synth Fest. Matrixsynth was able to record the last 15 minutes of Mark Mosher’s skype session to Synth Fest, while he was using and explaining the AudioCubes. You can watch the video below. Of course, many thanks to Matrixsynth

Mark Mosher also made a couple of soundcheck videos as preparation for the Synth Fest and uploaded them to ustream. Check out one of the videos he made of his soundcheck using AudioCubes.

Don’t forget to sign up for Mark Mosher’s newsletter, if you like to get notified about his upcoming live performances

More information about Mark Mosher:
Website: http://markmoshermusic.com
Blog: http://modulatethis.com
9box: http://9box.modulatethis.com

This week we received a video from Marcelo, musician and sound engineer from Chile and one of our newest members of the AudioCubist community. He was so excited when receiving his set of 4 AudioCubes, he immediately downloaded the software, and made this amazing video with his camera.

In this video Marcelo uses Steinberg’s Nuendo 5.5 and the VST LoopMash 2 together with MidiBridge. In MIDIBridge Marcelo mapped two faces of the AudioCubes to trigger the loops, and the two other faces as a trigger for the effects. As you can see in the video one of the effects was the mute function, to stop the loops (0:48).

Since some of you might be interested to learn more about his setup, we asked him for some more information about his set-up.

First, Marcelo installed MIDIBridge and LoopBe1 for MIDI loopback, from the Percussa download page. In MIDIBridge he assigned LoopBe1 as the MIDI output. He then created a MIDI track in Nuendo 5.5 and used LoopBe1 as input and LoopMash 2 as output.

In the first screenshot you can see how Marcelo created the loops in Loopmash 2. The MIDI keyboard is at the bottom of the screenshot. Each number corresponds to notes values in a MIDI controller. To create the loops you can arrange the notes the way you want.

Loopmash 2: Build the loops (screenshot taken by Marcelo)

In the second screenshot the numbers of the MIDI keyboard is visualized with numbers and symbols. Instead of changing the loops you’re changing the effects applied to the loops.

Loopmash 2: Add effects to the loops (screenshot taken by Marcelo)

More information about Marcelo:
http://www.bongman.cl

As you all know the AudioCubes work with any other software or hardware which is MIDI compatible.

We’ve already covered a couple of blog posts about how you can use MIDIBridge and IMPROVISOR together with other software such as Ableton, Logic Studio, Garage Band, Harmor from Image-Line. An overview of a couple of other interesting blog posts:

Featured question: does AudioCubes work with Logic
Composition using AudioCubes, Improvisor and Apple GarageBand
Composing using Fl Studio, Harmor, Improvisor and AudioCubes