“You’re going to have a house, and the house makes music. When you get here, you’ll figure it out.”
That is more or less accurate, as far as it goes, though it clearly falls short as a practical description. “The Music Box,” the project of which this tower is a part, is one of those things that requires a hyphen or a compound word to describe; Delaney Martin, its curator, calls it “a shantytown-sound laboratory.”
In more literal terms, it is a collection of tumbledown wooden and metal structures built on the site, and almost entirely from the remains of a late-18th-century Creole cottage that collapsed a couple of years ago here in the historic, bohemian Bywater neighborhood.
Each structure houses an instrument, or two or three. In some cases the structures are musical instruments themselves. There is the thatched-roof hut that is home to an elaborate arrangement of Balinese vibraphones, the shack with amplified floorboards, the rusty spiral staircase that is also a foot-operated pipe organ and the little glass house containing what looks like a giant, bell-lined hoop skirt. They are all clustered together on the narrow lot, like the stage set of a fairy tale that takes place in a junkyard.
Here’s a teaser video of the New Orleans Airlift’s Music Box Orchestra, a big crazy sound art/architecture project I helped out with. My contribution was the squeaky moving floor, which you can see providing the bass line as the performance starts.
A selection of my prints from the greenmarket produce scan series – ranging in size from 3 inches to 5 feet! – will be in the (Un)Still Life show at BPL’s Central Library at Grand Army Plaza, opening tomorrow! The show will be up through December 3.
Many of the fruits and vegetables I use in my images came from the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket, just a few steps from the library, so it’s especially nice to see them in the beautiful lobby gallery there.
Over at NYC Resistor, we put together a little team to enter the Jello Mold Competition at Gowanus Studio Space. The team members were me, Astrida Valigorsky, Mimi Hui, and Catarina Mota. After a false start or two, we ended up making a working toy piano out of jello (and some electronics). The Resistor JelTone tied for the Creativity Prize, and you can see it in the videos below.
That same weekend, I took some of my homemade instruments, including the 8-bit violin and a second JelTone (built in haste at the last possible minute), to the Solid Sound Music Festival for the CDM/Moog Handmade Lounge. After all my jello melted, on the second day of the festival I rebuilt the JelTone with fruit salad instead, and here it is:
I saw a firefly a few days ago, so it’s summer now, whatever the calendar says. Last weekend was the annual Figment Festival on Governors Island, and I brought back my 2008 wind-powered sound sculpture in a new cyborg body. Here’s a video:
I was lucky to be chosen as one of the Queens Museum of Art‘s sound art residents this month, so I’ve been working with my collection of vintage automatic music toys, and I’ll give a presentation/performance this Saturday (June 18th) at 5pm. The performance is free, but come early and check out the rest of the museum, including the famous Panorama of the City of New York! Event into: facebook.com/event.php?eid=229965507015603
Here’s the toy collection:
The following weekend, I’ll be at the Solid Sound Festival at Mass MoCA (North Adams, MA) as part of Peter Kirn’s Handmade Music Lounge: solidsoundfestival.com/exhibits
Coming up in July: a workshop at the Peabody Essex Museum near Boston, the Sketching in Hardware conference in Philadelphia, and a field trip to the Lightning Field in New Mexico!
Here’s an excerpt from last night’s performance of Zachary James Watkins’ composition “Moveable” for augmented piano. (I built the piano-tickling monster for this performance.) This is just a low quality recording – a much better one will be available later. The full piece is about 75 minutes long; the excerpt is 8 minutes.
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I presented my piece “Closing Doors” for robot toy piano at the NYC Electro-Acoustic Music Festival last week. It sounded something like this:
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Vegevision!
We owe that awesome headline to Brooklyn artist Ranjit Bhatnagar, who sometimes uses the term for his flatbed scanner images of Greenmarket produce, a project he’s been working on since 2000. His carrots graced the cover of Edible Brooklyn’s Spring 2007 issue, and selections from his scans–lovely little sprays of garlic chives, slices of okra that look like stars, and of course, bacon–are being shown through the month of December at the Baby Grand (world’s smallest) karaoke bar in a show called Greenmarket Scanography. For those who’ve been to this tiny Soho spot on Lafayette St., you know the key component of that name is Baby: This is but a sliver of a space, and thus Bhatnagar’s work, like others previewed at the bar, is being shown in slide format. Literally–the slides, shown below, are displayed on the wall, lit from behind, and viewed using the provided magnifying glass. Oh yeah, should you miss the show, you can see some of his recent work on Flickr, too.
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