Chicago gets a taste of the Montreal-based digital art and electronic music festival that showcases innovation in music and creativity on April 21-23 with Avant_Mutek: Chicago.
Founded in 2000, Mutek is an international festival organization dedicated to the promotion of electronic music and the digital arts. Its main event is an annual five-day event in Montreal, Canada that takes place in late May and early June. Many of electronic music’s most established figures have performed, as well as numerous new artists who have gone on to build sustainable careers. Along with performances, the festival also features workshops relating to gear and software showcases, and panel discussions concerning the issues that face electronic music and music production.
Reformat the Planet is a feature-length documentary that focuses on some of the personalities behind the 8-Bit / chiptune scene in New York City, featuring some of our favorite Game Boy artists, notably Bit Shifter.
Reformat the Planet (RTP) is a feature length documentary which delves into the movement known as chip music, a vibrant underground scene based around creating new, original music using obsolete video game hardware. Familiar devices such as the Nintendo Game Boy and Nintendo Entertainment System are pushed in new directions with startling results.
…After documenting several live chip music performances in New York City and being invited to film the first year of the now annual Blip Festival, it was clear that they stood before a rich cultural mine that few were tapping in any long-form projects. The decision to focus the film on the varied personalities of the NYC chip music scene was a quick and obvious one.
Here’s a nice article over at Memeshift with a lot of resources from all over the intertrons for getting started making electronic music. Even though it’s a bit old (2008), it focuses on basic principles and components, like oscillators, filters, synthesizer programming, and sampling. A nice resource for people just getting started.
What really makes a music scene? You know–those certain reasons that make you put on a jacket and promptly head for the El or call a cab just to get there in time. That’s what Chicago Innovative Electronic Music (CIEM) and subVariant are asking via their Crowdsourced 1.0 event: What is it about electronic music that people want to see live?
It really is a heady question. But, CIEM & subVariant‘s preliminary answer seems to be: "That which is "crowdsourced."
To the unfamiliar, "crowdsourced" means that the content that is the most popular "rises to the top" via votes–as in, the crowd chooses what’s the most relevant. On Digg.com (a popular news and entertainment aggregator) the front page is filled with only the content that has been voted up through "diggs." Threadless is also a good example: only the designs that are voted hottest actually make it to production.
On April 10, CIEM will test their theory in the electronic music world. Electronic music fans and supporters were asked to vote on a number of the submissions from Chicago artists to determine the lineup for the night. After approximately 600 online-votes later, the results were in, and the top four will perform in order of the number of votes recieved.
It’s democracy in electronic music. Like, seriously, democracy. Not that "republic" stuff that’s been thrown around. These artists have been chosen by the people, for the people.
Check out this cool synth kit that’s meant to be poked prodded and programmed into whatever you wish. It’s designed by James Grahame of Reflex Audio + Retro Thing, and Peter Kirn of Create Digital Music.
Here’s a demo of the kind of sounds you can make with this little hackable blippy instrument: Meeblip bassline demo by cdm
From James:
Oscillator A & B slightly detuned, square wave on A and sawtooth on B. FM turned all the way up, distortion on. The filter resonance turned way up (hence the chirpy squeal) and the filter cutoff knob is initially open, then twiddled a bit to help the filter chirp. At the end, I just slowly turn the cutoff down. the VCF envelope modulation is mapped to MIDI velocity, which adds some sonic movement.
Two months ago I started moving Fractalspin over to a hosted ecommerce platform and since then have been migrating over products and creating the new site design.
I’ve also added a bunch of new products, and even more stuff is on the way. Let mw know what you think! [Read More]
I put together a compilation of melodic IDM / deep techno called Robohustlin for my label, subVariant. I put out an open call for submissions in July and got an amazing collection of submissions. I decided to go with minimal techno / melodic IDM since that was submitted the most. Hope you enjoy!
Chaircrusher’s “Crow Beat” and Milipede’s “30,000″ take a somewhat dark, harder approach, while tracks like Diarmo’s “Details” and Matt Wolfe’s “4:09am” hover somewhere between hopefulness and melancholy, held together with intricate rhythmic programming.
In keeping with subVariant’s tongue-in-cheek, music-as-consumer-product design aesthetic (see Subvaritrax, Exception AM), Robohustlin‘s digital cover lists the individual artists as separate “cures” in a packaging style based on the popular cough & cold medication, Robitussin.
Last Thursday was beset by technical difficulties, so I’m re-doing the virtual release party tonight. Watch the post on the subVariant page in case I need to switch back to Stickam again: Robohustlin Virtual Release Party
Two months ago I started moving 
I put together a compilation of melodic IDM / deep techno called Robohustlin for my label, subVariant. I put out an open call for submissions in July and got an amazing collection of submissions. I decided to go with minimal techno / melodic IDM since that was submitted the most. Hope you enjoy!