ether^ra : visual arts, sound manoeuvring & arcana

NOIZETOIZE : Audible Objects Random Volt Generator / Antimatter Audio Brain Seed

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Sun, 19 May 2013 14:02:00 +0000

My personal chaos theory demands as much sonic serendipity and random events as possible. These two new modules certainly fit the bill adding numerous options to my appetite for the seemingly uncontrollable, fueling my belief in the Surrealist dictum that the laws of chance equal the laws of beauty...and perhaps the opportunity for a happy accident, a compelling epiphany. The Brain Seed is available at CONTROL in Brooklyn; the RVG from Audible Objects via Etsy.

ADDAC Marble Physics

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Sun, 12 May 2013 16:17:00 +0000

Listen to the marble roll helping to produce compelling threads of noise that can be stretched and truncated...add a Trogotronic 333 envelope; CV it into a maelstrom of controlled chaos.

JRB ModuleModules

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Sat, 04 May 2013 12:08:00 +0000

Jason R. Butcher, maker of very fine ModuleModule devices compatible with the Buchla 200e, has created two new modules for my system, the CVEQ and the Thumbstick. Jason can be found at http://fastheadache.blogspot.com

DEVICES : ADDAC EURO-MODULES

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:38:00 +0000

These recently purchased ADDAC modules, the Voltage Controlled Oscillator and the Complex Random with Expander are capable of wonderful things! The oscillator offers all manner of voltage control of parameters AND a wonderful sounding pulse wave; the Complex Random sends out voltage controlled (or manual) CV madness. With nine outputs(counting the expander's six), you can certainly create all manner of mayhem, both standard and Brownian! New toys=new joys!

w/o VERTICES on tumblr

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 16:30:00 +0000

Check out a new blog dedicated to my ether^ra sub-project, w/o VERTICES

http://wovertices.tumblr.com/

Double Andore

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 17:44:00 +0000

The Harvestman Double Andore is a dual envelope generator and much more. This track utilizes it along with ST Cloud Generator and the new Make Noise MMG. In spite of the rancor between them they got along quite well, sort of.

ether^ra side project

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 09:03:00 +0000

Template

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 01:38:00 +0000

I must create a system or be enslaved by another mans; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.

-William Blake

Ways Of Seeing

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 13:55:00 +0000

What you saw depended on where you were when.
-John Berger "Ways of Seeing" 1973

With time comes mystery, multiple meanings and perhaps a sense of longing...My large scale drawing "The Kitchen is No Longer Reassuring" (1983, pencil on paper, 38" x 76") completed after my mother's death, explores loss and makes the point that ALL art is essentially about memory, a pointed tug at what inhabits the liminal spaces of our now dreamt pasts. Spoons are zygotes, cracks swallow people, and chairs supply a support of sorts...and doors go somewhere? Perhaps this work offers a key to those dreams, a faintly recognized fragment that bridges a gap between us and ghosts.

Buchla 200e Track

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 19:33:00 +0000

Encore Electronics UEG

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 02:12:00 +0000

The Encore Electronics Universal Event Generator is a complex envelope generator!...a crazy LFO!...and a step-sequencer!...so much fun in a 30hp package!

ether^ra STOLEN FROM THIEVES VOL. II

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 11:15:00 +0000

The fine Game of Life label invited me to come up with 25 or so minutes of music for free download. Noise produced by eurorack modules, Buchla 200e, my Serge modular, and voice samples interbreed producing vaporous clouds, jarring dystopian jabs, and cut-up samples that are meant to be evocative of the 21th century's layered onslaught. www.gameoflifeproject.com

ether^ra - Stolen From Thieves vol.2 by ether^ra

Andrew Chalk : forty-nine views in rhapsodies' wave serene

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 15:25:00 +0000

Andrew Chalk's Forty-Nine Views In Rhapsodies' Wave Serene (Faraway Press) presents, using limited instrumentation(Polivoks synth, piano and organ), a microscopic world teeming with life and a wealth of inviting sonic detail. The aural equivalent of snapshots taken with a debased analogue camera, these 49 tracks remind the listener of the crumbling landscapes from Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece Stalker, haunted by memories that spawn a labyrinth of longings that drift and dissolve, and then start again with the next track. With titles like Halo Dispersed, Sleeping Stillness, Land Of Nod, and Seaward Flow, Mr. Chalk makes his intention to present a liminal museum of miniatures, chipped with age, but imbued with poetry's patina, abundantly and compellingly clear. This is art that offers us an opportunity for epiphany. We should be thankful.

PERE UBU : lady from shanghai

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 21:16:00 +0000

"It's a wonderful world; it's a beautiful thing"-David Thomas

How true! The new cd from Pere Ubu comes to us imbued with much of Ubu's Modern Dance/Dub Housing skittering sounds and David Thomas' dada vocals...and while I sorely miss Allen Ravenstine's noise synth genius, Robert Wheeler's EML stylings are compelling, fleshing out the sound like the body electric. Drums drive the sound with melodic snippet from various synths poking through the swampy soup, scratching the consciousness like a errant mosquito. On a few tracks, Thomas' vocal are mumbled shards, much like the dancing broken funhouse glass that makes the climax of Orson Welles' classic film The Lady From Shanghai, from which Ubu borrow the title, such a nightmarish hallucinatory experience...and like this release, a beautiful thing.

MORE!

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 15:24:00 +0000

MORE modules in my ever-evolving sonic palette!...the amazing ALM Pamela's Workout and a used CynIndustries Four Transients(...Never enough envelope generators!) courtesy of the gentlemen at CONTROL in Williamsburg, Brooklyn(GO THERE and play!!!!!)

Schippmann VCF02 Multimode Filter

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 11:40:00 +0000

With blinding lights and 13 cv inputs, the mind boggles with the VCF02's modulation potential...and 2 inputs with separate attenuators!...who could ask for more?...and those lights!!!

Sound Sculpting : New Envelope Generators

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 15:51:00 +0000

In the world of modular synthesis, it seems the introduction of some new ADRS's would not seem like cause for celebration, but these two new modules from WMD and Tiptop are quite special. The WMD Multimode Envelope (w/expander) offers 9 modes of operation and numerous CV inputs that make this module very powerful indeed! The Tiptop Z4000 envelope generator offers CV inputs and something called a DEVIATOR that sounds promising as a means of sonic sculpting and manipulation. I've found that these envelopes used in concert with almost any module can make for the creation of wonderful and varied mayhem. As This Second Sleep has stated "this is how we deform."

Scott Walker : Bish Bosch

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 20:56:00 +0000

All shadowplay mixed with discordant jabs of odd instrumentation and noise, Scott Walker's latest opus, Bish Bosch(4AD), ranks as one of the finest releases of the year. Scott's sound pictures are dark indeed, the bastard son of Ad Reinhardt's black paintings woven through with Cy Twombly psycho-squiggles, along with healthy doses of black humor. Unlike his last release The Drift that was populated with deep architectural drones, Bish Bosch is an angular tapestry sounding not unlike modernist serial music where silence provides a backdrop for the sounds of metal guitar, clanging swords, gargantuan drums and actual flatulence. All of this is recorded with pristine detail that further enhances its immediacy, its almost sickening expressiveness. This is beautiful brutality. Francis Bacon would be proud.

A Resounding...

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 23:04:00 +0000

NO...the only viable response to an over-reaching monoculture intent on imprisoning its inhabitants in a world of breath-takingly mundane sameness. The only free man is one who says NO to the "choices" foisted upon us...choices so lacking in compelling richness and so imbued with corporate talking points hoping to separate us from our money and our individuality that the only positive response can be NO, NO, NO, NO!

Moskwa Bipolar Rotosequencer

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 11:03:00 +0000

Given my eastern european roots, I am more than a little proud and elated to see the XAOC line of euro-rack modules make it to the U.S. AND quite please to see them now available from the fine gentlemen at CONTROL Brooklyn. The Moskwa has a prominent place in my new Goike mothership!
Get "em while you can at CONTROL on Lorimer Street...take the Moskwa for a spin!

174hp Goike Case

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 10:52:00 +0000

After hours of detaching, attaching, and making choices regarding the placement of modules(what Matthew Goike termed "moving in."), I am nearing the moment I can power this king of euro-cases up. It should provide a wonderfully dystopian light-show and quite a racket!

ether^ra REMIX

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 06:29:00 +0000

Bo Diddley vs Oscillator

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 12:40:00 +0000

The 1967 Rolling Stones album Flowers, mostly a collection of singles, odd and sods, does contain a few numbers of worth(PLEASE skip right over My Girl though!). What really impressed me after not listening to it for many years was Please Go Home, a cacophonous mixture of Bo Diddley guitar, Charlie Watts' pounding drums, Jagger's vocals pushed into an echo-smeared universe, AND, lurking in the mix, a trippy oscillator! I remember digging this alien sound in my teens and not knowing what it was. Was this my introduction to electronic music, other than the joyful activity of tuning in white noise, jarring static and ghost voices on my father's car radio? Who knows...but it's wandering electronic tone still makes me smile.

Headless Potential

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 18:56:00 +0000

After quite a few years lost in the wilderness of Buchla, Serge and euro-rack explorations, I find myself once again drawn to six strings. Starting as a blues player I branched out in to what can only be termed exploratory guitar noise without completely losing my tonal center. Sort of, to use a painting analogy, Cy Twombly meets Robert Ryman in a darkened room...quiet corners erupt into mayhem!

The grey Teuffel guitar and the pink Klein appeal to my need for non-conformity. Perhaps the headless guitars can function as an metaphor for my romantic need for unfettered creative "frequency painting" a la Duchamp. The Teuffel is the first industrial guitar; its controls produce a cacophonous outpouring, grey blasts of sonic detrius and smears. Both instruments can produce an acceptable traditional guitar sound, but as function may well be suggested by form, they beg to explore and experiment.

With all this synth obsessiveness as part of my recent history, we'll see where this takes me?

New Goike Case

noreply@blogger.com (ether^ra) — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 22:43:00 +0000

Spalted maple, made from a drawing I sent to Matthew, this is a beauty!