Moog Sound Lab

Mon 1st June 2015
This is an archive item from Supersonic 2015


Moogsoundlab8

Hosted at Birmingham City University, in partnership with the Supersonic Festival and Moog Music Inc.

 

Supersonic Festival is delighted to be partnering with the internationally renowned Moog Sound Lab and Birmingham City University to create a four week artist residents programme, which will be based at the Parkside campus. The Moog Sound Lab is focused on organic experimentation and is a unique opportunity for artists to explore analog sound-scaping, synthesis and effects.

‘The butterflies-inducing bassline on Donna Summer’s I Feel Love, the unmistakable melody wiggling through New Order’s Blue Monday, the sound of the Millennium Falcon taking off in Star Wars, the sounds of the guns in the new Star Trek movies, most of Kraftwerk’s seminal 1974 album Autobahn and a pretty much endless list of other game changing songs and records from the last four decades all share one thing. The greatest pioneer of electronic music wasn’t a musician, but an eccentric physicist with a longstanding love of taking things apart and putting them back together again. When Robert Moog (it rhymes with “vogue”) unveiled the Moog synthesiser to the world in 1964, he not only radically changed music, but culture itself.’

The lab moves to different venues and was previously Pioneered at Rough Trade NYC. It becomes a temporary residency space, offering a unique opportunity for artists to explore, experiment and create. A physical manifestation of the intersection of music, art and technology, the lab offers a unique resource to artists to make new work.
moogsoundlab.uk

Artists include:

Sarah Angliss, an award winning composer, roboticist and historian of sound.

Gazelle Twin, the twisted Cronenberg-inspired persona of producer, composer and artist, Elizabeth Bernholz.

Free School are a Birmingham retro-futurist, mask-donning disco duo, exploring a unique fusion of Electro, House, Balearic and Kosmiche.

Seán Clancy, Lecturer in Composition at Birmingham Conservatoire will work in collaboration with Thomas Parkes to  develop a new composition built from a vocabulary of analogue sources and samples that will explores tensions between found and original material, between narrative and rupture, particularly as these might be seen to correspond to elite and vernacular values.

Balandino Di Donato will be exploring the Moog lab via touch less control and sound spatialisation as part of his  pioneering research into Integra Live technology.

Mike Dring  will produce a new soundscape based on his interdisciplinary interests from architecture to glitch art. He takes inspiration through field recordings or through interpreting the pattern of movement prescribed by the built environment.

Jason Nicholson reworks the principles of The Harmonograph to produce exquisite physical drawings that seek to illustrate the relationship between musical frequencies, mathematics, art, design and new and existing technologies.

Andy Pilsbury will be developing, Helix, a new interactive online platform that allows users to participate in a multifaceted art project combining high-speed photography, moving image and ethereal soundscapes to create surreal flourishing landscapes.

 Steven Chamberlain (Selloptape Cinema), sound artists Tom Tebby and  Justin Wiggan collaborate on Birmingham: Symphony of a Metropolis, an ambitious new soundtrack. The piece, or ‘city film essay’, is a re-working of the 1927 Walter Ruttman film, Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis

BCULOGOS - CYMK

The residency will take place at Birmingham City University’s Parkside campus. A multi-million pound centre of excellence in the heart of Birmingham’s Eastside development.   It will sit alongside the Faculty of Arts, Design and Media Graduate Shows 2015. www.bcu.ac.uk