From Manchester, the land of Joy Division and New Order, a new sparkle of genious is born : LoneLady.
Julie Campbell is the whole band herself, mainly playing guitar and using rhythm machines, here and there she uses some touches of synths and there is no bass used in the tracks. The music is minimal and cold but never boring. Indeed she is a wonderful guitar player, in each track the guitar riffs are stacking to creating nice nervous patterns.
Her sound is very unique, the way she is shaping the guitar riffs is very creative and personal. In some tracks such as “Nerve Up” she is building layers of sound in a minimal way, other tracks are much more Punk oriented such as “Army”, one of my favorite of the album.
Here is a track from her first album hosted on youtube:
As for most of the mp3 I download lately I bought my copy at eMusic
One of the very cool consequences of being a visualist coder is that you come in contact with a lot of inspiring peoples. Sometimes you even get to meet people that you knew before starting your project and company. This is what happened with Michel Huygen, the soul of Neuronium.
I have always been attracted by electronic music that has it’s roots in the Berlin culture at the time when the city was a closed place. Neuronium music is following the heritage of this movement but with a unique touch that give the music his unique cosmic feeling.
I know Michel Huygen since a long time because he was an early user of ArKaos software many years ago. Not every musician has like him such visual sensibility.
Another inspiring person I got the chance to meet is Eric Wenger, the creator of many cool applications such as MetaSynth, ArtMatic, ArtMatic Voyager and many years ago the original creator of Bryce, the first 3D landscaping application.
ArtMatic is a software based on mathematical graphs defining textures or height maps that are then used by ArtMatic Voyager for the generation of landscapes. I was listening some Neuronium tracks a few months ago when I realized that the music matched very well with some of the ArtMatic worlds. At the same time I received a message of Michel Huygen informing me that he will come to Brussels to present some of his graphic works. and his latest cd’s I used that opportunity to start rendering a few loops and presented that to him during our meeting. Michel was very enthusiastic about this idea so I did push it to the end and here is the result.
You can see here the final version of the track “In Aliens I Trust” I decided to visualize, if you go to YouTube you can see it in 720p:
If you are curious to see the inner details of the landscape here is the height field of the landscape opened in ArtMatic:
ArtMatic Bio City 3B Interface
The rendering of each movie segment is then done in ArtMatic Voyager where you can define the camera movements and launch the renderings:
ArtMatic Voyager Bio City
All the segments took one month to render, for this work I used a MacMini that I have a home. I then assembled everything in Final Cut Express.
Hope you enjoyed the ride, the music is fantastic and the capacity of ArtMatic Voyager is just endless!
I found this documentary a few days ago and found it fascinating. While we just turned the page of the 2000s it’s nice to reflect for a few moment on my cultural roots before we continue our explorations.
The documentary itself speak about Krautrock, but it’s a term I always hatted. They explain in depth the origin of the term Krautrock in the documentary. For me the right way to name this movement is Berlin School of electronic music. The electronic music appeared all over Germany, not only in Berlin, but the cold war made this place so special.
So in this documentary you have interviews of John Weinzierl and Renate Knaup (Amon Düül), Danny Fichelscher (Popol Vuh), Edgar Froese (Tangerine Dream), Wolfgang Seidel (Ton Steine Scherben), Klaus Schulze, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Dieter Moebius (Cluster), Holger Czukay Jaki Liebezeit and Damo Suzuki (Can), Michael Rother Wolfgang Flür and Ralf Hütter (Kraftwerk), Iggy Pop, Zappi Diermaeir and Jean-Herve Peron (Faust), Eduard Meyer (engineer at Hansa Tonstudio)
One hour to understand the roots of electronic music that lead today to the many variations from ambient, goa, abstract … techno:
I saw Sleepy Sun in concert december 14 in Brussels at “Le Botanique”. It was a magical evening with my princess.
It was in the very cool “rotonde”, it’s a circular arena and it’s magical, you can be very close to the band.
La Rotonde - Botanique
Here is the encore of the concert, they did a cover of “The Chain”. The whole concert was perfect! The song were a little bit longer than the original tracks.
The light show was minimal but it was giving a nice mood to the event. Here is the band at the end of the concert:
