For nearly two decades, the Chemical Brothers mind-bending audiovisual live show has played to packed houses and festivals across the globe but it has never been captured on film. Until now.

Directed by long-term visual collaborator Adam Smith, it’s the first time the full Chemical Brothers live experience has been captured on film and, as you’d expect, it’s a front-seat psychedelic assault on all your senses at once.

You blink awake and find yourself halfway up the side of a Japanese mountain. It’s night time, right at the sticky middle point of summer. You’re in an opening in a darkened wood surrounded by – say – 50,000 other revelers, each of them frenzied; delirious from an all-encompassing psychedelia that seems to be emanating from a stage somewhere in the near distance. Above you, lights swoop and strafe across armies of marching toy robots and galloping deconstructed horses; paint balls explode in front of borderline psychotic clowns. You’re in the thick of it, consumed by the spectacle, absorbed into the crowd, surrendering to the noise and the visuals. Stunned by the jaw-dropping intensity of what you’re witnessing, just one thought flashes through your febrile mind.

From February 1, Don’t Think will be released on over 500 screens in over 20 countries worldwide for exclusive late night screenings. TICKETS ARE ON SALE - BOOK NOW

At NSC, we have a strong passion for electronic music (as you may have understood from on Hawtin/Kapoor post). Following our passion, we have seen and appreciate a short documentary shot by Resident Advisor, talking about Berlin underground scene. We all got in love for it.

Real Scenes: Berlin from Resident Advisor on Vimeo.

Each year, Monumenta invites an internationally renowned artist to conceive of a site-specific installation for the great nave of the Grand Palais in Paris. The vast atrium space, which encompasses some 13,500 square meters, has been tackled previously by some of today’s preeminent contemporary artists, including Anselm Kiefer, Richard Serra and Christian Boltanski.

This year it plays host to a colossal new work from the British sculptor, Anish Kapoor. Transforming the space into a red cavernous chamber that seems to extend beyond the scope of the structure that encapsulates it, Kapoor once again demonstrates the profound mastery of shape, scale and subtle use of eye-popping color that have made him such a force to be reckoned with on the international arts scene. Called Leviathan, the installation embodies the sense of awe-inspiring power and mysticism of the Biblical sea monster after which it is named.

“My ambition,” said Kapoor in the press release, “is to create a space within a space that responds to the height and luminosity of the Nave at the Grand Palais. Visitors will be invited to walk inside the work, to immerse themselves in color, and it will, I hope, be a contemplative and poetic experience.”

It is in this monumental, transfigurative setting that electronic music pioneer Richie Hawtin performed on June 21, through a creative partnership between The Creators Project and WeLoveArt. Hawtin’s DJ set helped lend an entirely new artistic experience to the space through the integration of music.

When a brainy, abstract audiovisual act can elicit some laughs and cheers, you know something is going right.

Euphorie, the live music and projection act by François Wunschel, Fernando Favier, and stage designer Pier Schneider of the collectives 1024 Architecture and EXYZT, isn’t brand new. But in the cavernous, packed Usine C at Montreal’s Elektra Festival earlier this month, it surely shone. Inside that booming rehabilitated factory, sound and video elements seemed to just click, the happy result of months of development, practice, and iteration meeting a highly appreciative crowd. Projectors and software, props and vocals, laptops and electric sounds were all jamming together like a band should. Part inventors, part musical performers, the duo are finding the sweet spot between technological magic and live jam.

The French duo of François and Fernando start slow, with a somewhat timid doodle on a projection screen. But that doodle grows into squares and boxes, as monochromatic projection across multiple scrims immerse the performers in electric-light scaffolds or showers of pixellated sparks. And then the neon guitars come out, and it’s on.
Conceived as a set of individual songs, each set piece couples simple musical compositions with visual elements, mindful in each of an inventive sound-to-image relationship. The pairings are traditional, but performed with a conviction and charm that’s irresistible.

When a brainy, abstract audiovisual act can elicit some laughs and cheers, you know something is going right.
Euphorie, the live music and projection act by François Wunschel, Fernando Favier, and stage designer Pier Schneider of the collectives 1024 Architecture and EXYZT, isn’t brand new. But in the cavernous, packed Usine C at Montreal’s Elektra Festival earlier this month, it surely shone. Inside that booming rehabilitated factory, sound and video elements seemed to just click, the happy result of months of development, practice, and iteration meeting a highly appreciative crowd. Projectors and software, props and vocals, laptops and electric sounds were all jamming together like a band should. Part inventors, part musical performers, the duo are finding the sweet spot between technological magic and live jam.

The French duo of François and Fernando start slow, with a somewhat timid doodle on a projection screen. But that doodle grows into squares and boxes, as monochromatic projection across multiple scrims immerse the performers in electric-light scaffolds or showers of pixellated sparks. And then the neon guitars come out, and it’s on.
Conceived as a set of individual songs, each set piece couples simple musical compositions with visual elements, mindful in each of an inventive sound-to-image relationship. The pairings are traditional, but performed with a conviction and charm that’s irresistible.

The projector-and-laptop, doodle-and-geometry combinations might be as familiar as the instrumentation of a rock quartet; the achievement of 1024 Architecture is making them actually rock. A couple of darker numbers get into some strange lyrics and a creepy talking head, but in more spare, economical moment, the duo manage to hit upon something elusive: wit. There’s a sense of humor and liveness to the whole act, a sense that the artists are comfortable poking fun at themselves, or at least in being ceaselessly sincere and unpretentious. There’s even a sequence that takes on a game mechanic; the silliness paradoxically completes the illusion of being immersed onstage. Tron-style, Daft Punk-like EL wire suits seem slightly tongue in cheek, but in the midst of all this drawing and playing and screaming solos on guitars, you really do get the sense that the players have lept into the computer. It’s a real entry into the digital world, too, minus any Disney Hollywood trickery.

The duo and their set designer are also extremely clever in their use of minimal stage dressings to get a maximal immersive effect. Using three translucent scrims spaced across the stage, combined with basic translation and rotation effects in the 3D software, they produce surprisingly-convincing illusions of onstage depth. It’s not even really quite projection mapping: rather, it takes advantage of fairly conventional stage effects that, thanks to human perception, are also highly effective.

In a late number, shouting the names of programming languages and software tools (Objective-C! MySQL!), the duo almost goes a bit nerdcore – or at least would top my list of “bands to write a theme song for CDM.”

Please check the following links for further details:

1024 Blog
Euphorie Project [FR]
1024 Architecture Cite

Propellerhead recently decided to create a giant, 4×4 light-emitting device so large that you have to literally jump between each of the pads in order to trigger the drum samples. Then they just randomly set up shop outdoors somewhere and hooked everything up to a projector showing the Kong drum synthesizer that it was hooked up to, and hundreds of people just stood there in awe.

Kong is a new instrument added in Reason 5, which by the way, it has been launched on 25th of August. It is a $129 upgrade if you currently own ANY previous version of the program, $349 if you are buying it for the first time, and $449 in combination with Record, additional sequencer application.

The Reactable Live! is the result of many years of research in the field of computer music and human-computer interaction.

The Reactable Live! interface is clean and direct, without text lists or endless config menus, it puts the whole music creation process in the hands of the musician.

Only by designing the hardware and software together could we create a completely new instrument that truly is a step ahead of anything else in the market.

How it works:

The way the Reactable works is deeply inspired by modular analogue synthesizers such as those developed by Bob Moog in the early 60s and enhances them with new concepts of sampling and digital effects processing.

While with modular synthesizers one typically had to connect these different modules with patch cables in a complex and error-prone process, with the Reactable this is attained in a much easier and more intuitive way, since connections between the blocks are managed automatically based on their types and affinities and on their proximity.

Some Dj’s and Producers (Villalobos, Coldcut between others) say that ceramic is the best sounds amplifier known nowadays.

Joey Roth’s came up with these beautiful ceramic speaker’s (they cost only $500, worth buying them).

Via Cracknuit

A few week back we posted about the preview of a new iPhone/iPad application called Griid, developed by Liine all together with very well known Dj and Producer Richie Hawtin in occasion of his Plastikman shows. The application was supposed to make work the iPhone/iPad as a midi cotroller/launch pad for professional performance program Ableton Live.

Well today Liine finally released its product and we had the chance to test it. Unless the set up is quite hard (you really need to pass through all the steps in the manual to get it work) the application works amazingly. It works via dedicated wireless connection and the latency is very low, so anytime you touch one of the grids highlighting the clip you want to play, done, fast and easy. The design is also amazing and this makes Griid one of the coolest iPhone apps I have ever seen.

Griid is available for download at iTunes Store

This extraordinary tune is created by Diego Stocco who uses sounds recorded by tapping,pulling,striking a tree’s elements and digitally composed by himself.Music from a Tree is not the last piece of musical art produced by the Italian sound designer,but definitely the most remarkable.

We advice to check his You Tube channel here

Richie Hawtin is gearing up to announce the arrival of Griid—the first development from new company Liine, who will “aim to redefine the way people interact with sound.”

Taking the role of spokesperson, co-developer and first official user, Richie Hawtin will tonight announce the arrival of the first in a series of control modules for Ableton Live, the first of which, Griid, is designed for expressive and tactile live performance via an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch. Following an announcement at his Q&A session for Sonar’s Digital Music 2.0/10 event at Barcelona’s Pulitzer Hotel, Hawtin will then go on to present a full demonstration of the app at the Minus Ghost Space, taking place at the city’s Miscelanea venue this Saturday, June 19th at 17.00.

Although at the time nothing conclusive could be drawn from the footage, you may recall seeing the video last week of Hawtin rehearsing at Detroit’s Movement festival using an iPad and a then unidentified app. We now understand that Griid will be based around an “advanced clip grid interface” allowing users to rapidly navigate their Live sets and fire clips. The feel of Griid is said to be very much in line with users’ everyday experiences of using Apple’s iPhone and iPad.

Further details will be announced in the coming weeks, although Liine have said that Griid will be available in three versions: Griid Pro for iPad; Griid for iPhone and iPod Touch; and Griid Lite which acts as a free trial version of the product.

“Development begins and ends with the performance experience in mind,” reads Liine’s first official press release. “As such, Griid’s specialised touch objects and gestures are refined through a back and forth process which blurs the boundary between stage and laboratory. The result is a playful and inspiring tool, augmenting the Ableton Live experience.”