If the human mind can conceive it, and human hands can build it, some boffin somewhere will find a way to wire it up with sensors and turn into a MIDI-triggerin’ musical interface. This won’t last forever though... Eventually, we will reach a point where every household appliance and piece of home furnishing is wired for sound art. By then, however, the brainiacs will probably have moved on, and have airborne clouds of buzzing nano-speakers to play with. And one can only imagine the sort of Pandora’s Box that that will open up…
But, I digress... Of all the innovative musical interfaces that are currently being thunk up (and if you want to keep abreast of them, then Near Near Future is the place for you) the Tone Ladder strikes me as particularly inspired. (And I’m obviously not alone in this, as it was recently nominated for the 2004 Europrix Multimedia Top Talent Award.) In a nutshell, it’s a set of step-ladders with sensor-laden rungs that can be used to trigger music and/or video loops, so performances of this wondrous device end up looking like carefully-executed games of solo vertical Twister... And, if you ask me, that’s a vast improvement on watching the tablecore brigade sit at their laptops and click mouses, doodle on Wacom tablets, or wave their hands over motion detectors. The most recent outing for the Tone Ladder was at a showcase evening for the Berlin chapter of Dorkbot, a global online and meat-meet community devoted to home-brew electronic art/device tinkering and computer-based audiovisual boffinery…
Which segues nicely into making mention of People Doing Strange Things With Electricity Too, a free online album of works by Seattle dorkboticians that was released on Comfort Stand back in late January. The collection is good snapshot of the sorts of amateur experimental electronica that are coming out of that city. My personal picks from the 25 tracks on offer are Ninnie’s dusty skipping-vinyl country drift track, Pretty Polly; Chenard Walcker’s Electricity (mainly because it has samples of the Captain Beefheart song of the same name); and Marcus Alessi Bittencourt’s Brazilian capoeira inspired collage… But that’s just me… Transmission over.