serial consign

This weekend a communique announcing a new release on Audiobulb Records ended up in the Serial Consign inbox. The project, entitled 1 | Favourite Places, is a compilation of "audio portraits" of specific locations from around the world as collected and interpreted by several artists including Leafcutter John, Taylor Deupree and Biosphere. Each of the contributing artists have captured field recordings from a place of their choosing and composed a piece of music around their site-specific aural fragments. This in and of itself isn't revolutionary as there is no shortage of field recording-based projects, but the overall design vision for the compilation is quite noteworthy.

1 | Favourite Places is supplemented with an interactive microsite (pictured above) which allow you to geo-locate the place that inspired each piece of music, hear the source field recordings and read brief statements from each of the artists. This flash based site is quite tasteful (i.e. no gratuitous animation) and exploring the interface definitely captures the spirit of the release. It is beyond the scope of this post to talk about accessibility and web standards, but it is worth mentioning that I had to use Safari to view the site as Firefox on OS X wouldn't work. This grievance aside, I enjoyed the piece and it definitely piqued my interest about the compilation. Beyond that (and at the risk of sounding nostalgic), I haven't seen any album specific interactive pieces like this since the heyday of Force Inc.

The microsite was designed by Andy Newman in response to the album design and packaging which was handled by Stereographic. I haven't heard Favourite Places yet but the March issue of Textura weighed in with a positive review of the compilation. It appears this release is to be the first of a series as Audiobulb has already posted a call for work for the next edition of the project.

[ruin / audiobulb fz-bulb / 2007]

1 | Favourite Places inspired some exploration of the main Audiobulb site and the label does appear to live up to its self-described interest in "Exploratory Electronic Music". The Sheffield-based imprint is run by David Newman and has been releasing ambient and experimental music since 2003. In cruising around the site it was great to see that the label is not only promoting a solid back catalog but a selection of VSTs, patches and even some hardware. Outside of overplayed discussions about distribution, it is not too often that you see a small independent record label thinking outside of the box so respect must be given where it is due. Keep an eye on this label!

Earlier this month, I was semi-inspired by a Dataisnature post on some recent work by Lia. In that post, Paul Prudence contextualized Lia's Isaidif project in relation to some of other great "drawing machines". To add to that list of projects:

First up is The Plotting Machine, a modified wide format printer that can be outfitted with a variety of "print-heads" to produce a variety of imperfect output. The project was developed by You Don't Matter, a design collective comprised of Martin Borst, Sebastian Cremers and Daniel Schludi. The device can be equipped with blades, a variety of styluses, and the trio of designers have even conducted some long exposure photographic experiments with the contraption. The statement for the project outlines some of the wonderful idiosyncrasies of the content output on this machine:

Most interesting and inspiring are all the little mistakes this machine produces, because of too much data, too much water, color, pressure etc. There are always gradients because the color gets less and less as the machine draws on. This expansion space describes the machine's actual identity. No Image looks like the other.

Take a look at the gorgeous output that this machine has generated - I'm particularly taken by the watercolor grid drawings.

Secondly, Rob Meek recently produced the above demo video for his Meek FM "typographic synthesizer" [see previous post]. While this device isn't a drawing machine in the conventional sense, the demo clearly illustrates the manner in which this system reads individual letterforms as reconfigurable vectors. The character of these "lines" can be modified and that shapes and modulates the sound travelling along these paths. This project is quite noteworthy in that it creates an interface through the intersection of two distinct disciplines.