Sufi Plug Ins, currently on display at the Istanbul Design Biennial, are touching down at the Aicon Gallery in New York City! This Thursday is the opening for the ‘Fact|Fission’ group show and you are invited to come catch Bill Bowen & I performing a 25-minute drone (using our DRONE plug-in, naturally) as live soundtrack to a new video by artist Nitin Mukul. Come melt with us… If you can’t make it on Thursday, Sufi Plug Ins prints & ‘how-to videos’ will be on view for the duration of the show, and the drone audio will be incorporated into Nitin’s video piece. Info | FB invite
This Thursday, November 29th, I’m presenting SUFI PLUG INS at a special session of Wayne Marshall’s Harvard course on ‘Technomusicology‘. Taking this unusual sound-software-art project to Harvard University! Amazing – thanks to Wayne for the invitation.
I expect we’ll cover a lot of ground, from Morocco music research stories to interface politix to considerations of software-as-art and the relationship between non-western knowledge systems & creative expression in our digital era.
The two-hour afternoon event is free & open to the public, so come along and let your Boston/Cambridge art-sound-tech friends know. Check out Wayne’s post for background on the class, and head here to read more about (& download, for free!) Sufi Plug Ins.
[screenshot: Sufi Plug Ins Bayati synthesizer]
Music 190r: Technomusicology presents… SUFI PLUG INS a conversation with Jace Clayton (DJ /Rupture)Arts @ 29 Garden (corner of Garden and Chauncy Streets) Harvard University Thurs, Nov 29, 3-5 pm.
Tomorrow I’m off to Beirut for the Share Conference, “a weekend-long public, free and non-commercial hybrid event blending an Internet culture and technology related daytime conference with dynamic cutting-edge music festival by night.” I’ll be doing double duty: a daytime artist talk on Sunday October 7th, and a conference-closing DJ set that night. First time in Lebanon, looking fwd!
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From there I head to Istanbul for the opening of the Istanbul Design Biennial, where we’re taking over a room to install Sufi Plug Ins & John Francis Peters’ Morocco photographs. Beyond Digital by the Bosphorus! Last time I was in Turkey was a dozen years ago, touring with Wax Poetic & Norah Jones before she was (the) Norah Jones. Everyone says the city has changed more than any other in this time, turned ‘hip’, skyrocketed.
Tonight, Thursday September 20th, I am participating in a free event at Williamsburg’s Public Assembly. DRONEWORLD! is “a multimedia conversation” presented by Motherboard.tv & the ETC festival. Our drones switch on at 9pm.
The FB invite contains bios of the participants in this “late night chat about our robot past, present and future, with detours into Peruvian archeology, Marilyn Monroe, remote taco delivery and more. With surprise unmanned cameos and the whir of new software — all set to luscious drone tunes.” I will be talking Sufi Plug Ins, ‘playing the stock market’, audio drones’ relationship to architecture, & more. Coder-wizard / microphone handcrafter Bill Bowen will be on-hand to demo our ‘Drone’ Sufi Plug In.
I enjoy events that get different types of people talking & relating to each other — call it interdisciplinary, call it being bored by the same type of similarly open-minded music fans shouting at each other in the same old rooms. This should be a lively night. Plus it’s free!
To get amped up, here are some vids. The first comes courtesy of fellow panelist Rahel Aina, who tweeted “as gender+surveillance goes, there’s also cryptodrones in TLC’s ‘unpretty’ video, c 1999”. It’s incredible. I would say that this TLC video is more exciting than the entire internet in 2012 — much of whose DNA seems to come from it, especially Tumblr. Check it out:
Next is the Instructional Video for our Drone Sufi Plug In. I believe that all software should come with clear, concise directions as to its use:
And last but not least, a new hit from Pakistani singer Sitara Younis, whose viral success in our Anglophone media bubble is due to a translation of its chorus: My gaze is as fatal as a drone attack. As the Guardian reports,
Maas Khan Wesal, a Pashtu music veteran who wrote the accompanying music, said the drone reference had nothing to do with politics, but simply the fact that the “eyes of a beautiful dancing girl are so powerful they are like a drone, they can destroy men”.
[screenshot from Sufi Plug Ins’ clapping drum machine, PALMAS]
This Thursday evening, Bill Bowen & I will present SUFI PLUG INs at Public Enemy producer Hank Shocklee’s Advanced Ableton Users meetup in Manhattan. Free with RSVP, live streaming. 7:30-10pm.
& on Friday Lamin Fofana and I are heading up to perform at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, where will be joined by DJ Rizzla for a night of ‘DJs on the Harbor’, throwing down at their lovely waterfront space. Come through!
Yesterday NPR’s flagship news program, All Things Considered, aired a piece on my Sufi Plug Insproject! One minute it’s drivel from Mitt Romney’s camp, the next my crew is talking about weird synthesizers and love song maqams.
People keep asking me if I plan to sell SPIs. The answer is no. They’re free, always will be, and we’re gonna build more – VST versions are the next priority. In order to make the Sufi Plug Ins exactly as they needed to be, the whole thing was self-funded (I can always eat less) & the entire team – Bill & I here in New York, Rosten in LA, and Maggie & Juan in Madrid – volunteered their formidable skills.
“What do you get when roughly 300 academics, journalists, and musicians gather to talk about music and the urban jungle?… The participants will explore sounds of the city–the reverberations of people gathered en masse. . .Presenters will pay particular attention to what urban environments have meant for race, gender, and sexuality”
The talks are free and open to the public, but advanced registration is strongly encouraged, and today is your last day to do that… Many, many fascinating talks are scheduled.
I present at 4pm on Friday, in conversation with the brilliant Jayna Brown. I’ll unveil my Sufi Plug Ins project — free music / software / tools based on nonwestern & poetic notions of sound in interaction with alternative interfaces. It’s easiest if you come see them in action. But then there is Julius Eastman! And Berber Auto-Tune! And a brand-new video to debut! And how it all relates to the roundtable’s stated topic of “The Time and Space of Alternative Sonic Blackness,” with professors Daphne Brooks, Tavia Nyong’o, Brown, and more.
[Sufi Plug Ins: Bayati Maqam synth GUI as artist print]
The week/end will conclude with a quick & dirty Mudd Up Book Clubb meeting on Sunday. Short story edition, details soon.
[screenshot from Sufi Plug Ins’ clapping drum machine, PALMAS]
