Bjork

Here’s a great Björk dance track from 1993 – Big Time Sensuality.

It’s more than fifteen years old, but it still sounds great because Björk has such a unique approach to her music and vocal.

How many of today’s dance divas will be doing vital work fifteen years from now? Read more…

Björk has announced a special DVD/CD/VINYL recording, Voltaic, to be released on June 23, 2009, world wide!

Available in five different physical configurations, Voltaic is a loving look at the past two years of Björk’s Volta activities—her sixth studio album, which came out in 2007, and the subsequent two-year world tour.

Nonesuch Records will release it in the US. One Little Indian in the UK and Universal for the rest of the world.

Details below. Read more…

This Reactable demo video sure looks pretty – but the functionality shown should be familiar to longtime Synthtopia readers. 

I have to ask the same thing I asked about using the iPhone as a Lemur – is this just eye candy?

Reactable is a collaborative electronic musical instrument with a tangible interface based on a table, and inspired by modular synthesizers of the sixties. It was developed by the Music Technology Group at the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.

Multiple simultaneous users share total control over the instrument by moving and rotating physical objects on the surface of a bright circular table. Manipulating these objects, representatives of the classical components of a modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sound typologies, generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer. There are only 5 reacTable, one of which was sold to Icelandic singer Bjork.

Icelandic original Björk has penned an interesting essay for the Guardian that looks at why she loves Karlheinz Stockhausen. 

Here’s an excerpt:

For my generation, Stockhausen’s published lectures had unbelievable impact. He was the most hopeful of figures: the 21st century was going to be great. The classical teachers in my school, meanwhile, kept moaning about the good old days of music and changing the masses of music pupils into slave performers, putting to sleep any creative thought or the will to make new things.

I remember sitting in his studio in Cologne, surrounded by 12 speakers, him creating a current traveling up and down, swirling around us like the force of nature that electricity is, my insides pulsating to his noise – primordial, modern and futuristic. He celebrated the sound of sound, in both his electronic music and his acoustic music. For example, my favourite piece of his, Stimmung, is vocal only, using the voice as a sound and exploring the nuances of it in a microscopic way, rid of the luggage of the opera tradition or any other vocal disciplines, styles or techniques.

This short music video for Play Dead by Bjork and David Arnold features 240 still photos joined together in two different ways to produce timelapses of the rotation of the night sky around the pole over a 7 hour period.

Shot at the Stockport Observatory, to the North of Adelaide, SA, home to the Astronomical Society of South Australia.