position:electronic musician

  • Jasmine Guffond
    http://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/moacrealsloa/jasmine-guffond

    Jasmine Guffond (Australian) is an electronic musician and sound artist working at the interface of social, political and technical infrastructures. Focused on electronic composition across music and art contexts, her practice spans live performance, recording, sound installation and custom made browser plug-in. Through the sonification of data she addresses the potential of sound to engage with contemporary political questions. Interested in providing an audible presence for phenomena that lies beyond human perception, via the sonification of facial recognition algorithms, global networks, or internet tracking cookies she questions what it means for our personal habits to be traceable, and for our identities, choices and personalities to be reduced to streams of data. Her music draws (...)

    http://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/moacrealsloa/jasmine-guffond_06061__1.mp3

  • If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture? - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/magazine/if-soundcloud-disappears-what-happens-to-its-music-culture.html?_r=0

    After the layoffs, the technology blog TechCrunch published a report claiming that SoundCloud had enough money to finance itself for only 80 days. Though the company disputed the report, the possibility that SoundCloud might disappear sent a shock through the web. Data hoarders began trying to download the bulk of the service’s public archive in order to preserve it. Musicians like deadmau5, a Canadian electronic-music producer, tossed out suggestions on Twitter for how the company could save the service. Chance the Rapper tweeted: ‘‘I’m working on the SoundCloud thing.’’

    Since its start in 2008, SoundCloud has been a digital space for diverse music cultures to flourish, far beyond the influence of mainstream label trends. For lesser-known artists, it has been a place where you can attract the attention of fans and the record industry without having to work the usual channels. There is now a huge roster of successful artists who first emerged on SoundCloud, including the R.&B. singer Kehlani, the electronic musician Ta-Ha, the pop musician Dylan Brady and the rapper Lil Yachty, to name just a few.

    The death of SoundCloud, then, would mean more than the sunsetting of a service: It could mean the erasure of a decade of internet sound culture, says Jace Clayton, a musician and the author of ‘‘Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture.’’ He reminded me of an online music service called imeem, which MySpace bought in 2009 in the hope of absorbing its 16 million users into its own platform. But the struggling service shut down, and all the music uploaded and shared to it was lost, including what Clayton recalls to be a very eclectic subset of black Chicago house music. ‘‘What does it mean if someone can delete hundreds and thousands of hours of sound culture overnight?’’ he asked.

    SoundCloud always let me get lost in a warren of music that I’d never heard — or even heard of — before. Once, it was Japanese trap songs. Another time it was Ethiopian jazz music. It somehow manages to evoke some of the most appealing features of offline music culture, like browsing through bins in a record store or catching indie acts at an underground club.

    SoundCloud took a community-first approach to building its business, prioritizing finding artists to post on its service over making deals with music labels to license their music, the approach taken by Spotify. The music industry was still in the process of adapting to a digital ecosystem when SoundCloud emerged; illegal file-sharing was rampant. But when the industry finally began squelching unauthorized distribution of artists’ tracks, SoundCloud was hit hard. D.J.s were also told to take down mixes of songs they didn’t own the rights to, and many of the remixes the site was known for were removed. SoundCloud ‘‘was very much built in the dot-com-era mentality of building an audience and then finding a way to make money,’’ Mark Mulligan, a music-industry analyst, told me. SoundCloud struggled to monetize the service. Artists who paid to be featured on the site balked at having ads run against their music, and when the company introduced its own version of a subscription service, called Go, the response was tepid. How do you persuade people who have been using your services free to start paying $5 or $10 a month?

    For the most part, streaming services feel sterile and devoid of community. Spotify, Tidal and even YouTube to a degree are vast and rich troves of music, but they primarily function as search engines organized by algorithms. You typically have to know what you’re looking for in order to find it. They have tried to remedy that drawback with customized playlists, but still they feel devoid of a human touch. Serendipity is rare.
    By contrast, the most successful online communities, like SoundCloud, have the feel of public spaces, where everyone can contribute to the culture. They feel as if they belong to the community that sustains them. But of course that’s not how it works. In ‘‘Who Owns Culture?,’’ Susan Scafidi writes: ‘‘Community-generated art forms have tremendous economic and social value — yet most source communities have little control over them.’’

    #Musique #SoundCloud #Streaming #Culture_Participative

  • Squarepusher Explores ‘Emotional Machine Music’ With 78-Fingered Robot Guitarist | Singularity Hub
    http://singularityhub.com/2014/03/01/squarepusher-explores-emotional-machine-music-with-78-fingered-robot
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkUq4sO4LQM

    Squarepusher, a popular electronic musician out of the UK, composed the piece in collaboration with Japan’s party robot band, Z-Machines. The band boasts a 78-fingered guitarist rocking out with 12 picks and a dreadlocked robot drummer.

    The song is called “Sad #Robot Goes Funny.”

    #guitare #robotisation #musique

  • Egyptian Electronic Musician Ahmed Bassiouni Dies in Cairo Revolution | Death and Taxes
    http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/51323/egyptian-electronic-musician-ahmed-bassiouni-dies-in-cairo-revolut

    Much of the publicity this past week went to freed Google executive Wael Ghonim, but another soul wasn’t so lucky: musician and visual artist Ahmed Bassiouni (…) Ahmed Bassiouni died of asphyxiation from tear gas on January 28 in Cairo, the city in which he was born. At least he was alive to see the people shake the very foundations of power, not only for Egyptians, but for all whom the events have touched around the world.

    #Égypte