Critical digital culture and media arts · Since 1993
The Neural Archive is a repository of publications collected by us during the years. Browse our collection here.
Sometimes the online world reveals unsuspected parallel dimensions. This is an unknown restyle of Neural independently (and secretly as we never knew about it) made by NY-based Motion and Graphic Designer, Clarke Blackham. Very nicely made, perhaps only a bit glossier for the magazine’s line, it testifies once more how even your most familiar outcomes can have another life somewhere else.
The value of craft after software sounds rampant sometimes, expressing the freedom of escaping repetitive taps and clicks to accomplish some assumed tasks. Mixing media, electricity, electronics, mechanics and inert objects Graham Dunning has realised a structured track/performance/open script in his “Mechanical Techno: Ghost in the Machine Music.” More than a proof of concept a machine music declination.
Isn’t ASCII Art a perfect form of “graffiti” in 2010s? The 8-bit aesthetics is among the strongest visual references connecting the analogue recent past with the omni-digital present, so why not adopt it to finally have some public art embedded in the present? In Varberg, Sweden, 2016, the GOTO80 crew (feat: Karin Andersson) did it, choosing (not by accident) the Mo Soul Amiga-font.
YesNo by Timo Kahlen feels like “traditional” net art, a well crafted stuck webpage for the user’s aural and clickable enjoyment.
The relationship between Andy Warhol and personal computers (becoming quite popular during his last years) has been only partially investigated beyond his Amiga works. In November 2015, Sotheby’s sold his “Apple (from Ads)” (acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas) for 910.000 USD, and in catalogue’s notes Warhol tells about his meeting with Steve Jobs insisting to give him one and showing him how to draw (even if still in black and white): “we went into Sean [John Lennon’s son]’s bedroom–and there was a kid there setting up the Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color…I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who helped invent it.”
Harsh Noise Wally, is a sophisticated mashup mixing strips of Wally, the lazy and cynic colleague of Dilbert with some epic noise music extreme attitudes. Well conceived and assembled.
Minority Report comes closer… Three huge screens at Birmingham New Street railway station are scanning passers-by and play advertisements accordingly. http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/new-street-station-advertising-screens-9920400
GoPro ancestors in the 1960s and 1970s, mainly sport and movie persons like F1 driver Jackie Stewart, Bob Sinclair and Steve McQueen.
CD + print – arbitrary
Mesmer is an experimental trio fascinated by the transience of sounds and the different contexts – be they natural or from cultural environments – that their musical practices traverse.
With Emil Jensen on trumpets, modular →
3CD Boxset + Booklet – 901 Editions
Imagine an apparently chaotic set with four improvisation musicians and tables piled high with mixers, effectors, steel containers, stringed instruments, and microphones of different types, together with various other objects from →
2CD – Fang Bomb
Paul Baran is a composer, electroacoustics sound designer and improviser, who lives and works in Glasgow. He is often engaged in collaborations with other musicians, as for example in his first album (2009) for the label →
CD – Persistence of Sound
The Langham Research Center is a collective dedicated to analogue electronic music experimentation, innovation and performance and, following in the tradition of concrete music and 20th century avantgarde movements, is committed to opening the field →
CD – Eich
The large number of twenty tracks compose “Black, Pink and Yellow noises”, an album made in partnership by the French artists Marc Baron and Jean-Philippe Gross. The first is an alto saxophonist we remember in pair with →
CD – arbitrary
Alongside various microphones, hydrophones and recorders, Richard Scott also uses some truly iconic analogue and modular synthesizers in this release. These are joined by programs such as Max/MSP and samplers, self-built controllers and effects such as a →
LP – Moozak
The Austrian electronic experimenter Nikos Zachariadis and the French free form turntablist Alexandre Bellenger combined musical skills for this work. The first six tracks on the A side capture our attention with their extreme tonal elaborations, raw →
2LP – Edizioni Periferia
Andy Guhl’s career as an improvisational musician went from strength to strength in the 1970s but it wasn’t until 1983 that the Swiss experimenter and architect stopped using any traditional instruments in order to embrace electronic →
vinyl + magazine – MOAB
A result of an accurate selection of tracks from different recordings of concerts and rehearsals, Ways To Prepare Pets For War by Otomax follows a specific rule: all the improvisations are set to an overall →
CD – Chant Records
When two improvisational singers have the opportunity to meld techniques and approaches to performance, they are able to recreate their own art, triggering a new language of musical invention and spiritual connections. This is exactly what →
