Spekki Webu & Taufan playing live during the Mirror Zone label night in Garage Noord, December 2024.

SpekkiWebu & Taufan Live @ MirrorZone GarageNoord 14-12-2024

In the past couple of days I created a short sound piece using ChatGPT. ChatGPT works with text, not sound, so my approach was to ask it to create a program that synthesizes sound of a certain description. Similar could be done, I imagine, with prerecorded sounds, like I could ask it to create a program that combines prerecorded sounds in a certain way, but I haven't tried that yet. The resulting synthesized sound is simpler than I had originally intended, because it turned out that there is quite a limitation on how complex a program ChatGPT can create before going "off the rails" and losing the thread. After the conversation I asked it to summarize the last successful result into a new prompt. The result is this 1-minute piece to which I gave the title Etude on Sound Blocks with Normal Distribution.

Etude on Sound Blocks with Normal Distribution

A brief phrase quickly evolves and dissolves. For taishogoto. Performed by David Bohn.

Taraxacum

Dr Harrold Linguini's Hammer

Students of Decay presents The Dip, a new full-length recording by Berlin-based artist and composer Thomas Ankersmit, marking his debut with the label and sixth album to date. Comprised of two expansive, sidelong pieces composed entirely on the Serge Modular synthesizer, it signals a subtle yet significant shift in Ankersmit’s trajectory, imbuing the hyper-physical, psychoacoustic intensities of his live performances with introspective, atmospheric, and even melodic elements. 

17:54 excerpt, from "The Dip" album on Students of Decay

Drop Bass Not Bombs (nADEV) free party by Kombativ, Kloki, and DKH
Much love to all and thanks for having me

Digital set by Taufan - live mashup (selected from sound material made in last 25 years)
All material by Taufan
Fragments 18:20-22:08 and 23:10-28:20 and 59:18-1:02:15 contains material made in collaboration with Koen and Tanno in 2004.
Contains some material from my tracks Symiotic (2:54-8:43) and Turbulent Dynamics (13:00-17:08) recently released (2025) on Hangar ltd.8 (Cult Collective).

Digital set at Drop Bass Not Bombs 2025

trace was written for a dance project of Karin Post's (Take) in 1994. The concept of the piece was based on the early computer drawings of Peter Struyken (who also created the lighting-design for the project), where simple algorithmic rules govern the direction of a line. The basic structure of the four parts of the music is simply a progression of complexity from the ratio 1:2 - 2:3 - 3:4 to 4:5. These proportions are worked out on a rhythmic and structural level.

Trace by Yannis Kyriakides (1994)

About the project: 
 Stelios Manousakis' solo live electronics project merges vocabularies and approaches from different, often seemingly clashing, realms of electronic music: noise and no-input music with electroacoustic composition with vibrant underground tekno. The sets are very hands-on, using a custom-built live-electronics instrument programmed in SuperCollider. Playing it is very involved, and as real-time as playing an acoustic instrument.  Bookings/contact: stm@modularbrains.net


About the piece:
L'Hypothèse de l'Atome Primitif Sonore (‘The Primeval Sonic Atom Hypothesis’) is named after a cosmological theory, 'L'Hypothèse de l'Atome Primitif', presented in 1931 by Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, a Belgian physicist, astronomer and priest. The theory was later mockingly dubbed by its opponents as the 'Big Bang' theory, a name with which it has become widely known ever since. Lemaître, based on Albert Einstein's general relativity theory and on Alexander Alexandrovich Friedman's equations, proposed a model of the initial conditions and subsequent development of the Universe, in which the Universe expanded and continues to expand from a single point containing extreme amounts of energy. This expansion happens in forward time and is coupled by a contraction in backward time that brings the mass of the entire Universe back into a single point (‘l'atome primitif)’, where and when the fabric of time and space comes into existence.

Lemaître’s theory is the inspiration for the structure of the piece and for the sonorities found in it. The piece begins with the bursting of a highly condensed core of sonic energy, which after a period of turbulence and constant transformation creates a plethora of sonic worlds to be observed: some slow and calm, others very fast, others oscillating, and others in chaotic states - but all constantly breeding change and transformation, even when they momentarily appear to be static. The piece zooms in and out of these worlds, looking, or rather listening, at these sonic galaxies from the cosmic to the quantum levels and in-between.

To realize the above, the piece also treats Lemaître’s theory as the conceptual starting point for the sound synthesis and control methods used, with the metaphor of a single point generating the Universe being the core of the design of the live electronics system: The system is a cybernetic model based on digital feedback, which is set in motion by one single binary digit: the primeval atom of digital technology. No other sound sources are used but real-time manipulation of that digit’s path within a synthetic sonic phase space of possibilities, thus revealing its multi-faceted potential and the emergent beauty of the constantly shifting digital universe it creates.

The piece is an Open Composition, meant to take its final shape through live performance, creating an immersive sonic experience that fluctuates between varying degrees of tension and release.


More info and a schematic of the live electronics instrument can be found here: http://modularbrains.net/lhypothesedelatomeprimitifsonore.html


Stelios Manousakis: L' Hypothèse de l' atome primitif sonore (live) [2010]

Stelios Manousakis is a composer, performer, sound artist and researcher. In these capacities he strives to develop a new musical and artistic language that is both visceral and cerebral, communicating in a purely cognitive and experiential level while being complex and multilayered.