• About the project:
 This 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 this piece:
Megas Diakosmos ('Μέγας Διάκοσμος', i.e. ‘The Great Order of the Universe) takes its name from a lost cosmological treatise written by Leukippos, an ancient Greek natural philosopher of the 5th century BCE. In this treatise, Leukippos introduced for the first time an Atomic Theory of cosmology, surprisingly comparable to contemporary cosmological theories. Very little is known about the work, but according to remarks of other ancient writers, Leukippos postulated that the universe consists of tiny, invisible, indestructible, unchangeable and indivisible 'Atoms' (the 'Being') differing only in size and shape, and of 'Void' (the 'Non-being'), that exists in-between atoms and has also material properties, although different (anti-matter?). This infinitely expanding and contracting void allows atoms to move and collide eternally, creating and destroying matter, new bodies, and our world, but also a vast number of other worlds in the universe, some inhabited some not.
Leukippos' atomic theory and turbulent cosmogonic vision form the conceptual and experiential starting points for the composition, its sonorities and their development throughout the piece, as well as for the system and sound synthesis methods used. The system is a cybernetic model based on digital feedback and implemented as a sonic complex dynamical system – mathematically similar to a cosmological entity or universe in motion. This sonic universe is defined by the sample-by-sample interactions of a single binary digit (One, or ‘Being’) moving incessantly within a world of Void (Zeros, or ‘Non-being’). This digit floats and collides, is fused and split from delayed copies of itself, thus creating countless sonic bodies in states of equilibrium, oscillation, chaotic behavior, noise and silence.
Although Megas Diakosmos is a fixed medium piece, all the different ‘worlds’ (layers and sections) were performed in real-time using a hands-on, live electronics version of the system to maintain an aspect of ‘in-time’ timelessness, and to accentuate the primal and visceral character of the composition.


• More info and a schematic of the live electronics instrument can be found here:
http://modularbrains.net/megasdiakosmos.html

This piece appears together with an artist interview at Gonzo(circus) [issue 103], a Belgian/Dutch magazine for contemporary music and culture.
http://www.gonzocircus.com/gc103


Stelios Manousakis - Megas Diakosmos [2011]

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, DKH, and SFK
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)

My research catalogue exposition, “Selective Retention: Interfacing the Past through Queries and Graphs”, is now published in the 36th edition of The Journal for Artistic Research (JAR).

Fracas is an accompanying Bandcamp release of four 'network pieces' exploring graphs, emergence, and relationships between sound material as it evolves through computational systems.

The title track was first released as a one-track album on Superpang and later as part of their No Catalogue compilation. This new edition places Fracas alongside three related works that have grown from the same research environment.

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JAR, Issue 36:
www.jar-online.net/en/issues/36

JAR article available here:
www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2938321/3620117

Fracas:
bjarni.bandcamp.com/album/fracas

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Averse

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.