On the cliffs of Uluwatu, when the ocean devours the sun, the seven masks awaken.
Eyes swell red, jaws stretch wide, and teeth gleam like knives.
The stone trembles under their laughter,
and the night opens with a mouth full of drums.

Before gods, before men,
storms carved the first dance:
thunder cracking skulls of clouds,
waves tearing cliffs like flesh from bone,
winds shrieking as if torn from hollow throats.
The masks are fragments of this first hunger,
faces of a rhythm that devours silence.

When dancers put them on, the masks feed.
Flesh becomes rhythm,
breath becomes fire,
and the world shakes with a frenzy of jaws.

The Ritual of Polyrhythm is not a song — it is a feast.
Teeth bite into stone, flames lick the wind,
and every step drives deeper into the marrow of the night.
The cliffs themselves bleed sound until the horizon splits open.


The Seven Masks and Their Dances

1. Mask of Stone Breath

The earth exhales through basalt teeth.
Its rhythm grinds slow and merciless, a jaw of rock crushing time.

2. Mask of Ember Laughter

Flames split into a grin of sparks.
Its rhythm leaps jagged and sharp, fire biting the night in radiant joy.

3. Mask of Ocean Eyes

The tide opens as a mouth that swallows endlessly.
Its rhythm drags all steps into the black water, drowning them in memory.

4. Mask of Hollow Flame

Ash swirls in its throat, a furnace without warmth.
Its rhythm is a hollow blaze, breath echoing in chambers of fire
where sound stretches like teeth across the void.

5. Mask of Thunder Echo

The skull of the sky splits wide.
Its rhythm is a roar of jaws above the earth,
a storm chewing silence into splinters.

6. Mask of Shifting Steps

The ground cracks beneath its feet.
Its rhythm twists and breaks, pulling dancers into chasms that never end.

7. Mask of Air and Dream

The final mouth opens into dawn.
Its rhythm devours form into shadow, shadow into smoke,
until only breath drifts across the horizon, carrying the hunger of night into day.


Closing

At sunrise the masks return to stone,
but their teeth remain restless.
They gnash in thunder, grind in the tide,
and bite within the dreams of all who have seen them.

Mask of Air and Dream

Mask of Stone Breath

Mask of Thunder Echo

Mask of Hollow Flame

Mask of Ember Laughter

Voltajes Prematuros

In this audio paper, I advance the concept of trans sound studies, a field that both theorizes and enacts how sonic practices can unsettle the presumed stability of voice, body, and gender. Drawing on trans studies, sound studies, and media archaeology, I situate the voice not as a transparent index of identity but as a mutable and more-than-human medium of experimentation. Through citations of historical speech synthesis, such as the Voder, CHANT and the DECtalk, as well as contemporary artistic practices by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Luca Soudant, the work demonstrates how technologies of vocal modulation open onto new sonic possibilities for gender beyond naturalization or legibility. Central to the paper is my own voice, spectrally manipulated in real time, foregrounding the critical potential of vocal unnaturalness as a practice of destabilization. In dialogue with theories of the »acousmatic question« (Eidsheim), trans operations (cárdenas), and trans*formative sonic thinking (Soudant), I propose trans sound studies as both an analytic and a creative method. It argues for embracing the alien and inhuman capacities of synthesized and modulated voices, not as failures of authenticity, but as generative openings for rethinking identity through sound.

Audio paper by Paulus van Horne.

Part of Se



Embracing unnaturalness: Computer voices & trans sound studies

Генеративный bytebeat-трек, написанный вручную через dollchan.net/bytebeat

Используемый код:

T=[13,8],l=[0,1],p=t* (("2222222#2222222#".charCodeAt((t>>T[ (t>>17)%2])%16)-35)/10),b=((t* (("0000000133333336=". charCodeAt ((t>>13)%16)-35)/10))%256/5),e=l[(t>>17) %2]*random()*(((-t>> [6,5,5,4,3,5,4,4,4,5,5,4,5,5,4,3] [(t>>11)%16]) %64)+64)/3,p%30.1/3+p%59.98/3+p%50.02/3+p %40.2/3+b+e+(t*("0402060=".charCodeAt ((t>>11)%8)-35)%256)/15

Звук порождён из побитовых сдвигов, символов, случайностей и математической боли.
Никаких сэмплов — только голая формула, периодичность, и то, что находится между. Кстати у меня ДР сегодня.

t>>17core

buy digital/cassette edition at nicemusiclabel.com & nicemusiclabel.bandcamp.com

Bassist and composer Joseph Franklin returns to NM for a wildstyle heat exchange, actioned live in collaboration with synthesist, composer and improviser Ben Carey. Modestly, this one does what it says on the box, however ‘a thousand tiny mutinies live’ revises motifs and prompts from Franklin’s solo bass and extended technique LP for NM in 2024 with spectacular license, captured in stunning high resolution audio.

Surrounded by an encircling audience, Franklin’s fragmented acoustic cycles issued from an array of instruments and sources were splayed across 4 channels at Brunswick’s Quadraphonic Club via Carey’s impressively restrained synthesis, software interaction and live engineering, mixed down to stereo for this release. The duo’s staggering meshes lurch from blistering to elongated and back again, often as tactile as they are psychically liquefied, both performances rippling at each other’s wide-eyed interpolations.

Quantitively, mere sinews of the original work flit in and out of focus, yet these strands are most noticeable even to those with a cursory familiarity with ‘a thousand tiny mutinies’. Carey’s attention to detail and care in the mix actively places Franklin’s performance in sharpest focus, re-nesting these percussive, often inter-tonal molecules into a realm of digital faceting, dragging their shared rationale into the cosmological. 

Frightening in its unpredictable objectives, this rare capture of a duo in such gleaming, inspired symbiosis does not strike so often.

a thousand tiny mutinies live (excerpt)

A free-form and free-time mini-modular mix making music minus many musical morals. 

Made on the fly with the Bastl Kastle v1.5, Kastle Arp & Kastle Drum with plenty of patching and cross-patching.

Reverb added to the Arp during recording and then further effects added in the mix. Am getting closer to finding that key of H.

The Nature of My Wayward Id

nicemusiclabel.com Naarm/Melbourne, Australia.

I am Artur Tokhtash, a composer and sound artist.
My music unfolds at the intersection of classical tradition and sonic art: preludes, improvisations, and electroacoustic structures are not genres, but forms of memory and breath.

For me, sound is ritual. Each piece is not merely a composition but a trace of presence, an echo of vanished spaces, a light from places that may no longer exist.
The piano, in my preludes, becomes a vessel — an instrument that carries not only melody but also the silence between notes.

My works do not function as background. They are spaces for listening, inviting the listener into a state where music becomes both signal and transformation.

Seismograf is an independent Danish web magazine focusing on the newest developments within the arts of sound.

New tracks tagged #Synthesis