According to Neil Howe and William Strauss, recent history has been iterating through four turnings called 1. High, 2. Awakening, 3. Unraveling and 4. Crisis. You can guess in which one we are currently in :-) Due to the cyclical nature of the generational model, a Crisis is followed by an High again. But what if instead a novel cycle-breaking 5th turning emerges and fundamentally changes how we live?
I had the joy to create an audio performance for an exhibition at the ⇾Kulturwerft.
(more…)My piece ⇾Jazz Champion was requested by the ⇾World Chess Hall of Fame in Saint Louis, USA. It is part of the exhibition ⇾Sound Moves: Where Music Meets Chess which features a really interesting collection of artworks related to chess. I am especially thrilled because it sits right next to John Cage’s electronic chessboard used in his collaborative music-composition piece Reunion — what an honour!
(more…)In her work, ⇾Berit Kröner investigates the similarities and differences of natural and man-made structures. By layering photos on transparent textiles two locations are formulated into a new one. This topic is of great interest for me and I was delighted to work with her on this project. I choreographed natural and artificial noise sources and synced them to the lights to create a strangely immersive piece. By playing with the perception of light the places morph into new intermediary states and establish different connections. The installation was on display in May ’23 at the brachiale art show in Lübeck.
A runaway is defined as a person under a specified age who has left their parents or legal guardians without permission. But what about robots?
(more…)This is a live performance of Times Squared at the Lab.30 Festival. When I wrote the piece, I pictured the lights of 1960’s New York as iconized by vintage color photographs of Times Square. The blue and yellow tones of the neon-lit glory are reflected by my instruments. The piece has a fusion jazzy feel – but as you easily can tell, I am not a jazz musician. Sometimes I just like to imagine to be one…
I recently showed my interactive piece ⇾Tonlichteinheit 1 at the ⇾Lab.30 Festival in Augsburg. Moreover, I was invited to play a concert and this was the first time I entered the stage with my sound and light machines. There were much more people than I expected since I was the last act of the festival and a bit nervous. However, I really enjoyed a lot playing for this crowd and my friends who occupied the first row in its entirety.
Eine interaktive Medienkunst-Ausstellung von Leo Neumann und ⇾pretty bloody simple.
Das ⇾KulturFunke* Projekt ist als temporäre Pop-Up Galerie konzipiert, in der Erfahrungen mit allen Sinnen gemacht werden: den Augen, den Ohren, den Händen, der Nase und dem Mund. Die Ausstellung zeigt Medienkunstwerke, die einen spielerischen Zugang zu Kunst, Musik und Technik ermöglichen und zu grenzüberschreitenden Sinneserfahrungen einladen.
(more…)Kolophonium is a piece featuring my brand new sliding bass. It is the first string module I have built hence its name “C.1” which stands for chordophone number 1. It is also the first time that I added amplification to an instrument and I made sure that the sound is emitted from the module itself according to my ⇾Tonlicht manifesto.
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Solenoite is a new tool for testing magnets. It is insanely useful when choosing the right solenoid for a project. One can quickly test magnets, measure the required fire time, check its power consumption and put it into loop mode to free up hands. In Portuguese sol-e-noite means sun-and-night which I find a very poetic way of paraphrasing the typical cycle of fire-and-rest states. I just love Portuguese.
This is the first minute of a new piece called Finland. Sometimes it is quite difficult to come up with a name for a piece and generally I think of words that I associate with the music. This time however I chose to do the opposite and pick a name that I feel has nothing to do with it and randomly came up with “Finland”. So I could equally have named it “Zucchini Soup”, “Adhesive Destruction” or “Ode to Gertrude Stein”. But I didn’t. After a while I noticed that for me the song has something to do with Finland as it bears a sense of fatalism which I would attribute also to some of Finnish culture. I guess my subconsciousness tricked me out, darn!
Finally! I moved my studio to one of Lübeck’s most famous streets: ⇾Mengstr. 44. The historical building is a typical merchant’s house from the 16th century. It is an inspiring place and I am really happy to have found it. Lots of space for lots of new ideas…
Recently, I turned an old dysfunctional chess computer into a jazz computer. In the video I play some moves against or rather with the machine. To score points, one has to enter jazz chords that match the last one played by the computer. It’s a fun way of discovering chord alterations and matching harmonies.
This video compiles some special moments from my exhibition at the ⇾Science & Fiction Festival 2019 in the ⇾Deutsches Museum. It was amazing for me to see what kind of moves people came up with in order to trigger the sounds – I did not expect this!
I am working on a completely new interactive installation for the Science & Fiction Festival. It is based on an algorithmic composition and I created a small non-interactive prototype to evaluate emerging audiovisual patterns. This is going to be great …
For the 2019th edition of the Maker Faire in Munich, my instruments were transformed into an interactive installation. I created a touch controller that allowed to switch on and off different parts of an audiovisual piece. The simple interface was especially popular among children age 5-10. I noticed that adults mainly wanted to understand how it all works. Children instead wanted to experience and play. Or destroy.
How does it look like when musical instruments do not make music but instead illuminate to other music playing in the room? Here are my light and sound machines shining along to Raymond Scott’s Lullaby.
The more I get involved in instrument building, the more I appreciate simple but well-made tools. In this vein I am very glad about the lastest addition to my studio, an old sturdy workbench and a Schlegel 125 EMF vice. Welcome guys!
This piece is called Transit as it reminds me of my journeys through Portugal, France, Spain and the many strange places I encountered there like seedy ports, noisy train stations and sad industrial zones. It features a newly build module – the I.4 – which is a kind of illuminated xylophone with lots of inharmonic overtones. The composition is basically only one large pattern which is built-up and torn-down. It is as monotonous as most journeys tend to be…
The family of percussion modules has grown to five instruments allowing for more interesting drum patterns. The latest addition was a cymbal-like instrument made of a coat hanger.
I created a new module: the I.2 is built upon rotary magnets that produce variations of click sounds. The discs only rotate if the current is applied for a sufficiently long time accompanied by a loud click-clack. Otherwise there is only a click without a clack.
I finished building modules M.1 and M.2. and programmed some simple beat variations to test light FX and sound. Quite happy with the results!
The studio has found a new home in 09/2016. It is now located within the FabLab Munich. I am extremely happy to be able to use its facilities for creating novel sound and light machines.
