Noise Party! On Saturday the 15th I’m doing a family junk-music workshop at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. Make silly instruments and silly noises! Stick around for other cool events! More info at avam.org.
Download poster
National Public Radio’s All Things Considered did a little feature on odd musical instruments on September 28th, and they were kind enough to feature some of my 29 Noisy Noises along with a bunch of other strange and wonderful instruments. You can hear the segment, and see a slideshow of some of the odd instruments, on the All Things Considered website.
I’m showing an installation in the East River, at that little brick-littered beach right under the Brooklyn end of the Manhattan Bridge this Saturday and Sunday (Sept. 27 and 28). It’s named Ignatz and it’s all about bricks.
Plenty of art and performances at the DUMBO Art Festival all weekend. You really should go!
p.s. consider subscribing to the moonmilk mailing list for announcements of stuff like this.
“Most of the people I’ve talked to, I’ve asked who had inspired them,” he said. “Who were you reading when you decided to start blogging? To a certain point that becomes a harder and harder thing the further back you go. For instance, Justin Hall started his site in January 1994, before most of us had heard of the web. I asked him, ‘Well, you’re one of the first bloggers, was there anyone out there who you were getting inspiration from?’ And he pointed me to this other guy named Ranjit Bhatnagar who was keeping a site at moonmilk.com in 1993. And, sure enough, it was a reverse chronological list of stuff he found on the web.”
— Simon Owens interviews Scott Rosenberg for PBS. Rosenberg is working on a book-length history of blogging.
15 years, wow. And I’ve been photoblogging since ’94. No wonder I’m tired. Check out a retrospective of moonmilk over the years here.
Electric Junk Guitar Workshop from ranjit on Vimeo.
On July 30th I’ll be teaching a class at Etsy Labs in Brooklyn, making electric guitars out of junk. Check out the etsy class listing to register for the class, or look at this post on Make.
“The electric guitar is a sophisticated and highly evolved instrument. But you can make your own out of a few bucks worth of junk and parts. Learn to wind your own guitar pickups and build them into a simple one- or two-string junk guitar with a surprisingly nice sound. Depending on your ambition and experience, you can make your junk guitar as simple or as sophisticated as you want, but everybody is guaranteed to go home with at least a fun twangy noisemaker.”
I made a little sound sculpture – a sort of wind-powered banjo – for this weekend’s Figment Festival on Governors Island. Here it is installed on the island’s waterfront by Castle Williams, with a spectacular view of downtown Manhattan. (If you’re in the New York area, come to the festival this weekend – it’s free, and there’s eight million things to see.)
If the wind really picks up, the flowers will spin.
And here’s a video from when I was testing it on my deck.
Update: here’s video from the festival itself.
installation proposal for artbots 2008 from ranjit on Vimeo.
Proposal for Artbots 2008
Simple automatic instruments are constructed from local materials and objects on site. The system learns the sounds it can make by trying out its instruments, and then uses its range of sounds to try to reproduce the rhythmic and melodic qualities of sounds such as the voices of visitors. It then loops and alters these imitative sequences into improvised compositions. (That last part’s not done yet, so you won’t see it in the video.)
In this example, the source audio is a bit of the soundtrack from the movie Citizen Kane, and the noisemakers are a set of found object percussion machines and an electromagnetically fretted electric guitar.
I’ve got three noisy things happening or starting soon:
Thanks to everyone who came to the 29 Noisy Noises party on March 1 and helped me celebrate finishing 29 instruments in 29 days! Lots of great people came over and made a lot of great noise on the 29 instruments — you can hear some of it below.
– more party photos from Andrew – more from me
electric jam
“set up a groove”