October 29, 2016

Kyteman jamming at home on his Eurorack modular synthesizer

Filed under: Music by Branko Collin @ 8:10 am

kyteman-eurorackWhen Colin Benders aka Kyteman gets home, he kicks off his shoes (or so I imagine) and turns on his impressive looking Eurorack modular synthesizer for some jams, which he films and the best of which he puts on YouTube. As Metafilter says, just let it run.

Kyteman wrote: “Ever since I came back home I’ve been pushing out tracks non-stop. Finally got something of a workflow going it seems. Not looking forward to editing it all later but that’s another story.”

And tonight on his webcast on Twitch.tv he added: “Next stream is probably going to be on Monday, … Monday and Tuesday. […] After that I am going to get back into recording mode. I really have to start pushing out a couple of tracks, because I want to work to an EP release or something like that.”

So if you want to see him play live, tune in to Colin Benders’ Twitch.tv channel this Monday.

Previously:

(Illustration: crop from the video; video: YouTube / Colin Benders)

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September 7, 2013

Kid Baltan’s experiments with electronic music

Filed under: Music,Technology by Branko Collin @ 12:12 pm

In 1956 Dutch electronics giant Philips decided to see if there was a future for electronic music. It created a Studio for Electronic Music (STEM, also the Dutch word for ‘voice’) and let composers/engineers Tom Dissevelt, Dick Raaijmakers and others work there.

The studio was part of Philips’ famous research facility NatLab, a name which aided Raaijmakers in finding the stagename Kid Baltan (the reverse of Dik Natlab). From 1956 to 1960 composers had access to the most sophisticated technology and used tape splicing to combine sounds into musical compositions. Raaijmakers explains on Youtube how it worked.

Somewhere during that time Edgar Varése worked for nine months at STEM on his Poème électronique.

Philips lost interest in the project. STEM was moved to the university of Utrecht and Dissevelt and Raaijmakers moved on to other projects. Today STEM lives on at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague where Raaijmakers taught Electronic and Contemporary Music from 1966 to 1995. Last week Kid Baltan died at a retirement home in the same city at the age of 83.

(Links: Weirdomusic, NRC. Photo by Wikimedia user Rosemoon, some rights reserved.)

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