Check out this – cheap – way to create your own sounds and instruments… out of vegitables!
Also check out his YouTube channel for more movies.
April 17, 2008
Noisy People: Improvising a Musical Life
It’s always nice to discover there are more people that share the same feelings about music; no rules, no boundaries.
While doing some research (read: surfing on the internet) I bumped into Tim Perkis’ website NoisyPeople.com, the homepage of his first feature-length film Noisy People.
Noisy People is, as described on the website “a feature length video documentary that opens a window into a tightly-knit group of unusual sound artists and musicians from the San Francisco improvisational music community.“
I found some excerpts of the documentary on YouTube. Here’s one that really amazed me! Standard rules how to play instruments? “Fuck that!,” as Djll, the guy in the movie, says.
Djll’s Trumpet
There’s more where that came from, on this YouTube Channel. Check it out.
But that is not everything…
On the website you can also find a very inspiring essay about the film. Written by Tim Perkis himself. The essay contains some lines that are really close to the Lalalab vision that it’s not about styles, or genres, or names, or agreements. But that it’s about the “cracks” between different musical practices that allows us to discover new approaches and angles!
But what of the music itself? While its practitioners form a strong creative community, there is plenty of disagreement among them about what it is they are actually creating. The music seems to exist in the cracks between different established genres/communities/practices, by turns appearing on the margins of jazz, or rock, or electronic dance music, as a form of contemporary Western (classical) art music, or as sound art — a variant of the plastic arts and not properly music at all. Over the years the names used for this family of musics are most notable in their meaninglessness: New Music, Noise, Creative Music, Improvised Music, Avant Garde Music, Eclectic Music, Free Music, Sound Art. All essentially empty names.
Tim Perkis, Feb 14 2007, Berkeley
Interested in the San Franciso Bay Area musicians? Here’s some more info about the artists profiled in the documentary. Enjoy.
March 31, 2008
Hello, Lalalab is here!
A couple of months ago we – Boudewijn, Maarten and Stefan – came up with the idea to develop an online platform where users can experiment with sounds in order to create music together with other people: Lalalab.
But why?
Well, as students Interactive Media at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, all three of us in our graduation year, we need to participate in a graduation project in order to get our diplomas. And because we thought it might be a good idea to do it together, we decided to bundle our knowledge and strenghts and to start our very first independent project.
Very motivating eh? Well, it really is because the three of us share the same music interests. We drink, eat and breathe music! All day and night… we even sleep and dream music… But more about our visions and interests later when this weblog really get’s it going.
Anyway, to get back to the introduction of Lalalab, we think experimentation is a very interesting quality of music. With that idea in the backs of our heads, and the knowledge which we achieved during our study, it was just as simple as 1+1=2 to get up with the idea to set up an online interactive platform where people can experiment with music. And Lalalab was born!
But with an idea alone, we’re not there yet. Right now we are working on the development of the first prototype of the Lalalab application. After that we are going to test it on a small group of test users we gathered in the past couple of weeks. Of course we will keep you up to date about the development via this weblog.
If you are interested in Lalalab or if you want to get in touch with us, you can send an e-mail to info@lalalab.com.
