Serendip Lab 10 year compilation

the year comes to an end and the french label Serendip Lab celebrates its 10th anniversary, with a 94 track compilation. One is from my soloproject Notstandskomitee and one by Akustikkoppler which I run together with Matthias Schuster:

https://serendiplab.bandcamp.com/album/compilation-anniversaire-serendip-lab-10-ans-ser011

Notstandskomitee: Strom (2020 remaster) available on Bandcamp

 https://notstandskomitee.bandcamp.com/album/strom-2020-remaster

After the 1995 CD 731 I sensed a need for an antithesis to the harsh sound and gritty topic of violence of that album. So I came up with the idea to create retro futuristic songs which are more on the uplifting side, done with modern, mainly digital sounds courtesy of the FZ-1 sampler and TG77 FM synthesizer which was the latest entry that time in the block 4 studio. The TG77 was already dominating the sound on 731 and later the Betriebssystem album by Das Kombinat. Augmented with a choice of analog gear, mostly Matrix6r and Sixtrak, the songs were still created with the Q80 sequencer, vocals were recorded on tape in sync with the sequencer. Hardiskrecording had not arrived nor been affordable for us so everything was mixed in one go and cut directly to DAT. Post mastering was technical not possible in the block 4 studio and the label had no budget to give it to a mastering studio so the CD is a bit rough and uneven. Fast forward some decades, now its easy to treat everything in the computer with modern tools and so I could bring Strom closer to its original vision.

While Strom was 1997 the antithesis, the tracks on the 1999 album Y2K, which was released as a split CD with the Brazil act Cyberthreat, was the synthesis and blueprint of the Notstandskomitee style today.

Malte Steiner | Notstandskomitee 2020

Piksel in Bergen exhibition till 9 December and Mozilla Hubs

The Price Of Berlin can be seen till the 9. December at the Piksel exhibition on location at Studio 207 in Bergen, Norway. The Mozilla Hubs version of The Big Crash VR can be experienced at https://hubs.mozilla.com/ufU2mgo/the-big-crash within a browser on desktop, mobile or VR headset.

See also http://www.thebigcrash.net

Paper at TTT2020

Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen will present the paper A Liminal Body of Performative Becoming at the conference Taboo - Transgression – Transcendence in Art & Science, which this year due to the pandemic will be fully online. Madsens’s presentation is scheduled for November 27th at 19:35 CET – and after that a round-table Q&A will take place. The conference is hosted by Ionian University (GR) and the University of Applied Arts Vienna (AU).

The abstract for the presentation can be found here:
https://avarts.ionio.gr/ttt/2020/en/presentations/116

Full program of the conference:
https://avarts.ionio.gr/ttt/2020/en/program/

Diana Rigg and the Germans

Like many in my generation I grew up with The Avengers with Emma Peel in TV (but it must be already a rerun) and it was important part of my socialisation. The concept of the weaker sex never crossed my mind. To be fair it has to be said that her precessor Honor Blackman laid the foundation for that character but I think these episodes of The Avengers were never broadcasted in Germany. The country was in Peel fever and like always, when Germans get obsessive over something, it gets embarrassing. Someone with to much money hired Diana Rigg after she left The Avengers to make the cheesy Minikillers short movies aimed for the Super-8 home cinema market in 1969. The budget went in her salary (I hope), the rest is incredible cheaply filmed in Spain without dialog. Kind of Secret Agent stuff but more like a hollow German fever dream of Emma Peel, on a low budget.

There is another one called The Diadem (b/w) or a shorter color version called Der Goldene Schlüssel, which is even filmed in Germany and also painful to watch:

The Big Crash at Piksel20

Tonight 18:00 Piksel20 festival opens in Bergen, Norway, and online. I contributed with parts from my The Big Crash, art for the pending burst of the real estate bubble project (http://www.thebigcrash.net): the installation The Price Of Berlin at the exhibition on location and The Big Crash VR as multiuser version in Mozilla Hubs at Piksel Cyber Salon. I will be online in Hubs:

https://20.piksel.no

Viral Life Symposium

Tomorrow, the 17., Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen is going to do a small presentation of The Voices of Stones - and do some stone narrations at the Viral Life Symposium - online during the day:

https://vitenparken.no/event/symposium-viral-life