Dick Raaijmakers

I found this fabulous video online titled "Intona: dodici manieri di far tacere un microfono" (twelve ways to make a microphone shut up) by Dick Raaijmakers. His experimentation at the edge of electronic musics technology is very compelling, I think of it as a parallel to the experimentation and that yields "extended techniques" in western classical music (such as bowing the tail piece of a violin, a brass flutter tongue and eventually the burning of a piano). An email that I received that alerted me to a festival of his work in Berlin mentions "unpredictable results of unsolvable problems". This is particularly well stated and important. When one is working with a violin the sound that results from bowing the taunt string is the summation of a myriad of random spectral interactions (I mean that the overtones are interacting and influencing each other and this is happening within the context of a physical setting which is forcing those sounds to collide and interact in a unique fashion). When we listen to a violin we do not hear the randomness but rather concentrate on the "violiness" yet on the microscale (time experienced at the thousandth of a second) there is infinite variation. With Raaijmakers work I am forced to consider and interact, even observe the unpredictability and interactions at the edge of the instruments range of functionality, sort of like glimpsing the final heroic moments of the human race or a virus before it is obliterated from existence. Art on the


edge














































of being





































as it were.

Also found this nice collection of links
and a video to round out the sensorial stimulation