Excellent Academic Records is a student-run record label at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. In the winter of 2009 we invited five emerging composers to dream of summer and make work from whatever joy or angst these dreams evoked.

Download all tracks from the release for free here:

Dreaming of Summer in Winter

Mastered by Byron Scullin at Deluxe Mastering
Photography by Hanna Tai
Cover design by Michael Pulsford

This project was funded by RMIT Union [Arts]

NOUMINA presents a story, an abstract narrative, a cinematic journey through the cosmos. From a twinkly gaze at the stars, we are confronted with a presence, a geometric object, and are taken on a journey to its domain.

Through super hi-resolution images of the Universe, the participant experiences multi-dimensional layers, geometric viewports to other-worldly realities.

Accompanied by a hypnotic original score, the piece swoons and arcs over multiple moods and territories, finishing back at our home world, again at the gaze of ever-distant night stars.

'NOUMINA' is a hybrid of Kant's 'Noumenon' or 'non-object', and 'Numina', or 'Numen': the mythological idea that spirit is inherent in everyday things. Literally, NOUMINA could translate to 'The Soul of Impossible Objects': an impenetrable Other, the transcendental alien.

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I created the video installation NOUMINA for the Semantic Clutter event and Liquid Architecture Festival of 2010. The work was shown at West Space Gallery in Melbourne, Australia, from the 13th - 16th of July.

I'd like to shoot out a Super Thanks to Phip Murray, Lauren Brown and all the Westspace staff, Tessa Ellief for inviting me to exhibit in the show, Nat Bates - Liquid Architecture Director, Bianca Durrant for her help at the opening, and to James Wright & Will Hyndmarsh for help with video documentation.

Check out a few photos and a further project description below...

'Noumina', 2010
Multi-Channel Sound, Single Channel 1080p HD Projection, Dimensions Variable
18 minutes, 11 seconds, Infinite Loop
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Additional Audio Processing: Ry David Bradley
Consultant - Observational Astronomy: Michael Fitzgerald
Translation Assistants: Zane Lynd & Tomoko Yamaguchi
Installation Technician: Jonathan Hopkins

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There is an impossibility present for us in travelling the great distance of interstellar space: our nearest neighbouring star, Alpha Centauri, would take a gargantuan 180,000 earth years to reach with current technology. Yet, along with other significant scientific developments, such as spacecraft, it has been the camera which has provided the modern simian with the most acute and descriptive way of sympathising with the cosmic void, and of understanding our place within it.

m. Leaf-tierney, 2010

Events often include concerts, immersive sound presentations, audio-visual and recorded work, exhibitions and installations.

2010 sees 'LA' hit its 11th year, with a program in 7 Australian cities. The festival presents an array of local and international artists engaged in the field of sound, in a range of live and installation settings.

I'm very privledged to have been invited by Tessa Ellief to take part in an installation component of the Melbourne leg of the event, taking place at West Space gallery in the Melbourne CBD.

Entitled 'Semantic Clutter', the gallery will host something of a 'festival within a festival', presenting a range of live performances and installations, and an open studio environment over the span of the exhibition period.

The show runs from the 1st - 17th of July, with 3 installation blocks, bracketed by opening and closing night performance events.

I'll be presenting a new audio-visual work, entitled 'Noumina', from the 13th - 16th of July in Gallery 1, sharing the space with Paul Candy, Lionel Marchetti, Lizzie Pogson and Kit Webster.

For full details check out the Semantic Clutter page at the Westspace website.

Opening Tuesday 13th July 6 - 8pm (unofficial official unpublished opening vip invite only underground super club)

1/15 Anthony St (Off Franklin St, Queen St end)
Melbourne VIC 3000

The Gertrude Street Projection Festival is a week of projected light along Gertrude St, Fitzroy
Melbourne. The free street-based event provides audiences with a navigable gallery across a multitude of buildings, shop fronts and venues. It's hosted by the Gertrude Association and is now in it's 3rd year with the 2010 theme ME.YOU.US.

I'm happy to announce I'll be taking part this year, alongside many other artists, including fellow RMIT Alumni Marcia Jane, and 2010 feature artist Kit Webster.

To get more of a low-down check out this short doco they've made on the 2009 festival, and download the opening invite above. Make sure you get along if you're in Melbourne.

The festival runs from the 9th of July to the 18th after dark, along Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, in Melbourne.

The 2009 Gertrude Street Projection Festival from Gertrude St Projection Festival on Vimeo.

For a long time I've kinda felt that visualizers and screensavers are like the future album art. Well, they exist now, but even after all this time, they still haven't found their feet.

To me, visualizers are very similar to a Lava lamp, or a fish tank in the home. But the odd thing is, people don't dedicate a space in the home for visualization. Well, not yet they don't, but they will soon. Visualizers are kinda stuck with the computer. But a computer is a different vibe thing compared to a fish tank or a lava lamp. It's not always ambient in that way, but visualizers make it so. But even then, computers do a lot of stuff, so you always have to turn the visualizer/screensaver off to get back to what you were doing.

I think it's a very meditative and pleasant thing to have a visualizer on in the home. Very contemplative. But I think there's something lacking that stops them from becoming domesticated. On the one hand, it's the current crossover that exists between televisions and computers. We're kind've at crossing point where one day, they probably merge and be the one thing.

I was going to make this post just the other day, since I'd been thinking about it for years, and now just this week we've heard about Google TV.

It's basically going to turn TV into the internet, and at the same time lounge the internet. I gave a presentation all about this theme in one of my fine art crits once (which no-one seemed to get), and it was the basis for my installation piece "Death To Yevgeny Nourish".

I've always felt the internet is a bit of a hunchbacks experience. Ergonomically bad. You really have to bend over it. And it's like, in the late 90's and early 2000's, it was all about integration. The computer became the centre of everything. But now, in this new decade, i think we're going to see technology grow back out into separation. It's finding where it needs to be. Small computers for hands on the move, iPads for ergonomic internet. And now the web comes back to the TV for experiences more suited to the lounge room.

It's always striked me dumbfounded that this option, on a Mac, never existed in Front Row. All you really need is a bookmarks list, a remote, and a sync to your desktop TV bookmarks. I always scour the net trying to find someone who coded a hack that makes Front Row a remote controllable internet. Mac's even shipped for a while there with a remote control!

But what does this all have to do with Visualizers?

Brian Eno, in his published diary A Year With Swollen Appendices, talked about screensavers as being more computationally efficient in the computer than CD-Roms. Video is a huge chunk of data, and a computer is much more efficient at throwing around math, and does a much easier job at creating nice visuals coded from a file size as small as 96k, than it does in trying to deal with large chunks of video.

And I agree. We used to use screensavers to stop images being burned inside our tv's, but we don't need that anymore, so the form has carried over into music-visualization. Eno liked the After Dark screensaver, whlie the Synthesoft series and Electric Sheep artwork have been notable additions to the lineage.

And as monitors have advanced, screensavers have grown away from a technical band-aid to a complex aesthetic function. And yet even after Eno's call to arms in the 90's, visualization seems to stay stuck with Media Players.

The iTunes one is probably the best one out there, but then, that visualizer becomes a representation for a persons entire music collection. While there are others out there (or see a list of notable visualizers at the Wiki page), it seems no one has yet to create a music specific visualizer.

Like almost everything else, music has become computerized. A whole generation has ripped their music collection to hard drive, and either given away their disc collections or sold them to second hand stores or ebay. Further, the term 'internet album' is a grossly misused term. To be truthful, they are albums distributed via the internet, via the network. But they do not use the internet as medium.

In this sense of an internet album, sites like Oculart are probably closer to the mark, while Flying Lotus latest collaboration with Aaron Meyers hits the nail on the head - but what we'll see in the future is full album softwares, with multi-aesthetic changes.

Even the Thinner label is a step in the right direction, with animated album covers for each release, though again it falls short of being a true, full-screen, multi-track representation.

Future albums of music will be websites, or applications that can be skipped backward and forward as easy as a remote changes tracks. They'll have animated, algorithmic album 'covers' - but steer clear of the DVD-esque model of iTunes LP. Again, this is a throwback to 'disc' technology, not an embrace of the computer as medium. Like Eno offers : it's not about simply offering files, or video. It's about using the medium : its about using code.

Up until now the music video has been the preferred time-based visual representation for musicians and sound artists. Even software based efforts are released as rendered video. But I think this decade will see a new age. An age of the music visualizer as self contained artist website and/or application/program.

And Eno is still ahead of his time - with 77 Million Paintings he created an application that acted like a music visualiser. And in Bloom, Trope and Air - Eno finally realizes his highly acute vision from the 90's.

The iPhone was the first ergonomic way to experience interactivity and coded media, and now it's extended to the iPad. But Google TV will, i think, bring about a new dawn of the internet music visualizer.

That is, an album of music which has it's own visualizer. Artist specific. I see a future that gets away from proprietary players like iTunes, and instead becomes a place where musicians and programmers collaborate to meet a new end. Heck, by then, it will probably be a feature of iTunes. I'm surprised it isn't already.

Since Google TV will allow bookmarks, you can essentially create folders of websites that are specific audio-visual experiences, and, as you would hit shuffle in iTunes, shuffle the internet, and turn your living room into a jukebox of coded, constantly evolving, generative AV.

So it's time to move away from the model of visualizer as plug-in for media centre apps, and tie visuals to music in stand-alone apps or websites, as albums.

With a whole community behind the creative coding scene in apps like Processing, Cinder and OpenFrameworks, it's only a matter of time before things start to materialize in the home, since Google Chrome is built right into Google TV.

In some ways it could even be an answer to music piracy and a way for artists to charge for music again. You pay for access to the website, and access is granted via protected password.

It's a project I'd love to work on. And if anyone would like to collaborate on such please get in touch. But no doubt Brian Eno will be there first, with a generative, algorithmically evolving ambient audio visual website on the day Google TV is released

Welcome to the New Decade.

m. Leaf-tierney
May, 2010.

Lately I've been totally obsessed with film & cinema.

I've got a few shows coming up this year (predominantly installation) and I started checking out a lot of sci-fi as part of research for the work. Slowly it bled over to just more film-watching in general. Along the trails I've discovered a lot of cool cinema sites, and a bunch things about film-making too.

I think one of my next major projects will be something of a larger scale film production. Or at least, on an indie level. I started watching David Lynch's stuff again and it just blew me out how much there is to do with cinema.

I got the idea for a film that had no real plot. Which I feel is a bit of the essence of Mullholland Drive, tho it does have a plot in many ways,

in some ways it's just that really interesting mix of plot devices all interacting in their own way that make it work as a cohesive whole. Like a kind of puzzle, or a game of memory that had matching pieces but the pieces were all different colours.

I like the term 'abstract narrative' to describe it. You can probably get it from Tool's clips, or the Brothers Quay stuff. But also from a recent online film, The Return of John Frum:

It kinda reminds me of Aeon Flux, and Tekkonkinkreet stylistically. But it's even more subconscious than Aeon Flux. It's the coolest little animation I've seen in ages.

But getting back to plotlessness.

In my Google searching I stumbled upon Harry Tuttle's website 'Contemplative Cinema'... which also has a counterpart - Unspoken Journal.

There's a huge amount of stuff on both sites. And they put me on to a whole bunch of filmmakers and types of film-making I never knew existed. I checked out 'Limits of Control' by Jim Jarmusch. It really is an amazing film in this way of being a kind of plotless, contemplative, abstract narrative film. Although we don't have to call or label any of these films anything. Its just fascinating to see this form emerging. Which is really an exciting area of film-making, I think.

I also found The Auteurs, an online Web2.0 style social-networking site dedicated to arthouse, independent, and rare cinema. It's partnered with Criterion Collection and is backed by Martin Scorsese - definitely one of the better film sites online and at a very reasonable price.

I've been checking out Cinema5d.com, Cinematography.com and nofilmschool, a blog by film buff Ryan Koo out of NY/USA> But they all have really great info on the burgeoning scene of DSLR film-making, and offer stacks of advice on where to start and what you need.

I found an awesome short, Pivot, via Ryan's blog:

Since Youtube we really saw the explosion of online Video content. But in 2009, and into this year, we'll really see the explosion of online cinema. With huge screens as standard on home computers now, faster internet speeds, HD everything, and the coalescence of amazing cameras at super-cheap prices, we're now seeing a lot of high quality projects being released online. It was a bit of a weird period there, video had to go through a small-frame-jagedy-pixel look for quite a few years. It really is an exciting time for film, both online and offline.

So, Cinema has come to mean a lot more to me lately. I've realized it's a central part of the way I think about art, and informing a lot about what I do whether it's art or music or film-making. And I kinda realized I am a filmmaker. I guess just growing up in the video age you get used to calling yourself a video artist.

LT.

However Passage have been consistently active since it's inception in 2009, making up for the now defunct ambient side of Thinner: Autoplate (though the archive link is now currently inactive??).

But Passage really makes up for it. The releases are exquisite, currently tallying up to a total of 5 - including the likes of Feldmaus, Clouds In My Home, Doyeq and Gaston Arovalo - the latter of which is a particular favourite of mine.

The latest release - 'Strange Dreams' by Slow (http://www.sergeysuokas.ru)- is an artist which I know little about, but who nevertheless provides a beautiful dreamy full length, which is surely one the labels best.

As Suokas describes:  "I willed to make this album sounding a bit lo-fi dried – a little hues from the past, world of dreams and unexplored lands, a little femininity and tenderness, simple and somewhat psychedelic melodies, all in all just for a pleasure listening”.

All in all Passage is a beautiful label, it's quite rare to find such high quality releases that provide the good without even charge a dime. I really look forward to future releases.

Be sure to check it out

ML.

I really love this project. The basic premise is a couple of guys who go camping and take gear to the forest, jamming out in nature, a healthy polar to my more computery Sinuso Dial project. It's interesting the sounds of the environment can have on your playing - out bush we wind up creating a suite of melancholy lullabies.

There should be more recordings of this project released in the future, but for now you can jump over to the audio releases section and check out the tracks, or click on the pics to download the full releases in .zip packages.

There's also a new site called 'Nawlz HQ' which includes a blog, gallery, shop, and a whole host of news feeds including links to Twittery and Facebooky goodness... Get amongst it!

Its a delicious blend of layered frequencies, a real ocean of shimmering ambient electronica. Somewhat reminiscent of Fennesz. For a free netlabel release this one really is a score.

Get it here.

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Also check out the latest release from Polish netlabel Qunabu:

Their 9th release sees a 4 track offering from UK dubtech artist 'Hoax', with the Insomnia EP. It's a nice driving techno album, and one of the more deeper, slower releases I've heard across the net in a good while. I'm really digging it.

A CD-R version is available via the Qunabu shop, and it's available for free download.

Check it all out here: http://netlabel.qunabu.com/

Also, Qunabu offer a range of other art services which you can find here: http://qunabu.com/

~

m.