New Album 'Unsorted Tales' Just Released!

Composed by U.S.O. Project - Unidentified Sound Object
SYN-007 © 2012 Synesthesia Recordings
Mastered @ Green Movie, Milan (Italy) by Matteo Milani & Federico Placidi

Performers:
Edoardo Carlo Natoli - Violin
Federico Placidi - Violoncello & Flute

TRACKLIST:

1) F'Shima (13.49)
2) Gretel's New Clothes (19.46)
3) Psalm 21 (22.15)

RELEASE INFO:

Artist: U.S.O. Project - Unidentified Sound Object
Title: Unsorted Tales Cat.No: SYN-007
File under: Experimental/Electronic
Format: Digital
Release date: 9.2012


F'Shima 



It's night.
There are no precise coordinates, nor recognizable signs that can lead us back to a familiar place.
And yet those sounds remind us, almost pathetically, of a summer night scene, to which we listened countless times.
But that’s not what this is.
The slow and articulated flow of pulsating energy gradually takes a structure, enabling us to be part of something very different.
The flow surrounds us, passes through us.
We can’t see it, nor touch it, but every particle interferes with our body, with our biological substrate. Far away, a storm is coming, perhaps.
It’s neither natural, nor inoffensive. It deceives us with the variety of its harmony of timbres.
The structure suddenly changes, reorganizing itself while turning us into something new.
A breach made of light. It’s oscillating.
Then, silence.
The air stagnates, suspended and motionless.
An electrical impulse.
One more. Others follow, one after another, fainter and more distant.
(Sounds), like petals made of ash.

F'Shima was designed and built around a series of recordings of electromagnetic fields generated by various electronic devices (Hard Drives, iPad, iPhone, Portable Game Consoles ...), recordings made ​​by using old analog phone-captors. The source material, sometimes fully recognizable, sometimes radically altered, has been digitally processed using the Kyma Sound Design environment.

Gretel's New Clothes 



"Nibble, nibble, gnaw,
Who is nibbling at my little house?"
The children answered: "The wind, the wind,
The heaven-born wind."

Gretel's New Clothes is, in a way, an acousmatic reinvention of the famous fairytale by the Brothers Grimm. It is in the form of a Rondò. 

There is no attempt to literally retrace the story, rather to suggest it in a subtle way, through the use of strongly characterized sound materials (footsteps in the woods, the wind, the "sounds" of the night...) which are then dialogically processed during the final Violin and Cello improvisation. 

“They walked the whole night and all the next day too from morning till evening, but they did not get out of the forest, and were very hungry, for they had nothing to eat... And as they were so weary that their legs would carry them no longer, they lay down beneath a tree and fell asleep.” 

Psalm 21



“...Your hand will find out all your enemies;
your right hand will find out those who hate you.
You will make them as a blazing oven
when you appear.
The Lord will swallow them up in his wrath,
and fire will consume them.”

Psalm21 is not a religious work. There is no implication of a celebratory or ritual nature. The dominant and recurring element during the composition of the piece, is the relationship between creation (as a constantly evolving act), creator (of which we ignore existence and features) and creature (as a self-conscious subject that reflects on his nature). These three elements are the driving force around which the work unfolds.

[Available on CD Baby Music Store]

[Digital booklet: Unsorted_Tales.pdf]

News: Sonic Screens 2012

U.S.O. Project is happy to announce the selected artists for the 2012 edition of Sonic Screens, which will take place in Milan on November 2012 @ O’.
Here they are:

Andrea Valle
Dispacci dal fronte interno
for Violin and Cello, spatialized electronics and printers 

Agostino Di Scipio
Two Sound Pieces with Repertoire String Music
for any number of bowed string instruments and live electronics

 [photo courtesy of Franz Rosati]

The two works will be performed live by Ana Topalovic & Èdua Amarilla Zádory and will later be released (in the first months of 2013) as a digital download by Synesthesia Recordings.

Sonic Screens 2011

Electroacoustic music concert

an event by U.S.O. Project | Matteo Milani & Federico Placidi
in collaboration with O’ and DieSchachtel

Sound direction: Matteo Milani
Max/MSP programming: Federico Placidi
Visuals: Franz Rosati

O’ | via pastrengo 12 Milan | Italy

Saturday, November 26th - from 7 to 9 p-m.


Free admission

Sonic Screens aims to render the endless possibilities of life and its surroundings experienceable in our conscious activity, trying to deal with the possible infinites of the listening experience, both in their objective and manufactured dimensions. This journey related to the pure immersive listening will take advantage of Ambisonics sound diffusion practice, creating an immersive sound flow between different electroacoustic works by these selected international artists:

1. Benjamin Taylor - Keen Awareness
2. Daniel Blinkhorn - anthozoa
3. Daniel Courville - Variations on Vater unser im Himmelreich
4. Diana Salazar - Spindlesong
5. Jon Christopher Nelson - Just After The Rain
6. Josh Goldman - Hexagonal (Facets 1-6)
7. Kotoka Suzuki - Automata
8. Panayiotis Kokoras - Anechoic Pulse
9. Tae Hong Park - 48 13 N, 16 20 O

At the end of the evening, a/v live-set:

Franz Rosati - Theory of Vortex Sound [OUTFLUX]
PATHLINE #1

Matteo Milani & Federico Placidi

Milan/Rome based Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi (aka U.S.O. Project - Unidentified Sound Object) are sound artists whose work spans from digital music to electroacoustic improvisation. Unidentified Sound Object was born from the desire to discover new paths and non-linear narrative strategies in both aural and visual domains. The project includes several collaborations with visual artists and performers. Milani and Placidi are the co-founders of the label "Synesthesia Recordings", a repository of electroacoustic works. U.S.O. Project is a continuing evolving organism.

www.synesthesiarecordings.com


Franz Rosati

Franz Rosati is a sound and media artist, focusing his research on real-time A/V, Visual Music projects and installations following an aesthetic idea based on discontinuity of aural and visual patterns avoiding any kind of repetition through the use of chaos mathematics, generative and stochastic processes. He uses his own custom made software for real-time micro-montage and sound elaboration in the microscopic time scale to realize compositions and performances based on aural and visual matter’s costant metamorphosis. During the years, Franz Rosati has played in a large number of electroacoustic projects such as Franco Ferguson improvisors collective, Meccanica Ferma, Solderwire, GRIDSHAPE, developing his own approach to electroacoustic improvisation. In 2007 founded Nephogram [contemporary documents] collectives with Stefano Pala a.k.a. UKQWJB. He also teaches MaxMSP/Jitter for sound design, interactivity and multimedia, focusing in computer vision techniques in several Workshops and Art/Design Institutes, and developed Interactive Examples for Electronic Music and Sound Design, a book about sound theory and practice in MaxMSP.

www.franzrosati.com

Introducing: Observation’s Pod

Observation’s Pod is a new section on Synesthesia Recordings where we post most of our researches’ output to the collective.
This place works as a permanent Laboratory where the product of our creative and experimental activity with sound is freely opened to the public in its raw form.

Matteo Milani, Federico Placidi


#1 Kyma Studies by synesthesiarecs




#2 Three Studies for Analog Synthesizer by synesthesiarecs

These three small works are based on the improvisational exploration of a specific configuration of the modules of Serge Modular synthesizer.

The synthesis model which was implemented is that of the Complex Feedback Frequency Modulation as shown in the artwork image: two oscillators recursively modulating that build a dynamic non-linear system exhibiting a chaotic behaviour.

In order to obtain a high timbral complexity, the waveforms generated by each oscillator are dynamically varied through the use of waveshaping modules.

All the material was created using only the patch described above, without any filter or other editing/mixing procedure.

The three short works are created on order to intuitively explore a dynamic system, while combining its output using an analogy with three well-defined poetic abstractions.

Sound & pictures by Federico Placidi

>>Flux

>>Field

>>Ton

[Observation’s Pod]

Out now: U.S.O. Project - Functions (binaural)

[Free Download]

Between 1967 and 1969 Gottfried Michael Koenig devoted himself to compose electronic music, producing a series of works entitled Funktionen.

The instrument that inspired and made ​​possible these compositions was the Variable Function Generator, designed by Stan Tempelaars at the Institute of Sonology, Utrecht.

Koenig used the VFG not only to produce the basic sounds (waveforms), but employed it as a modulator and control instrument in order to dynamically manipulate the elaboration processes which were carried out on materials (ring modulation, volume curves, filtering and reverberation).

The idea behind the experiment was to entirely produce the sound material and its structural implementation using only the VFG (this led to the creation of Funktion Grün, Funktion Gelb, Funktion Orange, Funktion Rot).

For a detailed analysis of Gottfried Michael Koenig’s Funktionen, please see the document on his official website:

Analytical Descriptions (1971) [Download]

The works presented in U.S.O. Project’s Functions explicitly refer to a series of works that with an extraordinary vision Koenig realized in those years.

The main challenge was both philological and aesthetical. The idea was to create an automated composition by exploiting the computing power of modern computers and by a sufficiently widespread and flexible software in order to re-program the original algorithms.

The Patches used in the prototyping of the generative software environment were assembled using a specially written program that provided in text format - using serial procedures - how the various modules should be combined with each other - i.e.:

Mel / empty / reverb
Basis / ring+mod / Empty
Pulses / empty / reverb
Basis / mod / filter-reverb
Mel / ring / filter
Pulses / ring+mod / reverb
Basis / empty / filter
Mel / ring / filter-reverb
Pulses / mod / Empty
Basis / ring+mod / Empty
Mel / ring / filter-reverb
Pulses / mod / reverb
Mel / empty / filter


Once we had identified the blocks, they were displayed in the form of flow charts - i.e.:

The various Patches were then implemented as Abstraction in Max/MSP:

In order to manage all the modules in parallel, plus the sends to the reverberation units and so forth, we constructed a matrix, that automatically reconfigures itself according to strict procedures based on serial techniques:

The implemented automata procedures have in fact "created" the composition itself.
In the end, the multichannel final master was obtained with Kyma/Pacarana’s surround Objects.

As you can deduce from a listening comparing the work of Koenig and U.S.O. Project, there are many differences, both in the aesthetic and formal domain.

It was clear to us since the beginning that we didn’t want to repeat Koenig’s compositional experiment in every detail, but to build - and then understand - something new produced using the same modus operandi that convinced him to make those works. At the same time we wanted to preserve an historical legacy with those works (something that is easily recognizable especially in the first piece). It was also interesting to us to empirically verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the procedures in terms of timbre and formal development using the serial approach.

The actual distributed version is rendered using U.S.O. Project’s custom binaural techniques for headphone listening only.

Beyond any reference to Koenig’s original works, Functions is a spontaneous self-reflection about the different states of sound matter and the exploitation of its possible configurations, shaped and imagined through a dialogical process between the machine and its operator.

Matteo Milani, Federico Placidi

[Functions Press Release - pdf]

"Nachtmusik aus 01"

Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi (aka U.S.O. Project - Unidentified Sound Object) are out now on Synesthesia Recordings with the new album called "Nachtmusik aus 01" (SYN-004), available in digital download only (PayPal, iTunes coming soon).

Listen to 60-second excerpts: (.m3u)

U.S.O. Project - "Nachtmusik Aus 01" [Synesthesia Recordings]
A Machine's dream out of human memories.

Performed and produced by Matteo Milani, Federico Placidi.
SYN-004 © 2009 Synesthesia Recordings. All rights reserved.

TRACKLIST:

1) Part I (12.09)
2) Part II (5.28)
3) Part III (5.37)
4) Part IV (17.48)

RELEASE INFO:

Artist: U.S.O. Project - Unidentified Sound Object
Title: Nachtmusik aus 01
Cat.No: SYN-004
File under: Experimental/Electronic
Format: Digital
Release date: 7.2009

Artwork by Jorinde Voigt [www.jorindevoigt.com]

+++++++++++++++++++++++++
Diptychon VII
VII/1 + VII/2 (Deklination Rotation Doppelte Akustische Impulse, Standpunktwechsel / Richtungsansammlungen,
Richtungs-Loops / Deklinationsablauf)

Jorinde Voigt
Berlin 2007
Ink, graphite on paper
114,4 x 30 cm + 114,5 x 210 cm (total 114,5 x 240 cm)
+++++++++++++++++++++++++

J.J. Abrams on 'Star Trek' Sound Design

(An excerpt from DIRECTOR'S CHAIR: J.J. ABRAMS - 'STAR TREK' - via Post Magazine)

PM: How important are sound and music to you?

ABRAMS: "They're always 51 percent of what makes a film work. As important as everything else is, when the sound and music don't work, it never works as a whole, and when they're great, it often looks great. It's weird — even if the visuals aren't terrific, the sound saves the day. Most films I love, if you pull out the sound and music, they're just anemic. So it's critical for setting the right tone, and Michael Giacchino, with whom I've worked since Alias, wrote a beautiful score.

"We mixed at Fox, and that was the most difficult part of post, because, for whatever reason, the first mix just didn't really work. So we brought in Ben Burtt to help out with some of the sound effects, because it just didn't sound like Trek. So he created all of these iconic sound effects that we hadn't been using at all, and identified the ones that were aurally the equivalent of what I was trying to do visually, and he ended up basically making the film into a Star Trek movie. Even those first sounds you hear, those sonar pings, weren't originally in the film. And he did a brilliant thing — he cleared out areas of sound.

"Think about your favorite movies of all time, and they might have had 16 or 24 tracks. Now we have 196 tracks, but it doesn't make it better and often makes it worse. Ben came in and said, 'Get rid of it all, pull it all back, use just these three sounds.' And suddenly it was, 'Holy shit! It's impactful now, not just a wall of sound.' So he de-Phil Spectored the film and gave us more clarity. But then we found we'd gone too far in that direction, and taken out 16 minutes of music and pared it all back. So now it felt too slight, so we did a third mix, which was partly possible because we'd delayed the release date by six months. That was massively important. We actually ended up putting back a lot of the score and then we took certain cues written for scenes and switched them out. We must have moved and added and adjusted nearly 24 cues. It was a huge amount of last-minute fine tuning, but it brought the music back to the fore in a lot of scenes, brought sound effects back more and used them as a support as opposed to a central element."

[read the full interview]

Call for electroacoustic works - 2009

Synesthesia Recordings is pleased to announce a 'Call for electroacoustic works - 2009'.

All presented music works should fit one of the following categories:

1. Works for recorded media alone
2. Works for recorded media and instrumental solo

Works should be produced using any conceivable analog device processing tools (pedals, no input mixers, analog synthesizers, custom built devices).

The use of computer or any digital device (except a DAW for the tracking/mixing) is not allowed.

The use of instrumental soloist is limited to one of the following instruments:

Violin, Violoncello, Double bass, Flute, Clarinet in B, Bass Clarinet, Soprano and Alto Saxophone.

The deadline for submissions is the 31st October 2009.

[more info: www.synesthesiarecordings.com]

“Synesthesia is a crossing of the senses.”

This label is to be intended as a repository of live improvised electroacoustic works. The main goal is to retrieve the late Renaissance praxis of “Ricercare” intended as exploration of a technical device playing it, subverting it in different ways. So this kind of “Musica Ricercata” should be affected by individual approaches to improvisation with sound materials of any kind, samples, electronic devices, pure sine generators, transducers. The local and momentary gesture generates a relational sequenced processes that defines the sonic path from start to the end. This recordings have to be intended as a “document” or Simulacra of a solo or collective performance but not as the performance itself (which is affected by causality relationships and other environmental and statistical phenomena). The Project is maintained, supervised by U.S.O Project in collaboration with many other audio-visual artists.

InharmoniCity (ZBF-0108): now shipping!

We are very happy to announce that the dvd-video 'InharmoniCity' is out. It's a co-production by U.S.O. Project with visual artist Selfish. Limited edition hard copies (300) are available via Synesthesia Recordings or via Zerofeedback (PayPal - $16). The press release is available here (pdf).

An excerpt from the dvd 'InharmoniCity':


Girl Running - U.S.O. Project + Selfish on Vimeo.

TRACKLIST:

1) Girl Running (08.48)
2) Invisible Words (12.20)
3) ...from the Past...out of the Future... (40.36)


InharmoniCity is packaged in a 2-panel wallet.

Best played at high volume in the dark.

U.S.O. Project @ Spark Festival 2009

Girl Running, an excerpt from the new forthcoming dvd "InharmoniCity" (Zerofeedback/Synesthesia Recordings © 2009) has been accepted for performance at Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts, Minneapolis.

Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts / February 18th, 2009 / Cedar Cultural Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN.

Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi (aka U.S.O Project - Unidentified Sound Object) + Giovanni Antignano (aka Selfish) / Moving Visual Art

[more info via spark.cla.umn.edu]
[follow Spark Festival on Twitter]
[subscribe to Synesthesia Recordings' RSS calendar feed]

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Winter Wishes 2008

Consequenzas is a free hallucinated and irrational experience based on the counterpoint between a male voice-over (reading a text from T.S.Eliot's "Four Quartets"), and an arabesque of sounds derived from different compositions for solo instruments by Luciano Berio, known as the Sequenze.
The electroacoustic transformation of the materials and the strong alteration of the voice's prosody refer to a far intimate place (in space and time), split between myth and religion, a place where the men's eyes can barely bear the light of truth.

Matteo Milani, Federico Placidi

[Listen/download]

(Italian)

Il tempo presente e il tempo passato
Son forse presenti entrambi nel tempo futuro,
E il tempo futuro è contenuto nel tempo passato
Se tutto il tempo è eternamente presente
Tutto il tempo è irredimibile.
Ciò che poteva essere è un'astrazione
Che resta una possibilità perpetua
Solo nel mondo delle ipotesi.
Ciò che poteva essere e ciò che è stato
Tendono a un solo fine, che è sempre presente.
Passi echeggiano nella memoria
Lungo il corridoio che non prendemmo
Verso la porta che non aprimmo mai
Sul giardino delle rose. Le mie parole echeggiano
Così, nella vostra mente.
Ma a che scopo
Esse smuovano la polvere su una coppa di foglie di rose
Io non lo so.
Altri echi
Vivono nel giardino. Li seguiremo?
Presto, disse l'uccello, trovateli, trovateli,
Girato l'angolo. Attraverso il primo cancello
Nel nostro primo mondo, seguiremo noi
L'inganno del tordo? Nel nostro primo mondo.
Là essi erano, dignitosi, invisibili,
Si muovevano sulle foglie morte senza calcarle,
Nel caldo autunnale, per l'aria che vibrava,
E l'uccello chiamava, rispondendo a
La musica non udita nascosta tra i cespugli,
E c'era lo sguardo non visto, perché le rose
Avevano l'aspetto di fiori che sono guardati.
Là essi erano, come ospiti nostri, accettati e accettanti.
Così ci muovemmo, noi e loro, cerimoniosamente,
Lungo il vuoto viale, fino al rondò di bosso,
A guardar giù nel laghetto prosciugato.
Secco il laghetto, secco cemento, orlato di bruno,
E il laghetto si riempì d'acqua alla luce del sole,
E adagio adagio si alzarono i fiori del loto,
Scintillò la superfice al cuore della luce,
Ed eccoli dietro di noi, riflessi nel laghetto.
Poi passò una nuvola, e il laghetto fu vuoto.
Via, disse l'uccello, perché le foglie erano piene di bambini
Che si nascondevano, tutti eccitati, sforzandosi di non ridere.
Via, via, via, disse l'uccello: il genere umano
Non può sopportare troppa realtà.
Il tempo passato e il tempo futuro
Ciò che poteva essere e ciò che è stato
Tendono a un solo fine, che è sempre presente.

_______________________________

(English)

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

U.S.O. Project in Blow Up Magazine #126, November 2008

U.S.O. Project, aka Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi, interviewed by Michele Coralli in Blow Up magazine.

Blow Up is a monthly Italian magazine about “rock & other contaminations”: out rock, electronica, techno, house, experimental, industrial, improv/jazz, traditional.

[blowupmagazine.com]

[subscriptions]

graphicalSound: Shapes

graphicalSound - "Shapes" is out now on Synesthesia Recordings 

Shaping the not visible. 

 

Performed by Matteo Milani. 

Produced by Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi. 

Artwork by Kirjava [kirjava.deviantart.com].

SYN-003 © 2008 Synesthesia Recordings. All rights reserved. 

TRACKLIST: 

1. State of Perfection (13.08) 
2. First contact (08.05) 
3. Water Emotions (07.33) 
4. Restless (06.47) 

RELEASE INFO: 

Artist: graphicalSound 

Title: Shapes Cat.No: SYN-003 

File under: Experimental/Electronic 

Format: Limited Edition CD-R/digital 

Release date: 10.2008 

synesthesiarecordings.bandcamp.com/album/shapes