The latest of edition of Vague Terrain is dedicated to celebrating the tenth anniversary of the .microsound community. Guest curated by the American composer Kim Cascone, the issue provides a range of commentary and context on "sub-atomic" musical aesthetics and a window into this globally distributed community of electronic musicians. In Cascone's own words .microsound is a fertile middle ground between "the ivory tower of sterile academia" and "the seizure-inducing din of the dance club". For those unacquainted with this zone of musical production, this collection of work provides a perfect introduction.

Featuring text & video contributions by Ben Neill,…

Kim Cascone

The latest of edition of Vague Terrain is dedicated to celebrating the tenth anniversary of the .microsound community. Guest curated by the American composer Kim Cascone, the issue provides a range of commentary and context on "sub-atomic" musical aesthetics and a window into this globally distributed community of electronic musicians. In Cascone's own words .microsound is a fertile middle ground between "the ivory tower of sterile academia" and "the seizure-inducing din of the dance club". For those unacquainted with this zone of musical production, this collection of work provides a perfect introduction.

Featuring text & video contributions by…

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After a brief hiatus, Vague Terrain is back with a new website and a fresh issue of our digital arts publication. Vague Terrain 10: Digital Dub features a variety of multimedia projects that explore the intersection of digital culture and all things dub.

This body of work contains contributions from Aguno, DubRocket, Eduardo Navas, Jonah K, NAW, Ohrwert, Segue, The Straggler and interviews with DJ Spooky and Kevin Martin (aka The Bug) conducted by Eduardo Navas and Corina MacDonald - you can view the issue here.

Vague Terrain is now moving towards augmenting the journal content with a group…

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For me, the end of May is always marked by a road trip to Montreal for the Mutek festival. I haven't taken in the entire festival since 2006 as that year I realized that I have a tolerance for about ten shows in a week, after which point I start to run up a dangerous bar tab and foam at the mouth. As luck would have it, this year's schedule condensed most of the programming I was interested in into a 48 hour window. I opted to arrive in Montreal on Thursday evening and skip the Saturday night and…

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Late last year, Paul Hegarty released Noise/Music: A History, a writing project which traces the phenomena of noise across various genres and experimental practices throughout 20th century music. After hearing about the text on Networked Music Review, I was quite excited to finally get to spend some time with this work over the last few weeks. The text is constructed as a series of short, thematic essays with the expected readings of Futurist Italy and Thatcherist England, as well as more involved analysis of proto-krautrock, the contradictions of "free" jazz and the noteworthy and enduring noise scene in Japan…

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Originally posted on Serial Consign

The creative practice of Sebastian Meissner is scattered across numerous pseudonyms and disciplines. I am a huge fan of his work as Random Inc., Autopoieses, and Klimek and I never even suspected these projects were all crafted by the same musician until 2004. I began a dialog with Meissner earlier this year when he was gracious enough to allow me to use the track "Sand" to score a short video piece. As we chatted back and forth, I learned about his photography and video (see post) and I became increasingly curious about the atmospheric…

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One of my favourite blogs over the last year has been Remix Theory, a writing project quarterbacked by media theorist and artist Eduardo Navas. Eduardo is also the author of Remediative and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture, a fantastic essay that beat-juggles a variety of paradigms that range from remix history through to data mashups. Eduardo and I have been firing questions back and forth over email for a few weeks and he has provided a compelling window into his research.

How did you get started researching the remix as a critical paradigm?

It was more a matter of…

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I capped off a really exciting week on Thursday with a micro-lecture at the first Toronto edition of talk20. Talk20 is an informal salon that operates in the same style as Pecha Kucha and Dorkbot. The gatherings are dedicated to bring together a variety of artists and designers to present work connected by a common thread. The first talk20 explored Error, and I was invited by the series coordinators Mason White and Lola Sheppard to showcase a selection of glitch art culled from the Vague Terrain archives.

When Neil Wiernik and I launched Vague Terrain in September 2005 we…

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klimek
Walking in Jerusalem
random inc.
autopoieses
bizz circuits

I've been a longtime fan of musician and artist Sebastian Meissner who releases beautiful and often unsettling ambient music under the moniker Klimek on Kompakt. I began a dialog with Sebastian when I tipped him off that I had used a Klimek track to score my Kamera Obscura project, and as we chatted back and forth I realized he was the creative force behind a number of other projects that have showed up on my radar over the years.

Sebastian is also behind or was involved in: Bizz Circuits, Autopoieses…

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Jan Jelinek
Farben
triosk

Last year I had the pleasure of inviting Jan Jelinek to Toronto to perform at the Music Gallery's X Avant festival. Jan delivered an incredibly visceral, droney set which was largely comprised of material from his Tierbeobachtung album. I'd be hard pressed to name another musician who has released as many groundbreaking and ambitious recordings over the last decade. Some artists define genres, but I think others destroy them by pushing them to their logical conclusions and breaking through these stylistic conventions into uncharted territory. Jelinek cracked open minimal house with his Farben project, and…