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ELECTRONICOS FANTASTICOS! is a project where retired consumer electronics are resuscitated as instruments, new ways to play music are invented, and all kinds of people are invited to be orchestrated with the artist and musician Ei Wada. Once we dismantle old consumer electronics, we realize the condensed wisdom of pioneers and the interesting and mysterious scientific/physics phenomenon hidden inside these objects. By transferring these into electronic musical instruments, a sound like a groan of electronics begins to echo. Old consumer electronics come to life as yokai-supernatural creatures from Japanese folklore, sometimes they appear as spirits of abandoned tools.

"Sampling is a production tool that is fundamental to electronic music. A seemingly simple act - taking small bits of prerecorded sound, often from an existing composition, and incorporating them into a new piece of music - has in the past few decades proven to be a revolutionary cultural force. An essential element for the development of hip-hop in the 1980s, as well as for electronic music scenes concurrently taking shape around the world, sampling helped lower the barrier of entry for potential music makers: No longer did a producer need studio access or a group of musicians to make full and rich productions. Instead, they could dig for loops and breaks from a wealth of existing material and use the pieces they found to create new compositions. The process also allowed the artists to insert themselves into a different type of musical timeline, traversing and connecting decades of sounds in a way that would have been impossible before the dawn of sampling."

"Electronic music has been around for about a century, and women (however ignored) have been a part of the movement from the beginning. Sisters With Transistors - a film with an excellent title - tells the story of electronic music's female pioneers, starting with the Lithuanian Clara Rockmore, who performed solo in the 1920s at the New York Philharmonic with a theremin, one of the very first electronic instruments. "

Circuit-bending is an electronic art which implements creative audio short-circuiting. This renegade path of electrons represents a catalytic force capable of exploding new experimental musical forms forward at a velocity previously unknown. Anyone at all can do it; no prior knowledge of electronics is needed. The technique is, without a doubt, the easiest electronic audio design process in existence.

"For over a year now, London has been a simmering site of dormant musical gatherings and suspended physical proximities, prompting me to wonder what's happened to the visceral, tactile energies through which collective musical formations gain so much of their social and emotional force. As Ben Assiter points out, the migration of electronic dance music online during the pandemic accelerated currents that were already underway with the ubiquity of livestream platforms like Boiler Room. With physical assembly prohibited, the dematerialization of collective musical experience gave rise to a whole new level of face-to-screen "participation," as solitary DJs began broadcasting live from empty clubs to bedroom audiences, who in turn performed "ironic dance floor interaction[s]" in the chat boxes."

"The music on Quartz Locked, Deep City Wandering, was sourced from non-musical, professional electronic appliances recorded back in 1987 and preserved on a C-90 cassette until this day. The original sounds were mainly derived from two electronic devices: a hacked, roadside traffic signal data logger, on the one hand, and a physician's pager, on the other. Wires were soldered to various parts of the data logger's motherboard and connected to a tape recorder's audio inputs, emitting a rich assortment of glitch sounds, static noises and buzzing a-plenty. A physician's pager, smuggled from the local hospital, was similarly hacked and manipulated in order to produce high frequency buzzing noises with striking modulation/demodulation effects. Both devices were eventually plugged together to create additional random interference patterns, while occasional tape manipulation and varispeed effect were also applied during the recording process."

"The "Sonògraf" is an electronic audiovisual instrument. Thought as a music learning tool for primary schools, it allows the drawing to be transformed into music, turning gestural strokes and geometric figures into electronic sounds. A set of buttons and potentiometers allow live manipulation of the "sonification" characteristics of the drawing, making it possible to speed up, slow down or pause the resulting music, as well as decide its scales and tonalities."

"In 1978, Brian Eno released Ambient 1: Music for Airports, a landmark album in ambient and electronic music. Although it wasn't the first ambient album by any means, it was the first album explicitly released as an 'ambient music album'. The album was essentially a continuation of Eno's experimentation with the tape machine as a compositional tool, as well as his exploration of generative music, music created by systems. In this article I'll discuss how Music for Airports was created, I'll break down and recreate the tracks 2/1 and 1/2, and hopefully give you some ideas about how to adopt this approach yourself."

"Until the arrival of the phonograph nearly 140 years ago, the only way to have music in the home was to perform it. Royals and the wealthy supported composers and performers to provide entertainment in their manor houses and castles; their residences often featured music rooms, where instrumentalists were presented front and center, like artwork on display. Other abodes placed the musicians in a separate room or loft, acoustically connected to grand halls to provide discreet accompaniment for banquets and events. Oddly enough, that dichotomy-show of the music, or hide it-still exists, even in our modern, electronic era. "

"Sounds carry intelligence. If you are too narrow in your awareness of sounds, you are likely to be disconnected from your environment. Ears do not listen to sounds; the brain does. Listening is a lifetime practice that depends on accumulated experiences with sound; it can be focused to detail or open to the entire field of sound. Octogenarian composer and sound art pioneer Pauline Oliveros describes the sound experiment that led her to found an institute related to Deep Listening, and develop it as a theory relevant to music, psychology, and our collective quality of life. Pauline is a composer and accordionist who significantly contributed to the development of electronic music. The culmination of her life-long fascination with music and sound is what inspired the practice of Deep Listening, the art of listening and responding to environmental conditions. As a Professor of Practice in the Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, she produced highly regarded work as a composer and improviser. Pauline's 1989 recording, Deep Listening, is considered a classic in her field."

Electronic Musical Resources: Articles

"I am hard of hearing as well as an electronic music enthusiast. I have always been an observer and I have always seen that my companions' reactions to the music we listen to together are different from mine. I tried with all my might to feel what they felt - with poor results. Which made me sad and irritated. Would I never be able to fully appreciate the aesthetics of sound? Eventually, I began to look more deeply into my experiences."

"Artistic innovations spurred by curiosity rather than by intellectual principles arguably produce more compelling and enduring breakthroughs. And Pauline Oliveros was undeniably curious when it came to music. By the time she was 9, she picked up the accordion; soon, she learned to play the tuba and the French horn. She quickly proved to be a highly versatile and accomplished instrumentalist. The capacity that really shaped Oliveros's career as an experimental composer and electronic-music pioneer, however, was not her skill as a musician per se but her awareness of the broader sonic field that surrounded her as she played."

"Cornelius Cardew was a fascinating figure. Both in his life, and through his music, he posed questions with which I find myself in equal sympathy and conflict. He is undeniably one of the most important figures in the Post-War British avant-garde. Cardew, by all accounts, was a prodigy. During his early twenties he worked at the highest levels of performance. In 1958 (age 22) he won a scholarship to study at the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, and was promptly asked by Karlheinz Stockhausen to serve as his assistant. Stockhausen's recollections of Cardew are drenched in respect. He was one of the few people whom he allowed to work on his scores unsupervised. During the late 50's, influenced by John Cage and other members of his generation, Cardew abandoned Serialism and began to compose scores utilizing indeterminacy and experiment. It was this period of his work for which he is most remembered, and from which Treatise (our subject) comes. In 1967 he joined the iconic free-improvisation collective AMM with Lou Gare, Eddie Prévost, Keith Rowe and Christopher Hobbs, which advanced his sense of compositional possibility. The following year with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons he formed the equally important Scratch Orchestra, which grew into a large ensemble, preforming over the following four years."

"In 1948, Moses Asch founded Folkways Records with a self-proclaimed mandate to record the sounds of the entire world. From the Sounds of North American Frogs to Speech After the Removal of the Larynx, Folkways documented the audible nooks and crannies of existence on hundreds of LPs produced by field recordists, scientists, and experimentalists probing the margins of the human soundscape. Seventy-five years later, electronic music duo Matmos have diced, looped, stretched, and recontextualized these recordings on their new album Return to Archive, which was assembled entirely from the so-called non-musical sounds released on Folkways. On just the album's first track, dolphins, beetles, telephones, humans stretching the limits of their vocal cords, a shortwave radio, and metal balers co-mingle in a fantasia of sound both everyday and extraordinary. Each track on Return to Archive morphs its source material into something completely unexpected, honoring and expanding on Folkways' legacy of sonic exploration. Featuring Evicshen and Aaron Dilloway."

"The music of Prélude Au Sommeil was intended as sleep-inducing and tranquilizing for use in mental hospitals. It is unclear if the copies pressed actually had been distributed to mental hospitals or if the whole story was just a fantastical joke on the part of Mr. Perrey. This album is known as a precursor of what would later became known as "ambient music", 20 years before Brian Eno, the Kosmic Courier and the American minimalists."

"Layered Memories: Searching For Sound With Yosi Horikawa follows the 2011 Red Bull Music Academy grad as he does field recordings on the World Heritage island of Yakushima and, later, plays the resulting music on speakers he has built himself. It's a behind-the-scenes look at how one of electronic music's most exciting talents transforms the everyday into something extraordinary."

"The history of field recording is central to the development of electronic music, with artists - from Eno through Scanner to Burial - drawing on its theories and strategies to create distinctive soundworlds. Lawrence English - boss of the long-running Room40 imprint, and the man behind this year's exceptional Wilderness of Mirrors - presents this beginner's guide to the discipline, including a rundown of crucial recent releases. "

"SOUNDIAL is the latest brainchild of sound installation team Jonathon Kirk and Lee Weisert (aka PAML; the Portable Acoustic Modification Laboratory). The installation aims to engage the public community with an arresting new manifestation of a public timepiece. Using ultrasonic, hyper-directional speakers, three rotating "beams" of newly-composed electronic music are transmitted in an outdoor public space. Due to the unique sound-transmitting mechanism of the ultrasonic speakers, these narrowly focused sound-beams are only audible to people directly in the path of the speaker."

""Times3" is the latest work by a veteran composer, vocalist, multimedia artist and "wild virtuoso.""