Dom Allen and Florian Hecker at Urbanomic

It's hot summer Saturday night; and at the Urbanomic studio at the Old Lemonade Factory in Falmouth. Dom Allen set up his complex sonic devices, handmade oscillators and modified toys in the studio and wandered off to take the air , leaving the knob twiddling to whoever wandered into the space. His instruments are messy, grainy, analoguey, and chaotic, it's hard to tell which button or switchboard jack does what, there's the image of a pin-up model etched into an exposed circuit board, with electrical contacts inviting you to probe her body surface for erogenous zones and glitch points.


Later everyone sits in lines of chairs for an hour-long talk with the classical electronic composer Florian Hecker, followed by a performance of his 4-track sound recording Rearranged Playlist as Auditory Stream Segregation. The Urbanomic crew had put a lot of sweat and tears into installing a special sound rig for this performance, but I have to say the show itself struck me pretty much as Stockhausen with disco lights.


Much as I love Urbanomic, flashing lights and noisy noises, I have profound ideological differences with the elitist art-music tradition that Hecker is coming from, so I did a quick bit of videoing and then hit the road.

Urbanomic party in Falmouth

Out to Falmouth last night for the EARTH MOVES launch party of Collapse V at the Urbanomic former Lemonade Factory. Collapse is journal of philosophy research and development and issue V has the theme of The Copernican Imperative.

Urbanomic is a lemony and effervescent gallery 'n' performance space. Brendan Byrne's video Another Day - shot on 16mm using a mechano-based camera rostrum - is running in portrait format on one wall.


The time-lapsed constellations form a suitable visual accompaniment to the space computersounds of Timothy Crowley (somebody tells me he is a grandnephew of Aleister) followed by looped live vocals through Kaoss pads and more laptops with chilly space beats from Oddstep Deployment Unit. All this followed by the Casio sound of Hedluv and Passman (straight outta druth):




I like this place, must come here again.