Gamelatron Clip at Galapagos Art Space (DUMBO, Brooklyn)

The Gamelatron (http://gamelatron.com, http://myspace.com/gamelatron), the world's first and only fully robotic Gamelan Orchestra, was developed in 2008 by LEMUR: League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (http://lemurbots.org) and composer Aaron Taylor Kuffner, aka Zemi17 (http://zemi17.net). The Gamelatron has 117 mechanical mallet arms, controlled from a laptop computer, that strike traditional Javanese and Balinese bronze xylophones, gongs, cymbals and drums. The robots themselves are augmentations of LEMUR's XyloBots and ModBots, robotic percussion instruments that performed George Antheils Ballet Mécanique at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

The Future's Stories of the Past is a suite of music written by Kuffner for the Gamelatron. The pieces tell the mythic stories of humankind's evolution from the point of view of the future's dominant inhabitants - a species of robots with human ancestry. The music draws from Kuffner's years of musical study and training in Indonesia, while maintaining continuity to his current project as Zemi17 in the Brooklyn underground electronic music scene and New York City DJ culture.

Aaron Taylor Kuffner (Zemi17) is a Brooklyn composer whose background is in experimental arts, electronic music and multi-media performance. From 2004 - 2006, with the sponsorship of the Indonesian Embassy in Washington, DC and the Indonesian Foreign Ministry Cultural Affairs Department, he lived and worked in Indonesia collecting field recordings of nature, researching classic gamelan music and performing with professional groups in Yogyakarta and Bali.

Category:

Travel & Events

Tags:

• gamelatron
• zemi17
• LEMUR

[trainguy111]

Neat! I hope kenquien checks it out!