Issues Project Room is an innovative, exciting gallery in Brooklyn, New York. Last month, they custom-built a 15 channel hemispherical speaker system and produced what they called the Floating Points Festival. The festival featured Hisham Bharoocha, Morton Subotnick, Stephen Vitiello, Zeena Parkins, Suzanne Thorpe, C. Spencer Yeh, and Tony Conrad.


Here is a picture of some of the speakers:



Here is a great review of this years festival from blogger Obscene Jester.

Here is another review from Avant Music News.

“a choir of rotating sirens, their individually strident voices congealing into a thick mutating chord that transfixed listeners in its sticky flux.” David Toop, The Wire


the sound world of siren:

This ‘choir of rotating sirens’ creates an audio visual spectacle that is essentially a live experience. Wherever you stand in the space it sounds different. As the arms rotate, the sound pulses past the listener with a Doppler-like effect, while the cluster of closely tuned oscillators creates a rich and pervasive sound world. A minimalist phasing of the rhythmic pulses emerges as the varying speeds of rotation of the arms makes the pulsing tones phase against each other in a constantly evolving polyrhythmic structure. The closeness of the tuning of the separate tones sets off a series of amazing overtones that evoke the sense of an ethereal choir.