Bloc Jam, collective musical composition

Bloc Jam from missmoun on Vimeo.

All together now… In June 2010, as the MUTEK festival filled the city's cultural venues with electronic music lovers, Bloc Jam took the magic to the streets, transforming the facade of an 8 story building in downtown Montreal into a game of improvised musical composition collectively composed by the public.

As the evening went by, passebys called in to contribute individual notes and beats to the gigantic colorful projection. These submitted rhythms where instantaneously translated into "tracks" of animated colors on the wall and an ever evolving soundtrack at the end of the phone line.

A project by Mouna Andraos & Melissa Mongiat, with Rob Seward and Kelsey Snook.

On music royalty

Martin Klimas: What does music look like?

Like a 3-D take on Jackson Pollock, the latest work by the artist Martin Klimas begins with splatters of paint in fuchsia, teal and lime green, positioned on a scrim over the diaphragm of a speaker. Then the volume is turned up. For each image, Klimas selects music — typically something dynamic and percussive, like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Miles Davis or Kraftwerk — and the vibration of the speaker sends the paint aloft in patterns that reveal themselves through the lens of his Hasselblad. Klimas rose to prominence in the art world four years ago for a series of photos that captured porcelain figurines just as they shattered. For this series, Klimas spent six months and about 1,000 shots to produce the final images from his studio in Düsseldorf, Germany. In addition to the obvious debt owed to abstract expressionism, Klimas says his major influence was Hans Jenny, the father of cymatics, the study of wave phenomena. The resulting images are Klimas’s attempt to answer the question “What does music look like?”

Julie Bosman