Michael Vorfeld is a very original German percussionist and sound installation artist. His Light Bulb Music was developed during live performances using a collection of colored amplified light bulbs and electrical apparatus. The electricity is used to make the glass bulbs resonate, however briefly, and the music arises from the multiple clicks and pops of bulbs and electrical switches. Vorfeld plays on the bulb’s fragility on one side, and the danger emanating from his less than secure electric installation on the other.

-- DESCRIPTION FROM "RADICAL GLASS MUSIC #3 ON CONTINUO'S WEBLOG

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The cloud chamber bowls themselves are sections of 12-gallon Pyrex carboys, suspended from a redwood frame on ropes. These difficult-to-find and impossible-to-tune glass gongs are played very carefully by a percussionist who risks the anguish of splintered disaster. The original bowls were found at the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, and had been used as cloud-chambers to trace the paths of sub-atomic particles.

-- DESCRIPTION FROM THE HARRY PARTCH INSTRUMENT COLLECTION

Composer Harry Partch demonstrates his Cloud Chamber Bowls in the 1958 documentary Music Studio below:

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The classic experimental music band, The Glass Orchestra, performs in 1979 with the original members. Eric Cadesky, Paul Hodge, John Kuypers, Miguel Frasconi, and Marvin Green. An excerpt from the CBC-TV show "Music to See."

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Meredith Monk, composer, singer, director, choreographer, performs "Our Lady of Late" at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado on July 23, 1975. Monk's vocals are accompanied by wine glass and percussion.

Recording from the Naropa Poetics Audio Archives on The Internet Archive. Image above sourced from "Radical Glass Music #3" on continuo's weblog

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Last Midi Background (LMB) is a project by Sebastian Schmieg, a Berlin-based student focusing on new media and stuff.

It is an internet radio, a cyberspace shuttle, and a kind of archive. LMB takes you on a journey through an almost forgotten web that is loud, colorful, often "personal", and doesn't care about standards. Though it might be forgotten by many, some parts of it are still there, waiting to be explored. And maybe we can learn something along the way.

LMB plays a continous stream of MIDI music. However these aren't just random tunes, instead the songs are taken from websites where they are being played as background music.

While playing a song the LMB cyberspace shuttle flies through a stream of images that have been taken from the website you're (kind of) listening to.

-- FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT

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The stage at St. Petersburg's Sergey Kuryokhin Modern Art Center was set for a blast of live electronic music, with seating for ten performers, each station equipped with samplers, laptops, and electric guitars. As the audience arrived the musicians tinkered with the controls; one stood near a huge glass jug, adjusting wires submerged in its murky liquid. But when the appointed time for the concert's start arrived, the performers retreated to the wings, and recorded music came up and continued for the next twenty minutes. It seemed almost like a wry comment on the detachment of the physical presence of the performer from the source of sound in electronic music. But in fact it was an unannounced presentation of past issues of Tellus, the 1980s journal of experimental sound produced by Harvestworks, selected by director Carol Parkinson. As it faded, the musicians took their places, at last, to perform Third Eye Orchestra, a piece written and conducted by Hans Tammen. It was a controlled improvisation, where Tammen lifted numbered cards indicating which of the score's instructions should be read at that moment. The musicians, all local recruits, visibly relished both the spontaneity and the monstrously loud sound that only an ensemble of many amplified electronic instruments can produce.

The Harvestworks evening was part of the program of the third edition of Cyberfest, an annual festival conceived and organized by Anna Frants, a New York-based artist and gallerist, Marina Koldobskaya, director of the St. Petersburg branch of Russia's National Center for Contemporary Art.

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Produced by the Artists' Television Network, the Live! Show ran in 1979 and from 1982-1983 on Manhattan’s Cable channel J. A weekly program overseen by Jaime Davidovich, the Live! Show was a variety show, featuring performances and videos by a host of New York downtown artists. Below you will find the second episode, which aired on December 28, 1979, with appearances by Jaime Davidovich, Carole Ann Klonarides, John Sanborn, Kit Fitzgerald, Lucio Pozzi, Tomiyo Sasaki, Stuart Sherman, The Social Climbers, and Youth in Asia. A playlist of other episodes may be found here.

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TV Party, hosted by Glenn O'Brien, ran from 1978 to 1982 on public access cable TV in New York City. A documentary about the show came out a few years ago, which renewed interest in the show and cemented its legacy. Below is an excerpt from the larger essay "THE TV PARTY STORY", where O'Brien reflects on the concept behind TV Party.

TV Party wasn't based on the Johnny Carson type talk show as much as it was based on Hugh Hefner's shows. Hef's Playboy's Penthouse premiered in 1960 and Playboy After Dark appeared in 1969. The format of both shows was a sophisticated cocktail party, not a desk and sofa set up. It was a fantasy of being at a super-hip, super exclusive jet set party. Hef wore a tux and there were always vixens aplenty on set as well as groovy guests like Sara Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and Lenny Bruce.

I loved the concept, compared to the stiff format of the Tonight Show. TV Party was Playboy Penthouse twenty years later and with no money. But TV Party was meant to be much more than a regular old talk show. It was meant to be art and it was also meant to be a political party. That's why you see all of those pictures of Lenin and Engels and Marx and Stalin and Mao hanging on the walls. We were doing "socialist realist TV."

"TV Party is the show that's a cocktail party but which could also be a political party." That was the slogan. My idea was that socialism meant going out every night, and that social action started with socializing. I think we were trying to inject a sort of tribal element into things. That's what happens ...

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Don't have access to a time machine, but want a taste of the Kitchen's programming during the late 1970s? Look no further than the Essential Repertoire Festival, which begins tonight and runs through the weekend at Issue Project Room. Organized by the experimental music series Darmstadt, the festival will restage works originally performed at the Kitchen's New Music New York concerts from 1979, curated by Rhys Chatham. Composers slated to present their 1970s-era work at Essential Repertoire include “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Connie Beckley, David Van Tieghem, Jill Kroesen, Jon Gibson, Ned Sublette, Peter Gordon, Peter Zummo, Petr Kotik, Phill Niblock, and a special performance of Meredith Monk's Dolmen Music by the M6. Check the full schedule here.

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