In our 6th Mixtape, Floating Spectrum is presenting a selection of music specially put together to resonate with our audience; music that utilizes data from our universe, such as sounds of two merging black holes, earthquake or planetary data sonification, and many otherworldly songs that take you through a peculiar journey.

Floating Spectrum is the moniker for Taiwan-born, Berlin-based composer and audio technologist, Mei-Fang Liau. Her fantastic debut album, A Point Between, is coming out in Temporary residence this September. And it’s been crafted from a combination of synthesizers, everyday household objects, and unique software synthesizers made by Liau herself.

Originally inspired by a dance performance for which Mei-Fang that explored the recurring cycles of nature. Liau also relied heavily on a self-made, fractal-inspired software synthesizer called Polyphylla, which simulates the way in which nature creates very complex and organic forms. It allowed Liau to create slowly evolving textures and sounds with complex dynamics. Furthermore, for one of the tracks, Liau built a generative sound system that turns visual data into sound. In this hybrid system, sensitively fluctuating analogue signals, fine-tuned data analysis, and human intuition perform together as one coherent living being.

She shares that she wanted to make a mix that would be interesting to audiences of CLOTMagazine, somewhere between art, science and technology. Most tracks are tech-driven, otherworldly, and some of them utilize some sort of planetary data. You can hear the sounds of merging black holes, abstract representation of earthquake motion data, planetary motion in our solar system, etc. and she goes even a step further: In my album, there are high dynamics among songs and within each song - surprises, contrasts, changes of moods, as if it was a sonic narrative. I tried to achieve similar dynamics with the mixtape to keep the listeners engaged throughout the journey. Many tracks have a blurry boundary between organic and digital sounds, which is also what I attempted to do in my album.

Tracklist:

Visible Cloaks - Terrazzo

Floating Spectrum - The early green outburst

Micah Frank - Tectonic (excerpt, earthquake data sonification)

Tim Hecker - Live Room

Tom Hall - Spectra

JAB - Planner's Beauty

Children of Alice - Liminal

Mind over mirrors - Vermillion Pink

William Basinski - On Time Out of Time (excerpt, uses sounds of two massive merging black holes, 1.3 billion years ago)

Victor Bombi - Me estoy marchando

Isao Tomita - Arabesque Nr. 1 (written by Debussy)

Laurie Spiegel - Kepler's harmony of the worlds (excerpt, sonification of the motion frequency of planets in our solar system)

Vangelis - Albedo 0.39