Sign up for our mailing list to get updates on our New Media Art and Sound Summit 2025 which is happening on September 26, 27, 28 at Museum of Human Achievement !
The full line up will be announced at the end of July !
Be an early investor in this program and buy the early bird pass! The best way to support us at this point in time is to buy the early bird pass. Thank you for thinking of us!
We are participating in I Live Here I Give Here and Amplify Austin again!
Amplify Austin Day is right around the corner. During the biggest giving event in Central Texas, residents from across our community will come together to support hundreds of local nonprofits for 24 hours, starting at 6pm on March 5 through 6pm on March 6.
This year our goal is to raise $5,000 with the help of 200 donors. These valuable funds will help us jump start our new efforts as a newly formed 501(c)(3) organization as well as support our upcoming New Media Art and Sound Summit taking place in the fall.
So how can you help? Make a donation to COTFG at AmplifyATX.org and then share the news with all of your friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors.
Amplify Austin Day is all about collective community giving. Every gift will bring us one step closer to reaching this year’s big goal and help make a huge impact on our community.
Why is it important for us to make this effort now?
Since 2003, COTFG has always maintained a focus on diversity (genre, DEI, interdisciplinary collaboration) and we have also helped many other organizations get off the ground. We have fostered collaboration among artists who would not have otherwise met and provided quality performances to audiences at very low cost.
For the first 13 years of our existence, our admin and production work was 100% volunteer based. In past decade we have endeavored to be able to compensate our staff to continue to do this valuable work in a sustainable manner.
This is our first year as our own non-profit organization which comes with much additional administrative costs. There are matching benefits from Amplify Austin and other companies per donation of each individual and many bonuses for us if you donate early!
Game Music has a long and interesting history, including a New Music Co-op concert in 2008 which spawned a still-running John Zorn Cobra ensemble called Mongoose.
Would you be interested in performing and composing Game Music in an evening-length group performance supported by the COTFG?
Game Music is rule-based and follows any sort of instructions found in games and other play-based activity. Red Light Green Light but with music? Uno cards used to prompt musicians? Flash cards directing group improvisations? Races to see who can play a musical passage the fastest? The possibilities are endless.
Some historical examples:
Musical dice attributed to Mozart
Duchamp’s toy train with bins to collect dropped musical notes.
Duchamp and Cage’s chess game on electronic chessboard
Any number of Fluxus and Scratch orchestra pieces
Xenakis’ Strategie (1962) and Kagel’s Match (1963)
John Zorn’s Cobra (1984)
Children’s clapping games
This project needs radical creativity and is open to everyone of every background and musical experience. We invite you to become a co-organizer, composer and performer.
We will provide warm up games and a workshop environment to develop games collaboratively. Bring your own games or just come to play!
The first meeting will be at Museum of Human Achievement on Friday, April 7th evening between 7pm and 9pm. All are welcome and for an eventual performance we plan to focus on games created by people in the Austin, Tx community.
The June meetings will take place at Crashbox on Bolm Rd. Thursday – June 15th Thursday – June 22nd
We’re both from the Texas/Mexico border; Joaquin from Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua and I’m from Eagle Pass, Texas. We met through a mutual friend of ours who would intermittently bump into Joaquin as a regular at La Perla on 6th and Comal. For weeks he kept hitting me up to meet this kid Joaquin who he sensed I would get along with, but I kept blowing them off for no reason (hater). When we finally met we hit it off pretty quickly and started making music together within a week or two of meeting, weird industrial collage music at first and then eventually we started to get regional with the motifs. We picked the name Nudo (which means ‘knot’ in Spanish) in reference to the unbelievably tangled network of lives and lifestyles, systems, idealogies, bulwarks, cash flows etc of the border region. Absolute in its beauty and its brutality.
What are some of the influences on your recent work? Musical or otherwise. We’re both really into instagram comedian Jesus ‘el Chanconkle’ Olguin. He can make me belly laugh and sob from the same post. We’re constantly sending his posts back and forth to each other. He’s like a construction worker from Guerrero, Coahuila who lives in San Antonio and makes vlogs of himself speeding in his truck, fishing with his kids, hounding his buddies, stuff like that. We both work doing manual labor so seeing somebody who’s encrypted his daily life into this weird performance art that can veer from lighthearted in-jokes into heartfelt posts about visiting what’s left of his late grandmother’s home in Guerrero is singularly compelling. Music wise I think with this next release we’re trying to chop tuba basslines and Tejano textures into something like footwork polka. We’re trying to find a way to make that 2/4 time signature into something that can be played as easily at a rave as it can at a cookout. Recombinant Norteño. Joaquin has been getting into programming and his understanding of this sort of harmony that is possible when everything is written correctly and pored over, when every line of code is double checked, I think that thoroughness seeps into the music. He has like 10 versions of every song with minute differences. Almost totally imperceptible to me, but really important to him. I just try and enchant the music with hyper regional samples off of Johnny Canales youtube archives and interviews with brickmakers, Tejano musicians, sound bites from news bulletins, contextual stuff like that to make it unmistakably ‘of the zone’.
What have you been listening to lately? We’ve both been listening to a ton of Cakedog (Leland Jackson) and the recently deceased Jon Hassell, as well as a lot of the kids playing corridos tumbados, which is this newer narcotized take on corridos and rancheras coupled with rap aesthetics. It’s kind of had a boom in the past year and a half. It’s beautiful to see those storied strumming patterns and rhythms get this youthful life breathed into them, a great inspiration to see these songs become huge hits with iphone voice memo recording quality and a deliberately hand played, unquantized feel about them. Junior H, Natanael Cano, Los Del Limit, are some hitterz in the genre. Shoutout to the 15 year old Lluvia Arambula, who is the best requintera in the whole scene and who recently parted ways from playing with Tony Loya to make her own tracks, and they slam. I actually cried watching a video of her playing live on Pepe Garza’s youtube channel. And of course, Joaquin and I are just both constantly deep diving into Norteño and Tejano deep cuts, nonstop studying b sides and hits from all eras and regions.
What does “avant-garde” and/or “experimental” mean to you? I think experimental is just a mode to be in. Like making decisions not based in logic or sense. Sometimes people think it has a certain predetermined sound to it, but I think it’s more about making a sort of ‘wrong’ decision and just leaning into it until it turns into the right one. We think that some of the most ‘experimental’ sonics happen with absolutely no pretension or thought really at places like bailes and pulgas. Just the idea of an entire group of people who, when they really want to cut loose, want to throw on a 6/8 timed huapango or a polka or a Norteño cut with a really garrish and opulent horn section is miles more ‘experimental’ than like, a modular synth jammer or something of that ilk, just because the headspace, the MODE, you have to be in to feel catharsis from that is more ‘experimental’. That music is like harsh noise to a certain type of person, almost totally textural and inscrutable. It’s what’s blasting out of the work trucks that drive around their neighborhoods laying tile, building houses, etc.
What work of yours would you like us to include in the post? No work to share as of yet! BUT we have an EP on the way from NYC label Gone Baby hopefully before the year is up, and our last release Maquila Egregore can be streamed at the Artfisia bandcamp/soundcloud. We hope people are still getting some juice out of that.
