Monthnotes May 2026
Every month or so, I share a quick digest of what I've been working on and reading. Here's the latest. More in the series here.
A couple of days ago, I played the biggest concert I've ever played to a sold out audience, so that's nice. Okay, only 50 tickets were available, but still we packed out the Malmö Wisdome for a 45-minute immersive audiovisual experience with surround audio and real-time visuals called Hadal Excursion.
The occasion was the Dome Dreaming festival, which ran in both Stockholm and Malmö - we were booked as the headline act on the Malmö leg. I keep saying "we" - it was me and my s01system collaborator Kotte Aistre doing sound, dressed as kayfabe scientists, and our pal Simon Rydén (supermarket_sallad, who I've collaborated in the past on various projects) on visuals.
It's a little hard to capture the experience in text, but basically the show was divided into three sections, with things getting progressively weirder over time. The first section was pretty rhythmic - glitchy beats, shimmering pads, with visuals depicting seasons passing in an otherworldly landscape, influenced by Roadside Picnic and Stalker. In the second section, we dove into the deep ocean to watch strange creatures swimming in the darkness, with ambient lapsteel, electroacoustic contact-mic stuff, and granular textures. Finally, in the third section, we fell into a visual space of raw geometry and I picked up my guitar and made a lot of loud/quiet/loud noise while Kotte sang gently into his contact mics and tamed feedback.
I'm really happy with how it went. It had DNA from many of the musical projects I've done over the last few years - but brought together into a coherent whole. "Every project is a pilot", says Simon, and he's right. There's more we want to do to perfect the experience, and I'm hoping we can get the show booked for more dates in more places so that can happen, but for now I'm really satisfied.
Oh, and we riso-printed some posters for the event which came out great. Here are some pics.
Also finished in the last month was Sonic Flows - another immersive audiovisual experience (I'm doing a lot of those lately), but on the web this time. It was created for a hackathon/datajam run by the Hubbard Brook experimental forest in New Hampshire.
The team on this one was assembled through the Decibels data sonification community that I founded a few years back, comprising of me (design, visualization, development), Ben Dexter Cooley (sonification, sound design, field recordings), Simon Rydén (from above, real-time generative visuals) Max Graze (sonification concept), and Micah Lewis (data analysis).
The whole experience is about 75 minutes long, taking the viewer through a year in the hydrological life of the forest. Precipitation, streamflow, and soil moisture are each mapped to different visual and sonic parameters, allowing you to see and hear how these variables relate to each other — and how they evolve in the hours following large precipitation events (i.e. storms). You don't need to sit there for 75 minutes though - I recommend clicking on the timeline to jump around to different events (storms are marked with yellow dots), and then leaving it on in the background to absorb the ambience.
We won third place in the competition, taking a special award for "best technical implementation of a multisensory experience". For me personally, it was quite fun to let someone else take the sonic steering wheel and work instead on the big picture ideas, and the UX and web design to scaffold the experience. I'm super happy with what we put together - go check it out (with sound on) at https://hbdj-decibels.netlify.app.
This month we also announced the winners of the second annual Data Sonification Awards. As regular readers will know, this is a project that I run with Sara Lenzi and Paolo Ciuccarelli aimed at recognising excellence in the field of data sonification.
Unlike most awards shows, it's not competitive - we gather together experts in the three categories (arts, communication, analysis) to establish a set of criteria, and then three judges assess each entry against those criteria. If two of the three judges agree that the criteria are met, then the work is awarded. So in that way, it's more like a Michelin star than an Oscar or a Grammy.
This year we gave out 25 awards, and the nice thing about the system is that I can enter my own work without it being a big conflict of interest (as other people are judging it). So I'm happy to say that my Sonification Machine project was awarded in the process.
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We'll be opening entries for the next round of awards towards the end of this year, but before that we're gonna put in some work to rebuild the awards website and make it a bit more flexible and cheaper to maintain than it is right now. Look out for more on that later this year.
Quite excited that I've been asked to interview Rob Hopkins as part of Malmö Democracy Week. Rob is the founder of the Transition Towns movement, working to bring communities together to sketch out visions of the future that people can get excited about. I'm very excited to read his new book, How to Fall in Love With the Future, beforehand.
I've been listening to System of a Down guitarist Daron Malakian walking Rick Rubin through the history and evolution of metal music on his Tetragrammaton podcast (part 1, part 2 - or listen in your fav podcast app), and even though I've never been much of a metaller it's hugely enjoyable. There's just something lovely about hearing someone who's both deeply knowledgeable and deeply passionate talk about a subject at length. Plus, there are heaps of musical examples. Highly recommended.
That's more or less it for today. It's been a very output-heavy time recently, and in June I'm gonna be doing the aforementioned interview, and running another Pixlar o Ljud showcase event, so that probably won't change. After that, though, I'm taking a month off and will hopefully get a chance to relax and do a bit less stuff for a while (yeah, right).
See you next month.
Duncan