A year to the day after last playing here, I played again, in and among various local modular synth musicians. Wonderful stuff, though my set suffered from an experiment with my own handheld speaker (from Boombotix), which...issued some horrible squealing, piercing feedback that was difficult to work with artistically. That said, there were some compelling parts of the set...though unfortunately an interaction between macOS Sierra click rejection (anticipating the new MacBook Pro), and a sluggishness between the OS and good old Pd Extended meant that my "start recording" click didn't register. So nothing got saved, sadly. Time to redevelop the patch in Pd Vanilla, I think. Or Max/MSP, which I keep meaning to do.
Duluth's own Tim Kaiser was on tour, and came through the 'burgh, and local noise-bending genius Echo Lightwave Unspeakable was able to set him up with a show at the Black Forge, so we did an evening of all three of us. My set was a struggle against one or two persistent frequencies with the PA; Jonathan's set was brilliant and concise, and Tim's unfolded hypnotically with his compelling consistency. Great stuff. (My set's out as Interstellar Radio.)
I opened up this show of several dark ambient and improv musicians from around Pittsburgh, Denver, and Chicago, and it was a good evening. My set involved a struggle to keep generating feedback with the mics (my sense was that the sound system was kept a bit low because of the potential for runaway feedback loops), but it ended up a bit ambient in a good way. Locals White Reeves and Shy Kennedy (of the mighty Horehound) were really impressive atmosphere builders, as were bassist CJ Boyd and Sister Grotto. Great stuff.
The year is off to a musical start with a show at this excellent coffeehouse in the Allentown neighborhood of Pittsburgh. I set up facing the PA, on the floor, and the result was good--I got a variety of sounds, even though I wasn't able to get quite the range of the house show back in November. Great coffee and a fine sound system here, too.
After the recent snwv show, I was ready to do another...until showtime, when I mistakenly killed my input with a bad filter setting, and then couldn't figure out what I did. I burned way more time than I should have, and while the end result (with an older version of the Pd patch) wasn't bad, my episode of user-failure was disappointing. Still, the result may be worth listening to.
Over a year since my last live show...I haven't been idle, what with the weekly composition practice, but...it's not quite the same as walking the tightrope of live performance. This particular house show was a great way to ease back in--friendly setting and audience, lots of different noise acts (some from NY, Buffalo, some local), ranging from a guy standing on an amplified metal box and screaming, to the exquisite work of VWLS from Buffalo, whose varispeed cassette works were phenomenally impressive. My set (taking advantage of our host's handheld Bose speaker) landed on the more ambient side of the spectrum, and was so good that I put it out. Would play again!
The first snwv show in a while--and since I'd spent a lot of time at the Deep Listening conference fighting mic feedback, I decided to embrace feedback for the show. The only input was two microphones, and it worked really well--I got lots of different frequencies shifting all over the place, ranging from swoops to noise. It was so good that I put it out, in both real-time and 1/4-speed versions.
I had two snwv installations during the First International Conference on Deep Listening July 12-14, at EMPAC at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, organized by Pauline Oliveros and the Deep Listening Institute. This one was a bit of a challenge--the pieces were scheduled for installation in a mastering studio, which was well designed to prevent obvious resonant frequencies through angled windows, sound absorption material, and the like. Even so, I was able to find enough resonance to make the pieces work. The first version uses the resonances of the longer dimension of the room; the second uses the shorter.
The 2013 First International Conference on Deep Listening was for me a transformative event. Many events involving music and sound (concerts, performances, installations) proceed with the understanding that listening will take place, but this conference was subtly yet crucially different, inviting us to turn our attention to the act of listening itself.
Bunita Marcus's composition workshop, in which the act of composition was an act of guided imaginative listening. We were encouraged to accept what we imagine, without "correcting" it. Several people offered their results, and in combination, it was beautiful. It was a ratification of intuitive ways of working, and an invitation to participate in a liberation of the mind's ear.
I found Seth Horowitz's keynote on the neurological phenomenons of sound, to be immensely valuable, explaining how we experience the world's sounds neurologically, the speed with which we process it, and how fundamental hearing is to us as living beings.
It was rewarding to be able to meet similarly inclined music and sound practitioners and to experience their work. Jay Kreimer's work with sensors and software was entertaining and surprising, and Ted Krueger's work with steel plates as resonators was not only conceptually compelling but also fascinating listening.
Tom Bickley's participatory instruction-based score 7 Hums 7 Times created a vast, quiet vocal cluster that was phenomenally beautiful, and combining it with everyone's slow convergence in the auditorium made the experience profoundly moving.
Eager as I was to hear Anne Warde's presentation, the way she handed a PowerPoint crash was emblematic of the quiet, accepting resilience of the conference, in which we were asked to disperse and walk around the space, just listening and moving, being aware of being in our bodies. As someone who's played in clubs, I think it's rare for an audience to be participating through listening instead of talking. Tomie Hahn's banding workshop was similar, grounding us in our bodies, an immensely important practice for those of us (myself included) who live primarily in our heads.
At breakfast one morning, someone noticed that the table was vibrating, and a bunch of us put our ears to it to hear it and identify the note. (It was a C, as it turns out.)
Impulse, an interactive piece at the third NOISE event in Pittsburgh on April 7, 2013. The piece was installed in a room covered in bubble wrap. I used four room mics into a Pure Data patch that processed each mic with a pitch shifter, panning algorithm (in quad), and two time delays. All parameters (transposition, chunk size, pitch shift delay, pan, 2-bus delay, regeneration, delay level) were set randomly by the system, at intervals that were themselves updated randomly. At times, the system would tip into oscillation. Here's an interview in which I discuss the piece.
