I've said it before and I'll say it again. We live in the future: Virgin Galactic
Tonight! (Thursday September 30th):
FM: An evening of forward-thinking electronic music
Live Performances By:
Velapene Screen
Vytear
Starkey
Gtori
A.D.
Video Projection Manipulation:
The Difference Engine
The Khyber: Upstairs
56 S 2nd Street
Philadelphia PA 19106
Free 9-2AM / 21+
Drink Specials till 12
The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura - from the nicely designed and extensive ManyBooks.net.
Voters Information Guide for the 2004 US Election
Get out and vote. For all you locals, it's still a very close race in PA, MD, and NJ.
Open Source tonight at the Aqua Lounge in Philadelphia. It's an open-mike type event for laptop musicians. I'll be performing some booty shaking new stuff.
Update: Dammit. Flooded out...
More on the live music coding front:
TOPLAP Manifesto
Improvisation by Loren Schoenberg
To many, composed music and improvised music seem to be opposites, but in jazz, they merge in a unique fashion. It has been said that the best improvised music sounds composed, and that the best composed music sounds improvised. Think about it — when you hear a great classical pianist play Chopin, or a superlative actor recite Shakespeare, they give the impression that they are actually inventing these ideas in front of you. In the same sense, a master improviser will occasionally hit upon a series of phrases that seem to have been preordained — you know where they are going, even though it is being created at the instant you are hearing it. The composer Arnold Schoenberg [no relation to the author] once wrote, "Composition is slowed down improvisation," and both disciplines deal with the same challenge — how to organize and present ideas in a coherent fashion.One of the most common misconceptions about jazz is that it is spun out of the air in a totally impromptu manner. This notion exists because many small jazz groups do not read music when they play. The truth of the matter is that what those musicians are actually doing is spontaneously creating a very sophisticated form of theme and variations. Imagine that you and a group of friends decided to do your own version of a favorite story — one that you know from a book or from a film, say, The Wizard of Oz. You decide who is going to play whom. It is understood that Dorothy is going to start in Kansas, there's going to be a tornado, she's going to encounter a gaggle of crazy characters in the Land of Oz, and by the end, she will wake up in her own bed at home. The way that you get from scene to scene will be up to the actors at the moment, but they are all so familiar with the progression of events and the underlying theme/story that the improvisation adds a special kind of intensity and calls for a higher level of engagement. This frequently results in a new sense of excitement and the possibility of understanding in a new fashion this well-known story.
Recordings of my recent performances at Hologram and UCAL have been posted on the live page... including a new song "Aloeswood" that was debuted at Hologram.
Mark your calendars for October 3rd:
FE(A)ST
An electronic music bake sale!Live performances by:
* Nintariman
* Vytear
* Mall
* Starkey
* Mikronesia
* Mark Domino & Jasper Speicher
* Bilwa
* Profolyx
* Good Night Stars Good Night AirVisual projections by:
* Vostek
* The Difference EnginePlus lots of tasty treats!
Sunday October 3rd, 7pm-12am
Cheltenham Center for the Arts
439 Ashbourne Rd - Cheltenham, PA
Free admission - All agesFor directions and further information:
http://www.cheltenhamarts.org or bill@teamtechno.com
Having children significantly lowers parents’ IQs
A five-year study run by Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction proves what many in the scientific community have always suspected: having children significantly lowers the IQ of both male and female parents.
V/A LOOP01 - A free MP3 microsound compilation from internet magazine loop.cl featuring Vladislav Delay, Kim Cascone, Richard Chartier, etc...
The second in a series leading up to the election. This time, graphs.
Live at UCAL - Feedback Concert Series - Philadelphia, PA - 9/11/2004
1. Aloeswood
2. Buttons
3. Brechia
4. Slipp
5. Beetle
6. Sakai
Tonight in Philly:
thursday, september 9th.
Doc Watson's. (11th & Locust) Philly.
9pm. 21+
WHITE HOT KID + VYTEAR + STARKEY + special guest (?)
So this is what Grime sounds like... Sounds like slow drum-n-bass to me.
All uncleared sampling ruled illegal (Even tiny snippets)
To respond to Matt's open letter to the Delaware electronic music scene, I'd like to say the following:
In my estimation, the Philadelphia-region scene is as healthy as ever. Let's make a list:
- Hologram (monthly)
- FM (monthly)
- Open Source (monthly)
- Occasional Seclusiasis one-offs and Laptop Battles
- Occasional R5 Productions shows (Ulrich Schnauss next week!)
- UCAL's Feedback Electronic Music Series
- Gate to Moonbase Alpha
- The Marvelous Binary events
- Philadelphia Electronic Music and Arts Festival
- Various free improv performances
- Various dance-oriented events
There has been a ton of stuff going on recently. It has been your choice to not participate. You haven't come out to any recent shows. I offered for you to play (either as part of Team Techno or solo) at FE(A)ST, the event I am organizing in October. You turned it down.
As for the claim that it is all mutual back-slapping and we're just playing for each-other, I beg to differ. The turnouts for the recent Hologram and FM events have been very good, and there were a lot of people there I didn't recognize. (Possibly because school is now back in session?)
And, there is no "unwritten rule" that we should have new material for each performance. What other musicians would you hold to this standard? Of course it is fun to have new things to play, but there is no obligation. And, with today's software (Live, MAX/MSP, PD, FL, VSTs), it is easier to create completely new versions at each performance, which keeps it fresh and interesting.
In summary, it seems to me that you have left the local electronic music community, not the other way around.
Matt explains how to use the Kaoss Pad 2 as a MIDI controller. I post it here for reference (and so I can find it later):
• Use a 5-pin DIN cable to connect the MIDI OUT of the KP2 to the MIDI IN of your computer's MIDI adapter.I'd add to this the following:
• Hold down TAP/BPM button while pressing and holding REC/STOP button. This will put you in MIDI Edit mode.
• Once here, turn the knob to set the MIDI channel you want the KP2 to transmit on. I use channel 12 myself (in homage to WHYY), but any of the 16 should work.
• Now comes the tricky bit. The eight lights above the touchpad correspond to the various incoming/outgoing MIDI messages. Here are the important ones:4 = Touchpad X-Axis (left/right)
5 = Touchpad Y-Axis (up/down)
7 = FX DEPTH knob
8 = MUTE lever• Press and hold the button representing the physical controller you wish to use. Another number will come up on the display. This is your Controller number. Set this to something arbitrary -- for example, my X-axis is on the factory setting of 94. Repeat this for each physical controller, making sure not to use the same number twice.
• Make sure all the lights for the controllers you intend to use are ON. All the others should be OFF. The ON/OFF state is switched by simply pressing and immediately releasing each button.
• Now, in your sequencer (such as Fruityloops), set your parameters to the controller numbers. Using the above examples, if I wanted to control a bit reduction effect with the touchpad, I could load up an instance of CMT Bitcrusher, then assign the "downsampling" parameter to MIDI Channel 12, Controller 94. When I move my finger across the pad at this point, the downsampling level should move with it.
• Make sure to write down your settings! The KP2 won't save them when you turn it off.
You can save your MIDI settings so they stick even after turning off your KP2. Just hold down the "REC/STOP" button for a few seconds while in MIDI Edit mode. It will flash letting you know that the settings have been saved.
Also, I'd highly recommend turning off the controllers you're not using (probably those corresponding to buttons 1-3). When I had these turned on, my host (PD) was eventually getting confused. When I turned them off, it worked fine.
Software that allows you to exploit the processing power of your graphics card to process audio? I remember talking to someone about this possibility awhile back. Very cool.... if true.
Live improvisational programming of self-modifying perl-based generative music code. Uh, yeah... or something like that.
Miracle on Probability Street - The Law of Large Numbers guarantees that one-in-a-million miracles happen 295 times a day in America
Nice interview with Chris Clark. My favorite bit:
The drums were made from a combination of domestic sounds -- scissors, doors, chairs -- that created a backdrop for other 808 and 909 hits. Then these were put through the mash factory several hundreds of times. The bones were baked, the brittle ones were sorted from the juicy, tough ones. No, but seriously, I think most of the drums were put through all sorts of things that changed the dynamics and made them more fluid. Most "tidy" engineers like to separate each drum track out and have it perfectly EQed. Although this is admirable in a sort of old skool watch-your-grandma-knit-you-a-nice-beige-sweater sort of way, I find it doesn't excite me. What I tend to do is just jam stuff through as many boxes as I can, until everything sort of bleeds into itself and all its surrounding parts.You can combine the artifacts introduced through the mess of all these boxes, like the background noise and the crackling desk, etc, and then just remove it all until you end up with some weird goblin drowning in an acid sort of squawk. Then maybe you could feed this back into a microphone, put this through a compressor, then put this through another noise gate inside of the sequencer that is being triggered by the delay of some granular pad sound and then maybe when this delay has it feedback rate changed it might trigger something else like a hi hat or a toilet flushing or a sample of someone having an orgasm or something. So, you see, it really ends up being quite a grey area and it can be hard to remember how or why I made my sounds in the way that I did. The processes lose their novelty, and thus lose their importance as singular, autonomous techniques. They feed into each other and often are contradicted by other "themes" within a track. So they inevitably become tiny bit parts in the wider picture of the work that I am assembling.
A couple very nice CD length electronic/ambient flavored mixes from someone called Derail.
Live at Hologram - Philadelphia, PA - 9/1/2004
1. Aloeswood
2. Buttons
3. Brechia
4. Slipp
5. Beetle
6. Sakai