I recorded the set on my Sony PCM-D50 and applied some subtle mastering with Ableton Live. I’m pretty fond of how the music and the recording turned out other than the fact that the bass clarinet is too low in the mix.

Here are the three tracks of improvised music from the evening adding up to around fifty two minutes. If you like experimental improvised music be prepared to have a long and challenging listen.
 

Davis-Glenn-Keston Track 1
Davis-Glenn-Keston Track 2
Davis-Glenn-Keston Track 3

Ostracon Video from Unearthed Music on Vimeo.

My project Ostracon (John Keston and Graham O’Brien) has been selected to perform at the In/Out Digital Performance Festival in New York this September, 2010. The schedule hasn’t been finalized yet, but we’ll be playing either on the 17th or 18th of the month at the Tank Theater, 354 West 45th Street, New York, NY 10036. Last year’s lineup included Monome creator, tehn (Brian Crabtree), and Peter Kirn of Creative Digital Music. From the In/Out Festival website.

In/Out is an annual festival that features leading performers, developers, artists, and tinkerers of the digital design community in hopes bridging the gap between the forum based world and the stage. The festival seeks to bring digitally driven performances into the limelight with two full days of workshops and performances.

This video is a live studio piece shot by Ai student Josh Clos, and recorded at Ai Minnesota by John Keston and Graham O’Brien. It’s representative of the music that we are generating during our live performances. For more checkout the Ostracon tag here on ACB, or visit our bio on Unearthed Music.

This round of Experimental Music Mondays features Stuart DeVaan from Savage Aural Hotbed, Davis-Glenn-Keston (Jon Davis, Tim Glenn, and John Keston), and Ostracon (John Keston and Graham O’Brien). Usually the last Monday of the month, this instance has been bumped up this Monday, July 19, 2010 where you will find us at the Kitty Cat Klub in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Expect to receive a brain-full of beautiful, grating, mysterious, haunting, mechanical, and organic sounds.

I’m working on a MaxMSP performance patch that uses a Wacom tablet to draw light onto dancers holding light sensitive instruments. Last night we decided to apply sound to the strokes to give the illustrator another way to interact in the piece. Currently the pressure from the pen is translated into the volume and the velocity is translated into pitch. It will need some fine tuning, but I think you can get the idea from the video.

On Wednesday, July 7, 2010 my piece Chromatic Textures was shown at 6X6 #5: Mystery, an exhibition at Ciné Lab in Athens, Georgia. My work was accepted along with five other artists, “…including Denton Crawford’s eyeballs, Aaron Oldenburg’s plunge into asphyxia, and a performance streamed live over the Internet from California.” Here’s my abstract for Chromatic Textures.

Chromatic Textures is a study on the synesthetic nature of our senses of sound and sight. Video input is used to produce generative musical phrases. The visual media is analyzed by the GMS (Gestural Music Sequencer) to create the musical forms in real-time. The software includes adjustable probability distribution maps for the scale and rhythm. Adjusting these settings allows familiar structures to emerge. The settings chosen for this piece cause notes within a particular scale to play more frequently, however, it is still possible for any note within the twelve-tone chromatic system to occur. As a result, dissonant or blue notes can be heard at rare instances throughout the piece.

The process for this piece involved shooting a collection of hand-held, macro-focused videos of various objects and textures. The intent was to frame high-contrast images that would work well with my analysis algorithms built into the GMS and create a sense of mystery in keeping with the theme of the exhibition. After choosing the best shots from the collection, I edited them together and applied processing such as converting the majority of the clips to black and white, and slight adjustments to the brightness and contrast. I captured the musical forms in real-time as the visual media was analyzed by the GMS. Next I selected short phrases from the generated music and looped them on separate layers for emphasis. Finally I automated the processing to enhance the dynamics in the generative composition.

Although it might seem that this work represents computer generated music, my process maintains a dominant human influence by gathering information from organic, time-based, visual media and using it to produce dynamic musical phrases. The GMS is an instrument with a camera operator as the musician. This method aims to satisfy my curiosity for “auralizing” visuals as opposed to visualizing sound.

“6X6 is a monthly media arts event in Athens, Georgia, a cross between an art show and a film festival, first Wednesday of the month at Ciné Lab. Six curated short video, film, performance, sound, or other time-based combination works.” For more about the 6X6 event visit their site at hexadic.blogspot.com.

Next is Siamese Bug made up of drummer TIm Glenn and guitarist Jeremy Ylversaker. Tim Glenn (HeatdeatH, Squidfist) and Jeremy Ylvisaker (Alpha Consumer, Dosh, Andrew Bird) have played together in Fog and Ourmine, Individually they’ve performed everywhere from Sydney Opera Hall to your nightmares. Expect to hear the sounds from contact mics on torn cymbals and vintage transistor interference through guitar pickups and pedal arrays.

The final act of the evening is by noise masters Juhyo. “JUHYO is a collaboration between Minneapolis artists Brian Kopish (Surrounded) and Bill Henson (Oblong Box). Together they create horrifyingly beautiful soundscapes of pure noise. Armed with an array of homemade oscillators, delay units, resonators, samplers and sheer volume; aimed with composition, discipline and conscious, focused intent; JUHYO exists as an entity of creative expression, freedom, subtle beauty and eardrum bleeding power.”

I have converted a Max patch I build into a Max for Live device as an exercise for learning M4L. The original patch is a monophonic step sequencer that I wrote about in Step Sequencer Built in MaxMSP. I ran into some difficulties converting the patch along the way. Although it worked perfectly in Live, for some reason it was causing Live to crash after saving. It was also not storing the values in the Live number boxes, drop-downs, and sliders. The problem went away when I went through the tedious process of recreating the patch rather than copying and pasting my original work. This is a little worrisome since the next conversion will not be so simple (Multitouch Rotary Dial and X-Y Granular Exploration). Here’s an audio example with a little reverb to give you an idea of what it does.

M4L StepSequencer

CreativeApplications.net has posted an article about the GMS. If you’re not familar, CreativeApplications.net (CAN) is a blog founded by Filip Visnjic. From the CAN about page:

Aim of CreativeApplications.Net is to bring together applications that challenge the ways how we share and engage with information. By scouting the web, CAN brings you best in creative app development and thinking. CreativeApplications.Net is platform independent. We look at OSX, Windows, Linux, iPhone, Web Apps, Flash, Physical Interfaces, Max MSP development, Processing and many others.

Filip was a speaker at Flashbelt 2010. During his presentation he showed a variety of fascinating work by his students and more featured on CAN. I was lucky enough to introduce him at the conference and experience his session. Checkout CreativeApplications.net for more.

Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure of introducing André Michelle at the Flashbelt conference in Minneapolis. André is the lead developer of Audiotool. If you’re not familiar with Audiotool it is, in my view, the best web based audio production application I have ever seen. The bulk of André’s presentation involved showing Flash built demos of advanced audio functionality, like granular synthesis, guitar modeling, and using physical modeling to influence sounds and sequences.

Toward the end of his presentation he brought Audiotool into the mix. Audiotool is an application built in Flash. The nearest thing I could compare it to is Reason. The biggest difference is that it runs on the web. This allows for social media opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. Instruments built into Audiotool, include very convincing emulation of several popular Roland devices, like the TR-808 and the TB-303. It also includes a modular synth called Pulverisatuer and a number of effect processors.

Finally, there is an audio track module that allows you to bring in samples stored within a pretty big library provided by Loopmasters. You can’t bring in your own samples yet, but André assured us it was in the works.

André played me a few examples of some of his favorite user generated tracks from Audiotool and I was very impressed with the sound quality and scope. It’s easy to dismiss a web based audio application as a novelty, but the community around it is creating some totally professional sounding stuff that can’t be ignored.

I’ll be performing solo material under my Ostraka moniker. Unicorn Dream Attack is also making music at the event. This event is free, and open to the public.

“Exquisite corpse” was originally developed as a game played by prominent Surrealists in France. The artists of Rogue Citizen have embraced this format to explore their own 21st century paranoid visions.

They capture the terror and excitement of new possibilities with their shared passions for drawing, experimental imagery and abstraction, playing an old game for a new world. All work in the exhibition will be available for purchase.

Location:
Stevens Square Center for the Arts
1905 Third Avenue South
Minneapolis, Minnesota