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Listening to art. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

Tag Archives: live-performance

The Patch Cord Godfather

Talking with Morton Subotnick about the intersection of technology and creativity

[ April 18, 2012 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

At 79, Morton Subotnick is by no means resting on his laurels, as substantial as those laurels may be. Several years ago, Subotnick, one of the co-developers of the first analog synthesizer, which Don Buchla constructed in 1963, started using Ableton Live in his own performances and recordings — which is a bit like if Les Paul had started using an iPad in his weekly sessions at the Iridium. But the fact that Subotnick did fiddle with and then embrace the Live software is an emblem of his trademark curiosity and creative energy. I had the opportunity to talk with Subotnick in advance of a pair of upcoming Colorado events — one at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs and the other at the Communikey Festival in Boulder. He’s touring and performing with Lillevan, the German visual artist. My interview appears today in the Colorado Springs Independent. Below is one back’n'forth from the Q&A. I will post more of the full transcript here at Disquiet.com at a later date.

Marc Weidenbaum: Does new technology help you achieve old musical ideas, or does it introduce new musical ideas?

Morton Subotnick: When my mother died, I got some boxes of old stuff and I found an essay I had written, I think, in high school.

It was a short story that described a time in the future when I came into a concert when they were doing a late Beethoven string quartet. The four musicians were on the stage with no instruments. They were sitting in chairs and they had bands around their arms and chests, attached to their chairs, and they had their music in front of them — and with their bodies and their minds they were playing their parts.

There was no sound in the auditorium. It was not quite like brain waves, it was more a physical thing; they were able to project the music through the electric currents in the room.

So, I’m still struggling to realize the ideas I had in 1960 and 1961. And I’m getting really close.

More on the Colorado Springs event at the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at uccs.edu and on Communikey at communikey.us. Read the interview (“Patch Cord Godfather”) at csindy.com.

The above video, from youtube.com, shows Subotnick and Lillevan performing live at Bregenzer Festspiele in Austria in 2010. (And many thanks to Ethan Hein, of ethanhein.com, for an assist in getting the interview to happen.)

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Tuned-In in Dunedin

The elliptical radio art of Sally Ann McIntyre's Radio Cegeste

[ April 17, 2012 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

The work is titled “dear friends who have died are all talking to me tonight / all at once” and it is credited to Radio Cegeste, which is in fact one Sally Ann McIntyre. McIntyre lives of Dunedin, New Zealand, and Cegeste is her working with a small battery of portable FM radios. The radios, in turn, work in collusion with each other in a small space, in this case in Dunedin gallery, to create a fractured sonic hologram of social activity.

McIntyre is working from a rich theoretical construct, which Radius presents along with the audio on its respective pages at tumblr.com and soundcloud.com. This is an except:

As a site-specific, spectator-less, solo performance, dear friends who have died are all talking to me tonight / all at once re-constructs and re-imagines personal and public memory through the medium of transmission, as an appropriate framework for uncertain, shifting structural and social realities. Small clusters of radio receivers, constantly shifted around the space, pick up the signal from a stationary mini FM transmitter. These receivers also engage with each other, chattering and heterodyning, becoming analogous to groups of people talking, and the social space of a gallery opening. Such chatter interjects the night airwaves of Dunedin, full of noise, clashing frequencies, and etheric vocal infiltrations, into what is usually perceived as the bounded space, silence and temporal amnesia of the ‘white cube’.

More on Radio Cegeste and Sally Ann McIntyre at radiocegeste.blogspot.com.

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Disquiet Junto: Live in Chicago (April 19)

Music for expanded glass harmonica, and other work

[ April 16, 2012 / Department: field notes / Comment: 1 ]

Update: There’s now a post-concert post with audio and video: “Disquiet Junto / Live in Chicago (MP3).”


The Disquiet Junto Group on SoundCloud each week employs procedural restraint as a springboard for compositional creativity. Over 150 musicians around the world have participated. At this concert, Chicago-area Junto participants will each perform a piece of “expanded glass harmonica,” and additional original work.

When: Thursday, April 19

Where: Enemy Sound
1550 North Milwaukee Ave., 3rd Floor
Chicago, IL 60622

Tickets: Donation requested
Door: 8:00pm
Concert: 9:00pm

(For those not able to attend, the event will stream live at numbers.fm.)

Who’s Playing:

• Aroon Karuna / Vapor Lanes
soundcloud.com/vaporlanes

• Erik Schoster
hecanjog.com

• Jason Shanley / Cinchel
cinchel.com

• Jason Soliday
jsoliday.com

• Jeff Kolar
jeffkolar.us

• Jon Monteverde / XYZR_KX
jonmonteverde.com

• Joshua Davison / Stringbot
stringbot.com

Plus possible guests

More info at:

http://enemysound.com/?p=805

The easier to remember URL for this page is:

disquiet.com/juntoenemychicago120419

Above images drawn from the third Disquiet Junto project.

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The Industrial Nuance of Prong

Talking with Tommy Victor about industrial music present and past

[ April 12, 2012 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]


I have an interview up at the Colorado Springs Independent with Tommy Victor, leader of the metal band Prong for some 26 years. The occasion is the release of the band’s new album, Carved in Stone, and its attendant tour. There are several ways in which metal and ambient electronic music have interacted or overlapped, and a lot of attention gets paid, rightly, to metal’s drone caucus, bands like Earth and Sunn O))) who slow down metal even further than Black Sabbath ever managed to, and get at something heavier in the process.

But there are other branches, and Prong’s employment over the years, and to varying degrees, of industrial music less as genre and more as nuance has been an interesting, and often enjoyable, thing to observe and listen to. Early on, the essential agent in this was arguably drummer Ted Parsons, who through the simple act of gating his drums — that is, of truncating the sound, lending them them a slightly clipped effect — adopted the aura of electronic percussion. And in turn, those sounds informed the band’s compositions. (Research for this Prong interview led me to get up to date on Parsons’ work, which delightfully led to learning about his Teledubgnosis work: “Digital Dub’s Metal Past.”) Sadly, my favorite Prong track, the one that best exemplifies this approach, never became a core part of the Prong repertoire. Here is a brief segment of the interview that didn’t make the final cut of the story:

Weidenbaum: I interviewed you last in 1990 or 1991, around the time of the Beg to Differ album. I was addicted at the time to the song “Prime Cut.”

Victor: We were recently rehearsing that song, and I knew there was someone who was deeply into that song. So, I guess that was you.

Weidenbaum: Will it be on the greatest hits collection?

Victor: It’s, you know, a little too avant-garde for that compilation.

The compilation mentioned here is due out later this year. Parsons, who is no longer with the band, may, or may not, have been primarily responsible for Prong’s early industrial approach, but Victor certainly himself came to prominence, notably as a participant in Ministry, as well as in Trent Reznor’s Tapeworm project.

Read the full piece at csindy.com.

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Algorithm Meets Object (MP3s)

Talented musicians from Kiev and Geneva meet mid-laptop

[ March 31, 2012 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

The pairing of v4w.enko and d’incise was a fine idea: Two musicians who embrace elliptical artistic identities and are given to remote, low-key sounds, working together. Their live effort, just released for free download on the great restingbell.net label, features the former employing algorithms in the service of generating drone-like figures, and the latter employs contact mics toward something more visceral and fractured. Somewhat rare for live electronic music, the listener can imagine with some certainty who is doing what as the performance proceeds. The recording’s title is simply the date of the performance, 27.08.2011, while its pair of tracks take for their names simply the length of their respective duration (“21’59″” and “34’12″”). The whole thing occurred at Tivoli 16 in Geneva, Switzerland, where d’icise lives and works — v4w.enko, aka Evgeniy Vaschenko, is from Kiev in the Ukraine. This is the first (MP3) of the two pieces:

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Get both tracks at restingbell.net, where the liner notes include this explanatory material:

Conception notes
Two spaces, two languages, two focal points, getting so close as synthetical and natural, but never touching.

The first space is black & white, minimal and symbolic. It talks about the beauty of color inside the sound and complicated structures but it has not colors in itself. It is a sort of counterpoint, a reference, a cold therory demonstration, a base of reflexions.

The second space could show colours of structures and physically complicated sounds. The rules that generate them might be very complex, and though unnecessary to be explain. The human perception comes first, on it’s own, at this level.

The first space is more unpretentious and selfgenerateed, the second requires more finely tuned work to take form. But in the end the two spaces are not in conflict. None has more value than the other. They happen separately and simultaniously. The sound reflects this relation, a contrasted proposition between automatic processiong, fixed layer, digital and physical.

Structure
Live audio in the real time.
Live treatments of various objects & contact mics.
Max/msp code in algorithmical sounds.

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