The Experimental Music Mondays series at the Kitty Cat Klub concludes this Monday, August 30 with a familiar lineup and newcomer Ten72 (Nils Westdal). Regulars Ostracon (John Keston and Graham O’Brien) and Terr the Om (Nathan Brende) are playing as well as my new unnamed trio Davis-Glenn-Keston. It is shaping up to be a fun and delightful evening of experimental music. Music will start by 9:30pm and go until 1:00am. Entry is free. Stop by and let us know what you think of this event.
This is the last chance to experience this series. For now there are no plans to continue the night at another venue, but depending on Monday’s turnout it may be taken under consideration. Thanks to all the people who have helped support this event, including Tom Rimarcik, Ryan Olcott, Graham O’Brien, and Nathan Brende, not to mention all the patrons who appreciated the work presented by the artists involved.
Ostracon and Unearthed Music have decided to release the Ostracon debut on cassette tape for promos and a short run for sale at shows and online. The as-yet-untitled release includes around 47 minutes of instrumental duets between myself on electronics (mostly layers of melodies produced by the GMS) and Graham O’Brien on drums. We recorded in the historically preserved Studio A of the former Flyte Tyme studios of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis fame. I’ll have more details soon, but expect the cassette to be available by the middle of September just before our performance at the In / Out Festival of Digital Performance in New York City.
The immediate response I get from most of the people I have told is, why cassette? I have to admit to being heavily laden with nostalgia for this format. As a kid (and into adulthood), I taped jam sessions, records and CDs constantly, especially my own LP collection. I was acutely aware of how quickly the quality of vinyl records could degrade. Cassettes are small enough to fit in your pocket, or bring a dozen of them on a road trip. You can throw one out a window, pop it in the deck and provided it didn’t get run over by a truck it will sound the same. I melted records in hot car interiors, had them scratched and broken by myself, friends, or siblings, and wore them out from over playing. Now I realize that tape in the long term is even more ephemeral than vinyl. So, again, why release a modern recording on cassette tape?
Since making the decision I have noticed that it’s not as rare of an idea as I thought. There is definitely a movement back toward this barely antiquated format. I don’t have any meaningful reasons for choosing tape, but I know that I’m not the only one to have nostalgia for it. This might be a good excuse for others to get out their cassette player of choice and listen to some old favorites they haven’t digitized yet. Remember packing your tape before recording, or tightening the reel with a pencil? I’ll probably throw in a card with a download code for those without a cassette deck, but what are your thoughts? Would you love to get you hands on a cassette of new music, or would you seek out a downloadable alternative?
I made this ambient piece using Audiotool a couple of months ago thinking that I might add some more layers, but I’m pretty fond of it as is and thought I would share it here. My original goal was to try automating some parameters and processing in Audiotool, and learn about Pulverisateur in the process. Pulverisateur, which I unfortunately spelled wrong in my track title, is a modular style virtual synthesizer that I connected to a Tonematrix for Monome-like programming. It has an amazing sound and, to my ears, sounds as least as good if not better than Reason‘s Subtractor. The image above will give you an idea of the signal flow for the piece. Checkout the audio, or make a remix on Audiotool if you like what you hear.
I just got a set of Beyerdynamics DT770 Pro closed back circumaural headphones and now I’m listening like mad to familiar music in order to get used to them as quickly as possible. I wanted some better quality closed back headphones firstly for performing, but secondly for recording, producing, and listening while on the road.
So far I’m very impressed with the detail and bass response. They have much more bass and overall volume than the AKG K240s that I use in the studio, but I imagine that the open back K240s are probably more flat. The DT770s are a snug fit and surround even my abnormally large pinnae. The thick velour padding blocks a fair amount of sound and keeps your ears toasty warm, or nice and sweaty in this ninety six degree heat.
It took me a while to decide about these phones, but based on what I’ll be using them for I think I made the right decision. They are louder than I expected, given that many people prefer to use a headphone amplifier with them. I didn’t find amplification necessary with my MacBook Pro, but haven’t tried them with an iPod, or anything else yet. Feel free to chime in with your own experience or opinions on headphones.
I have recently scored a soundtrack for a short movie that inspired me very much for its genuine content and powerful simplicity. I found the story so compelling and beautiful that at first I thought of writing something that could be defined minimal and very polite, with the intention of leaving enough space to the characters without overshadowing them and let the story evolve without too much distraction.
After a few days of work I realized what I was doing was ok, but was not exploiting the full potential of the beautiful message that the director was trying to convey. In other words, everything was fine to my eyes and ears, but my work wasn’t adding much to the movie. It felt detached. Why was that? How could that happen, since I felt so attached in the first place to the story and the characters?
The answer came to me the day after, when I asked myself (I often talk to myself): what is this movie really about? What is the sparkle that triggers all the events in this movie? What’s the primal dynamic? My answer was: intention. That was the only thread to follow in the story, the one element that I needed to translate into music. I kept ‘intention’ as my only reference and as soon as I started writing new music everything fell into place, magically. (more…)
On Monday, July 19, 2010, my latest trio featuring Jon Davis on bass guitar and bass clarinet, Tim Glenn on drums, and me on Rhodes and Sequential Circuits Pro-One, played at the Kitty Cat Klub for the Experimental Music Mondays series.
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.
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.
The Mississippi River is where my mates and I like to retreat to for fun and mischief. The other day
I was poorly documenting John Keston making some field recordings of a passing rowing team with my cell phone camera. I took the audio from the footage and made a little ambient piece using loads of processing. If I explained the treatment that I used on this short little low bit number I would have to write a book. So I’ll keep it short. I’m also posting the video so you can catch a glimpse of our late afternoon shenanigans. Now do you understand how I got the title for this ditty?
I created this piece today by starting with a few percussive micro samples from a recent field recording and using them as percussion. After programming a simple pattern I ran it through Pluggo’s Harmonic Filter and resampled the results to get two musical loops; one with a low frequency hit that forms the bass in the piece and another with a simple descending melody.
I put a triplet ping-pong delay on one send and an enormous reverb on another then made a quick 1:40 minute mix to hear how it all sounded together. I haven’t explained all the details by any means, so if you have any questions about what you’re hearing post a comment and I’ll give you more information.
This is only my second post on Audio Cookbook as I’ve been busy getting married in the last couple of months. Anyway, I’ve had more time to work on sounds and music (the organization of sound) and so I thought I would share a short segue tune that I’ve decided to include in my upcoming ten72 release Bicycle Family. The song sounds a bit like two other shorts that I’ve produced and helped produce. One is Baby Teeth from the ten72 release Flavour Country and Aerosol Eighty from the Keston and Westdal release One Day to Save All Life. This Short track has a working tittle of Teity which is my own alternate spelling of tidy. The programing is a mix of shorty little tidy samples mixed in with slick classic TR808 drum sounds. I played a really far out jazzy guitar melody over the top and it seemed out of place so I destroyed it with loads of filtering, dubby delay, and other fun tricks. The result is a nice contrast to the tidy bits. It flows in and out of the tiny sound particles like an electric stream.
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I just got a set of Beyerdynamics DT770 Pro closed back circumaural headphones and now I’m listening like mad to familiar music in order to get used to them as quickly as possible. I wanted some better quality closed back headphones firstly for performing, but secondly for recording, producing, and listening while on the road. 
On Monday, July 19, 2010, my latest trio featuring Jon Davis on bass guitar and bass clarinet, Tim Glenn on drums, and me on Rhodes and 
The Mississippi River is where my mates and I like to retreat to for fun and mischief. The other day
I created this piece today by starting with a few percussive micro samples from a recent field recording and using them as percussion. After programming a simple pattern I ran it through Pluggo’s Harmonic Filter and resampled the results to get two musical loops; one with a low frequency hit that forms the bass in the piece and another with a simple descending melody. 
This is only my second post on Audio Cookbook as I’ve been busy getting married in the last couple of months. Anyway, I’ve had more time to work on sounds and music (the organization of sound) and so I thought I would share a short segue tune that I’ve decided to include in my upcoming ten72 release Bicycle Family. The song sounds a bit like two other shorts that I’ve produced and helped produce. One is Baby Teeth from the ten72 release Flavour Country and Aerosol Eighty from the Keston and Westdal release One Day to Save All Life. This Short track has a working tittle of Teity which is my own alternate spelling of tidy. The programing is a mix of shorty little tidy samples mixed in with slick classic TR808 drum sounds. I played a really far out jazzy guitar melody over the top and it seemed out of place so I destroyed it with loads of filtering, dubby delay, and other fun tricks. The result is a nice contrast to the tidy bits. It flows in and out of the tiny sound particles like an electric stream.