This Monday, April 26, 2010 is the third installment of Experimental Music Mondays at the Kitty Cat Klub in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The line-up includes violin soloist Kip Jones, Ephemeral Structures, and Primidonahue (Michael Donahue). The music will start at around 9:00pm and there’s no cover to get into the club.
Yesterday afternoon I had a fantastic session with Ephemeral Structures. Although we have all worked with each other in several capacities, this is only the second time the group has performed in eight years. The result of yesterday’s session were pretty inspiring, so we are considering producing an album. The project includes Kyle Herskovitz (also know as DJ Zenrock) on turntables, Nils Westdal on bass and electronics, and me on electronics. The photo shows Kyle playing his turntable with a rubber band. I’ll share a segment of what we captured in a upcoming entry.
I was just informed by Charles Youel about video documentation for the 2010 ARTCRANK Poster Show featuring the track Fe2O3 by Keston and Westdal (Unearthed Music, 2010). The video does a great job of capturing the vibe of the event and I love the way they worked in our track. Here’s the description posted on vimeo.
“The 4th Annual Artcrank poster show. Its an Art Show for ‘Bike People’. Bikes are the world’s most fun and accessible way to get around. Posters are the world’s most fun and accessible art form. ARTCRANK brings them together. ARTCRANK is a showcase of bicycle-inspired original poster artwork that people can enjoy looking at and afford to take home. ARTCRANK began in Minneapolis in 2007, and has expanded to Denver, St. Louis, Portland, San Francisco and Des Moines. Every ARTCRANK show features posters created by local artists from the host city. Admission is always free, and posters are priced to let everybody take home at least one. This year the Artcrank opened at Shelter Studios in NE Minneapolis. If you’re interested in hosting or sponsoring an ARTCRANK show, want to participate as a poster artist, or simply have a question that hasn’t been answered by the previous paragraphs, send us an email and we’ll be happy to help. artcrankpostershow.com“
A website was recently launched by Andrea Streudel and Ali Momeni containing vast amounts of video and audio documentation for the 2009 Spark Festival. I’m going to be spending some time reliving some of my experiences there from last February. This is an incredible archive of materials from the festival. Something from virtually every performance, installation, keynote, and concert is available. To get an idea of the festival and the scope of the documentation I suggest watching the Spark Festival 2009 Overview.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t suggest watching the footage of my group Keston and Westdal with Graham O’Brien at the Bedlam Theater during one of the nightlife events (complete with crazy dancers). More documentation of Keston and Westdal’s performance is available including more video and a complete audio recording of the show.
Visit the site to download footage or audio of practically everything that happened at the festival.
While redesigning my portfolio site at johnkeston.com I decided to research some of the latest audio plugins for WordPress. Prior to today I was using a fork of Audio Player called Anarchy Media Player (AMP), which was nice for several reasons. One being that it automatically converts MP3 links to the player in posts. Unfortunately the player has not been updated in sometime and after upgrading the the most recent version of WordPress the admin panel for AMP stopped working properly, forcing me to hack my wp-options table.
The alternative that I have put in place is called WPaudio. Wpaudio uses the SoundManager 2 sound library that works by wrapping and extending the Flash Sound API, and exposing it to Javascript. This technique allows the Flash component to be hidden and transparent to both developers and end users.
SoundManager 2 is what’s used by mix sharing sites like SoundCloud and 8tracks. I have yet to find any difficulties, other than some alignment issues that I was able to resolve via CSS. Here’s an example of the player in use. Please comment on how it works for you.
Some of you might not be aware of the process to get electronic promos of my music for reviewers, radio, music blogs, publications, music venues, etc. If you’re in any way involved in the music industry please complete the Unearthed Music Service List Application.
As soon as your application is processed you will have access to download full length 320kbps MP3 files of all of the music currently available on Unearthed Music including my solo album, Precambrian Resonance by Ostraka. Don’t worry about being spammed because we send out no more that five or six mailings per year. Here’s Blitzen Machine.
I have a few performances coming up. One at the end of the month and two at the begining of October. Here’s the official word from Unearthed Music on the upcoming events:
Unearthed Music has a few upcoming events we thought you’d like to know about. On Monday, September 28, John Keston is celebrating his birthday by performing with Graham O’Brien on drums as, Ostraka with Dial System at the Kitty Cat Klub. The duet combines the stochastic, angular melodies produced by Keston’s custom music software with live drumming. Gestural video input is simultaneously projected onto a screen and processed into musical phrases. The results are live looped and molded into spontaneous compositions. Expert, veteran turntablist, DJ Zenrock, completes the bill.
Keston and Wedstdal with Graham O’Brien on drums are performing back-to-back events at Sauce with House Luna and Honey Stick (Thursday, October 1, 2009, $5.00) and the Dakota late night (Friday, October 2, 2009, $5.00). Sauce is located in Uptown on Lake and Lyndale and the Dakota is on Nicolet Mall in Downtown Minneapolis.
This segment from the piece Ostracon by Keston and Westdal was recorded on June 21, 2009 at the Kitty Cat Klub with Graham O’Brien on drums. This was toward the end of the piece and the laptops weren’t doing anything except providing a click for Graham. All of the obligations to the arrangement had been met, so with a small, but dedicated audience we let ourselves wander into an extended improvisational outro.
In order to put the last entry in context I thought I would share the original track that the Clavinet recording was made in. As I said before it is called Onikoroshi and it is the ninth piece on the album Super Structure Baby, re-released electronically in 2004 on Unearthed Music. I think the piece dates back to 1998 or 1999. Perhaps Saronni (Nils Westdal) will have some input on that.
Those of you with a discerning ear might recognize this phrase of reversed Rhodes electric piano from a recent Keston and Westdal release. Here it has no processing other than being reversed. Sometimes I wonder what attracts me to reversed sounds. They are strange, but somehow familiar. We have become accustomed to hearing things backwards in music and film. The intent is usually to unnerve the listener or sound disturbing or bizarre. I hear reversed sounds as beautiful and symmetrical counterparts to the forward versions.
As far as I know, reversed sound does not happen naturally. Yet it is something that has been technologically possible since the very first sound recordings were made in the late eighteen hundreds. Thomas Edison may have been one of the first people to hear sound in reverse. He noted that when music is played backwards, “the song is still melodious in many cases, and some of the strains are sweet and novel, but altogether different from the song reproduced in the right way”. Everything sounds better backwards.
As you may know, Nils Westdal and I make up the production team, Keston and Westdal. We have a variety of production techniques, but no matter how we are working, we end up with dozens of ideas that don’t get fully developed.
Every so often we review these ideas and consider revisiting pieces that are interesting, but most of the time they collect virtual dust on backup drives. Here’s an example of one of the ideas that have been sitting in limbo; in this case, since October 6, 2005.
I took the liberty of minimally arranging the parts and mixing the instruments, but I have added no processing. The entire mix is in mono with no panning or EQ. The bass guitar is running through an outboard phaser, so I soloed it for the outro so you can hear how that sounds.
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This Monday, April 26, 2010 is the third installment of Experimental Music Mondays at the Kitty Cat Klub in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The line-up includes violin soloist Kip Jones, Ephemeral Structures, and Primidonahue (Michael Donahue). The music will start at around 9:00pm and there’s no cover to get into the club.
While redesigning my portfolio site at 
This segment from the piece Ostracon by Keston and Westdal was recorded on June 21, 2009 at the Kitty Cat Klub with Graham O’Brien on drums. This was toward the end of the piece and the laptops weren’t doing anything except providing a click for Graham. All of the obligations to the arrangement had been met, so with a small, but dedicated audience we let ourselves wander into an extended improvisational outro. 
Those of you with a discerning ear might recognize this phrase of reversed Rhodes electric piano from a recent 
As you may know, Nils Westdal and I make up the production team, 