Bloodline: The Central Planes

November 8, 2021 marked the debut release from the trio Bloodline (Cody McKinney, Peter Hennig, and myself). The album was recorded in December, 2016 – a foreboding moment just before the world was plunged into the chaos of neo-nationalist politics. It took five years of sporadic listening, discussing, editing, mixing, and mastering to finally release it. Despite the delays, the music is just as relevant to me now as it was then.

Largely based on a series of graphic scores titled, Grocery List, by Cody McKinney The Central Planes is a raw, visceral, free, and exhilarating journey into the unknown. My endless gratitude goes out to Peter Henning and Cody McKinney for including me in this grand experiment, Steve Kaul for ingeniously engineering these weird sessions at Wild Sound Studio, Adam Krinsky for his tirelessly creative mixing, Huntley Miller for his expert mastering, and _you_ for daring to listen.

Bloodline is:
Peter Hennig (drums, cymbals, percussion, prepared piano)
John CS Keston (Rhodes, Piano, synth, electronics, prepared piano)
Cody McKinney (bass, vocals, electronics, various noisemakers, prepared piano)

Recorded at Wild Sound Studio, NE Minneapolis MN – December 2016
Engineered by Steve Kaul
Mixed at Bellows Studio, St Paul – Summer 2021
Mix Engineer – Adam Krinsky
Mastered by Huntly Miller at HM Mastering
Album art – John CS Keston

Parochial Dissonance by John C.S. Keston

Parochial Dissonance (Æther Sound, Dec. 4, 2020) – The title of this release describes the tragedy, loss, and suffering experienced when we narrow the scope of our worldviews. The album is a series of solo pieces captured from three streaming performances during the COVID-19 pandemic, and two live performances just before. Each piece was improvised within sets of rules applied to process, time, texture, and tonality. The pieces were performed on various synthesizers and Rhodes electric piano with occasional use of looping, arpeggiation, and signal processing. Continue reading for a look at the liner notes. Continue reading

ISSTA 2019 Call for Proposals

October 31st and November 1st, 2019 the Irish Sound, Science and Technology Association annual conference and festival will be held in Cork, Ireland at CIT Cork School of Music. Keynotes include a performance and lecture from Robert Henke (Ableton Live, Monolake) and a performance and workshop from Ellen King (ELLLL / Gash Collective).

I starting going to ISSTA in 2017 and have had incredible experiences while attending and performing. It’s usually a fairly small gathering of like-minded artists, educators, performers, and scientists all of whom are experimenting with sound in fascinating ways. I’ve participated in many events, festivals and conferences, but nothing aligns better with my interests and practice than ISSTA does. If you appreciate the music and sound experiments I share here on ACB, then please review the call below for details about this wonderful gathering. Continue reading

Video: REV2 Patch Degrader Demo & Sounds

This video describes and demonstrates the device I designed to create most of the patches in the REV2 Experimental Sound Set available here on AudioCookbook.org:

https://audiocookbook.org/prophet-rev2-patch-set/

I am hoping to make it available sometime in the next few months if I can gage enough interest for a release. To hear five minutes of just the patches (no talking) please skip to 9:56. Also a complete playlist of all 128 patches is available on SoundCloud:

Video: Parking Ramp Project

Aniccha Arts premieres a performance installation inside a seven-level parking garage. The project asks questions about transience, migration, and stability in a space that temporarily stores cars and is home to nothing. Performers pervade the parking structure with their bodies, working against the visible slant of the ramp to find their individual verticality. Questions we asked in creating the work: How do we find softness in a landscape of concrete? What anchors us on these alternating planes? How do we connect across such a complex landscape? video by: Cully Gallagher

This video by Cully Gallagher is 3 minutes and 30 seconds of fragments from the approximately 44 minute long Parking Ramp Project. Composing music for this performance installation showed me how far it is still possible to explore improvised music through experimental processes. Considering the acoustics of the parking ramp was a critical consideration within the musical scope. One approach to this was rests coded into the algorithms that allowed for the music to decay during long pauses while the ambient sound of the space inserted itself as an unintentional “performer”.

I am humbled by the willingness of the Pramila Vasudevan and other collaborators to humor my absurd scheme to compose the work using Javascript. This language allowed me to quickly produce animated, generative, graphic scores. It was also a privilege to perform the music with Peter Hennig (drums) and Cody McKinney (bass/electronics) who effortlessly interpreted the graphic scores. You can read and hear more about the project or continue for a gallery of screen grabs from the animated graphic scores. Continue reading