About John CS Keston
John CS Keston is an award winning transdisciplinary artist reimagining how music, video art, and computer science intersect. His work both questions and embraces his backgrounds in music technology, software development, and improvisation leading him toward unconventional compositions that convey a spirit of discovery and exploration through the use of graphic scores, chance and generative techniques, analog and digital synthesis, experimental sound design, signal processing, and acoustic piano. Performers are empowered to use their phonomnesis, or sonic imaginations, while contributing to his collaborative work. Originally from the United Kingdom, John currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota where he is a professor of Digital Media Arts at the University of St Thomas. He founded the sound design resource, AudioCookbook.org, where you will find articles and documentation about his projects and research.
John has spoken, performed, or exhibited original work at New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME 2022), the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2022), the International Digital Media Arts Conference (iDMAa 2022), International Sound in Science Technology and the Arts (ISSTA 2017-2019), Northern Spark (2011-2017), the Weisman Art Museum, the Montreal Jazz Festival, the Walker Art Center, the Minnesota Institute of Art, the Eyeo Festival, INST-INT, Echofluxx (Prague), and Moogfest. He produced and performed in the piece Instant Cinema: Teleportation Platform X, a featured project at Northern Spark 2013. He composed and performed the music for In Habit: Life in Patterns (2012) and Words to Dead Lips (2011) in collaboration with the dance company Aniccha Arts. In 2017 he was commissioned by the Walker Art Center to compose music for former Merce Cunningham dancers during the Common Time performance series. His music appears in The Jeffrey Dahmer Files (2012) and he composed the music for the short Familiar Pavement (2015). He has appeared on more than a dozen albums including two solo albums on UnearthedMusic.com.
I have been back in the studio recently with Graham O’Brien to record our second Ostracon record. We are still using the GMS, but doing things a little differently this time around. More about that later. But, since I have Ostracon on the brain I thought it might be nice to release a collection of fourteen live tracks from three shows we performed last year on SoundCloud. Each track is an untitled improvisation mixed roughly and edited for length. Today you can enjoy track one. If you like it, please comment/share and I’ll keep them coming.
This video created by Caleb Coppock illustrates the time scope (from dusk until dawn) of the In Habit: Living Patterns performance at Northern Spark, June 2012. I composed the music for the sixteenth and final vignette in the sequence titled, Energy and then adapted it for the time-lapse sequence.
Keep an eye/ear out for upcoming documentation that will display the dance movements in real-time. I also have some video with binaural audio recorded at one of the performances that I will be sharing as well.
I have recently accepted a position as an adjunct instructor at the Slam Academy in Minneapolis, Minnesota. With two Ableton certified instructors the school is offering a variety of classes in electronic music, but also stretching out into topics like Max for Live and music for video games. I will be teaching occasional master classes and private lessons that focus on my listed specialties of Max/MSP, Max for Live, Processing, sound synthesis, and jazz theory. Please checkout the school at Slam Academy, or like the Facebook page for more information.
Sometime in 2007 I came up with the term, “Organic Electronic Music” to describe music I was producing with bassist Nils Westdal in our project, Keston and Westdal. I’m sure that I wasn’t the only person to think of this combination of words, and in fact, a quick search reveals several artists, labels, and others using the phrase. Our use of the phrase was a reaction to our distaste for genre labeling. In hindsight it would have been sensible to define the meaning of the phrase there-and-then, instead of simply using it in a few descriptions for tracks and albums.
In any case I found myself thinking about this recently and decided that it wouldn’t hurt to define what I mean by the phrase and perhaps discover some new music that ACB readers feel fits into my definition. In my view any style of electronic music can be considered organic electronic music (OEM). Dub step, house, downtempo, experimental, or even minimal techno can be “organic” as long as the music meets one or more of a few simple criteria. Click the link to read my brief list of parameters.
Continue reading →
Today I created a SoundCloud group for AudioCookbook.org readers and contributors. I thought this would be a great way for readers to share what they are producing and perhaps feature occasional works on ACB. I have shared a handful of my tracks and experiments just to get started, but I’m ultimately looking for contributions from the ACB community at large. If you “SoundCloud” please feel free to share work that you have produced in an interesting or unique way. If you have created a Max for Live patch to process your sounds, made a particularly interesting field recording, or produced music using newly developed or experimental techniques; whatever it is, if it strays from the norm and sounds interesting we’d love to hear it!
