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.
Here’s the first in a series of microtracks I’ll be sharing here on ACB that I produced with a Korg Monotribe synchronized in a variety of ways with my SCI Pro-One. The nice thing about the Monotribe is that it has sync in/out that works perfectly with the Pro-One gate in/out functionality. I wasn’t sure if this would work or not so my friend Lukas brought his over and we tested it before I committed to buying one. I was quite pleased to find out that it works both ways meaning I can either sync the Monotribe with the LFO on the Pro-One, or sync the Pro-One to the tempo on the Monotribe.
This is one out of a collection of synthesizer tracks that I’ve been sitting on for a long time. Apart from the percussion, Libration (not to be confused with liberation) Dub was made entirely with the Casio CZ-1000 analog phase distortion synthesizer.
Recently I participated in a performance with a collective of musicians called Coloring Time. The show took place on Saturday, January 28, 2012 at the History Theatre in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota and was sponsored by McNally Smith School of Music. Performers include: Crescent Moon (Kill the Vultures), Kristoff Krane, Chastity Brown, Aby Wolf, Peter Pisano (Peterwolfcrier), Joe Horton (No Bird Sing), Michelle Kinney and Melissa Mathews (Mississippi Peace), Chris Thomson, Bobby Mullrennan (No Bird Sing), Casey O’Brien (Face Candy), John Keston (Ostracon, DKO), Graham O’Brien (Mississippi Peace, No Bird Sing), and many others. This video is from the last six minutes of the performance. Apparently there’s much more to come. If it’s as lovely as this segment I will share it here when it shows up. Enjoy!
The first ever Eyeo Festival was last June and the second iteration looks to be just as amazing as the last. Here’s a video of a presentation that I gave at Eyeo last year on using digital imagery to generate sound. I also have the HTML5 slideshow available (use the left and right arrow keys to navigate). A big thanks goes out to Dave Schroeder for creating Eyeo and sharing these videos.
