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.
This evolving bassline that’s arpeggiated on tritones was the apex of my interpretation of Erik Satie’s composition Vexations during Piotr Szyhalski piece Empty Words at Northern Spark early on the morning of Sunday, June 5, 2011. Eventually I will reproduce how I arranged these parts for the performance and share it here.
I am quite fond of how this short phrase from my interpretation of Vexations by Erik Satie turned out. I used Ableton to arpeggiate the upper melody on tritones while manually adjusting the patch on the Roland MKS-80 with the Bitstream 3X MIDI controller. This is what came out.
Here’s another segment from the DKO with DJ Luke Anderson performance on Saturday, June 4, 2011 on the steps of the Minneapolis Institute of Art accompanying the projected work in The Battle of Everyouth. This was a tremendous performance experience for me. Re-living it through the recordings has been enlightening as well. Video documentation is in the works.
Here’s an excerpt from the sixth and final track on our upcoming release, Unauthorized Modifications by Ostracon. Don’t miss our live performance celebrating the release at the Honey Lounge in Minneapolis on June 24, 2011. Artists performing with us at the event include Dosh, Smyth, and Ghostband. Rogue Citizen will be doing live painting during the performance.
Northern Spark is behind us and it was a wonderful event. I performed music for three non-stop, consecutive hours with DKO and DJ Luke Anderson on the steps of the MIA during the Battle of Everyouth while Jenny Schmid and Ali Momeni and their talented team of artists and volunteers transformed the museum into a new media artwork with interactive projections and participatory video capturing madness. Here’s a brief segment from the performance starting 103:28 in and finishing at 105:44.
