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.
Quite an interesting piece you were able to produce from that weird sound generator. Do you have plans to use this at shows in the future?
Actually I’m playing with an experimental trio called Ephemeral Structures that features me, Nils Westdal and Kyle Herskovitz on April 26, 2010 at the Kitty Cat Klub for Experimental Music Mondays. I just might bust out the WSG for the show, but to know for sure you will have to show up.
weird. all that hand-built circuitry produces some pretty rich tones. i like it.
if i understand the schematics correctly the WSG amounts to two voices, three ocsiators each, one of which is an LFO controlling frequency.
were you using the gating or summing “wackiness” setting for this recording?
also what does the “twilight zone” switch do?
There’s actually a layout with “less weird” labels for the WSG. It should explain a lot. Here’s a link.
http://musicfromouterspace.com/analogsynth/YOUR_FIRST_SYNTH/WSG_Reborn/formoreseriouspeople/SeriousSoundLabPanel.gif
That does explain a few things that I couldn’t divine from the diagrams alone. Thanks John.