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 a rough mix of a track that I’m working on for an upcoming album of material that I’ve been producing since August, 2008. I have committed to a release date of March 24, 2009 on Unearthed Music and I’m probably a bit more than half finished. Hopefully I’m on schedule. This piece was based on a simple loop of acoustic guitar that I played on an old Kawai with a missing string and a broken tuning peg. In fact I only used the low E and the A string on the instrument. The synth bass, pads, and melody are all made up of captured MIDI clips played on a keyboard controller and directed to VSTs of one kind or another. It’s close to being final, but still a bit of a rough mix, so comments are welcome.
I like it so far, keep up the good work!
The main thing I would change are the drums: they’re pretty dry and obviously synthesized, especially the crash sounds. I’ve found that a little bit of processing helps a lot with drums; anything to make them sound less like stock drum-machine drums.
Other than that I didn’t really have any complaints about the track. I especially like the acoustic elements.
Thanks for the feedback. “Dry and obviously synthesized” is exactly what I wanted. I’m pretty happy with the drums the way they are, other than a note I made to reduce the china cymbal. I’ve applied quite a bit of processing, but none of it is very obvious except perhaps the distortion created by the tube modeling I’m running the drums through.
Hi, im a great fan of your page from Argentina.
I just wanted to say that I dont know why all the audio you upload always has a strong “crackling” sound, from beginning to end.
Diego, I recently noticed this happening on a Windows XP machine in the Flash player, although I have not been able to reproduce the problem on other computers (Mac or PC). If you click the title instead of the Flash player you can play the clips properly in the browser. I’ll be looking into this, so hopefully it will be fixed soon.
Update: I have just upgraded the player, so to anyone who has had this problem, please let me know if it persists, or not. Thanks!
I have the same crackling / noise issues.. I didn’t have any problems until recently (like a week ago), and am wondering if it came up with the flash 10 upgrade, and the fact that flash always had issues with sound cards not running at 44.1kHz (like all musician external sound interfaces).
It’s a bug in version 10 of the Flash player for Windows. Please read this post for more details.
I really like it.
In my humble opinion I would make it or a little shorter or add a little more variations
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