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.
Since getting Ableton Live 8, I have yet to use it for a show due to performance issues and a lack of time to troubleshoot what’s causing garbled audio. I don’t have the same problem with 7, so perhaps 8 has more overhead. I’ll be looking into this soon. In any case I have had the opportunity to experiment with some of the instruments, including Electric. Although I still prefer the sound of my actual Rhodes pianos, Electric does a great job of simulating them, but more importantly it is capable of producing entirely new Rhodes-like instrument sounds. Here I started with an instrument out of the rack, tweaked it a little and then used it to play a loop I originally captured using the GMS.
Thanks for the useful info. It’s so interesting
nice track, nice sounds.
I am holding off for upgrade for the same reasons.
Not a bad experiment. Add some delay or verb (both?) with a whooshing pad or two, and this would sound like something from ICO (PS2 game).
Ah… yes. I loved ICO and its pseudo-sequel Shadow of the Colossus.