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.
A couple of weeks ago, while working in the studio with Nils Westdal, we decided to experiment with an old amplifier that has a built in spring reverb. We plugged the direct out into a firewire interface and hit the record button in the software. Nothing was plugged into the amp, but by turning up the reverb knob all the way and the volume most of the way up, the spring reverb became very sensitive to vibrations. All that was left to do was to bang the amp around a bit while capturing the output.
We did something close to this with an old Crate amp head that had a spring reverb. We fed the output back into the input, and recorded it with a mic. then we just tweaked the hell out of the spring, attached stuff to it, that kind of thing. It was absolutely bizarre. I’ll see if I can post a clip on my website.
Grant, please do post a link to an MP3 if you don’t mind. We’d love to have a listen. Thanks!
Pingback: Grant Muller » Blog Archive » Fedback Feedback
I posted some of the similar stuff we did here:
http://www.grantmuller.com/?p=40
though listening back on it its not nearly as cool as the sounds you posted, more oscillating and less open reverb from our recording.
Question for you, when you record 30 minutes or so of samples how do you quickly make clips out of the stuff you want to post? I find that it takes me forever.
Thanks for all you do, this is one of my favorite blogs!
Grant
Grant, those sound great. I especially like Section 4. As far as editing clips, I don’t think it’s any secret that Ableton Live is my favorite software. Although, as an instructor I use lots of other tools including Pro Tools, Audacity, MaxMSP to name a few. I always come back to Ableton for producing on a deadline. Once learned the interface lets you fly through tasks like butter.