Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts

Posted on February 16, 2009 by John CS Keston

This year’s Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts starts on Tuesday, February 17 and goes through Sunday, February 22 at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Festival features dozens of accomplished artists, performers, and speakers from around the globe. The content ranges from the experimental, electronic sounds of STEIM to the glitch, minimal dub of Stefan Betke, aka Pole.

My group, Keston and Westdal featuring Graham O’Brien on drums, are appearing at the festival on Thursday, February 19, 2009 at the Bedlam Theatre. We will be performing works based on material from our 2008 collection of experimental compositions, One Day to Save All Life (Unearthed Music, 2008). The concert is free and open to the public, ages 18 and up. Here’s Upward Not Northward from our last album. You might notice an abrupt ending on this piece because it’s taken from a gapless master.

Upward Not Northward

Another Rhodes Recording from Nublu

Posted on February 15, 2009 by John CS Keston

Here’s another example of Rhodes recorded during our set at Nublu. It’s interesting for me to hear these clips unprocessed and without the other instrumentation, not to mention the excessive crowd noise in the room. During the performance, when I record these clips, I’m usually running the Rhodes through various amounts of amp modeling, eq, compression, delay, and sometimes reverb or filtering. There’s often other loops playing while I record as well as live drums, bass and laptop added by Graham and Nils as you can hear in Segment of Recording from Nublu.

More Nublu Rhodes

Rhodes Loop from the Nublu Backline

Posted on February 14, 2009 by John CS Keston

One of the nice things about playing at Nublu is the fact that they have a Rhodes in their backline. I don’t know very many clubs that do, and most of the time, if they do they are in disrepair. Instruments in backlines suffer a lot of abuse. The Rhodes is not a delicate instrument but with heavy use certain things break. Most commonly the tines. So I went to the club early just to check on the Rhodes and offer to repair it if needed.

In fact, two tines in the upper register were broken, but fortunately Nublu had a “parts” Rhodes in the basement that had both of the broken tines intact. I quickly replaced the tines and made a few other minor adjustments and the vintage keyboard was ready for an evening of music. Here’s a clip that I created while improvising during our second set to give you an idea what shape the Rhodes was in.

Nublu Rhodes Loop

Busker with Battery Powered Dancing Dolls

Posted on February 12, 2009 by John CS Keston

I came across this busker in a Times Square subway station surrounded by several battery powered dolls gyrating to his music. Fortunately I had my Sony PCM-D50 along to capture a few minutes of his performance, and a few dollars for his tip bucket. The scene was surreal and difficult to describe, but enchanting never-the-less.

He was an older gentleman wearing an over sized beige trench coat hunched over a Yamaha electric organ playing an uptempo rendition of La Vie En Rose. The dolls were similar to those annoying dancing Santas, but among them there was a gyrating saxophone player and a creepy, blond, female, dancing doll with “sound, moving head, hands and buttocks”, as described on the web and shown here.

Battery Powered Dancing Dolls