Fourteen Live Mixes from Ostracon: Track 1

I have been back in the studio recently with Graham O’Brien to record our second Ostracon record. We are still using the GMS, but doing things a little differently this time around. More about that later. But, since I have Ostracon on the brain I thought it might be nice to release a collection of fourteen live tracks from three shows we performed last year on SoundCloud. Each track is an untitled improvisation mixed roughly and edited for length. Today you can enjoy track one. If you like it, please comment/share and I’ll keep them coming.

In Habit: Living Patterns Time-lapse

This video created by Caleb Coppock illustrates the time scope (from dusk until dawn) of the In Habit: Living Patterns performance at Northern Spark, June 2012. I composed the music for the sixteenth and final vignette in the sequence titled, Energy and then adapted it for the time-lapse sequence.

Keep an eye/ear out for upcoming documentation that will display the dance movements in real-time. I also have some video with binaural audio recorded at one of the performances that I will be sharing as well.

Slam Academy of Electronic Arts

I have recently accepted a position as an adjunct instructor at the Slam Academy in Minneapolis, Minnesota. With two Ableton certified instructors the school is offering a variety of classes in electronic music, but also stretching out into topics like Max for Live and music for video games. I will be teaching occasional master classes and private lessons that focus on my listed specialties of Max/MSP, Max for Live, Processing, sound synthesis, and jazz theory. Please checkout the school at Slam Academy, or like the Facebook page for more information.

OEM: What is Organic Electronic Music to You?

Sometime in 2007 I came up with the term, “Organic Electronic Music” to describe music I was producing with bassist Nils Westdal in our project, Keston and Westdal. I’m sure that I wasn’t the only person to think of this combination of words, and in fact, a quick search reveals several artists, labels, and others using the phrase. Our use of the phrase was a reaction to our distaste for genre labeling. In hindsight it would have been sensible to define the meaning of the phrase there-and-then, instead of simply using it in a few descriptions for tracks and albums.

In any case I found myself thinking about this recently and decided that it wouldn’t hurt to define what I mean by the phrase and perhaps discover some new music that ACB readers feel fits into my definition. In my view any style of electronic music can be considered organic electronic music (OEM). Dub step, house, downtempo, experimental, or even minimal techno can be “organic” as long as the music meets one or more of a few simple criteria. Click the link to read my brief list of parameters.
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