Coloring Time at the Deepwinter Bonfire

Posted on February 29, 2012 by John C.S. Keston

Recently I participated in a performance with a collective of musicians called Coloring Time. The show took place on Saturday, January 28, 2012 at the History Theatre in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota and was sponsored by McNally Smith School of Music. Performers include: Crescent Moon (Kill the Vultures), Kristoff Krane, Chastity Brown, Aby Wolf, Peter Pisano (Peterwolfcrier), Joe Horton (No Bird Sing), Michelle Kinney and Melissa Mathews (Mississippi Peace), Chris Thomson, Bobby Mullrennan (No Bird Sing), Casey O’Brien (Face Candy), John Keston (Ostracon, DKO), Graham O’Brien (Mississippi Peace, No Bird Sing), and many others. This video is from the last six minutes of the performance. Apparently there’s much more to come. If it’s as lovely as this segment I will share it here when it shows up. Enjoy!

Eyeo: Using Digital Imagery to Generate Sound

Posted on February 27, 2012 by John C.S. Keston

The first ever Eyeo Festival was last June and the second iteration looks to be just as amazing as the last. Here’s a video of a presentation that I gave at Eyeo last year on using digital imagery to generate sound. I also have the HTML5 slideshow available (use the left and right arrow keys to navigate). A big thanks goes out to Dave Schroeder for creating Eyeo and sharing these videos.

DKO at Acadia

Posted on February 20, 2012 by John C.S. Keston

My trio, DKO performs Tuesday, February 21st @ Acadia Cafe. 9pm/all ages/free. More for information about DKO visit AudioCookBook posts tagged with DKO, or checkout our tumblr page.

Duet for Synthesizer and Robotic Vehicles

Posted on February 16, 2012 by John C.S. Keston

In May 2009 I toured a newspaper facility with a group of students and a field recorder. Recently I decided to revisit the recordings and found that one of them was laden with the varied-pitched warning beeps of several robotic paper transporters moving about the printing facility. Here’s a duet study that combines the use of the Pro-One with the recording in a similar fashion to the last two examples.

Duet for Synthesizer and Freight Train

Posted on February 14, 2012 by John C.S. Keston

This is the second study in a series of duet recordings that I am working on. In this example I made a recording of a freight train passing from about fifteen feet away using my Sony PCM-D50. On a side note the train recording was made in December of 2008, and I had no Idea until recently that I would be using it as a test layer for this project. Next I performed along with the recording while attempting to listen and react the same way I would when improvising with a human performer. The synthesizer I used (and may use for all of these) is my Sequencial Circuits Pro-One running through the Memory Man delay. There’s quite a bit of low end in the synth for the first two thirds of the piece, so I recommend listening on a good system, or set of headphones, turned up as loud as you can manage!