What’s Your Favorite Traveling Music?

Posted on December 24, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

DC Subway Station Yesterday I got up at 4:00am to fly to Seattle for the holidays. It being one of the busiest times of the year, the airport was jam packed and chaotic. When I was finally settled on the plane and off the ground I cued up Boards of Canada on my iPod to drown out the sound around me.

Within a few minutes I could feel the travel stress melting away as if the music was programming my brain to relax and empty the trash. Anyone else have any particular music that they listen to when traveling? Brian Eno perhaps? Debussy? How about the opposite extremes? Speed metal or drum n bass?

GMS Video Experiment with Reason

Posted on December 22, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

GMS Video Experiment w/ Reason from Dane Messall on Vimeo.

My student, Dane Messall, has been experimenting with the GMS over the break and just posted this video experiment. He imported the video into the GMS and then interfaced it with Reason’s Thor synthesizer to generate the sound. Nice one, Dane!

People on Shelves

Posted on December 19, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

Andrea Streudel just posted some really nice video documentation of the People on Shelves exhibit that was performed on December 9, 2009 at the West Bank Social Center, using music I created during the show. From the original post, “The world premiere of maw.shelves, a software for dynamic 3-dimensional projection. We overlaid another projector to place our real-time, full-body silhouettes on the “shelves”. Music was performed live by Ostraka.” Checkout Minneapolis Art on Wheels for more details.

Spark Festival 2009 Documentation

Posted on December 16, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

A website was recently launched by Andrea Streudel and Ali Momeni containing vast amounts of video and audio documentation for the 2009 Spark Festival. I’m going to be spending some time reliving some of my experiences there from last February. This is an incredible archive of materials from the festival. Something from virtually every performance, installation, keynote, and concert is available. To get an idea of the festival and the scope of the documentation I suggest watching the Spark Festival 2009 Overview.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t suggest watching the footage of my group Keston and Westdal with Graham O’Brien at the Bedlam Theater during one of the nightlife events (complete with crazy dancers). More documentation of Keston and Westdal’s performance is available including more video and a complete audio recording of the show.

Visit the site to download footage or audio of practically everything that happened at the festival.

Music for People on Shelves

Posted on December 10, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

people_on_shelves I’ve just rendered my full eighty-six minute Ostraka set from last night’s event at the West Bank Social Center. So, while waiting for the delightful documentation that Andrea Streudel is sure to produce, here’s a short segment of audio from the set.

I used Ableton Live to produce in real-time and my wavetable glitch machine Max patch to make most of the noises, which I routed into Live using Soundflower.

The projection work of the evening was top notch. An entire wall of the building across from the WBSC was covered with animated silhouettes of attendees on simulated three dimensional “shelves”.

Here’s the excerpt. I’m also including a link to the entire eighty-six minute set that I uploaded to soundcloud.com for all the brave people who’d like to hear the full set.

Excerpt from Music for People on Shelves