Experimental Music Mondays: Ephemeral Structures

Posted on April 26, 2010 by John C.S. Keston

This Monday, April 26, 2010 is the third installment of Experimental Music Mondays at the Kitty Cat Klub in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The line-up includes violin soloist Kip Jones, Ephemeral Structures, and Primidonahue (Michael Donahue). The music will start at around 9:00pm and there’s no cover to get into the club.

Yesterday afternoon I had a fantastic session with Ephemeral Structures. Although we have all worked with each other in several capacities, this is only the second time the group has performed in eight years. The result of yesterday’s session were pretty inspiring, so we are considering producing an album. The project includes Kyle Herskovitz (also know as DJ Zenrock) on turntables, Nils Westdal on bass and electronics, and me on electronics. The photo shows Kyle playing his turntable with a rubber band. I’ll share a segment of what we captured in a upcoming entry.

Sound Crawl 2010

Posted on April 19, 2010 by John C.S. Keston

This Friday, April 23, 2010 at around midnight I am very excited to be performing a rare solo set at McNally Smith under my Ostraka moniker.

I’ll be using a number of custom developed tools, including the GMS and my tentatively titled WTGM (Wave-Table Glitch Machine).

The event is called Sound Crawl and is being billed as “the official sound track for Art Crawl”.

Other artists include James Patrick and Timefog, Oliver Grudem, and Minneapolis Art on Wheels. More information and a complete schedule is available at:

http://blog.mcnallysmith.edu/soundcrawl/2010-schedule/

Experimental Music Mondays Part 2

Posted on March 24, 2010 by John C.S. Keston

This Monday, March 29, 2010 is the second installment of Experimental Music Mondays curated by John Keston. The line-up this time includes Pawlic (Jesse Pollock) and Terr the Om (Nathan Brende).

Sandwiched between them is Ostracon. This is the name I’m using for the plural version of Ostraka. This instance involves the usual characters, John Keston (aka Ostraka), Graham O’Brien, and the addition of Oliver Grudem who will be interjecting his enigmatic imagery as an input source for the generative musical phrases produced by the GMS.

The venue is the Kitty Cat Klub, 315 14th Avenue SE, Minneapolis, Minnesota. The music starts at 9:00pm.

Four Oscillator Drone Produced with the WSG

Posted on March 20, 2010 by John C.S. Keston

What good is a Weird Sound Generator if you’re not using it to make weird sounds? Sometimes it is nice to just hold it on your lap and stroke it gently. That aside, it’s quiet useful once you plug it in and start twiddling the knobs. Here’s a piece I created by tuning the each of the four oscillators on the WSG and then fiddled with the filters. At the same time I made some adjustments to a phaser that I was running it through in Ableton Live and topped it off with ping pong delay.

Four Oscillator Drone

Experimental Music Mondays Call for Entries

Posted on February 28, 2010 by John C.S. Keston

I am curating a series of Experimental Music events hosted by the Kitty Cat Klub in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The first installment is Monday, March 1st, 2010. Subsequent installments are scheduled for the last Monday of every month. For the first show we have three performances.

Ostraka (myself) with Graham O’Brien on drums will be performing using the GMS. Terr the Om (Nathan Brende) will also be performing his distinct breed of electronic music, melding the output from his circuit bent toys with looping and real-time arranging in Ableton Live. Thirdly, Dialsystem consisting of brothers, Graham and Casey O’Brien will likely mesmerize listeners with their ethereal mix of bass, drums, and electronics. Music starts at 9:00pm.

I’m in the process of booking the upcoming events, so if you are a performer of experimental music and would like to get involved, please send your name, artist name, contact information, links to a biography, and links to audio examples to emm [ at ] audiocookbook [ dot ] org.