Recent Praise for Isikles

superior_icicles

I am very excited about praise we have received for Isikles, a recent album I produced with Chilean producer Lister Rossel. Ironically yesterday was the Summer Solstice, but Lister has returned to Chile in the Southern Hemisphere where the climate is in the midst of winter. Everyone who has taken the time to listen to Isikles has appreciated the mystery and depth of this work. For example artist, musicians, and educator, Piotr Szyhalski said this after listening:

It’s interesting how it seems to transport my mind in both directions on the timeline. Certain elements send me back, sometimes way back, while others have a future oriented thrust. There is a sense of silent disaster unfolding. I imagine that this is what dying might feel like: when your mind brings you a sense of comfort, which masks the finality of the event…
Piotr Szyhalski

Richard Devine, whom I had the pleasure of performing with recently at the Dakota in Minneapolis, shared these thoughts:

Isikles puts the listener on a beautiful elegant journey of ambient, soundscapes, pulses and textures. One of the best chill out albums to come out in a long time.
Richard Devine

If you haven’t had a chance to listen, try the track Corvus in the player below. It’s one of my favorites. This album filled with analog synthesis, sound design experiments, and field recordings of ice and other things, was a joy to produce. Lister’s talent, work ethic, and conceptual clarity made it a very special collaboration. The full album is available for listening or download on our BandCamp page. Thank you for listening!

john_and_lister

AVGM: Rheology

Here’s another movement from my composition Vocalise Sintetica that I performed at Echofluxx in Prague and later during Northern Spark 2014. I named the movement Rheology after the study of the flow of matter in the liquid state. The audiovisual content was created with a Max patch I developed called AVGM (AV Grain Machine). The instruments that I used to create the accompaniment include: DSI Tempest, Bass Station II, Korg Volca Keys, and Memory Man Delay.

Vocalise Sintetica at Echofluxx 14, Prague

On May 7, 2014 I performed Vocalise Sintetica at the Echofluxx Festival in Prague. The piece is made up of four movements: I. Machines (00:00), II. Liquid (18:43), III. Vocalise (28:55), and, IV. Sintetica (38:41). Each movement is a playlist of five audiovisual objects that are instantly available to be projected and amplified while being granulated in real-time by a performer using a multitouch interface. The performer may loop their gestures applied to the audiovisual objects in order to bring in additional synthesized sound layers that contrast or mimic the audiovisual objects. My performance at Echofluxx was made possible by a grant from the American Composers Forum with funds provided by the Jerome Foundation.
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100 Strange Sounds No. 43 – Water Bubbles

A few months ago I came across a series of sound design video experiments produced by Joo Won Park. I have not had the time to check all of them out, but the ones that I have tried so far are all very interesting. Instead of leaving the sound as is Joo Won slowly applies processing to the recording creating a new perspective for the listener. Here’s a recent addition to his series, Water Bubbles.

Sounds from a Contact Mic Frozen in Water Ice

Freezing the mic outside overnight

I just got a note from Dan Pugsley of Radium Audio. regarding their new resource Radium Audio Labs. The site will feature a broad variety of sound experiments and explorations. Dan writes,

“Radium Audio has recently started a blog demonstrating some of our explorative processes, and though it’s very much in the early stages of development we have some pretty interesting pieces uploaded already and I was wondering if any of it might be suitable for Audio Cookbook? We have two new explorative projects in the works at the moment, one of which is based on binaural recordings and the other will be revolving around the use of dry ice to create a variety of sounds.”

The projects posted so far include using a coil mic to record the electromagnetic fields from various electronic devices, like an iPhone and a printer/scanner, and my favorite at the moment, sounds captured from a contact microphone frozen in water ice as it melts.


Frozen Contact Mic in Ice by Radium-Audio