On April 11, 2010, I gave a concert at The People's Culture Palace in Camperdown, NSW. The event was hosted by Nick Shimmin and videoed by Graham Burchett, and hearty thanks for both of them for providing a wonderful place to play, and for great documentation.
I was really happy with the results of the concert - it was a great venue and I thought I performed well. I'm presenting here four videos, which give most of the music played at the event. In an effort to make what is basically laptop performing a bit more visually interesting, I'm wearing t-shirts specially chosen for the occasion. For the first piece (which is divided in two because of YouTube's 10 minute video time limit) "Texan Stretches with Frequency Modulations Owls and Springboard" - which is a live musique concrete piece, I'm wearing my Xenakis fan-boy t-shirt from TwelveToneTees.com. For the next two pieces "E/Phi (Didn't Care) for microtonal string quartet samples, and "Experience of Marfa: A Book of Drones Number 5" (excerpt), I'm wearing a Phi equation t-shirt from MathematiciansPictures.com.
Texan Stretches with Frequency Modulations Owls and Springboard is an 18 minute performance for time-stretched samples (made with the freeware PaulStretch), a frequency modulation patch (in Vaz Modular), some sampled owls (on the Yamaha SU-10 mini-sampler) and an amplified board with springs, screws and sandpaper attached to it, which is processed through 2 hand-controlled effects units - the Korg miniKP and the Alesis Air F/X. The video is divided in two - part 1 ends with a quote from an interview I did with Nicholas Slonimsky in 1980, and part 2 begins with the same quote.
Part 1:
Part 2:
E/Phi (Didn't Care)
is a piece of mathematical sonification, an example of taking things way too far in terms of mappings, and a good humored piece of Neo-Pythagorean modernist tunes (and tunings). The first million digits of the mathematical constants e and Phi are used to pick pitches, rhythms, durations, timbres, tempo relations, and a few other aspects of the piece. In addition, the scales in the piece are also based on e and Phi. In live performance, I'm controlling the tempo of what's going on, conducting, as it were, the imaginary string quartet.
Experience of Marfa: A Book of Drones Number 5
was written in 2007. It's for 3 Arturia Moog software synths tuned in 25, 26, and 27 tones per octave. The same chord progression is played on all 3 Moogs, using the Scala on-screen keyboards. This means that the chords beat against each other at rates determined by the differences between the scales. It's a drone piece that uses harmonies and tuning differences to assemble a progression of timbres, giving the listener a sound that they can "hear into," exploring sonic textures. This video is only a 10 minute excerpt from a 50 minute piece, but it's probably long enough to give one the idea of what the piece is like.