Following on from the live performance at C4CC, Heather and I spent a day recording in my studio, and this is the result.

Heather’s voice is the main sound source – I’m capturing her words as she speaks, and she is responding to the sounds that result. On two tracks I’ve used bowed metal and a kitchen whisk to provide extra textures.

If you would like to get high quality downloads of these tracks, click on the “Buy” link to go to my bandcamp page. The tracks are free or pay what you like.

A live improvisation with Heather Taylor at the Centre for Creative Collaboration in London (Kings Cross). This was an evening of performances to support TuttleToTexas, and the first time Heather and I performed together. We were both pleased with the results, and decided to do some studio improvisations together. more on that later.

Naiff : Naiff

I’ve had a bit of a break from working in my studio – part of which was a week away working with children with special needs. This is a week long project that I run from time to time on behalf of Eyemusic (best known for the wonderful Colourscape structure and new music festival).

At the end of the week I was performing in Colourscape on Clapham Common with Lawrence Casserley, Phil Wachsmann (violin) and Simon Desorgher (see the image below) . There were some lovely soundscapes created, which makes it a pity that we didn’t record any of them!

So I decided it was time to do another studio improvisation with my “sunday morning” software, but using some different sound sources. I decided to start with a plucked kitchen knife (hence the title of the piece) as I wanted short rather than sustained sounds to start off with. To this I then added a bowed and struck brass rod. As I use this software more, I’m starting to get more of an idea of how the input sounds are going to turn out, and when to start them running.

This is a more peaceful piece than some of the previous ones, and as the source sounds are natural (as opposed to the electronic noises from the Cracklebox), the resulting sounds have a lot more internal variation.

Enjoy!

Here’s a recent picture of Simon performing in a giant bubble floating on the Thames, as part of the 2009 Thames Festival…

I’ve just found out about this rather beautiful physical controller that’s in prototype right now. Can’t wait to get my hands on one …

http://madronalabs.com/hardware

density1 :  density 1

density2 : density 2

I’ve just bought a CrackleBox from STEIM. It’s an inexpensive, nicely made circuit bent instrument, played by touching the silvery contact pads on the box surface. The pads connect to various points on a circuit board inside the box – touching the contacts short circuits various parts of the board, resulting in semi-predictable sounds being generated.

This is a first improvisation using the CrackleBox with my time stretching instrument. The sounds are electronic and tend to be intense, so this is quite a different piece from my work with flugel horn.

A bit of history…

The CrackleBox was created by Michel Waisvisz at STEIM in the 1970s, and is one of the earliest examples of a circuit-bent instrument.

The idea in circuit bending is to take an existing piece of (battery powered) consumer electronics, expose the circuit board, and touch various points on it until you get some kind of unintended sound. You gradually create a map of the most interesting points to touch, and then solder wires between those points and some kind of contact pads that you can touch with your fingers.

There’s a great article on circuit bending here, with a more pithy definition : “the creative short-circuiting of everyday electronic sound devices to make strange new instruments and art objects”

Here’s a link to the site of an interesting custom maker of electronic instruments – BugBrand.

An early pioneer of circuit bending is Reed Ghazala, whose excellent (and beautiful) site is well worth visiting. Not only does Reed make custom instruments, but he has a wealth of material on how to circuit bend your own instruments. If circuit bending interests you, his site is a good place to start. He also has a book available on Amazon: Circuitbending: Build Your Own Alien Instruments (ExtremeTech)

Also check out Handmade Electronic Music by Nicholas Collins, which is about all kinds of hardware hacking, not just circuit bending.  It’s a great book for beginners as you start off by creating very simple sound makers with basic tools like loudspeakers and batteries.There’s chapters on making contact mics, tape head instruments, circuit bending of various kinds, and building simple synthesiszer circuits. And along the way you learn how to solder, and avoid electrocuting yourself. You really don’t need to know anything about electronics to start making noise makers with this book.

(Note – both of the above links to Amazon are affiliate links)

symphony of the senses 1 :  symphony of the senses 1

symphony of the senses 2 :  symphony of the senses 2

Symphony of the Senses is a piece by Simon Desorgher, for improvising musicians and dancers. The piece has a broad structure, in that specific sections are defined (heart, breath/air and so on), but the specific details of how each section is formed is largely left to the musicians to decide. This version of the piece was performed in Colourscape with Simon playing flute, Michael Ormiston on vocals, various eastern percussion instruments and (if I remember correctly) effects pedals, and myself on computer. There were three improvising dancers with large coloured scarves, and various scents were released in the different sections of the piece.

In Colourscape the audience move around the whole structure  – fixed performers (that’s me) are in a large central dome, whilst the other musicians are on radio mics and can move around freely. The dancers also roam the structure during each performance. It’s quite an experience, for audience and performers alike.

I’m using the same software that I used for my solo perfomances with metal, so I’m layering and looping sounds using software recorders (technically, I’m recording into buffers) and replaying the sounds using granular playback and delay lines, as well as adding extra effects. These are live performances, but there was quite a bit of post-production – mostly in the mixing, though there was a bit of editing involved as well.

Time : time

waiting : waiting

“persistence of vision“ is a two hour edit of a 4 hour performance in Colourscape, from around 2000/1. This time I’ve broken the recording up into separate, shorter  pieces, of between 5 and 15 minutes.

nervous rain :  nervous rain

I think that by this time, I had most of the metal sound sources on my performance rig sorted out. In addition to the metal strips, I had found two beautiful metal whisks in the kitchen department of one of my local department stores, both of which produced everything from quiet, hard bell-like sounds up to a demonic rattling; a large piece of angle-iron gave much needed stability to the sounding board, but turned out not that sonically interesting – a grating continuous bell-like sound and the occasional clang were about all that it would produce; and my “eviscerated spring reverbs”.

what lies beneath :  what lies beneath

Back in the days when I worked for EMS, I’d found that you could create a wonderfully thunderous sound by (gently!) knocking the synthesiser so that the springs in its reverb unit banged together. So I hunted around for a couple of old reverb units, and took the lids off the springs. Now I could brush the springs directly with bits of paper or plastic, or create an incredible industrial screeching sound by bowing the mounting plates of the metal casing.

The rain-like sounds in “nervous rain” (above) were created by slowly (and gently) dragging the edge of a piece of card slowly along the springs. This sound is then fed directly into a 2 channel looping delay line, with different delays on each channel, so that the sounds drift slowly apart.

Again, the sounds are looped and layered, and played back in different ways – slowed down, pitch shifted, random playback and so on. One of the modules in the software plays a single recording back at different pitches, producing chords. This is what you can hear in the “the final toll”, where the chord gradually shifts down to a single pedal note.

the final toll :  the final toll

here’s a link

I’ve finally started rehearsing with the new software I created recently, as I have a performance in Rotherham with Colourscape in a few weeks time. Here’s the piece from yesterday.

I’m away on the north of England this week, running a first outing for the sensory room version of my interactive max/msp software at the Haworth Art Gallery in Accrington. Today (Saturday) was the first of two “public” days, and they’ve gone well. I’ve shot some video of people trying out the system, which I’ll edit when I get home next week. It’s pretty dark in the sensory room, so I’m not sure how well it’ll all come out. I was using an LED light from B&Q as a kind of low tech light source this morning while shooting some shots of the empty room – worked pretty well!

In the meantime, here’s the second part of suspended …

suspended_pt2

suspended – second part

Download link