Rhythm Wish
Although this idea/piece is a couple of years old now, I realized I’ve not written about it in any detail (although I have talked about it on several occasions). So this is that. But more than that, I want to talk about what this idea isn’t, and how gloriously isn’t it is.
This is story of how a complicated idea became simpler and simpler until nothing else was left but its core.
The aesthetics of accidentally listening wrong, on purpose
Let me tell you a story about the last eight years of my life, when I developed a special relationship with the last twelve seconds of Shania Twain’s “You’re Still The One”:
Friends. Objects. Lights. Feet.
Over the years I have had many wonderful discussions with people whom I have never met. Either through emails, forums, or even chatrooms I have talked about all manner of things with people scattered around the world. Sometimes these virtual friendships manifest in the physical world and a thing is born. An art thing. This is one of those times.
Black Box project
The Black Box project is a project that involves Pierre Alexandre Tremblay on bass/electronics, Patrick Saint-Denis on robotics/electronics, Sylvain Pohu on guitar/electronics, and myself on drums/electronics. It’s a four-way collaboration that has gone through two residencies (in Montreal and Huddersfield), to work out the finer details of putting a large-scale show together.
It looks and sounds something like this:
Have Learned, Learning, Will Learn
I was very young when I started learning music. My household was a musical one, with my mother playing piano and grandmother and great-aunt being being piano teachers. Growing up, I had 3 hour piano lessons every day, which I rarely enjoyed. I did not look forward to the lessons because music was a chore, it was something I had to do. It wasn’t until I picked up the guitar as a teenager and started developing a personal relationship with music, that it became something I wanted to do.
I then embarked on multiple (at the time unrelated) strands of learning music. I carried on with classical piano, solfege, and 4-part writing through university, while playing guitar, bass, and drums in all kinds of bands. Previously, I had learned to work with wood and metal in shop class, and later learned to solder and make my own guitar pedals. I didn’t know it at the time, but these unrelated strands of my life would eventually come crashing together.
I have recently completed a PhD in music composition from the University of Huddersfield. The experience was life changing in many ways and I am thankful to all the people that were there for me along the way. Through the PhD (and thesis) I developed and refined my thoughts on composition, improvisation, memory, interaction, mapping, and openness/sharing. You can read about all of this in my thesis which exists as a dynamic web-thesis (I am very proud of the thesis, and consider it to be an art object in and of itself).
Just Making Things Up
I was sitting in a cafe with a few friends and we ended up talking about how “just making it up” was often used as qualifier when talking about shitty music. Like seeing someone perform, it sucking, and thinking “it sounds like they’re just making it up”. I couldn’t completely disagree with this, as I have heard my fair share of shitty improv. But after seeing a close friend (Richard Craig) give a talk about performing with flute/feedback, and how adaptive/reactive he has to be, I couldn’t help but think that this was also a way to describe the sublime in performance. That shimmer/glimmer of transcendence. “Making things up” means it fucking sucks, or touching god. The stuff in the middle is composition.
Improvising is a big part of what I do, as a performer (whatever that means), composer (whatever that means), and just about everything else. And as such, I’ve thought a lot about improvisation, specifically things that I don’t like about it, in my performance as well as in others’. Many of these [shitty improv] tropes have inspired me to find ways to overcome them. Sometimes just being aware of the trope is enough to avoid it, but other times it’s taken a more deliberate reprogramming. What follows are a bunch of the tropes/ideas/problems and, where applicable, what I’ve done in order to overcome them.
Lights
Here are a couple of performance videos using an approach I’ve just recently started calling Light Vomit.
What you see in the video is a combination of automated processing (via The Party Van/Cut Glove) with a variety of DMX light interactions and behaviors. Everything is controlled from a Max patch I made specifically for the gig (and specifically to test these behaviors), most of which use audio analysis to dynamically record/play/process incoming audio and trigger a variety of light behaviors. (Click here to view my moment to moment analysis of the performance using my Making Decisions in Time improv analysis framework.)
Cut Glove – new gamepad-based software
Here is the new piece of software based around an Xbox 360 controller that I’ve been working on for about a year. It is called Cut Glove and it’s a live-sampling and processing patch that contains mappings based on video game mechanisms and metaphors.
This is what it looks like:
Some of the core ideas in the patch are based on sampling and processing modules I developed in The Party Van, another piece of software I’ve written. However, in Cut Glove I rebuilt everything completely from scratch, with tons of new features, more options, better overall sound, etc…. At the core of Cut Glove is karma~, a Max external I recently put out which can you read about in detail here.
Before I go into detail about what Cut Glove does, and more importantly, how the mappings are implemented, here is the first of three Cut Glove performance videos in this blog post:
You can click here to download Cut Glove(v01), the required externals, and instruction manual.
The rest of this blog post will go into detail about the background, development, and technical implementation of Cut Glove.
This is why
Something that I’ve alluded to in various blog posts, and is present in the whole of my webpage, but I’ve never specifically talked about, are my thoughts on openness, sharing, money, and capitalism. Ever since Ray Evanoff prodded me to write something more about the ‘magic’ stuff that him and I have talked about, I’ve really gotten into the idea of doing these kind of blog posts, in between my generally technical/informative ones. So this is another one of these posts.
[su_pullquote align=”right” class=””]You do what you think is right especially when it’s hard to do, otherwise it doesn’t matter.[/su_pullquote]
I’ve always been a quite open, helpful, and sharing person. I suppose it’s in my nature to be that way, but increasingly, I’ve made a conscious effort to act in this manner. Even if it is difficult or embarrassing. You do what you think is right especially when it’s hard to do, otherwise it doesn’t matter. “It’s easy until it’s hard”. I strongly believe that acting in this manner can (and will) change the world. Kindness is contagious, and openness/honesty is viral. That sounds real hippy-dippy, but read on.
Titles (synchronicity, time travel, magic, etc…)
A Possibility:
Title as prophecy. The art and muck that you are involved with bends around you, is bigger than you, is smarter than you. It points in a direction that you could not conceive. That you could not imagine. It becomes the truth, out from under you. It is an arrow. It is a line.
<as point on line>
You’ve named a thing. It becomes your future.
You name the thing. It becomes a fictional present.
You have to name a thing. Do you give, to become the art?
Which future does the arrow point towards?
You are the single point at which the Universe will crease.
</as point on line>
A Possibility:
Title as bound poetry. You become the filament. The rod. You are honest. And you touch god, the bottom. You can see everything. Naked, you channel truth into a list of things.
<while shivering>
Uncertainty.
You extend yourself. All of the way.
Profoundly. Endlessly.
Nothing is more important than this moment.
</while shivering>
A Possibility:
Title as arc. There is a beginning, with its end built in. It starts before you are paying attention, and finishes after you’re ashes. It is made up of everything around you. It is a resonance through multiple points of time, folded over each other.
<righting, writing rites>
You become aware of it happening. You make a note.
You live the life required of you.
You are becoming the art.
Your life and the art, are folding together.
It makes sense.
The end is here. The end was always (t)here.
</righting, writing rites>
pǝʇsᴉxǝ ɹǝʌǝ sɐɥ ʇɐɥʇ ƃuᴉɥʇʎɹǝʌǝ oʇ sʎǝʞ ǝɥʇ ˙III ‘uoᴉʇuǝʇuᴉ uɐ ‘uoᴉsoldxǝ uɐ ‘ɹoɹɹᴉɯ ɐ ‘ɹǝᴉɟᴉldɯɐ uɐ ˙II ‘ɯoɔ˙(pǝɯɐuun)/ɯoɔ˙ʎssndɹnoʎʇoƃɹoɟʎpɐǝɹlɐᴉ/ɯoɔ˙lɹᴉƃɹǝɥʇouɐɥʇᴉʍǝʌoluᴉɯᴉ ˙I
Making decisions in time
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Table of Contents
Background
Development
Implementation
Analyses
The Future
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Background
It started with a simple question: “Why compose at all?”
At the time I was working on what would later become iminlovewithanothergirl.com and was trying to figure out how to deal with composing for myself as an improvising solo performer using a new/invented instrument which is difficult to reproducibly control. This marked a big shift in my compositional thinking. I began moving away from precomposing discrete gestures and started focusing on pure improvisation. I carried on this line of thinking through multiple compositions and projects over the next three years and eventually produced a framework for thinking about improvisation – making decisions in time.
Towards the Beat of a Different Drummer: A Journey into the Loss of Fidelity in Drums and Electronics
I wrote a paper on my evolving drum+electronics setup entitled “Towards the Beat of a Different Drummer : A Journey into the Loss of Fidelity in Drums and Electronics”. It was accepted in the end, but as a poster length paper, meaning that I had to cut the eight page paper down to four pages. There were lots of pictures/diagrams so after removing that and trimming some footnotes, I only needed to cut out a paragraph or two to make it fit.
Here is the full length paper version of the paper:
The published version, as mentioned, is a bit shorter and is available as part of the ICMC2011 published proceedings.