“Under Pressure” with video animation by David Sullivan and sound by yours truly was a piece exhibited at the Duets show at Loyola last year and later at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.
I neglected to post the video online, but here it is. View it in fullscreen with good speakers if possible!
Under Pressure from david sullivan on Vimeo.
My third (or fourth?) entry to the Disquiet Junto is a 2-minute narration that was uncomfortable to do. I initially resisted doing this “audiobiography”, as I generally dislike the self-consciousness that arises from talking about myself or hearing my voice, but as so many others in the Disquiet Junto have done it, I felt like I was cheating by skipping it. By the time I was finished, there were many things I didn’t talk about that contributed to the whole picture that didn’t make the cut : Indian music, analog synths, field recordings, Autechre, My Bloody Valentine…. but I was already several minutes over the allotted time when I started editing.
I also created a new SoundCloud account to post works from this site. I’ll be retroactively posting all the tracks from this blog soon.
background music: Chef Menteur – “Io” (edits)
More on this #60th Disquiet Junto project at:disquiet.com/2013/02/21/disquiet0060-audiobio
More details on the Disquiet Junto at: Groups – Disquiet-junto
More details on the SoundCloud “audiobiography” project at: blog.soundcloud.com/2013/02/06/audiobiography/
this is a track I composed for the 50th disquiet junto project.
My grandfather was a big time amateur (“ham”) radio operator who had talked to every country in the world, and he convinced me to get my novice license as a young kid, where i learned morse code. He passed away about 10 years ago but I am always thankful for his interest in electronics and tinkering that he passed on to me. The call CQ or “seek you” is what ham operators use to initiate conversation, that is the foundation of the pulse of this piece. The other signal incorporates a simple message from my (expired) call sign to my grandfather’s (RIP).
I used Max/MSP to generate the Morse code messages, (a little rusty to do it manually) and I ended with a sample of the Radio Tirana (from communist Albania) interval signal that I could pick up on my Heathkit ham radio, and was magical to me as a kid.
more on this 50th Disquiet Junto project
more details on the Disquiet Junto
Note: I first found out about disquiet and its founder/former NOLA resident Marc Weidenbaum when he reviewed my band Chef Menteur’s earliest mp3s and wrote about New Orleans’ burgeoning electronic music scene in the early 2000’s (See this 2005 piece he wrote right after Katrina). He’s only gotten more involved in the electronic music community since moving to San Francisco, keeping regular dispatches up and engaging via his twitter account @disquiet. His Disquiet Junto project on SoundCloud is now one year old; and this is my first entry, posted near the end of year one…. Congrats & thanks Marc!
Tonight is the closing (there was not an opening) for the Duets show at the Collins C. Diboll art gallery at Loyola University in New Orleans. David Sullivan and I put together a piece for it. It’s the same as can be seen at the Ogden but the presentation is closer to our intention here: the display is much larger (projector) and the audio is full range (speakers with subwoofer).
David made the video; I made the audio using analog synthesizers, field recordings I made of tree frogs in the neighborhood, Max/MSP and Max for Live.
Here’s my first successful attempt at getting the Juno-60 to sync with the Roland TR-707 sequencer. Kick and snare drum sounds provided by a junky old Tama analog drum machine that appeared out of nowhere many years ago.