New music for the end of May!

I’m very happy with the way that Under Third came out. It’s introspective, with a sense of lazy urgency. Floating through the piece is a modified Landini “under third” cadence, that provides both drive and drone, eventually getting swallowed up as the piece gains bulk. This is also the densest piece I’ve done in a while, using 12 different instruments and an unbelievable number of filters which ground my dual G5 to a screeching halt.

Enjoy.

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I’ve grown more than a little obsessive about the idea of non-recordable music in recent years. We’ve gotten so used to archiving, taping, recording, storing for posterity, that the original itself sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. Why bother going to a concert when you can listen to the CD?

This has caused me, in a way, to bifurcate myself musically. One part constructs music that only exists in recorded form, music that never had an initial performance, but was constructed block by block. The other part creates music that can’t be recorded at all, music that incorporates multiple senses and that depends on the whim of the musicians and a few rolls of the dice. If one managed to create a multi-media video of a performance, the result would be nothing but the record of an iteration of the work rather than the work itself.

It’s been a rejuvenating day. Lots of music got written, both on Langue and otherwise.

Varia takes a crack at music writing with my album, Travelog. Writing about music is a tricky thing; one needs a special vocabulary to speak clearly about music with other musicians, and once one has developed that one can’t use it very often because then the writing makes no sense to non-musicians. She manages the task rather well, in my opinion. Here’s a particularly good passage:

Varia’s been listening to bits and pieces of Travelog (and bits and pieces of the various songs as I play them on loop for hours) for well over a year now, so hearing her impressions as a listener rather than a supportive spouse are extra interesting to me.

Guess what? I’m sick again. I get the feeling that my body is betraying me sometimes.

In between fits of coughing and bouts of medicine-induced delirium (this is an exaggeration I assure you) I’m doing what I can to retain any semblance of humanity. I dragged myself out for a meeting this morning, and made a remarkably tasty batch of masoor lentils for dinner. The smell would certainly have been warming my heart throughout the day as it bubbled, if only my nose worked.

On the way home from the meeting, I had one of those brilliant moments where the structure of the piece I’m working on just spread itself out on the mental table and said “here, this is how it is!” When I got home I successfully scribbled it all out before something knocked my brain for a loop, so I’ve now got a road map. The piece, entitled Langue, and scored for flute and video, is about how things interconnect to create the potential for meaning. Kind of like a context-free grammar, but with a lot less math and more flute.

The artistic problem for me is how to meaningfully relate the flute and the video. So much “multimedia” art feels feckless and lost to me, like two different pieces duct-taped together. What does the video offer the flute — what does the flute offer the video? Can there be a meaningful interplay to the two, a real coming together? This is what I hope to address.

Technically it’s going to be different. Unlike Dramatis Personae, where I used Jitter to process mostly live video, Langue uses as source material a large number of photographs, which I am still amassing. There’s probably going to be some pre-rendered video as well as some light filters, which ought to save some precious CPU cycles (real-time video rendering does bad things to a computer).

Input is going to be mostly via audio. I started with a fragment of the Jitter tutorial code and ended up with something that can read in peak amplitude, assign a number to it, and have something happen depending on that number. This is pretty neat. Here’s an example, excerpted from the rough draft:

When this passage is played, there will be three loud pitches nestled among the quieter ones. These three will be picked up an assigned numbers; let’s say that on a scale of 0 to 5, with 5 being the loudest, these three translate to 4, 5, and 4. I set it up so that something happens when a 5 is picked up, something different happens with a 4. So as the flute plays, three different events are triggered on the video screen. These might not be big things, but things that build ever so slightly on the event event. Of course there’s no way I can guarantee a 4,5, and a 4. On the day, it might be 4,5,5, or 4,4,5, or a 4,3,3 or so forth. But I don’t want to guarantee it. Musicians are not machines, and writing for them like they are takes all the fun out of it (for me and for them).

Given this, setting up some sort of structure and cohesion becomes a lot more like landscape design than architecture. Set up the paths, tend the plants, make sure that a left turn is taken about here, and voila! That’s what I’m striving for. Over the course of the piece, the video gradually responds differently to the flute, and eventually the flute starts to respond to the video. And then what? Only my scribble of paper knows.

I had hoped, in vain, that we’d seen the last of dreary weather for a while. Fortunately, a day of interesting work, a bowl fresh vegetable soup, and a cup of cocoa work wonders in making things just a bit more bearable.

Marking the rapid flow of time, this post marks a year to the day I switched the site over to Tinderbox.

Vlad Spears of 2second(fuse) reviews Travelog:

Alwin Hawkins delivers his verdict:

Sales have been good so far, and there are still copies left.

Ayn Rand approved: Fountainhead Natural Spring Water.

Transmit 3.2 supports Automator actions, one of which is “synchronize from your Mac to a remote server.” This makes updating a Tinderbox site like this easy as cake. Use Tinderbox to export the files and run then run the workflow — Automator will tell Transmit to connect, synchronize, and then disconnect. I’d written an Applescript to do pretty much the same thing many moons ago, but the recent releases of Transmit broke the “quit at the end” portion. This is much slicker.

I’m pretty busy right now, but it’s almost exclusively brain work. Coding, research, composing: all of these things occupy more or less the same part of my mind, which leaves me feeling wiped out at the end of the day. So I decided that I need something a bit lower order, something where I could be active without tickling the top of Bloom’s taxonomy.

If I had a house, I’d be all set — my dad used the house and its endless repairs and upgrades for this purpose. If I had a potter’s wheel and a kiln in the garage (and a garage while we’re at it), it would be ideal. But these are contrary-to-fact conditions, so I was left to find something else. But what?

The question of a suitable handicraft was addressed. All things requiring a vast amount of space or upfront expenditure were ruled out., and after considering what was left I decided to take up mailing. I ordered some rings and a pair of pliers.

I realize that chainmail is, as far as products go, relatively without use in today’s modern world but I’ll be the first to admit that it’s one of the things that drew me to it. Spending all day with technology, getting as close to the bleeding edge as I can without cutting myself, it’s very invigorating to spend time arranging little bits of metal in uniform patterns (again, without cutting myself). An unvalorized binary opposition if you will.

Here is my very first project, a European 4-in-1 ring pattern. Getting the weave started is the hardest part. I ordered three sizes of rings, this being the largest. The good news about working with the large rings is that the pattern is easy to see and make, the bad news is that the rings are thick and heavy and take some real strength to bend.

I add a row when I’m feeling like a break, so it will eventually get bigger, but for now it make Ye Olde Coaster, perhaps the worst possible coaster in all of human history. It gets hot and scratches the table. Dark ages indeed.

I’m home after a delightful week, and thrust back into the thick of things with a series of meetings.

On the return flight I finally finished On being Authentic, a good survey of the development of the concepts of self and authenticity. My brain has been teeming with valorized binary oppositions all day.

While in Atlanta, I managed to convert Chava to Tinderbox. She’s already usign it for her Art History research; after a guided demonstration, she realized that it was way more useful than the software she’d been using and took the plunge. Map view was the winning feature for her, but it was the ability to have someone who already knew the program work through a possible solution to her problem that made the difference.

The political parallels between now and the end of the Roman Republic chill me at times. I’m half-expecting to see proscription lists posted.

In slightly less soul crushing news, I found a flyer on the Atlanta subway in which a gentleman promised, for a $3500 fee, to get people out of jail “Utilizing His Awesome Knowledge of Law And The Supernatural African Kong Science of Palo Mayombe!” This gentleman also happens to be a Rosicrucian Magus — the back side of the flyer described the areas of instruction proffered, including “Time Travel” and “Communicate With The Dead”.

Georgia has been good to me. I’m getting a goodly bit done, sleeping in and generally relaxing.

This morning the family and I went down to a local place for brunch. The girls have grown up quite a bit since I first met them, but they are still pretty much the same. Rhiannon is finishing up Kindergarten, and has become even more curious and mischievous. She’s extremely clever and more than a little wicked, a great girl. Isadora at four is as whimsical as ever, as I got to experience firsthand as she colored at the table while our meal was being prepared.

Her coloring is a story in progress. It started with a larger red heart below a colored egg, sitting in the sky. Then there was her sister made out of chocolate, and her, bleeding (”I’m bleeding!” she says matter-of-factly, pointing to the two red streaks I mistook for legs). Then they were in a lake, quickly populated with fish, penguins and ice. A tree, complete with ladder, was constructed to let people visit the egg. Then jellyfish and hearts started raining down from the heavens.

Chava, ardent student of art history that she is, found and read me a passage from a book on Man Ray, about a riot at a 1923 Dada soiree:

I am safely in Atlanta. On flight down, the majority of the trip was spent either above or in the middle of a raucous lightning storm. I had images of an elementary school teacher explaining Ben Franklin’s experiments with kites and keys, and began to feel a deep empathy for that metallic object, aloft in adverse conditions.