I almost forgot to follow up… last Sunday, Bill, Eric and I did some voice, vocal processing and visuals using/inspired by Ross White’s poetry. (Can I post the poems here, Ross?) It went well. We’re going for a sort of manipulative feedback loop between the speaker/singer and the audio artist. Picture this: the vocalist wears headphones and speaks into a mic, the audio artist speeds/slows/stutters/lowers/distorts the voice in various ways and feeds it back to the vocalist’s headphones, in an attempt to override/influence the vocalist into vocalizing in different ways. Think possession — think voodoo. It may seem strange but it works in micro and macro (basic behavioral conditioning) so maybe we can do it in mezzo, too. It’s a chunk of experimentation towards my idm thesis show in October.

On the visual side, Eric and I did a Keyworx jam — since I’m so rusty with Keyworx, it was a bit frustrating — but it turned out alright. Tomorrow, Bill and I will be continuing the possession work. I’ll do more White-inspired visuals if Mundial (the new home for SHARE jams since last summer) isn’t too crazy with the Super Bowl party.

Blogues pour vous

It’s like blog Christmas over here — I’ve been turned on to so many fascinating blogs lately. Check the blog tag in my del.icio.us for blogs on visuals, information visualization, new media and music. The Bad Plus (one of my favorite bands has a blog?! Oh, Santa.) have turned me on to the PostClassic blog of Kyle Gann, a composer, critic and musicologist, who has been writing on music for the Village Voice since ’98. His music is beautiful, what I can understand of his music writing is really interesting and he posts full mp3s of great music (like this and this (his own, gorgeous)). Even if you’re not interested in music theory, you can skim through his posts for mp3s.

I’m singing in a church in 12 hours…maybe I should go to sleep now. Nah. Why sleep when I can play my piano? The first mp3 link there, Dream in White on White by John Luther Adams: not only achingly beautiful but easy to improvise to.