Crap — did I really go more than a week without posting? Sorry.

Quite a weekend. On Friday I hung out with Fabian at my favorite cafe, sharing music and working on my Keyworx patches. He’s a great guy; it’s a shame he’s got to head back to Deutscheland this week. More’s the pity, he didn’t make it to SHARE on Sunday. “Whither Fabian?”, said we.

The Neutrino show on Saturday was completely off the hook: just a wild, wild show. I was very happy to shoot Red Bastard, Matt, Pat and Rebekka, and they did not disappoint. Our first scene had Red Bastard knocking Matt off his skateboard and stealing it. Matt chased “Red”, who suddenly turned and lay (enormous) belly down on the board — I don’t think I could forget that image: Red Bastard’s lumpy mass flat on the ground, staring down Matt crouched in front of him. Neutrino: save the tapes and get a screencap of that shot.

Sunday, I did an improv workshop with Dave Pasquesi, a masterful Chicago improviser. As Ashley said, it was a breath of fresh air. He teaches listening above all else and to invite the moment, not seize it. “The scene doesn’t need anything from you; your partner doesn’t need anything from you — you need your partner. Look to them.” Faith: it’s all about faith.

I heard Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot yesterday and I had to get it. The ambience is beautiful. A precise, hard attack in the production is so popular right now as to be almost undetectable. To listen to an album that evades or blurs that axis is very refreshing.

At SHARE, Eric and I did a collaborative Keyworx set with Isabelle (read: networked performance with someone in the Netherlands), which was a good first taste of the slow process of a multi-user collaboration. Some guys who looked about 16 years old* did a featured musical set, showing an impressively broad range of styles. Towards the end, it got pretty heavy on the screaming blips so I took off.

* They’re probably in college but if they are in high school then way to go, them! They’re quite talented.

SHARE this Sunday, as I am wont to say, was nifty. I shared some vids with Fabian so he could play with them in Arkaos; he gave me a bunch of great photos. Surprisingly, it wasn’t that hard to access his PC over the network.

I like Fabian’s website — it’s slim, jumpy, and the little message pane is nifty. Plus I just love reading German, even though I can only decipher every tenth word. So heiss! This coming Sunday will be Fabian’s last SHARE for a while, unfortunately; his tourist visa is expiring and he’s going back to Germany. Happily, he’s got a new girl/friend to meet back in his hometown — they met online, just like Beth and me, soon after his girl back home dumped him — so it’s not a complete bummer for him. He hopes to return next year.

There were two featured artists, Kera Nagel (Axiomatic Integration) and Andre Aspelmeier (Gradient Communication). Each performed solo and then, together, as Incite/. Their handles are a mouthful but they were very sweet and their stuff was really good — syncopated, glitchy electronica accompanied by minimal, tense video work perfectly synced to each musical element. Kera’s second piece really demonstrated the value of setting a long, slow, inviting groove before breaking it. Slow pans across panoramic photos with two very subtle effects — a small wavy distortion and a narrowing of the letterbox, both perfectly Mickey Moused* again — it invited you into the image and made the eventual break even more powerful and entrancing (being as it was a rotating, diagonal bar of red shot through with gold cross-hatching). The medium (and the techno music to which it’s often set) lends itself to speed and disjunction — it’s good to slow things down and restrict your palette to a handful of colors.

Andre did his solo set entirely from samples of a tin box containing two springs and a contact microphone. It was very cool.

The video for their dual set had one section of simple diffraction gratings against each other, an idea I’ve had since college but never tried, sure that it would suck. I was wrong. The moral: fuck doubt.

I met a sweet woman named Angel, a friend of Daniel Vatsky (one of the SHARE regulars, who is also sweet). She liked my phys_plant5 stuff (my most developed video performance piece at the moment). She runs a monthy show out in Williamsburg called Dogs Blood Rising. She asked for my card — I might get my first gig!

This Sunday Eric, Isabelle (who’s in Amsterdam) and I will be collaborating in a Keyworx performance, working concept: figure/ground (me/Isabelle), floater/modifier (Eric), which roles will rotate. I am very excited.

Andre’s nifty little MIDI controller (by Faderfox).

I snuck a peek at their performance notes; either they’re mathematically inclined…or they’re spies.

Andre’s box. The lid was embossed, “STAR TREK: the Next Generation”.

Andre and Kera kicking it deutsche-style.

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p>* Film slang for scoring that’s synced precisely to the action of the scene, e.g., Mickey gets clobbered with a poker: bonk!**

** Sproing, fweet, vwip, schloop…you get the idea.

My cousin is getting married! Mike proposed to Jen at the Oregon Country Fair on Saturday, July 10th. He arranged for them to be called on stage by a comedy act and got down on his knees in front of a crowd of dirty hippies. It was very sweet; I saw the video. After the comic duo (using shaky, faux-French accents) spends too long ad libbing and loses momentum, Mike takes over and pulls out the ring and the question. Jen is overcome, Jen accepts, they embrace. The crowd cheers.

Mike made a huge mosaic poster that was waiting for her to see when they left the outdoor theatre.

If you want to see all the little people and doggies that went into each tile, you can view or download a huge version (3.75MB). If you don’t have a lot of memory, your browser might hang a bit if you view it, in which case you should right-click and save the file to your computer where it will fill your hard drive with little Jens and Mikes (in much the same way as they’ll soon be filling San Diego with such homunculi). Congratulations, Mikey and Jen!

Update

Mikey has given me permission to post the link to the video of the proposal. Be warned: it’s ~four minutes long (70MB) and liable to cause jerking of tears and pulling of heartstrings — even moistening of palms, if you’ve got a thing for bad French accents.

Update update

Mike has whipped up a slick new page for the video and the poster, the former in Mac- and Windows-friendly versions.

I called my brother at lunch today. He’s a rare coins and bullion broker. On the spur of the moment, I used a heavy Southern dialect and gave the receptionist a fake name. He picked up:

Pete: This is Pete Winckler at ______ Rare Coins. Me: (thickly) Hi there, Pete, this is Joe Carreyon. Lissen, I saw on yer website that you had them Saint-Gaudens — the ones from the treasure ship? Pete: We do have the pre-1933 Saint-Gaudens gold coins; unfortunately, they’re not shipwreck coins. Me: Huh. See, I was hopin’ to get some o’ them Saint-Gaudens from the traysure ship.
Pete: We do have shipwreck coins; they’re just not Saint-Gaudens, sir. Me: Well, that’s a damn shame. Hmmm. Lemme tell you hwhut: you got a brother, don’t cha, one whut’s real good at acting and accents? Pete: You little bastard.
Me: (long giggling)

He said that it was the first and last time I’d get him, but he’s wrong. Maybe I’ll get Lou to call next time.

What can I say? She’s wonderful.

I eat her hair.

Look at the happy couple.

Isn’t she gorgeous?

Dan (pictured here) loves Beth (above).

“Who, me?”

“Yes, you. To the cuddlemobile!”

Mineminemineminemine.

Early music

Eric is a new friend; he’s made me feel very welcome at SHARE, introduced me to a great program to start doing live visuals with and helped me learn it. On top of his visual skills (surprise, surprise) he’s a skilled musician as well. In a remarkable coincidence, Eric — like another friend who introduced me to ars electronica — plays the lute. On his site Asteria Musica you can download three beautiful tracks of Eric singing and playing early music with his partner, Sylvia Rhyne. If you listen to only one medieval song this year, make it Quant La Douce Jouvencelle.

Fognode

A couple of months ago, I stumbled upon some excellent ambient music from a very talented multi-instrumentalist producing under the name Fognode. Fognode is Brian Siskind and his music is ambient in the sense that it creates a space, an atmosphere — a place where you can go. Listen to “Mandala” off of Beat Hollow, which has a beautiful sound that Brian described to me as “kinda gamelan on a kalimba (thumb piano).”

Kid Icarus not included

When we lived in Belgium we had to use a step-down transformer to convert the European 220v to American 110v for our Nintendo Entertainment System. It weighed at least 10 pounds, had very sharp edges and could give you a serious burn after, say, 10 hours of Rygar. I have many wonderful memories of playing Nintendo games with my brother. I also have many grey, stale memories of frustrating, compulsive hours of Shadowgate, A Boy & His Blob, and Friday the 13th, which had a permanent bug that made all the items intangible and the game thus unbeatable. But even when a game sucked hardcore, the music was generally addictive (read: endurable even after many hours) and to hear it now brings back all those fond/stultifying memories. I give you the Nintendo Breakz, a collection of short remixes of classic Nintendo game themes, which includes such classics as Punch Out, River City Ransom, The Legenda of Zelda (1 and 2), Excite Bike, Metroid and Megaman. Best listened to with sore thumbs, lower back pain and a full bladder. [danke, BB.]

Is it washable?

Some of the Autechre tracks I’ve been listening to lately are achingly beautiful. The garbled line, ‘is it washable’, from “Under Boac” off of LP5, keeps running through my mind and out my lips. You can listen to the whole thing at Warp Records’ BLEEP online store. I would also suggest “Fold 4, Wrap 5″, which too is gorgeous. (BLEEP isn’t easy to link to, but you can go to this page if you just want to hear those tracks and don’t mind not having the other frames showing.)

Eno

Listen to more Eno. We demand it!

Late addition: Steve Reich

Steve Reich was one of the pioneers of experimental, conceptual music. An excerpt from his fierce tape-looped piece “It’s Gonna Rain” can be heard in a mammoth, two hour Brian Eno interview available from the Internet Archive. In the multimedia section of his website, you can download a twelve minute sample of his Music for 18 Musicians, a beautiful, hypnotic piece.

Every Chemical Brothers and Crystal Method song ever written is a direct ripoff of the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Comes”.

Defy me. I dare you.

Here’s a sample movie (2 MB, Quicktime needed) from the stuff I’ve been working on tonight. It feels so good when I get in the zone. The stuff I was making tonight really moved me; I was playing it while listening to an Autechre track, “Fold4, Wrap5″, which is just gorgeous.

I started in to working this evening feeling pretty down on things. At long last — after a breakthrough in a thorny technical problem with a Keyworx patch — I got the patch where I wanted it, and it was beautiful to watch. Plus, a chance linkage gave it an aspect I hadn’t been going for — a very pretty aspect. I’m back up; feeling good about my endeavors.

I’ll be doing this stuff — ‘spinning’ video, if you will — between acts at the Neutrino show at the PIT tomorrow night, 10 pm. Do come.

As I walked to fetch lunch yesterday, I ran into a friend who was on his way to a (pretty big) commercial audition. Seeing him made me think: when will I quit my day job? When will I support myself with acting, video and such?

From an index magazine interview with Richard James, a.k.a. Aphex Twin:

MEREDITH: Well, it’s great to make money by doing what you want to do. RICHARD: But if I didn’t make any money, I wouldn’t give up making music. I used to make more music in college, when I had a shit job. I couldn’t wait to get home and start working. I wouldn’t want to be in that position now, but the rush of going into my bedroom after being trapped in school all day, it was quite lush. MEREDITH: You’d find yourself almost running back. RICHARD: Yeah. But when I left college and started just doing music, it took about three years to come to terms with not having to work at a job. Having all the time I wanted wasn’t so good ?¢‚Ǩ?°?É‚Äû?É¬Æ it was hard to be happy, even though it was what I’d wanted for ages. I had a bit of cash, I didn’t have to get a job, but it wasn’t as exciting as coming home and looking forward to making music. MEREDITH: And now … RICHARD: I got used to it, and now I really love it.

In other words, live and work in the right now, not OhMyLifeWouldBePerfectIfOnlyIHadMoreTimeToDoThisAndThat Land.

*** A pause while I listen to a Steven Johnson interview about emergence. Done. Well worth listening to and it has samples of Eno’s Generative Music &em; the first time I’ve heard any. ***

But how to deal with doubt?

From an interview with Brian Eno:

PETER: It seems that almost the biggest pain humans can feel is total aloneness. BRIAN: Occasionally I go off for a few days just to sit somewhere on my own. I refer to it as “going into the abyss.” I don’t even take books because they?¢‚Ǩ?°?É‚Äû?ɬ¥re another way of engaging in the group consciousness. The idea is that I’ll spend some time in a quite boring place where I don?¢‚Ǩ?°?É‚Äû?ɬ¥t know anybody and I don?¢‚Ǩ?°?É‚Äû?ɬ¥t speak the language. PETER: What’s that like? BRIAN: It’s actually very traumatic. The first two days are especially disturbing. I lose sense of the value of anything I’ve been doing ?¢‚Ǩ?°?É‚Äû?É¬Æ it all starts to look completely meaningless. If I were actually depressed, I would never do this because I could very quickly end up topping myself. [laughs] PETER: Does it eventually become a positive experience? BRIAN: Yes. It’s a fantastic moment. Suddenly I’m no longer desperate. All these things that I had thought were wonderful suddenly look like shit, but there?¢‚Ǩ?°?É‚Äû?ɬ¥s still something great about being alive. It kind of reaffirms everything.

Hmmm. I’m a broody bastard today.

Elsewhere in the interview, Eno recommends Richard Sennett’s The Uses of Disorder. I’d like to read that. Read an interview with Autechre and more, if you like; one can learn from their workflow. And here’s another another Steven Johnson interview.

Eh. I don’t feel like drawing a neat line through all of the above. If you don’t see a line there you’re probably not reading this bit, either.

I’m thinking about starting an improv/theatre wiki or adding a lot to the Wikipedia. Ross and Dan both think it’s a good idea. What about you?

Today’s food for thought comes from Gerhard Richter, the German painter. Note: this food for thought is fully applicable to any art, improv included.

THORN-PRIKKER:* Could you say something about the unusual form of “War Cut?” RICHTER: My approach to form is very simple. Whatever is real is so unlimited and unshaped that we have to summarize it. The more dramatic events are, the more important the form. That is why people marry in a church and why we need a priest for a funeral. THORN-PRIKKER: With “War Cut,” did you give these dramatic events form by putting them between book covers? RICHTER: The book covers and the way the material between them is treated. And the way texts and images influence one another, change their meanings, with the images changing incomparably more because they are much more open and ambiguous. THORN-PRIKKER: But the images and texts are placed alongside one another almost blindly. You have great trust in the chance occurrences involved in such form. RICHTER: Form is all we have to help us cope with fundamentally chaotic facts and assaults. Formulating something is a great start. I trust form, trust my feeling or capacity to find the right form for something. Even if that is only by being well organized. That too is form. As for chance, consider John Cage. His musical compositions were never a total appropriation of a chance acoustic event. He devised an ingenious system to build structures from dumb abundance. And he devoted even more skill to giving form to this succession of sounds. That is the absolute opposite of chance, nature and rubbish.

Hurry and read the NY Times interview this is from before it vanishes into extortionate pay-per-view land. Be sure to check out the accompanying slideshow, from which I ganked (fair use, I think) a jpg of Richter’s abstract painting No. 648-2, with photos of which he made “War Cut”.

[via artblog]

* O, what I could have done if I had been named Jan Thorn-Prikker!