Google Maps announced today that it has added support for generating bicycle directions. See the video above for an intro. This is listed as a beta feature and is apparently only available in 150 or cities. Albany happens to be one, so I gave it a go by typing in a few common destinations.

The routes appear mostly workable though far from ideal. They thankfully avoid busy, highly trafficked roads and give some preference to flatter routes. What few biking infrastructure amenities Albany possesses don’t seem to be part of the Google database. My usual route from Albany to Troy utilizes the Hudson River hike and bike trail for most of the distance, while the Google generated route substituted a long stretch on a two-lane road with an average speed limit of 45 miles per hour–not my first choice.

It will be interesting to watch this service develop. I certainly plan on using it but will likely do so in conjunction with other route-finding services (where they exist).

Albany Sonic Arts Presents Lucre and Jonathan Chen

Sunday March 14 @ 8pm
Upstate Artists Guild
247 Lark St.
Albany NY
$5 suggested donation

• Lucre is the improvising trio of Chris Cogburn , Bryan Eubanks, and Vic Rawlings who perform with exposed circuits, extended ampli?ed cello, low-? modular synthesis, and stripped down percussion.
• Jonathan Chen will perform a solo set of music for electronics, viola and violin.

Chris is a good friend from my Austin days and does great work with the No Idea Festival. I’m very excited he’ll be playing in Albany. And I’m equally excited that local artist Jonathan Chen is finally getting a chance to present his work.

More information about the artists after the break…

About Lucre

Working with exposed circuits, extended ampli?ed cello, low-? modular synthesis, and
stripped down percussion, Lucre, the trio of Chris Cogburn (Austin, TX), Bryan Eubanks
(Brooklyn, NY), and Vic Rawlings (Boston, MA), come together for the ?rst time to de-
velop their music for ten days in the Northeast. Long standing duo work exist between
all three and the idea for a trio came about during a gathering of musicians in Seattle
during August of 2009.

Vic Rawlings and Bryan Eubanks are familiar to Albany audiences through two previous
Albany Sonic Arts appearances. Chris Cogburn is making his Capital District debut.
Cogburn is based in Austin, TX where he presents the No Idea Festival, an annual
gathering dedicated to improvised music.

About Jonathan Chen

Jonathan Chen will perform a solo set of music for electronics, viola and violin. The
electronic work is created by producing feedback through a trumpet: a small micro-
phone is positioned in place of the mouthpiece and a small speaker is set next to
the bell. The feedback is altered by pressing or releasing the valves on the trumpet and
by ?ltering the frequencies via equalization and volume control on both an ampli?er and
a mixer. The work for viola, entitled “de-clime” involves the use of a metal mute placed
lightly on the bridge, coupled with bowing while changing pressure and speed. The re-
sulting sounds include difference tones and beating as the pitches gradually move
higher throughout the duration of the 15 minute work. The works for violin focus on tim-
bre and pitch while employing extended techniques such as preparations, sub-tones,
and micro-spiccatto. A wide variety of sounds are produced at dynamic extremes.

Born in 1974, Jonathan Chen is an improvisor, composer, and installation artist. His solo
work has  been presented in cities such as Atlanta, Beijing, Berlin, Chicago, London,
Luzern, New York and more. As a collaborator, Chen has worked with Tatsu Aoki, An-
thony Braxton, Gene Coleman, Nic Collins, Bill Dixon, Ensemble Noamnesia, Flux
String Quartet, David Grubbs, Alvin Lucier, John Zorn (brie?y) and many others, per-
forming both in the U.S. and internationally. Chen received his MM in Violin Perform-
ance from Northwestern University, his MA in Music Composition from Wesleyan Uni-
versity, and is currently working on his PhD in Electronic Arts at RPI in Troy, NY.

Straight to “Tape”

My previous approach to recording followed a “live to 2 track” design. I would play the piece and capture the input sounds along with whatever sounds were generated by my Max patch. The results were certainly true to life, represented my live performances well, and usually sounded fine. Occasionally, though, I’d wish for more flexibility to tweak the sounds, particularly the vocal or banjo sounds since I don’t have the luxury of recording in the world’s greatest sounding room. So I looked into ways to expand the number of available tracks.

Multitrack Multitudes

I played around with Soundflower, Rewire and Jack in various combinations and sometimes got things working pretty well. But the setups never completely gelled for me–partly because I felt constrained by the number of available outputs on my aging MOTU interface, partly because I needed as much available CPU for running my patches and couldn’t spare enough to run my DAW at the same time. So I eventually went back to recording everything in Max using a very slightly modified version of the quickrecord utility. This turned out to be a great way to break out individual tracks for further EQing during the mixing stage. One drawback was having to split the multichannel file into individual stereo or mono files. (Audacity and ProTools both do this very well. If only AudioFinder would support multichannel files…) But mostly I still felt constrained by the limited number of outputs on my audio interface; I often resorted to creating submixes of individual elements in Max in order to cram all the sounds into the available channels. With 10 outputs available I’d use the first 2 for monitoring while recording, 3 or 4 for live mics, leaving only 4 or 5 for sounds generated by Max.

Aggregrate Device – Duh!

Just the other day I had a breakthrough realization: I could use a Soundflower aggregate device to address many more output channels than are physically available on my interface. Now I’ve got channels to spare. I’m kicking myself for not thinking of this sooner. The biggest drawback? Now I’ll be spending much more time in mixing mode. I wonder when I’ll ever get this CD finished…?

091108 Willow Street Improvisation 1.mp3

091108 Willow Street Improvisation 2.mp3

091108 Willow Street Improvisation 3.mp3

I loved my short time working with the LEMURbots (residency, video, photos, Issue Project Room). Someday I hope to get (and share) the footage from my performance at LEMURplex.

LEMUR’s Eric Singer and Leif Krinkle are both quoted in the article. I can’t think of anyone better to work on a project like this.

improv1 from ps on Vimeo.

improv2 from ps on Vimeo.

I look forward to seeing how this project continues to take shape.

• High temp: 5 F
• Low temp: -2 F
• Average Wind Speed: 46.7 mph gusting to 72 mph

A foggy day with visibility down to 1/16th of a mile. The observatory reported zero hours of sunshine for the day. Perfect conditions for rime ice. We could hardly step outside without it accumulating on our clothes and, of course, our gear.

My recording bag covered in rime ice. My headphones were unscathed since I wore them under my balaclava (and hat (and parka hood)).

I brought out my contact mics to record the sound of rime accumulating on them. The best spot I found was attaching them to the windward side of a wooden sign post. Here’s an excerpt:

rime_accumulation.mp3

Listening to the entire recording one can clearly hear the frequency of the resonant ping sounds increase as more ice accumulates. I suspect the ice accumulation reduces the surface area of the contact mic or otherwise stiffens the transducer–in a manner similar to a drummer increasing the pressure on a drum head and thus causing the pitch to rise.

Here’s a recording of an ice-covered chain squeaking in the wind. The squeak is less metallic than I expected, sounding more like rubbing ice cubes together.

squeaky_chain.mp3

Here’s a photo of the chain (taken on another, much sunnier day). Yes, this chain appears to be preventing the building from blowing off the mountain. The story I heard is that the chains were an important part of the original building. When they rebuilt the structure, chains were included as an historical and decorative element. There were times when I could have used a chain or two to prevent me from blowing away.

Jackie and I covered in rime ice after our contact mic recording expedition.

Here's all of my audio gear packed up and ready to go.

January 9: We all gathered at Jackie’s house, threw our gear in the van and drove to New Hampshire. Jacqueline Goss was the leader of the crew: video artist, writer, director, producer. Jesse Cain: cinematographer. Dani Leventhal: talent. (She hates that word, but after spending the better part of a week together I think it fits just fine.) We spent the first night enjoying the comforts of the Appalachian Mountain Club Joe Dodge Lodge. Jesse unpacked and assembled the camera so we could begin shooting first thing in the morning.

Jessie and Dani checking out the focal length on the 135mm lens

January 10: First thing in the morning we met our ride up the mountain (snow tractor!) at the Auto Road and took a minute to shoot a few establishing shots.

Mt. Washington (the summit is obscured here--it's just behind the peak on the right)

On the way to the summit we stopped just above the treeline to shoot a few more scenes. I loved seeing the stunted krumholtz trees that are just visible in the lower left corner of this photo.

Jackie and Jesse on the Auto Road

Late morning, we arrived at the summit and quickly unloaded our equipment. Visibility was good, and since we didn’t know whether we’d get clear skies again Jackie and Jesse and Dani peeled off to shoot some scenes that didn’t require sync sound while I took a look around the observatory and organized our gear.

Summit Weather:

• High temp: 1 F
• Low temp: -5 F
• Average Wind Speed: 45 mph gusting to 62 mph

Here’s an excerpt from the first day of recording; a scene where Dani knocks the rime ice off a sign. These sounds are indicative of winter weather on the mountain: wind envelopes everything, so even rather violent actions produce only faint tinkles of ice.

knocking_rime_off_sign.mp3

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/invisible-city/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Metroland critic Mike Hotter has chosen last September’s Faust show at Proctors as one of his top live events for 2009:

2. Faust, Holland Hopson, Century Plants

GE Theatre at Proctors, Sept. 30

Seminal German art-rockers Faust showed why they have been championed by avant-garde musicians for more than 30 years, while hometown openers Holland Hopson and Century Plants performed amazing outré music of their own. Hopson, in particular, is a must-see performer, a musical treasure hiding right under our noses.

Hotter’s mention of us “hometown openers” is certainly welcome, though his superlatives may not be entirely deserved.

Josh Potter chose the Boredoms as his top show of the year; I was surprised that it didn’t show up in any of the other critic’s lists. Read the entire article with all the other critic’s picks.

Here’s an evocative short film by David New honoring R. Murray Schafer