Tag Archives: Bent Electronics

ASAC Presents Defragmented: Marko Timlin and thenumber46

Posted on by

Albany Sonic Arts Collective presents Defragmented: A concert of emergent systems featuring Marko Timlin and thenumber46 (Suzanne Thorpe + Philip White).

Saturday April 10th
Upstate Artists Guild
247 Lark St.
Albany, NY

8PM
Suggested Donation $5 (all proceeds go to touring performers)

This concert features Finnish- based composer/sound artist Marko Timlin alongside thenumber46, the collaborative effort of electro-acoustic flutist Suzanne Thorpe and electronic musician Philip White. Both Timlin and thenumber46 employ improvisation and non-linear analog systems to create music in which a delicate balance exists between the human and machine. A music at once intuitive and mechanical. Explosive and subdued. Violent and meditative.

More about the artists after the jump.

Continue reading →

ASAC Presents Lucre and Jonathan Chen

Posted on by

ASAC Presents Lucre & Jonathan Chen

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…

Continue reading →

Weeping Willow Street Improvisations

Posted on by

Last November I spent a memorable, rainy afternoon at Travis Weller’s place performing a house concert as part of his Willow Street Concert Series. Nick Hennies wowed us with music for solo percussion including an entrancing performance of Alvin Lucier’s Silver Streetcar. I played music for fretless banjo, bent electronics and computer. Then Travis and I improvised two pieces with Travis playing his Owl, a custom-built piano wire lyre with electronics. Nick joined in for the last piece of the afternoon. The rain kept us company all along.

[audio:091108_willow_street_improvisation1.mp3]

091108 Willow Street Improvisation 1.mp3

[audio:091108_willow_street_improvisation2.mp3]

091108 Willow Street Improvisation 2.mp3

[audio:091108_willow_street_improvisation3.mp3]

091108 Willow Street Improvisation 3.mp3

More Wichita Mind Control

Posted on by

Jason Cosco was kind enough to post a video of me performing Wichita Mind Control for bent electronics with MaxMSP at the Upstate Artist’s Guild Gallery last April. This was the premiere performance of the piece. Though my pieces often changes incrementally (or sometimes substantially) as I continue to perform them, this first shot at WMC still feels definitive to me.

Here’s audio of the same performance (previously posted here)

[audio:wichita_mind_control_estate_capital.mp3]

Wichita Mind Control – Estate Capital

Tax Refund

Posted on by

Here’s your tax refund from The Field Guide: two new recordings from my recent Albany Sonic Arts Collective performance at the Upstate Artists Guild. See photos from the show here.

The first piece features an in-progress version of my Fender Telecaster morphing into an electric 6-string banjo. I replaced the lowest string on the Tele with another high string to serve as a drone. Soon to come are railroad spikes so I can change the pitch of the drone string more easily and my usual allotment of sensors added to the instrument. This piece is played in a traditional thumb lead two-finger style using a modified mountain-minor tuning (dG’DGcd) run through a loopy MSP patch.

[audio:spring_dissent_bubbling.mp3]

Spring Dissent (Bubbling)

The second piece is a modified version of a work for banjo and electronics with the banjo replaced by my Base On, a circuit-bent walkie-talkie. Not much of the circuit-bent sound is heard, though, since it drives an elaborate resynthesis process in MSP that simultaneously retunes the pitches to just-intonation and smears the transitions with glissandi. A touch of feedback in the process opens up slightly unstable areas where the algorithm fights with itself to settle on a consistent pitch.

[audio:wichita_mind_control_estate_capital.mp3]

Wichita Mind Control – Estate Capital

Handmade Electronic Music – Updated

Posted on by

Nic Collins’s wonderful book, Handmade Electronic Music – The Art of Hardware Hacking is getting an update. Routledge is publishing a new edition with, according to Nic, “lots of new circuits and illustrations, more examples of artists’ designs, and a DVD with 87 1-minute video clips by hackers from all over the globe, as well as a series of step-by-step video tutorials.” I can’t wait to see it. After the jump are a number of events surrounding the release.

Continue reading →

These Days

Posted on by

These days I’ve been helping sound artist Micah Silver with his upcoming installation, The End of Safari, at MassMoCA. It’s part of an exhibit called These Days that opens on Saturday 4/4.

Micah asked me to build a way to aim a Holosonics Audio Spotlight speaker on a pan/tilt head using MIDI messages. I worked with a MidiTron he already owned, a handful of relays and the usual baling wire, duct tape and chewing gum. The setup provides an uncanny sense of localization–much more ghostly than panning a sound around an array of speakers.

Here’s a shot of the altogether messy electronics.

MidiTron pan/tilt controller

Transformer di Robot…er?…er?…

Posted on by

I finally got around to posting audio examples for some bent electronics projects over on the main (static? abandoned?) hollandhopson.com site (find them here and here). And I thought I’d share this 2:50 hit single I uncovered in the process.

[audio:http://www.hollandhopson.com/download/bent_electronics_examples/voice_xformer_07.mp3]

Download

This is a single take from a circuit bent voice transformer. I’ve written catchier tunes, to be sure, but I doubt I’ll ever get more techno than this. I can’t wait for the extended dance mix, the mashup and the celebrity DJ remix!