Audio/Video: Hartford Artspace, April 25th

[wpvideo D3YNrBlv]

The above is some low-quality video from our most recent show at Hartford’s Artspace. Below is audio only.

The performance space, as you will be able to tell in the recording, was cavernous. I estimate the ceiling to be between 16-20 feet. The room was exceptionally live and reverberant. Our approach is always to improvise, in the most genuine sense. We do not discuss what we are going to do before hand, nor do we really “practice.” Once we were in the space, we knew that we had to incorporate a lot of space (silence) into our improv to keep the texture from becoming too muddy. The work has a natural ramp shape as we move from sporadic and spacious to dense and thick textures at the end.

Hardware used: mostly the Casio SA-2 with a little bit of the growler. We set up the mixer so that the mic input was routed to both computers, and our computer audio was routed to each other as well. (This creates great cross-talk possibilities, and is mostly how we work now.) Kane was running his granular patch and, at the beginning, it is easy to hear him grabbing bits of what I am doing with the mic. I played the Casio a bit, banged on the mic a lot, as usual, but started with cups, forks, and my hands. The household objects were provided by Juraj Kojs who performed in a later set.

My code was primarily made up of recursive ndefs (sorry, SC3 specific stuff here…) which take the incoming sound, delay it using comb filters, feed a certain amount back into the signal, and a certain amount out to a bank of “effect” ndefs. By dynamically changing the delay length of the comb filters while running the synth, pitch-shifting occurs which varies the resulting feedback loop’s overall spectra.