frey

Hello.

My grandmother, who is 92 years old, is suddenly very very sick. I may not be able to do this gig on Friday.

Next Friday myself and Emil McAvoy are doing a performance at the Moving Image Centre in Auckland (I have already blogged about it here).

I have learnt pure data pretty much from scratch for this performance, because i am concerned that expressing my creativity through proprietary software that is currently being marketed heavily around the world to musicians as the best way to make music is compromising my art.

We’re going to be running lots of live input. I have four microphones which will be installed around the venue to catch conversations. These will be live processed to an underlying rhythmic system using pure data. I’m tapping the control messages at various points and will be sending them to Emil’s computer using pd’s netsend and netreceive objects. At Emil’s end the raw net code gets translated to midi control messages and patched via midi-yoke into the VJ software he will be running.

His part of the equation will consist of processing of live video streams from cameras installed around the venue, incorporating the control signals from the music end of things at his discretion.

So no prepared material from either of us, and no outside sources — just live streaming.

Seriously, exquisite. Get the whole thing, for free, here. Because musicians love you, the world is beautiful, and music wants to be free.

I’m currently reading Babylon and Beyond: The Economics of Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Globalist and Radical Green Movements.

In it, I found this, by none other than John Maynard Keynes:

The love of money as a possession -as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life-will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.

Interesting to see some of the truths behind what the neoliberals have to think. On the one hand, under certain conditions the idea of the free market actually makes some sense. On the other hand, neoliberal policies often work to actively undermine the very conditions that make markets function in the first place.

It’s all about what they say vs what they mean. Like building a group dedicated to opposing the Kyoto Protocol and calling it the Climate Council:

The Climate Council… is dedicated to informing policy on domestic and international climate change. It has been one of the most ardent opponents of the [Kyoto] Protocol, and on behalf of its coal and other industry members, has actively worked against most U.S. government efforts to address climate change.

(emphasis added)

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From the flyer (pdf):

Friday 5th of May
8pm. $15
Galatos.

17 Galatos St
Newton
Auckland

Emil McAvoy & Damian Stewart present ‘Reciprocity’

An improvised collaborative audio visual piece. By recording the
performance space it becomes a self aware organism reading
and writing itself, performing itself into existence.
Emil McAvoy is an interdisciplinary artist working in live video,
experimental film and photography. Damian Stewart (aka Frey)
is an experimental electronic sound artist who works primarily
with feedback as a compositional tool.

Today is Anzac day. There are some nice little stencils around which have a poppy flower and the words ‘lest we forget’ underneath. I like that stencil artists are aware people.

I’m up at work and listening to music and watching videos rather than working, as you do I suppose.

The videos I’ve been watching come from:
Nate Harrison — check out his documentary on the history of the Roland TB-303.
Drone — a system for live processing of audio and video.

And music:
Bannister Boy – Lullabye, on the Drift netlabel, which sounds like this, ie, exquisite.

Have a beautiful day.

Oh wow.

Wait till you hear my new electroacoustic piece. It’s based mostly on a recording I made of a giant asphalt-laying machine that was working outside the window of the house I was staying at a couple of months back (Newtown’s famous Turret House, well, famous if you’re a punk that is ;-)

It’s big and epic and grand and ends with the most beautiful harmonics. One of the field recordings I made on that day was inside the house, about 3pm on a Thursday afternoon, after the machine had moved on a couple of streets. The house was quiet but the mics were pressed up against the window so (at maximum gain) there are wind rumbly noises and afternoon suburbia, buried in hiss, and underlaying it all is a number of deep rumbling oscillations that must’ve been transmitted through the ground, plus a cyclic beeping noise, being the machine’s warning beeper.

Convoluting the signal with itself yielded just the harmonic parts — so as the track fades out the the hissy original field recording blends into these purer harmonic sounds. Here, check it out.

Stacey Pullen gig on Saturday was all right.

Pity I was so tired. He was playing some pretty neat stuff, although touching more the house than the techno end of things. Whoever was on before him was playing more my kind of sound.

Mr Pullen had a mixing style I found a little frenetic, he’d barely let a beat go on for more than four bars without fiddling with it somehow, dropping it out or breaking the groove somehow. For someone like me, who prefers to dance by letting my body become intimately acquainted with the groove, and then running with it for minutes on end, it was a little frustrating at times. Plus some knob spilt beer all over my shirt and the sleeve of my jersey. Washed the shirt but the jersey’s woollen and not machine washable so unhappy.

Fun overall though, and I’m glad I went, even if I do still ache a little bit.

The earlier part of the evening actually contained a beach picnic with fire and toastie pies cooked on said fire. Nothing like a long walk back from a beach picnic with only moonlight to see by. Magical.

I’m learning how to use Pure Data. It’s pretty nifty, but hard to get one’s head around.

I’m trying to relocate a weblog I stumbled across by accident a while back. It was by a man who blogged every masturbation-induced orgasm he had. He had a way of writing; it was beautiful.

And, something that really got my feminist instincts ticking, he wrote about porn, and masturbating with and without porn, and the difference between the sensations and ideas that floated through his brain while doing so.

Unfortunately, I lost the link; but I’m about to go hunting. Bear with me. My del.icio.us will fill with blogporn; don’t be alarmed, it’s all under control.