Just a word that the Max for LIVE public beta is now available for download:
http://www.cycling74.com/downloads/maxforlive
Have at it!
Category Archives: 6 – MACHINES
Fiery Redhead vs Pyro Punks
When I heard that Kathy Supove was going to be performing with Toy Killers at the Stone on Halloween, I thought, “Toy Killers? Hmm…might be before my time.” I think I was still playing with toys when these guys were in full swing during the late ’70s and early ’80s. So I set off to see if I could find out more about them.
Lo and behold – YouTube has everything you know? – there’s a video trailer for a CD of unreleased Toy Killer material that came out last year. The band was/is made up of madmen percussionists Mark E. Miller and Charles K. Noyes, who apparently liked to literally tear it up and burn it down during their downtown performances. Mayhem ensued!
The pyromaniac pair made some industrial punk, no-wave noise with a host of downtown musicians like Elliott Sharp, John Zorn, Nicky Skopelitis, Bill Laswell, Arto Lindsay and the Golden Palominos. Actually, you can listen to a bunch recent demos from Miller and Noyes on their MySpace page. They sound just as clangy, buzzy and aggressive, but I didn’t hear firecrackers or blowtorches going off. Fire codes are a bit different these days, but it will be perfect Halloween fun to see Kathy (ahem, Kathleen) Supove go head to head with this infamous duo.
– Jocelyn
Monome-Nucleosis
One of the most prominent new musical tools I saw in use during the MMiX performances and workshops last month was the Akai APC 40, a controller with buttons, knobs and sliders that was created specifically to work with Ableton LIVE.
The APC hasn’t been out that long, but already Ableton users have developed some far-out finger skills on the device, which almost remind me of keyboardists or guitarists with that kind of high speed dexterity on their own instruments. Some examples:
You could say the APC 40 is similar to the very popular monome, which made it’s first appearance on the electronic music scene as early as 2005. But the monome does not include knobs or faders, using just the minimal grid of backlit buttons on a square box, which is an open-ended interface that can be configured as toggles, groups, or sliders for pretty much any audio application. At this point, the active community of monome users and developers has started using the device for more sophisticated open source video, text and game applications.
Not to be left out in the cold, Novation releases their own Ableton controller this month. It’s called the Launchpad, designed to work with Ableton:
The Novation design seems to split the difference between the APC and the monome, but it probably won’t be as open as the monome. I haven’t found anything solid yet on whether it will work with anything other than Ableton, but I expect someone will figure how to hack it. But the basis for all these controllers are those backlit chicklets, like it’s the most natural musical act to press something and make sound, whether it’s keys, frets, pedals or silicone buttons.
– Jocelyn
Ben Neill’s “Inevitable Improvisations”
“The question for me has been what are the most important aesthetic tendencies to emerge out of the recent landscape of digital musics and media?” – Ben Neill
http://vagueterrain.net/journal15/ben-neill/01
Check out Ben Neill‘s recent article in the new .microsound edition of the online journal Vague Terrain. In it, Neill discusses the importance of improvisation in the various approaches to creating live interactive digital music and art.
In Case You MMiXed Out the First Time Around
Wondering why in the world you missed some of the incredible performances at the MMiX Festival 2 weeks ago? Well, I’ll help you redeem yourself because there are several opportunities to see some of those composers and musicians who participated in MMiX at some deeply cool gigs this week:
***First off, composer, violinist and loop-meister, Todd Reynolds, performs with his string quartet and The Meredith Monk Ensemble TONIGHT at BAM’s Next Wave Festival. To quote Todd’s own description of this special performance:
“Songs of Ascension is Meredith Monk’s seminal work for her own vocal ensemble and string quartet. It’s the first time Meredith has used string quartet as part of a larger work, and of course, as Meredith is one of my most-revered interdisciplinary and musical heroes, I am honored to be a part. Early on, Meredith asked me to collaborate with her on this project and to put together the perfect string quartet team with great-spirited, flexible, excellent players, willing to seek virtuosity in the clear and simple, willing to memorize an hour’s worth of music and treat physical space as if it were the greatest musical score…”
Performance starts at 7:30pm and you can find out more about it at the BAM website or visit Todd Reynolds’ own blog, right here.
***Tomorrow night, Thursday, head downtown to The Stone for MMiX Festival curator, Patrick Grant, who will perform at 8:00pm. After rocking it out ensemble-style at MMiX, Patrick takes it down a notch for this appearance. Here’s the plan, according to Patrick’s Facebook event:
“PATRICK GRANT: IN BOCCA AL LOOPER – Armed with a keyboard, guitar and a laptop, I’ll be performing a solo set of music that grooves to the looping and layering of angular interlocking riffs, mash ups of both urban and world beats, and pop timbres used in the service of avant tonality. A sonic soup for the mind, body AND spirit. I hope you can make it. More info at http://www.patrickgrant.com.”
The Stone is located at the corner of Ave. C and East 2nd St., NYC (F train to 2nd Ave.), $10 at the door. The Stone is curated in the 2nd half of October by Kathleen Supové and its artistic director is John Zorn. If you stick around for the 10:00pm show, you can also catch Bora Yoon performing in HUMAYUN KHAN & GUESTS: Humayun Khan (Indian classical vocal improvisation, Afghan sufi) Said Tinat, Shahin Shahida (guitar), Bora Yoon (vocals, tanpura), Haroon Alam (tabla, percussion) Douglas J. Cuomo (guitar, electronica).
***Finally, get the weekend started right with Joshua Fried/Radio Wonderland performing at free103point9‘s annual fall festival of radio art and experimentation at St. Mark’s Ontological Theater:
“Radio Wonderland: Joshua Fried turns the very bits and bytes of commercial culture into the driving backbeat to our dance of independence. In this developing solo, Fried abstracts live FM radio with laptop, electrified shoes hit with sticks, and a computer-hacked steering wheel (from a Buick 6).”
That’s Friday at 8:00pm, $7-$10 on a sliding scale. Shake a leg in the aisles people!
So that’s it, what a wealth of performances to expand your mind and entertain your senses! Don’t say I never tipped you off to any of the cool stuff.
More MMiXers to come…
– Jocelyn
MMiX 4.1
Just a few more photos of MMiX closing performances by Chronotronic Wonder Transducer and Ben Neill with Bill Jones. Special thanks to Tyler Isaacson, who snapped this set of pics, and to Anna Li and Amanda Katz for lending a helping hand – my students are the BEST!:
– Jocelyn
MMiX Festival Part Four
OK. The thing is done. Long exhales, a good long nap and heart-felt thanks to everyone. Your support, artistry and friendship (not to mention your cables and power strips) have meant the world to us. 🙂
More pics to follow in the days ahead:
There’ll be plenty of content (video too) coming out as we get it together after a well deserved rest.
In the meantime, there’s many a point to ponder. We all learned so much about HOW music is being made in its current state that now the question shifts to WHAT is being made, let alone WHY.
Ben Neill made a great point, as far as “interactive” music goes, that being: It connects best with an audience when there is some level, structured as it may be, of improvisation. That made a lot of sense to hear that put so clearly. Without it, where is the risk, where is the edge-of-our-seat excitement which has always made for great music/performance no matter the decade, epoch or technology (?). With that in mind, nothing worthwhile is truly new. It’s simply this year’s extension of what humans have been doing since time immemorial.
Which means, for us here: more to come.
Thank you everybody!
-The MMiX Team
GO!
Looking Sharp: Live Music with Video
“You are going to hear something that you have never heard and whether you like it or not, it’s going to inspire you somehow.” – Composer and conductor Butch Morris on Elliott Sharp
That’s a quote from the film, Elliott Sharp: Doing the Don’t, directed and produced by Bert Shapiro. The film explores the career of performer, composer and multi-instrumentalist, Elliott Sharp, tracing his journey from “National Science Foundation award-winning ‘science geek’ to an internationally acclaimed musician and composer.”
In the film, we follow Sharp from the premiere of his opera “Em/Pyre” at the 2007 Venice Biennale to a rock club in Beijing; from the recording of an album with his blues band Terraplane to a performance of Sharp’s Orchestra Carbon in New York; from solo guitar, bass clarinet or saxophone performances to an overview of all the hand-made instruments Sharp’s created to expand his unique musical language. Here’s the trailer for the film, which was released last year:
It is hard to imagine the NY experimental music scene without Elliott Sharp – he’s been at it for 30 years. Though you may experience his music in film scores, as part of installations, at concert halls or large rock palaces, you’re just as likely to find him in more intimate, offbeat venues. This is what happened to me several years ago, when I wandered into a tiny jazz club near my apartment, expecting to see the usual Juilliard trio on rehearsal night. Instead, to my amazement, I found Sharp playing achingly beautiful delta blues with acclaimed vocalist, Queen Esther. He’s released over 200 recordings spanning the musical spectrum and currently leads four ensemble projects: Carbon, Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane. He’s applied fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction. Truly a scientist and a pioneering musical artist.
This Saturday night, October 10th, Elliott Sharp comes to the MMiX Festival in a special appearance with visual artist, Janene Higgins, whose videos began as a direct offshoot of her graphic design, incorporating collage, text, and image-layering into a time-based artform. Her videos and installations have been performed and exhibited at numerous festivals and galleries worldwide, including The New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center; The Kitchen; Eyebeam Art + Technology Center; documenta; Art Institute of Chicago; Experimenta Festival in Buenos Aires and many more.
Come to Theaterlab to experience these two boundary-smashing artists up close – you’ll get inspired…and you’ll like it.
– Jocelyn
Sound the Mutantrumpets!
Ben Neill‘s Tripycal is one of those albums that looms large in my personal soundscape. Back in my publishing days, I used to wrestle with 300 page manuscripts and marathon voice recording sessions. My head was so often jammed with words and speech, that I’d escape to my office and put on Neill’s record, with it’s ambient, dub-oriented jazz that seemed to knock the text-based stress right out. And on weekend chill-out nights, I’d sometimes hear those sophisticated bass lines and spacey horn notes floating through The Cooler, that old metal dungeon of a nightclub on far West 14th street.
Ben Neill
More than 10 years later, I have the pleasure of seeing innovative trumpeter and composer, Ben Neill perform this week at the MMiX Festival on Sunday night. Neill invented the mutantrumpet, a trumpet that’s been tricked out with extra valves, knobs, switches and electronics so that he can use the it to control audio and video components in live performance. He first introduced the instrument in the ’80s, working with synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog to create the electronic interface, and he further developed its computer capabilities during a residency in Amsterdam during the ’90s. The result is several albums’ worth of uniquely trippy, adventurous music flavored with jazz improvisation and dance-floor grooves, plus a career that includes many collaborators such as Mimi Goese, DJ Spooky, DJ Olive, John Cale, Page Hamilton from Helmet and the late artist David Wojnarowicz.
A few years ago, Ben Neill began working with photographer and visual artist Bill Jones, with whom he created Palladio, an interactive, playable movie based on the novel by Jonathan Dee. In their performances together, both VJ and trumpeter control music and video as a single hybrid form – a truly interactive, live duet of images and sound.
Ben Neill’s latest album is Night Science, available on Thirsty Ear Recordings. Ben Neill and Bill Jones will perform at the MMiX Festival on Sunday, October 11th at Theaterlab.
– Jocelyn
The MMiXdown 