Sweeney and Louth-Robins play the EMU

Last night I performed at the EMU Space supporting Panoptique Electrical (Jason Sweeney) and the launch of his new release Let The Darkness At You. Performing once again with a combo of turntable and laptop, I was pleased with my performance aside from a couple of 'happy' accidents with vinyl slippage. Jason's set with projections was a testament to his outstanding reputation as a composer and performer. The fifty minute set was absolutely beautiful - by far the best electronic music performance I've seen this year. The EMU Space's perfect acoustics reinforced Jason's glacial and darkly atmospheric music, which coupled with slowly pulsating black and white images, gave the music a strong emotional weight. A very friendly receptive crowd made this one of my musical highlights for 08.

Thanks to Lauren for the lovely photos, there's more on my Flickr page here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/7528804@N04/

I've posted some video excerpts from my performance here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUodUPAUJAs

Now for a break from performing until November, and soaking up Germany in the meantime.

Review on Resonate

My review of Metalog’s show at the Wheatsheaf International Hotel has been published on the online New Music publication Resonate. I am kind of hoping it doesn’t attract as much ‘attention’ as my review of the Adelaide Contemporary Music Festival did.

http://www.resonatemagazine.com.au/article.php?id=208

The Arouser - video documentation

Yesterday in preparation for the show this Friday night I decided to create some documentation on my custom built Max/MSP patch - The Arouser.  It's the patch that I've been using in tandem with my foray into turntables and real-time vinyl manipulation, as evident on the mini-release mimi.

The Arouser - an overview

The Arouser - demonstration

Thesis a-go......oh.

Yesterday's progress on the thesis did not go entirely according to plan, as I gave up in the office around noon, trudged home and decided to rehearse for the upcoming EMU show on Friday. I'm taking a sick day from work today, currently holed up in the Unley Library giving it another shot. I think the next two weeks are going to be a rough journey.

Reports from the busy body

Thesis a-go go:

Sitting up in my castle room at uni I'm going to attempt to thrash the elusive fourth chapter of my thesis into some kind of layman sense.  Two-and-a-half months ago I set myself a deadline to get this instalment finished by the time I set off for Germany.  Now that my departure is only two weeks and a few days away, the realisation has come that I'm going to have to get cracking on this post haste.

Website a-go-go:

I also foolishly set myself another deadline a month ago to get the personally anticipated website launched before I leave.  It's coming along well which is good.

At last!

After three years of hunting:

Exhibition: happy times

I had a trio of little ink works in an exhibition opening last night.  It was a nice evening at Higher Ground, though the real suprises occured when 1) I sold the three works, and 2) I won third prize!  Happy times I say.

Updates

Research:

As I was watching some gymnastics on TV last night I had a flashback to late 2005 when I was writing what would be my Honours thesis.  I don't know if it was the human bodies flinging themselves into the air with precision or the horrific accident one girl from Russia suffered that struck a synapse in my head and reminded me that writing a thesis is a feat of great concentration and pain.  At this point I switched the TV off and rewrote the introduction for chapter four. 

Kamera:

I just bought myself a new digital camera which I'm very pleased with.  I decided I should upgrade from my battered Olympus 3.2 mp and invest in something more 08 for the impending trip to Germany.  At $150, it's a steal for a Sony Cybershot and a fortunate coincidence that Harris Scarfes is discontinuing its camera department due to competitive market forces and flogging off everything for cheap.  I suspect the rapid improvement of camera integration in mobile phones may be the main reason for such department stores to be discontinuing stock.

Performance:

The show with Panpotique Electrical (Jason Sweeney) is coming up next Friday at EMU.  I'm currently putting together some new material as well as rehearsing sections of mimi for the show.

Ink trio (better res) for next week's exhibition

Garden Ruin


Cloud & Tree



Reeds

Sister blog updates > Cooking

The old cooking blog has been as quiet as a zen kitchen for the past 8 months, remember that courgette salad on New Year's day? Probably not, but it was gud! Anyway, because I've been too busy to maintain the blog this year, my firend Poppi has donated her Love Cookies recipe. Cheers, Poppi!

Jump over, check it out and feel the love cookie (more appropriately 'biscuit') stylie.

http://dontmentionthegarliccrusher.blogspot.com/

Tape Abuse

A sequel of sorts to the post a month ago when I took cruel hand, knife and pliers to a vinyl record of Beethoven. The results were awful, but I have a little more hope for a blank cassette tape I've had sitting in the backyard since Saturday morning.



I've decided to bring it in from the cold wintery climate this evening, give it a cup of tea and have a listen to it on the old Tascam 424.

I've always liked the way that tape breaks down. The way that the sound quality dimishishes compared to vinyl is a lot more subtle and homogenous because its breakdown affects the overall picture (i.e a frequency band) rather than the infrequent clicks and pops that marr a well-loved (or well-hated) slab of vinyl.

Ink kunst for FF exhibition

Process.


Fin.

Nice way to spend the weekend.

Exhibition opening - Wednesday August 20th, Higher Ground > 6 - 8pm

mit wine!

FELT

Last night I played a set at the Felt Art Space alongside Panoptique Electrical (Jason Sweeney) and ii (Melbourne.) The art space was temporarily transformed into an ideal venue for some ambient musings on a freezing rainy evening in Adelaide.

I was very satisfied with my set which was my first public excursion in vinyl & laptop. I used my recent mini-release mimi as the template for the performance, splicing in some new material as well as some spare of the moment experiments which seemed to work and go down really well to a very receptive and friendly audience.

Jason's set under the droned guise of Panoptique was nice and consistent with layer upon layer of rich metallic textures overlaying each other and colouring the space nicely.

Unfortunately, Lauren and I had to head off after my set to attend the Helpmann Academy event so I missed the opportunity to see the guys from ii perform. However, we did see them play a lovely set the previous night at the Grace Emily providing support for Aviator Lane.

Thanks to Jon and Alex from ii and Jason as well the crew at Felt for a great and well organised evening. Jon and Alex, thanks for the invite! Looking forward to performing with you when I get over Melbourne again sometime soon!

Also, cheeers the Lauren's parents for taking my gear home, it would've been a bit cumbersome lugging around a turntable and precious vinyl for the rest of the night.

Some of the actual performance photos soon.

Inside the Sony Ericsonn's digital lo-fi ear

This has been something of a pet project in spare pockets of my time in the past couple of weeks. I've been extracting the audio track from video recordings made with my mobile phone in quiet places.

Naturally, mobile phone videos come with a significant degree of noise, both in terms of video and audio. I discovered something interesting about the audio track when I was messing around with a short video I shot whilst driving back from McLaren Vale about a month ago. Using iMovie I slowed down the video as much as I could to see the visual effect, when I played it back the audio track had been rendered into an expected drone albeit with a strange selection of little digital artifacts - clicks, swooshes and echoes. Nice stuff in other words, from a Tsunoda/Julius/Minard point of view.

Over the past week I've been making some more recordings in quiet places, both rendering at slowed down (droney) and high speed (cicada-y) settings. Quiet places for the reason the built-in mic is partial to distortion and clipping at loud volumes and broad frequency ranges.

I like these sounds because they sound very artificial. Although they are sped up and slowed down, they're faithful to their original form in a somewhat disembodied and plastic manner. When one sound event is mixed with others, their respective semblance becomes obscured and new sonic identities and environments are evoked.

The example below is a sample montage of several recordings from several different locations. The audio from the recordings has been modified using the simple technique explained above, in many cases the original video track would be slowed down/sped up in its entirity, then selections of the modified audio would be selected for collage.

audio example [1:49]

***

Regular visitors to this blog will know I've always been an aficionado of lo-fi technologies, though I can first remember being introduced to the lo-fi potential of mobile phones a couple of years ago when a UK friend Kate Donovan set up a project called Airvent. The project involves her phone calls to a Berlin radio station who broadcast and record her movements around London, the sound of her surrounding environment is filtered to the listener via the mobile's low fidelity signal. Occasionally traffic, conversations, jackhammers and the sound of birds can be heard slipping through the digital ether. I assume the title is an analogy of sorts, the airvent as a carrier, amplifier and filter of sounds whose sources/locations are unknown to the listener.

***

I've also started recording using unorthodox acoustic filters, including, (LO!) a teapot in the garden the other night.

Quiet Blog

It's been a busy hectic week and a few days, hence few updates of late.

Weather report in brief:

- Currently preparing material for the Felt Space show on Friday. Which I'm really looking forward to.

- Currently finishing some vis art for an exhibition in a couple of weeks.

- Writing a review for Resonate.

- Mixing down some music for earthed cable and Tascam 424 (see below.)



- I've joined Last FM! My artist page is *here*, my profile is *here*.