part of the CETI SPA (SPring break Adventures): Sound SPA 2023 collection, our performances will target the inner layers of the muscles and connective tissues between your ears. emerge refreshed, with all brain stiffness and discomfort dissolved and discarded.
the following evening, sunday, april 2 at 7:30 pm pacific, we will replay the performance on the lines_community twitch stream.
digital and cash funds raised from the performance will be donated to OUTMemphis, an organization that is actively supporting trans youth and adults in places where anti-trans legislation is being enacted. OUTMemphis empowers, connects, educates, and advocates for the LGBT community of the mid-south. more information about OUTMemphis and ways to support the organization may be found here: https://www.outmemphis.org.
Thank you for a phenomenal show(i needed this road trip like a personal pilgrimage to get me out of a funk and the show was like the ultimate oasis of inspiration and beauty to me).
Every single artist at the top of their game, so impressed:
Again, Thanking You All, so immensely, for a beautiful show, it was so great meeting you all, and i was very proud to be able to sit in that audience and witness so much greatness.
(apologies i won’t make it to the workshop on Sunday, i went to the coast and am really feelin a hike today, but now that i know i enjoy the drive i’ll surely be back to Pdx and Seattle area more often, will see you all again for sure )
dear raja, it was sososo lovely to meet you and such an tremendous honor to have you come up to see us perform! all the safest travels and i hope we are able to visit for longer soon.
1000% will be archived, likely early this coming week
such an honor and pleasure to hang with @fourhoarder + @Yunsumz these past few days, and @rajaTheResidentAlien is an absolute hero for making the drive up to us and being the warmest wellspring of genuine excitement and heart
OUTMemphis was selected in response to the wildfire of anti-trans legislation being signed into law across the country, and very specifically the Mid-South. rather than focus on organizations that do lobbying (which is valuable, but things have hit emergency status nationwide), we all wanted to use the performance as an opportunity to raise funds for an organization which provides direct support and services for the youth + adults that have been put into the crosshairs in Tennessee.
eee! nearly time!! this show was so special, can’t wait to share it with y’all.
what an amazing evening. I’m so glad I got to tune in with a friend and share that experience (and say, “Wanna see my friends make some amazing music?”). I had to leave the stream a little early (10:30pm is a late start time for me over here in Philly!), but I’m looking forward to revisiting the whole thing soon. And thank you all so much for your support of OUTMemphis with this event. I really admire that you all engage with artistic practice in a way that is so deeply interwoven with community and care. It’s truly an inspiration.
i’m at the airport rn, but want to add my voice to the chorus of joyful incredulity at the mammoth-sized spirit which @24Franks , @jaseknighter and @infinitedigits brought into this week. the performance was such an excellent digest of their unique offerings of heart and perspective – it’s wild, but the way they conjured their sets are an 1:1 energetic representation of how they engaged with everyone in habitus and all the CETI workshops.
also holy hell, the live video synthesis was so so staggering – Matthew Rempes knocked it out of the dang park, burned the dang park down, built a coliseum of radness, knocked it down and planted a forest.
this week was one of the best periods of time i’ve experienced in many years. not just, like, all highs or something colored by nerves and the excitement of hanging with folks i deeply admire; this week hit me in a very grounding way. the set and setting built between everyone present for the Sound SPA (and beyond!) gave me so much to consider – i’m humbly looking forward to how i’ll continue to grow from what y’all have taught me <3
I don’t want to induce fomo about what is like in the dark room surrounded by these amazing sounds and amazing people - luckily a recording exists. the recording shows what you might already know - @dan_derks has unfathomly crisp expression of music through joy (and vice versa), @24Franks has a delicate touch that delivers the most beautiful melodies mixed in with the sounds of your fondest childhood moments, and @jaseknighter has an intuitive knowledge of space and sound who can bend time and tickle your ears. and me… well, I like to make loud sounds while searching for the piano keys that are actually in tune (I’m kidding, but only a little…see below if you want details). but seriously, there was so much true expression of self in these performances…of who these people are/were/will-be. could not ask for more.
here's details of what I was doing while hiding in the dark behind a piano
the first piece is a reworking of the slattern pits. I am running the acrostic norns script, specifically this branch (most of my norns scripts are edited into little performances categorized by branches so I don’t mess up everyone elses code). acrostic is simply layering strega, over and over, after which I use the grid to make melodies. I never know what will happen when I run this script, its always widely different, but I find this rendition particularly beautiful.
the second piece is the l_ll__l_ norns script (specifically this branch) which I edited to slowly morph from a cloud of tones to gated chords with a synthesized kick. I know more or less what notes are in the chord, so I started searching for a melody around them on the piano. I found the piano keys are sticky (not complaining! I love a piano with character). and they are not always in tune. this is fun though because the piano itself has its own expression which I wanted to explore.
the last piece is the bigbang norns script on this branch that plays random chords for random amounts of time. SuperCollider is doing a lot of heavy lifting synthesis. this piece really benefits from a subwoofer. the norns screen has a little countdown so you can see how long you have before the next chord…and I try to use that time to find a melody and phase into the next chord. like musical tetris or something. the grid is sequencing the strega. the grid makes it easy because it lights up the notes in the chords so I can play on them, or around them, whatever I feel like in the moment. in this moment I found joy in both.
Dan said it’d be great to end with some twinkling piano at the end and he was 1000% right.
anyways, I am deeply deeply grateful to everyone who came up to enjoy the show - @rajaTheResidentAlien!! so floored you could make it and honored that you were there. and everyone I met at CETI (@fourhoarder, @Yunsumz, sorry sorry I’m not sure everyones lines name if I missed you). and Matthew for the cool visuals (everyone told me the visuals behind me were so cool and after watching the performance I completely agree). finally 1000% grateful that we got support for outmemphis which is such a noble cause in these somewhat ignoble times. more support is always needed.
I’m just going to say wow. its all I can really say at the moment. what an amazing show.
my set was pretty straightforward
just sequencing just friends via a sequencer max patch I made and running it into the beta ndls script that @Andrew made! LEGEND. I also played some recordings from the past couple of years and a poem that my friend Remy recorded for me.
I’m still floored by how much these sets (and this whole past week in general) affected me. I really can’t express to y’all how rad @dan_derks@jaseknighter@infinitedigits are as educators, friends and next level humans. I know that this is just the beginning to more beautiful moments like these!
what struck me the most about last weekend’s performance was how wonderfully everything flowed from one set to another as well as from the time we had spent earlier in the day facilitating the habitus workshop together. everything was perfectly balanced and full of joy, very special, simultaneously fragile and full of a tremendous strength. i was kinda scared to go on stage but i also felt very safe and protected knowing i was performing with such lovely lovely lovely people.
a good amount of my performance was spent live coding in druid with the new crow v4 firmware and i’ve put the lua file i uploaded to crow along with performance notes on github here. this code was built on the examples just published along with the v4 firmware, especially the hotswap tutorial.
@jaseknighter thank you for making the livecoded code available. It’s amazing how much you did with so few lines of code, and it’s also so helpful to see the evolution of the code in the git log. I’m going to be rereading that a bunch of times.
Thank you to everyone involved for the truly masterful, moving, and exquisite performances and for organizing the event. Very nourishing and inspiring.
Ps. The git log had me wondering if there’s a way to set up an autocommit hook in common editors every time a codeblock is run in a repl. It would so cool to have snapshot recordings of livecoded sessions to rewatch alongside the performances…the screen projections can be hard to follow.
i really like your idea of autocommitting code run in repl. i have no idea how to do this but i posted about it on the norns study discord and will report back if anyone has some solutions.
also, wanted to add a few additional thoughts about my performance…
i had everything setup about a month ago and practiced about 20 minutes every day or two leading up to the performance. while setting up my instruments and practicing, i spent a lot of time wondering about why we make music and how the sounds we make are the same or different in sound and purpose from other creatures. so, for example, i spent a lot of time imagining i was facilitating a duet between (1) the bird sounds coming from a sample played in @infinitedigits oooooo script (recorded in arriba, colorado last fall while driving back to pdx on my way back from my luckdragon residency) and (2) the “artificial” bird sounds generated by @MengQiMusic 's wingie2 running the new blippo box firmware.
Short version: the command you want to run each time you trigger a change that you care about recording is probably just git commit -am $(date) or something like that. How you hook that in to your editor will of course depend on the editor (I can provide an example for vim if it would be helpful).
EDIT: As an aside, great idea to use git for this and I can’t believe I didn’t think of it given that I use git heavily every day! I had been planning to a build some other system that would append new text to a file with timestamps or something like that, but git is clearly a great tool for this.
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