CHRONOTRONIC WONDER TRANSDUCER is a miniature discollective of musick artists and poet-inventors.  Using a variety of means and methods, from hand-made electronics to custom-designed software, to conjure electromechanical invocations to dead gods and summon sound from the deep void of silence.  CWT’s lineup includes:

Ted Hayes presents Stan Breakhage, an ambient-industrial music & video performance that warps and manhandles Stan Brakhage’s venerable Dog Star Man into visual breakcore, aligned and controlled with custom-designed, live electronic instruments.  See a clip of Stan Breakhage’s premiere performance here.  Ted Hayes is a poet, inventor and composer whose work revolves around the concepts of the beautiful and the sublime, intersecting with desire and plummeting into stratospheres of bright noise and dark philosophy.  Combining both the arcane visions of structuralist film with a sincere sonic splendor, Stan Breakhage is not to be missed.  Read more about Ted’s work at http://log.liminastudio.com.

Joe Mariglio is a composer and artist whose practice spans many mediums.  He is often labeled an electronic musician, but does not really understand the term, since the vast majority of music has been electronic for some time.  Some of Joe’s work deals with problems surrounding the mediation of experiences.  Joe is also interested in networks, human and otherwise, structured improvisation, and narrative forms.  He enjoys baking bread, meditating, and building guitar pedals.  He documents his process at www.joemariglio.com.

And Um Yeah conjures a noisy electro–psychedelic swell and turns it into a song. Using handmade instruments, custom software, and creatively modified electronics, they will attempt to lure you in a world of fun and fear that you can only see by closing your eyes and pressing on your eyeballs. And Um Yeah isAmy Khoshbin and Michael Clemow, based in Brooklyn, NY.  Check them out at http://www.myspace.com/andumyeahmusic.

Steven Litt is a recent graduate of the Interactive Telecommunications Program of NYU. He is the creator of CrudBox, a robotic rhythm machine that controls electronic or electromechanical devices, amplifying their sounds in real time. His work mixes the raw, abrasive sounds of noise and electroacoustic music with the rhythms of electronic dance music. He is an artist, designer, and musician. He currently lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Lori Napoleon is an artist, mad-scientist and synthesist inspired by the physics of sound and light.  Her background in the hybrid art and science of holography fuels her continued explorations in process and material, and the creative potential intrinsic in challenging our assumptions about everyday objects, and repurposing obsolete technologies.  Spawned by her hybrid love of electronic music and the primordial urge to “build stuff,” Lori is currently focused on sound and instrument design, beating circuits into submission, and composition with analog electronics.

Voilà!  Here are three videos from my performance for Splice NYC, two of which demonstrate my wireless, beat-repeating space eggs of doom:

Postfix

She Landed Here

Can We Now

And if you missed this show, I’m playing next Wednesday (7/15) at Le Poisson Rouge for XRAY!  Facebook event here: XRay

Thanks again to everyone for coming, Matt for playing with me, GP for shooting video, and Maxx for inviting me to play!

Live @ Monkeytown, May 22, 2009: Continuum.Puncta

In a novel collaboration, artist and composer Ted Hayes combined his languid “function drones” with sonic inventor Steve Litt’s “CrudBox,” a solenoid-driven percussive sequencer, to create a fully analog performance that juxtaposes fields of continuous tones—the continuum—with sequences of percussive beats—the “puncta.”

Ted uses common laboratory equipment—the function generator—with processors from much different contexts, like guitar pedals, as a platform for composing epic, rumbling aural landscapes. Conducted with the aid of artful and detailed graphic scores, he is interested in developing melodies that are just out of reach of ordinary timeframes, resulting in impressions and visions as opposed to discrete themes and leitmotifs.

Meanwhile, Steve Litt punctuated these fields and spaces with the amplified percussion generated by his CrudBox, a handmade hardware sequencer that strikes small samples of varying materials to produce a panoply of alien sounds.

Special guest Adam Harvey showed his interactive KaKoozies: “Combining gesture recognition with beer mugs, KaKoozies is a system for creating kinetic art while drinking beer.”

Thanks to everyone for coming to the show, and special thanks to Lindseytr0n for shooting extra video!

tedbot.com
crudlabs.org
ahprojects.com

Last Tuesday at ISSUE Project Room I performed a new experimental music piece titled “Manifold Voices:”

Thanks so much to my players: Jessie Shaffer, Henry Bigelow, and Matt Boyle.  Read on for lots more information on the piece.

“Manifold Voices” is a musical work for violins and function generators. The function generators—electronic lab equipment for generating simple signals—utilize a graphic score that Matt and I interpreted live.  Here are the first three pages:

The score for the function generators consists of a curve denoting amplitude over time. Pitches are indicated numerically in Hertz, and occasionally arrows indicate glissandi. As you can see, it was continuously revised during rehearsals.  The function generators drove two independent speakers, which were mic’d and run into guitar pedals (an Akai Headrush and a multi-effects bank, respectively), then into Ableton Live on a laptop for delay and reverb, and then into the house mixer.

“Manifold Voices” grew out of two intersecting developments: drone music I had been working on with the function generators (the technological side) and research in musical tuning systems (the theoretical side).  Since the function generators afford the use of specific frequency values, I decided to attempt to write this piece using a Pythagorean tuning system, where the fifth interval is a perfect 3/2 harmonic ratio.  Toward this end I developed a simple PureData patch to automatically generate the frequency values for the diatonic scale.  The violins were tuned down to match note values derived from a fundamental frequency of 250hz.  More details to come…