Archive for the 'Music' Category

Fly by Wire + Similar + dpwolf @ Horse Bazaar

Published on March 2, 2006 in Gigs, Music and Video. 0 Comments

Fly by Wire, Similar & dpwolf @ Horse Bazaar

After a momentary break in musical proceedings, Fly by wire and Similar are back to present the second instalment in their impromptu electronica sessions. Freshly sequenced beats fused with acoustic instrumental noodlings, miscellaneous loops, and evolving sound textures await the curious listener. No intractable, avant-garde noise making here folks. Soulful ambient melodies meets urban digital beats. Visuals in extra wide screen format by dpwolf.

Fly by wire vs Similar
8pm, Sunday March 5th
Horse bazaar
397 Lt Lonsdale St
Melbourne
$4 entry

If you�ve never been to horse bazaar its well worth a visit. They have this crazy panoramic projector setup covering most of the room and even a rear projection display in the toilets?! oh yeah, and there will also be music of course�

Plug & Play: Simulus

Published on February 27, 2006 in Gigs, Music and Video. 0 Comments

Simulus* with video by dpwolf

Cold Meat Industry

Published on February 6, 2006 in Gigs, Music and Video. 0 Comments

Busy weekend. On Saturday and Sunday I did lighting, video projection switching and played iTunes in between acts at The Corner Hotel for two big nights of noisy industrial music featuring various acts from Sweden’s Cold Meat Industry record label plus a few local acts.

I can’t believe how much fun it was doing lighting! So much power to change the mood of the stage, pinpointing and highlight certain areas, in 3D, with smoke machines! It really made projecting straight video feel dim and flat in comparison. I guess the ideal setup for larger shows would be using multiple, brighter projectors or PixelLines so as to project potentially moving images from different angles.

Each of the acts provided me with their own visuals on DVD, VHS or live from their laptops and my job was simply to make sure the right footage was playing at the right time and project an animated logo in-between acts. Melbourne’s Shinjuku Thief’s carefully synched visuals reminded me of video clips for artists on the Warp record label, in particular some of Chris Cunningham’s work, really good stuff.

Oh yeah, I added a gigs category to the blog and moved some old gig info posts into it. Hopefully I’ll manage to post in this category BEFORE the gigs happen once in a while

VJ Bertranol

Published on October 27, 2005 in Music, Tech, Video and Web. 0 Comments

VJ Bertranol aka Bertrand Gondouin is a Sweden based VJ, video blogger and video software developer.

Through his company Mixnbrew he has developed a number of interesting bits of software including Symtonic A Flash based online video mixer application, Patchouli a video blogging uploader / content management system, and Scramble a granular video synthesis engine.

Good work and good to see the whole video blog / vj / network video crossover thing happening.

Technorati Tags: vj

Rock over London, Rock on Thornbury High

Published on October 14, 2005 in Music, Note to self, Video and Vidget - Discussion. 0 Comments

Today I played live visuals for Legs For Fish at Thornbury High school. Kent Macpherson from the band is a music teacher there and organised a performance / presentation for the kids from music, media and IT classes. We played three improvised AV sets and the kids seemed not to hate it

As Paul from the band said, it makes you acutely aware of how self indulgent this sort of improvised performance is when are doing it in front of a room full of kids who aren’t necessarily there by choice. Some of the kids seemed to dig it and some asked some good questions. “Why do you do this?” “What does it mean? The pictures just looked like colours and shapes.”

I used the Quartz Vidget I prepared for the Liquid Architecture gig in July as it works fairly well and made it easy for me to show the kids what I was doing without the confusion of showing a huge messy Quartz Composer patch. After each set we took questions. I showed how I can grab any two video files or sequences of still images and mix them together, manipulating colour, brightness, contrast etc. as well as layering multiple copies over each other. After the second performance I showed very briefly how Quartz Composer works by dropping in a video file, connecting it to a Billboard and then running it through a couple of effects.

Looking back at the QC presentation I gave at Electrofringe after this one I realise I should have shown heaps more examples and started much more slowly in Newcastle. Assuming no prior knowledge meant I explained things much more clearly, and I introduced things in a much more logical order (having slept the night before also helped!).

Kiss-My-Fringe

Published on October 12, 2005 in Gigs, Music, Note to self and Video. 0 Comments

I’ve been back in Melbourne for a week now and have started to catch up on some sleep so its time to reflect on the past couple of weeks’ gigs and event.

On the 27th and 28th of September I performed as part of Kiss my after effects, an experimental video art festival which is part of the larger Melbourne Fringe Festival 2005.

On the 27th, after much last minute tinkering, I provided visual accompaniment for Null Hypothesis (aka Elaine Carter) who played a set of crunchy industrial beats and glitchy tones. Parts of my old Quartz Composer patches refused to work on my new laptop (I think I had a second ‘Video Input’ node hidden somewhere in a macro-patch, connected to nothing which prevented my use of live video in) so I ended up using my old computer with an older patch and copied my newer images across. The set ended up going pretty well, visually based almost entirely on sequences of still images manipulated and fed back upon themselves. I really like the effect of adding in a layer of video feedback over the images so that the highlights bleed out and move across the screen. I’ll post some examples of how this looks soon.

On the 28th I played two sets with Doktorb Robotnik (Adrian Lucas) and Soul Mirage (Simon Gorman), also as part of KMAE / Melbourne Fringe Festival. For the first set I played audio and video simultaneously with Adrian on feedback electronics and Simon on keyboards. I used pretty much the same video set up as the night before and found the task of playing both audio and video a bit overwhelming. I would either get lost concentrating on the audio and realise that I hadn’t changed the video for 5 minutes, or fade myself out of the mix and focus only on the video. It was an interesting exercise but far too stressful to allow for good improvisation. I don’t think I want to try it again any time soon. For the second set I focussed on audio only (playing with ableton live) and felt an enormous sense of relief and freedom in contrast. I was able to listen to what Adrian and Simon were playing much more easily and improvise without having to ‘think’.

After the gig Adrian and I started the long drive up to Newcastle for Electrofringe…

Electrofringe 2005

Published on September 25, 2005 in Gigs, Music, Tech, Video and Vidget - Discussion. 0 Comments

It’s coming up on that time of year again. Electrofringe is a new media arts festival held in Newcastle as part of the This Is Not Art arts festival. Lots of good stuff on and definitely worth the trip.

This year I’m presenting / performing the following:

Realtime Video Manipulation using Isadora and Quartz Composer

“Introduction to the use of two software platforms which allow the creation of realtime video installations which can respond to the audience or other available data.”

This will be a introductory ‘tips and tricks’ panel presentation with Luke Toop (Adelaide), Steve Huon (Melbourne), Khalid (Melbourne) and myself. I’m probably going to focus on the basics of how create a Quartz Composer patch and then turn it into a stand alone application with Xcode and a little bit on network access and RSS etc.

Spac{v}e dpwolf vs Doktorb Robotnik

A live improvised AV performance with my frequent collaborator Doktorb Robotnik. Audio and video feedback crossed with data pulled from the network in real time. Followed by a discussion.

Re – Imagining (live) Video – Narrative

A panel presentation / discussion with Jean Poole and Anna Helme.

From the blurb:

“Audio has been easily sampled, processed and manipulated live for decades. Although hardware and software now allow video to become just as malleable, it is used in a limited number of ways. How can current-day video tools be used to composite video at live events differently? How can theatre and storytelling better integrate live video? What storytelling possibilities lay beyond recreating cinema, music videos or ‘wallpaper’? How do live video and sound work best together? What video is most worth having live?”

Technorati Tags: Electrofringe, Quartz Composer

Wild Dog Hill Recording Session

Published on September 25, 2005 in Music. 0 Comments

On the 3rd of September I headed out to Wild Dog Hill, a recording studio in St Andrews (about 40km north-east of Melbourne) with Doktorb Robotnik (Adrian Lucas) on feedback electronics and Simon Gorman on processed keyboards to have a jam and make a couple of recordings. Simon invited along Dan, Caesar and George who play drums, guitar and bass respectively.

It was the first time Adrian and I have really played with ‘musicians’ (these guys were VCA music graduates). We make noise, soundscapes, amient, textural noise. There are rhythmic and occasionally melodic elements but its not exactly something you can hum along to. There was a beautiful clash of cultures and general confusion as we were sound checking. To set our levels Adrian, Simon and I would produce the loudest, harshest tones we were capable of making. Dan, Caesar and George played a perfect rendition of “Rapper’s Delight”

Anyway, the session ended up being a lot of fun, resulting in two half hour sets. Simon did a great job of mixing us as he was playing and making sure that everyone was involved and had space to contribute. I am most happy with the first of the two sets, I guess because it sounds more like our other recordings, only with the addition of more traditional musical elements. I’m looking forward to playing with them again.

Here it is. It’s long (29 mins). It’s big (40 Mb). It’s a 192kbps MPEG-4 audio aac file. Enjoy.

dpwolf & David Sevo with Canvas City and Bits of Clay @ Glitch

Published on September 15, 2005 in Gigs, Music, Video and Vidget - Discussion. 1 Comment

Hmm, nothing like retro-promotion… this happened a few weeks ago.

Friday 26th of August: A night of live AV performances with dpwolf and David Sevo, Bits of Clay and Canvas City at Glitch Bar & Cinema in North Fitzroy.

David played an ambient set of prerecorded tracks mixed with musique concrete style found sounds and samples and I projected very abstract, fluid, generative images created using analog to digital feedback through realtime effects in Quartz Composer.

I had just been down to see the excellent white noise exhibition at ACMI and was inspired by the ideas of abstraction on display. Curator Mike Stubbs’ essay on the exhibition is definitely worth a read: white noise : a leap into the light.

Here is a quick diagram which shows how my setup was plugged together:

My DV Feeback Setup

The video output of the laptop was connected to both the analogue input of the MiniDV camera and the projector. The FireWire output of the video camera was connected back into the computer. Displaying the DV signal from the camera through colour controls and halftone line filters, back out through the computer’s video output I created a feedback loop. Rather than using mouse based on screen controls as I have with previous Vidget setups, for this performance I chose to use a MIDI controller with 8 knobs and 8 faders. This gave me much needed ‘hands on’ control so I was able to manipulate the feedback by adjusting various patch variables.

Click image to play.

Here is a fairly large (29 Mb), long (8 min) video created playing around with the setup in preparation for the gig which should give some idea of how it looked. This kind of play is an important (and fun) part of my research.

The video is released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license however the music is copyright .

Technorati Tags: Quartz Composer, vidget

dpwolf @ Liquid Architecture 6

Published on July 2, 2005 in Gigs, Music and Video. 0 Comments

I am performing visuals tonight with Jean P��le, bunniboi, Lindsay Cox and Keith_D at The Public Office in West Melbourne as part of Liquid Architecture 6, a festival of sound art.

The night kicks off at 7:30pm with a huge line-up of local and international sound artists including excellent Melbourne AV performers Robin Fox, Dale Nason and Kim Bounds. At around midnight the night will change gears and proceed in a minimal techno orientated direction accompanied by live video on three screens until around 6am. I haven’t done an all night gig for a long time so it should be interesting. We’re going to split up the night into roughly hour long brackets where we will each have a defined role (lighting, matrix switching, main vjing, or support vjing) and will rotate and collaborate in various combinations and permutations.

Technorati Tags: Liquid Architecture

Metal Music Machines

Published on July 2, 2005 in Music, Note to self and Vidget - Discussion. 0 Comments

This week I spent a day improvising and recording audio with Doktorb Robotnik (Adrian Lucas) and was reminded of one of the key aims driving my research. I am developing software devices which allow the user to manipulate audio, video and other data in real time. By creating these works I am attempting to give the user the same feeling of control that I experience when performing live audio, of creating order out of chaos and letting it fall apart again.

Adrian and I have been making improvised sound art / noise / music together, for about 9 years. During this time we have developed various methods for collaborative performance and our production methods have evolved considerably.

Initially we would assemble, manipulate and sequence sound objects on computer in to create finished ‘tracks’, often to accompany short video works. While our process was improvisational in many ways, the combination of unlimited levels of ‘undo’ afforded by the computer software and the goal of producing a piece of a set duration meant that hours of work went into seconds of sound.

A significant shift occurred when we agreed to perform live at a music festival at uni: Rusfest 98 . With no idea of exactly what we were doing, we assembled a very basic setup consisting of two multi-effect guitar pedals and two basic synthesisers. Each of the pedals was set to a 2 second delay which let us play various sounds on the synths and have them repeat endlessly. Rather than spending hours obsessing over a few seconds of meticulously cut up audio, we were improvising in real time – in front of an audience. It was exhilarating. We had no interest in melody and our pedals were keeping time, we were free to play with sound. We had constructed a kind of machine for the generation and manipulation of sound in real time and given ourselves a set of variables with which to control it. While our individual noise making machines have diverged technologically since then to consist of a series of interconnected guitar effects pedals which feed back on themselves and a computer running live audio sequencing / processing software, the processes at work in our first performance are still employed.

We build ‘machines’ with fixed number of variables and manipulate them to generate audio in real time. This is exactly what I am doing with images and data in both my Quicktime and Quartz Composer Vidgets.

Technorati Tags: vidget

MIAF: Remains To Be Seen

Published on June 17, 2005 in Gigs, Music and Video. 0 Comments

More Melbourne VJ action next Saturday and Sunday nights as part of the Melbourne International Animation Festival in “Remains to be seen“, co-ordinated by John Power.

I’ll be playing as dpwolf at around 9 on Saturday 25th June @ Duck Board House, 91 Flinders Lane.

Electundra 2005

Published on June 16, 2005 in Gigs, Music, Video and Vidget - Discussion. 0 Comments

Electundra is an annual festival of live experimental audiovisual performances. It was held at Loop, Melbourne, Australia from Sunday 12th of June through to Wednesday 15th, so I’m a little late in promoting it! Since last year the festival has grown from two to four nights and featured around 40 artists performing. It was great to see the range of visual styles and techniques represented from live camera switching and physical object manipulation to computer based performances.

I went with the latter option for my own set, performing visuals with Quartz Composer on one laptop whilst running Ableton Live on another laptop for sound, collaborating with Doktorb Robotnik (Adrian Lucas) on feedback electronics. I knew that doing two things at once was going to be quite a challenge so I developed a visual patch which used live audio input to modulate and manipulate images in a number of ways – see this post for a simplified version of my setup. Hopefully this gave the imagery a ‘liveness’ and ‘directness’ which meant that it wasn’t too obvious when I was focussing my whole attention on what I was doing with the audio side of things.

Technorati Tags: Electundra

NIN releases song as Garageband file

Published on April 17, 2005 in Music. Closed

Recently Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails released a song from his latest album as a free downlooad in the Apple GarageBand file format. This has allowed anyone with that program (I believe it comes as a standard install on recent Macs) to easily remix, rework and generally play around with the song as though they were in his recording studio. The vocals, drums, guitars etc are discrete tracks which may be arranged with new or existing sounds, sped up or slowed down etc.

This is not the first time an artist on a major record label has made it easy for listeners to remix on of their tracks (for example Jay-Z released an a cappella version of his Black Album which famously led to a mix with The Beatles’ White Album by DJ Dangermouse to create The Grey Album), but it is notable for the fact that it includes the contents of the complete original ProTools session in a format which is both highly accessible and highly malleable. The user, in a kind of collaboration with the band (and one could argue with GarageBand and its developers) may produce an endless series of ‘versions’ of the song. The song itself shifts from being a set text which may be read or played, to a cybertext which may be read from, or played with.

via Boing Boing: NIN’s Trent Reznor releases song as GarageBand file

Shynola

Published on March 16, 2005 in Music. Closed

The Shynola session at ACMI the other night was excellent. All four members of the UK animation crew spoke about and screened a collection of music video clips and short films from their student days through to their most recent video for Beck. I had seen most of the clips beforehand, either on rage or online but it was great to see so many, the session went for almost three hours. Audience members were free to ask questions in between the clips which worked well. Questions ranged from the technical, through to how they work together, how they started, and what they’re up to now.

Some highlights:

“what software and hardware do they use?” – I think the person who asked this was expecting to hear about custom written software and render farms but they actually use fairly standard off the shelf software such as Maya, Photoshop, AfterEffects etc, with no special plugins and regular computers.

Looking at their 3d work with this in mind it is interesting to note their use of very simple wireframe graphics and scenes with fairly low polygon counts, which wouldn’t take too long to render. These elements are often treated as layers and mixed together with other imagery to produce a look that is quite different to the stereotypical, clean 3d look. In clips such as Pyramid Song for Radiohead and Eye For An Eye for UNKLE some of the layers have been intentionally compressed with highly lossy compression to produce an almost painterly effect.

“how they work together / how did they start out?” – they met at uni, shared a house and have been working together ever since. They all work on every project and have similar skills in each area.

Seeing Shynola tomorrow!

Published on March 7, 2005 in Film, Music and Video. Closed

I can’t wait to see and hear the SHYNOLA folks speaking at acmi tomorrow night. The UK based animation and illustration collective have produced some of the most amazing beautiful animations in the form of music videos, ads and ‘blipverts’. They are currently working on the feature film “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” with Hammer and Tongs (be sure to check out ‘Tongsville’ too).

Karlheinz Stockhousen: Advice to clever children…

Published on November 20, 2004 in Music. Closed

K. Stockhausen – Advice To Clever Children

Segmentation Fault

Published on November 2, 2004 in Gigs and Music. Closed

Its on again.

Audiovisual Experiments.

8:00PM Tuesday 2nd of November.

Loop 23 Meyers Place in the city.

This month SegFault regulars Dale Nason, dpwolf and Doktorb Robotnik will be joined by Jean p00le and Future Eater.

Also joining us is Kim Bounds who will be providing the before, after and in between music and Steve Huon who will be keeping the visuals playing between acts.

Due to the date of the gig (the date of the US presidential election) we are presenting a loosely war/nasty based theme.

Things will lighten up towards the end of the night as TestPatN will be facilitating a series of experiments in the field of fun single-serve collaborations between guest artists involving microwave cookery, video and sound.

Gold coin donations were super handy last time (I covered the cost of photocopying the fliers!) so thank you and remember to bring your change this time.

Faxed Head & Critical Animals

Published on October 23, 2004 in Music, Note to self and Research Methods. Closed

It has been deathly quiet around dpwolf/blog land lately so I thought I’d bring some deathly noise.

Faxed Head

Faxed Head are an extreme / death / black / noise / metal band from Coalinga USA with an excellent (very dark) sense of humor. See their bio on the site for their complete mythology and read how the members’ group suicide pact went horribly wrong leaving Mc Patrick Head confined to a wheelchair and permanently covered in plaid, Neck Head with no head at all and LaBreya Tar Pits Head with his face covered in tar.

The site also features mp3s and some video of their 1997 tour of Australia. I remember seeing them on Channel 31 way back then, hilarious Their most recent album features a ‘re-imagining’ of the 2pac/Dr Dre classic California Love as Coalinga Love. It looks like their site hasn’t been updated in a couple of years (maintained by ASCII Head!) so I wonder if they are still around.

Listening to Faxed Head also reminds me of Michelle Phillipov’s presentation at Critical Animals in Newcastle: ‘Septic vomit of chyme’: Death metal vocality and the disavowal of identification.

“Rock’s “authenticity” has long been predicated on its ability to “represent” the everyday lives of its audience, with the singing voice functioning as the primary identificatory locus of listening. Michelle Phillipov explores how death metal troubles this literal reading of the power of rock and voice.”

While I missed most of the actual paper, I caught the discussion which followed in a room full of lively metal enthusiasts. Christy Dena has posted a a full rundown of the Critical Animals Papers (including my presentaion) at the ANU underthesun collaborative weblog.

Music and Media

Published on September 26, 2004 in Music and Note to self. Closed

I just read about this series of lectures at the MoMA in New York, Laurie Anderson, Michel Gondry, Brian Eno speaking about the mixing of media and music, one each week. I wish I was there!

From the site:

“The mixing of media took off in the late 1960s, as the barriers between artistic disciplines broke down and artists began moving freely between painting, sculpture, photography, film, and video. …
Music is at the forefront of this interdisciplinary experimentation. Musicians led the way in developing new working methods–they were interdisciplinary from the start. The work of Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno, and Michel Gondry evinces their backgrounds in music; Anderson was a teenage violin soloist, Gondry played drums in a rock band, and Eno is a well-known pioneer of electronic music.

Music is infused with a wild, innovative energy that has proven especially invigorating to media art, an art form that thrives on trampling conventional restrictions.�The development of media art over the recent decades paralleled the transformation of our musical environment. For Anderson, Eno, and Gondry, music and art are not separate forms. In their art and in their careers, these artists merge the two forms seamlessly. Installations, feature films, performance pieces, and other hybrid projects are imbued with a sensibility that owes much to the artists� musical background.”

Via www.danwinckler.com