Over the last few years I've been working on developing a new art style. As with anything new to me, I don't just let it out in to the wild after inception. It must be researched, and refined, so as I can start to realize its potential. For the coming year I plan on making art a big part of my creative efforts. Best case scenario end game would be a show at a little gallery somewhere. I am considering creating a tumblr or a separate blog for this new art, but am still undecided on that at this time. For now I am working on coming up with a concise definition of what the style is. A definition that I am sure to, redefine. More on this later.
Just a short little clip I did while working on making a live incarnation of our Bluffs project. I've been slowly building a library of video clips for eventual use as source material for live projected visuals. The below is one of those clips.
Another "beat vignette" from my November 2011 New York City trip. I forgot exactly what subway stop this was at (anyone care to fill me in?). Analog bleeps and loops courtesy of Korg, and Moog. The synth at the end is a Little Phatty controlling a MG1 via control voltage, playing a single detuned sliding note in unison. The beats are comprised of various processed bits and fragments from my own library.
A little video I took while our shuttle crawled along through Times Square. I set aside a few hours the other night and created this little beat vignette to 'score' it. Tossed in a little modular mayhem courtesy of Moog, Korg, and Bleep Labs and Viola! I generally have music running through my head, so this is sort of like my minds eye view. I think I planned on doing more to this, but as it is I probably spent too much time making sure that the fades and subtle changes match up to stuff on screen, all the while wondering if the small handful of people who see it will even notice (same with any sort of art right?). Part of me thinks I should be doing this sort of thing to "good" (higher quality) footage, but I sort of like how even the blindingly bright lights are muted and dark. I thought about doing some video correction, but I like the noise. L85.
Just a few little details that I found going through some of my pictures...
They really highlight some of the things I find attractive in the marco mode of the Harinezumi camera, the texture, the noise, the smearing focus contrasted against the sharp focus, all contributing to the other worldly feel of these pictures. I still love the hyper crispness of a high quality macro picture from a SLR or something along those lines, but these just have something about them that I really adore. I think my love of slightly fuzzy macro-photography can be traced back to the back page of '3 2 1 Contact' magazine, where it featured different close ups of objects, and you had to guess the object. Ah memories. Maybe I will see if I can buy some old back issues...
Unlike some of my other multiple exsposures that I have done with the Holga this one was accidental. This is both my studio work space, and the main room over at Good Dannys. I took the picture at my place on a tripod, in the dark, over a long period, and forgot to roll the film. A few days later we went into Good Dannys Studio to mix and I snapped the picture at his place. The below is the result of 'mixing' of two studios.
PS: I love the lens flare 'halo' I think that it's fuzziness is a result of the plastic lens.
The year is rapidly drawing to a close, and it seems like the number of good musical events are starting to ramp up. Slowly, but with greater frequency, I'm starting to have a weekly itinerary good of shows I would like to see, a list I should probably just add to my calender instead of keeping in my head. In Austin, this ramping up of awesome shows always seems to continue till it explodes into SXSW. People have pretty varied opinions on SXSW, and I totally understand both sides of the SXSW pro/con coin, but whether it is official or not, I can already feel a distant giddiness in anticipation of the hive of musical and cultural activity that comes with that part of the year. To me, a lot of the fun, and the experience is not just who is on what stage at what time, but the frenzy, the excitement in the air, and the general adventures that come a long with it. You find your self in some odd and awesome scenes. So in that light, I thought I would share some of my favorite pictures from SXSW 2011 that aren't looking towards the stage. Some times the environment around you tells you when to capture the moment.
These are all unedited and taken with my lil Harinezumi camera whose noise I love so much...
I always love seeing patterns that we can't normally see. I adore the way that two similar perforated patterns passing each other reveal a hidden interference pattern, but there are even more amazing patterns that we are not normally aware of that are floating by us, drifting through space and time, pulsing, expanding, reshaping each other as they flitter in and out of existence. Seemingly random patterns of light, movement, reactions, etc, if drawn or plotted often start to reveal surprising shapes and forms that otherwise will have gone unseen. When I contemplate these patterns, I begin to day dream of those interlaced patterns of the universe that predict the unpredictable, and point to the unknown. The video below reveals amazing patterns in harmonics of sound through pairs of frequency modulation based oscillators. Very definable shapes in patterns hidden in sound, a sound that if you were to only hear, you would have no idea contained such structure! Watch as it unfolds, into seemingly 3D shapes, and complex diminishing patterns.
I think ever since I saw "The Minds Eye" video I wanted to be a 3D animation artist, and I would love love love to be a professional sound designer. I suppose I am closer to a sound designer than an animator, someday maybe I will find time to get into animation. This video combines both those loves. Someone out there is living my dream as a work week. Hopefully someday I too will get serious about it.
(Watch High Res with good sound if you can)
Manifest Jukebox was conceived as a monthly music night where the theme is simple: we would play awesome music of our choosing from our respective music collections, with no truly defined genre. More on this later... Manifest Jukebox has taken its first form as a mix series on the internet through the mix magic skills of my partner in musical crime Scot Markland. I really, really love these mixes, and I have heard a LOT of mixes in my years. I highly recommend checking out the first one HERE if you haven't already (free download)! Volume 2 is now out! This volume leans heavy on rhythms from around the planet. Why did I say planet and not world? Probably because when you say 'world music' people conjure up images of the dusty new age section in music shops, and this is sad as there is some amazing music from the other non-North American and European continents. Much like the brand 'electronic music' glosses over so many aural gems and musical rarities, 'world music' as a descriptor does much the same. Scot as usual digs deep and dishes out some diamonds, unearths some forgotten funky relics and serves up some slices of music you forgot you knew about. For the new volume Scot asked me do some of my new art style, which I think I shall call Serial Glyphography, over a map. I found a reasonably old map (you have to guess the country) and went to work. I am actually really pleased with the results! There were actually two separate pieces that I did, and I cropped a good 10 or so details and let Scot choose the one he liked best, and this became the cover. I liked some of the other options so much I decided to share them with you! (Maybe share the entire originals if someone asks or I feel like it). Each one has something cool cropped into it. I'm glad Scot decided because I would have a hard time choosing. Which do you like?
Excuse the Simpsons reference there but, this video is amazing! I love everything about it. The sound, the method, the science! I have often day dreamed what it would be like if we could see sound, or watch waves of energy bounce and collide around us, so this is pretty awesome:
A High Res. detail of an attempt at a landscape. I think this is from a section of the "sky". This is where color layering and using different inks pays off, I love the yellow peaking through where the water color would not bind.
Some times it's the little accidents make something pleasing. Often in the world of audio the "happy accidents" are left in, a mistake or unintentional slip that ends up with something awesome that would be near impossible to come up with on your own in the context of what you were trying to accomplish. The random act of something you did with out intent, that yields unexpectedly positive results is something rare and precious. I think as you come to enjoy this influence of chaos you also learn to run with it. This little detail is full up accidents both happenstance and forced. The positive and negative of a stencil switch places, the seeming random colors are actually shapes and letters near buried. The little odd dots are constellations of bleed through of a larger object. The light criss-crossing lines of gray that look like brush strokes, are actually my finger pushing around dried ink. I like to look at these fluid squiggles and wonder what in my brain was directing this voyage? Turn here, stop, reverse direction! I guess it's the same thing that tells you "that's enough ink there" "don't cover that bit up any more than it already is". Interesting stuff. This little detail highlights, what to me (in a staring at clouds sort of way) looks like some sort of weird beak nosed strider. The actual lighter brush strokes seem to add a sort of depth that starts to set a scene for me. The point of all this dissection is that what may seemingly be random may not be random at all. In my opinion it's this costume of randomness that makes some of the most interesting media... it's something I definitely strive for, but also something I don't want to push too far that it becomes robotic and, ironically, 'forced'. Sitting on the fence between "by design" and "by accident" is a funky mental balancing act.
This is from a piece I did, that I actually have a title for (wow), called '9 Blocks'. I am rather fond of it. Like many of my works lately, I think the causal observer might glance at it and not take it in. Not what I see in it at least. I suppose that is an age old artist worry. In this one, as with some other recent ones, I have played with masking, in hopes that the 'pure' negative space will lead one to focus on the 'micro negative space' created by the overlaying. The more I think about it, this new style I have been playing with seems to be all about negative space, something I was told over and over I had entirely too much of in art class. I am posting these details of my recent pieces rather than showing the whole picture, in hopes that you can see a bit of what I see when I look at these, and not just the easily consumable chaos and colors. I particularly like the 'bleed' at the edges of the block in this one. This bleed is caused by the under laying watercolor and the ink as it seeped past the border of the mask. It's as if one world is seeping out into another. I have always loved the way liquids have spread into paper, going as far as they can into the little spaces and grooves between the fibers. I have often marveled at coffee stains or the spray marks left by stray food or water. It's a kind of art you just can't make.
Me and Scott have completed three tracks for our Grackle Pop project, which will actually be released under the name Bluffs. This is a pretty big deal for us! Especially if you've known how long we have been making music together. You can get an idea of why it has taken so long by reading this post HERE. So we are still in the process of finding logos, fonts, making web pages and generally putting together a game plan for how we plan on putting it out and getting it into peoples ears. Fear not eager reader (and mildy interested reader) you will hear them soon enough. Part of the process is letting a few people hear the tracks as we decide what to do with them. So that involves creating the MP3's, tagging them with relevant information and assigning some temporary artwork to the files while we settle on art for the EP (or single tracks as it may be). So for some temporary artwork I created a file for the standard MP3 image size and "auditioned" (almost chose sections at random) several detail shots of some of my recent artwork, which I mysteriously referred to in this POST. So I thought I would share some of the choices I chose from:
Some years ago me and Scot decided to start a musical project. We both had strong backgrounds in the ways of electronic music. Agreeing that we would not me making 'dance' music, we decided to make something that would showcase the sounds we liked, something that would not really follow any rules (because you know, we're rebels. Cheese on!) and something that might even follow the accessible structures of pop music. This was Grackle Pop. Grackle Pop has since ended up sort of being an umbrella name for what we have been up to, and once more things have started to happen. As part of that process Scot and I have setup: Go ahead and click that.
This is a place to showcase some of whats been going on in our speakers these years since the inception of the project. I wont explain too much more as I wrote a nice post HERE explaining why the blog is there. I'll still post audio oddities and such here, there may be some doubling up on both sites, but Falling Tree Audio will give a more complete picture as to what the two of us have been doing. Our first release will be coming up soon!
Speaking of doubling up, check this cool tile image comprised of details of pictures take with my Hazcam:
This was taken with my Holga on my way home from work. With the Holga firmly wedged in between the dashboard and the window I snapped pictures at various moments on the way home from work, thus this image is a mutli-exposure compilation of my daily voyage home. There are a multitude of amazing cameras out there that can give you a very concise, focused, image of what it is your capturing, I'm trying to use the Holga with it's 120 film to make a sort visual impression of what I want to capture, not just a record.
Another SXSW has come and gone! I don't plan on writing a detailed post of everything I did, but I just wanted to say... I had a great time. I decided against a wristband this year, there was TONS of awesome official showcases, but nothing I was dying to see or, as a bonus of living in Austin TX, would not be able to see in the coming year at some venue here in town. You can have an awesome time with out a wristband, this is something I have known for a while, and something that the rest of the world seems to be catching on to more and more every year. So much so that the free events may be getting out of hand, and organizers and talking about roping it back it in, which makes me sad, because I LOVE free. So many years I have carefully planned my SX, seeing new exciting acts and watching acts I've always wanted to see, but this year I just took it as it came, with only a vague skeleton of a plan to follow. I got to see good friends play good shows and wander aimlessly through down town alone eating free food and drinking free beer as I went. I got to ravage a free bar at an exclusive venue I've long wondered: "what's it like in there" (I later learned the floor collapsed during a fevered dance party... it was an old house indeed). I felt a solid concrete parking garage bounce like a trampoline, and even had a fleeting moment of "wow this seems really dangerous, am I about to be apart of a disaster?!" I got to see acts I'd seen before play the best set I've seen them play (TV on The Radio) and of course - see bands I've always wanted to see (Dead Milkmen - they really were fantastic). I even went to Flatstock and actually managed not to buy a new poster, a personal best! All told I had a great time, ate some great food, drank untold amounts of free drinks, and spent all of it with great company. I couldn't ask for more! I probably missed three times what I saw, but that's the way it goes. Every SXSW is a different experience for me, and this one was great! L85
SXSW is nearly upon us. Music is on our minds. Time to get the music machine up and running.
I'm in a band, Rally Rally, but there is another older project that has been laying dormant... waiting. Mutating. Growing.
Grackle Pop.
Some of you may know about this project, I've been working on it for some time with fellow elusive Grackle wizard, Scott. We completed some remixes and there is upwards of 20 or so tracks in various stages of completion. We long searched for, and auditioned, several vocalists, we wanted to to be some sort of electro..pop.. mutant thing, but alas nothing worked for us. So in December we decided it was time (after several loved ones and friends kept telling us how much they liked the demos) to put some of it out there. So in the beginning of April we will be going into the studio with Danny Reisch of Good Danny's to complete an EP. As such, we decided to start recording and re-recording so of the bits going into the record. So this Sunday we went over to the Rally Rally recording roof and got Mig from Rally Rally to lay down some tracks while me and Scott tweaked away on the Moogerfoogers. It feels good to get back to work on these tracks and see where they go...
As a celebration of the reanimation of Grackle Pop here is another little video. I made this as I was composing some pieces for an intro section to a track, and there is a good chance that section might not appear in the final track so I rendered a few of the loops sequentially then just went to my slowly building achive of video clips from the Hazcam and pieced this together. As with most little audio visual things on this blog, it's just a snap shot, a preview, an appetizer.
Tubular Bells by the Brooklyn Organ Synth Orchestra
I saw this video over at Matrixsynth and it is amazing! Not only does it feature amazing playing and players, but it is just chalked full of rare keys and synths (as well as some modern ones, like my Phatty). The amazing variety of awesome instruments is inspiring to me. I could never play like these girls (OK maybe I could match Super Cute) but I hope to one day own a collection of key based oddities HALF that awesome. Some many one of a kinds, that only do one sound really well... it's like a pallet of colors only few artists have the privilege of working with. I hope to some day just have an awesome collection so I can have awesome players come into my studio and just let them run wild. Until then, I will watch this video now and then until it goes away.
So this is a mini-track I put together last night. It's composed of a guitar loop I cut out of an unreleased Rally Rally (a synth-punk electro-rock band I'm in) track, another guitar and organ loop I cut out of Rally Rally jam session, and I topped it all off with a fresh new synth patch and let it chill over night. I've been shooting video clips with my new Harinezumi for use in live visuals or videos, so I selected a fitting clip and lined it up. Viola! This video is starring Snowball, my teacup panther, and a late golden Sunday afternoon.
So, this is where I tell you dear reader what this blog is all about. Then I talk about what I plan to do with it and make a joke about seeing if I will keep up with it...
But seriously folks. I plan on using this as space to share little bits of things I find interesting. I think that in some part we are defined by our interests. Sure, that’s a bit of a blanket statement but, I mean it in the way that if I put on display the little bits and pieces that catch my attention, you the causal L85 observer might be able to be able to build a more accurate model of who I am, what I like, and the overall aesthetic of the things that peak my senses. I intend on posting art, pictures, videos, music, stories, and little bits of visual oddities and audio experiments that tend to leak out.
