Going Fragile March 18, 2011

it is not easy to get out of your own material, and it can be painful; there is an insecurity aspect to it. This actually is probably the most experimental level. When do you think real innovation and experimentation are happening? Probably when people are insecure, probably when people are in a situation very new to them and when they are a bit uncertain and afraid. That is where people have to push themselves. People are innovative when they are outside of their warm shit, outside of the familiar and comfortable… I don’t know exactly what I want, but I do know exactly what I do not want.

- Radu Malfatti, from Noise and Capitalism

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February Session Photos March 13, 2011

February 2011 - Jason Alder on bass clarinet, Tess Walkowski vocals

February 2011 - Jonathan Reus conducts the group

February 2011 - Pinar Temiz homeswinger, ebows

February 2011 - Berit Janssen plays flugelhorn

February 2011 - Georgios Papadakis and Jonathan Reus on electronics

February 2011 - Andreas Otto playing fello

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Received on March 7, 2011 March 7, 2011

After much hard work during the final rush of the RPM challenge the rough cut of the album is more or less complete and was received today, March 7, 2011 at RPM headquarters (according to the info on our RPM challenge page).

The album really came together quite literally in the last few days from what were until then pretty disparate segments. In the end I’m pretty happy with the narrative that’s been crafted.

Many of the tracks still need some production love, and the overall duration of the album deserves more material, but for now it’s a job well done. Especially given the short and hectic time span imposed by the RPM challenge. Now that we have the main elements and narrative down, we’ll be looking forward to finishing up the album at a more leisurely pace over the coming months, with a second session already in the works.

You can listen to the rough cut on our RPM challenge page, or using the embedded player below.

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Crunch Time February 20, 2011

Crunch Time

Image c/o Jeremy Bogdan's Crunch Time

The end of February is fast approaching and the album is coming together. The recorded material we took away from the session at the beginning of the month is rather rough. Two days just isn’t a lot of time for a such a diverse group to musically cohere. But it was a good start for the next session and the seeds of many fruitful methodologies were planted. More on those later. For now we focus on the album.

What better way to illustrate the range of material we captured than through distraction-proof 30-min excerpts.

1. This first bit comes from one of the early takes that came out of an improvisatory “get to know each other” game we played in groups of three. A single leader would choose two playmates and assign them instruments along with a stylistic directive. Often players would pick up instruments they had never played, and the stylistic directives ran the gamut of abstraction from “surprise happiness” to “cockroach”. The result was mostly chaotic, spontaneous noise music of varying stylistic ilk. When approaching the compositional aspect of this album I had to somehow figure a plan out for dealing with this mish-mash of material. This take was the one most in need of production love. The mantra of “we’ll fix it in post” comes to mind. Certainly the producer’s touch is ever present, but due to the extensive manipulations this track is more marked by my personal artistic style than any other. Instruments include an original 1971 Putney VCS3, hand-made oscillator circuits, voice and feedback.

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2. This second excerpt features more material from these early exercises. This one came together far more fluidly, and is (more or less) a single take. Instruments featured are one of Yuri Landman’s Homeswingers, hand-made electronic oscillators, and the glorious VCS3. The VCS3 has a dirty, lo-fi sound that I am absolutely in love with. It’s like the whiskey-laden high lonesome sound of analog synths. And playing it? Forget keyboards. It’s control voltage only! Legend has it that Michel Waisvisz, director of STEIM for 26 years, received his initial inspiration for the legendary CrackleBox from opening up the back of one of these synths and touching the sound circuitry inside.

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3. The third excerpt comes from the second day. This day we began to explore more conducting-inspired approaches to improv, by assembling small groups and having a single player act as conductor, playing the group as if they were themselves the notes of an instrument. This take is from a series of vocal/instrumental groupings featuring key phrases cut from the Future of the Lab (book). We were lucky to have such a culturally diverse group, so we decided to capitalize on this by playing the phrases off in a myriad languages, creating a linguistic firefly swarm where semantic meaning is constantly flickering in and out.

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4. The final excerpt comes from one of the few loose free jam sessions interspersed throughout the two days, just to take a breath between more “serious” sessions. Adhering to all these rules and exercises can get exhausting.

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Munch.. crunch..

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February RPM Challenge January 28, 2011

RPM Challenge 2011 Banner

Writers have national novel writing month. Musicians have the RPM challenge. A world-wide community effort to get everyone off their butts and make an album in the month of February.

From the RPM website:

This is The Challenge – Record an album in 28 days, just because you can.

That’s 10 songs or 35 minutes of original material recorded during the month of February. Go ahead… put it to tape.

It’s a little like National Novel Writing Month, (NaNoWriMo.org) where writers challenge each other to write 1,700 words a day for 30 days, or the great folks over at February Album Writing Month (fawm.org), who encourage artists to write 14 new songs in February. Maybe they don’t have “Grapes of Wrath” or “Abbey Road” at the end of the month, or maybe they do—but that’s not the point. The point is they get busy and stop waiting around for the muse to appear. Get the gears moving. Do something. You can’t write 1,700 words a day and not get better.

We say deadlines make the best music. The clock is ticking…
Check out the Future of the Lab at RPM.

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The first Future of the Lab January 25, 2011

The first Future of the Lab improv session is upon us. This February 5th and 6th a group of musicians from various cultural backgrounds and musical styles will descend upon the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music, Amsterdam’s crown jewel of experimental music and sound art. The goal of this session will be to use some naive improvisational approaches to compose material for a concept album based upon the Future of the Lab, a truly wonderful collection of essays compiled by Baltan Labs predicting future roles of media labs in a world of highly socialized online knowledge sharing and cheap, ubiquitous technology.

Future of the Lab - Book

This will be the first of many experiments using improvisation to create compositions. Composing by playing.  The “scores” for each track of the album are word and music games, improv exercises, and on-the-spot songwriting sprints concocted by the group and inspired by the text. The composed and aleatory material that comes from these sessions will then be lovingly massaged into a full-length musical narrative of 40 minutes, or so.

The roster of guinea pigs for this session. We’re a pretty diverse crew. Leaning a bit to the side of electronica, but we’re at STEIM, after all.

Jonathan Reus (US/NL // electronica, americana) – concept, production, engineering

Pinar Temiz (TR // singer-songwriter, sound design) – homeswinger overtone zither, electronics, percussion, voice

Berit Janssen (DE // big band jazz) – trumpet, flugelhorn

Tess Walkowski (US // art punk, music theatre) – percussion, voice

Georgios Papadakis (GR // music theatre, electronica) – electronics, found objects, voice

Andreas Otto (DE // classical, electronica) – fello (sensorized cello + electronics)

Jason Alder (US // free improv, klezmer) – clarinet, bass clarinet, found objects

Christoph Scherbaum (DE // jazz, electronica) – electric guitar, electronics, voice

Mitsuhiro Kaise (JP // rock) – electric guitar, Jew’s harp, Korg Monotron, voice

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