Act 2: Stage 1: No I.d. Panic increases while pushing through the crowd. There’s no end to to these halls . The disco is dark. Everyone’s a vampire and who can you blame? But you finally find what you’re looking for. A china town disco dancing light shines on the prize but it seems 10,000 feet away. “I feel like I can make it”,an ambitious thought. An elderly man relives his youth by a pop and lock next to the bar. Candy for the eyes and I forget once again what I’m walking towards.
One day I found a minitape recorder in my backpack after pick up from baggage claim on way to Florida. The tape contained some live opera rehearsals. This loop was created from an excerpt from the tape, sped up, and perhaps some reverb..? Long ago.
Instrument: Grandma’s church organ. Orginal recording with digital still cam with video.
After making this ditty, I thought I might name it “Ferries Really Wear Boots.” Somehow to me this sounds like the tune that Ozzy Ozbourne might have heard when he spotted ferry(gnome?) he talks bout in the classic, “Ferries Wear Boots.” In this rendition, he spots the ferry with boots dancing in a dark alley way under a blue spotlight and this song is playing.
The iPoet asks “How the poet can be heard in a world of screens?” which is actually both question and statement. The answer is the medium in which the poem is contained. The work delivers it’s finest moment when it cut’s through to transcendence with the insight “the poet writes life hearing death.” ‘Why do we need poets?’ indeed.
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Felipe Barral Momberg, the self-proclaimed iPoet, is a one man revolution. His piece “The arrival of the iPoet” is the manifesto of iPoetry. The work explicitly blurs the boundries between poetry, music and visual art. There is a strong connection between Momberg’s iPoetry and the Artronica movement. We both embrace the spirit of removing the aesthetic constructs that sometimes seem to unnecessarily segregate the arts. We say ‘Music is Art’. Momberg’s refreshingly direct work says iPoetry is art AND music…and we agree!
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1-Bit Symphony
We haven’t curated much at Artronica but this piece is just too irresistible to pass up. I came across this piece from Avantpost on Tumblr. This is exactly what I hope we’ll start doing at Artronica. Make physical music art objects. Even though Tristan Perich is not affiliated with Artronica his work is a fresh inspiration for us. I have been critical of the sale of mp3s and cds, but I have no qualms about encouraging you to buy this work on Tristan Perich’s website because you are really getting an object of true value here.
I’m pleased to finally show my composition “The World (100 Loops)“, the first in a series called “Non-linear Music“. The series is a revival of works I composed in 2003. I was influenced by the short phrase aleatoric method of Terry Riley’s “In C”, the direct melodicism of Philip Glass and the phase shifting of Steve Reich.
CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE WORK ››
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For “The World” I composed an entire composition of a minute and a half with MIDI and then arranged it for an orchestra (with my very limited understanding of orchestral arrangement). The next step was more fun. In Cubase (a program I no longer use thanks to improvements in Ableton Live) I approximated the orchestra sounds with VST synths. Then I broke down each instrument line into 9 phrase loops (except for the string baseline (top) which stands alone as the main theme). Originally I pulled in the looped phrases into Ableton and the piece was intended to be performed by myself randomly firing off the clips in Ableton as a performance. I actually recorded some of the ‘performances’ (no one was watching but what to call them?) and that’s where I left the series in 2003.
Jason Freeman and Japan Soul - Piano Etudes - I. Observing Squirrels
I came across Jason Freeman’s Piano Etudes a few months ago. I believe it had been featured in the New York Times. I was a bit floored because I actually had a similar idea about eight years ago to make something I called “non-linear” music. Well this is certainly that. I did actually record some live performed pieces of non-linear music back then, but the full bloom of the idea would have been to do what Jason Freeman has done and transform the listener into the arranger. Continue reading
