I live in an apartment that shares no common walls with any other apartment, which makes my building something of an architectural freak. For a couple years I’ve been under the impression that this unique layout allowed me to make a lot of robot noise without disturbing anyone, and I was half right. The neighbors on my floor can’t hear me from their apartments, and I thought the same was true of the neighbors above me. But I was wrong. Apparently, one upstairs neighbor has been suffering through late night jam sessions while wrapping her annoyance into a tight ball of passive-aggressive Minnesotan rage. Because I’m a nice guy, and because I got tired of electromechanical furniture dominating my living space, I rented a real rehearsal space.
As it turns out, this was a great idea in its own right. Being able to play with normal volume is very liberating and completely changes how I practice. I’m able to balance the instruments better, build up thicker textures, and simulate a real performance. I got a little giddy with that freedom during my first full day in the space, and I dropped my planned session of scales and rhythm exercises for hours of self-indulgent jamming, which in a one-man improvisatory band, is actually the point of the enterprise. Who else would I indulge? But I digress. I recorded about half an hour of spontaneous beat creation and melodic noodling, and while there are some awkward moments and some loops last too long, I like the overall vibe. Unlike earlier tracks, these are mellow beats that aren’t in a hurry to get anywhere. Synths amble around in a bouncy reverberant space grounded by regular patterns in the djembe and auxiliary percussion, and enough weird stuff happens to avoid ambient chillout blandness. That said, it’s background music. Anyone listening for structural narrative in the modulation scheme will be…well, let’s just stop here and say that anyone who listens for the structure of modulation schema probably endured a harsh, though rigorous, upbringing in the former East Germany and deserves our support and patience. But that person will be bored Scheißelos by this track. Other people, however, may enjoy listening to this session while distracting themselves with homework, chores, or any one of the many brilliantly stupidly brilliant single-serving tumblrs on the internets. I recommend Fuck Yeah Menswear.
Other people’s music can be interesting too, and I thought I’d share some sounds that I’m digging.
Chicago juke music has been around for years, but I didn’t stumble upon it until recently, so for those who, like me, haven’t hit up underground dance parties on the South Side in a while, a brief introduction: Juke is derived from Chicago house music and hip hop but turns the tempo way up to around 150 bpm. The rhythms are intensely syncopated and often create tempo ambiguities; you’re not sure if the beat is at 75 or 150 bpm. Both are often viable listening strategies and you can choose to hear the music at either, allowing you to perform perceptual gestalt flips–who doesn’t enjoy a good gestalt flip? Juke has an associated dance style called footwurk that features manic legwork, and “footwurk” is sometimes used synonymously with “juke” to refer to the music itself. This article in New Zealand music mag Rip It Up delves deep into juke/footwurk’s origins. Here’s an off-kilter exemplar from Chicago dance music polymath Chrissy Murderbot.
Closer to my own practice, Archie Pelago uses a complex setup of laptops and live instruments to create an improvisational beat-based music that draws on jazz and dance music.
Cities Aviv is a Memphis-based rapper who likes to stretch out highly textured samples from classic R&B, chillwave, and jazz and let them bake in the sun for a while before applying a high sheen of reverb. I don’t listen to lyrics so I couldn’t tell you what he’s rapping about. Probably money, women, and his own skills as a rapper, but that’s just a guess based on what I’ve read about rap music.
To stay true to my roots, some modern composition. I’ve always enjoyed Salvatore Sciarrino’s work for being ultra modern without being dogmatic and for maintaining a sense of joy and wonderment against the angsty, neurotic gloom that characterizes a lot modern music from composers of his generation. The violin caprices are tour de force of technique that I’ve had the good fortune to hear live twice. Here’s a taste:
Speaking of angsty, neurotic gloom, one composer who does it better than almost anyone alive is Austrian Georg Friedrich Haas. His piece for chamber ensemble Wer, wenn ich schreie, hörte mich? (Who, when I scream, will hear me? — do you see what I’m getting at?) is one my all time favorites pieces. It makes great use of cymbals to augment shimmering dissonances, and creates a massive sense of foreboding with slowly accelerating, swooshing chords in the brass and strings that move in and out of phase. To hear Haas in a mellower mood, check out his second string quartet, which is gauzy spectral work in the mold of Grisey.
I wish Engadget Deutschland had contacted me for the post. If I remember my year abroad correctly, “balls-to-the-wall freebasing steamfunk” is one word auf Deutsch.
Auf jeden Fall, bitte Klicken Sie auf die “Like” Taste auf der rechten Seite um in Kontakt zu bleiben und Nachrichten über neue Jazari Ereignisse, beispielsweise videos mit der neu gebauten “Wobble” Maschine, zu bekommen.
On Thursday I had the pleasure of performing for an enthusiastic crowd at TEDx Grand Rapids. The organizers of the event had asked me to do a short talk about my music in addition to performing, which is something I’m always slightly apprehensive about because I worry that too much explanation and theoretical discussion can make the music seem like a demo instead of something that stands on its own. But I put those concerns aside and wrote a short talk that was as much about trends in music software and hardware as it was about Jazari, and I’m glad I did. At the reception after the conference, a couple people told me they would have been annoyed if I had walked off the stage after my last djembe solo. Apparently in 2011, giving the people what they want means robot drum ‘n bass plus futurist prognostications. That’s a giant leap from “Free Bird.”
Here’s the text of the talk that I prepared:
The title of my talk is Cyborg Musicianship; I am wearing a large controller made from springbok horns and arcade buttons; and I also surrounded by electro-mechanical machines that play instruments. Extrapolating from these facts, you might think that cyborg music is an eccentric kind of sci-fi genre made by nerds and shared on obscure internet forums. And you would be half right. But the other half of the story is that cyborg musicianship already dominates the production of pop music and permeates music-related video games and mobile device applications. The machines that you see on stage here are in a sense hardware manifestations of ideas that have spread throughout musical culture in software. Before I elaborate on that point, I’d like to lay out a tentative definition of cyborg musicianship. (more…)
A new member will join the band over the next couple months, which poses a problem: I’ve run out of limbs. Controlling three machines with two hand-held devices is hard enough, and trying to extend this framework of direct control would require either rapidly alternating control of four machines between two controllers or building foot controllers. Foot controllers are out of the question because I think they’re fairly ridiculous. For an organist or drummer, they’re fine, but for a quasi one-man band, simultaneous foot and hand control looks a little clownish.
The other approach of alternating control of the four machines with my existing controllers works well enough, be it leaves me stuck in loop-based music: play something on one instrument, loop it, switch to another and play something, loop that, now switch back, etc. I’m eager to overcome this approach. Live interaction and simultaneous constrained improvisation among all participants, whether human or computer controlled, is what interests me. (Why it interests me more than loop-based music is a topic for another post.) Musical human-machine interaction has been a research topic for at least two decades now but has seen mixed results. Research in the field often produces interesting demonstrations but little in the way of music you might actually enjoy. Among the more notable efforts is Robert Rowe’s Cypher system, which uses a rules-based approach, and Francois Pachet’s Continuator project, which favors a data-driven, machine-learning strategy. I favor the latter approach augmented by the ability to build hooks into the generative system so that I can steer its output.
Machine learning researchers often describe their models as “black boxes” because their inner operations are opaque to observation. (more…)
I’m playing Room Zero on Sunday, May 30th. Doors open at 8, first set at 8:30. Location is in NE Minneapolis. Email shield.your.eyes [at] live.com for directions.
I’m playing Saturday, May 15 at Shuga Records in NE Minneapolis as part of Art-A-Whirl (map). 2 pm is the time slot and there’s no cover.
This will be the debut of my springbok horn controller, which probably–going out on a limb here–represents the first use of animal horns in a gestural music controller EVER. Come witness history of sorts.
For years I’ve been interested in what makes some rhythmic patterns more compelling than others. Certain beats and certain clave patterns have the power to entrance listeners or at least sustain a rhythmic texture for minutes. These rhythms tend share a number of mathematical characteristics, and the computer scientist Godfried Toussaint has done fascinating work in investigating these characteristics. His work becomes particularly interesting when read alongside the work of musicologists and percussionists like Simha Arom and David Locke. Locke argues persuasively in his book Drum Gahu that one of the defining characteristics of the Gahu bell pattern is metrical ambiguity–specifically, the property that almost any strike in the Gahu bell pattern could function as the downbeat. The ambiguous metrical foundation laid by the bell allows other instruments to influence subtly how the listener perceives the meter. My speculative thinking is that the ambiguity of the pattern is what keeps it interesting. Players in the ensemble can flip the listener’s metrical orientation with subtle accents, and the attentive listener can even perform a Gestalt flip on his own by deliberately trying to hear a particular bell stroke as the downbeat.
A couple years ago I tried to pivot off of Toussaint’s research to quantify metrical ambiguity. The resulting paper is here. This research, believe it or not, has actually influenced how I improvise. With Jazari, I usually try to have at least one instrument play a metrically ambiguous pattern–which isn’t to say that I’m doing the equations in my head. Rather, once you’ve researched metrically ambiguous rhythms, you get a sense for how they feel, and it’s this feel that I go after.
Who am I to argue with the people? And rest assured, your donations will not fund the extravagant roboticist lifestyle we’ve seen depicted in Popular Mechanics in recent years. No Lear jets, no strippers, no coke-snorting automata. Every cent will help build (physical) drum machines and a bass machine. Oh yes, there will be a bass machine.
I’ve had some requests for a diagram of the circuit that I use, and I’m going to post it with the proviso that no one should actually imitate this design. Partly due to my own ignorance at the time, and partly due to a failed attempt to isolate the power electronics from the Arduino, I used a combination of an opto-coupler and an NPN transistor where a single PNP transistor could have been used. But for the curious, here it is:
When I have nothing else to do, which will be approximately never, I’ll rebuild the circuits with PNPs and eliminate the opto-couplers, which I suspect damage the switching speed of the PWM signal. I don’t have a scope to verify my hunch, but it would make sense; optos are used in compressors because they smooth out a signal, which is the opposite of what I want. Right now, everything works, so this is a lower priority. (more…)
