Month: May 2019

The Place ReSounds of Water

Sunday May 19th was a gorgeously breezy afternoon when Susanne Romey fluttered and howled on the Native American flute while Eleanor Mills pulled rich sounds from The Bells, and Lee Moore Crawford blessed and balanced the water, while Jody Cassell moved and was moved by internal and external energies. dejacusse added a little shimmer to the bell harmonics and witnessed this most beautiful rendering of love.

Big thanks to Jim Kellough for sound smudging the space, to Linda Carmichael for the video capture, and Central Park School for allowing us to celebrate at The Bells.

Stay tuned next year for National Water Dance 2020 Durham NC!

Synthesizing in Ableton: They are On It!

Well, my short-lived journey into configuring Ableton Live as a synthesizer has come to a halt with the purchase of a Behringer Neutron at Moogfest AND with the Ableton announcement that they are Beta-testing CV plug-ins for Ableton 10. I am soooo excited with this direction.

My experiments with creating modulation FX using “dummy clips” or Envelope Generators yielded some new directions for iBoD and dejacusse. We are experimenting with running live sound through the FX tracks and EG clips. This coming Sunday, we will perform The Place ReSounds of Water in front of the Central Park School for Children. Eleanor Mills will play The Bells, dejacusse will morph the bell harmonics into a watery pallette that Susanne Romey will play NA flute over top. There will be meditative movement and the pouring of water. Come join us!

Sunday May 19 @4 pm

724 Foster St @The Bells

Moogfest 2019

Being an introverted elder, I am no longer the festigoer I once was. One festival a year is enough for me and this is it! Moogfest is an incredible sonic universe that opens up in and around Durham, and turns my world upside down. This year was no exception!

There were numerous durational performances, sound installations and interactive opportunities. I was particularly excited to meet Madame Gandhi, who gave a fabulous performance at Motorco last year. This year she lead two sessions of interactive play at The Fruit. The set up included a Push, a Bass Station, a drum set, microphones for vocals and small percussion, and two synths! WoW! She wasted no time with alot of talk. We jumped right in and started playing. I really appreciated that! I played Push and did some vocals, but mostly listened. The group came up with some nice grooves.

This experience reminded me that I prefer solo or small group playing these days, and the energy of the experience was fantastic! Glad I showed up!

Durational performances involve a group or person performing for 2-3 hours solid with no silence. The 21C Museum Hotel Ballroom and Global Breath Yoga Studio were the venues for these works. For durational performances, I love to sit with the beginning and the end OR go in for the middle. Heard Richard Devine and Greg Fox perform the beginnings and endings of their sets. Always interesting to hear the different approaches the start and finish in the broad context of a durational performance. I would love to create a durational performance there someday…soon.

21C was my favorite venue this year. I heard a wonderful variety of soundscapes there in quad sound with excellent sound engineers, a beautiful light show and interactive screens on either side. The bookends of the weekend for me were Ultrabillons and TRIPLE X SNAXXX (local favorites). Both of these sets were incredibly satisfying to listen to. Big synths and bouncy modulars all around. What I come to Moogfest for!! In between there was Aaron Dilloway who gave an amazing embodied noise performance that was as much exorcism as anything else. Drum and Lace started her set with some whispy songs that all seemed to be the same short length, like 3 minutes or so. But then she launched into some beefier pieces and really took the space. She had some gorgeous videos behind her as she performed.

Cuckoo was so much fun and I envied him his tiny set up which he carried into the venue in a knapsack. At one point, he was playing a vampy section and said, “well, this is the point where I introduce the band!” and proceeded to show us the three small controllers he had routed together. He has YouTube videos, so I want to check him out. Here he is playing at The Pinhook.

Finally, I had a few mind-opening, inspiring encounters. Steve Nalepa pointed the way to route signal out of Ableton for quad speakers. He performed at 21C through quad speakers using Ableton. I always wondered why you would route tracks to sends only in the I/O menu. I havent yet tried this, but plan to soon. Then there was the Modular Marketplace! I delayed going till Friday and spent 3-4 hours there playing. As the WoW would have it, the modular unit Behringer Neutron was on sale for $100 off. I struck while I had a little cash flow. Less than a week later, Abe, Nuet and I played a beautiful primal soundscape for Audio Origami on Friday May 3 at ADF Studios @ 4:30pm.

Thank you, Moogfest! See you next year!