I spent spring break in New York working on an installation project.  Similar in concept to an earlier piece, A440, but should be very different and hopefully a tiny bit more interesting.  Thanks to Dustin and Shrage for helping out with the shooting… about 100 shots in two days.

The video below is not part of the project, but it is Shrage playing the trumpet… even better.

kid can flat out play.

Forgot about a project for class and had about 2 hours to do something so I went minimal and used a really beautiful prelude from Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier.  I tried to reflect the overall dramatic structure instead of individual events (also took less time)… so enjoy the music and if the animation adds to it then great.

Thanks for the pep talk, Eric.

Max Hattler’s multi-award winning abstract political short film, in HD. Islamic patterns and American quilts and the colours and geometry of flags as an abstract field of reflection. © 2005 Max Hattler

Max Hattler

Olay!

CAUTION… Starts with a big loud hit (Think Tchaikovsky’s 4th, Movement 4, beat one, Daaaaa, daaaaa, da, ddddddddddddd, bo -boom.)

had a mix assignment due today… i used those things (above)… it’s a pop song… you might disagree… busy… slept for 3 hours… smell interesting… listen… headphones… holes.

Also, I realize that this here blurrg has veered a bit to the self indulgent side as I’ve become busy, but I’ll be sure to get some more quality work (read: by others) up soon.  Have a great, what day is it? … Thursday.

I’m starting to see two trends in my work… and they are differentiated by control. Control relating to audience, control of materials, medium, concept, ambiance, site, whatever. In most of my music and video work (until now and sometimes still now) I am a control freak. I want to guide the viewer or listener, I want to control what they think and how they feel and when they breath. I think that this is a somewhat natural tendency for many artists. It shows ability and skill, it is difficult to do, and well conceived control can have an immediate and profound effect on people. Control is generally why people cry in movies, why we all liked postal service, and why cute kids sell cereal… strrrreeetch.

But lately, influenced somewhat by certain people (big and small), but more so by the work I’ve been thinking about and possibly even a dusting of maturity, I am interested in losing some of that control in some of my work.  Losing control is scary.  But, it is also one of the best ways to learn things.  By letting things happen instead of forcing them to happen, or by creating a construct within which things happen, you are offering work with the potential to reach something that might be new and different, might be thought provoking and sublime, and might very well be just be bad.  By relaxing my grip on craft and ability and my forever practiced and obsessively polished set of skills,  I have started to make some art that I can actually watch (if you know me well you would know that I would usually rather eat sawdust then listen to my music).  So, I’m going to try out some new approaches once in a while (quite publicly even) and see where it goes.

Now, I can’t entirely give up all control right away, that’s just plain crazy talk at this point.  My less controlled ideas are still fairly controlled in comparison to the standard canon of experimental (chance based, minimal, site dependent, difficult) pieces out there… but I’m working at giving up some of the control, taking myself out of the thing for a change and letting concept take a bow once in a while.  Even if while concept is taking a bow he is being pelted with tomatoes and other brightly pigmented vegetables.

There is a chance that I could be wrong about a lot of this… and there is always a pretty good chance I could be going a little insane (it is 4 in the morning and I am waiting for after effects to finish rendering a ‘very controlled’ sequence, so I can composite it and finish my ‘ultra controlled’ (will probably post in the next few days) video/music thing.)

just thinkin’ aloud, you know, blaaarging along…

I finished this piece last semester and have been reluctant to post it because it’s a 6 channel piece that really should be experienced in a surround sound setup… but I had to do a stereo mixdown to submit it to some festivals so I’ll put it up here too.  It is an Acousmatic piece.

Also, in a perfect performance setting, it would be pitch black… but pitch black is almost impossible to come by because there are always those glowing red EXIT signs in concert halls… thus the title. So the sounds would be all around you instead of just stereo… yada yada, it’s about 9 minutes long.

Here is the program note: (definitely headphones on this one)

EXIT (2008)

for speakers

I came across this Craigslist ad in 2006 while hunting for cheap apartments in New York City:

Room for Rent – Utilities Inc.

Single room available in old apartment.  The lights and other fixtures are a bit noisy and there is an insect problem, but the common room is dimly lit so you’ll rarely notice the company.  The doors creak and the faucet tends to drip.  Smokers encouraged, please knock.

This is a really quick little jingle I did tonight for our first project for the class The Recording Studio as a Compositional Tool. Made from sounds recorded during a little free improv sesh in class… trumpet, piano, guitar, flute, and drum sticks on bottle I believe were the sound sources.

I haven’t been doing a lot of pure sound work in the past couple months (a lot of time spent on video) but I’m getting back into it.  I’m going to try to do at least one short “ringtone” sized piece a week… I’ll start posting them here.  The title of this one is:

The secret of snarking out on a school night is to get to bed extra early and then wake up in time to Snark - usually about 1:00 A.M.

(title taken from the book, The snarkout boys and the avacado of death)

Pretty happy that David OReilly just won the first prize at the 2009 Berlinale for his animated short Please Say Something (first 5 episodes are above).  I’m not much of a follower of the festival circuit, but the Berlinale is a big one with big films and PSS is a little one made by one person in his apartment.  Part of what I love about PSS (and a lot of the other OReilly animations) is that it needed to be done by one person sitting in his apartment lost in his little created universe.  The narrative sense, the animation (3D but…), the sound design, and the pacing are all pushing against conventions but are still simple and coherent.  You can’t see all of PSS online but there are a bunch of OReilly’s other films over on vimeo.  Check out WOFL and his music video for the Venetian Snares (and if you have the stomach RGB XYZ is where it all started but…)

UPDATE:  The full-length version of “Please Say Something” is now online (and below)

http://www.davidoreilly.com

A troubled relationship between a Cat and Mouse set in the distant Future.

Written, Directed & Produced by David OReilly, Sound design & Voice synthesis by David Kamp, Sound design & Music by Bram Meindersma. Distributed by Future Shorts.

I’m taking a class right now with Dennis Miller, a composer and animator who is a visiting professor at Brown this semester.   The class is called Sound and Image and the focus is on creating integrated audio-visual video pieces based on musical forms.  Here is a little experiment I did for the first assignment.  I wanted to keep it pretty simple, explore one idea, and give it a definite structure (A-B-A).

(4 minutes long, use headphones instead of those silly laptop speakers)