The Amazing Rolo

The Weather Gage

A few months back I was invited down to Wales to build a sound sculpture for Bangor Sound City. I hand built a series of solenoid-triggered glockenspiel notes mounted onto cherry wood from the Hicksville Planing Mill in western Maryland. These hung from an alcove on the Garth Pier in Bangor, North Wales. Small propellors mounted outside the alcove were designed to spin in the wind, and control the rate of playback. Here are a few photos from the building phase:

The only problem was that I overestimated how much wind there would be! The propellors didn’t spin like they were meant to. The hanging notes worked really well, though, and the opening day was blessed with glorious sunshine. Here’s a video I’ve made showing it in situ:

The installation was up for several days, and I had a wonderful week in and around Bangor, Llanrwst, and Nebo. I played a super awesome gig in Conwy, spoke to some wonderful students at a school outside of Bangor, and I even managed to catch a very exciting Llanrwst United FC match. Many thanks to northern bloc and Datrys for supporting this project. A very special thanks also to Dominic Chennell and his beautiful family who hosted me during my time there and to Jacqui Banks who drove me all around the countryside!

Tableau of a Lithotomy

Many many things are happening these days, despite the apparent silence on this blog. You can check the Lucky Frame blog for some examples of the stuff I’ve been up to. I’m working on a few videos and things to post here, in the mean time I wanted to share an amazing record I found.

This 45rpm record is called Tableau of a Lithotomy by Marin Marais”, and I found it in my partner’s grandparent’s record collection. I was drawn to it because I’m a big fan of Marais, and because the cover design seemed incongruous with the content. It turned out to be a promotional record for pharmaceutical company Norgine, advertising Enzypan and Muripsin. Side 1 is a performance of the Marais piece “Le tableau de l’opération de la taille”, which is (according to the liner notes) “the only musical description of a surgical operation” (this is in the pre-matmos era). This record purports to be the first modern performance and the first ever recording.

There are several versions of this piece youtube in the original French, though I must admit that I find this version to be much more compelling, perhaps because of the lack of reverb and the dispassionate voiceover.

The reverse side a radioplay-style recording of a doctor and a patient discussing the merits of various Norgine medications.

The sleeve design is also amazing. I’d like to scan it all at some point, but for the moment here are some photos.

I’m bound to use this record for some sort of project in the future…if you have any ideas let me know! In the mean time, please download the recordings and use them for anything you like. Could make some creepy hiphop samples or something…

The Weather Gage

In about an hour I will be jumping on a train to beautiful North Wales, where I am delighted to be creating a new installation on the Garth Pier in Bangor. This project is being done as part of Bangor Sound City, with the support of Datrys and northern bloc.

The Weather Gage will be comprised of a series of small propellors mounted on the pier which will turn in the wind. The speed of the wind will control the playing of a series of little glockenspiel notes hanging in one of the alcoves on the pier. The press release at northern bloc describes it much better than I do:

This installation harnesses the power of the wind to play a glockenspiel. A form of digital Aeolian harp, small propellors will generate tiny amounts of electricity, which will activate glockenspiel notes, creating polyphonic and polyrhythmic textures.

Here are a few photos from the preparation stages…

The wood for the glockenspiel notes is cherry from Mennonites in western Maryland, but that’s another story!

The name is derived from an older nautical term which refers to your position relative to the wind and your enemy. If you were upwind from the person you were trying to attack, you could bear down at will. Possibly the geekiest name for a sound installation ever?

Also on the pier will be an interactive installation by Adam Cooke and Elizabeth Edwards, which will involve a gigantic tea set. Fun stuff! Come on down anytime and say hello if you’re in the area. I will be installing it tomorrow starting bright and early, and it will be open to the public all week from 8:30am to 5:30pm. It closes on Sunday the 20th at noon.

I will also be playing a gig in Conwy on Friday night – I will post more about that later on in the week, right now I have to go catch my train!

Love Music Festival

For the past few months I’ve been quietly working on a gigantic project with an amazing team of people, and last week we finally went public. The Love Music Festival is a brand-new series of musical events happening in schools all around Scotland. It is comprised of a series of exciting workshops in September and October and culminates in two weeks of concerts in venues from Shetland to Peebles, and everywhere in between.

My job is to build custom software, musical installations, and run creative sound recording workshops in schools…so far I’ve been to Peebles, St Andrews, Barra, Benbecula, and Kilmarnock, and next week I’m off to Shetland and Inverness for a few more. You can follow my adventures on my dedicated Love Music page, where I’ll be blogging and posting software and videos. There is some software for download there already, give it a try!

On a side note, the Western Isles are amazing. I’m glad I got a new raincoat, though.

Spores at the Botanics

Thanks to everyone who came down to the Botanics last Sunday! Patrick and I had a drop-in session to show off our Secret Sounds of Spores installation, and we both felt that it went really well.
We got lots of great video and photos, which we will be going through in the coming days. In the mean time you can see this video (featuring a glimpse into a fascinating tangential conversation I had with Paul Stamets) that Patrick put together showing everything in action:

Spores at the Apple Store

For the past few weeks Patrick Hickey and I have been working more and more on our Secret Sounds of Spores project, which is coming together nicely. For those of you just joining us, we are building an installation for the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh which will create music from falling mushroom spores. You can see these spores if you shine a laser underneath a live (or recently deceased) mushroom, and I’m building custom software that will analyze them and trigger a series of strange musical instruments that Patrick and I are building. My previous post explains the concept a bit more, and here’s a new video that shows some of the instruments in action:

Patrick and I will be giving a demonstration and explanation tomorrow night, the 15th of July, at the Apple Store in Glasgow. The event is free and begins at 6pm. We will be showing off a few of the instruments, I’ll be explaining how I’ve approached the software, and if this rain continues we shouldn’t have any trouble finding some mushrooms!

You can RSVP on the New Media Scotland Facebook Group or Eventbrite page.

Hope to see you there!

edit: as I’ve said in the comments, thanks to all who came by! I’ll post photos as soon as I get them from the Apple Store, in the mean time here is one of the mushrooms set up with the laser:

The Secret Sounds of Spores

I’m working on a project right now with Patrick Hickey, founder of Nipht Technologies, which involves building an installation that will create music from mushrooms.

This all came about when Patrick showed me some videos he had made using closeup footage of a laser pointed underneath a protected mushroom – as you will see in the footage below, it’s absolutely gorgeous. I loved how shining a laser revealed a whole hidden world that to me had an intrinsically artistic and musical quality.

Anyway, we decided to collaborate and make an installation that would turn the patterns of those falling spores into music. We were awarded an Alt-W grant from New Media Scotland for the idea, and we have been working on it for the past few weeks. This video gives a bit of an introduction to what we are doing:

One interesting (and unexpected) outcome of tracking the spores to make music is that you end up with a really fascinating data set. This image represent the notes on a piano roll being triggered by three different mushroom spore video feeds – you can see the different patterns created by the different mushrooms.

It’s a big project, and it will take a few more blog posts to explain it all, so if you have any questions please let me know and I will address them as well as I can!

Exercise Magic!!

Readers of my twitter feed will remember a series of tweets a few weeks back about my performance at the Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow called Exercise Magic!!

This performance was part of a Cryptic Night with fellow artist Rachel Maclean. The night featured videos by the both of us (including my “Penalty Shootout” and “A story about techno”), a wacky Q & A session, and my performance, which was specifically commissioned for this night.

Exercise Magic!! was based around an exercise video (Real Results with Beverley Callard). I donned a specially designed suit designed by Kristina Johansen containing Wii remotes – you can read through the process she went through to make it on her website. The wiimotes, and a wii balance board on the floor, sent data to custom built Max/MSP/Jitter patches, which controlled the video and audio in real time based on my movements. If you’re interested, you can see a screenshot of that patch in my previous post.

The performance started off with me entering the stage and warming up, before beginning to exercise along with Beverley and Co. Slowly, though, my movements started to create strange sounds that clashed with the perfect world of the video. Eventually the lines began to blur between who was controlling who – was I following the video, or controlling it? Throw in some jamming remixes of the exercise music and you get the idea of Exercise Magic!!

I hope to do this performance again at some point soon, and develop it even further. For now, here is a video that shows the first couple of minutes…it was very dark in there so it’s not great quality, but I hope you get the idea.

Photos by Tamara Polajnar

Adventures at CCA Glasgow, Part 1

Anyone in Glasgow over the next week can drop the Centre for Contemporary Art on Sauchiehall Street to say hello to the Gelkies! It’s all a part of the leadup to this Thursday, when I’ll be showing work and performing at Cryptic Nights at the CCA. I’m sharing the night with film artist extraordinaire Rachel MacLean, and we’ve got lots of wackiness planned. We’ll both be showing some of our videos, and I’ll be premiering a brand new performance called “Exercise Magic!!”, which I’ll write about more soon. It involves Wiimotes, an exercise video, and spandex. A screenshot of the Max/MSP/Jitter patch I’m working on, for those of you into that kind of thing!

TEI Conference at MIT

A few weeks ago I got to attend the astounding TEI Conference at the equally astounding MIT Media Lab. It was awesome for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which was because I got to present some great work. I was working on a project by Sarah Kettley and Martha Glazzard of Nottingham Trent University, who have been developing custom built knitted stretch sensors which can be embedded into clothing, a project they call “Aeolia”. It’s pretty sweet.

Working with Sarah and Peter Gregson, cellist extraordinaire, I developed some custom software (using Arduino, Max/MSP, and Ableton Live) which allowed Peter to manipulate his own playing through his movements in real time. Here’s a video we made during rehearsals:

I don’t have a video of us showing it off at the conference, unfortunately…it was just too busy! But I think it went really well and if all goes well we’ll be developing this project further.

This trip was possible thanks to support from the Scottish Arts Council and New Media Scotland.

The rest of the conference was absolutely fantastic, the highlight for me being an incredible “bodyhack” studio workshop with Daito Manabe + company. The TEI folk made a great little end-of-conference video about the studio workshops (featuring music by yours truly!):