Things that go hum in the night

Lie Low

2010-12-02T02:07:00.004Z

One of the first tools I created when I combined a MIDI controller with the Oddity (an Arp Odyssey emulator made by GForce) was a set of patches of pure intervals. I did not set these intervals in any fixed intonational scheme, but took a more simple approach. I tuned the two oscillators in the Oddity using the 128 steps available in MIDI to obtain the best beatless intervals as possible. I performed the tuning entirely by ear, listening for the absence of beats while tuning a unison, octave, major second, minor and major thirds, perfect fourths and fifths, minor and major sixths, and two minor sevenths, one above and one below the tonic note.

The title "Lie Low" comes from a fragment of a folk song recorded in 1930 in Manchester Center, Vermont, by Helen Hartness Flanders. Flanders included this song in her book The New Green Mountain Songster. I found the book years ago in Brattleboro's Brooks Memorial Library. I was drawn to the fragment "Lie Low" because it is the sole entry in the volume in the Mixolydian mode. In my own performances of "Lie Low," I take the original melody, stretch it out over an extended period of time without rhythm, and place the melody over a drone. "Lie Low" is performed using the Oddity/MIDI controller. The melody's intervals, as they relate to the drone, are taken from the purely tuned intervals that I stored as patches. I then manipulate ring modulation the filter's frequency and resonance to emphasize various harmonics and difference tones in the intervals.

Soundcheck with children playing

"Lie Low" received the heaviest editing of all the tracks on Panic and Anti-Panic. The old train yard at Engehavej at which the Festival of Endless Gratitude took place was a cavernously resonant space. Since I don't tend to like to work with high volume, I didn't play my set particularly loud. Nearly 30 minutes of music were filled with clanking bottles, dragging chairs, children laughing, and one rather loud cell phone conversation; removing these distractions reduced the track down to a little over nine minutes, so the version on Panic and Anti-Panic does not represent a complete performance.

View of the stage; Zhaeng Zhaeng performing.

Unrock

2010-05-01T03:27:00.006Z

The track "Unrock" refers to the record store of the same name, located in Krefeld, Germany. Krefeld, the birthplace of the artist Joseph Beuys, was the first stop on the trip. The store Unrock presented the concert, the last one to take place in the old store, as an event to mark its move to a new location.

Before the show, we hung out with Bernd, a friend of the owner, who reminded us that Krefeld sits not far from Düsseldorf, the home of Kraftwerk, Can and Neü. Bernd's words stuck in my mind, and in the mid-section of "Unrock," with its insistent LFO-based pulse, and in the final section's bursts of white noise, I pay my respects to the traditions of the region.

A document of a complete performance, "Unrock" is the only track on Panic and Anti-Panic to appear in an unedited form.

Up the Gravity Well

2010-05-01T02:34:00.009Z

The tracks on Panic and Anti-Panic flow in reverse chronological order. Although "Up the Gravity Well" appears first on the album, the performance occurred at the end of the trip, in Den Haag, the Netherlands. "Up the Gravity Well" was recorded in the basement performance space of the Villa Grijpsheert. Actually a squat in the embassy section of town, The Villa Grijpsheert stood at least three elegant brick stories tall and housed a variety of artists and their studios.

The title refers to a phrase that William Gibson uses in his novel Count Zero to describe the location of a burnt-out hacker, Wigan Ludgate, who is squatting in the remains of the Tessier-Ashpool family's orbital mansion, the Villa Straylight:

Wig, I said, times money but tell me what you intend to do now? Because I was curious. Known the guy years, in a business way. Finn, he says, I gotta get up the gravity well, God's up there. I mean, he says, He's everywhere but there's too much static down here, it obscures His face.

Concert poster by Samantha Rees.

Up The Gravity Well - Excerpt by johnlevin

Panic and Anti-Panic

2010-03-15T02:13:00.008Z

When I put a record out into the world, it should have a life of its own, separate from me and my ideas. Ideally, it will travel to far away places where I lose all control over its reception. At the same time, I think it's important to leave a trail in the world so that someone who finds the record can, if, they desire, follow it home.

In the spring of 2009 I received an invitation to participate in The Festival of Endless Gratitude. The Festival, organized by a group of musicians, visual artists and producers, came together in Copenhagen, Denmark, during the third week of May. The organizers located the festival in an former trolley repair station, a space in the early stages of a transition into an arts center. In this rough but impressive space they installed a stage, bar and art gallery, and devoted four nights to celebrating the connections between a group of artists and musicians in Copenhagen and western New England.

I took Sunday afternoon to explore the city by myself, with the Botanical Gardens as one of my destinations. The day began overcast and with a cold rain, but by the time I arrived at the Botanisk Have the sun shone warmly. On one of the garden paths I chanced upon a bronze of the goddess Athena and the satyr Marsyas. As a player of reedpipes and shawms, I have felt a sympathy for Marsyas' misfortunes involving the gods and musical instruments ever since I first encountered the stories. I took several pictures of the statue while thinking to myself, "here's an album cover for some future day."

Upon my return, I decided to release the recordings of my European performances, and to use this picture for the cover. All I needed now was a title. The god Pan often takes the form of a satyr in visual art, and the word "panic" is derived from his name. The two Olympians with whom Marsyas had unfortunate encounters are Athena and Apollo. Pan and satyrs, to me, conjure the Dionysian aspect of the life, while Athena calls to mind life's Apollonian aspect. So I considered this jumbled complex in my mind of Marsyas-Satyr-Dionysian and Athena-Apollo-Apollonian and came up with Panic and Anti-Panic. The idea of going on a brief tour of Europe to play music in places I had never been before would ordinarily strike me with, well, panic. Yet on this trip I remained, to my surprise, quite relaxed and in the moment. Panic and Anti-Panic. Following the festival in Copenhagen, I hopped into a late nineties Volvo with the duo Aeth'r Myth'd and hit the road, opening for their concerts in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. Both musicians in Aeth'r Myth'd are also members of Sunburned Hand of the Man. If I imagine my music on a continuum with the music of Aeth'r Myth'd (or Sunburned, for that matter), I'd place them more towards the Dionysian end of the spectrum, and myself more towards the Apollonian. Panic and Anti-Panic.

My Gakken Diary, Part Three: First Music

2008-10-14T02:45:00.004Z

I finally got it together to make a piece with the Gakken SX-150. My basic idea was to treat the Gakken the same way I treat my Arp Odyssey: run it through a Line 6 DL-4 in looper mode, with a long repeat time, to emulate tape delay with feedback. Much of the work I do with the Odyssey involves modulating consonant intervals in the filter with a combination of envelopes, sample and hold and the LFO. I like making automatic music with the Odyssey, using a slow LFO to trigger events, and using different kinds of feedback in patches to get the synthesizer to more or less play itself. Needless to say, this isn't really possible with the Gakken, and it requires a lot more manual intervention than the techniques I've worked out with the Odyssey.

This first piece was made almost entirely by tweaking just two parameters; the filter cutoff and the amount of LFO modulation applied to the oscillator. Because it's very easy to slip with the small stylus on the carbon strip, the third parameter is a kind of manual oscillator drift. You can get some very nice beating effects by sending tiny tuning changes into the delay, just by slipping a bit on the carbon strip with the stylus.

Here's the piece:

And for comparison, here's a piece from 2004 using the Odyssey:

My Gakken Diary, Part Two: Mechanics

2008-09-20T02:42:00.003Z

Last night, after putting this thing together, and making a few preliminary experiments, I began to wonder if I had broken it somehow, because a few things did not make sense, at least not based on my assumptions of how a synth should work.

So I spent some time squinting at the schematics in the magazine, looking at the various videos online, and reading posts on Analog Haven via Nabble, and I came to the conclusion that the design of the Gakken SX-150 has some unique points.

Here's how I put it all together, based on my years of doing subtractive synthesis on and Arp Odyssey:

The LFO Rate only affects the pitch of the VCO. You can't also assign it to the VCF. So it goes.
This is the weird one. The VCF appears on some level to be a combo VCF and VCA.
The above assumption is borne out by the fact that, at first, when I cranked the Cutoff on the VCF all the way to the right (or anywhere past about 2 o'clock), I couldn't get the Attack and Decay (AD) in the EG to have any effect when using the stylus. My original assumption about this synth was that the EG would be invoked when you touched the stylus to the carbon strip. But with cutoff anywhere above 2 o'clock, touch the stylus and its note on/note off. No shaping from the EG. It wasn't until I turned the Cutoff down to about halfway (below 1 o'clock) that this would happen. So that's where I get my theory that the VCF is sort of a combo VCF and VCA.
Pitch Env takes the settings from AD on the EG and applies them to the VCO. If you combine Pitch Env with the LFO, you can get some interesting Frequency Modulation effects on the VCO.

I'm posting this in the hopes that someone else comes along, reads this, and either agrees with me or points out where my thinking is wrong.

My Gakken Diary, Part One

2008-09-19T02:21:00.012Z

Like many synth nuts, I've been reading since late summer on the Matrixsynth blog about the Gakken SX-150, the tiny analog synthesizer, in kit form, that comes with the Synthesizer Chronicle issue of the Japanese science magazine Otona-No-Kagaku. Two weeks ago, I finally decided to get one. I found one through a bookseller in Japan with an E-Bay store. I received it last week.

I'm not sure any outfit here in the U.S. could produce a magazine like this. The Synthesizer Chronicle itself is tucked away behind an extra cover, whose background art includes the divine Arp 2500, under which is a cardboard box containing the actual Gakken SX-150 kit. The magazine covers 50 years of the history of the synthesizer, with lots of photos, plus memorabilia items such as Yellow Magic Orchestra stage diagrams and master tape track sheets. Countries of origin of synths covered include the U.S., the U.K. and Japan.

My day job is at a college with a substantial population of international students; my first impulse was to find a Japanese speaker to help translate the instructions for assembling the little synth. But the pictures in the instructions are clear enough, and this Flickr set fills in the rest of the details. For those of you who just got one, and are about to embark on this project, I've got two additional pieces of advice:

1. Run the blue cable (the one that attaches to the carbon strip) behind the post that the circuit board screw goes into. Otherwise, the cable may float around to the right of the power switch.

2. When you're finally dropping the circuit board into the case, make sure to flip the synth over to actually see that everything is popping through the right holes before you screw it all together. The instructions skip this step, and I discovered that the power LED wasn't in its proper position.

For those of you who haven't ordered one yet, or whose synth hasn't arrived yet, I have this word of advice: This is a kit attached to a magazine that (if you're lucky) you paid about 60 bucks for before shipping. It's not exactly made to the same specs as a Moog synthesizer. The knobs and pots in particular are a little funky. I always marvel at how people in Flickr sets get objects to look so beautiful. The magazine does a great job of photographing it too.

Well, by the time I had mine all put together and was running it through its paces, I felt a feeling I hadn't felt since childhood; wanting something really badly for Christmas, opening it up, putting it together, and then realizing that it's a really just a little piece of plastic trinket. Well, I put it down, made dinner, and came back to it, and now I'm back to where I was originally. It's pretty cool. I'm not going to establish an entire artistic oeuvre around it, because it's not going to last more than five years. But it's going to occupy a spot in my arsenal right next to my Cracklebox--a portable device for wandering around the hall, making unpredictably spontaneous, hard-to-control sounds above the drone.

At The Tinderbox in a Thunder Storm

2008-08-21T02:49:00.004Z

Charlie and I played a Tweak gig at The Tinderbox this past Monday. We opened for Michael Jordan Touchdown Pass, Wingnut Dishwasher's Union, and Defiance Ohio. We were invited to join the first half of MJTP's set; the band asked us to lay down a bed of D minor drone and texture for a half an hour with electronics and acoustic instruments, as a prelude to their first song.

This summer has been marked by dramatic thunder storms, as cold fronts move in swiftly over the day's heat. Monday night provided one more. When we headed inside and up the stairs to start our set, the twilight sky turned dark grey-black, and drops of rain began to fall. By the time we were 10 minutes into our set, the storm was in full swing.

Our bed of D minor was created with an Oddity soft synth, a Roland SH-32, and two looper pedals. We were wandering through the audience, Charlie and I playing long tones, Charlie on a Tibetan conch trumpet, and I on a Turkish sipsi. Thunderclaps broke, lightning flashed, rain poured. Loading our gear into the trunk of Charlie's car after the show, we discussed this moment, and learned that we both had the same impression: the storm was playing us, and we were playing the storm. Of course, that wasn't reality, but that's how it felt. Our music turned tensely elemental, and the energy of the storm seemed to feed into it.

Photo credit: Tweak by Scott Link