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AV Club.
Last week, I returned to the
Ambient Church
extended universe to provide live visuals for a concert at
Church of Saint Luke & Saint Matthew in Brooklyn, NY. This
was part of a three-day festival called
Mezame, which took place across multiple historic NYC venues. The
show I performed at was headlined by
Charlemagne Palestine, an old-school minimalist musician who played the church
organ as a drone instrument, as well as performing on piano.
The opening set was by
Madeline Stepien, a contemporary experimental electronic musician whose
semi-abstract soundscapes I accompanied with stark,
monochromatic light-forms.
Brendan Bercik expertly projection-mapped the space, using two
projectors stitched together to avoid the shadows cast by the
church's huge, elaborate chandeliers. I was placed in the rear
balcony with the projectors, so the videos and photos below
are from that vantage. The audience, below and in front of me,
had the projected imagery towering over them, which I imagine
made for a more immersive experience — though harder to
capture on camera.
I used a combination of analog and digital video generation
and effects, with video oscillators, live-processed footage,
and a digital feedback loop tuned for responsive live control.
You can see the setup I used in the last photo in the image
gallery below.
Many thanks to the folks at Ambient Church for inviting me and
organizing this festival (clearly a huge undertaking), to
Madeline Stepien for the audiovisual synergy, Brendan for the
setup and mapping, and
Arrien
& friends for keeping me company in the booth and
documenting. Also, I didn't have any direct contact with the
venue, but I am grateful to the people who run the church for
being open to hosting events like this in their fantastic
space.
Also, I was pleased to run into my old friend, the poet
Sparrow, at the early show.
Here are some short excerpts from Madeline Stepien's set
(thanks Arrien for the videos):
This past Friday,
REALITY ORP (me and Andrei)
performed at a live show at the Ely Center of Contemporary
Art, our local artspace in New Haven. This show was organized
by our friends who presented a new collaborative multimedia
piece called Monochromatic Pool. Paula Mattusen,
another electronic musician, also performed a live scoring of
a film titled
Rising Divergence
by Tom Snelgrove.
For our set, we performed another iteration of the
improvisational setup we've been using since May, in which I
perform sound and Andrei performs video. During our set, a
sudden summer storm began, with the rumblings of thunder
underscoring the bass frequencies of my audio. We didn't
capture a recording of the full set this time, but we were
documented in a photograph taken by Trix (of New Haven Noise);
see the gallery below.
I really enjoyed seeing the
Monochromatic Pool performance that our friends Kit
Young, Dave Scanlon, and Chanelle Allesandre collaborated on.
They made their own stringed instrument with electric pickups,
which is sort of like a lap steel, but longer, and played by
two people (Dave and Chanelle). The insrumentalists also
performed vocals that resembled some sort of scientific
document rendered in HTML (with references to molecular
structures and <html> tags being spoken
aloud as "less than, html, greater than").
Throughout the performance, the actions of the instrument
players were captured by a live camera and integrated into
Kit's live video processing system. It was a multifaceted and
unusual performance, and even more exciting because we love to
see things like this happening in our town.
Photos of all three sets are below. Special thanks to Trix and
Tom for letting me hand them my camera during our set.
In spring of 2024, I began a new project called Zine Club, in
which people could purchase a membership and receive
Mystery Objects (mailed parcels containing small
art-objects) and Digital E-zines (virtual zines
delivered via e-mail) at regular intervals. Since then,
creating things for Zine Club became a ritual for me. It
motivated me to create small things more often, and it
provided me with a small but reliable income source that
allowed me to spend more time on my art practice. I
consistently received feedback that people were delighted and
surprised by the things I sent them.
Zine Club grew to over 40 members. While I had initially
thought that more members would be more efficient through
economy of scale, it turned out that instead, my systems began
to show their cracks. Time spent packaging items, increased
shipping costs, and manual email sending began to encroach
upon my ability to sustain the project. Additionally, my
practice in making Zines and Objects began to feel somehow
separate from my main art practice, which deals with
audio-visual systems.
AV Club is a new project I've just launched, which will take
the place of Zine Club going forward. There is a new name, and
some things have changed, in the service of making the project
more maintainable and aligned with my practice. The focus may
shift to include more writing and technique-sharing,
accompanying the art itself. But the overall intention is the
same: make strange and intriguing things, and send them to
people. I am happy to report that, in the first few days of AV
Club's existence, 17 members have already joined — many of
them former members of the sunsetting Zine Club.
AV Club has its own website, and I already wrote more about
the project in the
intro post
there. If you're interested in supporting and receiving weird
art, give it a read and consider subscribing!
Meanwhile, I've sent out three Mystery Objects and two E-zines
since my last "reveal post," so I'll share them
here. See below for images of the final Zine Club editions.
Also, the zine club webpage will stay
up as an archive of the project.
Thanks to everyone who supported Zine Club over its two-year
existence. I look forward to carrying the torch onward into
the new era of AV Club!
This past Saturday, Andrei and I performed a set as
REALITY ORP for another
Weird Music Night
at
ChaNorth, an artist residency space in Pine Plains, NY. This is a
yearly event for Upstate Arts Weekend, and it was our second
time participating. This year's event was a series of eclectic
sets, including one by our friend Chants Voyage, whose music
has been described as "cryptic techno," and another
by Phantasma Traumata, seen in the image gallery below in
their unique costumes. There was also a clown who, among other
sketches, performed an industrial techno song on colorful
plastic toy instruments.
Continuing my recent explorations in live improvised sound, I
sampled and looped an FM radio, kalimba, and vocals, and
manipulated them with granular processing. Andrei performed
live video using footage they recorded of liquids, processed
with feedback loops and digital transformations using their
self-created Gravity Waaaves device. See below for a diagram
of my audio setup.
We made a recording of the set, but I neglected to record my
audio directly, so the sound is from the camera's mic.
Contrary to my expectations, I actually like this version
more, as it includes the environmental sound and atmosphere
that made the event so enjoyable. Beneath the sound from the
PA, you can hear the sounds of night in the forest, children
giggling, and people sitting in the grass, murmuring to each
other. In the video image, moths flutter around the lamp on my
audio table. This is the sort of delightful, intimate event
which seems to bring out the best in live performers.
On Saturday, May 9,
Andrei
and I played a show as
REALITY ORP in the Boston area.
In this instance, I performed music, while Andrei performed
live visuals. It's been a while since I did live sound, so I
developed a new setup, which I'll likely continue exploring
for the next few shows we play.
I sampled a small handheld FM radio through a microphone,
scanning through stations until I found a snippet of sound to
loop and process with granular synthesis. I also played the
continuumini, vocals, and kalimba, also with granular
processing. The result is a slowly morphing ambient soundscape
that evolves gradually over time in parallel with Andrei's
visuals.
The two-day event, titled Orbits, was organized by
fellow artists
cskonopka
and
Callie Chapman, who also performed as part of the program. We performed in
a multimedia space that contained a sprung floor for dance,
and multiple projectors facing the walls and floor. The other
performances included interesting combinations of modern dance
movement and interactive projected video.
It was very cool to see these collaborations taking shape, and
to be a part of this exciting synergy. We used multiple
blended projectors to create a widescreen image. Here is a
recording of our set:
