Live A/V Show at Ely Center
February 24, 2026
This past weekend, I organized a live show at Ely Center, a community art space here in New Haven, CT. The impetus for the show was that two experimental electronic musicians I know from Worcester, MA were doing a mini tour around the northeast. I put together a mixed electronic bill, and performed live video projections throughout the event.
Visiting from Worcester were RUBY, who refers to her musical practice as 'keymashing' and performed dancey riffs using an old IBM mechanical keyboard as a controller, and Imaginary Prisons, who did a mixture of ambient sound textures, and percussive segments that bordered on drum and bass, using an open source node-based daw called bespoke synth.
Locals joining the bill were The Herbalists, an epic dungeon synth artist peddling intricate, fantastical melodies (who also performs under many other monikers), and Parlay Droner, who performed hazy lofi psychedelia with an omnichord and several tape-based machines that I will have to ask him more about some time.
Considering that I'm still new to New Haven, and don't know that many people yet, I was a bit nervous about the turnout, but a good number of people braved the cold weather to join us. Ely Center's new interim space is really nice for these sorts of events, and this show was a spiritual participant in the Weird Music Night series also hosted there.
Since I was filling multiple roles at this event (working door, helping with sound, etc.), I tried to keep my visuals setup as simple as possible while still remaining dynamic enough to shift to suit the different vibes of each set. I didn't use a laptop or resolume this time; the only "computer" I used was the single-board Jetson Nano running Andrei's Artificial Life video oscillator software. I also used my classic video feedback rig with a gimball head allowing for rotation of the camera. Scroll down to the bottom of the image gallery to see a diagram of my signal chain.
Overall, I felt that the show went really well, and I really enjoyed all of the sets that we performed. While I don't organize shows very often, it can be a very rewarding experience to see how the energy of many people can come together to make something happen. I'm especially grateful to the folks at Ely Center for opening their space to us, to Aude, Ruby, and Drew for the photos and footage, and to Andrei for helping with literally everything.
