Earlier this week, my Monday night ambient improv livestream was delayed by a bad cable, though it took me 20 minutes (live on Twitch) to figure that out. I ended up recording a lot of the plug/unplug/restart/swap-gear process, and had the thought that I should incorporate it into this week's track. That's the buzz/wah-noise/click sound in the background at the beginning, middle, and end.

Initially I'd tried sub looping a lot of it to use it as a rhythmic element, but that ended up sounding annoying. So I played guitar against it, and ultimately reverted to some snippets of the debug-noise, with cleaner guitar as an alternative or counterpoint.

There's some convolution reverb here, as well as compression/eq on the stereo.

The title comes from NGC 503 being an elliptical galaxy, but also from the ellipses in things I've left out of this, and the interruption of the live performance.

Very busy week, including prep for a Max/MSP show with mic feedback, so this week's submission is one of the test runs through the Max/MSP patch, with guitar. Kinda ambling and chaotic.

.aiff file captured to the drive, then brought into Ableton for level correcting, a touch of convolution reverb, and Full-Chain Master. And there we have it.

Title from the discovery of liquid mercury under this temple in Teotihuacan

A very busy week, including beginning prep for my upcoming performance in Chicago, so I've had my head in Max/MSP (particularly developing performance interfaces I can use on the iPad with Cycling74's Mira). So it was fairly natural to do some improvs with the input shifter patch, and this is one of them. Max/MSP -> file, Ableton Live for tweaking levels and compression, and adding a bit of convolution reverb to the mix. (And it's a rehearsal opportunity.)

Title from one of the uses of this week's element hafnium--as the electrode in plasma cutting.

Another even busier week, so here's another quick improv with the sine-waves-and-random-processing Max/MSP patch. There's some convolution reverb using an impulse from a Swedish reactor, some EQ8 to roll off above 8K (because it's peaky up there), and full-chain master. Title comes from the n=3 magic hexagon, which sums to 38.

I wanted to do something ambient this week, and it ended up a bit more dense than I planned, but there three convolution reverbs (two of which, cascading, give that breathing effect), a lot of synthetic percussion, some drum machines, Kastle modular synth, and slowed-down singing bowl (as well as slowed-down in-my-tracking-space ambience). Title from the bell-like tonality of the singing bowl, and the fact that 15 is the fifth Bell number.

An extremely busy week of work, performance preparation, and performance, with ups and downs. Coming off a very satisfying snwv set with my new Max/MSP patch at Oscillate: Pittsburgh 2017, here's a quick improvisation with just a sine wave oscillator into the patch. I added a bit of reverb and full-chain master in Live, and cut out a longer part of the noisy waterfall section, but otherwise it's the result of this improv. Features of the patch: pitch-shifting, delay, delay regeneration, and sample-rate and bit-depth reduction, all of them randomized and continually updating. And the time between updates is itself randomized, for extra confusion. Title comes from previewing the piece for the kids, and talking about it after they listened.