Catalonian Generators.

Available now are a pair of recordings covering two realizations of the "Generator" piece as performed in Catalonia during May of 2017; physical, cassette-only edition via Broken-Music, digital version & the digital / cassette bundle via Bandcamp.

Return of the long-dormant Canadian Protracted View label; famous for the venerable "Synth Night" double-tape box (featuring early cuts by Oneohtrix Point Never, Carlos Giffoni, and Prehistoric Blackout) & my own "Live Generators (1)" & "Live Occlusions (1)" & "(2)" outings. This set offers the highlights of two extended, durational performances reviving the "Generators" framework (just shy of its 8th anniversary) executed during Spring of last year in the titular Catalonian cities; the former just after noon on the 21st of May inside Amposta's "Lo Pati Center d'Art Terres De l'Ebre" & the latter the day before as the sun went down outside of Lleida's "Centre d'Art la Panera".

Both begin with the familiar cascading Sample & Hold canons before a set of rapidly complicating, albeit cleanly sub-dividable rhythm-arcs & transpositions creep in; while the former set is augmented only by subtle audience interference & brief interjections of pre-recorded Concrète sound, the Lleida set goes one further by incorporating subtle real-time augmentations of the environment itself along with an almost linear, dance-floor ready coda incorporating primitive analogue drum synthesis.

Thanks to Luis Codera Puzo & Santi Barguño (without whom these realizations would not have been possible) and to Arnau Sala, Paolo Thorsten-Nagel, Chloe Pensavalle, & everyone else surrounding this trip; "Amposta Generators b/w Lleida Generators" comes as a twin-tone "Imprinted" C36 cassette tape with "Atari Yellow" leader shrouded in a "Reversible" four-panel J-card inside a Norelco box with "Mustard" detail in an edition of 105 copies.

Roland Kayn

At BOMB editor Andrew Bourne & frozen reeds proprietor Ian Fenton's behest, I wrote a little something about Roland Kayn, centered around the issue of the latter's "A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound" 16-disc boxed set & digital FLAC package, one or both of which everyone should own and consume episodically. Here's a sip:

The Winter 2017-2018 Issue #142 is currently sitting on newsstands worldwide; I recommend that you read the magazine in a well-lit place away from your computer while consuming caffeine, as that is my personal preference. Aside from the fact that the quarterly has recently celebrated its 35th anniversary and is one of the last standing print publications with a 10k+ circulation covering contemporary art, music, and general transgressive cultural activity, this particular issue brings together several relevant ca. now threads, including pieces on Milford Graves, Jlin, Meredith Monk, Tuli Kupferberg's YEAH, and more. That said, the article can be read, along with most of this issue's content, on BOMB's site:

https://bombmagazine.org/articles/roland-kayns-a-little-electronic-milky-way-of-sound/

Kayn has been a central figure in my own artistic practice for the greater part of the past decade and research on him & Norbert Wiener in particular has been crucial in my current phase of delineating as much algorithmic control over formal tenets in music as possible.

Shop.

OK, that Kranky Bandcamp round went super well, so we're back into the fray w/r/t all of this.

You'll find a new tab in the menu up top; a "Shop". Therein you'll find a series of player widgets, each linking to a dedicated page on Bandcamp where each title is now for sale, in both Digital and, in a growing number of cases, Physical editions as well (toying with the idea of making small-run, "On-Demand" editions of some of the unreleased titles ala the "Traveloglog" series, will keep you posted on that). 

26 titles up at time of writing, including several otherwise unreleased affairs; this all to justify the "Subscription" option, which, for the princely sum of USD$120 per annum, grants you full streaming rights & downloads of everything in both lossy & lossless iterations, along with the incentive of a 25% discount off of all Physical goods. That's a hot potato if there ever was one; handle with caution. 

Note that, in the case of the Kranky, Editions Mego, and PAN titles, that the labels are essentially "lending" me the audio so that it can all be listed in one tidy place. Billing of both Digital & Physical iterations will be through them, as will the fulfillment of their tangible goods; multiple currencies may be in effect. Physical items on my various "Private" imprints will ship to you from sunny Australia.

One of the things that I love the most about releasing music Digitally is that its essentially without a definitive history, malleable. I loved how "The Life of Pablo" kept getting revised & reworked, long after the official release date. And so, as I migrate my audio archives from the dying embers of one studio machine to another, and as I come across the session data & assorted materials from each record, I get to augment the listings on the individual Bandcamp pages for each title. Good news is that if you buy something once, you're privy to upgrades & afterlife.

Kranky, Bandcamp.

Between 2002 & 2006 I completed five separate album-length projects for (then) Bruce Adams (& now) Joel Leoschke's Kranky, a label that I had already formulated a major crush on due to early releases by Labradford, Stars of the Lid, Roy Montgomery, and Dadamah. This body of work remains at the core of my musical personality, perhaps wearing its influences too readily on the sleeves of a series of waistcoats of varying complexity, but I'm forever indebted to these guys for asking in the first place, and for getting these particular records of challenging music out into the world in such a thorough and thoughtful way. 

All five have just been added to Bandcamp, where I maintain an artist page despite a somewhat disastrous experiment in airing a bunch of my primordial dirty laundry over the past few years - it did not meet expectations in the way of interest and has since all been taken down - but there's no reason that my proper, commercial releases over the years can't be made available for purchase in both physical & downloadable form. I do like the platform, and it has become the rare late capitalist success story in that it actually benefits end-users & creators alike. Plus I cry-tweeted that the 600mb file limitation was stifling & they raised it to 2gb, which rules. 

We're squarely at the 15 year anniversary of "Playthroughs'" release, which I revisited a few months back for a commemorative concert at l'Auditori in Barcelona, reviving the old patches & frameworks. I'd like to take a moment to outline at least what was - and is - going through my head regarding these records, in hopes of finding a new audience for them. Titles link to the respective pages on Bandcamp, trivia and inside baseball maneuvers galore; enjoy!

"Playthroughs" (KRANK-055, October 2002)

Released literally the same day as the Hrvatski "Swarm & Dither" collection, this record was the result of a three-year process of building a standalone performance & recording setup in Cycling '74's Max-MSP. Based around a the idea of using the subtle tuning inconsistencies of an electric guitar to synthesize sine-tones into a swarm of nested, mathematically aligned delays, it grew in complexity & scope until reaching maturity in late 2001, when the majority of the recordings here were made. Three long takes of real-time, improvised guitar-computer music, recorded direct to hard drive via Max's "Quickies" patch, are cut with two multi-tracked pieces using layers of Feedback and Time-stretched Acoustic Guitar strums, respectively. If I had to pick one piece of my music to be played at my funeral, it would be "Modena", captured late at night, again, in a single, unedited take using only the pictured Italia "Modena" model on back cover. I made a video for it & everything:

Trivia: the misplaced "L" on the cover was, in fact, a mistake on behalf of Kranky's art director. It's not visible on the later, licensed Japanese P-Vine edition of the disc, which also includes an extended live "Playthrough" recorded at Lilli's in Somerville, MA that year. 

"Antithesis" (KRANK-064. April 2004)

2003 became a solid year of touring, increasingly more the "Playthroughs" material, and increasingly less the Hrvatski work; I ultimately gave up on the latter. The success - and it's hard to understate this now, considering the current reality of physical releases - of "Playthroughs" had me scrambling to assemble a follow-up, and the idea of doing two vinyl-only releases was proposed, then seized upon. "Antithesis" largely covers a series of pieces recorded at the tail-end of my undergraduate studies at Berklee. This was a period when I was HEAVILY investigating American "New Music" scenes from the 60s, 70s. & 80s, very deep into the New York School of composers, Fluxus, La Monte Young, Terry Riley, early Minimalism, New Age, the Cold Blue Music scene, etc. Seeing Tony Conrad perform around then was a real lightning bolt for me, his influence clearly evident in both "Twin Guitar Rhodes Viola Drone" & "Rhodes Viola Multiple" - "Obelisk" came out of my infatuation with the early Sound Poetry scene; the caveman drums were likely a remnant sensibility from getting deep into the whole post-Broken Flag & 90s Bristol scenes. "Schnee" was recorded much later for a friend's documentary film, which apparently has been shown a few times with this as a soundtrack; I've never seen it!

Trivia; the entire art-spec is modeled after one of Tod Dockstader's Owl-label "Quatermass" LP. Jim "Ning Nong" Siegel, later of Raspberry Bulbs fame, both took the absurdly apropos cover shot & played drums on "Schöner Flußengel". I later learned that I had broken a key Kranky tenet by putting a portrait - or any photo of a person - on the record. The same exact image was later used in the artwork of Matmos' "Civil War". 

"Schöner Flußengel" (KRANK-071, October 2004)

SF had its roots in a series of recordings made between 1997 & 2003 in the oft-flooded basement studio I kept in a shared house in Somerville, MA, pictured on the rear cover of "Playthroughs". I started working as a Sales Manager for Forced Exposure at the beginning of this run, and the daily intake of obscure Psych & Experimental Music definitely made an indelible mark. Modeled after Fille Qui Mousse, Agitation Free, Älgarnas Trädgård, Günter Schickert, Achim Reichel, etc. it was originally slated to be a specifically Krautrock-themed Hrvatski release for Mike Martinez' Deluxe label (working title: "Hrvatski '73") but shifted away from beat-focused motorik into more of an Electro-Acoustic direction. Despite "Weiter's" clear C/K-luster worship, I'm still proud of much of this.

Trivia: the "Digital" version of "Lixus" was recorded in one take via the same Max-MSP patch I was using to perform the Hrvatski material; I still don't know how I did it! The individual guitar parts were then lined up & turned into the "Analogue" version w/ Jim's drumming. 

"Multiples" (KRANK-081, May 2005)

The direct result from a pair of informal residencies at Harvard's Studio for Electro-Acoustic Composition and the MIT Media Lab, the pieces on "Multiples" showed a clear love of both Minimalism & the self-automating Modular Synthesizer patch. Most don't realize that I actually avoided using Synthesizers for the majority of my early career, but sitting in the HUSEAC with Serge Tcherepnin's original '73 paperface prototype, it was instant love. To Kranky's credit; the opening sequence is easily one of the most challenging segments of anything I've released, and was never questioned. 

Trivia: to this day, this is probably the sole record that I designed myself that I'm happy with; of course realizing my limitations in this department. After a long email exchange & a trading of releases, Tod Dockstader said some very nice words about both the layout & the music, which meant everything.

"(Recorded in) Lisbon" (KRANK-092, March 2006)

A single, monolithic "Playthrough" performed at Lisbon's Ze Dos Bois on a bill with Oval, Rafael Toral, Icarus, and many others, this was the peak of the live "Playthroughs" attempts. Using un-amplified electric guitar through a series of pedals directly into Max-MSP, along with recordings of the Serge & a few battery-powered synthesizers. Getting a thumbs-up from Rafael was huge, then & now he's one of my favorite musicians. 

Trivia: after this concert, I took a few years off from serious touring & eventually started performing music again locally on Modular Synthesizers. I didn't release another, proper studio record until 2010's "Disingenuity B/W Disingenuousness" for PAN. Joel at Kranky, to this day, has reserved four mid-100s catalogue numbers for a series of vinyl-only releases of material from this era, which were waylaid when my laptop, freshly containing all of the mastered audio & design, was stolen off the stage between soundcheck & a performance at Paradiso in Amsterdam.

GRM Immersion Festival in Paris, European Dates; November 2017.

I will be returning to Paris in mid-November to perform at the GRM's "Immersion" festival. Preliminary information:

http://www.maisondelaradio.fr/immersion

This looks to be an amazing event, held in L'Auditorium De Radio France at Maison de la Radio, with pieces & performances by Eliane Radigue, Chris Watson, Thomas Köner, and myself on the 11th, then a program of classic Musique Concrète by Parmegiani, Ferrari, Xenakis, Reibel, & Bayle on the 12th featuring Reibel and Bayle diffusing their own works!

I'm scheduled to land in France on the 9th of November, after which I'll spend a few days in the studio getting reacquainted with the Coupingy in preparation of performing a thematically-specific "Redaction" before heading to Milan for a few days of work before playing a "Matinée" concert in Quad at Standards on the 19th. 

Update: fantastic trip, as expected! The GRM sessions & concert went beautifully & it was incredible seeing & hearing Bayle perform "Tremblement De Terre Très Doux" over the Acousmonium in the brand-new Maison theater. The fine folks at URSSS once again filmed & recorded the Standards performance and have put up an impeccable video on their site, embedded below: