Landed back in town on Wednesday afternoon & someohow managed to mix-down, master, and share the recordings from the Sound & Gravity festival (which was incredible; saw so many great things from Ana Roxanne to Microplastique to Ami Dang to Kari Watson & Katinka Kleijn; reconnected/hung out with so many deep homies that my head was spinning throughout) & the two opening sets out on the road at Vivarium and The Cedar afterwards (which was maybe the most relaxing & consistently inspiring music-trip I’ve ever been on; Setting are easily one of the best bands going right now, a crystallization of so many of my own deeply-held music predilections into a coherent sound, all done with an impeccable attention paid to detail and pacing, really incredible!) all woven in & around a continuous overnight Field Recording made way out in The Driftless on our day off.
Quite happy with the direction this music is taking; as with anything Eurorack-related, there’s constant refinement & re-decision in hardware-choices, especially after so many conversations with developers & builders alike pushed me to consider a majority-computer/digital instrument that, while still applying the patch-cable paradigm, feels closer to working with software like Max-MSP, Supercollider, & Bitwig‘s Grid than anything analogue (I’ve even been having Max-like order-of-operations issues; you can occasionally hear the main clocked quantizer get ahead of the note-event triggers & envelopes, which results in that sudden break-apart microtonality as the oscillators are seeded with just-slightly slewed values that have yet to fully cook!)


As many had asked at the shows, I’ll keep this past week/end’s pair of MG configurations (screencaps above) here and here; I’m very much mid-stream in exploring all of the apps in Phazerville 2.0, which is doing the heavy melody-generation lifting here via 3 separate 4-tap ASR’s (which are in turn driving a 4-voice Digital FM “Harmonic” Oscillator, a 4-voice Supersaw Oscillator, a 3-voice Multisampler, and a single 303 voice) while leveraging the remaining 2 Quadrants for master-transposition inputs from a tiny USB MIDI keyboard. The quantized note-streams & transposition-lanes are fed into a “Matrix Precision Adder” that allows me to re-route anything to anything in real-time, which has been huge. I also had an “Aha” moment days before leaving around using a pair of small clock-divider/processor modules to both generate polyrhythmically-dense drum patterns & to trigger the individual main-melody voices; the sets documented above progressively delve into this approach. The middle-section (from about 27m onwards) of the S&G set is maybe my favorite of anything I’ve performed in this vein this year; really nice combination of timbres (that water-drop sound is actually piano run through a highly resonant lowpass being “pinged”) & control vectors gradually dialed-in that is as much “Computer Music” in the historical-record sense as it is “IDM“.
Anyways; I’m excited around all of this & would love to continue to travel for music at this exact pace, so please get in touch if you need me for anything. A couple of great things locked-in for October already (there’s the Verbatim Text-Sound Expo out in the Catskills at which I’ll have a surprise collaborator TBC, plus a further duo-gig w/ my closest collaborator Chuck Bettis on a great bill at TV Eye) so stay tuned!

























































