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 & musicians alike this year 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 was even having 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) which gave flashbacks to learning Max at Berklee in the early 90s.


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 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!

























































