Cat showing off a Sequential Prophet 6. By maxeredussence on Instagram.
We at CatSynth are a bit envious of this kitty, as we covet the Prophet 6 (and the Rev 2). I love my Prophet 12, but these are completely different instruments and complement one another. You can read our NAMM 2015 review of the Prophet 6 here.
As Kearny Street Workshop gets ready to celebrate its 45th anniversary, we at CatSynth look back in the many ways our histories have intertwined in the past decade, from a shy outsider writing reviews to becoming Board President!
In August 2009, I attended a guided tour of the Present Tense Biennial, an exhibition co-curated by the Chinese Cultural Center and an intriguing-sounding organization named Kearny Street Workshop – it seemed an apt name for organization hosting an exhibition on Kearny Street. I wrote an article about it which was seen by the folks at KSW including then-executive-director Ellen Oh, who invited me to cover their flagship program APAture the next month.
I did go to several of the APAture programs, including the opening night and visual-arts showcase and the music showcase, writing more articles, making new friends, and probably drinking a bit too much. This was an entirely new community quite apart from the experimental-music and jazz circles in which I traveled, or the other contemporary visual artists I was meeting. I went on to attend KSW’s rollicking SF Thomassons Performance Tour in January 2010, and also befriend Truong Tran (himself a former executive director) at the opening of his first solo exhibition Lost and Found.
It was during these and other events that I became more acquainted with the history of the organization beyond the art and artists it was currently supporting. I learned about the Asian American movement, about the history of the neighborhood from which KSW derived its name and about the fall of the I Hotel. Kearny Street Workshop was not simply an arts organization, or eventhe “oldest organization in the U.S. focused on Asian American artists”, but a multi-generational group dedicated to local activism and community through the arts. I became a regular donor and continued to attend events, including A Sensory Feast, and continued to write and share reports. But in many ways, I was still an outsider looking in.
That all changed in 2013 when APAture returned after a four-year break and I was a performing artist for the opening night.
I performed an experimental electronic set with tabletop and modular synths and a dotara (Indian folk stringed instrument) for a large and diverse audience. I felt more connected to the KSW community, but that was about to become even more so as then program director (and later executive director) TJ Basa invited me to get more deeply involved, recruiting me to join program committees, including the ever-popular Dumpling Wars. This led to joining the board of directors in 2014.
During this time, KSW was in a process of rebuilding from its board down to its individual programs and partnerships, and returning to its activist and community-focused routes. Under TJ and new programming manager (now Artistic Director) Jason Bayani we began to focus programming in this direction, including the resurgent APAture festival (which I performed at again that year).
[2014 Kearny Street Workshop / Antoine Duong]
Later that year, I became Board President and Chair as we grew the board into its strongest and most active team in many years. It was quite an unexpected turn that I would never have anticipated when I first started attending events five years earlier. KSW became a family, and I was now about as much an “insider” as one could be. I learned a lot about individual and institutional fundraising, forging relationships with other groups, and the herding of cats that is a small and scrappy but ambitious arts non-profit. But I still found joy in participating directly in events and writing reviews, including for last year’s APAture festival. It coincided with the launch of CatSynth TV, and we featured the opening night and book-arts showcase in two of our early episodes.
Tomorrow night is our 45th Anniversary Gala, to be held at the Chinese Cultural Center, where I first encountered KSW nine years earlier. In a way, it is coming full circle. But instead of writing a review, I am writing a speech to recognize the 45 years and multiple generations of history. If you are in San Francisco tomorrow evening and wish to join us, there are still a few tickets available for the general program.
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After a brief hiatus over the weekend, we’re back – more on that later. In the meantime, we have this cute photo of Zelda the Gray with a DSI Evolver, Arturia KeyStep, Native Instruments Maschine, and more 😺. From skaterdays on Instagram.
Sam Sam makes her cartoon debut in Boink Boink Basement!, our latest offering from artist J.B.
We think she fits right on with the myriad other fascinating elements in this surreal drawing. And snoopervising is one of the things she does best in creative settings, as can be seen in this previous post.
We have a brand-new CatSynth TV! This one demonstrates a couple of the hidden features of the Moog Sub Phatty synthesizer.
In particular, we look at filter-topology selection and Oscillator 2 beat frequencies. The filter selection makes the instrument much more powerful, moving between the extra crunchy 1 and 2-pole filters to the smooth 4-pole that is “quintessentially Moog”. The beat frequency is a bit more esoteric – it maintains beating frequencies across different pitches, leading to some odd detunings in different registers. But it can add a new timbral-metric component to compositions – something to explore in more depth.
We also look at the Editor/Librarian software from Moog, which is really handy for accessing these features as well as saving patches.
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This morning we bring you a beautiful black cat with green eyes (like our beloved late Luna), courtesy of our friends at polynominal.com.
We’re pretty sure this is Marcel, who has appeared on CatSynth before, You can see his previous appearances here. As he is the focus of this image optically and conceptually, we are unable to identify the modular synth in the back.
A rainy afternoon like this one at HQ can be a delight. Listening to the polyrhythms of the droplets outside, the gray sky and the shadows, all from a warm comfortable space with a purring cat and favorite music. It can be a great time for focusing on creative projects, or just lying around and experience the “disintegration of thought.”
Rainy days at an office can be more challenging, especially when said office is one of the worst offenders of “forced togetherness.” I retreated into my work, getting better acquainted with the Swift programming language and listening to music on my headphones using the mobile music-play I was tasked with building. To this day, I associate Shuggie Otis’ “Strawberry Letter 23” with rainy days and the mental and personal space I created for myself.
In my mind, I was in a dank 1970s wood-paneled den with a stereo with large speakers – maybe a lava lamp or two – as the gentle rain outside provided a foundational background noise. A bit melancholy but also happy and contented. I also played a lot of Ornette Coleman on our app as I was building and testing it. It was no accident that Lonely Woman rose in the play statistics against the insipid contemporary pop tunes form our top charts and staff picks.
Another aspect of rainy days at this particular office was that our external network often went down. It is rather difficult to work at or run a technology company without internet, so this logically led to an exodus with most of us working from home the remainder of the day. On one occasion, one of the co-founders exhorted us all to come with him to his apartment building with the selling point “we have a rec room!” This was quintessential forced togetherness, as it is unclear what possible benefit a rec room would have to do with getting our work done. Now I don’t know what was going through his mind – perhaps he was just lonely, and maybe he even thought he was being generous – but it was par for the course for a company whose culture seemed about hanging out together. This was, after all, the same company with the coercive lunch behavior that I described in the previous installment of this series. Even before joining, when I balked at an embarrassingly low offer, part of their response was a series of emails and links to blog posts of them hanging out and partying, presumably intended to show me “how cool they were.” This should have been a red flag, but I did not take the warning. A bit older and wiser, I do take such warnings very seriously now when I evaluate business and career opportunities.
However, it still remains an open question as to why young companies, particularly with young founders, tend to put such a premium on togetherness to the point where others are pressured to participate. We will continue to unpack this in future installments of this series.
We learned yesterday of the passing of another of our musical heroes, Cecil Taylor.
This segment of solo piano demonstrates how his playing is incredibly complex but remains thoroughly musical. The fast runs contain a unique contrapuntal language. And more importantly, there is phrasing, contour, and emotion that unifies the performance. Taylor had an uncanny ability to combine European classical tradition, jazz, and other African American influences into a unique musical language that he dubbed “black methodology”. This quote from poet and critic A. B. Spellman, included in the official New York Times obituary, sums it up well.
“There is only one musician who has, by general agreement even among those who have disliked his music, been able to incorporate all that he wants to take from classical and modern Western composition into his own distinctly individual kind of blues without in the least compromising those blues, and that is Cecil Taylor, a kind of Bartok in reverse.”
It is hard for me not to compare Taylor with another contemporary of his, Ornette Coleman, who passed away in 2015. Coleman is one of my favorites – Taylor takes the level of complexity to another level. Both remain huge influences. We leave you with this recording of “Calling It the 9th”.
