From rarebeasts on flickr:
You can see other wicks looper photos as well as others by rarebeasts, some featuring his own cat Luna!
Author: catsynth
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Two upcoming performances this week
Wednesday 12/15 9PM-midnight
Ivy Room hootelatkenanny
kingman’s ivy room, 860 san pablo avenue Albany, CAHanukkah may be over, but the Hoot still has its big barrel of boiling oil, thanks to
The Atchleys [kattt and Kenneth]
voice and electronics and latkesDean Santomieri [with special guests]
voice and reeds and percussion and jonathan frazen and latkesAmar Chaudhary
with Dave Coen (djembe), JP (drums), Bill Wolter (guitar) and… applesauce, we need to balance this outI am excited about this set. It combines experimental work based on iPad instruments (including Curtis and the Korg iMS-20 app) with my recent work in jazz and jam-session performance. It should be one big rhythmic continuum that elides into the Atchleys performance. Or maybe something else. The Ivy Room shows are always a bit unpredictable 🙂
And then on Thursday…
Thursday 12/16 8PM-10PM
Long Night’s Moon Concert: Droneshift
Luggage Store Gallery, 1007 Market Street, San Francisco, CA
Droneshift is a collaborative concert of improvised drone music. Between 15 and 25 musicians will gather to contribute to a continuous 2 hour drone, each adding their acoustic or electronic instruments here and there, and weaving their sounds together to create gradually shifting tapestries of music. The performance will most likely shift back and forth from completely acoustic music to electric ambiance and post-industrial noise.
Tom Bickley – wind controller
CJ Borosque – trumpet
Bob Boster – processed voice
Amar Chaudhary – iThings
Matt Davignon – wine glasses/vessels
Tony Dryer – bass
Adam Fong – bass
Phillip Greenlief – sax/clarinet
Ron Heglin – trombone/trumpet
Jeff Hobbs – bass, clarinet or violin
Travis Johns – electronics
Andrew Joron – theremin
Aurora Josephson – voice
Sebastian Krawczuk – bass
David Leikam – Moog rogue synthesizer
Cheryl Leonard – viola
Brian Lucas – electric bass / tapes
Melissa Margolis – accordion
Bob Marsh – voice
Marianne McDonald – didgeridoo
Chad McKinney – supercollider/guitar
Joe McMahon – didgeridoo
David Michalak – Omnichord
Kristin Miltner – laptop
Ann O’Rourke – bowed cymbal
Ferrara Brain Pan – sopranino saxophone
Rent Romus – sax/tapes
Ellery Royston – harp w/effects
Lx Rudis – electronics
Mark Soden – trumpet
Moe! Staiano – guitar
Errol Stewart – guitar
Lena Strayhorn – tsaaj plaim / wind wand
Zachary Watkins – electronics
Rachel Wood-Rome – french horn
Michael Zelner – analog monophonic synthesizer, iPod TouchThis is an impressive list of musicians participating in this version of the Droneshift! I will contribute my small part with “iThings” (iPad and iPhone) and using several apps, including the drone-friendly Smule Magic Fiddle.
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Happy 102nd Birthday to Elliott Carter
This evening we at CatSynth wish a slightly-belated 102nd birthday to Elliott Carter. His birthday was this past Saturday, December 11. An inspiring figure, not only has he lived to an impressive age, but continues to be a prolific composer. Indeed, as reported on Sequenza21, he attended a concert in Toronto entirely of works he has composed since turning 100. They also mention that earlier last week he attended a concert in honor of that young upstart Pierre Boulez, who turned 85 this year.It was also interesting to see him placed in the context of the last century, from a personal connection with Charles Ives, one of the first “truly modern” American composers stretching to the current era. His work, like Ives and those that followed in that tradition, is very often very complex and often very precise in detail (and challenging to perform). Of interest to those like me who are also into mathematics alongside music, many of his formal methods with pitches and harmonies used more complex combinatorial structures than earlier serial composers, including collections of all possible pitches of a particular length – an approach that would later be categories as “musical set theory.” Many of these ideas have been collected in the Harmony Book
which was published in 2002 (when Carter would have been 93).
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CatSynth pic: Stitch and CME MIDI controller
Stitch with a CME UF-series MIDI controller:
Submitted by Bob Motamedi via facebook.
This is a good time to remind readers that we welcome submissions of cat-and-music pictures via facebook, twitter @catsynth or the our handy submission form.
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Weekend Cat Blogging #288: Saturation
We at CatSynth are feeling pretty saturated this weekend, particularly with music and social events. But that doesn’t stop us from posting some recent unsaturated images of Luna:
Probably not the best pictures from a technical point of view (they were taken with odd lighting and at high ISO, the “setting of last resort”). But they still seem precious in their way.
Weekend Cat Blogging #288 is to be hosted by Salome at PaulChens FoodBlog?!
The Carnival of the Cats will be up this Sunday at Mind of Mog.
And the Friday Ark is at the modulator
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Fun with Stats: Nobel Peace Prizes by Country
In light of today’s Nobel Prize award in peace, a little number-crunching of peace prizes by country (using this Wikipedia page as a data source). I actually did not guess this distribution in advance.
United States 22 France 10 United Kingdom 10 Germany 6 Ireland 5 Sweden 5 Belgium 4 South Africa 4 Switzerland 4 Austria 3 Israel 3 Argentina 2 Bangladesh 2 Canada 2 China 2 Egypt 2 Norway 2 Poland 2 Portugal 2 Russia / USSR 2 Costa Rica 1 Czech Republic / Austria-Hungary 1 Denmark 1 East Timor 1 Finland 1 Ghana 1 Guatemala 1 India 1 Iran 1 Italy 1 Japan 1 Kenya 1 South Korea 1 Macedonia 1 Burma (Myanmar) 1 Mexico 1 Netherlands 1 Palestine 1 Romania 1 Vietnam 1 You can read a speech by the most recent winner Liu Xiaobo here.
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CatSynth pic: Pallina the Synth Cat Strikes a Pose
Two photos from Davide Mancini, via matrixsynth:
“Pallina, my housecat. She also loves the analog warmth.”
“Same cat, another synth. She loves to sleep near the SIEL DK80, KaossPad3 and Tenori.on power supply… should be warm and humming there…”
We have seen Pallina before, click this tag to see her previous posts.
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CatSynth pic: Mimi and Drumtraks (3)
One more picture of Mimi with the Sequential Drumtraks, courtesy of our friend Eric Pochesci of Polynominal:
Follow the link to see Mimi’s previous pictures.
