Travel

Preparing for Omega Sound Fix

The Omega Sound Fix gets underway tonight at the Alfa Art Gallery in New Brunswick, New Jersey.  I am planning to be present tonight as well as tomorrow and as with other larger music and events I will be probably be live tweeting @catsynth.

I have been busily preparing for the performance (along with everything else one does for a long-distance trip).  The basic setup features the iPhone, iPad, MacBook, monome, DSI Evolver and Korg Kaoss Pad.

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The iPhone will primarily be running Smule Ocarina, while the iPad will be used for the new Smule Magic Fiddle, the Korg iMS-20 (pictured) above, the Bebot, and sundry other instruments.

One thing I have noticed is that although the main musical items have shrunk in size, the entire rig remains large, primarily because of the ancillary elements such as cables, stands, etc., so it ends up still being quite cumbersome and heavy, especially when loading it into airline-friendly suitcases.  I ran into similar challenges with previous performances in New York as well as the one in Shanghai last year.

Musically, I will be doing three pieces.  I will reprise the music-plus-video piece featuring Luna that I did at the Quickening Moon concert in February, but using the iPad with Magic Fiddle and the iMS-20 to replace the Octave CAT (which I will not take on the road).  I will also perform a couple of the other current standard solo pieces, such as the prayer bowl with Evolver plus Smule Ocarina, and the live-sampling piece featuring the monome and a variety of Indian and Chinese folk instruments.  I have two new Indian instruments to use tomorrow:

The first is a dotara.  Although the name implies two strings, this instrument actually has five.  I have not played it before, so we will see what happens.  The second is a new gophichand.  My other gopichands are fine, but it’s nice to have a few (if only as spares, as they are quite delicate).  I will be freely mixing them with Chinese percussion instruments as well as my iPad-based model of a Chinese guzheng that I first used at the Luggage Store Gallery in September.  I like the idea of mixing elements from different traditions together into something new.

For those interested in attending for following, here is the full info on the Omega Sound Fix festval:

Sonic Architecture Unveiled by Electronic Composers and Human-Robot Band at Underground Music Venue
Electronic Music Festival resonates in New Brunswick art gallery

Over twenty innovative international and local musicians will perform at the bleeding edge of sound on Nov. 20 & 21 at Omega Sound Fix. Headlining performers have performed with the likes of John Cage, David Tudor, Steve Reich, Lydia Lunch, Faust, and Throbbing Gristle and are exploring new territory this fall.

Richard Lainhart is an award-winning composer, author, and filmmaker renowned for his individual work and collaborations with John Cage, David Tudor, and Steve Reich. His compositions have been performed worldwide with his earliest sonic forays predating Brian Eno’s ventures into ambience.

Philippe Petit of Marseilles, France is an innovative composer, who considers himself a “musical travel agent,” and assembles “sound-images” with turn tables and digital wizardry. He has performed across Europe and the Americas with Lydia Lunch, Faust, and Throbbing Gristle.

Octant, a one-man and multi-robot band, will plumb the depths of cybernetic accompaniment on Sunday, Nov. 21. Mathew Steinke serves as the band’s Gepetto and sole human member. “I would go out of my way to see an Octant show…” writes CMJ magazine.

Tickets are $6 for one day, $10 for a two-day pass. Doors open at 6 p.m. on Saturday and 4 p.m. on Sunday.

About Omega Sound Fix:
Local musicians, Mike Durek and Mark Weinberg, spawned the idea of an innovative and eclectic music festival during a mini-golf match last summer. Durek and Weinberg expressed frustration with the lack of a new music scene in New Brunswick and sought to fill the void with innovative sounds and talented performers. Click here for more info.

UPDATED List of Performers:

Day 1: Saturday 11.20.10 @ 6:30pm
Brendan Byrne
Zilmrah
Richard Lainhart
Philippe Petit
PAS
Pots and Powercells

Day 2: Sunday 11.21.10 @ 4:30 pm
Blithe (doll)
Borne
Octant
Ezekiel Honig
Trinitron
Amar Chaudhary (Catsynth)

Omega Sound Fix, Alfa Art Gallery, New Brunswick NJ, November 20-21

On Sunday, November 21, I will be performing a solo set at the Omega Sound Fix festival at the Alfa Art Gallery in New Jersey.

“What is the Omega Sound Fix? It’s a new music festival in New Brunswick, New Jersey. It features 12 bands over two days, some international acts, and some local. It will showcase the underground explorers, the Magellans of the music world…foregoing the known in search of new lands and new sounds. They are all on the bill because they offer something unique to the music world.”

Click on the digital dinosaur picture above to see the flyer featuring the full festival line-up.  I am excited to be a part of this event.  To help us fully fund the festival and make it a success, we have launched a Kickstarter campaign. Check out this video from festival organizers Mike Durek and Mark Weinberg, and donate something if you can. We have discounted tickets, CDs, DVDs, and other neat things to offer as rewards (I wouldn’t mind the housecleaning myself).

Reconnaissance Fly at Luna’s Cafe, Sacramento

This is the “official CatSynth report” from our Reconnaissance Fly show at Luna’s Cafe in Sacramento last Monday.

Luna’s Cafe is in downtown Sacramento, within a couple of blocks of the large park that surrounds our State Capitol.

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I had stopped in during then In the Flow Festival back in may, so everything was quite familiar.

Inside, the stage was…well…a bit cozy.

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We managed to fit ourselves on in an odd arrangement of angles and overlapping. Polly was in this small triangle of space bounded by the stage front, the keyboard and the drum set.

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The painting behind the stage is David and the Giant Under the Blue Moon, by Bill Carr. All of Carr’s paintings on the wall had a moon theme, which was rather apropos of the venue (although “Luna’s” actually refers to the name of the proprietor of the cafe and not directly to the moon or to any cats we may know).

I felt like we did not play as well as we did at the Outsound Music Summit, but it was still a fun experience, and we got a warm reception from the audience (including the other musicians)

We were followed by the Garage Jazz Architects, with Lob Instagon on bass, Chad E Williams on guitar and Mark Halverson on drums.

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They played a mix of covers and originals. After an original piece called “Butter”, they moved into a series of including an interesting version of the Simpson’s theme with alternate harmonies, and several other classic TV shows. One of the originals was a surf-style piece entitled Surf Orangevale. From what I am told, Orangevale is a completely landlocked area east of of Sacramento. Lob also recited a poem that he composed on August 9, 1995 after hearing of the death of Jerry Garcia – a poem he only reads on August 9 – with musical accompaniment by the rest of the band.

Lob also leads the group Instagon, which has a different lineup every time it performs. After the show he invited me to join in the next Instagon performance, which just happened to be at the regular Outsound Thursday night series at the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco. That took place last Thursday, so look for an upcoming report soon.

Thanks to Ross Hammond for inviting us to play, and Art Luna for hosting us at the cafe

Report from the In The Flow Festival

As I prepare for my next performance with Reconnaissance Fly tonight (details here), it seems like a good time to look back at last week’s In The Flow Festival in Sacramento.

My roadie friend and I arrived in Sacramento around 12:30 to the rather calm and rather pleasant jazz-guitar sounds of the Nahum Zdybel Trio. As we wandered off for a quick bite to eat, I was thinking how much of a contrast our own set would be. When I returned to set up, the ensemble on the other stage lead by Henry Robinette was harder and more driving – with much stronger drum, bass and rhythm guitar – but still straight ahead jazz.

[Reconnaissance Fly: (Tim Walters, Polly Moller, Amar Chaudhary).  Photo by Jen Hung.  Click to enlarge.]

So then it was time for us to perform. Our set begins with my graphical improvisation piece Small Chinese Gong, a complete 180 degree turn from the previous sets, though it does feature a short section of tongue-in-cheek early 1970s lounge jazz amongst the free improvisation and noise. We also did both of our rock-inspired pieces One Should Never and An Empty Rectangle (written by Tim Walters); a more refined version of The Animal Trade in Canada with both a bluesy “Ca-na-da” rock-out and an Afro-beat jam; and an abridged performance of our epic Ode to Steengo. All the pieces feature spoetry, i.e., spam messages that rise to the aesthetic level of poetry.

Our set was followed by Fig, the duo of Nels Cline and Yuka Honda. Their set started relatively calmly and quietly, but by the time I finished packing and had a chance to wander over to the other stage, things began to get a bit louder.

[Fig (Nels Cline and Yuka Honda). Click images to enlarge.]

Nels Cline alternately set driving heavily processed guitar rhythms and long virtuosic lines against Honda’s beats, which featured highly synthetic percussion sounds. Often, she was playing a Tenori-on, as featured in the second photo. Overall, the set moved back and forth between beat-based sections and “skronking” (i.e., arhythmic and often noisy performance with fast runs of ntoes), ending with an extended guitar-and-drum-machine jam with a more techno feel.

The next set (back in previous room) was Ambi, a duo of Stuart Liebig and Andrew Pask. As the name suggested, the music had an “ambient” quality to it in that the sounds created an environment for the listeners more than individual lines and riffs to focus on. The set opened with lots of one-off percussion samples with pauses of varying length, some notes being very isolated and others coming in small clusters. On top of the percussion hits were layered long “space-like” sounds, liquidy bass notes and saxophone. Gradually, beats emerged from the ambient mix, but the patterns were regularly broken by other off-tempo sounds. I did notice they were using a Monome, a complement to Honda’s Tenori-on from the previous set. After a while, the beats become stronger and more stable, but were again interrupted by the sound of a thunderstorm that gave way to analog-sounded filtered arpeggios. Towards the end, the set, which unfolded as one long piece, evolved into a jam between bass (Leibig) and saxophone (Pask).  It concluded with a driving funky bass riff, which stopped suddenly in mid-motion, an ending I found quite effective.

After this set, we took a break from the festival to explore a bit of Sacramento, including the immediate neighborhood and some of the downtown. This excursion inspired last weekend’s Fun With Highways: Sacramento Edition article.

We arrived back at Beatnik Studios in time to L Stinkbug, featuring GE Stinson, Nels Cline (again), Scott Amendola and Steuart Liebig (again). There was certainly a lot of “double-dipping” in the lineup of the festival, but that seems appropriate for an event focused on improvisation, and the performances among the different combinations of musicians can be quite different. L Stinkbug was, if nothing else, loud. Certainly, these are all very technically adept musicians, and the combination of driving beats and skronking should be relatively loud, but perhaps a little less so in this particular space. We moved back and forth between the main stage and the adjacent room to avoid the full affects of the volume.

If there was one overall regret from my abbreviated experience at the festival, it is that it was an abbreviated experience. I missed a few sets that I would have liked to see, including Vinny Golia, whom I had heard at last year’s Outsound Music Summit, and the Thin Air Orchestra, featuring many familiar wind players.

Fun with Highways: Sacramento edition

This is a major interchange in Sacramento, California, where I spent most of yesterday. Running north-south along the river is I-5, while east-west is the Capitol City Freeway (Business 80 and US 50).

To the southeast of the interchange, along X street, is the neighborhood that includes Beatnik Studios, where I performed with Reconnaissance Fly at the In The Flow Festival. See our previous article for a link to a liveblog of the festival.

The nearby entrance from 16th street to the Capitol City Freeway is marked only as Business 80, and does not mention US 50.

One can follow 16th street north under the freeway to the downtown and midtown section of the city. This includes our rather dysfunctional state capital, and a scattering of fun local businesses north of N street, including Luna Cafe, which was hosting events related to the festival on other evenings. We were not there at right time to see the festival events, but we did stop in for some handmade juices and enjoyed sitting out on the sidewalk in the early evening. For those of us who live in San Francisco, a warm evening is a rare treat.

Fun with Highways: Kew Gardens Interchange

Returning to San Francisco from New York often involves a highway trip to JFK Airport, and there is one spot along the Van Wyck Expressway (I-678) that is almost always guaranteed to come to standstill, the Kew Gardens Interchange:

kew-gardens-interchange

The Van Wyck Expressway runs vertically in this picture, from the center top to the center bottom.  The Grand Central Parkway runs from the upper left to the center right.  The Jackie Robinson Parkway runs from the lower left to the interchange where it ends at the Grand Central Parkway.  The Union Turnpike runs along either side of the parkway.  Finally, the main surface thoroughfare through Queens, Queens Boulevard (NY 25) is in the lower left corner.

kew-gardens-with-signs

One doesn’t really see the complexity of this interchange from the road, just a series of exits in quick succession (or not so quick when one is barely moving), and in fact that it seems like the Van Wyck is merging into another, narrower road at the end, before the reassuring signs that one is still on the right road to the airport. It often seems like many of the larger highways in New York are really stitched together from older, smaller, highways.

This interchange was featured on Empire State Roads, with more information and images.

I have been on the parkways as well of course.  The Jackie Robinson Parkway winds its way narrowly towards Brookyln through parks and near several cemeteries.  I have relatives who reside in at least one of them.