Two upcoming performances this week

Wednesday 12/15 9PM-midnight
Ivy Room hootelatkenanny
kingman’s ivy room, 860 san pablo avenue Albany, CA

Hanukkah 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 latkes

Dean Santomieri [with special guests]
voice and reeds and percussion and jonathan frazen and latkes

Amar Chaudhary
with Dave Coen (djembe), JP (drums), Bill Wolter (guitar) and… applesauce, we need to balance this out

I 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 Touch

This 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.

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).

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

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.

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.

Weekend Cat Blogging: Homecoming (temporary)

With delays in the construction at CatSynth HQ, I decided to bring Luna home for the weekend. It is nice to have her home, even though it is only temporary.

As one can see in the above image, things are a bit out of place in anticipation of the work, but that doesn’t stop us from enjoying our time here. Here we see Luna checking out a new toy (a birthday present from a friend of ours):

Note the picture frames neatly resting on the stairs behind her. Much of the artwork (paintings, prints, etc.) had to be moved as well.

Weekend Cat Blogging #287 is at Mind of Mog.

Kashim, Othello and Salome are pulling double duty this weekend, hosting both the weekly Carnival of the Cats and the monthly Bad Kitty Cats Festival of Chaos. We suspect they are going to be busy.

And the Friday Ark is at the modulator.

Keyboard Cat’s World Series Wonderful Pistachios Commercial!

From chuckieart on YouTube:

“http://www.playhimoffkeyboardcat.com – Keyboard Cat went to Hollywood and made a commercial for Wonderful Pistachios! Bento even met Perez Hilton and Rod Blagojevich! Get crackin!”

Really, Rod Blagojevich?!

Also on matrixsynth. The keyboard in this case is the classic Ensoniq Mirage.