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Sep 262010
 

Tonight’s podcast is one from the WRVU vaults: Parasites, an ambitious episode starring a whopping eight participants. Four played their instruments and four leeched off of these instruments and manipulated them. Each maker was paired with a manipulator. Acoustic guitarist and clarinet player Charlie Rauh got pirated by laptop-armed Lawrence Crow. Anthony William Herndon played his modified keyboard while John Marshall leached his signal with rack mounted effects. Jamison Sevitts’s trumpet was manipulated by Pete from CIA and his nest of pedals. Brey Mcoy played various wind instruments while Chris Murray hacked in with his sampling pad.  I did the live mixing and mastering. You’ll hear this episode in its glorious full length. I didn’t have time to cut it down because I’ve been busy planning the 1st Annual Circuit Benders Ball and Theatre Intangible Halloweird October.

What’s Halloweird October you ask? For the entire month of October, we’re bringing you five special Halloween podcasts, including a new horror movie soundtrack, the Halloween Extravagana volume 1 from 2008, and the all new Halloween Extravaganza Volume 3. The fun starts next week. To prepare yourself, be sure and check out the previously broadcast Halloween Extravaganza Volume 2 and the Dracula Improv.

If you like the show, tell a friend and leave us feedback on iTunes. And now, Parasites.

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Jun 072010
 

Dekalb, Illinois experimental rock band CMKT4 stopped by Theatre Intangible for an improv and artist showcase while on tour.  You may know drummer Austin Cliffe as Creme Dementia on the circuit-bending blog GetLoFi.  We’ll release the artist showcase in the near future, but for podcast episode 23, we present to you the improv: Artificial.

Artificial stars CMKT4 (Austin Cliffe, Zach Adams, and Jeff Cox) and regulars Laurence Crow and Craig Schenker.  CMKT4 played a variety of circuit-bent toys, a guitar synth, and hand-made bottlecap contact mics (which they make and sell.)  Craig played saxophone and Larry played laptop synths and sampled Craig’s sax.  I did the live mixing, editing, and mastering.

This is a pretty insane improv, and it may turn out to be one of my favorites.  Enjoy.

If you like the show, tell a friend, share on your social networks (share link below), and leave us a review on iTunes.

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Mar 072010
 

We had a great time at Podcamp Nashville this year, and our show went off without anything disastrous happening.  Apparently, planning does pay off.

If you haven’t been reading our previous posts, Podcamp Nashville is an un-conference about podcasting, blogging, and social media.  We rocked the socks off of twelve or so bewildered attendees with an improv set that fed audience live tweets into a speech synthesizer.  Any tweet that used the hashtag #pcn10ore was read live on air, and we had no control over the content.  One guest tweeted, “Are you guys on acid?”   We peppered the tweets about us with tweets featuring random keywords that the audience picked.

All in all, not a bad day’s work.  Featuring Craig Schenker on saxophone, Lawrence Crow on Supercollider, Chris Murray on Casio SK1 and various effects, JJ Jones on vocals, Melody Holt on vocals, and myself on tweet-synth and SKI.  I mixed the show live on my Mackie 8 channel mixer and recorded on a Marantz digital field recorder.   Aside from some compression and clicks and pop removal, I did very little post-production work on this show.  You’ll hear it in it’s entirety, warts and all.

While I do wish the festival was more about podcasting (as the name implies) and less about business-focused social media strategies, I’m very pleased with our experience.  (Ironically, that is the strength of the Barcamp principle — it’s about what the attendees and speakers want it to be about.)  The major plus is that it got us tons of free press with write-ups in the Metromix and the Tennessean.  And it was a pleasure to watch some of the other sessions, highlights being David Beronja‘s Skype session, Mitch Canter‘s WordPress session, and Dave Delaney‘s talk about geo-location services such as FourSquare.  Maybe we’ll incorporate Foursquare in a future improv.  (Ideas anyone?)

The tweet-to-speech program was a modified version of this open-source Python program by Jayesh Salvi.  While Jayesh’s program searches for tweets in the logged-in user’s timeline, our program searches tweets based on keywords.  I’m a complete Python programming newbie, and I couldn’t have done the modifications without the help of Bryan Kemp.  I also added some lines to filter out certain words (like our hashtag #pcn10ore) and to replace others  (Festival has an annoying habit of pronouncing the symbol “&” as “ampersand,” thus I replaced the “&”‘s with “and”‘s).

You can download our modified code here. (Right click and “save as”)

If you have Python, Fetival, and Curl (if you don’t, in a Linux command line, run “sudo aptitude install python curl festival”), you can use this script in your own musical adventures.  Feel free to modify it as you will.  To change the keyword, replace “keyword” in the following line with the keyword of your choice.

TWITTERURL=”http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=keyword&rpp=30″

Add a “+” between words if you want to search for multiple keywords (ex. peanut+butter) and a “+OR+” if you want to search for one word or the other (ex. heaven+OR+hell).  Replace “30” with the number of twitter messages you want the program to read before it ends.  I left in the commented-out lines of the original program, so you can experiment.  Future improvements: I’d like this program to automatically filter any tweets previously read through, and, of course, it would be nice to be able to plug in the options from the bash terminal when you run the program instead of in an editor.  I’d love to see what you guys can do with this program.

Feb 152010
 

I know that I have a habit of saying each show is my favorite . . . but really now, this show IS my favorite thus far.  Doublebass avant-jazz artist Thomas Helton joined us for an improv with ~ORE~ regulars Lawrence Crow, Charlie Rauh, and Craig Schenker.  Because Thomas was only here for one day, we pre-recorded this episode in my basement 10 days before the original WRVU air date of June 21st, 2009.  Consequently, it’s the first show where the players were at least a little soused.  (Charlie now loves Hopslam beer.)   We didn’t have a theme per say, just the cues to play texturally and in ways the instruments weren’t necessarily made for.  This happened to be a strong suit for every one of the players.  This show is a textbook example of musicians playing experimental music musically and LISTENING to each other.  Helton on doublebass, Crow on violin and detuned autoharp, Rauh on guitar, Schenker on flute and saxophone.

Lawrence Crow just released a new album, and you can download it for free at his website.  I’ll be reviewing the album on this blog very soon.  

Thomas Helton’s bio from his web site:

For 15 years Thomas Helton has laid down basslines for jazz ensembles in Houston and around the US. He has appeared  at the Montreux Jazz Festival, and has recorded with Joe LoCascio, Carol Morgan, Chris Connolly, Smitty, Kevin Patton, & Cindy Scott.
Thomas brings all of his passion and experience for jazz to the table when it comes to his other half, avant-garde music. Early in his jazz career, Thomas was inspired by the sounds of John Zorn and Peter Kowald to venture outside mainstream musical bounds. This journey began with the Rosta Jazz Avengers, a Houston-based quartet all about free improvisation and sonic exploration. Thomas quickly jumped into composition, beginning to develop a style that combines thematic composition with free improvisation, a sort of loosely controlled writing style showcasing his hand-selected performers.
Thomas has released three albums to date. “Good Robot” (2007) and “Experimentations in Minimalism” (2006) feature compositions for small ensemble. “Doublebass” (2003) is a collection of live, freely-improvised solo performances. Thomas also appears on the 2003 Norcal Noise Fest compilation CD, as well as the KUHF “The Front Row” 2006 compilation CD.
Without further ado, we bring you Crow Helton Rauh Schenker: