Monthly Archives: August 2013

1975 vintage analog syth-Doug Lynner at Luggage Store Gallery 8-1-13

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lsg 8-1-13 - 10Lynner’s Mystery Serge looked almost new, even though it was originally built in 1975. It had been renovated and upgraded. Even the patch cords looked new. The sounds were pristine and melodic and were simple and easy to follow, which I like.
Usually when I see an old analog synth, it looks pretty beat up.

He had another “box” with knobs but I did not write down the name of it.

He also played slide guitar and synth keyboard at the same time. Interesting and unusual.

Doug is definitely an “old timer” in the synth world!!

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Here’s the bio from Outsound event page on Facebook
Doug Lynner performs, composes and records using vintage and contemporary analog modular synthesizers, digital and virtual synthesizers and traditional instruments. Of special note is Doug’s Mystery Serge, an amazingly versatile analog modular synthesizer designed by West Coast synthesizer pioneer, Serge Tcherepnin.

Created in 1975, the Mystery Serge has been painstakingly conserved and upgraded and stands more than well in comparison to contemporary analog modular synthesizers. Its unique design gave rise to “patch programmability,” the ability to reconfigure a single module for many different uses by patching it differently.
Doug Lynner’s music is based upon the notion of “sound for sound’s sake”

He explores the intrinsic value of sound through mixtures of ambient, avant garde, rhythmic and soundscape genres.
In addition to his avant garde, experimental composition and music journalism, Doug is a pioneer in live rock performance with synthesizers and a founding member of the synth pop recording acts LEM, Mobius and Invisible Zoo.

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From his Web site:
Doug received a BFA in Music Composition from the California Institute of the Arts where his mentors were Morton Subotnick, Harold Budd, James Tenney, Leonid Hambro and Nicholas England. There he was deeply immersed in music technology and compositional processes as well as being instructed in world music genres such as south Indian flute, Gamelan Orchestra and Pigmy and Bushmen rhythmic singing and playing.

Link: http://neatnetnoise.com/
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/doug-4

He sometimes performs in the Santa Cruz area.
Disclaimer: I am not an electronic musician but love the sound of those vintage analog synths!! My band partner in Ear Spray, Carlos Jennings, plays one regularly.

Loopy Layered Vocals-Lindsey Walker at Luggage Store Gallery 8/1/13

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lsg 8-1-13 - 11Lindsey performed “Mathematics UK Lite Live”, a composition she had been working on for awhile, using a Digitech Jam Man, Boss Loop Station, Alesis NanoVerb, Micro flanger, and MXR Carbon Copy Analog Delay.

It was sort of droney, which usually puts me to sleep, but I was captivated by the her sounds. The sounds were looped and layered and changed enough to keep me interested. Also, they were easily recognized as vocal sounds. Sometimes the vocals are so modified they sound like electronic computer music. I kept thinking of my high school days singing Gregorian chant in the church choir where we all sang the same score with no parts. Lindsey was much more interesting with her multiple layers, but had a similar appeal.

Link to Lindsey’s unedited full performance (scroll through the intro by Rent Romus)

Link to Lindsey and Doug Lynner’s (the performer for the second set who played a 1975 vintage synth) duo. (Scroll through the intro) FYI, the title “Hippy Jam LSG” is what Matt Davignon, one of the curators,  likes to call jams with both performers from both sets.

I see Lindsey sometimes as she is one of the few regular attendees at the Luggage Store Gallery and other music events. I knew she was a vocalist. But, I had never heard her perform. I figured she was doing “songs” similar to popular music. I was really wrong!

Although I don’t use looping now, I did learn quite a bit about it performed as a “newbie” at the 2011 Y2K International Live Looping Festival in Santa Cruz California. I had never even used a looping pedal.

Both Lindsey and I performed, in different years, as newbies at the Looping Festival and attended Jazz Camp West, where we both took vocal classes,. Wow, what a coincidence!!

How did Lindsey get started doing these strange vocals?

She was working (and attending) Jazz Camp West in 2007, a camp for adults held at a Boy Scout camp in the Santa Cruz CA mountains. Kid Beyond was there, teaching beat box and live looping. Lindsey had always thought you needed a band to perform and realized she could perform solo.

Later, she met Rick Walker, the Ultimate Looping Guru who is very willing to help newbies. Rick loaned her a looper if she would agree to perform at one of his Looping Festivals in Santa Cruz.

That was it. She never looked back.

Like many of us, when she was young she played clarinet in the school band and studied piano. Previously she was in a folk singing group, “Dogs in Dublin” for awhile.

Here’s her bio from the performance on Outsound Present’s Facebook event page

Lindsey Walker has a background in textiles, photography, styling, painting, classical piano, clarinet, mandolin, folk singing, digital and analog sound synthesis as well as stompbox live looping.

Regardless of her engagement in the arts, she considers herself a machine operator of sorts using transparent layers of breath and voice as input to build sonic textures. Her B.A. in Psychology from University of California, Davis informs her exploration of perception and communication where the human senses and technology meet.

Lindsey was the first artist from the United States to contribute audio to Nat Grant’s international blogging project “Momentum,” in 2012.

In 2008 at the Y2K International Live Looping Festival in Santa Cruz California she was nominated for “Newbie of the Year.”
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Lindsey’s soundcloud link:

Some interesting vocal sounds there – very different from her Luggage Store performance!!

Sun Ra Arkestra at Victoria Theater in San Francisco – 8-3-13

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Reprinted with permission of Mark Pino, aka Disaster Amnesiac, percussionist in Ear Spray (and other groups), from his blog posting dated 8/3/13 at http://disasteramnesiac.blogspot.com/ He is in the Ear Spray photo above.

Disaster Amnesiac feels certain that last night’s concert at the Mission District’s venerable Victoria Theater will go down as a high point for live music in the Bay Area for 2013.

Waiting in line for admission, I felt a great, freaky vibe emanating from the hundreds of music fans and Mission street people. Thankfully, the vibes were realized inside, despite lengthy delays in getting everyone seated and starting the music.

Owing to that delay, Disaster Amnesiac felt a bit inhibited as regards taking photos of the first two groups. Let me say this: Hans Grusel’s Krankenkabinet performed a great piece for strings and electronics, in which a Power Electronics blast was paired with Black Metal vocalizing and really neat costumes and props (Grux?). Their sounds gave this listener a nicely powered lift. sfSoundgroup played two long pieces, the first by Luciano Berio and the next by Krzsztof Penderecki. Berio’s sound worlds, free-standing spaces of their own, must be entered at their terms, and if this is done……yeah, BEAUTIFUL. Note to the SF Orchestral Establishment: performances of this music can make $$$$!

Standout players from this group were John Ingle and Joshua Allen, with their saxophone POWER, and equally strong bassist Scott Walton, who drove the Penderecki piece ferociously.

As for the Arkestra? Their Space Jazz music, so abstract and so warm, so swinging and so fiery. Disaster Amnesiac had not seen them since a Halloween show at Slim’s in the early 1990’s, and I wept tears of joy upon realizing that I was being treated to the amazing sounds of Sun Ra, his myth living in arrangements that he left behind, sparked by the loving mind of Marshall Allen and his big band cohorts. It strikes me that the Arkestra means a lot to a lot of people, and this shows when they play. The make people happy with their mixture of standard tunes, Ra originals, New Orleans funkiness and 21st Century space blasts. I just can’t sing their praises enough.

Above: the Arkestra lives!

Above: Travellin’ Spaceways!
Major kudos to Kirschner Concerts and their partners for putting on this great event! Space is indeed the Place!
Comment from Ann O’Rourke, the editor of this blog: I saw Sun Ra live in 1968, during his first west coast tour, in San Francisco in a marijuana smoke haze. I was living in the Haight Ashbury,  in my “hippie days”. I had never heard live jazz before. He was a fantastic composer, band leader, pianist, and Entertainer. I never forgot him. I couldn’t make it to this Arkestra performance, darn!!
Link to arkestra web site: http://www.sunraarkestra.com/

To read more of Mark’s reviews and comments, go to http://markpinoondrums.blogspot.com/ Very interesting!!

Maxine-Maxareddu Musicbots at 12th Annual Outsound New Music Summit!!

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One of my favorite parts of the Summit is the “meet the artists” intro. Composer Ritwik Banerji talked about his Max/MSP-based software musicbot, Maxine, referring to it as his “child” which he was teaching. I found the statement very intriguing. Rittwik has a background of teaching children and has a young child. The other performer, Joe Lasqo used his prior Artificial Intelligence work in expert systems and natural language/speech processing, which he applies to programming Maxareddu.

(Max/MSP is very flexible software that is used for composing electronic music, and other music and video uses.)

Ritwik Banerji and Joe Lasqo used their “Improvising Agents”, “artificial-intelligence software entities that listen to, interpret, and the produce their own music in response.”

Appropriately, the set opened with a chat between two animation people in a video projection. Their “conversation” was very funny. I thought someone wrote it, but it was completely “improvised” by the two characters. I don’t hear much humor in experimental music. Way too serious!!

Here’s a link to the chatbots on youtube (much shorter than the video at Outsound): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzlbyTZsQY

The two human musicians joined the conversation on their acoustic instruments(Banerji: sax, Lasqo: piano). Since I’m an acoustic musican (percussion) also I really liked this part.

Maxine “appeared in early 2009 as a being, deeply inspired by Banerji’s work with children in Chicago. Like one would hope of a child, this project focuses on the creation of a social agent, finding ways through sound to make its presence known, while respecting and enhancing the presence of others. Recently this project has more strongly engaged the issue of astromusicology, or the real-time musical diplomacy between human sound makers and the spectral bodies of Maxine.”

Musicbots Maxine and Maxareddu used a microphone to “listen” and then improvise to the sounds of the Banerji’s saxophone,  Lasqo’s acoustic piano, and ambient sounds in the room.

For more information Maxine Banerji, including Ritwik’s approach to teaching, go to a very interesting article by Banerji at: http://cec.sonus.ca/econtact/12_3/banerji_maxine.html

For more information on Joe Lasqo, go to http://www.joelasqo.com
For more info on Ritwik Banerji, go to http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/people/ritwik_banerji

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Warren Stringer – videos and software fiend/badass programmer

Warren Stringer very seldom performs, so it was a real treat to have him there doing video projections. Joe Lasqo, the curator, invited him. Per Joe, “I met Warren through the SF Electronic Music Meetup (SF EMM), which we both belong to. I gave him a ride to a show by the SLOrk (Stanford Laptop Orchestra) that various people from this group were attending, that got us talking and one thing led to another..”

“He didn’t develop the chatbots, those were from the Cornell University Artificial Intelligence Lab. However, the original video of the chatbots from the AI lab was only about 90 seconds, so all the video transformations of their images after that were due to Warren’s software.”

“… his custom visual synthesis software/system can listen to the music and change the visuals accordingly on its own, and it can also operate under his command (i.e., both it and he can improvise the visual track along with the musicians).”

Since I’m working on getting set up to play video projections behind my group, Ear Spray, I spent a little time before the performance, chatting with Warren. He was using a webcam, iphone and an ipad and a Macbook Pro, which is what I was planning on using. So I got the names of all his equipment so I could check it out later. He was also using touchpad controller of his own design with software that he wrote using C++

I assumed he was just a ‘regular’ video person. I was really wrong!! Fortunately, Joe Lasqo told me about him.

Link to his bio (warning – very technical!)
http://muse.com/ws/bio.htm

Click here see what electronic music guru, Amar Chaudhary, said on his blog
http://www.ptank.com/blog/2013/07/outsound-music-summit-vibration-hackers/

For more details on the Summit and the artists, go to
http://www.outsound.org/summit/13/schedule_details13.html

To read Joe Lasqo’s blog writings about the Vibration Hackers sessions On Thursday, July 26, 2013, click here

Disclosure: I am not an electronic musician, but I play with one in my group, Ear Spray. Many, many thanks to Joe Lasqo for explaining it to me!!