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Vietnam Day 3 Field recording with Richard Eigner and Workshop with Vietnamese Musicians

Richard Eigner getting into the many sounds at a busy intersection in Hanoi

I’m starting to get into the swing of things, body clock is still very confused but the vibe of the city is such that it carries you along on it’s noisy, smoky, hyper-alive wake.  I spent several hours walking around recording and taking photographs with Richard today. And when stepping off the street and into the calm of my hotel I keep noticing that my body is actually vibrating such is the excitement of the city.

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Afterwards I headed to the Goethe Institut to give a workshop on my Light controlled music hard/software which was really good fun especially when the audience started getting involved with playing the interface. I learned a lot.

Hanoi Score workshop and Scooter ride including Vietnam’s most controversial Fruit! (Day 2)

This morning I worked with a group of players and composers from Hanoi’s ‘Rhapsody Philharmonic’ we performed my animated graphic score piece.  at the British Council building which was a lot of fun.

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As you can see there is no fear of experimentation here. The players made fine use of a steel bin, instrument cases for percussion and tubes to sing down. Their timing was impeccably good and they also laughed a lot too which is no bad thing.

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Later on after a little afternoon nap I was picked up by the excellent Cuong on his moped for a tour of Hanoi by night. Cuong is rightly obsessed by fruit and we went on culinary tour which left my tastebuds in a state of complete ecstasy! In the video he points out Vietnam’s most CONTROVERSIAL fruit while skilfully whizzing along the streets of the old town.

Arrived in Hanoi! (Day 1)

Sunday Synth Freakout.

CMOS Synth I’m in the process of designing and building at the moment.

J x.

Quadcopter Makes Disjointed Noise Improv

All the sounds you hear are being triggered and modulated by a downward facing LED which I rigged onto a little quadcopter. The light is picked up by the LDR’s from my light controlled music system which uses and an Arduino to send control data to Max/MSP where the sound is produced… I need to improve my flying skills if this is to go any further!

If you want to know more about the light controlled music system I’m doing a talk and concert at Brunel uni on Feb 27th and a talk an workshop at University of Wales Newport, City Campus on March 14th.

J x.

My Home Made guitar plays: Disorder by Palace music (Will Oldham).

Dusted off the guitar I made in 2007 and decided to have a go one of my favourite Palace tunes. Disorder comes from the 1996 album ‘Arise Therefore’ Which is a beautiful melancholic and sparse record with some of Will’s best lyrics of all time.

late 50's STC 3045 dynamic

I recorded the music with two very old mic’s that I’ve been getting into lately. The voice uses an old BBC STC 4035 from the 1950′s and the guitar a 1970′s AKG lapel mic which is labelled BBC Radio Paris.

I think this is an AKG made sometime in the 70's

I just saw the same mic hanging around Dudley Moore’s neck during his duet with Cilla Black – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxgHypEdeEU

About this guitar:

http://leafcutterjohn.com/?page_id=33

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqep67V4Qqw

J x.

A little video of the new light to sound hardware. Live at PowerLunches Dec 2012

Thanks to Blanca for the video.

Leafcutter John concert using new DIY light interface at Cafe Oto Tomorrow.

Wednesday 4th April 2012: Door Times : 8pm Tickets : £5 adv / £7 on the door

The BEAM Festival presents BEAM NIGHT, a special one-off taster event held at café OTO. BEAM is a playground of homemade instruments and sonic installations and was devised by Artistic Director Sarah Nicolls to explore the physicality of electronic music.  The focus on electronic music being created LIVE is explored through a programme of performances, demonstrations, installations and workshops.

The acts tonight all use unusual and/or homemade interfaces to perform. Atau Tanaka & Adam Parkinson play iPhones as sensitive, handheld controllers; Bruno Zamborlin performs café OTO’s wall – possibly for the first time?! – with his invention, Mogees, which read gestural language on any surface; Marco Donnarumma’s Music for Flesh is a visceral sensor performance using his instrument system Xth sense, which has just been named “the world’s most innovative new musical instrument” and awarded First Prize at the Guthman Musical Instrument Competiton in Atlanta (http://bit.ly/yiHBu6). Tom Bugs (maker of Bugbrand synth products) appears in a rare performance using his Modular synths and also sets up a mini-installation for the night, whilst the beguilingly creative Leafcutter John conjures up soundscapes with his new explorations in light and sound.

More information, videos & sounds on the BEAM NIGHT website

A new track that looks like Chicago in the Fog…

I’ve been beavering away on new music this week. I also bought some software to help me clean up a live recording of my recent piece  with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. These two things came together when I put the track I was working on into the editor and realised it looked quite like a night time image of a city in the fog. I’ve never been to Chicago but from what I’ve seen in photos and film it’s not a million miles away. The visualisation above is a spectrogram which plots the energy in different frequency bands from low at the bottom to high at the top. Time is along the horizontal axis but that is not always be the case….

This image is from an amazing web-app thing I found. It will plot a circular spectrogram of any file on soundcloud. It’s programmed by a guy called Lee Martin.  You can make it work for any track by changing the address:

http://spectrogram.heroku.com/artist-name/track-name

Click here to see and hear a real-time circular spectrogram of ‘Chicago in the fog’. It works only on newer browsers.

If that’s not working for you here is the track, it’s not quite finished but I’d quite like to know what you think of it.

Hope you enjoyed that,

J x.

Some more light controlled music….

An attempt to play something a bit more musical on the light controlled audio system I’m currently working on.