Saturday Night at Spark...

Wow. A memorable evening. Great music, particularly by Ben Nevile and Andrew Pask and then by Randy Jones. Ben and Andrew did a trance inducing set of interlocking polyrhythms and modal melodies, whereas Randy got more insane dance grooves going while singing about, ahem, "My Little Pony," among other things.

Somehow, at the end of the evening (4am) at our usual hang, the Hard Times Cafe, Roy Carroll (who joined Andrew and I on many adventures this trip) and I heard about a big rave going on. Well, we decided to go. It was pretty insane. Photos to come later. As I dropped my camera and broke it about 6am while grooving to the DJs...Back to the story. As we were walking up, I was joking around speaking faux German to Roy when this hyper-rave-fiend comes up to us and says, "Dudes, are you German, are you? Are you? I love Germans, say something in German!" So I said, "yah, yah, my name is Dieter and this is Heinrich. Is dis das rave?" Well, we led the guy on, and it turns out he was involved in the production and got us in for free....saved us 20 bucks each...also gave us his number in Miami and told us to visit next time we were in the states...

Also...

Many of you that know me, know that for years I have wanted a granular synthesis footpedal for my electronics...Now that I've gone max/msp I have one. One of the gentlemen that I've met on this gig at Spark is Nathan Wolek, he is it when it comes to granular synthesis. And if you've been wondering what the heck granular synthesis is you can download papers at his website by clicking his name or pointing your browser at NathanWolek.com. Or you can start by going to Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granular_synthesis and read about it...

Friday night at Spark...

Another great day. The highlight for me was DEFINITELY Gregory Taylor and Tom Hamer performing music with Mark Henrickson doing video improvisation. Gregory was using Radial to create gorgeous loops and textures with Tom playing, among his other percussive devices, an amplified pine cone. Yup. Amplified pine cone. It sounded great! Mark continues to impress me with his video. More pics on the way, as soon as I find my connector cable...

Thursday night at Spark

Great night! Since we performed opening night our only job now is to hang out, listen to music, and meet people. I was lucky enough to hang out with Andrew Pask, of course, and meet Ben Neville, Nathan Wolek, Joe Grimm and other very interesting musicians, as well as see the beautiful and engaging Smyth-Wymore Disappearing Acts. One of the most engaging and interesting pieces yet on the program....wonderful. That and the folk-singer/percussion/musical saw (!) duo....REALLY! Haunting folk singing with fiddle and overtone singing accompanied by dark electronics and percussion: "A Conversation with Death" Michael Theodore and Tim Eriksen performed. Tim Eriksen is a bit of a legendary character around here....beautiful day. I can't say enough good about Tim Eriksen, he is the real deal. Check him out by clicking here.

Hardware-Be-Gone

Finally, Spark makes it official for me. No more hardware/stomp box based sound processing...Cycling 74's max/msp is it for me...the versatility and portability combine to make it THE way to go, in my humble opinion. Listening to all these laptop guys and the amazing array of textures and timbres they get is amazing...

Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Art 2006

The Choir Boys (me and Andrew Pask) had a wonderful gig at the Nomad World Pub in Minneapolis, MN last night...what a great venue. Part of the Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Art directed by Douglas Geers, we played as part of their Spark Nightlife...a great club, the night was curated by J.P. Hungelmann who was AWESOME. A great guy who took care of our every need (assisted by Mark, the soundguy), from making sure I could hear myself in the monitors (which was a problem, but got fixed right away) to making sure we had our favorite cocktails on the bandstand. His curating was beautiful, flowing from ambient, to the madness of the Choir Boys, to pointillistic laptop and video. Wonderful night. One of the great shows of the night: video artist Mark Henrickson working with Jitter...wonderful video, The Choir Boys hope to work with him sometime. I hope he is reading this. Photos by Roy Carroll an Irishman living in Germany with a wide vocabulary of Canadian slang...he also turned in a mean set on laptop using Reaktor. Check out his amazing grooves at his Myspace Site.