"Modular Medley"

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"Modular Medley" [mp3 removed]

Instead of continuing to post 1.5 minute tunes I saved up a few of them and made them into a suite. The sounds are made with a combination of digital modular synths and analog effects.

Am continuing to explore using MIDI to control the Mutator filter (my one piece of vintage '90s gear).
About forty seconds into the first "movement" you can hear mirror image patterns written in the pitchbend controller grids of Cubase--one pattern for the left channel and one for the right, so there is an antiphonal effect. The sequences are "carving" pitch information out of a sustained synth note played into the filter's external audio input (and split by the filter into stereo channels). Pitched down an octave it reminds me of the eerie tuned drum bass note Goblin uses on the Suspiria soundtrack--it's instantly recognizable if you know the movie.

The Kraftwerk-y tune in the second "movement" is the MIDI demo pattern for the Reaktor SQP sequencer, drastically altered by turning the (virtual) dials on the HERW Modular-Mini synth while the sequence plays--my own patch, FWIW.

The final part consists of a Mutated and digitally delayed Sidstation solo over some analog kick sounds.

more on artisanal photorealism

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...and the trend of Western contempo artists hiring painters from mainland China who will render any image you send them as an "original oil." This has been going on since at least the early '00s--Ludwig Schwarz did it and also an artist from Munich who's name I'm forgetting.

Of course in some cases these paintings are supposed to be bad but not everyone thinks that way. In a recent studio visit in Dallas I met an artist who had stacks of paintings that had just come from China. He was in three shows and was using the artisans for cheap studio assistants. He was emailing back and forth with them on what kind of painting surfaces to use and they were sending him back proof prints as they were working. This might get a pass if the paintings were good but their appeal had more to do with the digital collages he was making--he should have just shown those.

If you merely needed "painting fodder" to put in an installation (say, where you were digitally inserting a painting into a TV show where the characters were talking about a painting) this might be a plausible reason to "cheap out" but ultimately, if it's on display people are going to have to look at the thing. Possibly it could be a semiotic investigation into cross-cultural misunderstanding: how artists hand-render an image that they have no emotional investment in or cultural attachment to. But if the point is to have a sellable object to place oneself in the Western commodity-based discourse then you are just injecting the art equivalent of grey goo into the system. Like we need more of that.

some of the above is salvage from an earlier, deleted post

"Rotor 34 - HyperMolecules" collaboration with Duncan Alexander

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Our collaborative page is here. Molecules with a "vintage" look--resembling stop-motion puppet animation--form and reform at high speed, in never-repeating combinations.

Below is an animated GIF I made, capturing just a fragment of the action:

rotor34_capture

Internet Explorer reads the page wrong (of course) but it's not so bad--the growth of the molecules is all vertical (see screenshot of a single frozen moment), resulting in an, er, erectionpalooza.

The spheres and struts are bitmap drawings that I use for collage and installation work (and some animation). Alexander talks a little on his blog about how he is animating these components on the HyperMolecules page ("I wrote a simple javascript loop that would assemble and reassemble them like self-constructing molecules"). The way the shapes are assembled is very familiar to me from countless hours of doing this manually.