Orchestrate Clang Mass

Maryanne Amarché at Ars Electronica 1989

2011-10-23T09:55:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite people Maryanne Amarché ... too bad we lost her so soon

Culture of Fire

2011-03-24T15:05:00.000-07:00

In June of 1994 David Tudor was in Amsterdam preparing for a performance of “Oceans” with Merce Cunningham’s company at the Amsterdam Opera House. He had shipped all his equipment to STEIM and it was stored in the studio there. I just happened to be working in the studio they chose to bring all his equipment to. So once again I was meeting up with one of my great mentors having worked with him at Mills several times and then shared performance venues in Berlin and New York over the preceding years. I remember him lighting his cigarettes with a lighter that looked like a small Thompson machine gun. I was prowling around the Amsterdam guitar shops looking for pedals with him and Matt Wand of Stock Hausen and Walkman. On his hand and knees on the floor with a ZVex fuzz factory and an Ibanez delay hooked up in a direct feedback loop into a Marshall cranked up to 11 … Beautiful. The guitar salesman in their leather pants and Motley Crew tee shirts had been casting eye rolled side glances to one another until David turned it on then … what I will call “the Culture of Fire”. They exchanged startled looks back and forth and were wondering how to get this old guy to stop this tremendous wall of noise that filling the music shop and ringing everyone’s ears. All acoustic instruments were resonating right along with these flames of sound … David had given me an introduction to Forest Warthman and Mark Holler who had helped him build the instrument of his last double CD album on Lovely called the Neural Net Synthesizer. It was made for three ETANN (electronically trainable analog neural net) chips. The instrument was stored on a desk at Forest’s technical writing firm in Palo Alto and with a note for Maestro Tudor, I was given the opportunity to spend and an afternoon “playing” the instrument. I put quotes around playing because there was no real way to play this other than to turn knobs and furiously jack and rejack the little mini plugs in and out the 128 various outputs looking for a sustained signal. I kept the DAT rolling and eventually got some 2 hours of material.

IMéRA

2011-01-19T10:48:00.000-08:00

Where IMéRA residency is located

View Larger Map

These are fun .

2009-12-16T23:06:00.000-08:00

WHAT A BEAUTIFICAL HUMAN/ALLIGATOR/BUMBLEBEE! here are some other animations that deserve perusal:

liquid television beautiness
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RWC2Xps8bg

gisele kerosene
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzOtvdieqNQ

offon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEr9Z7Q4ZxY

pixillation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_54sqEMql5A

amazing japanese commercial from the 80s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GuIXETf-JM

2009-09-11T19:13:00.001-07:00

rediscovering "If only i could remember my name"

2009-07-07T11:22:00.001-07:00

David Crosby's album from 1971 is just an amazing snapshot of a very interesting period in American Rock n Roll history. It is is a veritable who's who of the SF/LA rock scene from that period.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

conductor vs network

2009-06-25T21:18:00.000-07:00

The sage on the stage or the dynamic inter-connectivity facilitated by a central organizer. Great music and great knowledge distribution depend on different degrees of this sort of interaction.

My day job for the last year and a few months has been closely involved in experimenting with and creating new educational technology resources at a major university (CSUEastBay in Hayward, CA) However my years of previous work in the dynamic distribution of musical decisions and actions via networks is never far back from the front of my thoughts. This is a consensus based way of creating music with machines that had grown out of a post-hippy community utopia vision that was ironically fostered as an under current in the new anarchy unleashed by the "new wave" and punk culture of the early 1980's. For all the "Sic Vicious" sneering and safety pin earrings, there was a feeling of a new paradigm based on a consensus of the crowd. This undercurrent fostered the now burgeoning open source software revolution and manifested itself in my life as series of musical projects, most centrally charcterized by the work of the HUB (Please reference this link for more than enough information about this work )

The over riding experience of playing music in this new way was one of a sort of intense engagement that appeared to the audience as a complete separation of the actions of the performers from what they were seeing. The visible concentration and small motions did not coincide with the resulting bombardment of sound the issued forth. A recently revelation from my son, now 28, who grew up on this musical genre was that the listening experience was alway discorporate and detached for him. This is something that Iannis Xenakis had mentioned to me when I had the rare opportunity in 1983 to work with him for several weeks. He walked up to one of the 10 loudspeakers that we were setting up for a live acoustimass mix of his "La Legend D'eer" and put his hand on it and said only, "This is the problem with electronic music". I understood this to mean, the discorporate nature of using the loudspeaker itself was the problem of connection. It was only later when the electronic pulsing of the loudspeaker created an atavistic collective dance urge that something more primal was satisfied, but those of us who have been working at the filigree at the edge of these beats are examining something more ephemeral and less easily understood and defined.

Cage tried to let us believe that it was all alright, and to a certain extent this world of sound is all alright, but there is a way to proceed with care and attention to detail that was clearly the unspoken part of Cage's (and Tudor's) process when I saw them working. All these great pioneers of electronic music were equivalent to conductors in a more traditional context. Conduits for the enery they were harnessing.

In some ways none was more emblematic of this concept of a thought conductor than Pauline Oliveros particularly with her "Sonic Meditations". This ground breaking work, a set of simple instructions about sonic mindfulness, pointed the way to a new type of musical context based solely on collaboration based in procedure. The late great composer/performer/theorist Jim Horton maintained that Oliveros' early works in this vein carved the conceptual path that is now referred to as "free improv". This focusing of the intent through guidance has in some cases led to a form of unwarranted idolatry, almost cultism, but there is no doubt that it deserves our respect and attention.

At the time of Cage's death in conversation Serge Tcherepnin told me he was under the impression that "the only real future would be in collective work and cooperation between artists, colaboration." It is this sense of unification and collective consciousness that is at the basis of what makes any orchestra great, and I would say that technology gives us the advantage to circumvent these mechanisms of performance and create on-going contexts of performance and sonic intervention that are at once anarchistic and yet unified in the common need for the expression of that place between the random noise of exsistence and the single beautiful tone of a bell.

Cellphonia: 4'33"

2009-06-05T20:45:00.000-07:00

Call: 1.212.937.7725 to add your note (of silence)
Visit: http://cellphonia.org/433/listen.html to see the scrolling score and listen to the installation performance at The Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University.
Commissioned by New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME)

Designed by: Steve Bull & Scot Gresham-Lancaster

McCluhan vs Mailer (1968)

2009-05-15T13:54:00.000-07:00

My Son Nathan told me about this one.

Worth checking out

Scot

trying to post audio

2009-04-16T20:11:00.001-07:00

Here is Whitman's ode to America

Mobile post sent by scotgl using Utterli. Replies. mp3

Testing Utterli for the first time

2009-04-16T19:54:00.001-07:00

I am using a new service called utterli http://utterli.com/ that pushes content to several social media sites at once with one "utter" ...

Mobile post sent by scotgl using Utterli. Replies.

Cellphonia: tempo variabile

2009-02-12T14:49:00.000-08:00

Great Sound in 'yud' gallery at CJM

2008-10-24T13:20:00.000-07:00

It was an amazing opportunity last night to hear a HUB piece in performance. So often I am listening as a performer which is a way different experience from actually just sitting back and absorbing a piece. VAV, Chris Brown's commission for John Zorn's Aleph-Bet Sound Project at the beautiful new Contemporary Jewish Museum in downtown San Francisco on Oct. 23rd.

This was an unusual HUB event for a lot of reasons. This piece more than most of our other pieces was not done as collectively as usual. Chris got the commission and did a lot of the ground work on the piece, designing a functioning user interface and really clearly specifying all the parameters before any of the rest of us worked on the piece. Still the end result had the characteristic "collective" sound that is emblematic of the HUB's work.

There was some back and forth over email when we were putting this piece together about attribution and this spirit of cooperation that felt to be partially violated in the way this piece came to Chris first. He was clearly credited for his excellent work on it in a way that separated him from the rest of the group. This is unusual from our usual practice. However, having gone through the full experience now, it is clear it was his vision of this piece and hard work to make it happen that made a significant portion of what we heard in this magnificent new space last night.

It was pleasure to meet Dan Schifrin as well writer in residence and director of Public programs at the museum. What an interesting job to have; to be responsible for this amazing acoustic space with the promise of it's rich future for performance and interaction.

There are some interesting problems that are presented by the architects vision of this room, supposedly designed for sound, but more aligned with visual aesthetic considerations. For the concert last night they brought in 4 surround speakers and a LFE subwoofer for in the plain of the gallery while the Mackie UPM 100 that are installed above for the standard playback just acted for the lift provided by the "center" channel of the 5.1 mix that Chris had done. Looking at the space it was hard to understand why the architect, Daniel Libeskind, did not specify that the speaker system be built into the walls of the space. For that matter, why weren't the lights also integrated into the walls? The striking non-perpendicular aspect of the room is unnecessarily disturbed by the lighting and speaker grid above the space.

However, I am not complaining this is a spectacular venue in a fantastic new venue that promises to fully enrich the cultural life of the Bay Area and it was a real thrill to be a part of the beginning of what promises to be years of rich new culture creation associated with this new resource.

Octoharp on TIEM!

2008-09-25T19:59:00.000-07:00

TIEM

Taxonomy of Realtime Interfaces for Electronic Music Performance is database of musical interfaces and instruments. The curators are interested in exploring the practice and application of new interfaces for real-time electronic music performance. So I submitted information about my ongoing "Tensegrity Harp" cum "OctoHarp" project.

TIEM is a great resource that any interested live electronic music performer should check out.

This attention to this project will hopefully spur me to dust off the moth balls and get the instrument prototype #5 into production.

2008-09-12T20:58:00.000-07:00

Toyojis_Song.mp3 - Scot Gresham-Lancaster

Using sensor Data from a Crossbow network on Camilie Vineyard, I constructed this piece for the tree planting memorial for Toyoji Tomita at Mills college on Sept. 10, 2008. Thanks so much to Mark Holler for giving me access to this amazing sensor network he has constructed at his place on Mt. Veeder.

It was a wonderful evening with performances by many who love and will miss our good friend.

HUB 'smart mob' on Mozes.com/hub

2008-07-15T16:02:00.000-07:00

Ebu says: "Check it out"

Dreamhouse mashup

2008-07-14T15:28:00.000-07:00

Best if veiwed in full screen ...

New HUB 3 CD set "Boundary Layer"

2008-05-24T12:11:00.000-07:00

I am very proud of the new retrospective of my work with this landmark computer music network group.

From the Tdzadik website, "A new recording by the band that pioneered laptop ensembles over twenty years ago coupled with an historic overview of their recordings, unreleased tracks and video clips of the band in performance. Functioning in the West Coast tradition of composer as instrument builder—redefining music from the ground up—The Hub makes music using electronic and digital systems of their own devising. A natural extension of the late 1970’s ensemble the League of Automatic Music Composers, the group has performed worldwide over the past two decades and continues to break new ground in the ever-growing laptop medium. "

Check it out ...

Extraordinary Rendition

2007-09-10T23:40:00.001-07:00

This performance is from the Deep Listening convergence concert at Lifebridge sanctuary in High Falls NY in JUne 2007

Evolution revolution

2007-07-17T12:45:00.000-07:00

Maybe not the as high brow as much that I usually post, but I thought this video was too unusual not to pass on. Hope you enjoy it.

more where this came from

Guy van Belle from Brataslava live in Munich

2007-07-08T16:57:00.000-07:00

Here is a picture of Guy van Belle (gevan bella) the now Eastern European racountuer and instigator in Berlin on a fine afternoon at the Tesla new media center in June of 2005. You see the experimental stuffed panda balloon in the distance. Photo by Tim Perkis

On 7-7-07 at 7 pm Guy was playing "tubes and flutes" on his mac through the t-u-be vst plugin to the inventive people at t-u-b-e from his front room in Brataslava. As he said in an email:

contributing for the workshops by http://www.t-u-b-e.de/
(it is in an old brewerey in a very beautiful cellar in münchen with a good technological setup
but I guess since I am playing from home missing out on that too .. hihi)

and isn't that the problem with doing network music. Concert promoters save so much on air fare. I like the deep listening convergence scheme cooked up by Vonn New and Pauline Oliveros to rehearse online and then fly everyone in to play together. Much better and very special, I was so happy to be a part of it.

Don't miss my recent interview that is now available on the turbulence.org Networked Music Review. It was so very nice of Helen Thorington to have me. If you haven't checked the site out your really should. It is fantastic.

Extraordinary Rendition online score

2007-06-30T13:47:00.000-07:00

Click on the title above to hear my own rendition of "Extraordinary Rendition" that I performed as part of the Deep Listening Convergence at Lifebridge Sanctuary in High Falls, NY on June 10, 2007
Monique Buzzarte' trombone
Pauline Oliveros accordion
David Arner harpsichord
Katharina von Rütte vocal
Scot Gresham-Lancaster piano

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Click here to get access to a "live" score of "Extraordinary Rendition" the instructions are to follow the green ball.

"Extraordinary Rendition" grew out of two sources. First my unstoppable attraction to bad puns. As a musician and a purveyor of rendition after rendition in the course of my life the repeated references to the U.S. governments new improved, indeed, extraordinary renditions had to be met by my own "Extraordinary Rendition". Around this time while studying Mark Levine's book "Jazz Theory" I came across a set of changes that took the core of John Coltrane's remarkable "Giant Steps" and modulated through all 12 keys. I thought to myself while playing through them, there is the essential material here for an extraordinary rendition of this classic jazz standard. So I felt it was my patriotic duty to do my little part for this administrations endless ill defined "war" with my own "Extraordinary Rendition".

This is dedicated to the wonder of "habeus corpus" and the Geneva convention and to all those who truly know that the "rule of law" is what makes our nation great.

Also, check out this cool flash animation based on "Giant Steps" by Michal Levy.
John Coltrane continues to inspire ...

Scot

Cage on "What's My Line" 1960

2007-05-07T10:07:00.000-07:00

From WFMU's "Beware of the Blog" comes this treasure. John Cage performing "Water Walk" on the national TV show "What's My Line?" I remember watching this show as a kid, but I must admit I don't remeber seeing this episode.

Etude before the Convergence

2007-04-27T10:38:00.000-07:00

Here is a transcript of my unsuccessful attempt to have 9 remote players perform in the Concert Hall in the Music Department at SJSU. Mercury was obviously in retrograde on this one ;-) but the link on the title of this entry is one Pauline Oliveros posted of a really fun mp3 of what everyone was doing online that we couldn't get a feed of onstage at the time. It was a bit frustrating up on stage for me, but everyone tells me they had a great time online. So that is great.

Here is a bit of the text chat transcript just before I gave up:
Scot Gresham-Lancaster 4/25/07 7:58 PM
add me back in
Stuart Dempster 4/25/07 7:58 PM
meltdown
Marc Jensen 4/25/07 7:58 PM
uh oh
Monique Buzzarté 4/25/07 7:58 PM
only 9 add in
Marc Jensen 4/25/07 8:03 PM
is something happening now? I'm still dropped
Scot Gresham-Lancaster 4/25/07 8:05 PM
Thank you not working got to go Thanks a million
Michelle Nagai 4/25/07 8:05 PM
i'm on hold again
Stuart Dempster 4/25/07 8:06 PM
Have a good rest of concert!
Michelle Nagai 4/25/07 8:06 PM
looks like scot has moved on!
Scot Gresham-Lancaster 4/25/07 8:07 PM
bye
Stuart Dempster 4/25/07 8:07 PM
anybody get hurt?
Marc Jensen 4/25/07 8:08 PM
no, we survived the riskiness
Viv Corringham 4/25/07 8:08 PM
better go before we do
Michelle Nagai 4/25/07 8:08 PM
i've got sleepy business. i think i must go...
Monique Buzzarté 4/25/07 8:08 PM
viv back in?
Michelle Nagai 4/25/07 8:11 PM
i'm going to sign off. do i just hit the hang up?
Monique Buzzarté 4/25/07 8:11 PM
yep
Michelle Nagai 4/25/07 8:11 PM
by eall - have fun!
Viv Corringham 4/25/07 8:11 PM
i'm back i think
Marc Jensen 4/25/07 8:28 PM
crash? or is it just me?
Monique Buzzarté 4/25/07 8:28 PM
I'm ok
Marc Jensen 4/25/07 8:28 PM
okay, it's back
Monique Buzzarté 4/25/07 8:29 PM
zzz for meeeeeee
4/25/07 8:29 PM
xo to all
Viv Corringham 4/25/07 8:31 PM
lovely to play with you all- sleep got me too.
4/25/07 8:31 PM
byeee!

Skype or not to Skype

2007-03-18T12:50:00.000-07:00

Saturnalia presents...
First of many skype based rehearsals for the Deep Listenting Convergence

Will Swofford says:
"see below a link to our recording of the first spontaneous conference.
This one is likely to go down in the music history books right next to
James Brown Live at the Apollo ;-)

Hope you all have as much fun listening to it as we had creating
it....

Click Here

Will Swofford, Michelle Nagai + wee one, Kathy Kennedy, Norman Lowrey,
Monique Buzzarte, Al Margolis, Scot Gresham-Lancaster spontaneously
convergence and break through the skype barriers. Nice work everyone.

Test by Fire ... Wall

2007-01-19T18:22:00.000-08:00

Live performance at CSUEastBay Multimedia Forum on one end and Vonn New's studio in Kingston, NY on the other. My good friend Phil Hofstetter had invited me to give a retrospective of my work, but I decided to start by showing this example of what we are trying to do with the:
Deep Listening Convergence Project

Cutoff at the end, Vonn asks, "Where am I?" because she didn't know where the other end of the performance was located. ;-)

Léon Theremin plays "Boatman on the Volga"

2006-12-10T15:50:00.000-08:00

I shot this video of Léon Theremin plays "Boatman on the Volga" at the Ensemble Room at Mills College in 1991 during his visit to California.

Hot Potato at NYU

2006-11-21T15:03:00.000-08:00

HOT POTATO!!!

Scot Gresham-Lancaster

Play a note (any note or sound) before you randomly throw the single 'potato'. The potato is simply a number that sets the duration of the sound event in each instance. ie 100 = 100ms, 200 = 200 ms etc. Any potato handler can change the number ... or not.

The HUB plays "Cut to Ribbons" at NYU

2006-11-21T14:58:00.000-08:00

specified by Chris Brown

Cut to Ribbons specifies that each player in the network plays event-streams of sonic events (called 'ribbons') whose character is algorithmically composed using parameters shared with the rest of the ensemble. These parameters include: pitch, amplitude, timbre, tempo, rhythm, duration, density, and phrase duration. Each parameter is sent to one other player in the network at the moment the ribbon is triggered, and each player must allow any parameter received to replace his current value for that parameter, although he may also manually adjust any of his parameters at any time. Another parameter called ÒtuningÓ is broadcast to all players at the start of each ribbon, and is used to control stochastic deviation from the other parameters in the composition algorithm; but each player chooses only one other player's tuning data as an influence on his own process. The purpose of this system is to create a complex feedback network of data exchange, so that the ribbons generated are all influenced by each other, but each each player retains the freedom to play their own sounds at times of their own choice.

The HUB plays "Boss" at NYU

2006-11-21T14:53:00.000-08:00

specified by Phil Stone

Any Hub member can take over the role of 'boss' at any moment. The boss has complete control over every Hub member's volume (including his own), and can manipulate it in any way he desires. Aside from this constraint, each player is free to create a personal sonic environment.

The HUB plays "pins&splits " at NYU

2006-11-21T14:47:00.000-08:00

specified by Mark Trayle

pins&splits

Hub players alternate between a single 'background' sound and a set of one or more 'foreground' sounds. Players have no control over their own foreground/background switching, that's done by other players in the group. They do have control over certain parameters of the sounds they make. My intention was to thin out our typically hyperactive sound through a limitation of sonic material and the interruption of the performers' musical flow.

The HUB plays "Lou Drift " at NYU

2006-11-21T14:37:00.000-08:00

Lou Drift
specified by Tim Perkis

dedicated to composer Lou Harrison

This is a piece in free intonation, in which there is no gamut or scale defined. Each pitch played is calculated based on a simple just rational relationship with another currently sounding voice.

The basic behavior requested: pay attention to a /pitch message which is sent to you (you will not be paying attention to EVERY pitch message you see: more on that later). Interpret the value of the pitch message as a real number frequency in Hz. You should play and hold a reasonably long tone (several seconds long at least) at the frequency requested, and calculate a new /pitch message that you send immediately to /hub. Calculate the new pitch by multiplying the pitch that you played by one of the set {2,3,4,5,7} and then dividing by one of {2,3,4,5,7}.

In addition, I will be sending occasional /density messages. Take the number provided as a minimum time, in seconds, that you pause after you perform a play/calculate/send action before doing it again. After your pause deadtime is over, grab the next (or a very recent) /pitch message and use that as the basis of your new action. You need to be able to catch any sent /density message sent, even if it is sent during your pause time.

The HUB plays Tesla Sync at NYU

2006-11-20T11:58:00.000-08:00

John Bischoff

Tesla Sync

In Tesla Sync, one player establishes a rhythmic framework by distributing a continuous stream of trigger messages to all players. Players respond to some triggers and ignore others in their own way, thereby creating complex and unpredictable patterns that always remain synchronized.

from a Performance on Monday, October 30, 8pm

Frederick Loewe Theater
35 West 4th Street
New York City

The HUB plays ""Noosphere" at NYU

2006-11-20T08:36:00.000-08:00

Noosphere
Scot Gresham-Lancaster

Sonification of Global Consciousness

The Global Conciousness Project has been collecting data from a global network of random event generators since August, 1998. The network has grown to about 65 host sites around the world running custom software that reads the output of physical random number generators and records a 200-bit trial sum once every second, continuously over months and years. The data are transmitted over the internet to a server in Princeton, NJ, USA. The network is accessed via the internet and the instantaneous generation of sound or sonification of the current state of the network.

Monday, October 30, 8pm

Frederick Loewe Theater
35 West 4th Street
New York City

Amsterdam Boat ride then DEAF 2004

2006-10-03T20:01:00.000-07:00

Cellphonia Blockparty mix for Aug. 11, 2006

2006-08-22T22:54:00.000-07:00

After the great success of this version of our "cellphone opera" at the zero/one festival we have decided to leave it going for now, so please join in. If you already have, you can do it again and again. Admission free (especially on nights and weekends ;-) call 408-228-5848

NY Times
August 6, 2006
ART
At ZeroOne, Paintings Are So Last Century

By JORI FINKEL
SAN JOSE, Calif.

excerpt:
"Some projects take audience participation one step further, allowing people to add voice, text or images to an artwork in progress. By dialing up another project, Cellphonia, [(408) 228-5848] a caller (presumably but not necessarily from the area) can join the chorus of a current-affairs opera. The libretto for that day, based on news feeds from The San Jose Mercury News, is voiced one line at a time; all the caller has to do is echo it back into the phone. The performance is recorded and automatically mixed with other voices. Later a caller can download an MP3 file of the song for playback on his own phone at http://cellphonia.org

“So often people with cellphones to their ears are in their own world, cut off from reality,” said Steve Bull, a New York artist-programmer who developed the opera with composers Scot Gresham-Lancaster and Tim Perkis. “This will pull people back into the community, as they sing the community story and hear their voice in the community chorus.”

To participate call: 408-228-5848
Listen at: http://cellphonia.net

we will be putting occasional mixes up at the "Cellphonia San Jose podcast" at:
http://cellphone.el.net/podcast

If you are interested in sponsoring your own variation on this concept of a cellphone opera don't hesitate to contact us. info@o-art.org

Lamento del molare frustrato - S. Bassanese

2006-07-08T12:29:00.000-07:00

Lament of the Frustrated Molar
by Stefano Bassanese
Nicholas Isherwood - Baritone
“Sixth dentistica sitting” for voice of bottom, electronics and video
extracted from “Fuori dai denti”
text of Tiziano Scarpa

I met Stefano when the Hub was at the Music Conservatory in Cuneo, Italy in June of 2006 where he leads the Computer Music and New Media Department. While he was helping us get ready for our concert with his students there, he was also preparing to Leave to be part of the "June in Buffalo" festival in Buffalo, NY. There he would primere the english version of this piece sung by Baritone Nicholas Isherwood . This is a "rough mix" that Stefano passed on to me. It is very amusing and surrealistic. We are all missing the 8 channels of surrounding speakers and video that are part of the live performance. With any luck we will have an opportunity to see it performed this way.

Lamento of the frustrated molar constitutes the sixth “dentistica sitting” outside from the teeth, a job of musical theatre devised with Tiziano writer Shoe. A history that plays between grotesque and the surrealistic one around the topic of the teeth, included the terror that this argument can provoke, alluding metaformation to that “bad tooth” it can represent. I have articulated a sonorous world invented round to a subject that just inside finds of the mouth, imagining that the teeth are arranged nearly to mark the border of the same fonatorio apparatus. We can say that the hidden subject is therefore the same vocal identity. Taking cue from the surrealistic and often comic situations that the drammaturgia succeeds to produce, the sonic language develops a evocativo lessico constituted from nervous pulsations, resonant micro-cavities, sussulti telluric, liquid ecstasies, etc.

Here the Molar thinks of being the stationary calcification of a pre-historic jellyfish, a free time to swim in the ocean with its transparent umbrella and its melted filaments, but that by now made solid he is hostage of the dental arched one, with roots in the gum. The musical writing tries to integrate imagination perceptively and truth, plays on the schizoide dissosciation of the molar/ricollocandol jellyfish in the distribution of the vocal registries, uses gestures primarily which the vibratory pulsations like rhythmic elements in order to generate and to control different sonorous elements, constantly converses with the flow parallel of the images video giving place to a complementary counterpoint of perception.

an automated translation of Stefano Bassanese hence the occasional untranslated italian words.

Enjoy

Tacoma Narrows Memorial Oscillation Tour

2006-05-27T20:42:00.000-07:00

I hope you find it interesting. I pointed the podcast at the opening of our first performance from Cuneo Italy on June 3, 2006. This was performance of my specification "Noosphere" and included 4 hubsters and 5 students from the Conservatory there.

They used both titles for our "BrückenMusick" gig
Our concert on a bridge in Cologne
"Tacoma Narrows Memorial Oscillation" or "Sink, Rhine, and Hooker"
I knew, given the choice, Jens Brand could not pass up my terrible pun.

Also, we will return to Centro d' Arte in Padua after not being there in over a decade.

We are a footnote at NIME in Paris mostly at IRCAM

more specifically

Norbert Schnell and the gang at IRCAM are really putting on quite a shindig
Here is all the other stuff that is happening at NIME 2006

We are doing a three day workshop ending in a concert with the students at the Conservatory in Cuneo Italy ...

This about all I can find about Cuneo online. I guess they aren't too big on advertising on the web there.

Our host Stefano Bassanese has done a lot of interesting work:

And of course the "Direzione artistica" at Centro de Arte and my favorite musicologist of all time, Veniero Rizzardi should get a mention ;-)

What better way than to give a pointer to some of his writing. In this case about some early Morton Feldman piano works works preformed by Debora Petrina. This is a great record, by the way, very interesting and not what you might expect.

It was Veniero that pointed out that "Bitches Brew" is really a tape piece. This highlights the interesting relationship between Miles Davis producer Teo Macero and Edgar Varese, but that is very interesting story for another day.

HUB in Padua June 2005

2006-05-10T16:04:00.000-07:00

Here is the poster of the HUB for performance in Padua, Italy. Mark Trayle will not be there so he was "Stalin"ed out of the photo. It was taken last June in Berlin as you can see the "the Fernsehturm or the Tele-spargel (toothpick)" in the background. We will be playing in Cuneo, Italy then Padua (Padova) then flying to Paris for the NIME conference and finally to Cologne (Köln). There was a whole adventure with the NIME thing that had to do with me proposing the hub do a workshop, then having it rejected, then reinstated, and then a piling on with a bunch of other people. So we will just be breifly talking about our music for 45 minutes. They tried to yank the conference passes they had promised, but that was going too far. We were also going to play at LOGOS in Ghent, but we couldn't fit it in the schedule. It is too bad as it would have been great to see Gotfried and Moniek again.

The video podcast and linked to this site is from a HUB performance at the Metopolis Kino in Hamburg in Nov. 2005. Special Thanks to Georg Hajdu for helping us put that performance together.

New Orchestration of "Machine" for small orchestra

2006-03-17T13:46:00.000-08:00

I wrote a version of this piece for full string orchestra during my artis residency at Djerassi in 1995 and ddecided to fully orchestrate it this year. I am not quite done, but I thought I would put up the first part up until the brass "fugue-like" entrance.

Cellphonia in the News: up and running

2006-03-04T11:41:00.000-08:00

"Cellphonia: In The News is a location based karaoke cell phone opera about the alienation of the contemporary technophile that includes text, sound and allows participants outside the core players to contribute as a remote chorus. Cellphonia begins anywhere anytime five people gather."

To hear the ongoing stream go on iTunes, Quicktime player, etc. to:
http://celphonia.no-ip.info/listen.m3u

To contribute your voice to the mix; call and follow the prompts:
510-280-1697

Artists
Steve Bull
Scot Gresham-Lancaster
Tim Perkis

The HUB and Thomas Lehn in Cologne

2005-12-16T12:47:00.000-08:00

Chris Brown did a rough mix from the four tracks Thomas Lehne recorded at the Academy of Arts and the Media Cologne, for your listening pleasure.

String Quartet - The Heart that Wandered

2005-12-15T12:01:00.000-08:00

Here is an electronic realization of an unplayed string quartet of mine that I finished in 1996. I wrote the bulk of it in the summer of 1995 while at the Djerassi Artist Residency program. If you are David Harrington, give me a call ;-)

First set at Tilburg, NL Nov. 16, 2005

2005-11-23T15:25:00.000-08:00

The HUB is just back from a 6 day tour. We played the first night at Club Paradox in Tilburg, NL
a review is at: http://tinyurl.com/aopphi
from the bad translation of the Dutch via robot ubersetzer:
" Yes, itself has them it, however, to their sense. But is taken into account the auditor little. The muzikanten start acting with a scale to sounds which still most do think of communication systems between flying dishes, served by innumerable aliens. And that remains this way. Improvised, without only grip and without aim."

Don't think he liked it. Thank God for the "Lexicon of Musical Invectives" it gives me hope.

PERRY MASON IN EAST GERMANY (5'13") _1988

2005-11-11T20:29:00.000-08:00

From the firstHUB CD
composer: John Bischoff
performers: John Bischoff, Tim Perkis, Mark Trayle
recorded at Fylkingen, Stockholm 9/27/88 engineer: Paul Pignon

Each of the six players runs a program of his own design which constitutes a self sustaining musical process. Each program is configured so that it can send three changing variables important to its operation out to the Hub and also to receive three variables from other players. Each player reads the variables put out by three different performers, and sends out for use by three different performers as well. This relationship of mutual influence results in a network structure that often yields a special kind of musical coherence; the persistent diversity of the parts is complemented by moments of change that appear to propagate from one part to the next. These linked motions can, in turn, affect global changes in the music, giving the music structure beyond any individual's planning.

Whackers from first HUB CD

2005-11-04T19:32:00.000-08:00

1988 - CSUHayward Designed and built "whackers" 64 channel percussion
robot 1 Amp per solenoid channel with Robert Marsanyi HMSL based
instruments remaps midi note events to solenoid note num. = whacker #
vel=period and intensity of hit The HUB CD on artifact cut 5 "whackers"

Notes from CD:
The whackers are a number of individual solenoids or relays that have the capability of whacking or (?JH)string objects in their proximity when told to do so by a computer. In this case they were arranged next to an entire gallery, the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery, full of large sound sculpture objects designed by Tom Nunn and Bob B. Hobbs. These sculptural objects were things such as large suspended sheets of steel with brass rods welded to them, a piano harp, a suspended automobile fuel tank, a circular sheet of steel suspended on balloons, and others. The development of the whackers grew out of the notion that some visceral aspect of the act of making and listening to music is inherently missing when the loudspeaker is used exclusively. Rhythm and amplitude to a certain extent were controlled by Tim's manipulation of real time parameters and partly by the characteristics of the objects themselves. In the mean time as"Whackmeister" Perkis madly twiddled knobs, I ran around trying to make sure my little whackers were hitting their mark.

Hub_Berlin

2005-10-02T19:27:00.000-07:00

Hub_Berlin,
originally uploaded by SGreshamLancaster.

This picture of the HUB was taken by Jens Brand in June of 2005 for our upcoming tour in the middle of Nov.

Sedimental Journey - Oliveros and Dempster

2005-09-30T13:04:00.000-07:00

10/3 - 7:30PM PDT (10:30PM EDT) Songlines Series, Mills College -
Pauline with Stuart Dempster perform a SEDIMENTAL JOURNEY!
via iCHATav with Pauline in Troy in the iEAR Studio at RPI and Stuart in Seattle at the DX Center, U Washington and the duo appearing on screen in the concert hall on the Songlines Series at Mills College Oakland CA. This concert is commemorating 50 years of musical friendship between Pauline & Stuart. Other collaborators include June Watanabe-choreographic direction,
Scot Gresham-Lancaster internet coordination and production design
John Bischoff, Les Stuck, Chad Kirby and Greg Palmer- technical direction
Attendance will be in three places: Oakland, Troy and Seattle.

Hub Renga

2005-09-23T13:12:00.000-07:00

Here is the first of several old HUB pieces that I am going to podcast. HubRenga is from the 2nd Hub CD which is still available from CDEmusic. In a 1999 article for electronic musician, Tim Perkis, described it this way.

"HubRenga was a live radio performance, in collaboration with the Well, a computer bulletin board and messaging system. The Hub was connected to The Well through a dialup line in the studios of KPFA radio in Berkeley. The public could dial up the Well from their home and type in lines of poetry which would be read aloud on the air; this stream of text also was fed directly into the Hub computers, which were programmed to respond to certain "power words" in the text with musical actions of each composer's choosing. In the weeks leading up to the performance The Well poetry community had collectively compiled this list of power words. "

Enjoy

First Podcast at 30,000?

2005-09-11T09:27:00.000-07:00

I just made this short recording with my laptop while flying on Lufthansa flight 434 from Munich to Chicago. The entire post was done from seat 37 F. So I am wondering if this is the first podcast at 30,000 ft. We are over the coast of Labador. I tested the webcam and it seemed to work fine. I think we can do one up on Stockhausen's ridiculous helicopter piece with our on ridiculous inflight piece ;-)

Returning from the ICMC in Barcelona, which was hectic, and a fantastic visit with Jean-Marc Montera, Patrick Laffont, Michelle Ricozzi and many of our other collaborators at the Impass Montevideo in Marseilles.

Well this is expensive so I will get off. It is all cloud cover now or I would insert a picture as well

MP3 of HUB at Tesla Berlin

2005-08-26T16:10:00.000-07:00

This is a 57 MegaByte file that is the entire set that the HUB did at Tesla in Berlin on the evening of June 23, 2005. Thanks to Phil Perkins for mastering this and Carsten Seiffarth for making it possible.

Interview with Sam Ashley

2005-08-26T10:10:00.000-07:00

Here is an interview with Sam Ashley Sam lives in Dortmund Germany. This is the first time I used audioblogger with a conference call.

Comments on Hub review

2005-08-25T13:08:00.000-07:00

The Hub got slammed by a critic in the San Francisco Classical Voice web page. There has always been some distance between where our music is and what classical music criticsm wants to hear. This has been true for decades. You can check the review for yourself at here

Hub at SFEMF

2005-08-19T04:56:00.000-07:00

The Hub will be playing this Saturday at the SF Electronic Music Festival. I will post some of the audio later when it becomes available.
Thursday, August 18th, 2005: Chaos Butterfly, Eric Glick Rieman, George Lewis
Friday, August 19th, 2005: Victoria Jordanova, gal* in_dog (aka Guillermo Galindo), Morton Subotnick
Saturday, August 20th, 2005: Matt Heckert, Patrice Scanlon, The Hub
Sunday, August 21st, 2005: Sutekh Blevin Blectum Zeena Parkins

Ersatz Humanaids

2005-08-17T08:56:00.000-07:00

Here is an interesting project that my son's friend Revel has done. He is using a ultrasonic detector to recreate the visual field as a 3d audio environment. Click picture to see a larger image.

Interview with Richard Marriott

2005-08-15T16:34:00.000-07:00

Composer and performer Richard Marriott, for many years associated with the Clubfoot Orchestra was by the other day and so I did a quick interview with him about his current work.

First testaudio blog

2005-08-15T12:06:00.000-07:00

This is a test audio blog that I did using audioblog.com

Vex from 2nd HUB CD

2005-08-14T19:34:00.000-07:00

VEX (Scot Gresham-Lancaster, 1993) is short for Vexations and refers to the short chorale written by Eric Satie in 1893 and popularized by John Cage in the early sixties. I was pleased to be able to maintain the etheral quality of this beautiful piece while contributing something more to its dreamlife. "With great immobility" in Rosicrucian induced hallucination, I see Mr. Satie taking a lobster for a sunday stroll in the park near his home in the outskirts of Paris.

2005-08-14T18:19:00.000-07:00

Here is a picture that Tim Perkis my good friend, and fellow Hubster, took while we were in Berlin this June. It was amazing how the shaft of light mapped to the end of the "c" of the grafitti. We were at the new Tesla center at was once the Podewil. Carsten Seiffarth the curator and producer there, had seen us at DEAF 2005 in Rotterdam in November. You can see a video of our performance there here. The Hub is performing at the San Francisco Electronic Music festival next week.

2005-08-14T17:57:00.000-07:00

I am sitting here watching "Cat in the Hat". It did get mixed reviews and I am seeing why. Mike Meyers has been so brilliant in so many other films. Any way I called this blog "Orchestrate Clang Mass" is the anagram of my full name Scot Gresham-Lancaster. By rearranging the letters you get this result. Pretty amazing really. Any way as part of my ongoing struggle to figure the best or at least expensive method to podcast. If you are interested in alternatives I have been experimenting with Pivot. I have made a blog for our non-profit ORIMA at http://o-art.org/weblog . I will be back later with some more.