12/12/12/13

Continuing with the patch I've been using lately - the core of which is the 266 and a single 259 - while directing the experiment toward including "movements" (7, in this instance) within a single self-playing recording:



And from Saturday - two takes of the same Self-Playing sequence (or rather, with two patch cables added for the slower, second take). This experiment deviates from a standard sequence with nested loops through the use of second external clock source under the influence of random values also advancing the 250e. Some reverb added in protools:

4-H Club (in response to a drawing)

Golden Blizzard - an artist collective of which I am a member - was recently selected to participate in More Mergers & Acquisitions on display December 10, 2009 - February 14, 2010 at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. Seeing that the collective has something of a history of self-celebration and operates at times like a recirculating delay line overdriven with feedback, we decided to each reinterpret a single arbitrary, older piece of work for the show.


Golden Blizzard
4-H Club, 2006
22 x 30 inches

Although I had originally planned on a different approach, in the end I chose to respond by recording a piece with the Buchla and reformat one of the solid state audio players I created for the most recent Golden Blizzard show (seen here). Below is a photograph of the finished player installed in the gallery:


Jason R. Butcher
4-H Club, 2009

And of course, the track itself - All Buchla 200, with processing/editing by way of ProTools:



The show opens December 10, 8-10PM.
Although I've spoiled the surprise as to my own work - I'm sure my Blizzmates' work will amaze and stimulate you.

11.27.09 Self-Playing Recordings

I spent most of the day leading up to the evening performance with Don Hassler at Railroad Earth (excerpted here) developing a Self-Playing patch that could be deviated from for the show. Most notable between these two recordings, the performance excerpt, and "A Difficult Embouchure" (recorded two days later) are changes to control of the Lopass Gate and function generator patching. My goal with each of these patches, was to avoid the easiest solution - some method of randomly addressing 250e stages. In these 11.27 recordings, a pair of function generators controlled aspects of the 266, which were fed back to the 281, as well as to the 259s. I scaled back further for "Embouchure" which began as an experiment to see with how few cables I could achieve a sufficiently interesting Self-Playing structure - but instead led to the elimination the function generators and gating altogether, instead using a rapidly changing fluctuating random voltage to pulse the quantized and distributed sections of the 266 patched to a single 259.

The video, of a descent in the elevator of Smith Tower in Seattle, seemed to be a fitting match and a fun way to deliver a Self-Playing track. Seeing that Self-Playing work is relatively valueless in the time domain, the counting down of the floors here seemed to me to function nicely in place of any discernible dynamic in the overall recording. Thus you know - at least approximately - when you may expect it to end.