I Did Too!

BobLike by DarwinGrosse

I wasn't kidding about being inspired by Bob Ostertag's Motormouth album - mainly because it was clear that he remembered to hit record! Here's something I popped off this morning in the style of his work, using my 5U-modular instead of a Buchla.

Enjoy! Or not!

[ddg]

Press Record!

Bob Ostertag produced another nice little album, available freely, that shows the value of hitting record when you are working on a modular system. This album, called Motormouth, was apparently created when a friend left a Buchla system with him while on vacation.

It's a wonderful bit of work, and worthy of a listen - or three. Thanks to Gregory for turning me onto this.

[ddg]

Morton Today

I was happy to trip over this video in a posting to the dotcom mail list. A great piece of history, and some great memories of "the day".

[ddg]

A view from a gig

I just got back from Wisconsin which was filled with many un-fun things. But one of the Very Good Things was getting to do a live radio broadcast with Gregory and Tom. This is the audio section of the group that played at the Spark Festival, and I was hoping that we could do something nice again.

Doing these sorts of gigs is really difficult: you really need to know your instrument, and you have to be confident in being able to provide something useful to the group. I played Enhanced Modular (modular sound generation, laptop as idiosyncratic effects processor), Gregory played his laptop super-patch, and Tom pulled the whole thing together with a little percussionistic temporal glue.



It went off beautifully; we put out about a hour of live work, with several sections that naturally developed without speaking (there was a live mic for the percussion, so we couldn't really talk). I took a more active role in this one, doing a lot of low-end work with the modular. Gregory did more on the high end, and we all slotted together very well.

I can't wait to work with these guys again.

[ddg]

The All-Seeing Eye

An awful lot of the work I've been doing lately has been related to a single piece of gear. And it's not the modular - it's the XBOX 360 Kinect. This little device is the perfect tool for all sorts of sketchy computer vision work, and it is cheap as sin for what it does. I've been using Jean-Marc Pelletier's jit.freenect.grab object (in combination with his cv.jit tools) to do some remarkable depth and location tracking. You'll probably see some of it in your neighborhood right soon.

For anyone that has written off Microsoft, you just have to work with this device - and realize that it has sold more $150 units than McDonalds has sold Big Macs over the same period of time. A stunning piece of work!

[ddg]