So as you may know from some of my previous posts I’ve been doing lots of Max/MSP programming, moving my previously hardware-centric performance setup into the laptop.

I recently put out the v05 version of my Party Van software, and it is looking/sounding great if I don’t say so myself.

Here’s a performance video using solo snare + electronics:

Here’s what the latest version looks like:

And a full walkthrough/demo of the patch/GUI:

And about what it is:

Description and Overview

The Party Van is a live sampling and performance instrument built using Max/MSP. It was programmed around the Monome 64 and Arc 2 controllers but includes mapping for an iPad running TouchOSC (custom layout included) as well as the Keith McMillen Softstep foot controller. Additionally, the patch has MIDI learn functionality built in, so every parameter can be mapped to any MIDI controller.

Click here to find out more about the patch and to download the patch/instructions/etc..

So I’m doing a solo (drums+electronics) tour across the UK hitting up a bunch of classy cities (details below).

In addition to that, my post-jazz trio, A Greater Horror, is playing the Manchester Jazz festival, as well as releasing our debut EP at the festival.

Speaking of festivals, there’s also the Chorlton Art’s festival, and BEAM festival gig dates in the mix.

Speaking of in the mix (erm, kind of stretching it eh?), my string quartet + computer hard drive piece (It’s Made From Pieces Of From Pieces Of My Skin) should hopefully be premiered by the Distractfold ensemble in a couple of months too, with Angela Guyton making a documentary about the piece/performance.

In addition to the AGH EP release, I’m back in the studio with PA Tremblay to record a follow up to our last CD. Also have some studio time booked with Phil Marks, for a smoking drum duo we’ve been working on, and some more studio time with Richard Knight for a peculiar guitar+no-input mixer thing we’ve been kicking around.

All in all, some rather busy next couple of months. Do stop by some of the gigs and see the new setup/instruments in action.

5 May 2012 – Birmingham – Solo Drums+Electronics
9 May 2012 – Sheffield – Solo Drums+Electronics
10 May 2012 – Manchester – Solo Drums+Electronics
22 May 2012 – Manchester – The Noise Upstairs Ensemble
23 May 2012 – Chorlton – Solo Electronics
25 May 2012 – Manchester – Takahashi’s Shellfish Concern
30 May 2012 – Kent – Solo Drums+Electronics
6 June 2012 – Leeds – Takahashi’s Shellfish Concern
22 June 2012 – Manchester – Drums with PA Tremblay
24 June 2012 – London – Solo Drums+Electronics
29 June 2012 – Manchester – The Noise Upstairs Ensemble
7 July 2012 – Sheffield – Drums with Federico Reuben
12 July 2012 – Manchester – Drums with Federico Reuben
14 July 2012 – Manchester – A Greater Horror
26 July 2012 – Huddersfield – Solo Drums+Electronics

Finished a new piece a couple of days ago. This one was quite difficult as it required me to work in a very different way than I normally compose.

First, here is the piece:

I highly recommend downloading and listening to the uncompressed .wav file as this type of noisy audio doesn’t compress well. (click here to download the .wav file)

It was a ‘commission’ style assignment for one of my modules in my MA and it had certain stipulations. The main ones were that it needed to be for fixed media, it needed to include field recordings, and finally, it needed to be ‘about Manchester’. Those last two were the doozies.

After some conceptual wrestling I decided to go with Alan Turing as my point of departure and using a process similar to how I generated source material for my last piece (It’s Made From Pieces Of From Pieces Of My Skin – for string quartet and computer hard drives) I generated raw ‘data file’ sounding source material. Whereas in my string quartet I then orchestrated that material for string quartet, this time I used the actual audio.

I’ve also been wanting to mess around with mp3 compression, as a compositional resource, for some time now. With some help from Alex Harker and Dominic Thibault I created a tool for dynamically and variably mp3-ifying audio. We hear this sound all the time, but usually very subtly. I wanted to hear it not so subtly. It’s a very interesting and unique sound in that it becomes very gritty and lo-fi sounding, but in a very ‘smashed’ kind of way, different from the clear/clanginess you get from standard lo-fi effects (via bit crushing and sample rate reduction). I’ve incorporated this mp3-ification algorithm into the (as of yet unreleased) next update to The Party Van Max/MSP patch.

I’m currently thinking of putting together an EP of fixed media pieces when I finish my MA as I now have 3 of these pieces, which don’t really fit in with much of my oeuvre. (You can hear & read about the other pieces here).

Finally here are the program notes which explain more about the piece and process:

A Machine (2012) 4:58
by Rodrigo Constanzo

Alan Turing, and his work as a cryptanalyst and pioneering computer scientist, was the thematic inspiration for A Machine. Using the idea of encryption and decryption as a starting point, I collected files relating to Alan Turing that ranged from academic papers and personal letters, to photographs and biographical texts. The files were processed in a number of ways, including optical character recognition and en-masse concatenation. This was done in order to make them suitable for sonification–the process by which the data within the files was converted in to audio.

Additionally, some software tools were developed to dynamically and variably compress audio, using psychoacoustic analysis in much the same way mp3 compression works. The compression was used as a processing/sculpting effect as well as a structural and form bearing mechanism.

The use of field recordings is minimal, with the field recordings being used primarily to frame the electronic sounds. They provide a reference point from our reality for the rest of the work to juxtapose against.

The Chocolate Grinder is a software emulation of a skipping/glitchy CD player.

It sounds like this:

And looks like this:

It’s my first app for the Monome Arc.

Full description of the app:

The Chocolate Grinder is a software emulation of a skipping/glitchy CD player.
You can record (or drop a waveform) into a buffer and then define a playback/glitch window.

It uses authentic skip/glitch samples at every jump point along with weighted randomness of sample choice to emulate several makes/eras of CD players.

The seek/fastforward is also faithfully recreated.

It’s also shown up on the web in a couple of places, which is nice. Here it is:

http://thecreatorsproject.com/blog/rodrigo-constanzo-grinds-chocolate-and-sound-with-monome-arc-2

http://m.matrixsynth.com/2012/02/chocolate-grinder-arc-app.html

http://cycling74.com/project/the-chocolate-grinder/

http://cycling74.com/2012/02/21/collaboration-in-the-forum/

And now for a bit of background on the app/sounds.

I’ve been doing lots of programming in the last few months. It’s all building towards The Party Van, an all-in-one Max/MSP performance patch. Along the way I also made the Monolase, an 8-bit modulated delay/sampler based on the ciat-lonbarde Cocolase. The Chocolate Grinder is the latest step in that ongoing process.

I’ve been fascinated by the sounds of skipping CDs for years, having first heard the music of Yasunao Tone, and later the amazing Nic Collins. Even before hearing Nic Collins pieces which are similar in approach I had done some piano improvisation + skipping CD of piano music on my first CD, The Beatles White Album. On that CD I have two versions of a Bach Prelude, which I set about to learn in the ‘traditional way’ so that I would be able to follow the skipping CD wherever it went.

It sounds like this:

At the time I had not yet learned to how to modify a CD player via Nic Collin’s ‘unmuting the pause’ technique, so I did it by burning several CDs full of the Bach piece (Glenn Gould‘s inspiring performance) then scratching/modifying/preparing the playing surface of the CD. I also used a couple of different CD players, one desktop/component style player, and one portable CD player. The behaviour of this setup was temperamental at best so I had to do hours worth of takes before I got something usable (the CD player would often just stop/reset when it would start skipping). Because of the erratic nature of this kind of skipping you get some very nice shifts and movement with the skipping material (as opposed to the more controlled kind of skipping you get with the ‘unmuting’ approach).

For my app I tried to have it be controllable in terms of interface/playability but for the sounds/behaviour to be a bit unpredictable. As mentioned above it uses actual samples of CD skips, along with some synthetic attack modification, so you get an endless variety of sounds when it hiccups. I also used some randomization in the level of the skip, and more importantly a couple of ‘behind the scenes’ things that happen every time you load the app. Each ‘CD module’ takes on a character when loaded. This is done by using a weighted randomization of what samples to play (the weighting is generated by another weighted random procedure at startup). I found that different CD players and CDs tended to lean towards certain types of sounds, so I wanted my app to be able to recreate that. In addition the rate/sound of the fastforwarding is also slightly variable on each startup. Those two things aren’t controllable by the user (unless they edit the patch’s guts). The final element of this ‘behaviour modelling’ is the ‘jitter’ control. This is user controllable and can add a subtle (or not so subtle) variation in when the glitches come back. It is visually clear what’s happening in the GUI, whereas on the Arc that kind of movement was confusing looking, so you see a fixed window on the Arc regardless of the jitter setting.

In the end I’m very satisfied with the sound and playability of this app, and it’s nice to see other people enjoying it.

Below is the patch if you want to download and use it. It requires Max6 (or the free runtime version) and the Alex Harker externals which can be downloaded from his webpage. Alex Harker was also very helpful in the creation of the patch (creating the gen playback module).

Click here to download the patch.

New project.
A Greater Horror
It’s a trio of piano, electric (fretless) bass, and drums.
Sort of post-jazz meets math-rock meets contemporary classical meets electronics.

http://www.agreaterhorror.com

A Greater Horror – Arms Wasted On A Weak Will by Rodrigo Constanzo
A Greater Horror – Darii’s Martyrdom by Rodrigo Constanzo

So a few months ago I experienced a big paradigm shift. I had been a lofi/hardware guy for many years, but when planning my next big change in hardware, I decided it would be easier to just built it in Max/MSP instead. So I started doing that.

I made this post back in September with the first module of what would become the setup I’m working on at the moment.

Well I’ve been hard at work since then!

Add to that the fact that I finally got a Monome last week, and you have somewhat functional patch/setup going.

The patch is called “The Party Van” in honor of my trusty WTPA, and The Party Bus which I built around it.

Here’s a quick video demo of some of the stuff it can do. (it can do more than what’s in the video):

Here is a more thorough look at it, but in a less musical manner.

It still has some stuff to add, but at the moment it is this:

All in one setup incorporating many different modules/effects. For monome64 (and soon arc2).

Features: 2 sample/loopers with overdub, halfspeed, and reverse functionality. Each with a sample slicer/dicer, granulator, pattern recorder, and MLR style buttons/display. Each looper can be put into ‘lofi’ mode to simulate the WTPA 8-bit sampler that inspired each module.

A series of realtime effects (stutter, pitch shift, lofi, filter, dirt, reverb, and chopper).

There is also a “reminder” row that circularly records all incoming audio and lets you play back any of it up to 10minutes in the past. (Great for real time sampling when you missed something awesome).

There is no quantization. And all the modules play really nicely together. You can start recording a loop while in slicing mode, or switch between grain/normal and start where you left off, or record every knob wiggle in the pattern recorder, or reverse while creating your original loop etc…

This patch is an ongoing project for me. It is currently in an alpha state as far as what I want, but each module is tested and working pretty solidly.

Things that will get added: -Concatenative synthesis (realtime grain replacement of incoming audio with audio from the buffers) -Arc2 functionality. Arc stuff everywhere!

Click here to download the patch and instructions.

Finally finished a new string quartet. It is called “It’s Made From Pieces Of From Of Pieces Of My Skin” and it is for string quartet and four computer hard drives.

I’ve been working with computer hard drives for a while (with the help of Richard Knight) and when it came time to write a new string quartet I decided to incorporate the hard drives. I’ve not heard it all put together, but the texture of ‘acoustic’ hard drives and strings I can imagine to be real nice fit.

This is also the first through-written piece that I’ve done in around 5 years. I’ve written a lot of improv stuff, or open stuff, or band stuff since then (most of the stuff for the trio I have with Mauricio Pauly and Alex Tod is through-written, but with open sections). That was a big hurdle to get over for me. I’ve grown a ton as a musician and performer in that time, but hadn’t composed (this type of stuff), so negotiating that space took some gusto.

About the piece itself. In addition to working with hard drives I’ve also been getting into embedding deeper conceptual stuff into my music, and this piece is no exception. From the program notes:

It’s Made From Pieces Of From Pieces Of My Skin is a string quartet about media, technology, and string quartets, made using media, technology, and string quartets. Nearly all of the musical material in the piece comes from sonified data files related to Crumb’s Black Angels and Bartok’s Quartets (primarily the 2nd one). A computer script would take text, image, video, as well as many other file types and convert them into audio files. These audio files were then orchestrated for string quartet and computer hard drives and make up most of the piece.

The piece is supposed to be workshopped by the Danel quartet in January, but that may or may not happen (there is a very unpleasant man between me, and that workshop happening….and I’ll leave it at that).  Barring that, it might get played by the Distractfold Ensemble as they might be chubbing their string section up to a quartet. We will see.

Without further adieu:

As you may or may not know, I’m a bit of a hardware nut. Specifically lo-fi hardware. Most of my music and setup has revolved around lo-fi/DIY hardware for years now.

I used to use a laptop, along with analog/lo-fi hardware before that but have since stopped using a laptop (in performance) altogether. I just love the feel/sound of gritty electronics.

When writing this paper for the ICMC earlier this year I got to thinking and brainstorming about the next iteration of my hardware hub, The Party Bus. The plan was to incorporate live (acoustic) sampling, trigger-based control, and pseudo-ghetto concat synthesis. It was an ambitious plan and I had most of the planning worked out. When it got around to finally start building it I realized that it would be faster if I just build it in Max (which I hadn’t touched in a couple of years) rather than in Arduino.

By this point I had toyed with the idea of adding a laptop back into my setup but given the complexity of it, I didn’t want that extra layer. I was intrigued by the headless/screenless Mac Mini setup I saw several people use while I was at STEIM earlier this year. After doing a bit of research and soul searching, I decided to rebuild my setup in Max and have it eventually live in a headless Mac Mini. Basically ‘black boxed’. Which is, basically, I was planning on building, except in line code.

SO,

I started building stuff a couple of weeks ago. It has been very slow going as I haven’t coded in max for about 3 years now and my last creations weren’t anything terribly complex. Rather, they didn’t involve live audio, which is central to what I want to do now (and what I wanted to do then really). I also hadn’t used Max5 much either…. I quit right when it was about to come out.

What I want to do is pretty complex so I’m, sensibly, tackling it one step at a time. The main bit will consist of a dynamic/overdub/varispeed looper with quirky effects like slicing (the patch below) and granularization etc… It’s very much inspired by the WTPA Sampler which made up my Party Bus system. The actual looping/overdub/varispeed part is still getting some kinks worked out, but this part is done.

It’s setup so it will be an object I can drop into the bigger whole once everything else is done. The stuff on the left is generic/varispeed groove~ playback stuff. The extra bits just handle the manipulations coming out of the slicer. At the moment it’s not setup for live input as that will be a different module. So here you can load a sample and go to town on it.

What does it do?

You can jump around a sample at a variable, steady rate (between 1sec and 10ms).
You can jump around a sample at a variable, random rate.
You can reverse some of the ‘slices’ randomly.
You can add a triggered envelope to each ‘slice’ (the size of which adapts to speed).
You can manually shorten the triggered envelope decay.
You can alter the sample start and end point with this effecting the window for randomizations mentioned above. It also reverses the sample if you make the start point later than the end point.

And finally most of the above is effected by the overall speed/pitch of the sample playback. So if you slow down the sample, all of the slicing timing moves with it (as if you’re slowing down a tape/turntable), rather than the slicing being a separate effect sitting on top.

So without further adieu.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE MAX PATCH

So I’ve been working with what I call the Sidrassi-Tom for just over two years now. It’s gone through several revisions over the years including how the electronics/contactmics are setup, to switching a new drum, to most recently incorporating a whole new circuit and speakers.

Here is the dedicated page with info/pictures/video on the current (and older version of the Sidrassi-Tom).

I ran into several snags along the way, but in the end I’m very happy with the build.

The v3 of the Sidrassi-Tom also has the beginnings of an epic WTPA (8-bit sampler/looper) and Arduino-based gesture/trigger controlled that will be able to do live sampling/granulizing/etc.. all without a laptop…

By beginnings I mean I’ve incorporated the hardware side of this next project into the drum in the form of a foam drum trigger (as viewable in the pictures below).

Here is a video of what it looks/sounds like:

So I started my MA in Electro-Acoustic Composition last September and the University of Manchester and have just handed in my course work for this term. This officially completes my first year (doing it part-time) of the degree.

During this year I’ve really tried to embrace the academic thing, and put my all into everything I was doing.

In the first term I wrote two long (4k words each) papers, one on “Electronic Virtuosity in the Context of Electro-Acoustic Improvisation” and the other one being an analysis of friend and collaborator, Pierre Alexandre Tremblay’s epic drum+electronics piece “La Rage”. Both came out well, which was a great relief as my academic writing is pretty shitty with the last paper I wrote previous to these papers was a 600 word essay that I got a “C” on…

During that term it was announced that the ICMC (International Computer Music Conference) would be held in Huddersfield this year. I decided to write and submit a paper, and some music, which was painful to take on as the deadline fell a couple of days before my academic paper deadline.

I wrote a paper on my evolving drum+electronics setup entitled “Towards the Beat of a Different Drummer : A Journey into the Loss of Fidelity in Drums and Electronics”. It was accepted in the end, but as a poster length paper, meaning that I had to cut the eight page paper down to four pages. There were lots of pictures/diagrams so after removing that and trimming some footnotes, I only needed to cut out a paragraph or two to make it fit.

Here is the full length paper version of the paper:

The published version, as mentioned, is a bit shorter and will be available as part of the ICMC2011 published proceedings.

So that was last term. This term, in addition to going to STEIM, I wrote two ‘fixed media’ pieces. Both etudes with themes of “Time” and “Space”. I am very proud of the of both of the pieces and will use them in future releases (with real titles). Going into it I didn’t want to make “throw away” music for the etudes, I wanted to make music that I could stand by, that explored the criteria given.

I began working on my time etude, now called “Where The Skin Meets The Bone”, last term, but in an unfortunate turn of events, lost all of my work (on paper at the time). It wasn’t too big a deal as I had scanned some of the notes, but it did suck the wind out of my motivation. Luckily it wasn’t due until this term. The approach I took regarding the time etude, was to form an observable disjunction in time between two sets of drums with electronics. The two exist in the same space, so they function as a duo, but time starts and stops independently for each. This is achieved by “freezing” time by means of acoustic and electronic extensions.

“Where The Skin Meets The Bone”

The space etude, now called “Six Motherfucking Pitches”, is a piece I’ve been wanting to work on for a long time. The premise is that the piece begins with a massive cluster that slowly dissipates over time. In preparation for the piece I recorded, edited, and catalogued 481 different pitches on dozens of different instruments totaling over 48 hours of audio. The piece is divided into six different sections, accented by a reorchestration of the remaining pitches. The structure is such that the first four sections grow increasingly shorter with the fifth section being as long as the first and sharing the same timing in terms of frequency decay and space generation. The final section explores the space and timbre of the remaining six pitches.

“Six Motherfucking Pitches”

Special thanks to all the performers who chipped in pitches for this one:
Alex Farha
Anton Hunter
Richard Knight
Abigail Sanders
Rod Skipp
Mauricio Pauly
Ramsey Janini
Hervé Perez
Keith Jafrate
James Adolpho
Jack Adler-Mckean
Nikki Hicks
Paul Strachan
Angela Guyton
Ben Cottrell
Graham South
Robin Eggers
Sonia Paço-Rocchia
Laurence Boot
Tom Owen
Rodrigo Constanzo

I recently spent a week and a half at STEIM and it was amazing. This is the blog I posted for their project blog.

———————–

I’ve known about STEIM, in one way or another, for almost 10 years now. While living in Miami (currently in the UK), it existed as a faraway place where amazing, almost magical, things happened.
After moving to the UK I always had, in the back of my head, a thought that I would go and see it in person. After starting my MA (in Electroacoustic Composition at the University of Manchester) I decided to apply for an orientation workshop.
Now backing it up a bit. Zoom and enhance. Zoom and enhance.

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

I’m a performer, improviser, and composer, likely in that order. I’m also an instrument building and modifier.
What I most often do is improvise using my drums+electronics setup. It looks like this:

I built and/or modified nearly everything on that drum set (down to the drums themselves), including all the electronics laying around it.
My approach to electronics, in general, is very DIY/lo-fi. I haven’t used a laptop in live performance in over three years, and I only did it for a couple of months then anyways. Most of what I do is hardware based. Even now that I’m getting into sensors, code, and microcontrollers, it is leaning towards self-standing, embedded solutions (ie Aruduino, iOS, etc…).
So what does it sound like?
Here is an short track from an improvisation-based CD I did with brilliant composer/performer Pierre Alexandre Tremblay:
Glitch House Beat (200bpm)

It also looks like this:
GEMDays 2010 Performance

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Ok, back to STEIM.
Being that I build instruments and such already, I have a few ideas for things that might be worth applying for a residency for. The two main ideas are as follows:
1 – An accelerometer and gyroscope based wireless sensor for attaching to the wrists of a live painter.
2 – A computer hard-disk ‘percussion’ instrument that is part automaton.

Now for some details. The first one is intended for a cross-disciplinary improvisation-based group I have, called Takahashi’s Shellfish Concern.
It looks like this:

And sounds/looks like this:
TSC @ The Noise Upstairs

The manner in which we, more recently, perform is that there are contact mics placed on the back of the canvas, and the two musicians (Anton Hunter and myself) sample/process the sounds of the brushes/palette knives on the canvas. Where the sensors come in is that they would be controlling a system (max/MSP) that samples/processes the sounds she makes. In effect making the sounds from the video linked above a self-standing instrument. This will allow Anton and myself to go back to using more ‘traditional’ (and I use that term VERY loosely) instruments.
My original plan was to use gutted/adapted wiimotes for this project. More specifically wiimotes with wii motion plus built in as the gryos would give much more accurate tilt/rotation readings. I still plan on doing that for the development of the software, but after speaking to nearly everyone here at STEIM, it’s clear that bluetooth is not the best solution for wireless performance. Lots of connectivity type issues that I’d rather avoid. I think the final hardware version will be something based on an accel/gyro/arduino board with the wireless part being XBee based.
Now this project seems right up STEIM’s alley in terms of sensor/wireless/art/interaction etc.. but it also falls in an area just outside of what I can manage on my own. And particularly in terms of software (more on this below) I think it would be better to just develop/build it on my own and maybe apply for a residency to refine it later on.

Now the second idea, the hard-disk clicking one. This is what I think I will apply for a residency for as it involves things that are outside of my understanding quite a bit, and fit in with what STEIM does, but in a different way. The current/rough idea is that it would contain four ‘open face’ computer hard drives (very old/loud ones) that would be mounted on a wooden/resonant enclosure. Below that would be several foam drum-pads. When tapping one of the pads, the corresponding hard drive would start a clacking pattern that would die away. Each hard drive would have a different pattern it went through and/or all would cycle through different patterns. I’m also thinking of using the platters themselves as encoders and having contact mics on them to amplify/process the sound later on.
The kicker is that I want it to be self-standing. As in, no computer. Due to the multi-instrumental approach I have at my drumset (see picture below) adding a laptop to the system would be prohibitively complicated, AND it would be nice for it to be a self contained system.

So those are two ideas that spending time at STEIM has really gotten me thinking about. Well what about the time itself?
The workshop/talks have been great. Getting demonstrations of JunXion/LiSa were very handy, as well as learning about the history of STEIM. For me the fun started on day three (or was it four?). Taku’s talk on inventing instruments, as well as Kristina Anderson’s interaction design talk were my favorites. That conceptual approach to the instruments/interfaces is something that resonates with me. More of my recent builds have been interface adaptations, like the Electric-Whisks.

How I interface with my instruments is a big concern in a mixed instrument like mine. The interface choices I make have to account for being an instrumentalist at the same time. I’m not a ‘controllerist’ in any way.
In addition to drums, I play piano/guitar and similar instruments (piano is actually my first instrument starting at 4years old and studying it through university). This instrumental extension is something that poses unique interface problems. I’ve never been a big fan of sensors for sensors sake in that music doesn’t become more exciting if you throw a sensor glove on it. I believe the music is what’s exciting. I guess this is a tangent/rant that could live elsewhere.

What about the STEIM hardware/software?
Hardware wise the Arduino, and similar boards, really changed the game. Most of what I saw here, instrument wise, was based on Arduinos and old PowerPC Mac Mini’s (interestingly enough). They do seem to be making some interesting developments in terms of XBee/wireless type solutions. I’m curious to see if that manifests itself commercially.
Software wise it’s a bit weird. LiSa, the longstanding staple of STEIM software feels really limited to me. Granted, it does what it does well, and I LOVE live sampling. For me the limitation comes in in terms of MIDI resolution. I HATE the sound of 127 steps in gestures. That step-step-step sound when doing rapid and/or long changes kills it for me. The fact that there is no easy way to incorporate DSP into the equation is another bummer. I’m half tempted to learn LiSa and develop a setup with it, but knowing that there is a roof, as it were, isn’t appealing. I’ve done some max/MSP stuff in the past, and although I can’t make a LiSa in Max, it might be worth the work/effort building it in there as theres no ‘roof’. There is also a more practical limitation in that LiSa runs in rosetta, which is supposed to be gone from the next OS X (10.7) update. Yikes!

So in summation. STEIM is an amazing place. Vibrant with energy, history, and brilliant people. It’s hard not to get inspired here. And inspired I am. There are practical manifestations of this (the instrument ideas above) but more importantly there is a deeper, conceptual inspiration in terms of electronic music and interfaces.

I’m very excited to release “16 Figures”, a improv trio CD I recorded last year with Ray Evanoff and Iain Harrison. After recording Ray’s duo ATEMNT for The Noise Upstairs records last year I proposed an improv project to Ray, which quickly turned into a trio with Iain on sax. The original idea was to have lots of short improv pieces, but after rehearsing and discussing ideas, we scrapped the short pieces idea and just left it completely open. I sort of glazed over what the actual idea was from the start for the sake of everyone involved, but let me just say that it involved a movie with Vin Diesel….

On the recording I play Namasitar and Old Mr. Grassi (abbreviated to “strings and electronics”), Ray Evanoff plays amplified cymbal, and Iain Harrison plays alto saxophone.

The music is very….interesting. There’s something about the sound of electronics+cymbal scrapes+saxophone that is very visceral and almost uncomfortable.

Here is the official blurb:

Rodrigo Constanzo (amplified strings & electronics), Ray Evanoff (amplified cymbal), and Iain Harrison (saxophone) are about as diverse a trio of musicians as could be. With a collective background ranging from DIY instrument building to Brazilian music to big band, the three bring a lot to bear on the act of making music. This eclectic range of musical influences and experiences gives rise to improvisations which highlight both the unavoidable conflicts and the common ground which emerge as a result of their distinct backgrounds and outlooks. This diversity is acutely documented in their forthcoming album, 16 Figures, which features companion artwork produced specifically for the occasion by Angela Guyton. All three musicians, plus the artist, are currently based in the north of England.

Here is the bandcamp widget:

You can buy CD which comes in a hand stamped cardboard sleeve with artwork by Angela Guyton for £6 here.

Here are some pictures from the recording session.

After meeting and playing with Hervé Perez back when The Noise Upstairs’ Sheffield night started in early 2010 we got to talking about doing a recording together. It took a bit to work out the logistics of when/where and all that, but we finally got in the studio and recorded a doozy.

I played toy piano, Specto, Party Bus, Sidrassi, modified CD-player (ala Nic Collins), iPad (using Grid, Curtis and TOPLAPapp), Namasitar, and some misc percussion.

Hervé played soprano saxophone.

In the process of editing/listening/mixing at the moment, but hopefully a release will follow later this year along with some other exciting things.

Here are some pictures from the recording session.

I enjoy doing remixes. It’s not often I have an opportunity to do so as I don’t do traditional remixes (adding phat beats and the like) nor do I know many musicians who seek remixes.

When I do a remix I try to approach each differently, and try to re-imagine the song.

Here are a couple remixes I’ve done with some info on what I did.

The first I did for cottrell/findlay/hunter and Concrete Moniker.

They were putting out an album of trio improvisations and had asked other musicians on the label to do remixes of tracks.
I picked the track “C” as it was really sparse and had the performers playing at different times.

I knew going into it that I wanted to radically transform the track into something else.
I also basically ‘improvised’ the remix as from the time I got the email with the download link to the stems to do the remix, to the time I uploaded the completed track back to the label took exactly one hour. That’s it.

Here is my remix:

Here is the original:

More recently I was asked by Beats & Pieces Big Band to do a remix for a re-release of their, then sold-out, EP.
I was stumped as to what to do for months. It was only when the deadline came looming around that I decided I actually had to DO something.
In not wanting to do a plain remix, I decided to interpret “remix” differently, and basically re-recorded the song.
I chose to use a male vocalist to recontextualize the lyrics, and changed around the key and time signatures a bit.
The mood is still there but, I think, amplified.

I recorded everything myself (including the singing) as the point of reference, then called in a couple singers to lay down the final tracks. Evan Wilson and Holly Carter, both from one of my old bands supplied vocals for the track.

Here is my remix:

And the original:

I hate social networking sites.

I find them really boring and artificial. Fake interactions between fake friends.

HOWEVER, with how popular these sites are becoming, as an artist, it’s important to be involved, and available with the technology. The only reason I’ve had a Facebook (the worst of these sites as far as I’m concerned) is for that very reason. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), people don’t go onto Facebook to check for music, much less experimental music.

Today I finally broke down and signed up for Twitter. The other half of the social networking chimera.
And with that, I linked up as many of my social networking sites as I could, and most importantly, I linked my RSS feed to them as well. So when I add actual interesting news (unlike this post), it will go out there, to the places on the web, where I daren’t go.

I’ve updated the links section on my webpage to reflect the slew of of sites I’ve got things on, but here they are.
Marvel at their redundance!

http://www.myspace.com/rodrigoconstanzo
http://www.youtube.com/kriista
http://rodrigoconstanzo.bandcamp.com/
http://twitter.com/r_constanzo
http://soundcloud.com/rodrigoconstanzo
http://vimeo.com/rodrigoconstanzo
http://www.last.fm/music/Rodrigo+Constanzo

So many many exciting things in the works. I will list some of them, in no particular order.

A trio record with Ray Evanoff (of Atemnt) and Iain Harrison that has been recorded and is in the process of being mixed.
A solo Drum/Keyboard improv record that will be called “P-P-P-Piano, P-P-Percussion”. Some recording done.
A solo album filled with a shmorgishborg of stuff called “Constantly Rodrigo”.
A duo album with Richard Knight on no-input mixer. We are in rehearsals at the moment.
A drum compilation album I was invited to play on. Other performers include Chris Corsano, Glenn Kotch, and Greg Saunier.

After joining The Noise Upstairs last year, Anton and I put a lot of things in motion to help The Noise Upstairs grow and improve. Among them have been excellent workshops, podcasts, and now a new Sheffield Noise Upstairs, but one of the biggest has been The Noise Upstairs Records. We just released our third CD by the amazing Huddersfield duo Atement (formerly Gift of Life, which performed back in November last year). We decided it was finally time to make a big deal about it so we had a label launch night party.

We had a great performance of John Zorn’s COBRA by workshop participants, then I did a solo set, with Atemnt closing out the night.

Below are some pictures and videos from the night.

After speaking at the Max/MSP Symposium at last years GEMDays Festival, PA Tremblay mentioned that he’s going to try to get me to perform at this years festival. One year later, it came to pass. I shared the night with Phil Archer. We were both interviewed before the concert, which was wonderful to hear how similar our paths had been, even though the results were rather different (we were both still playing on the ‘circuit-bending’ night).

Click here to download/hear the interview.

The performance went great, I felt. It was my first gig with my new drum setup. I modified a 16” floor tom into a nice little jungle bass drum. It sounds massive and boomy. Mmm mmm. I also bought a decent 12” Sonor rack tom, which I converted into a floor tom, along with piezos so it would work as a Sidrassi-Tom. It was also my first gig with my completed Party Bus mixer/8-bit looper/sampler.

Below are some pictures and a video of the performance.

So like, one of my bands, Deaf To Van Gogh’s Ear is opening up for Xiu Xiu next month (February 23rd). This is super, absolutely, truly, amazing. It’s the second time we’ve opened up for someone ‘starstruck-able’, the first time being when we opened up for Extra Life last year.

Awesome.

Finally finished building this little box. It’s a Where’s The Party At 8-bit Bendable Sampler and a buffered 4 to 1 mixer, all in one. It took months to finish, mainly due to problems discovered during my poorly functioning first build. I had to solve clock bleed, a noisy mixer, and other tasty details.

Click here to find out more about The Party Bus.