SPECIAL EVENT – CHATFIELD STATE PARK STELLAR LOUNGE on Thursday, July 11th from 9:30 PM to 11:30 PM (Weather Permitting) at the RC Airport.
I’m super excited to announce that I am partnering with Chatfield State Park and Colorado Parks & Wildlife for a night of stargazing with telescopes, where live music meets the cosmos at the Stellar Lounge. Rocky Mountain Synthesizer Meet is providing live space music provided by yours truly.
Here are some details on this event and a deep dive into some behind-the-scenes work that goes into preparing for a long-form improv of this nature.
MORE DETAILS AND RSVP HERE
Event is subject to weather so please make sure yo read details at Details and RSVP here at https://www.tickettailor.com/events/rockymountainsynth/1300176 to stay in the loop on this one.
⚠️ PARK PASS REQUIRED
The event is FREE, but attendees are required to have a State Park Day Pass which is $10 per car. You can pay at the gate or buy a pass online. More info on passes and links to buy online here https://cpw.state.co.us/buyapply/Pages/ParksPassInfo.aspx.
BEHIND-THE-SCENES ARTIST NOTES
Long-Form Improvised “Off-Grid” Set
I’ll be performing original improvised long-form ambient musical pieces along the lines of my ambient works at the Sonic Encounters Podcast with a “space music” edge. On breaks I’ll be playing tracks from Sonic Encounters albums.
While I certainly use a quantized approach in my beat-driven tracks, for my ambient work, I’m inspired by my dear friend, collaborator, and mentor, the late Dino J.A. Deane to focus on improvising and playing in-the-moment. To play, and not playback.
“This is the time of the playback artist, a time of quantized rhythm, quantized pitch, and quantized risk; the result of a profound influence that technology holds over every aspect of music production… Technology Has No Breath.” – Dino J.A. Deane, Becoming Music (a book about the art of flow in music).
To Dino’s point, technology has no breath, so it’s up to the player to imbue “breath” into live electronic rigs. He was an incredible master of expressive play and gestural performance using iPads and inspired me to go the same route for live samplist and improv work.
As a result, I’ll be using an iPad to perform the music you’ll hear, and most of the movements are played on-the-fly and are not quantized to a clock or a timing grid. Instead, I’m playing the instruments with complex chains of effects, live sampling of my own performance, using Frippertronics looping, and a palette of curated presets and original field recordings and samples as a starting point for each movement.
A Battery-Powered Rig that Supports “In-the-Moment” Ambient Improvisation
I’ll be running ALL on battery with an iPad Pro 11, the amazing small but capable Zoom AMS-24 audio interface, and a pair of battery-powered Bose S1 Pros. The rig is suspended on a mic stand with an iPad mount and a small audio interface tray connected to the mic stand. I can play this sitting, standing, or simply have the iPad in my lap.
Multitouch and Gestural Instrumentalities
As I don’t quite have my neural mind link working, I’ll be performing using carefully selected iPad instruments and iPad MIDI controllers that support VERY expressive play.
I make use of Blue Mango’s (http://bluemangoo.com) amazing Velocity Keyboard which magically supports velocity-sensitive MPE. It even supports MIDI aftertouch by detecting how much of your finger is rolled on the glass. I’ll be paring this with the amazing sounding Twin3 and Continua synths which also allow me to do sound design on-the-fly.
I’m also making use of off-grid gesture recording with Samplr and an alpha version of Delta-V audio https://www.deltavaudio.com/, Spacecraft Granular synth which support gesture recordings.
Intentional Compass Headings and Sonic Breadcrumbs
As I mentioned, for this event, I’m doing long-form improv over a series of different musical pieces, each with multiple movements. Even so, each piece is its own sonic story and has a compass heading and some milestones I’d like to hit along the way to help evolve the music.
To facilitate all this, I have created a series of complex AUM racks with a large variety of synths, effects, and Frippertronics looping with the amazing Enso looper by Audio Damage.
Some of my AUM sessions are quite large, with one topping off at 58 nodes. So think of a Eurorack with 50+ modules, or perhaps 5-10 Waldorf Quantums.
To help me stay on my intentional compass heading, I’m using a cool Enso feature that lets you save loop buffers as part of a preset and recall the looper settings and buffer when the AUM session loads. Basically, while rehearsing these pieces, I’ve saved the loop buffer in a few cases. The buffers don’t start a Frippertronics drain until they are activated. This means, as I progress to an upcoming movement, I can engage a looper with a little bit of the sonic flavor of the next movement. In other words, these snippets act as a sonic “breadcrumbs” to help me remember where I should go. I then start performing into the looper, and the breadcrumbs fade away to live improv.
I Hope To See You There
That’s it for now. Let me know in the comments if you enjoyed, or found inspiration in these behind-the-scenes notes.
See you at the show. RSVP here.
Mark Mosher
P.S. Dino’s blog and YouTube channel are still being maintained as an archive. I encourage you to check them out to learn and hear the works of this amazing sage.
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