Ben Neill Blog

Last Saturday I played at The Stone with LEMUR, the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots.  We’ve been working together for about a year now and it’s a very exciting collaboration.  Their instruments have a strong kinship with the mutantrumpet, and the idea of networking my instrument with their extensive cyber percussion battery is a perfect realization of the idea of networked performance.  Also I have a long history of performing in a duo setting with percussion, and I have revived some of my older pieces for this setup.  In this type of configuration, the computer becomes less of an end point and more of connector for physical instruments on the input and output sides.  In this way the technology starts to become invisible, facilitating interaction in the physical world.  The next step is to combine the LEMUR collaboration with interactive video, controlling two different outputs from the mutantrumpet/laptop system at once.

photo by Joy Garnett of Newsgrist

My residency at STEIM from July 24-August 12, 2008 was focused on continuing to develop my recently redesigned mutantrumpet, which uses the Junxion board and software as its interface. The previous version of the mutantrumpet had been designed at STEIM in the early 1990’s. I was also interested in developing a more complex approach to my use of LiSa, which I have been working with for nearly a decade.

Frank Balde and Jorgen Brinkman were both available to work with me extensively while I was there. Frank demonstrated his approach to programming in the Junxion software environment, offering new possibilities for complex responses to control data that I had not even considered. He also answered my specific questions about features in Junxion, including the use of timers, display states, and a binary keyboard setup from the switches on the mutantrumpet. Frank and I also spent a lot of time discussing the aesthetics and practical considerations of interactive performance, as well as where the field is headed. He demonstrated some of his work with the IPhone as well as the Wii controller, both which point to amazing new possibilities. Jorgen assisted me in refining the physical switches and continuous controllers to make them more robust. Frank showed me how to further perfect the controllers using tables in both Junxion and LiSa and snapshots in LiSa. (more…)

Today is the last day of my three week plus trip to Europe, spending most of the time in Amsterdam at the amazing Steim studios. My residency at Steim was fantastic, primarily thanks to Frank Balde, the chief software programmer there who spent a lot of time with me explaining the subtler points of Junxion and LiSa, two programs that he created. I made a new piece while there, and had a chance to do some jamming with my friend Jozef van Wissem, the illustrious lutenist/composer. We plan to do some long-distance collaborating, something we’ve been talking about for a couple of years.

My wife and daughter came along on this trip, and we had an opportunity to do quite a bit of sightseeing when I wasn’t working in the studio. We spent a few days in Paris, and a highlight was seeing the exhibition Traces du Sacre at the Centre Pompidou. It was an amazing collection of art from wide ranging periods and styles, all dealing with the idea of spirituality. One room contained 3 videos: Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Joseph Beuys’ I Like America and America Likes Me, and a video of Jackson Pollock painting in his studio. My neck got sore from turning side to side trying to catch them all…a great exhibition.

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Jul 18 2008
We Are Hacks: Music and Visual Performance at HOPE, NYC – Preview
By Peter Kirn
Related: 8-bit, CDM, chiptune, Community, DIY, events, gaming, hacks, Hardware, hope, Jitter, laptop-performance, Max/MSP, Nintendo, NYC, oddities, patching, Reaktor, robotics, Software, sound-art & more

8-bit and robots and odd Max and Reaktor patches and custom visual software and visualizations of data packets and sound made from plants and mutant trumpets and gloves for DJing and laptop music – we’ve got quite a lineup here in New York this week.

Friday night, a live audiovisual lineup from the worlds of createdigitalmusic.com / createdigitalmotion.com invades the HOPE conference, aka Hackers on Planet Earth, the three day-long convergence of tech hacking. $10, open to all, 11-2a Friday July 18 at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. It’s a live digital, technological variety show in a doomed NYC landmark hotel with an audience of famous and infamous hackers. (Think Kevin Mitnick and MythBusters’ Adam Savage and Steven Levy, all in one place.)

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The Brooklyn Vegan did some nice coverage of my first curated concert in the Site and Sound series at World Financial Center

Ulrich Schnauss review and pics

Dorit Chrysler review and pics

Guest of Cindy Sherman, the film for which i did original music, is playing at the Provincetown Film Festival this week.

It’s the top pick of the festival in the Cape Cod Times.

Bob Lefsetz has some great insights on the record industry - here is an excerpt of his latest missive on where the music biz is heading…

360 DEALS

Irrelevant. The major labels don’t have enough infrastructure to pull them off!

It doesn’t matter that Rick Rubin was hired at Columbia. Doesn’t matter what Edgar Bronfman, Jr. has to say. Do you read press releases from Rambler? Have you purchased stock in Wham-O? Do you comb the newspaper looking for stories on transistor radios? DO YOU STILL LISTEN TO MUSIC ON CASSETTE?

The major labels squandered their power. It was based on control of distribution. Now anybody can make and distribute their music…have you heard of MySpace and Tunecore? The majors are consolidating their efforts in just a few acts… They don’t understand, the great mass, the minor acts, in aggregate, will end up with the vast majority of the pie. Just like in the TV business. Network share continues to slide… No one cable channel dominates, but all together, THEY DWARF THE NETWORKS!

So what did the TV networks do? THEY BOUGHT THE CABLE CHANNELS!

The only hope for the major labels in the future is to control ALL THE MUSIC! They’ve got to be in business with everybody, involved in every transaction, interested in the act that sells 1,000 copies. Providing services to EVERYBODY, and with this mass, controlling the market…

Look at Irving Azoff and Front Line… Does he sign one act? Or two? NO, 250! And then he leverages these!

Don’t listen to anything the major labels say, they’re on the way to extinction.

The idea of multiple layers of tempos or rhythmic subdivisions occuring simultaneously is one of the key formal elements of music over the last century. It can be seen both as developing out of an African rhythmic sensibility that manifested itself in the polyrhythmic quality of jazz, as well as the natural evolution of post-romanticism into complex serial music that culminated in the works of composers such as Stockhausen and Elliott Carter. Minimalism also frequently worked with the idea of multiple tempos layered together or shifting, as in the phase pieces of Steve Reich.

In popular music the polytempo idea reached a new level with the advent of drum and bass in the 90’s. While the tempo relationships are always 2:1, the music revolves around the use of elements in the 2 different tempos. Timbaland uses a multiple tempo style in his hip hop programming, with his jittery double time beats and synth pulses providing an essential element of his sound. Today, the sounds of dubstep and grime are continuing the evolution of polytempo sounds. Using dub as a starting point, dubstep producers and DJs work with a constantly shifting pulse relationship that is usually 2:1 but occasionally shifts into triplet patterns, 3:2 and 4:3 structures.

Why has the idea of multiple time strata continued to be so important? The abstract language of music serves as an excellent model or simulation of complex structures that evolve in time. In today’s highly mediated world, we all have to function on many more simultaneous wavelengths at once, communicating through various means in what Teilhard de Chardin called the noosphere. Polytempo music is a kind of simulation of that experience that models time into a type of architecture based on resonant harmonics. It makes sense that it continues to be such an important element of the development of musical ideas.

I developed a concept called rhytharmonics in the early 90’s to describe this musical structuring.

Two articles in the New York Times over the last couple of days signal an even louder death knell for record labels as we have known them. For Some Music, It Has to Be Wal-Mart and Nowhere Else discusses artists selling their music directly to Wal Mart, the nation’s largest music retailer. This is after Wal-Mart’s rack jobber called it quits last week - Handleman Exits Music. WalMart To Anderson

Frustration and Fury: Take It. It’s Free.

Trent Reznor’s interview in the New York Times is one of the more interesting statements on the whole subject of music and technology that I’ve seen in a while. In addition to giving his music away for free, bypassing labels altogether, Reznor discusses how he made The Slip in a very short period of time and how he is designing his stage show to be an “interactive instrument”. Brian Eno talked about trying to get U2 to make its last record quickly as opposed to taking years - they didn’t listen and wrote 150 songs over a year period; it’s a hard thing for an artist to do and I admire Reznor for it. It’s great to see artists like him pushing forward into new ways of working.

The Color Bar Remix from Palladio, the VJ movie I made with Bill Jones, is now online on the new Club Chroma channel on Joost. Joost (IPA: /ʒuːst/, like “juiced”) is a system for distributing TV shows and other forms of video over the Web using peer-to-peer TV technology, created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (founders of Skype and Kazaa). It’s been touted by many as the next evolution of TV.

Joost began development in 2006. Working under the code name “The Venice Project”, Zennström and Friis assembled teams of some 150 software developers in about six cities around the world, including New York, London, Leiden and Toulouse. According to Zennström at a 25 July 2007 press conference about Skype held in Tallinn, Estonia, Joost has signed up more than a million beta testers and is on track for an end-of-year launch.

You can see our video here: Club Chroma

In our adaptation of Jonathan Dee’s novel Palladio the Color Bar Remix is the piece that pushes the central character’s art over the top to stardom. For more on Palladio check out the Palladio blog here: www.palladiomovie.com

Thanks to Eric Dunlap and Holly Daggers of Eyewash/Forward Motion Theater for including us!