Particle Castle Bubble Party!

I produce a series called Particle Castle Bubble Party! that aims to make the process of making music/art more transparent and accessible. Rodrigo Constanzo  hosts the sessions, and anyone can get in touch to discuss aspects of their work they think would benefit from a conversation with him.

I edit the footage down to keep the conversation flowing, and add elements that augment the conversation in the final video as well. Concepts, terms, and references that might seem unfamiliar are defined or cited on screen as they’re mentioned–and we don’t shy away from the occasional gag. Rod and I believe that sometimes the best way to absorb information is via humor, so hopefully you get a sense of that with what we’re making here. Enjoy. Make art.

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CeReNeM Videos

This is a video I made about Wet Ink, where they discuss pieces they performed during the 2019 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (hcmf). It features pieces by Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, Bryn Harrison, Kristina Wolfe, as well as the ones composed by their own members, Eric Wubbels and Sam Pluta.

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Media for the FluCoMa project

November 2019:

The FluCoMa project put on an amazing performance at HCMF this year. The artists involved were: Olivier Pasquet, Owen Green, Lauren Sarah Hayes, Leafcutter John, and my long-time collaborator, Rodrigo Constanzo.

I made this video about them:

February 2019:

I’ve made the logo and video bumper for FluCoMa

What is FluCoMa?
The Fluid Corpus Manipulation project (FluCoMA) instigates new musical ways of exploiting ever-growing banks of sound and gestures within the digital composition process, by bringing breakthroughs of signal decomposition DSP and machine learning to the toolset of techno-fluent computer composers, creative coders and digital artists.

To create these I:

1) Used Affinity Designer – this was the first time I made something for someone else using vectors. I normally draw using traditional media (and I’ll occasionally color using Photoshop)
2) Created and filmed many different types of ink behavior, on paper and in water
3) Revisited my aviglitch library scripts from when I made Its Fleece Electrostatic, to create the glitch effects found in the video bumper
4) Used Final Cut to animate the different elements of the logo for the bumper
5) And of course just sketched a lot using pencil and paper to get initial ideas down, or to try to change the direction of the design. 

Here are some key moments in the logo’s evolution (Though it wasn’t exactly as linear as this and I’ve left out some things.)
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But I Guess, In The End, We Just Moved Furniture Around (Video Version)

This is a collaboration with David Pocknee and Richard Craig. It’s definitely David’s piece but he invited us into the compositional process with him. We met several times over the span of two years to come up with what this work ultimately became. It was just a lot of trying things out; a lot of looking at stuff and a lot of moving stuff around. David is good at combinations. I just love him. We You can find the score here (on David’s website). 

The wreck of former boundaries (music video)

This is a music video I made that features the electronic version of Aaron Cassidy‘s The wreck of former boundaries (“The wreck of former boundaries (2014-15) for fixed media 5.1-channel electronics”).

I asked Aaron if he wouldn’t mind sitting down with me while I filmed him. I didn’t know what I would make, but felt like I had enough kernal thoughts/feelings at the time that something not hollow would happen. I was sitting in a talk he was giving about his new work, and as he played this piece, I was struck by how he listened. That’s when it became clear to me that I needed to capture both of these things: his words and his listening. The rest of my ideas would hang on this as the material, or this would be the material through which I’d look into those things. 

This is the first thing I made out of that material: A music video. Continue reading »