Once more unto the streams…
Hide self, view
A few weeks ago, Oakland-based composer/improviser and longtime comrade Kyle Bruckmann reached out to see if I’d be interested in a short-term collaboration. He’d been invited to make a short performance video for streaming, he wanted to find a way past the “improviser in their living space with their phone camera” format, and he had some snippets of footage in hand, left over from a March 2020 recording session with Walker Olesen and Amadeus Regucera. I’ve been developing custom generative video-editing software since the Archipelago project in 2016, and I’m always eager to work with Kyle; a phone conversation, a few emails, and we were off and running.
After a couple of passes through the algorithmically-driven chipper/shredder (you can see a few of the 604 edits in the timeline above), and a lot of tweaking and polishing, the result is Hide self, view, a new audiovisual piece premiering online this weekend. I’m excited about the resulting fusion of our aesthetics: Kyle brings his distinctive oboe technique, improvisational language, and performance persona, his deliciously weird sensibility for electronic music, and his unerring sense of pacing, while I contribute my enthusiasms for fluctuating patterns and the delirious quality of information overload. Kyle describes the piece as “reflections on a year of attempting to communicate, teach, and create while staring into the rectangular abyss,” and while the pessimism of that phrase is well-earned, we’ve found a remote-collaborative way to make work that’s far more than the sum of its parts.
Hide self, view will stream Saturday, June 19th, 7 pm EDT, as part of the four nights of the Infrequent Seams Streamfest, running Thursday 6/17 - Saturday 6/20. Tickets are $5 per night, and there’s a stellar roster of artists participating in the festival. Please join us.
At the workbench
Pattern Variation Rules Everything Around Me: in addition to the emphasis on editorial pattern in the structure and material of Hide self, view, I’m also working on a new improvisation instrument that extends the generative-variation ideas I’ve been exploring with J. Soliday (in neural goldberg) and Scott Worthington (in LV2MKRT). Meanwhile, my recent effort in the network-music project with Matt Ingalls focuses on a piece titled “Assembler,” in which the Matt and I collaboratively shape, vary, and edit a continuously repeating pattern of material. We add to, delete from, and alter the elements of the pattern - sometimes working together towards a common goal, sometimes in a tug-of-war - while the repetitive aspects of the continuously changing “loop” help the listener to follow the twists and turns. Perhaps at some point I’ll exhaust my fascination with this idea, but for now it remains a full-blown obsession.
Nonce
Staff cartoonist John Granzow has his own take on multimedia collaboration.
Thanks for reading, listening, and viewing,
yours,
Christopher
Christopher Burns
http://sfsound.org/~cburns