The shortest distance between two points…
The Shenanigans-to-Tomfoolery Continuum
Bridges of Königsberg is the longest-running of my collaborative projects. David Collins, Peter J. Woods and I first played together at Milwaukee’s Borg Ward Gallery in September 2013. I think we all assumed going in that the performance would be a one-off - but by the time we finished our set, it was clear that we had started a band. Fast forward through cross-country and cross-continental moves, a global pandemic, a heap of touring, a bunch of recording, and a whole lot of nonsense, and we’re still going strong. In no small part because Peter and David are lovely, lovely people who I cherish spending time with.
In an advance celebration of our tenth anniversary, here’s our latest opus, The Shenanigans-to-Tomfoolery Continuum:
Where our previous album, The Celebrity Veto, was all about dreaming up constraints and creative challenges, independent studio work, and post-production trickeration, the new record is a return to the classic Bridges of Königsberg mode - press record and let ‘er rip. I may have been piped in from Philadelphia, but even so, I think you can feel the heat of the live recordings, not to mention the pursuit of the “weirder and more specific” that is the BoK raison d’être.
Our gratitude to the good folks at Rubber City Noise who have helped to bring this new album to light, and especially its CD version. While I am strictly an amateur graphic designer, I’m gosh-darn proud of the layout work I’ve done on the physical release - both as a continuation of the theme of our previous albums The Buster Keaton Maneuver and The Celebrity Veto and as a set of shenanigans, tomfoolery, and continua in its own right. Go get yourself a CD. For reals. Do it. It’s a ridiculous object.
Oh, and speaking of ridiculous objects - I wrote a bunch in the previous newsletter about making an animated video to accompany one of the album tracks. And now it, too, is ready for your delectation:
At the workbench
As always, I’m building and refining new software instruments for the live performance of electronic music. The latest model builds on the strategies I’ve been using for instruments you may have heard in use with LV2MKRT, neural goldberg, and househusbands. But there are new wrinkles as well - rhythmic controls that make it easier to explore polymetric and polyrhythmic textures, generative capabilities that expand the range and variety of musical phrases and behaviors, and the ability to accelerate tempi into the stratosphere, where sonic events become so compressed that they blur into clouds of texture. (Or if you prefer the fancy terminology - you get granular synthesis). Already well into beta-testing, and hopefully ready for performance on a stage near you sooner rather than later…
Nonce
Cartoonist and technical innovator John Granzow demonstrates the Fosbury Drop. Thanks as always for reading - yours,
Christopher
Christopher Burns
http://sfsound.org/~cburns