The triumphant return of tangible media
neural goldberg's Still Life With Juggling Brick launches today
Help to combat the dematerialization of everything!
Still Life With Juggling Brick
neural goldberg co-conspirator J. Soliday and I are at it again - building and refining semi-autonomous music systems, connecting them together via ye olde Internet, tweaking their output while they play, then spelunking through the resulting heap of recordings to bring you the very best (wildest, silliest, most chaotic, most joyful, most compelling) moments. This time our friends at record label FTAM have gotten in on the act, making it possible for us to release a new slab of music on compact disc. Hop onto the Still Life With Juggling Brick rollercoaster, as we careen between ecstatic intensity and gleeful absurdity:
One of the particular delights of neural goldberg for me as a collaborator is that J. and I both regularly lose track of which system is making what sound at any given moment. If I think to myself “that timbre definitely belongs to J.” then there’s a 95% chance that I’m the one producing it, and if I’m confident it’s made by my system, then 95% of the time it will in fact be coming over the wires from Chicago. This record is as deep into the mind-meld as we’ve ever gone, and I’m bewitched by the fusion of our aesthetics.
I’d be tickled if you’d show some love to the record label and purchase a copy; and while you’re there, there’s a bunch of other outstanding new FTAM releases to dig into.
Performances! (For realz!)
It has been an incredible joy to return to live performance. In May I had the pleasure of working with Sam Pluta and his students to realize Alvin Lucier’s Music On A Long Thin Wire, as part of a festival of Lucier’s music organized by Sam, Ian Power, and Heather Stebbins. Long Thin Wire is one of Lucier’s most mesmerizing works - so much variety from such simple means! - and we had a lovely experience putting it together and sharing it with an audience.
The whole event was terrific, with Grace Leslie’s realization of Music for Solo Performer (aka “the brainwave piece”) a particular revelation.
At the end of July, J. and I got together in Milwaukee to perform our first, honest-to-goodness live, together-in-a-room show as neural goldberg. While we’d met a couple of times previously, we hadn’t seen each other since we started the band in 2020. I don’t have enough superlatives to express how good it felt to connect in-person. (It always bears repeating that music is a social activity. We form friendships through sharing music, and especially through playing music together).
We played a pretty hot set, too, in our idiosyncratic doing-as-little-as-possible way…
At the workbench
The last few weeks leading up to the July show were busy with work on the software instrument I play (in neural goldberg, for LV2MKRT, and pretty much everywhere else). Most of those changes were small improvements (even if some of them required substantial alterations “under the hood”). For instance:
more accurate timing for rhythms, and an expanded range of rhythmic possibilities;
a wider range of amplitude envelopes to create the impression of various kinds of accents and dynamics;
improved reverb algorithms (the instrument defaults to “dry” and reverb-free sound, but now the “wet” is a little more luxe when it appears);
lots of improvements and fixes to the FM synthesis section, substantially widening the range of timbral possibilities and eliminating some sources of “crackle” that were driving me batty;
adding trill, tremolo, and “squiggle” features. The instrument now has some interesting answers for the question “when is a pitch not a pitch?”
After years of work on the various iterations of this instrument (with continuous testing and evaluation, including playing and recording with friends), there were some surprising positives to having a performance date on the calendar. I perhaps could, and arguably should, have come up with a lot of these ideas and solutions sooner. However, the imperative of “this happens in public on July 29” provided a considerable amount of clarity and focus, and helped me both to generate new ideas and to concentrate on some of the housekeeping chores. A strategy to remember for the future.
Since returning from Milwaukee, I’ve got a new project underway (gasp, it’s been a while since that happened!), but I’ll save that story for another time…
Nonce
Cartoonist John Granzow assures me that Eurodishrack is the next big thing.
yours,
Christopher
Christopher Burns
http://sfsound.org/~cburns