rejay.

Said I'd never do it again, but all it took was for someone to phrase the request in the form, "I'm sure it's not worth asking you to do this, but..."

Actually I'm pretty sure that phrasing's been used before, I guess I just wasn't ready. Anyway, this post is to remind me that I'm DJing again for the first time in years.

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the discard pile.

Photo: Raymond van Mil.

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So far, one of the toughest aspects of making music for dance/theater is having to throw things away b/c they don't work when placed in context with their intended visual components. I'm still too new at this to have any real understanding of how to build this "workingness" in from the beginning, so this means I am often spending hours making audio that, while it might be satisfying as audio when I'm at home, just totally fails once I get to the studio and try to match it with movement material. Which means that I have piles of audio languishing around that I have spent wildly varying amounts of time on, their common bond being their uselessness. This is The Discard Pile.

This here first discarded item is a totally painless one, maybe that's why it's first. It's something I threw together for WAFTUG in literally 10 minutes, but never even came close to suggesting we use b/c it's so different from the direction we were going in. It's just five versions of "The Last Post", slowed down to varying degrees and played simultaneously. Then I removed any moments that I found too disorienting or pointless, and pruned it into a shape that suggested some kind of "intelligent" harmonic movement, intelligent as in "on purpose".

Morsanek: The Last Post (2:07, 4.9MB).



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the girl who misses much.

When I'm working on an audio editing project, the first thing I do is make a scratchpad in ACID and just quickly pick around in my audio archive bucket for 30 or 40 sounds that I feel are somehow relevant to the task at hand. And then I start combining and organizing interesting pairings so I can see if my initial impulses were remotely useful.

That's how it goes unless there's some kind of design goal that requires freshly-generated source material, in which case you got to make that shit first. For example...this summer Firestone and I participated in an event at the Stedelijk here in Amsterdam which involved remixing a work of their choice from their video archive. The work we were assigned was Pipilotti Rist's I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much. 

So the first thing I did was to take the audio track from the video and chop it up with BeatSlicer and build loops out of it in FL Studio, then grab most useful-seeming loops and see what kind of bigger things they suggest, etc.. 

This approach doesn't always work. Although I liked some of what I did for this assignment, the end result wasn't very satisfactory sonically. But when I listen back to the scratchpad versions of the music, there's much in them that I find promising or even OK as it is....how did things get fucked up? Hopefully I'll get a chance to talk about what went wrong, but until then, here's the scratchpad for that assignment: totally unmixed, unorganized, and underedited, but some of the sonics speak to me. 

Morsanek: I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much (20MB, 08:53).

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you so promotional.

Ideally one would post about his gigs before they happened, but...yeah. There's one more date left on the current run: 19 jan 2012, at De Gouvernestraat in Rotterdam.

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http://wereallfortheunderground.wordpress.com/

Concept: Hillary Blake Firestone i.s.m Mark Morse & Floriaan Ganzevoort
Creation/ Performance: Hillary Blake Firestone, Mark Morse, Anat Spiegel
Light Design: Floriaan Ganzevoort
Technique: Floriaan Ganzevoort, Kees van Zelst
Advise: Igor Dobričić, Keren Levi, Sam Louwyck
Production: Martine Dekkers, Mara Tomanek
Co-Production: Grand Theater Groningen, nb Projects, Dansmakers
Amsterdam With support from Fonds Podium Kunst
Photo: Raymond van Mil
Graphic Design: cubicle-design.com
Thanks to: Stichting Studio Dok, Nicole Beutler, Wilbert Bulsink, Felix van de Vorst, Raymond van Mil, Jeroen Kimman, Thomas Myrmel, Clare Gallagher

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summer's kiss is over baby.

In actuality it never showed up, did it. We had like 4 summery days this summer, and I think I was locked in a rehearsal studio for 3 of them. Total bullshit.

At least it's not like I have to switch back into work mode or anything: we never stopped. I'm not really complaining: August in Berlin was unsurprisingly fun and rewarding: our hosts at Podewil/sommer.bar/Tanz Im August were perfectly great, and our modifications to hardly resulted in something quite hallucinogenic and exhausting (in a good way). We did three loops over two hours, the video above is loop 1 plus 7 minutes of loop 2. I'm really hoping we get a chance to do this again somewhere so we can try more loops...right now we imagine that 5 in a row (3.5 hours) could be possible.

Currently enjoying the luxury of a whole week off, and then it's back into the studio to get some work done on WAFTUG before we take this is hardly an invitation to Milano in October.

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we need a reason to get drunk on a tuesday.

I wish I could say that my non-stop working this summer was a calculated response to the relentlessly shitty summer weather we've been having (think 60F and rainy), but no...it's just a sort of mollifying coincidence, actually being inside when the weather makes you want to be anyway.

After the wildly successful Julidans/ILTWT excerpt/premiere of WE'RE ALL FOR THE UNDERGROUND (ok, it was at least "successful"), we took a whole week off, and now we're back in the studio (above) working on an adaptation of this is hardly an invitation for the Tanz im August festival in Berlin (tentatively titled this is hardly an installation, ha ha) wherein we transform the procession sequence into a live installation that destroys the stage and then cleans itself up and restarts as many times in a row as we can do it.

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i like to watch too.

This is what's happening now.

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