The NOW Now | Shannon O'Neill

Sound a Day 001 - Splinter Loop

After my performance at Don’t Look Gallery in October, in which I remixed a bunch of older works, I felt that it was time to focus on making new sounds for a while. I decided to make a sound a day, but soon got busy and fell out of the routine. I mentioned this to Nat Bates when we caught up recently and it turned out that he’d had a similar idea. He suggested that we should each make and share a sound a day. He’s already started.

So for at least the next few weeks I will be uploading a new sound here every day. Which begs the question, what do I mean by a ’sound’? Generally they will be the sorts of sounds that go into my recordings and performances, such as field recordings, synths and media samples, sometimes heavily processed. I hope to share some technical and aesthetic ideas along the way. You’re welcome to use these sounds – please share the results.

Download

SAD001 – Splinter Loop 1:31 3.7MB 84BPM 32 Bars

These days when performing with the Splinter Orchestra, I use my Korg MS-20 Synthesizer, with a number of accessories, including an iPhone, a Korg mini-KP Kaoss Pad, and an Edirol R-09 recorder. You can see my setup in the photo above. The Edirol is used to pick up sounds from the group and use them as triggers or modulation sources for the synth. A by-product of this is that I have many hours of recordings of Splinter Orchestra performances and rehearsals.

SAD001 is made from a brief moment of a Splinter Orchestra recording session at the ABC in September. It’s just the shuffle and thud of instruments as microphones were being set up and levels checked. I used Wave Editor to select the sound, then Ableton Live to warp the events into a rhythmic loop. Both the ‘Beats’ and ‘Re-pitch’ Warp Modes in Live gave pleasing results, so I made a clip of each version, then sequenced them randomly, using Follow Actions. Some compression was applied to fatten it up, along with EQ to reduce hiss and rumble.

By the way, the Splinter Orchestra will be performing this Monday at the NOW now festival program launch at Serial Space.

Chris Mann, Amanda Stewart & The Splinter Orchestra

Monday, 10 August, 2009

The NOW now Series #6

Chris Mann (born 1949) is an Australian composer, poet and performer specializing in the emerging field of compositional linguistics,, coined by Kenneth Gaburo and described by Mann as “the mechanism whereby you understand what I’m thinking better than I do.”[1] He is currently based in New York City.

Mann’s unique style of reading incredibly dense, parenthetical texts at a high speed has brought him recognition as a unique performer and recording artist. He has had a variety of recording projects over the years, including the ensemble Machine For Making Sense with Amanda Stewart, Chris Mann and the Impediments (with two backup singers and Mann reading a text simultaneously while only being able to hear one another), and Chris Mann and The Use. His piece The Plato Songs, a collaboration with Holland Hopson and R. Luke DuBois, features realtime spectral analysis and parsing of the voice into multiple channels based on phonemes.

Amanda Stewart (born 1959) is a contemporary Australian poet and sound/performance artist.

She began writing and performing poetry in the 70s and has since produce a wide array of sound, video and multimedia work. In 1989 she co-founded the performance ensemble Machine for Making Sense with Chris Mann, Rik Rue, Jim Denley and Stevie Wishart . She has toured in Europe, the United States and Japan.

and The Splinter Orchestra

Serial Space 33 wellington st chippendale

$10 / $8 at the door

NOW now review

My review of this year’s NOW now festival has just been published by RealTime.