(Back in the) New York Groove
Early on in the pandemic, when the permanency of it all had finally sunk in, I made the choice to abstain from performing in front of & amongst audiences until my school-age son could get vaccinated, thus lowering the chance of not only him & his mother getting sick, but the entire ecosystem of working families at his school & myriad afterschool & weekend activities as well. I’m happy to report that the relentlessly churning gears of the pharmaceutical industry have finally yielded the solution we’ve been waiting for, and that he has just received his first of two doses (at school, no less) & all things going according to plan, will be full vaccinated by the end of this month.
This opens up the possibility of performance (not to mention the attendence of concerts, movies, restaurants, etc.) once again. The elephant in the increasingly claustrophobic room I have been all but avoiding for the past 20 months, and the major stumbling block at this moment is what shape exactly a performance will entail. I’d hinted at this over the past 2 years, but in the end I did either sell or trade off the majority of my Modular Synthesizer setup in the early days of the pandemic due to resource strain, causing something of ripple-effect on what forms the “Live Electronic Music” I’ve been focusing on for the past decade+ will take going forward.
I love the Eurorack scene & the possibilities therein; some of the smartest, most creative people I will ever meet are absolutely flourishing within that world & I will forever keep a foot in the foot in the door there, but in truth during the last year or so of my travel/performance schedule I was starting to feel like my concerts had become localized NAMM booths rather than the sorts of grey-area, mystique-laden enterprises I’ve always been drawn to as a listener. Discourse at events had become a (dry) recitation of model numbers and price-points instead of a focus on what we were hearing, let alone the motivations and methodologies behind any of it, and I think I’d finally had enough.
After a good 18-month break, during which I made music privately, at home, largely on Acoustic & Electric instruments, it was my recent collaborator Andre Goncalves who brought me back in. With full trust he sent over his brand-new bespoke real-time Granular Synthesis & Processing Environment, which single-handedly set off all kinds of possibility-bells-and-whistles & had me thinking of what I was able to do there again. An email from Steve @ Thonk around the flat-packed, DIY cases from ALM Busy Circuits led to a conversation with their creator Matthew Allum, who also generously sent over a selection of his recent designs, leading to the implementation of a tiny, tidy setup of real-time sampling & manipulation, all of it in the digital domain. I’ve been very happy dedicating one day a week to exploring the firmwares & methodologies of this blessed setup, which has only been lending to one breakthrough after another.
