North Loop

North Loop is included on my "Breathing Voltages" CD. 

I completed work on this project in the Winter of 2016. It's a fragment piece, which uses as it's source material a recording of the live electronic music performance I did at my Six Projects record release party, and also some recordings of the rehearsals for that performance. I deliberately chose to NOT use a computer in this live performance, which was something new for me. I'm calling the piece "North Loop" for several reasons: 1.) The live performance took place in a part of downtown Minneapolis called the North Loop, 2.) though the piece is not particularly loop-intensive, it does make use of some loops, and 3.) I live and work in Minneapolis - a Northern city.

The instrumentation for this piece consisted of my vintage Minimoog D and Moog Model 12 modular synthesizers, a Roland D550 synthesizer triggered by a Yamaha KX88 keyboard controller, a mixed assortment of contemporary modular synthesizer components from various manufacturers, a Tim Kaiser Quad Oscillator and a vintage Fender Rhodes electric piano. Signal processors included a Moog 12-Stage Phaser, VOX V847 Wah pedal, Electro Harmonix Big Muff, Lexicon LXP-15, Yamaha D1500, REV7 and two SPX90s. Additional computer-based processing was also employed later during the construction of the finished piece in postproduction.

The video below is of the live performance. The music you're hearing is the actual finished piece, which was created later in a computer, using audio from the performance and from rehearsals for that performance. There are multiple layers of audio, which have been highly edited and mixed to create the finished product . I edited the video to more or less line things up to match as best I could, but it's really just an approximation. There was a lot of improvisation involved in the performance, and the finished music actually has more simultaneous layers than I would have been able to pull off live as a solo performance. Still, it's nice to see the video with the music and I also like that we have some documentation of Paul Christian's visual projection work. He was using the Processing software environment to create the imagery. I was feeding him about eight separate audio lines that he was working with live.

Here's a picture of my live performance rehearsal setup in the studio. I tried to get it to be very close to what I actually had to work with at the event. I must confess, that I have become very highly adapted to working in the studio. This live performance was quite a departure for me. Obviously, there is no electric piano in this shot, though I did include it in the live setup, (see above). Also, some of you might recognize the vintage LinnDrum machine sitting on top of the racks to the left. I was experimenting with it, but ended up not using it in this project.