October 2012

more chris shier ... collabs (?)

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noisia5something4_400

noisia5something2_400

noisia5something400

Screenshots of my drawings on this page (resized and made into square format)
Make your own 2001 ending - fairly mindblowing mandala-maker - I like how asymmetry and decay is factored in.
Added the question mark after "collabs" because we need a better word for joint image-making -- collaboration implies back and forth, give and take in the making of a single work. These Shier drawings are two steps, where most of the brow-furrowing occurs at the design step.

Added a blog category web app art - tm for this type of two step work. My input in these varies from most to least.

"Triangle and 8-Bit Delay," "Pulse and Triangle and 8-Bit Freeze"

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z3000mk2

"Triangle and 8-Bit Delay" [mp3 removed]

"Pulse and Triangle and 8-Bit Freeze" [mp3 removed]

In these tracks MIDI piano roll notes trigger very basic modular synth patches and some very basic effects. Overtracking is used to stack tunes. These sound like chiptunes but they are just waveforms that are really...basic.

Update: Added a couple of bars to "Triangle and 8-Bit..." to make the middle section more coherent.

cockrill and phillips

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Recommended: Interview with Mike Cockrill in Whitehot magazine. Saw Cockrill's work at Kim Foster years ago and thought the subject matter was brave in a Balthus-like way that we weren't seeing in the then-hot Yalies who were flirting with sexual subject matter. Didn't know the collaborative work he did with Judge Hughes in the '80s -- the reproduction in the interview shines, with glints of Peter Saul and John Wesley. Seen as jpegs, Cockrill's newest work in the studio ventures into the terrain of George Condo's East Village Cubism but possibly bests what Condo's doing now for sheer straight-into-the-Id commitment.

While you're at Whitehot, be sure to gawk at the people photos from Richard Phillips' Gagosian opening. If you are an artist not living in New York, the eerie combination of glamour and extreme social awkwardness might give you serious pause about ever wanting to move here. Haven't seen the paintings yet but they don't look good. Am doing a bit of a mea culpa for writing about Phillips in the mid-'90s - in self defense his work didn't have the polish it has now: he had just started copying the dated fashion photos and the slight clumsiness read as a critique rather than a path to standing next to Sasha Grey.

"The Sad Knife Missile"

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"The Sad Knife Missile" [mp3 moved to Bandcamp]

Another FM7* ditty - I made these patches mucking about in the "operator matrix." Out of kilter "Are 'Friends' Electric?" reference, I realized after the fact. The grittier, high pitched sounds are the Doepfer A-112 in pitch-shift mode.
Just finished reading (and enjoying) Iain M. Banks' book Matter and the title is a nod to his futuristic warfare tech and sentient spacecraft that are sad when they die.

*The FM7 softsynth was patterned on the classic Yamaha FM synth from the 80s, the DX7. Native Instruments made the usual improvements and now calls it the FM8 but I have pretty much no interest in upgrading. Instrument design, like website design, never gets simpler and more elegant - it just fills up the product with more stuff.