Tenori-on
I was unaware of Toshio Iwai's work until recently. (aside: it's interesting how things tend to happen together. First the Mutek mailing list told me about the Tenori-on launch event in Montréal, which I can't go to, then my "audio guy" co-worker showed me a video of it while we were looking at the Korg NDS synth, then another co-worker talked about not seeing it at Yuri's Night, and finally there's another launch event here in SF, where I found out that Iwai has worked with Ryuichi Sakamoto, whom I saw at Recombinant Media Labs some time ago. Whew! Also, I played Electroplankton a lot at one point although I was unaware it's another Iwai project. And apparently Iwai was artist-in-residence at the Exploratorium in SF before my time.)
(sorry about the terrible phone pictures)
Anyway, Iwai showed a few of his past projects that he thought led up to the Tenori-on at the SF event. My favorite was his collaboration with Sakamoto, Music Plays Images X Images Play Music. Sakamoto plays the piano, and the music (the actual key strokes too, not just the sound signal) is visualized on a big screen, and that in turn "plays" a second piano. If anyone has a video of the performance I would be very happy...
I played with the Tenori-on a bit and it's pretty cool. Keep in mind though, that I was just amazed at how awesome the visuals were at least 50% of the time (it lit up on the bottom too!), and my attempts at making music resulted in something that sounded slightly worse than a Logic n00b's efforts. For some reason the casing felt a bit cheap, although it was supposedly high-quality... Maybe the weight distribution wasn't right?
The other highlight was seeing Sutekh again. By the time he performed the event was almost completely empty. :shrug: I have no clue what he did to get those sounds/images out of the Tenori-on.
There was another indietronica performer called I Am Robot And Proud who played the Tenori-on like a keyboard. I actually liked his music despite labeling him "indietronica"... The contrast between his music and the performer before him (forgot his name. He did a noise thing which I liked a lot) was also amusing.
I'm really happy that I somehow got into electronic music. Listening to Aphex Twin back in the days when what became Audio Galaxy was just an FTP search did the trick, although it took some time before I really got into it :)
Every so often I'm reminded that electronic music is white boys' (and a few weird Japanese boys') playground though. Has Stuff White People Like done an article on it? (probably not; they're becoming lame now)
On a completely unrelated note, a pair of tickets from a year ago showed up in the mail today. I remember wondering where my Michael Mayer/Gui Boratto tickets went last year, and buying them again after bitching to TicketWeb. They're stuck in the frame of my mailbox by some incompetent postman.
Looking forward to the Caribou concert on Wednesday, and Ellen Allien in May (although her latest is lackluster, compared to Berlinette etc.). Anything else interesting?
I'm drawing a lot in the past couple weeks. Mostly bad stuff unfortunately...
It balances my other, C-coding life.
(sorry about the terrible phone pictures)
Anyway, Iwai showed a few of his past projects that he thought led up to the Tenori-on at the SF event. My favorite was his collaboration with Sakamoto, Music Plays Images X Images Play Music. Sakamoto plays the piano, and the music (the actual key strokes too, not just the sound signal) is visualized on a big screen, and that in turn "plays" a second piano. If anyone has a video of the performance I would be very happy...
I played with the Tenori-on a bit and it's pretty cool. Keep in mind though, that I was just amazed at how awesome the visuals were at least 50% of the time (it lit up on the bottom too!), and my attempts at making music resulted in something that sounded slightly worse than a Logic n00b's efforts. For some reason the casing felt a bit cheap, although it was supposedly high-quality... Maybe the weight distribution wasn't right?
The other highlight was seeing Sutekh again. By the time he performed the event was almost completely empty. :shrug: I have no clue what he did to get those sounds/images out of the Tenori-on.
There was another indietronica performer called I Am Robot And Proud who played the Tenori-on like a keyboard. I actually liked his music despite labeling him "indietronica"... The contrast between his music and the performer before him (forgot his name. He did a noise thing which I liked a lot) was also amusing.
I'm really happy that I somehow got into electronic music. Listening to Aphex Twin back in the days when what became Audio Galaxy was just an FTP search did the trick, although it took some time before I really got into it :)
Every so often I'm reminded that electronic music is white boys' (and a few weird Japanese boys') playground though. Has Stuff White People Like done an article on it? (probably not; they're becoming lame now)
On a completely unrelated note, a pair of tickets from a year ago showed up in the mail today. I remember wondering where my Michael Mayer/Gui Boratto tickets went last year, and buying them again after bitching to TicketWeb. They're stuck in the frame of my mailbox by some incompetent postman.
Looking forward to the Caribou concert on Wednesday, and Ellen Allien in May (although her latest is lackluster, compared to Berlinette etc.). Anything else interesting?
I'm drawing a lot in the past couple weeks. Mostly bad stuff unfortunately...
It balances my other, C-coding life.