Matthew Bourne live with Memorymoog & Minimoog Model D // Headrow House Leeds 2017 Modular Meets

Published on Sep 28, 2018 DivKidVideo

"Here's a live performance from Matthew Bourne captured at Headrow House in Leeds at an event held in association with Modular Meets and Super Friends with Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith headline (I don't have that performance to share).

Matthew was performing with a Moog Memorymoog and Minimoog Model D as well as a Roland Space Echo under his mixer. Stripped back and simple with both synths "played" like a piano/keyboard as opposed to sequenced and sampled in a studio.

Grab Matthew's fantastic 'moogmemory' album here - https://matthewbourne.bandcamp.com/al..."

Perfect Circuit Systems: West Coast Series

Published on Apr 12, 2018 Perfect Circuit Audio

"Perfect Circuit's West Coast series is a family of Eurorack systems curated to embrace the colorful and quirky methods of West Coast synthesis originally pioneered by Don Buchla and Serge Tcherepnin.

Featuring five systems at a variety of price points, the West Coast Series is our gesture toward any musician drawn to modular synthesizers by the marimba-like sweeps of Morton Subtonick, the dense textures of Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, the sweeping gestures of Bob Ostertag, and beyond.

Check out the link below for more information, and keep your eyes peeled for more from Perfect Circuit Systems next week:
https://www.perfectcircuitaudio.com/s..."

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Supporters of MATRIXSYNTH get %10 off at Perfect Circuit Audio!

Suzanne Ciani Lecture (Montréal 2016) | Red Bull Music Academy

Uploaded on Oct 4, 2016 Red Bull Music Academy

"A true synthesizer pioneer, Suzanne Ciani’s love of electronic music began in 1968 during a field trip to MIT, but it was her decade-long adventure mastering the Buchla 200 that would define her career. She worked in commercials and in the late 80’s and 90’s redefined herself again as a five-time Grammy-nominated new age artist. In her 2016 Red Bull Music Academy lecture, she talked about her history as well as her recent collaborative effort with fellow Buchla player Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith.

The Red Bull Music Academy is a global music institution committed to fostering creativity in music. We celebrate music, its culture, and the transformative minds behind it. Begun in 1998, the Academy has taken the core principles that underlie its annual workshop for selected participants and applied this curatorial approach to events, lectures, and city-wide festivals throughout the year."

Le Comte - Kaitlyn

Published on Nov 24, 2016 LeCCComte

"Directed by Jean-Sylvain Le Gouic

"Chaleur et Mouvement" available on iTunes :
https://itunes.apple.com/fr/album/cha...

Twitter : https://twitter.com/LeCCComte

12" soon available on Les Disques Anonymes

Patrice and Louis Decourrèges thank you so much for letting us film in this wonderful place.
Shot by Gilles Pensart & Jean Sylvain Le Gouic
Grip Hugo Beaumanoir

Thanks for watching.

© Paradis Records 2016"

Adventures in Synthesis: Backyard Fall Afternoon Modular

Published on Sep 27, 2016 Chris Beckstrom

"I'm on a mission to challenge some ideas about modular synthesis:

That is has to be expensive, or that you can't build it yourself, or that it has to look pretty, that it's too complicated, that you need an electrical engineering degree to play it, or that you can't take it outside.

After all, it's a musical instrument not totally unlike a guitar. Now that I've reconfigured it a bit, why not bring it out to the back yard and play a bit?

This simple patch was inspired by the work of Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. If you haven't heard her magnificent music, check it out!

Patch Notes

There are 4 voices in this patch: The bassline, a 3-note repeated figure by saw waves, the delay of that figure, and another saw oscillator.

CLICK FOR MORE »

Todd Barton on BBC Sounds + Multum in Parvo Release

Excerpts of Todd Barton's performance at the Unsound Festival in Krakow is up on BBC Sounds.

"A rebroadcast of excerpts from my performance of Music and Poetry of the Kesh at the Unsound Festival in Krakow last month with a wonderful ensemble of Polish musicians. Here's the link which will be active for a month.

And the first excerpt on the broadcast is from my new solo Buchla Music Easel album, Multum in Parvo with cover art by Ursula Barton! [embed below]

Much more to come in 2019! Gigs in Belgium, NYC and Santa Barbara. New Album releases too.

Happy Holidays!
Best wishes,
Todd"

"If you’re anything like me, then one of your favourite albums of 2018 was Music and Poetry of The Kesh, released on the Freedom To Spend label. Recorded over two years in the mid-1980s, Music and Poetry of The Kesh in truth was never really designed as an ‘album’ as such. It was a cassette bundled with early editions of the legendary author Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home novel.

The novel described the art, culture, language and ethnography of a fictional tribe of indigenous inhabitants of North California, 500 years from now. On the tape, Le Guin and her friend and collaborator, composer and sound artist Todd Barton, created a detailed, vivid musical identity for these people - the Kesh.

Listened to in 2018, the sounds of Music and Poetry of The Kesh feel simultaneously ancient and futuristic. Todd designed and built new instruments to realise the Kesh’s music, which were woven among synthesisers and field recordings from the Kesh’s native Napa Valley.

It’s a stunning, singular piece of work, but the story doesn’t end there. Anyone intrigued by Music and Poetry of the Kesh would be well advised to dig further into Todd Barton’s work, starting with Multum in Parvo - a brand new piece Todd composed using the Epoch Modular Benjolin and Buchla Music Easel.

“Don Buchla created a musical instrument that he said had no ‘preconceived ideas,’” Todd recently told the Listen to This website. “He wanted people to figure out how they wanted to interface with it. You see that with Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Alessandro Cortini—they’re bringing their own voice to the palette. For my part, I’m obsessed with sound, with the ‘Buchla Paradigm.’

“His approach to synthesis, which was so different from Moog on the East coast, is immediately evident to anyone who has ever touched a Buchla instrument. If you listen to a Buchla, it will start rewiring your synapses.”

Todd honed his craft composing for acoustic instruments - string quartets, small ensembles and orchestras. In the 1970s he was drawn to emergent synthesiser technologies because of their abilities to access tones ‘between’ the standard 12 notes of the Western musical scale, and to have the power to craft music out of glitches and unique sonic gestures that are unplayable on acoustic instruments.

Multum in Parvo is reflective of this approach - it has a definite and logical flow as a composition, but its content is abstract sound sculpted out of pure energy, something only analogue synthesis can offer.

Sometimes sparse, sometimes bristling and jumping with detail, Multum... provides a genuinely multidimensional experience. Listen to it in the dark on your best headphones, you experience your brain moving slowly through a black space where an orchestra of strange, electro-microorganisms seem to swarm, murmurate and disperse, adding their distinct flutters, whispers and calls to an immersive electronic symphony.

Like the classic Forbidden Planet soundtrack, which Todd was inspired by, or indeed Music and Poetry of the Kesh - Multum in Parvo seems to function as part of some unique sonic ecology, according to its own rules, in its own universe and somewhere just beyond time.

Multum in Parvo is available on CD with artwork by the artist Ursula Barton - Todd’s daughter, named after his great friend and collaborator. It is also available on cassette with Blue Tapes artwork as ‘blue twenty-eight’.

Praise for Todd Barton:

"Multum In Parvo creates a very real imaginary place, and then it weaves that imaginary place into exactly where you are right now. I’ve listened to Multum In Parvo a dozen times or more and I’ve never heard the same album twice, because I change and my mood changes but also because incidental noises in my body and my surroundings – from sighs to car horns to distant giggles – all seem to be on very friendly terms with Todd Barton and his Buchla." - The Quietus

“Listen outdoors and the creek water you hear in Le Guin and Barton’s songs may sync up to the muddy river you’re passing; listen during a city’s winter and the percussive rhythm and bell-like tones will commune with your apartment radiator. These are sounds that seek to speak from then and beyond, to right now.” - Pitchfork
credits
released October 5, 2018

Improvised soundscapes by Todd Barton
on the Buchla Music Easel and Epoch Hordijk Benjolin

Cover art by Ursula Barton (ursulabarton.com)"

Moogfest 2018 (live edit) - Modular on the Spot, Moogfest | Eurorack Modular Synthesizer

Published on May 26, 2018 Lightbath

Moogfest 2018 (live edit)
Modular on the Spot
Durham, NC
May 19, 2018

Patch notes archive available through Patreon rewards: https://patreon.com/lightbath

All hardware performance/improvisation recorded straight to 2-track and mastered Premiere with compression and eq. This performance is an edit of the full 36-minute set available exclusively on Patreon.

I'm so grateful to have been a part of Moogfest 2018. It was great to hang a bit with lightbeams Emily Sprague, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and Sean Hellfritsch and to see some cats—like Waajeed and Jamire Williams—from my 'past life' as a guitarist in NYC. Thank you to Yoga After Dark and Modular on the Spot for having me.

It was an honor to play another MotS event, this time alongside Rodent, Peter Speer, Sarah Belle Reid, Jake Pugh, Jerry Kaba, and Lee Coleman. As with my first MotS experience, the vibe was one of immense support. It was so much fun to lead the audience through some air guitar moves. Truthfully, I don't know how that happened, but I'm glad it did. Thanks to all who participated!

And lastly, it was great to meet some of you IRL after my set. I also finally got to meet Richard Devine and talk shop (thanks to his wife and family for giving us some time to do so). Many thanks to Iain Smith for helping to cart my gear up the hill to the car.