Last Night A DJ Saved My Life
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2004 at 7.30 pm
Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle, WA

Speakers:

Kris Moon, “Turn Your Laptop Into A Battle Machine”: Seattle-based Kris Moon has been djing since 1993 (he currently shares the spotlight with a mechanical bull at a secret downtown location), and will be leveraging his long experience in the field to teach you how to ready your own machine for a live performance using Ableton Live, focusing on adjusting loops with envelopes, assigning keyboard hotkeys and using only the laptop with no controllers. A degree of familiarity with the basic operation of Ableton Live (http://www.ableton.com) would be helpful, but is not essential for this presentation.

Brian Thomas, “Rethinking The Live Music Experience”: Despite being an avid electronic music fan, local synthesizer addict Brian Thomas found the live performances associated with Electronica somewhat lackluster. His response: to create a new way to perform electronic music. The culmination of this effort is a new form of live experience that incorporates all the elements of a modern music performance: audio, video and lighting. Performance itself has been added back into the experience, since Brian will not be stuck behind a turntable or a laptop. With the intricacy and fullness of the whole experience, you may just forget that he is performing with all these elements- LIVE! (http://www.7Laws.com)

Randy Jones, “Live Audio+Visual Shows – Concepts And Technology”, Local musician, programmer and co-founder of Orac Records, Randy Jones, will discuss the ideas and technology behind the live audio+visual shows he has been doing since 2000. To make these shows possible, he created some new objects for the Max/MSP programming environment which later became part of Jitter, Cycling 74's video and matrix processing toolkit. Randy will show us what Jitter is about and talk about other works it has enabled, as well as works predating it which ‘got him into this whole thing in the first place’. (http://2uptech.com/)

Sean Horton, (aka Nordic Soul/Dreaming in Stereo), founder of DECIBEL – the first ever Northwest Electronic Music Festival, which will be held here in Seattle in September 04, will tell us all what to expect, and give us a sneak preview of Decibel’s programming. Decibel is a four-day, multiple venue festival designed to expose the Northwest to both the international and regional electronic music scenes. Running from 9/23/04 – 9/26/04 inclusive, Decibel aims to educate as well as entertain through workshops, seminars, open discussion, comfortable venues, excellent sound, exciting performances, interesting visuals and a diverse selection of quality electronic music. The festival will focus on no predominant electronic music genre, but instead will emphasize the similarities that unite all forms of electronic music (synthesis, technology, dance, urban post-industrial culture, digital art), and will feature the work of talented local producers, label owners, DJs and performers alongside the artists that have influenced them from further afield. (http://www.decibelfestival.com/).

Pre-speakers: Martin McCavitt - From 7 pm to 7.30 pm, during setup, Virginia-based Martin McCavit, in Seattle for two weeks (and performing at Ffej’s Cognitive Dissidents, Coffee Messiah, 3/9) will be creating a live performance using interference patterns generated by two waveforms, using the timeline in Digital Performer as a repository of controller information. Performer skips to various locations in the sequence time line, and the new location sends controller info that changes the parameters of the self oscillating plugin. He’ll also be working with solenoids, which respond to the amplitude peaks in the signal sent to them, striking percussion instruments. Audio is also sent to speakers, so the performance becomes a blending of loudspeaker and acoustic ‘instruments’. http://www.soundclick.com/bands/2/birdsinthemeadowmusic.htm

Randy Jones will perform an audio + visual set after the presentations.

Marco Gavini has been pushing pixels for almost 6 years now at a variety of events in San Francisco and Seattle.

Randy Jones is a musician and programmer. His work focuses on computers as instruments for creating live sounds and images, instruments through which the musical practice of improvisation can be applied to the processing of non-verbal idea systems. To realize his audio+visual work he uses Jitter, the graphical programming environment he helped design and code for Cycling '74. Jones has performed at Chicago's Transmissions Festival, at the Media-Space Festival in Stuttgart and at the Technicolor performance series in Berlin, in addition to many shows in and around his home city of Seattle in the Republic of Cascadia. Other projects have included visuals for the Summer 2003 Radiohead US tour, a video piece "Lunarlanderlegs" shown in the Sonar Festival in Barcelona in 2001, and a permanent installation of music-responsive visuals for Seattle's aro.space in 1998. In 2000 he collaborated with Radio Drum virtuoso Dr. Andrew Schloss in composing and performing "UNI," a structured audio+visual improvisation. The duo performed "UNI" at the LEAPS festival in Vancouver BC, at the Festival de Música Electroacústica in Havana, at Stanford University and at the opening of Seattle's Experience Music Project. Jones has also had a long-time interest in dance music, and co-founded the Orac Records label with Konstantin Gabbro to foster boundary-pushing in dancefloor styles. http://2uptech.com/

Kris Moon has been djing since '93, spent 3 years as electronic music director at KUGS, college radio in Bellingham, 2 years managing pro audio at the nefarious Guitar Center in Seattle, a couple more as techno/electro buyer for Zion's Gate. He currently plays top 40 hip hop at a bar with a mechanical bull. http://robotrash.com/; http://nwtekno.org/vb/showthread.php?threadid=68890&eventid=15216

Brian Thomas: Throughout the 90's Brian worked at various music software companies, including Dr. T's Music Software and The Blue Ribbon SoundWorks, the latter of which was purchased by Microsoft in 1995. At Microsoft he was a tester on a variety of music-related products, including DirectMusic and the musical components of Windows versions 98 through 2000. In 2001 he left the company to work on a variety of his own music and music technology projects. He has been both addicted to synthesizers and involved in the music technology scene for 18 years. You can listen to over 10 hours of his Electronica music for free at http://www.7Laws.com.