Pictures from Bare Wires
March 16, 2009
[slideshow]
(Pics by Tamara Polajnar)
Blog
Bare Wires in the Skinny
March 13, 2009
Nice piece on ‘Bare Wires’ by Clare Sinclair in the Skinny;
...‘The lines between technology and the arts are blurring at an astronomical pace: the latest laptops and computers position themselves not only as tools for business, but as home entertainment centres where anything seems possible.
J. Simon van der Walt, performing as part of the Cryptic Nights season, parallels this revolution yet takes it back to the ‘Bare Wires’. As Edward ‘Teddy’ Edwards and the Electr-O-Chromatic orchestra, he presents and electronic symphony of music and performance.
Van der Walt’s imagination takes us on a technologically devised musical jourrney with improvisation, composition and electro-junk. His passion as a performer, actor, director and composer is apparent, and he strives to blend musicality, innovation and theatricality into one.
Luckily, Cryptic’s creative drive lies in a similar field, making the Cryptic Nights season a perfect match for the composer. He arrestingly combines his “creative misuse of technology”, such as text-to-screech (the warping of standard computer text-to-speech software), with reverting back to his childhood use of electronic junk as instruments. This piece could reinvent the way we experience music, and its place in a modern society. The electronic age is vibrantly creative, and with ‘Bare Wires’ the performing arts are keeping pace.’
cynthcart
February 22, 2009
Got hold of a loan of a very cool instrument to use in the show;
Yup, it’s a cynthcart, a Commodore 64 hacked up to play as a synth! Tried it out in rehearsal today, works great. (Thanks to Col for the loan.)
Plan for the show, version 01
February 21, 2009
Plan for the show, version 02
February 21, 2009
Well, that worked out easily enough. If the longer numbers are in the region of five mins, I reckon I can just about bring that in at 45 mins.
Also working on a list of instruments, looks like twenty-two different bits of gear, including laptops, effects units and conventional instruments.
Slipping Away
February 20, 2009
Driving work the other morning, I wrote this waltz in my head;
It’s called ‘Slipping Away’ because, as you might have noticed, each time it repeats it accidentally slides down a semitone; like the last slush of winter on a window pane, or someone slowly, gently, dying…
I think I’ll use it in the show on March 5th. Which now, finally has a fourth player! And, I got a loan the other day of an *extremely* cool instrument to use in the show, more details to follow.
...Ed bends Yamaha
February 15, 2009
I was round at Eddie’s house the other day, and we had a go at circuit bending an old Yamaha RX17 drum machine;
This is pretty standard stuff, a well-known bend linking pins 4 and 12 of IC 116. After some experimentation, we decided on a 100k log pot with a 1k resistor in series. Ed is a bit iffy about the whole idea of circuit-bending, kind of goes against the grain for someone who was trained in electronic engineering! But we had fun - going to use this in the show on March 5th.
Ted Edwards classic
December 22, 2008
I’ve finally managed to persuade Ted to let me post some of the amazing back catalog he’s built up over the years. Below is a piece called ‘slacion’ which he did ‘sometime in the late 70s’, using an adapted version of the PE Minisonic synth plus tape loops plus a spring reverb. The video is also by Ted, a recent digital remix of ‘some old Betamax that’s up in the loft’. I can’t wait to find out what else he has up there… [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrJ3cSXfiqY&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]
...Loudcoding?
December 16, 2008
Managing to do the same kind of thing now in SuperCollider, speaking one word at a time, which kind of makes more sense in this context; loudcoding?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AG8hMLAXs_U&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]
(Amazed at getting this to work, actually. I’m *so* not a programmer!)
More text to screech
December 4, 2008
Updated version of the Bare Wires text interface;
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi9olQyxfzE&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]