Randy Jones
visual music and softwarenews
New 2up.jit.centroids
A Max/MSP/Jitter external I made in 2004---how time flies---just got a major update to fix some long-standing bugs. Improved match algorithm is improved. Help file is now in Max 5. Price: still free.
Chladni Videos
Chladni Patterns 3 from Randy Jones on Vimeo.
It’s been a hectic few months in a very good way. The summer proper was spent finishing and defending my M.Sc. thesis, this wonderful indian summer afterwards has been about playing couple of very different live shows: an ambient party in Mendocino county, and our own Decibel Festival. Both were amazing in different ways and in general I feel lucky to be doing such stuff, though getting prepared for these things it’s true I’ve invested a lot of sitzfleisch making technology when I could have been gardening. Now I get to share more of the results, though, the fun part of the process, and I’ll be documenting here at least a little. As a start, I made some movies yesterday of the waveguide mesh model I used in my thesis work.
Vids on Vimeo
I put some of my work on youtube a while back, but was never happy enough with the result to bother broadcasting the fact. Vimeo, however, is pretty badass, so now I can put some decent videos on the net without editing my site. Here’s a little piece called “OVNItos.” I did it in 2006 to test out render_node. Check this channel in the future for new live cinema pieces, more documentation on my multitouch controller project, and so on.
New Eyes for the Mind
Here is an essay I wrote for The Cinematic Experience, published by Sonic Acts Press, Amsterdam. In which I point to some ideas from the history of experimental animation that can shed light on where it is we are going with Live Cinema. And hopefully address some of my pet peeves without being too peevish. I’ve corrected a couple of typos and resisted the urge to do anything about meanings.
Mobile Billboards
I’ve just written a nice letter to the Mayor that will probably get a form-letter response. The jist was: should driving a truck in the city all day, for no other reason than hauling around a billboard-sized ad, be legal? ‘No’ has been the immediate answer from everyone I’ve bounced this off of, and I’m not talking about the Adbusters set. People hate these things. It seems like you could make some pretty cut-and-dried laws about this kind of thing. Ads on trucks already hauling stuff: OK. Ads on trucks hauling no stuff: NOT OK. Maybe a politician eager to establish himself as a “green” candidate could see some profit in this idea. Or maybe that’s naïve of me because of the power of the ad lobby, but anyway I spent half an hour turning my annoyance into action, and that feels good.
Check this out: an online brochure that promotes mobile advertising as “an environmental choice.” Why environmental? Because it reduces waste. Waste of what? Your ad dollars. It looks like they are recycling cars into metal shoes too, that’s good to know.
Lachenmann in Vancouver
This Saturday I’ll be in Vancouver helping perform live electronics for a very special concert of works by Lachenmann and Nono. Lachenmann is visiting to lecture, so we hope we do a decent job. Making the Max patch for Nono’s tuba piece has been an educational experience, one about which I hope to write more later. But for now, just the show details:
Vancouver New Music, the University of Victoria, the UBC School of Music and the Goethe-Institut are pleased to host Helmut Lachenmann, one of the most influential European composers of the 20th and 21st century. With Special guest Helmut Lachenmann, Max Murray, tuba; Dániel Péter Biró, live electronics; Randy Jones, live electronics; Kirk McNally, live electronics; Jee Yeon Ryu, piano; Franklin Cox, cello;AK Coope, bass clarinet; Franklin Cox, cello; Jee Yeon Ryu, piano Works include Post-Prae-Ludium per Donau by Nono; 15’;Serynade, 25’, Pression, 10’, Allegro Sostenuto, 35’ by Lachenmann.
More info here.
“And I Don’t Mean the Writer’s Day. ”
I’ve been reading some Amy Hempel lately on Chuck Palahniuk’s strong recommendation. Like just about all writers I respect, she has an utter lack of pretense and a way with packing as much meaning into as few words as possible. Traits that translate well into music, and that I hope for my own work to have. This interview at powells.com sums up her approach in about fifty words that sum up three-quarters of everything you need to know to make good art in whatever field.
Interviewer: When you teach creative writing, is there one piece of advice that seems to resonate more than others, seems to work, with students?
Hempel: Not so much a piece of advice as a question to keep in mind, which is the most basic of questions: Why are you telling me this? Someone out there will be asking, and you better have a very compelling answer, or reason.
There are people who have been raised by loving parents to believe that the world awaits their every thought and sentence, and I’m not one of them. So I respond to that. Is this essential? The question might be, Is this something only you can say—or, only you can say it this way? Is this going to make anyone’s life better, or make anyone’s day better? And I don’t mean the writer’s day.
Last Minute Notice
Come see me and Kamran Sadeghi perform live cinema at Cinema by Design, tonight at the Northwest Film Forum. Free! 8pm.
Brakhage in Victoria
I’m happy to announce that a Stan Brakhage screening in Victoria, a project I have been trying (however intermittently) to make happen for a year now, is a go. Thanks to Michael Hoppe at Cinecenta and the UVic Art Department, we finally have funding for and dates for the screenings. In two consecutive Tuesdays, Cinecenta will be showing the entire Vancouver Island Quartet, four of Brakhage’s later films which are, as Marilyn Brakhage puts it: “grand meditations on childhood, adolescence, middle age and Stan’s imaginings of heaven—richly metaphorical and rhythmically beautiful. “
JAN 29 (7:15 only)
2 BY STAN BRAKHAGE:
THE CHILD’S GARDEN AND THE SERIOUS SEA (1991 80 min; colour; silent; 16mm)
THE MAMMALS OF VICTORIA (1994, 30 min; colour; silent; 16mm)
FEB 5 (7:15 only)
2 BY STAN BRAKHAGE
THE GOD OF DAY HAD GONE DOWN UPON HIM (2000, 50 min; colour; silent; 16mm)
PANELS FOR THE WALLS OF HEAVEN (2003, 32 min; colour; silent; 16mm)
More about this DVD
I have a first batch of 50 Six Axioms DVDs, each bearing 32 minutes of visual music in NTSC video, Dolby 5.1 surround audio. I had the discs duplicated at the very nice Protape Northwest here in Seattle, used my rubber-stamp kit to print on them, made 50 origami cases out of translucent vellum, and numbered each one. I am sending the disc out to a few people to see if anyone wants to release it on a larger scale. But if nobody wants to do that, these will be the only copies. Either way they’ll be the only ones I wrote on.
If you want one, you can have one for twenty dollars+shipping. To reserve a copy, please write me an email with your shipping address. I’ll let you know how much shipping will be, you send funds via paypal, and I’ll mail you a DVD and thank you for supporting experimental visual music.
Six Axioms DVD
Coming soon to a theater near you. Check out more stills and video excerpts here.
A Cinematic Experience
I’m headed to Brussels in two weeks for the Cinematic Experience conference, organized by Boris Debackere and part of the Cimatics audiovisual festival. If all goes well, I’ll be bearing a few “artist proofs” of Six Axioms on DVD. I’m also working on an essay for the conference about subjective vision and simulation as organizing principles for “live cinema.” If this is your type of thing, then by all means get in touch.
Natural Metaphor For Information Visualization
Anymails is a brilliant project by Carolin Horn with Florian Jenett, an Electroplankton-like interface to your inbox which is cute yet sharp looking and actually useful. “[...]all received emails from school are blue and look a bit like croissants.”
Someday Lounge, PDX, this Friday
Community Library presents
RANDY JONES
MARK TEMPLETON
LULLATONE
WHITE RAINBOW
STRATEGY (DJ)
Someday Lounge, Portland, Friday July 30, $7
... more info about the other artists playing:
MARK TEMPLETON
Mark Templeton is the flagship artist of new New York label ANTICIPATE (affiliated with the dance label Microcosm). Mark’s electro-acoustic music is completely improvised, guitar-and-computer music, but he doesn’t just stop there, incorporating sampled instrumentation, vocals, and other live elements. It certainly relates to the music of icons like Fennesz, but with added dimensions of North Americana and avant-garde chamber music. This is his first visit to Portland all the way from Alberta, Canada.
LULLATONE
Audio Dregs artists Lullatone just released their 3rd album that combines whispered vocals, sine-tones configured in pop hook arrangements, and now a metronomic pulse almost hinting at dance music. This is their first Portland show and we’re happy to have them on board since their Artistery gig got cancelled. They have recorded music for Nobukazu Takemura’s label Childdisc as well and are rarely seen stateside so if you are into them this is your chance…
WHITE RAINBOW
White Rainbow’s new cd is coming on Kranky in the fall and it is fantastic. You know him as one of Portland’s deepest bringers of technoized granola eternal now yarnsound rainbow dome guitar pedal computer music.
STRATEGY will be DJing bizarre beautiful music in between bands, vinyl only.