muses: Share SJ

last night was the inaugural meeting of Share San Jose; Share is a worldwide community that gathers monthly to make communal music and art. Participants bring their portable equipment, plug into our system, improvise on each others' signal and perform live audio and video. SHARE furnishes the amplification and projection.

revelations

my secret: i happen to be a big fan of sound art. from about age 10 or 11, i was one of those millions of people who were influenced by the local independent radio station. 'my' station is WMNF, a completely independent user supported community station in the heart of conspicuously conservative central Florida. i first discovered Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the Word of "Bob": J.R. "Bob" Dobbs on WMNF.

last night, i was very interested to talk to the Share 'participants' but within moments of being there it was abundantly apparent that i should become a maker. this was a little strange because despite my absolute love of noise art; i am not a musician. i bombed in elementary school when trying to learn an instrument and ham-fistedly beat on a cheap electric guitar in my teens. my friend Ethan Miller spent a few minutes with me to install an algorithmic sound program called ChucK. the programming is done on the command line but, it will take me some research to pickup some fluency.

¿dirt style?

and so with absolutely no pre-planned platform, they asked if i wanted jack-in to the mixing board and i said yes. i picked up random samples from my favorite ccMixter site the Freesound Project and mixed loops using Quicktime. on top of this I layered my text to speech synthesizer and read my theories on art practice into the mix. do i need to invest my time in one of these complex sound programs? maybe not.




my 'ow' sample built from Sumanguru Gyra Jones upload :
and asample of the jam (yes that's the woot-ow loop in minute 3):