The Prince of Mid-Air…

In honor of one of the all-time great basketball names, and a player that the fanbases of both the Philadelphia 76ers (aka my team) and the Cleveland Cavaliers (aka Dennis’ team) would call iconic, we titled this performance World B Free.

Revisiting this recording, I hear elements that have been G LEAGUE IGNITE staples from the very beginning of our rehearsals together. There are my droning electronic textures, manipulated via the pressure applied to each pad on the grid controller. There’s Dennis’ pairing of cracked woodblocks and other wooden acoustic sounds with synthetic electronic timbres. There’s heavy distortion. At larger scales of form, there are times where the material gradually builds and intensifies, as well as a moment or two of electrifying contrast. All of those things have been present in our duo playing pretty much from day one.

Other aspects of this work have only arrived recently. The delightfully idiosyncratic samples that Dennis triggers from his Sensory Percussion controllers (the drum shells with black heads at the far left and far right of his setup), the melodic patterns that I’m playing from a single sustained press on the grid controller, the pitchy modular synth tones synced to Dennis’ kick drum, and some of the glitchy and rhythmic applications of effects processing in my setup have all arrived in just in the last few months. New, too, is our exploration of grooves that combine fast tempi, quiet dynamics, and dense textures, as is our shared sense that bass lines are an increasingly important aspect of the music we’re making.

There are yet other approaches that we’ve abandoned. Early on I imagined that we might (sometimes?) be a kind of percussion ensemble, and created a bunch of drum-machine-style pattern sequencers and synthesized drum timbres… only to realize that Dennis has that angle covered (and brilliantly), and that, even if I occasionally stumble, in this context I’d rather be playing than supervising a bunch of computer-driven generative processes. Meanwhile, Dennis has sometimes set up much larger sets of cymbals, only to decide that a drier and darker sound palette is mostly the way to go, and his setup has become increasingly focused on electronic gear as we’ve gone on. (Metals do still turn up from time to time - as you may have already seen and heard in Rowhouse volume levels). The patient, woodshedding-oriented process of G LEAGUE IGNITE enables us to test, analyze, build, discard, synthesize, and gradually build a repertoire of improvisational possibility.

If World B Free isn’t enough visual stimulus for you, here’s an animated music video I made for “Ablutions,” a track from longtime collaborator Kyle Bruckmann’s new album Patternalia. Kyle shorthands this particular record as “planetarium music” (though while that may have been a leaping-off point for the composer, I don’t think it does full justice to the delightful idiosyncrasy of his electro-oboe-minimalism). While I tried to honor the planetarium aesthetic in the animation, I ended up with something more “aquarium” (in an abstract kind of way) instead.

I’m up to some of my usual visual tricks here - grids of circles are still grids, and, as with several previous projects, the animation is presented as a continuous single “shot” or “take” with no edits. But there are new developments, too. That single shot encompasses transitions between several contrasting “scenes,” aligned with my understanding of the structure of Kyle’s music. I’ve used partially-transparent color as a way to get various blur and glow effects that create a sense of depth - even though this there’s no use of perspective or other simulated 3-D. And I’ve enjoyed finding ways to make this animation dynamic even though the circular forms are solidly rooted in place - they change size and color, but never position. I’m grateful to Kyle for this invitation to collaborate - the Patternalia record is available now on Bandcamp, and it’s well worth your time.

While not, strictly speaking, “what I’m working on right now,” I thought I’d describe one of the instrumental features I’m relying on in the performance of World B Free. Starting at about 37 seconds into the video, I’m playing high-register tones with sliding, unstable pitches - in my personal parlance these are “squiggles.” There’s a long history of using a very slow oscillator (Low Frequency Oscillator, or LFO) to modify the pitch of an oscillator running at a much higher frequency. When you listen to the output of the fast oscillator, you hear vibrato, at the rate of the LFO. Although tradition is to use sinusoidal or triangular waveforms for vibrato, the squiggles depart from convention in using a unique shape for every note, with new shapes automatically generated every time I launch the instrument. (Yes, I am the kind of person who enjoys strange applications of mathematics). So each individual pitch might wobble according to a shape like these examples:

Furthermore, each pad on the grid controller has an independent pressure sensor - so the harder I press while sustaining a given note, the faster the LFO runs, and the wider the detuning of the squiggle becomes. To keep things as squirrely as possible, the mapping of pressure to speed uses a different curvature than the mapping of pressure to width - making the aural relationship between speed and width a little more subtle. With a single pitch, it’s possible to hear how the frequency changes, and what aspects of it are repetitive. As soon as multiple pitches are in play, each with its own shape and its own continuously changing speed and width, it turns into a blur of sliding tones - just the way I like it.

More next time about additional ways of animating sound in these G LEAGUE IGNITE videos - time-varying changes to filters, distortion, modulations, etc. Thanks as always for listening and reading - yours,

Christopher

Christopher Burns
christopherburnsmusic.com