in short order…

A previous edition of this newsletter introduced Peak Time and Its Malcontents, a new album of electronic improvisations from Bridges of Königsberg. The complete record lurks behind the link in the album title, but if you want to stimulate your visual cortex along with your auditory system, here’s a brand-new video for the first track, “giving 110%.”

[please be forewarned that said visual cortex stimulation includes flashing lights]

I’m sure my enthusiasm for pixel art is obvious, and yeah, as a kid I was definitely wrapped up in the low-resolution video games of the day. But re-watching this piece (originally created in 2024), I’m even more struck by its reflection of my obsession with grids. It’s a theme that runs through a lot of my animation work (exhibits a, b, and c), as well many of the digital illustrations I’ve created in the past few years.

Of course, I’m hardly alone in my fascination with grid forms. Cue art historian Rosalind Krauss (in her essay “Grids,” reprinted in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths) - “it is safe to say no form within the whole of modern aesthetic production has sustained itself so relentlessly while at the same time being so impervious to change” - as she cites artists from Piet Mondrian to Agnes Martin. Am I obsessed with, and profoundly influenced by, the history of modernism? Guilty as charged.

But also: am I fascinated by the ways in which the modularity and repetition of a grid can be bent away from predictability, and towards richness and complexity? Yep, that too. Am I inspired by the ways in which the negative spaces contained by grids offer transparency, and thereby invite layering? Perhaps most of all. And so giving 110% is (very) unlikely to be my final “grid piece.” But it’s nice to take a moment and think about why I go back to that form again and again, and about what I hope to express through it.

As promised, details of the Low Pass Ambient Open Mic event in Philly, featuring Kyle Bruckmann and I playing a duo: Wednesday, July 23, 2025 at 1842 E. Passyunk Ave., beginning at 7 pm.

Ambient Open Mic is a lovely gathering of community - we are flattered to be the “featured guests,” and I’m looking forward to a fun and casual evening with a broad range of sounds and styles. I’m also eagerly anticipating performing with Kyle again (our last time out was 2018). His playing is always imaginative, focused, and provocative, and I couldn’t ask for a better teammate / sparring partner / fellow traveler. If you’re in Philly, please come hang!

Previously in this space I wrote about a software instrument I jokingly called the “New Thing.” (The actual working title/name is “hall of mirrors”). One of the things I’m experimenting with in this new design is a different approach to rhythmic performance. In previous instruments, I’ve generally used one (or both) of two approaches: a> “play the rhythms by hand” (as one would with a keyboard or percussion instrument), or b> “let the machine do it” (as one might with a drum machine) - define a few guiding characteristics of the rhythmic performance, and then turn the software loose to produce the actual timings.

With “hall of mirrors,” the software still generates the actual rhythms, but the performer is invited - or even required - to shape the parameters that govern those timing decisions in more continuous and more flexible ways. You perform the rules that produce the rhythm, continually mixing different types of durations with different relationships to the overall tempo and beat (e.g., grace notes, periodic rhythms, tuplets, long sustained tones) to produce an ongoing sequence of timings.

I haven’t spent sufficient time playing with this approach yet to determine if it’s a good idea or a bad idea - but it feels different enough, and intriguing enough, to be well worth coding and exploring. And more generally, one of the things that keeps me at this instrument design work - almost ad infinitum - is the opportunity to keep answering the question “how can you play music?” in different ways.

The cartoonist’s vacation continues. Safe to assume that there will be no further drawing until that rain-suspended game of pétanque is completed.

Thanks as always for listening and reading - yours,

Christopher

Christopher Burns
sfsound.org/~cburns