In praise of patient neighbors…

The last time I wrote, I promised that there were several more G LEAGUE IGNITE videos on the way. Today we’re launching the second of five: Rowhouse volume levels (named in honor of a December rehearsal and recording session conducted at-home in Philly).

The origin story for G LEAGUE IGNITE begins in 2017, when I heard percussionist/composer/improviser Dennis Sullivan perform as one-half of Popebama, at the New Music Gathering in Bowling Green. I made a point of gushing over Dennis and his duo partner Erin Rogers after the performance - it was a fabulous and mind-expanding set. But I didn’t really get to know Dennis until October 2022, when he and I shared a bill on a short Baltimore / DC / Philly tour, Dennis playing as part of Blood Luxury (with violinist Erica Dicker), while I was playing with guitarist Bryan Jacobs (a project which culminated in our Pinball record).

On tour, Dennis and I hit it off pretty much at once - for a lot of reasons (I admit, I use tomato pie as a strategy for making friends), but not least our shared enthusiasm for baseball and basketball. Dennis, Erica, and I spent a delightful afternoon together in a Philly sports bar, watching Dennis’ beloved Cleveland Guardians beat Tampa Bay in a playoff game. By the end of the tour we were jokingly threatening to start a podcast that would cover “equal parts noise music and G League” (the latter being the National Basketball Association’s developmental league. If you’re not familiar, you’re better off not knowing why it’s called that).

The podcast was never a serious plan, but the phrase “equal parts noise and G League” fermented in our brains. We talked more and more about doing some duo playing together, and one day Dennis declared that our band name should be G LEAGUE IGNITE - the name of a G League team that was announced to great hoopla at the end of 2020 and… went out of business in 2024. Name in hand, the project became inevitable (as is so often the case, nomenclature is destiny), we spun up rehearsals in the fall of 2024, and here we are today.

And yes, it is so very me to settle on a band name which is completely impossible to Internet search because it’s ganked from a failed minor league basketball team.

Dennis and I have both occasionally used lighting as a component of our compositions (in my case, in projects like Constellations and Filaments). Somewhere along the way, it occurred to us that since we were both using digital instruments (my controller-and-laptop rig running Pd, Dennis’ Nord Drum and Sensory Percussion devices), and since we both had stashes of cheap digitally-controllable lighting fixtures, we could integrate some interactive lighting into our setup.

The Rowhouse volume levels video shows off the results. At the opening, the lighting is a consistent blue wash - but as I trigger bass tones, using the nearest-to-me / bottom row of pads on my grid controller, randomly selected lights switch to a brighter color (initially purples and whites), then gradually fade back to blue. As we get into the piece and Dennis starts playing Nord Drum (next to the snare drum in his rig, look for the six black pads in a red case), he triggers similar effects.

Over time, the color palette changes, the number of lights involved in any given “flash” increase, the fade times lengthen, and eventually we arrive at strobing light in randomly selected pink and white hues. Those features are all based on an automated timeline, rather than performer input - I’d rather focus on playing music than try, likely fail, to multitask by attending explicitly to the lighting in performance. Happily, the ways in which Dennis and I create musical variety (instrument changes, rhythmic contrasts, etc.) also serve to produce variety in the lighting behavior - put those features of our playing, and the lighting interactions they generate, together with the inexorable timeline-driven changes, and we wind up with an interesting result. As I watch, I quite enjoy the way that the shifting configurations of bright vs. dark colors cause our shadows to leap and dance across the rear scrim.

All of the lighting control is coded in Processing, which is so darn useful in its ability to integrate different digital art tools and environments - a little bit of programming makes a whole lot of audiovisual synchronization possible. Each video has its own specific lighting design. Expecting logic leans into the blinky-flashy, Rowhouse volume levels is more interested in interactive clarity, and… you’ll see more in future installments of this newsletter. I’ll be back in a few weeks with next video, and more about the behind-the-scenes too.

Thanks as always for listening and reading - yours,

Christopher

Christopher Burns
christopherburnsmusic.com