Tonight I’ll be playing with Matthew Herbert + Stargaze at the Barbican in London, performing Terry Riley’s famous minimalist masterpiece In C.
Detailed show info on the Barbican website. It’s sold out, but I’ve heard that more tickets may become available before the show.
We did this performance once before a few months ago, at the Cologne Philharmonie, and it was great fun. This time I think it will be even better…
I’ve built a small family of mechanical drum machines using Meccano and solenoids. These will play different rhythms and keep time (the famous repeating C, for example). Here’s a video I made while experimenting and testing the machines:
I’ll also be doing some live sampling/looping/remixing, of course, together with Matthew and Hugh Jones (Crewdson). Hugh will be using his brilliant new hacked concertina, which is one of the nicest musical interfaces I’ve ever seen.
I performed a live set on BBC Radio 3 with the BBC Concert Orchestra and Matthew Herbert at the Roundhouse. I made some custom software and hacked a harpsichord. It was super fun.
As part of the ‘Matthew Herbert Quartet’ I was part of the recording of the new album “The End of Silence“, made entirely out of the sound of a bomb. This is getting released in June, and we have started playing live shows, starting in Italy, Germany, and Australia.
Which reminds me, I went to Australia with Mr Herbert + co. to perform One Pig, The End of Silence, and a one-off piece called “One Room” at the Melbourne Recital Hall. Some interesting reviews here.
On a similar theme, I was in the group to perform “One Day” at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg.
I spent four days in Aldeburgh and Snape as part of a Faster Than Sound residency with Peter Gregson, Pekka Kuusisto, and Reactify. I wrote a piece for Violin, Cello, and Electronics which was performed at Aldeburgh Music.
Our game “Bad Hotel” was nominated for an Independent Game Festival award in San Francisco, so the whole Lucky Frame crew went out there for a week to shmooze. We didn’t win, but it was great.
We’ve been working on a super fun project with Dundee Contemporary Arts, making generative data visualisations.
So, it’s been quite an amazing first half of the year. Writing this post has been an interesting exercise for me in terms of looking back on what I’ve done. More soon!
It will come as no surprise to followers of this blog that I have been touring with the incredible Matthew Herbert on the amazing One Pig show. It has been one of the most rewarding artistic and professional experiences of my career – we’ve played at venues from London to Tokyo, and the rest of the group (Tom Skinner, Hugh Jones, Sam Beste, and Dilip Harris) are out of this world.
So it’s with great pleasure that I can announce that One Pig is coming to my (adopted) home of Scotland for a seven-date tour. We will be starting in Glasgow, working our way up to Shetland, and finishing off in Aberdeenshire.
Spread the word, and come to a show near you! I will of course be playing my bizarre and intriguing “Sty Harp“, and every show will be accompanied by local chefs cooking delicious pork. What’s not to like?
For more information about the show, check onepigscotland.com. It’s quite a treat.
Through some terrible organisation and forward planning on my part, I somehow managed to neglect posting here about the now nearly-complete Seznec Bros tour. Over the past week my brother and I have played shows in Bath, Torquay, Oxford, London, Penryn, and more. We are finishing it all off tomorrow night in Fulham at Brook’s Blues Bar. It’s been a brilliant little batch of shows, especially since we were joined for several of them by the incredible Senegalese multi-instrumentalist Amadou Diagne.
Our show in Oxford was organised by our amazing friend Malachy, who then put us up in his gorgeous home in the countryside. He has in his possession a lovely Wurlitzer electric piano, which I completely fell in love with. Cory and I made a few videos with it, here’s the first one for you:
Be sure to check the Seznec Bros website, where you can buy our new album, watch more videos, and get details on our activities!
I’m just getting ready to head off to Paris to meet up with Cory for a couple of Seznec Bros shows. It’s been a little while, so we’re really excited!
We’re going to be using these shows to record some video and take some photos, so hopefully I’ll have plenty of content to post here and on the Seznec Bros site in the coming weeks.
Be sure to Like us on Facebook for news, updates, and goodies, and if you’re in Paris or Brittany this week come down to the shows!
12 July, 9pm, Chat Noir, Paris
13 July, 6:30pm and 10pm, Café Toucouleur, Tregastel
I’m super excited to be headed off to Manchester today to play the One Pig show with Matthew Herbert at FutureEverything. Show details are here. This follows on from recent gigs at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, SOS48 in Murcía Spain, and at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. It’s been an amazing adventure, and I’m looking forward to more. Coming up we also have Brighton on Monday the 21st of May, and then two shows in Portugal at the end of June.
Here’s a video someone took from the crowd in Spain…
Here’s a trailer for some upcoming Matthew Herbert One Pig shows…we’ve been doing loads of gigs around Germany and France, and in the coming weeks we are hitting up England, Spain, and Portugal, with a show in Poland in August too.
The footage in this video comes from our debut Royal Opera House show, which seems like ages ago now!
Come see us in Murcia (5 May), London (9 May), Manchester (18 May), or Brighton (21 May), and be sure to say hello.
Here’s a short video from Reuters about the One Pig project I’m involved in. It goes into some background of the album, as well as the live show and the styharp, together with some footage of us rehearsing for our recent show at Cafe Oto.
You can also check out this great review of the gig from Clash Music and see a lovely gallery of photos here.
Next week I’m headed back out with Matthew Herbert and company to do some more One Pig Live shows. I’ve spent the last few days tweaking the Sty Harp and I’m looking forward to the gigs!
The dates and places are: November 17th, Berghain, Berlin info in English, German
November 18th, STRP Festival, Eindhoven info in English, Dutch
Over the last few weeks, in addition to doing some exciting things at Lucky Frame, I’ve been on the road with Matthew Herbert for his One Pig tour. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve built an interactive musical pig sty for his show, and I’m performing it onstage with him (and an incredible band made up of Sam Beste, Tom Skinner, and Hugh Jones).
We’ve only done three shows in the past few weeks, but they have all been brilliant. The first was in Bolzano, Italy, for Transart. We played in a giant abandoned aluminium factory on the outskirts of town. It was a packed show, and the chef on stage (fittingly named Hannes Pignater) made some amazing bacon with leek and apple. The venue also provided us with a recently butchered pig’s head, which was…um…interesting…
A couple of photos of you, which show Matthew testing out the styharp during the soundcheck and a picture from the show:
After a quick stop back in Scotland, where I spent the day working on the Man High Mixer project that you can read about over on the Lucky Frame website, I headed off to Japan with the band for two shows in Tokyo. It was an incredible trip (despite the giant typhoon that hit the day we arrived). The crowds were great, the staff at Liquid Room was brilliant, and the food was delicious.
We have a few more gigs scheduled, and more are being booked all of the time. For the moment it looks like the next three gigs will be:
17 November, Berlin
18 November, Eindhoven (STRP Festival)
25 November, Brussels
A few months ago I was very lucky to meet musician/producer extraordinaire Matthew Herbert in person and learn about his exciting One Pig project. For this album Matthew recorded a single pig’s life “from birth to plate” and constructed an album out of the resultant sounds.
The Independent recently published an article about the album, read it here to learn all about the concept and motivation behind it all.
I’m extremely excited to now be a part of the live show for this album. Over the next few months I’ll be touring with Matthew as part of a five-piece band, playing a brand new controller/instrument built especially for the show – the StyHarp!
As the name suggests, the StyHarp is designed to mimic a pig sty, and is used in the show to trigger, control, and effect sounds in real time by pulling, plucking, and twisting the strings. It’s a very physical thing to play, which is part of the fun. I don’t have any great video footage of it in action, so you’ll have to make do with this hilarious video of me jamming with the band during rehearsals:
Our first show is this Friday September 2nd in London, at the Royal Opera House as part of the Deloitte Ignite Festival. As of this writing there are about 30 tickets remaining, so if you’d like to come you should book quickly! Otherwise we’ll be playing shows in the following weeks and months in Bolzano Italy, Tokyo, Eindhoven, Brussels, possibly Germany and Poland, and maybe more. I will post when I get more details, of course.
If you’re interested in the background and building of the StyHarp, keep on reading! Some technical details ahead…
When Matthew and I first started thinking about what we wanted to make for his show, we were certain that we wanted something physical, something with resistance and response, something that looked strange, perhaps even frightening, and evoked the themes present in the One Pig album. We wanted to be able to have direct control over sound, but also wanted something with a life of its own. The musicality and the theatrics had to be on equal footing. All of these things led me to want to make something with strings, something big and something that would take effort to play.
The main component of the StyHarp is the string sensors, which are ripped from Gametrak controllers. These gadgets are a sort of proto-Kinect, designed for PCs and game consoles. They were marketed as 3D motion trackers, and packaged mostly with golf games (with comical miniature golf clubs) and sold only in the UK from 2000-2006 or so. To use a Gametrak the player wears a pair of gloves which are connected to a base station with some wire (which looks suspiciously like orange fishing line). Inside the base station these two lines each go into a spool, which is connected by a few gears to a standard potentiometer. The potentiometer thus turns as the wire is pulled in and out. The wire is also fed through an X-Y joystick-style potentiometer. The result is that the distance and location relative to the base station can be tracked with startling accuracy, all using technology that has been around for over a hundred years. Pretty great, huh? It’s a wonder no one thought of designing a controller like this for the Atari or the Binatone TV Master.
Many thanks to Jung In Jung and Martin Parker for introducing me to the Gametrak and for helping me track down a few extra for this project!
So the design we settled on for the StyHarp called for 12 Gametrak strings (four per side, three sides), thus six Gametraks. Each Gametrak has a USB output, but it turns out that only the XBox and PC versions of the Gametrak can be used as a HI Device (and the XBox version requires a little hacking even to do that), so it quickly became apparent that I would not be able to just plug them all into my computer. However, Jon (aka Lucky Frame partner in crime) suggested I tap into the outputs directly from the potentiometers, and plug them into an Arduino, thus bypassing the Gametrak’s USB circuitry altogether. That worked great! However….each Gametrak has six parameters (x, y, and distance for each), which means I needed 36 analog inputs, and the Arduino only supports 6. Even the Arduino Mega only supports 16! So I decided to use the Arduino Mux Shield from Mayhew Labs. This lets me have up to 48 analog inputs, which are multiplexed through the digital pins in some way that I don’t understand.
During the early stages of development (i.e., three weeks ago) I was planning on using the Gametraks in a fairly un-hacked form. This was because the models that I had bought did not seem all that conducive to hacking – the gearing was more or less separated from the wire spools, and it seemed like a headache. Some people have done it (including this guy, who used it to build a Gametrak-based Ondes Martenot), but it didn’t seem worth it to me. However, I ended up finding a few later model Gametraks, apparently released in 2006, which use a slightly different construction which lends itself to hacking – in fact, the whole reel, gearing, and potentiometer setup is tightly packaged into individual and completely separate little boxes! It’s amazing. So I found a bunch of these and ripped them apart, and I had all the sensors I needed. I was even able to hack out the little connector wires that they use. If this interests you, be sure to find the ones that have rounded ends like this.
To connect everything to the Arduino I’m using 1/4″ stereo jack cables. This is partially because I had a loom kicking about my studio, but also because it is an affordable and robust connector, and venues are generally guaranteed to have a bunch of them just in case. I therefore attached two female connectors to each set of wires which connect to the Gametrak sensors, and I built a patchbay box for my Arduino.
On the software end, the Arduino is communicating through USB using a serial data system built by Jon in Processing. This is much more robust than the software provided by Mayhew Labs, which kept on crashing because of the load of data coming through…Jon implemented a brilliant call-response system which eliminated all crashing. Go go Lucky Frame! So Jon’s utility is sending all the data via OSC into Max/MSP, where I’ve built a flexible patch for sending MIDI notes and controls to Ableton Live, where all of the sound processing and triggering is going on. The sounds are all original recordings from the One Pig album, and they are triggered by pulling or plucking the strings. Twisting and pulling the strings then control other effects like delays, filters, and so on.
The Gametraks are all connected to stands using plumbing fixtures, and the strings are pulled out to connect across and create the fence. I’ll be inside the sty for much of the show, playing the strings, and I’ll be joined at one point by the rest of the band…but I won’t give away the ending.
It’s loads of fun to play, and I’m really looking forward to the shows. Come by if you can, and as usual get in touch if you have any questions.
