Via brian comnes:"This has been a busy week with the NoiseFest Saturday and Loop Festival Thursday.
Attached are some pics from the Y2K6 Live Looping Festival. Rainer Straschill's rig has the Korg Wavestation (gratuitous synth porn) He's from Germany see www.straschill.de for more) and I threw in some cool shots of him in action. Rick Walker (festival organizer and looper par excellence) is the guy in the white suit. - love that chain and cymbal stuff
The Thursday night event was their "experimental" night so the sounds had some common DNA with the noise folks. The big difference of course was the musicality and nuance, much more of that with the loopers than the noise crowd. I know you focus on synths in your blog, but in effect what these looper folks are doing is capturing waveforms on the fly and then sustaining and layering them with the looper gear, then modulating the results and keeping it all interesting in real time. Is that really fundamentally different than drifting through a sequence of waveforms driven by a Korg Wavestation?? This year the computers were way more prominent than Echoplexes compared to last years presentation. The coolest instrument there by far was the Zaxophone which is basically a fiberglass or bamboo stick (pinned to a piezo much like a one note kalimba) played with a bow and modulated by a block of wood. This thing was almost human sounding, ranging from kids chatttering to orgasmic moans. There's a picture of that too. Unfortunately the artist from Japan was not on the official program so I am sorry he is anonymous. (maybe rick can supply the name)"
Title link takes you to more shots. Previous post on the festival.
I think Brian means "daxophone". One of the coolest instruments ever IMO.
ReplyDeleteyou may be right on that now that you mention it, BTW it debuted there last year and made a repeat show this year
ReplyDeleteYou may be disappointed that the use of the Wavestation here was only as a MIDI controller for my laptop rig (I tend to bring my laptop to far-away gigs and then borrow guitar, keyboard and equipment stands locally - the Wavestation appeared courtesy of Bill Walker).
ReplyDeleteAs for (synth) sound generators, the prominent sources on this concert were stuff by NI (Kontakt, Pro52, FM7) and the mda epiano - check out the track "I left my pants in San Francisco" at http://www.y2k6loopfest.com/mp3.html
(for those among you interested in this: my hardware-based setup does also include a Wavestation KEX, next to a Waldorf Q and a MicroModular)
Rainer