Dreams, Moments, Travels
Update: I’m adding this in the summer of 2023 because we didn’t have a blog post for our departure from Phoenix up to Portland, Oregon. This was originally taken to send to my partner Jeffrey of TimefireVR as we were seeing more and more movement in the virtual reality space.
Tonight at the Musical Instrument Museum was the Mehmet Polat Trio…I think I’ll let his website do the talking this time:
The Mehmet Polat Trio is a spiritual yet adventurous meeting of three virtuosos of magical instruments: ney, kora, and ud. With roots in the Ottoman, ancient Anatolian, Balkan, and West African music traditions, the trio welcomes listeners with its musical authenticity. The original compositions are colored by daring improvisations and grooves, presented in an atmosphere of chamber music.
The King of Ju Ju music from Nigeria; King Sunny Adé was playing tonight at the Musical Instrument Museum. I’d first encountered his music back in the early 1980s in Los Angeles as somehow he became rather well known in the punk rock circles of L.A. at the time. That it took me more than 30 years to finally see him is as bad as the 30 years between learning of Kronos Quartet and finally seeing them here at the same venue. The diversity of acts that perform at the MIM is extraordinary and I cannot praise their booking department more for their fantastic efforts.
About to chow down on the Dinosaur Bone at Twin Smokers BBQ in Atlanta, Georgia. This punctuates the beginning and end of our trip to the South with BBQ on both sides, along with a load of it in between. From here, we caught our flight back to Phoenix, Arizona.
This is Eban Crawford playing the prototype Expressiv Infinity in one of the hallways near our workshops. The city of Durham has done a great job bringing this event to their city and the support for all of the art and venues that are playing a role at MoogFest. I’d love to come back but will need to take off a few years to recover from the stress of signing up for events and workshops that fill up minutes after the schedule goes live, and even then, it turns out that your reservation doesn’t have to be respected if one of the MoogFest staff members decides to let walk-ins enter a workshop early thus bumping you because of fire code rules that only allow so many people in the room. Getting booted from the Robert Rich performance also hurt my enthusiasm. The solution next time, I suppose, would be to purchase the $350 VIP option, which allows the attendee to register their interests before the cheaper $99 general admission guest. While the organizer might think their pricing is fair, I don’t think they take into account those who are incurring greater costs due to coming from out of state and out of the country. The truth is that I don’t know how I’d organize it any differently for such a niche and eclectic event.
Building circuits at the LittleBits workshop, where we are learning to make our own optoelectronic sequencers and noisemakers, is a blast.
Our last performance was in the middle of the afternoon and it was of Suzanne Ciani performing on and demoing her Buchla synth. Suzanne is a pioneer in electronic instruments and sounds having created an iconic bottle of Coca-Cola being opened sound and a wide body of work for film and television over her career. She also holds the distinction of being the first woman to be the solo composer of a major Hollywood film. Most recently, she’s been working with Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, who has been gaining attention as a Eurorack synthesizer artist.
Suzanne Ciani’s Buchla synthesizer.
Heading south out of North Carolina and traveling through South Carolina on our way back to Atlanta for the flight home tomorrow. It was a truly great adventure and learning experience.
It was bound to happen, and happen it did. No, this Eurorack synthesizer did not become mine, but I started down the path of buying components for a synth that would become mine. Part of yesterday and again this morning, I was talking with the guys from Make Noise, WMD, Bastl, and, of course, Rick Burnett of Erogenous Tones, who has probably spent nearly two hours with me by now. So without a case to mount anything in and zero idea of how any of this stuff works yet, I take the plunge and buy my first Eurorack modules. First up were the Make Noise Pressure Points, 4MS Spectral Multiband Resonator, and the Black Market Modular Colour Palette filter. An hour later, I grabbed the Noise Engineering Loquelic Iteritas oscillator, WMD DPLR Delay, WMD Aperture filter, and the Erogenous Tones Levit8 mixer. Ten pieces of never-before-played equipment and no real knowledge if I’d gather enough skills to feel that my purchases were worth it; I did it and will try not to look back. They say Eurorack is one of the worst and most expensive habits to acquire, and I’m learning the truth about that.
While it was difficult to focus on the workshops I’d signed up for as I was in a purchasing frenzy, I really did make an effort to attend. This one is from Michael Garfield, who is leading a live looping workshop.
Jaron Lanier was here today for the second keynote of the festival. Jaron’s career started for me back in the early ’90s with the first go-round of virtual reality. At one point during his talk, he gave a demonstration of a “khaen” instrument from Laos, which dates back to the Bronze Age; I’m tempted to buy one if I can find it.
I was busy talking synth modules again while Caroline took in a performance by Reggie Watts. I also bumped into Richard Devine and Jaron Lanier while in the synth demo area.
We have finally seen The Orb live and in person, and they even played a bit of Little Fluffy Clouds!