Ikue Mori and her ilk

TrierMusic · Post by **TrierMusic** » Wed Jul 16, 2008 3:08 pm

ME AGAIN!

Anyone know of any articles/interviews etc. on how *improvising* laptop musicians like Ikue Mori do their thing? Like in contexts like John Zorn's Cobra - how they have things set up to switch on a dime, etc.

Looking for brainfood.

(I suppose they're probably using stuff like SuperCollider or whatever...)

apfEID · Post by **apfEID** » Wed Jul 16, 2008 3:31 pm

she uses Max/MSP.

logic_user99 · Post by **logic_user99** » Wed Jul 16, 2008 3:40 pm

Off-thread slightly:

Has anyone heard the 'Hemophiliac' recording by John Zorn, Ikue Mori, and Mike Patton? It's absolutely bloody bonkers... alot of it is random screaching and curious sex noise. There's a few nicely inspired bits, though.

TrierMusic · Post by **TrierMusic** » Thu Jul 17, 2008 1:01 pm

Yeah, Patton is great. Adds a strong dose of insanity to everything =)

Cool video for it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BikTKdmPans

But that's a good example, really - I think this is all improvised(?) So I want to try to cobble together some Live stuff that will give me lots of control...I'm thinking about buying one of those SL0 controllers. I NEED A MILLION KNOBS AND BUTTONS!

mikemc · Post by **mikemc** » Thu Jul 17, 2008 3:37 pm

TrierMusic wrote:Yeah, Patton is great. Adds a strong dose of insanity to everything =)

Cool video for it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BikTKdmPans

But that's a good example, really - I think this is all improvised(?) So I want to try to cobble together some Live stuff that will give me lots of control...I'm thinking about buying one of those SL0 controllers. I NEED A MILLION KNOBS AND BUTTONS!

my thoughts about improvising go like this:

1) you can improvise on the sound/tonality level (manipulating synth patches and/or waveforms)

2) you can improvise on the note level, whether with melodies, chords and rhythms (traditional 'musical improvisation')

3) you can improvise on the 'phrase level', where a phrase is a substructure of a song (a 'riff', some riffs, a bar, some bars).

4) is dependent on the third, intra-phrase rearrangement (clip scrubbing, envelope alteration, selective gating/muting, inversion, transposition)

The first one is done by assigning controllers to aspects of the instruments sound-design oriented parameters, and also by selecting an assortment of instruments (AOI) to combine.

The second one is done mostly internally, getting appendages to play the desired notes.

The third can be done in the same way as the second, but of course with Live it's done by launching clips.

And the fourth is done by doing what it says in the fourth one.

(yes it is the case that a phrase can be as granular as a note, but that is extraneous to the model).

So you splay your AOI across various tracks (which can include audio input from voice and instrument), and you can add them in/remove them by arming/disarming tracks.

You set up your note-sending apparatus to send notes to these.

You set up one or more tracks to capture what you are outputting, to be able to build layers.

Now, if you are a 'start from blank purist' you are done. You have the challenge, if you want to include 'type 4 improvisation', to assign controls on the fly to do those things because you will be creating clips that weren't previous thus instrumented.

If you are not said purist, then you include some clips to trigger and to do type 4 you assign controllers for those and their envelopes, etc..

[edit] dropping in whole effects or racks thereof is a 5th type of improvisation, kind of orthogonal to the notion of actual compositional improvisation but definitely a type of on-the-fly creation of sound.