Here is Peter Bill’s rough cut of our performance at “the florence,” an old theater at the base of Smith Tower, that had lain dormant and empty for 14 years.

Bruce Bennett- sound mix, keyboards
Peter Bill – pixel pushing, live paint, source vids
Byron Diel- drums, sound mix
Vance Galloway- guitar, sound mix, tech coordination
Michael Zbyszynski- sax, flute, sound mix

and laralay- live paint, the guy from Big Lebowski on trombone, paul on bass clarinet, and and….

thanks again to Seth for the space!

(2005-6)

electronic music and sensor programming for Myra Melford
with Dawn Saito, Oguri, Stomu Takeishi, Cuong Vu, Michael Haberz, and Reinhard Ploesch

		photos of sensor grid
		photos of the electronics
		schematic of noise reduction circuit (pdf)

The sensor grid protoype is a 4′ square floor with microphones and sixteen infrared range sensors mounted inside, beneath round acrylic windows. Dancers dance on, beneath, and with the surface, and the sensors influence the electronic sound in real time.

2006, 20′ for video and tablet-driven live electronics with video by Anthony Discenza

News Cycle #2 is a live collaborative digital artwork consisting of reprocessed and interwoven excerpts from three 24-hour cable news networks. The raw material is 36 hours of news footage, 12 hours each from CNN, MSNBC and Fox news from one day in summer 2006. Each section of the piece represents a different compression of the day’s footage, exposing digital and analog artifacts inherent in the technical processes. The resultant sound from this footage is manipulated using a customized digitizing tablet to “draw” a score by extracting data from the video stream. The tablet is used to select specific scan lines from the piece, generating changing buffers that are subsequently convolved with either the audio content of the video, pink noise (in silent sections) or a mixture of the two.

Commissioned by The Getty Center and The Montalvo Arts Center.

Live at Studio 74, Fresno, CA

2 June 2009

More music:

Respectable Citizen is an electronic improv-core ensemble that simply eludes any classification beyond eclectic. Their sound has been described as everything from ambient, illbient, experimental electronic, drum n bass, dub electronic, down-tempo, lounge, raga-esque, space rock, prog rock, to noise. The group only assembles for gigs and recording sessions as its members are scattered up and down the west coast. Bruce Bennett (now back in San Francisco after a year “on the road” as a refugee from New Orleans in the wake of Katrina) navigates a multimodal musical space of resonant sonorities littered with arabesques, classical quotations, and melismatic melodies. Byron H. Diel, a shamanistic visionary from Fresno, California, articulates ever-shifting meters and polyrhythmic play across a sampled drumscape. Vance Galloway, Seattle’s most reclusive experimental electronic guru, sculpts the sound of his guitar through a wash of electronic manipulations from the spacious to the granulated. Michael Zbyszynski charms snakes and tantalizes the audience with heavy breathing and screaming saxophones. Together, they bring into play a dynamic and varied web of sound texture, rhythm, and melody sure to delight the connoisseur and the dilettante alike.

This is binaurally encoded, so listen with headphones if you can.

My musical interests in Alone in a Crowded Room are twofold. Electronically, I am exploring macroscopic and microscopic processes in the time domain. At the same time, I am engaged with the physical reality of the alto flute and by extension, the flautist.

The long delay lines at the beginning of the piece are an example of macroscopic process; the technique has long been a part of compositional vocabulary from analogue tape loop to cannon at the unison. In this piece it creates the situation for an interior monologue between the player and himself. Concepts repeat, decay, and interact with one another, creating new layers of meaning with each recontextualization. As the piece progresses, microscopic process come to the foreground. The sound of the flute is broken into individual grains that gradually loose cohesion. The monologue branches out, as memories of the original performance split into fragments.