The Seafarer was recently shown at the 2012 United States Super 8mm Film & Digital Video Festival and won an honorable mention!

Originally a piece for acting cello by Kevin Clark, Kevin adapted his work to video with the help of Michael Feldman (video) and myself (sound design). It was a long work of love putting this together in our various points of free time. I’m really excited to see our work being appreciated.

Info from Kevin’s site:

The Seafarer adapts an Old English poem about the suffering and joy of the sea. It began as a concert piece for acting cellist, and grew into a film. The translation into modern English was made by Burton Raffel, and is used by kind permission of the Yale University Press, as printed in Poems and Prose from the Old English.

Cast:
Cello and Performance – Rachel Gawell
Voice Performance – Claire Buckingham

Crew:
Director and Co-Editor – Michael Feldman
Composer andProducer – Kevin Clark
Sound Recording/Design – Zach Herchen
Visual Effects – Victoria Nece
Editor and Assistant Director – Brian Hedden
Cinematographer – Antonio Cisneros
Sound Operator – Gillian Arthur
Production Assistants – Josh Feldman, Ben Johnson

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k6RW6qvYrU

Benjamin Taylor has finished making hard copy parts for Shipbreaking! We’re one step closer to my premiere on March 15…

Check out my premiere of Strangeloop for solo bari sax. I commissioned Victoria Cheah to write me piece and she used the opportunity to explore strange loops. A strange loop is a system with a “tangled” hierarchy, meaning as you travel through it you wind up back where you started. An example is nearly any classic drawing my M. C. Escher.

This performance is from Ruckus Amongstus, a recent event organized by Kevin Clark and myself. The video was recorded with the generous help of Mike Feldman, Alan Jeffries, and Matt Dunnam. You can see other performances from that night at Kevin’s YouTube channel.

I am currently recording tracks for Benjamin Taylor to use while creating the CD playback version for “Shipbreaking”!

Also, testing my ability to blog right from my phone…

I know it’s not hard for a computer controlled piano, but this is pretty awesome.

Found on Reddit. Video on YouTube.

Check my recent performance with 1st Construction of Evan Chamber’s Come Down Heavy! at Vaudeville Park. Above is the fourth (and final) movement.

1st Construction was co-founded by Danica Borisavljevic, Ela Polak, and myself last summer. We are currently hard at work commissioning pieces for piano/violin/sax and planning summer concerts. Stayed tuned!

Video from YouTube.

Above is a piece called Years by Bartholomäus Traubeck. From his project page:

A tree’s year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music. It is mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appearance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture). The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and hardware setup, but the data acquired from every tree interprets this ruleset very differently.

There’s some great info about it on the Creative Applications Network website.

Shoutout to Boing Boing where I first saw the video.

This past weekend I kicked off the new year with a 3+ hour variety show of great music, theater, and performers collectively called Ruckus Amongstus! Developed by past No Signal members, we applied our basic idea of “gather everything you are into right now and put it in one epic event”. We had a great turnout at Exapno (a new music community center in Brooklyn, NY) last Saturday Jan 14. Many thanks to the audience for there support and positive feedback. It looks like we’ll be doing this again!

I was very excited to have included the premiere of Strangeloop, written by Victoria Cheah for me. We had worked heavily on this piece in 2010, made a recording, but never got it onto a program. A strange loop is a system that cycles on itself, self-references, and is a paradox. The classic example is the popular drawings of M. C. Escher.

The event included a gesture piece, rock music, jazz, new opera works, a monologue, and improvisations. Plus we had Dennis Clark and Orlando Klass mixing unique cocktails. We videotaped the whole event and plan to get much of it up on YouTube soon! Check out the program:

Gestenstücke by Juan María Solare
Strangeloop by Victoria Cheah — WORLD PREMIERE
Giant by The Bad Plus
Khan Variations by Alejandro Vinao

***IMPROVISED YouTube Film Scores***

Physical Improv testing for Summer’s Twilight by Kevin Clark — WORK IN PROGRESS
We Two Boys by George Lam
Phthia

***IMPROVISED YouTube Film Scores***

Textual Healing
Monologue from “A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer”
The Seafarer by Kevin Clark, translation by Burton Raffel
My pain by Edward Thomas-Herrera

***IMPROVISED YouTube Film Scores***

Sylvana Joyce and The Moment

Our wonderful performers were:
Peter Bellomo, Sara Phillips Budde, Kevin Clark, Dennis Clark, Dave Cohen, Michael Compitello, Sean-David Cunningham, Matthew Dunnam, Lainie Fefferman, Michael Feldman, Rachel Gawell, Rose Ginsberg, Zach Herchen, Jaime de Jesus, Alan Jeffries, Sylvana Joyce, Emily Kadish, Orlando Klass, George Lam, Robert Maril, Casey Middaugh, James Moore, Domenica Romagni, Christopher Smith, Andie Springer

In the beginning of this year AM/PM commissioned Eli Stine to create a video for performance with Kati Agócs’ piece Hymn. We were really blown away with the result and recently spent the time to record the piece. Above is the result. Enjoy!

Video from YouTube.

Get a sneak peak at Benjamin Taylor’s latest work Shipbreaking!

The piece is being funded (and premiered in 2012) by a consortium of saxophone players I’m organizing. If you’re interested check out http://www.benjamintaylormusic.com/sax-commission.html