You can complain about music events and festivals as they are, dream about what you’d imagine an event could be – or you can go and make it happen. And since the latter category fits friends-of-the-site Chris Gilroy and Lara Grant, it’s well worth an endorsement for this weekend’s In/Out Festival. (For their part, both Chris and Lara have been regulars at our Handmade Music NYC series; Chris as an electronic audiovisualist, and Lara as a textile-and-sound-melding felted signal processing guru.)
If you’re in New York, hope you can make it or even help cover it for CDM. If you’re not – like, for instance, if you’ve recently moved to Berlin – we’ve got some videos here to give you a taste of this particular assemblage of musical makers.
The lineup looks rich and varied on the performance side, coupling emerging artists with known names, all in genre-bending, adventurous sound:
Daedelus, Christopher Willits, Ander, Bit Shifter, tehn (Brian Crabtree), Portable Sunsets, Nick Demopolous’ Smomid, Comandante Zero, Noizmakr, Programs, Sarah Danke: Switched, Ivan Franco
There’s also a great selection of workshops:
- Heatit°C prototyping workshop, which uses a heat-reactive postcard for an analog circuit alongside “thermochromic and conductive inks and batteries, switches and conductive thread,” all made with a Craft Robo for producing 2D and 3D templates. (Wait… wha? Someone definitely go and cover that.)
- How to make a contact mic
- Kinect and movement using free software (Pd) – with Sofy Yuditskaya, who writes about Kinect and other 3D hacking today on Create Digital Motion
- Max for Live with Christopher Willits
- Comandante Zero on integrating live acoustic and digital instruments into performance
- Alternative musical instrument discussion
And here I’ve assembled some of my favorite videos of the artists and past In/Out events:
Stephen McLeod turns an egg-cooking session into a live, improvisatory tune – fried breakfast you can dance to:
There is a certain sense of magic or alchemy in the way a good cook or a good musician can transform raw ingredients into something beautiful. I feel like there is a kinship between these two disciplines, and this series of videos and performances is a meditation on that intersection.
While I prepare for you a meal, I use microphones and a computer to process the sounds. These sounds combine to form an automatic composition, determined by the recipe and improvised on the spot.
A meditative musical creation by tehn, aka Brian Crabtree, creator of the monome, was a highlight for me in 2009. (I played visuals live, using my photography and software I built in Processing. Side note: the bio pic is Brian appearing at one of our first Handmade Music NYC installments, put on with friends at Etsy.com who are now based here in Berlin. Strange, the arc of time and space.)
Here’s protofuse, aka Julien Bayle (French artist also known for his Max development work and protofuse controller), playing Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room with Chris Gilroy on visuals.
Festival co-organizer Chris Gilroy jams at one of our Handmade Music NYC parties from earlier this year.
“Switch” by Sarah Dahnke (here with meredith Blouin) is a far-out dance confrontation, in which bodies augment one another with sound.
And to close out this set with a groove, here’s Switzerland-based artist Ander playing a truly futuristic-looking controller Station, which appears to be ready to operate the Death Star.
Incredibly, all this music runs US$20 a day, or $30 for a limited-edition two-day pass, with workshops priced at $10-15 or free.
In/Out runs at The Knitting Factory and Death by Audio in Brooklyn.
http://www.inoutfest.org/tickets