After playing a kick-ass N event with officeR, SKIF++ and MoHa at Paradox Tilburg on wednesday for a small audience, officeR played a rather tame set at the Gaudeamus Live Electronics festival on thursday. I'm suspecting that's due to the little playing we actually do. Compared to the SKIF++ sets the officeR concerts seem to be so much more risky in a way. There are more nerves, more insecurities, more expectations - but then again, compared to the not so exciting impro sets after officeR in the Bimhuis, I think we did a pretty good job. The impropool sets were performed by not the least in european improv: Anne LaBerge, Justin Bennet, Marko Ciciliani, Lukas Simonis, to name a few. But the free improv they played is interesting for about 5 minutes. Then of course there are the short interesting connections that are made sometimes, but the overall structure is too loose to keep the attention.

De moraal van het verhaal: Keep Away From Free Improv If You Want More Than The Occasional Thrill...

This week (Nov 20 - 24) is the LEF festival - organized by Gaudeamus, and a bit by STEIM. We're having the 'elektronischeinstrumentententoonstelling' (an exhibition of fun toys - to be touched), a book presentation by Nic Collins tomorrow (tuesday) at 16h. Then Michel W. is playing in Bimhuis on wednesday, and I play with officeR on thursday, in the impropool. To show that improvisation doesn't always have to be free.

As if this wasn't enough, we're also playing with officeR, SKIF++ and MoHa at Paradox in Tilburg. More info: http://www.paradoxtilburg.nl/, http://www.n-collective.com/, http://www.umatic.nl/SKIF++ and of course at http://humanelectric.net.

Last saturday I was at November Music in Den Bosch, for a presentation of the Wave Field Syntheses system. Not going to go into the details (just google it), but it's a way to diffuse sound in a 2-dimensional space. In this case with 192(!) speakers. Yannis Kyriakides, Wouter Snoei and Barbara Ellison were asked to create compositions for the system, which turned out to be a brave, but not very succesfull task. Just playing around with positioning sounds in space is not an easy thing to do, and it turned out they had only three days with the system. Impossible to make more than a demo for the cool movements the system can create. Well, maybe I'm just jealous....

I switched to Movable Type, a blog system, so I can enter more data, more often, more easily. I don't know if you out there are waiting for more info on the web, but at least it gives me a space to blah.

And for those of you that are dying to see what else you missed in this spot, here are previous posts:
News Archive
News Archive - really old