MK Speed Dial presents “Dark Dream”

Some notes: I neglected to grab a copy of the video from Scotty at the event, so this remained the one undocumented presentation. Fortunately, I was able to correspond with Mr. Rickard and a master DVD was procured via the post. I ripped the disc and re-encoded the video. The result is what you see above. Thanks to Scotty for adding a great presentation to the Winter Commission, and for going out of his way to get me that disc. Now all of the presentations from WC2 are available on youareweare.com for posterity! Now I can sleep.

-Ross
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IRIC performs at the Second Annual Winter Commission

Some tech notes: There were a lot of steps involved in creating this video and the resulting performance. First of all, the background music. This was created wholly in Ableton Live 7. I first imported Ms. Newsom’s performance into Live. Fortunately I had already beat mapped it a long time ago for some other aborted project. I lowered the pitch to my desired key. Then, using Ableton’s notorious ability to turn wankery into art, I jammed over the basic performance on guitar, bass, piano, and drums. My limited musicianship for each of these instruments was negated by Ableton’s ability to rapidly isolate the ten seconds from each run-through which sounded really good and re-combine them, “Live” as it were, in “Infinite Combinations” as it were. Ableton’s the best for a lazy musician such as myself. Thirty hours of tweaking and arranging later, I had the musical backing for the video.

Next up, the video itself. Basically, the bulk of work for the video was done in Adobe Premiere. Throughout the editing together of these videos, I have had a lot of trouble with Premiere. Notably, it hates Xvid-encoded AVIs, which most of my content was stored in. Thankfully, there is an amazing plugin for Premiere which allows AVISynth to act as a frameserver into Premiere. If you are having trouble getting Premiere to handle any kind of AVI content, I highly recommend it: Premiere avisynth import filter.

Finally, I had to create the Karaoke part. For this, I used Karaoke Builder Studio, which I think is what the pros use. The output looked just right. I had never made Karaoke before, so this was a treat. This program is old and weird. It’s designed to make traditional CD+G Karaoke CDs. During my youthful Karaoke obsession, I had always assumed that the glitchy-ness of Karaoke discs was due to scratches on the physical medium. Not so! The program creates glitchy output, wonderfully so – look for the screen artifacts in the videos shown here.

Once I had created my base track, I downloaded a CD+G DirectShow filter (I think this one). Then, I created an AVISynth file which referenced the resulting CD+G file and loaded it using DirectShowSource. It was harder than this, there was an extra step and my memory is a little blurry of that week… getting the CD+G file to load into AVISynth was tricky. Doom9 had a guide on how to do it, though, worked like a charm after I finally read it through VERY CAREFULLY. “Filter Graphs?” I dunno. Oh wait, I found it. I hope to recreate this step and post a tutorial in the future. Anyway, once I had it loading in AVISynth, all I had to do was load it into After Effects using the AVISynth/Premiere plugin mentioned above, add in the scrolling IRIC graphics and song title (I admit I created them in Photoshop at low-rez and used After Effects to make it look crappy and genuine rather than doing it in the Karaoke editor proper) render the whole thing to an AVI, import that AVI into Premiere, key out the background color provided by the Karaoke software, and overlay the whole mess over the video I had edited together. Cake, right?

At any rate, I hope you all enjoy it. And I hope to make more of these. Now, at least, I know how. I have included below the original video in case you ever want to perform this song in the privacy of your own home.

IRIC performs at the Second Annual Winter Commission

Thanks to everyone for their kind words about this performance. It was scary but fun.

-Ross
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Grandpa Wheelchair Performs at the Second Annual Winter Commission

Some recording notes: There are three video sources here. Jubal’s camera, Alan on my HV20, and also some footage sent to me from Evan from his camera. Evan was doing some insane stuff. My understanding of the situation (and feel free to correct me, Evan) is he hacked together a control interface out of an old joystick, which along with who knows what other triggers controlled a Max/MSP/Jitter session consisting of weird effects put over old films, switching back and forth with the live performance. The whole thing was then shunted over the projector system. I’m glad we were facing the other direction because I think its brilliance might have distracted us from the task at hand.

The instruments played were Erik Wallace’s drums, first by Luke, then Amanda (thanks Erik for the loan), Jubal on bass, Mark on Casio SK-5 sampling keyboard. Violin, first by Amanda then myself, and roommate Eric’s electric guitar, first by me then by Luke (thanks for the loan, Eric). The first number was totally free-form, both as a warm-up and an attempt to do a true improvisation. The next number we called “A Drone”, basically attempting to play around the chord of A Major but still playing whatever we wanted. The results were weird! Which is what we were shooting for. Thanks to my friends for making this happen.

-Ross

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Banana Splitz performs at the Second Annual Winter Commission

Some recording notes: The evening opened, of course, with a technical glitch. As the Splitz took the stage for the first time, the audio immediately crapped out with a “pop”. The ever well-prepared Anjali ran back on stage and regaled the audience with tales from the dark realms of science as the AV crew scrambled to figure out what the heck went wrong. We still don’t know what went wrong. We plugged the audio source directly into the board and called it good. The Splitz were good sports about the whole thing, but for the purposes of brevity, the preceding video edits out the tense bit.

The following video consists of 3 sources. My (sort-of) trusty HV20, Jubal’s camcorder, and a the video (I’m guessing from an iPhone?) Kelly sent me. There were a lot of people walking in front of the various video sources so it took a good deal of editing to get a good shot of the stage at all times. Hope you enjoy!

-Ross
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Sri Craven Bla lectures at the Second Annual Winter Commission

Later that evening, Sri Bla graced the stage again for a look at the foundation of all scientific thought with his presentation Well, Actuarially, a look at how the science of the insurance industry permeates through all areas of the scientific method, especially those pertaining to performance artistry.

Sri Craven Bla lectures at the Second Annual Winter Commission

Thanks to Sri Craven Bla for all of his help raising metaphysical awareness for the evening, and creating the sound scientific foundation on which the rest of the Winter Commission so precariously perched.

-Ross
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Camp Meeting performs at the Second Annual Winter Commission

Some recording notes:  Mark made the video which was projected above the band as they played. It was down to the wire, his computer kept crashing, but the render finished just in time. Also, the camera Alan was using to shoot the band kept glitching out, so only a certain amount of footage was usable. Which is a shame, because it really looked good. As a result, I cut to Mark’s video quite a bit. We were also kind of racing to get the live audio working in time for the performance. The band finally got a live sound they were happy with so they started the performance before we could mic for the recording. As a result, the audio could be better.

But in case you wanted a copy of it, here’s an mp3 of the performance:

MP3 of the Camp Meeting Performance

There is, thankfully, a more clear recording of Camp Meeting, created when I miked the band’s practice the day before the Winter Commission, in my basement. I have coupled it with Mark’s video to create the following video.

Camp Meeting performs at the Second Annual Winter Commission
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If you would like an mp3 copy of this demo recording, the links follow:

Track 1
Track 2
Track 3

-Ross
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Sol Olmstead performs at the Second Annual Winter Commission

Some recording notes:  Again, this was taken from the night of February 20, 2010 at the American Museum of Radio and Electricity. Erin’s art was projected with a classic slide projector. In fact, the whole performance was all-analog, at least until we got our grubby little hands on it. Sol’s performance was captured on Jubal’s camcorder, and I believe Alan shot the handheld video for this segment. Alan stepped in quite a bit (with zero notice or incentive) to capture a huge swath of the entertainment that night, and the resulting video is quite good. For that I thank him. Thanks to Sol and Erin for creating a really cool multimedia experience.

-Ross
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Biagio Biondolillo performs at the Winter Commission

Some recording notes:  I included Biagio’s sound check so that you get a feel for our commitment to TOTAL AUTHENTICITY in our presentation of the events of the Winter Commission.  That said, I cheated quite a bit in making everything look good so don’t set your phasers to lionize just yet.

Biagio’s set took place at the Second Annual Winter Commission, an art event we have held twice, this time at the American Museum of Radio and Electricity in Bellingham, WA on February 20, 2010.  This year’s theme was “A Night of Art and Science”.  Video was provided from two different sources, my Canon HV20 camcorder, and Jubal’s ancient (but durable) classic camcorder.  There wasn’t a lot of light for this set, so everything is a little grainy.  Eric shot the video on the HV20. Multi-track sound was recorded directly at a high bit rate directly from the board, a Mackie Onyx 1620i. Katie took some great shots from the mezzanine earlier in the night, so I spliced those shots in to give a feel for how many people were there. The resulting presentation is weird and a little disjointed but hopefully conveys the spirit of the evening and captures Biagio’s performance as best we could.  Stay tuned for more performances from the Winter Commission, here on youareweare.com

Also, included is an mp3 of the entire performance:

Biagio Live @ The Second Annual Winter Commission
-Ross
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This video was originally shown at a local Christmas pageant called Jinxmas to a live audience.

OK, here goes:

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...originally a laboratory "where scientists could work to understand..."

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"...the unique electromagnetic fluctuations..."

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"...emanating from this sector of the Island"

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As you approach, a grating clanking noise emanates through the walls. To the side sits and ominous access panel or shed of some sort.

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You realize: it’s a frickin’ Dharma station.

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Foreshadowing.

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Antenna for transmitting The Numbers

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more foreshadowing

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I’ve often wondered what it was.  One time I was on a walk with some friends to check it out.  As we pondered its purpose, a weird guy in his mid 30s on a BMX came riding down the side yard out of no where and shouted at us in a slurred voice, “pumping station.”

We’ll see, BMX guy, we’ll see.

The first step to deducing the function of this structure was to figure out its address.  Through trial and error on Google Maps, I was able to establish that it was on the 1100 block of Otis Street.   Here’s an aerial shot I obtained using “Bing Maps”, which is a service so cool it almost makes up for the annoying sidebars and the fact that it has the “Bing” name attached to it.

Next step was to look up the properties on that block using the excellent Whatcom County Assessor’s Parcel Data Base Information System.

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hmmm...

City of Bellingham Water Department, eh?  Sounds promising.

Bingo.

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BMX guy was right.  More specifically, it’s apparently a “Water Pressure Control Station”.

But what of the mysterious access shed?

Internet to the rescue again.  If I was to make an educated guess I’d say that it’s probably an emergency diesel generator installed in 2003.

ominous rear view

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CASE: CRACKED WIDE OPEN