Sunday, January 14, 2018

Blog Assignment #1 - Jacob Rogers

The first time I was in the class, I worked on a soundscape project with Jonathan Mashburn and Mac Porter called Hogback. This ended up being a pretty fruitful collaboration for me because, after having worked together once, Jonathan commissioned me to write a percussion quartet for his new group Up/Down Percussion. They did a nice studio recording of the whole thing, and the video just came out a couple weeks ago.




As for a type of collaboration I'm interested in, I recently saw a set by the band Quicksails. Their live shows involve structured improvs with electronics, and live synthesized/processed visual displays. I've been increasingly interested in film as a medium lately (both live generated and precomposed) and would be very interested, to whatever degree, in working with that medium. Here's one of their music videos, a bit more clearly structured than their live material but equally effective.

3 comments:

  1. This piece is really beautiful. One of the best things about this class is the opportunity it presents for people of all different backgrounds to collaborate and form lasting relationships. It would be really cool to combine a piece like this with sound reactive visuals.

    The video with the song is mesmerizing. I'm really curious about the process of making this sort of thing and I'd like to explore it more.

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  2. This piece is gorgeous. I enjoy how each of the instruments seem to occupy their own pocket of the rhythmic spectrum, but every once in a while, hits on all of the instruments fall on the same beat and the result is a shocking wash of sound. The video is well made also--moving to a wide shot once the group reaches a climactic sonic moment.

    This is a really cool video. It's interesting to see where the eye is drawn as more sounds are introduced. I noticed that as the arrangement became more dense, it became more difficult for me to tell which sonic events were triggering which visuals and I started to watch them all as a group rather than tracking the individual changes.

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  3. I love this piece, it's absolutely captivating. It reminds me of some of Brian Eno's stuff, but maybe with a little more motion and clarity to it (if that makes sense). I'd love to talk to you about your process for writing this piece, I think the instrumentation works really well here too.

    I think this video is really cool just because of how well it accompanies the music. I like how the shapes and the music interact. It really forms a complete experience of sorts.

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