Yesterday everyone but me left STEIM, as the orientation was over. I got a computer, keyboards, and other gear from Nico and set up shop in Studio 2. It was a lovely sunny autumn afternoon, so after taking leave of the others, I walked to the Museum van Loon, right around the corner from me, which is an 18th century mansion on Kaisersgracht. Hanging there are portraits of the van Loons, the earliest dating back to 1616. They are in pristine condition (probably around 20 of them) and would be proud acquisitions of the Rijksmuseum if they could get their hands on them. Quite lovely. Then I walked around the canal to foam, a photography gallery and publishing house. There were two exhibits on, both really great. One was of the photos of a Russian, Alexander Gronsky. We had just been talking about abandoned cities in the world (google this and what you find is astounding), and one of the two series of photos by Gronsky was of Russian landscapes in places where the population density is less than 1 person per 20 sq. kilometers. These large photos were quite carefully balanced in composition, mainly white (snow) with striking bits of color that focused the eye and played like notes on a piano score. Each photo had a strong narrative element to it as well. He's won a big award for his photos from foam, and it is easy to see why. The second exhibit was photos and a film by Johan van der Keuken. He'd worked in a format I have been thinking about a bit, that of the pictorial narrative: a series of photos from the same event from different points of view, sort of like a film with a very very slow frame rate, but edited with close-ups and from different angles. He has one very famous photo, called "île Saint-Louis" (1958) that was meta-documented in one room, but it was a good enough photo to deserve that one room to itself. After a send-off dinner at Café de Jaren with Josh, I went back to the studio for the night, working on a setup for live looping, making music and writing Max patches and experimenting with LiSa looping software. I decided to really start very basic with LiSa, a good decision. While talking with Josh at dinner, I vowed to do an internet performance every two weeks at some time TBA, using whatever advances I'd made in a personal improv performance setup. While working on the beginnings of this idea, I ran into lots of difficulties, but some interesting accidents happened at the same time. One such accident is that I had created an 8-track simple looping patch in Max/MSP, and each track is successively triggered automatically by loud bursts of sound. Well, during the improv session, I inadvertently was making loud enough sounds to step through the tracks quite quickly at sort of random times, which started this ever-evolving loop of short sounds—evolving because the recording kept cycling around the track count and recording what it heard. Unfortunately this resulted in the end in a terrible feedback loop. But this is an interesting idea to be able to be switched on/off for a loop bed. I also decided that one way of playing through looping live sample track that might distinguish me from others is the way I play it on the synth keyboard, making musical tones from the sample tracks as well as noise/loops. The type of samples taken is something to delve into, as words have their own distinctive character while playing back, as opposed to tones. This is worth experimenting with, using poetry and stories and observations, yet spoken/sung in a specific way?

Yesterday Frank Baldé gave a fairly in-depth look at junXion software, which is used for i/o purposes from sensors, wii, video, audio, into the computer. It is very clever and easy to use, and is quite nicely featured, serving the purpose not only of i/o, but also of routing i/o, and a unique feature of allowing a fairly deep level of interaction between and among sensors. This could be very useful in quickly experimenting with multiple-controller systems/instruments. By the end of my practice session I was able to play a software synth and do some fun control of other basic MIDI parameters with my wii controller. It was a beautiful sunny day in Amsterdam. Most of the workshop participants went to eat a special Dutch lunch of kroket (which is some lamb rolled in mashed potato(?), breaded and fried, and served on a bun with mustard) and a cone of french fries slathered with mayonnaise. I must say my stomach didn't take to that lunch very well. But afterward I took a nice walk around the city, followed by an experimentation session in the studio. The day was capped off by dinner in our communal kitchen with Josh, Alex, and Nora, where we shared ideas and generally had a convivial time.

Yesterday we had our first couple of STEIM sessions. I met all the other workshop participants, who are: Josh, a PhD student from Sussex, in England, who is very bright and easy to be with. He and I went grocery shopping together and are sharing  food; Alex, from Australia, who is more into art installation than music per se; Dave,  from Ireland, who is figuring out what he wants to do; Nora, from Germany, who is a clarinetist and wants to get into electronic music more; Eric, who I don't know much about, other than that his accent is American and he's tall. First we had an orientation to the facilities, and then a presentation on the history and mission and artists at STEIM. Then followed a regular Tuesday lunch with all the STEIM people in their little common room. Afterwards we went back down to the main studio for a session on the software we will mainly be using this week, called "LiSa." What floored me is that it is almost just like what David Marchant, Roger Cheng, and I developed for our dance "Soundwave Surfing." LiSa is a program that records live input and then immediately starts playing it in loops and you can "surf" through it. It made me feel various things: 1) I've already done this sort of thing, 2) what we've been doing is of 'world class' caliber, 3) maybe this is a sign that this is the direction I'll be going in with custom instruments in general?? But I'm really putting some time into thinking about what an instrument would be like for me to grow with in personal electronic music making. After I finish this email I am going to start collecting all my thoughts and begin to hone in on what my personal electronic music aesthetic might be, and what direction I will want to take here in the next two weeks. After our LiSa session yesterday, most of us went out to a café and had a beer sitting outside in the sun by a canal. It was a nice time to get to share our backgrounds and just enjoy the sun for once. Afterwards Josh and Alex and I came back here to make dinner. Then I went down to the studio and got to work learning LiSa.