Dubble8 Productions

DJ Dubble8 and Wendel Patrick

I am very happy to be introducing a new music series and collective, the Baltimore Boom Bap Society. Our mission:

In the last two months of 2011 I found myself with four very different projects, occupying very different cultural spheres. The first project was a set of video game music that I composed under contract with Day 1 Studios based in Chicago. My job was to score the cinemas, which were basically fixed video files, while the surrounding game-engine music was being created by the dubstep producer Klaypex. While the scoring experience went well, the game was ultimately cancelled. I put together most of the music I created for the project into a playlist on SoundCloud:

Music For An Abandoned Video Game by Dubble8

Shortly after finishing the game music, I began working with Baltimore beatboxer Shodekeh on a remix of Dolmen Music by Meredith Monk. Shodekeh was commissioned to contribute a track to Meredith Monk Remixes & Interpretations, which is slated for release on February 19, 2012. I worked with Shodekeh as producer (alongside production work by Max Bent), recording and mixing beatboxing parts as well as vocal and cello contributions by Kate Porter and Bonnie Lander, and “warping” the original recording to a variety of purposes. I also contributed some cuts & scratching on DJ controller. The full remix, as Shodekeh envisioned it, turned out to be over 14 minutes long. This was deemed too long for the compilation album, so we had to cut it down to something substantially smaller. We hope to be able to share the full version some day soon! In the meantime, look for the Remixes & Interpretations album coming out this February.

In the midst of these recording projects, I got a new live music series off the ground at The Windup Space: Baltimore Boom Bap Society, a collective for improvised and collaborative Hip Hop, with co-founder Wendel Patrick. Our first several shows were just the two of us, playing a 30-40 minute set in between other bands. Coming into 2012, we introduced our first full evening show with three additional guest artists. More on that later!

The last major performance of the year was the premiere of my piece for youth orchestra and DJ controller, with the Chesapeake Youth Symphony Orchestra. The piece, Five Levels of the Watershed was a long time in the making, but well worth its lengthy digestive process. The student performers and conductor Julien Benichou put a lot of work into this, and it payed off beautifully in the amazing acoustics of Kerr Auditorium at Annapolis Area Christian School. My only regret is that I was too busy when setting up my gear to coordinate with the recording engineer about micing the sound coming from my speakers (which were pointed toward the audience, while the only mics were directly above the front of the orchestra). In short, my live contribution to the piece comes off as a bit subtle in the recording. Have a listen:
Five Levels Of The Watershed by Dubble8

It’s been a busy past couple of months, leaving hardly an opportunity to pause and write about it.

I don’t think I’ve yet mentioned the new electronic music series started by my friend Chang Park, DEUS EX MACHINA, which will soon have its third event (this Saturday) at the 3rd floor lounge of Dionysus bar & restaurant. I had the pleasure of playing on the first one, back on August 12th, on which I collaborated with Liz Meredith on amplified viola. DEUS EX MACHINA is filling a vital role in the Baltimore musical community, providing a well-attended space for all flavors of experimental live electronic music. This Saturday a few of my students from MICA will be performing a group improvisation on the series.

September 8- DJ set with Chang Park at the Nomad Gallery, another awesome community art enterprise to come out of MICA, putting down (nomadic) roots here in Baltimore.

Setember 14- Prelude and postlude DJ sets for the first Mobtown Modern concert of the season, featuring the JACK Quartet playing the complete string quartets of Iannis Xenakis, in the immensity of 2640 Space.

September 27- I kicked off my latest free improv binge on the Out Of Your Head series at the Windup Space, with two vocalists- Amanda Bloom and Lauren Shusterich.

October 2- Collaborative performance with mezzo-soprano Megan Ihnen and cellist Emily Wright at the Metro Gallery. This performance built upon a previous performance with Megan, our arrangement of a collection of Afro-American spirituals through a Trip-Hop lens.

October 8- Collaborative performance with fellow beatmaker/multi-instrumentalist Wendel Patrick (a.k.a. Kevin Gift) at the Windup Space. Focusing on improvisation and experimentation within a Hip-Hop framework, this was the first in what we hope will be an ongoing and expanding series of collaborations to be known as Baltimore Boom Bap Society.

October 13- DJ set for the Fall Festival at Baltimore Montessori Public Charter School.

October 14- Collaborative performance with meta-saxophonist/composer Matthew Burtner, as part of his guest performance at MICA (third guest artist of the budding Sound Art program).

October 15- Collaborative performance with Matthew Burtner and saxophonist Michael Straus on the Sonic Circuits series at Pyramid Atlantic, in Silver Spring, MD.

October 16- Collaborative performance with violist/electronic musician Liz Meredith at 2640 Space. Liz organized this performance to focus on ambient and experimental electronic music. The show also featured excellent performances by Chang Park, Jason Sloan, and Ayako Kataoka.

Looking forward to a week or two of keeping my gear in the studio.

Planning out digital DJ techniques (in Traktor) to be notated

Just before the beginning of the school year I finished my large composition project of the past year, Five Levels of the Watershed, for the Chesapeake Youth Symphony Orchestra. I am looking forward to performing with the orchestra on the premiere on December 17th (details below). For my part I will be using a combination of 2 controllers (Traktor Kontrol S4 and Korg padKontrol) to manipulate field recordings, spoken text, and samples of the students’ playing as part of a collaborative composition workshop. The orchestral score incorporates phrases composed by the students and extends them in a variety of textures relating to aspects of the Chesapeake Bay.

CYSO Winter Concert

December 17, 2011

7 PM

Annapolis Area Christian School

Beginning this Fall, students at Maryland Institute College of Art will be able pursue a concentration in Sound Art, within the Interaction Design and Art department. Available classes will include Introduction To Sound, Sound Art, Live Electronic Music & Multimedia, Sound Installation Art, and Studio Techniques & Recording. While the first three of these classes have been offered previously, this new concentration provides an opportunity for students to focus their work on sound art and electronic music throughout their time at MICA, with expanded resources. The Sound Art concentration was formulated over the past year by Jason Sloan, with whom I first co-taught the Live Electronic Music class in Spring 2010. Jason and I have collaborated on stage and in the studio on several occasions, and I’m inspired to be working with him to advance this new program. Visit our page on Facebook!

This past Tuesday I played two improvised sets with Derrick Michaels – sax, Michael Ronstadt – cello, and Mike Ross – drums, on the Out Of Your Head collective’s weekly improvisation series at the Windup Space. I have played on this series maybe ten times since December 2009, when I happened to schedule a show for my sound class at MICA at the Windup earlier on the same night, and was invited to participate in that night’s improvisation ensemble. Since then, OOYH has become one of the main reasons why I love living in Baltimore. It is an amazing forum for experimentation and spontaneous collaboration, and the center of a wide-ranging community of brilliant improvisers.

Much respect to the other free improvisation community in Baltimore- the Red Room series at Normals Books and Records, which has been running in one form or another for several decades. Many players on the OOYH roster play at the Red Room as well, and I’ve been to some great shows there. The community and setting of OOYH at the Windup Space has a distinctly different vibe to it, however, which I think has to do with its openness to a variety of musical directions. Free jazz can yield to ambient drone-scapes, which can open up into glitched out hip-hop beats with minimalist melodic expansions improvised above it.

Performing as I typically do with DJ software and controllers, or turntables (plus melodica, on occasion), I am often exploring the boundary between DJing (selecting and mixing pre-composed audio material) and electro-instrumental performance (sounds created in real time). I might focus on scratching and active signal processing, or I might mix segments of beats or simply establish an atmosphere for the other musicians to improvise over. I don’t consider myself a virtuouso instrumentalist, as most members of the OOYH collective are, but rather a participant in the shaping of the collective soundscape. In the process, I am conducting my personal research into the ways that I can speak expressively through my electronic resources (my setup for almost every improvisation is different), while incorporating elements of previous compositions or any music that I am listening to, and simultaneously being responsive to what other musicians are doing in the moment. I am infinitely grateful to OOYH for the opportunity to explore these hybrid musical directions within a community as open as this.

In the first few days of July I took a short trip to West Virginia and Kentucky with my family. We stayed with several sets of awesome friends in KY, and on the last night ended up on a few hundred acres of forest and prairie in Mercer County, where our friends Andrew and Tara were living. Among the abandoned farm buildings on the property was an empty silo, which became an instant hit with my 2-year-old son, Drew, as he explored the resonance of his shouts inside. Ever since, I have heard Drew adding an extra echoing syllable on the end of his words.

Upon getting back to Baltimore I came upon a call for scores from Phyllis Chen, seeking works for toy piano plus another “toy” instrument, to be played by a single performer. As melodica was listed among these other possible instruments, and having both toy piano and melodica in my personal gamelan, I instantly began playing around with ideas for a short piece. Remembering the experience of my son’s playful exploration of resonance in the space of the empty silo, I began focusing on the ways that each instrument could be thought of as a resonating chamber for the other. The attack-decay-sustain envelopes of these two instruments could hardly be more different (at least in their usual techniques of performance), and this directed my attention to ways in which composite sounds could be shaped between them to make it seem like one instrument was extending the other.

Thinking about the original function of the silo in storing up organic materials for later use, I looked at the sketchbook in which I was writing as a similar vessel- from which I collected several shovelfuls of fermented harmonic sequences or loops from the past, and processed them to feed new sonic animals.

The piece, Silo, was completed within a week- approximately three and a half minutes long, and the perfect antidote to the lengthy composition process on the chamber orchestra piece that I have been writing. It was also the first piece in quite a awhile that I composed while using only acoustic instruments as reference to what I was hearing, and also written out entirely in pencil before opening a file in my notation program. It felt good, and reminded me that there’s something to be gained by changing that physical relationship to the process once in awhile.

Mobtown Mixtape I: Ligeti Analogues by Dubble8

Toward the end of May I completed a cycle of mixtapes for the Mobtown Modern music series. 2010-11 was the fourth season of the series, featuring ten concerts of post-classical works in a variety of sub-genres. While I had assembled mixes for past seasons, these were previously only released online as track lists that represented my live DJ sets at the Mobtown Modern events. With this season, Director Brian Sacawa and I decided to release each mixtape as a continuous mp3, fully mixed for streaming or free download, in anticipation of each concert.

Brian provided the restriction that each mixtape was to have exactly ten songs, in any number of genres, related to the ideas represented on the upcoming concert. In the case of four of the mixtapes, I had complete creative control to choose the songs to be mixed. For the other six, however, the songs were chosen by the composer featured on the concert (or, guest DJ Alexandra Gardner, in the case of the “Unsilent Night” event). As you might imagine, this was an incredible way to expand my music collection with favorite music by some of my most respected colleagues in the world of new music composition. It was also a great creative challenge as I sought to personalize the overall mix with my own flow, and to find effective transitions, even in cases where the sequence of tracks appeared to veer in wildly different directions.

In retrospect, I feel like some of my most adventurous mixing resulted from the track sequences chosen by another artist, which I combined with my own bank of samples and sonic manipulations that I wanted to explore within the software- Ableton Live. This act of mixing from a collection of musical sources chosen by another person (or a group of people) became somewhat of a theme connecting a few different projects since this past winter.

One example is my Mobtown Double Decade mix, a contribution to Mobtown Modern’s Project 20 Remix- dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the Contemporary Museum, built from 20-second samples recorded by 20 Baltimore musicians.
Mobtown Double Decade by Dubble8

The whole series of Mobtown Mixtapes for the fourth season of Mobtown Modern may be found here.

A couple of years ago I encountered an artist by the name of Theresa Workman, a.k.a. Oh My Goodness, on alonetone.com. I was particularly drawn to her smokey contralto voice on a song called “Put A Nickel On My Door”, and asked her if she could send me some a cappella tracks. A stream of other projects delayed an opportunity to work with what she sent me until this summer. As part of the Introduction to Sound class that I teach at MICA, I introduce a project on sample-based beatmaking. By way of demonstrating the software (in this case, Ableton Live), I like to create a new beat in the week that I am introducing this project to the students. This gave me an opportunity to create a remix of the Oh My Goodness song, and also to incorporate some sounds that resulted from the workshop that I attended at the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM) in Amsterdam. Using JunXion, the STEIM software for sensor mapping to MIDI, I used object tracking with my built-in iSight camera to control a sampler and Max4Live Loop Shifter instrument in Ableton. This provided a perfect background layer of glitchy vibraphone fragments and noise, upon which I built my drums (sampled Tom Waits beatbox and warped field recordings) and synth parts. Have a listen to the original song by Oh My Goodness here, then check out my version below:
Put A Nickel (STEIMglitch) by Dubble8

I am currently working on a chamber ensemble version of my piece “Five Levels of the Watershed”, commissioned by the Chesapeake Youth Symphony Orchestra. The chamber version is being written for performance with a version of my own ensemble, the Purple City Players.

The focus of the piece is the Chesapeake Bay: viewed from the perspectives of watershed geography and drainage, Native names associated with various rivers and creeks, industry and shipping, remembrances of watermen, erosion and vanished islands.

“Five Levels” evolved from a workshop that I held with a group of students from the CYSO. I provided lines from a book of poetry by M. Kei about the Chesapeake Bay, and also some harmonic structures. The students responded to particular images in the poem and wrote some phrases of music for their own instruments, which I have developed and mixed into the final score.

In both the youth orchestra and chamber versions of the piece, I will be performing a  live electronics part using Traktor Pro 2 with an NI Traktor Kontrol S4 and Korg padKontrol. I am notating the live electronics part for performance functions in the Traktor software (cue points, setting loops and changing loop size on the fly, shifting loop location, applying chained effects, etc.) but am keeping it open for different controllers.

The electronic part incorporates processed samples of the CYSO students improvising and performing their phrases composed during the workshop, a separate group improvisation by 7-and-8-year-olds at Baltimore Montessori Public Charter School (focused on images of water in different states), field recordings and spoken word related to the Bay, and various Ableton instruments extending bits of the orchestral score.