The music is a sketch that I made for pieces matter – a different version evolved to be the main theme for Lieves performance. And the video is an experiment that I , ehm, experimented, having too much time on my hand while travelling to my brothers home and family by train. A seven hours ride, enough for filming, cutting, color correction. Final touches on the way back.

So if you want to watch me watching the countryside between the place where I live and the place I was born, well, you are welcome:

And yes, I am a little proud that I managed to listen to myself [see my last post], and no, it didn’t hurt.

In short: I tend to overcomplicate things.

So i was very much relieved when two things happened that did not hurt at all:

First, Georg approached me with a beautiful left over animation from the gloom video that he did not want to go unnoticed – if i could make some sounds for it, who knows what it´s for. And so i did – who knows what it’s for.

And then Flo „The Hamster Conspiracy“, who is currently working on a new album with „The Bunny Situation“ (yes !) was in the need of a video-quickie to get his piano miniature online. The task was simple: He only wanted a spectrogram running and i was not allowed to spend more than two hours with the visualization.
Ok, it took me three, but here we go:

Head over to the The Bunny Situation, and if you like it, like it.

[And in the meantime i will try to learn from this, cause it’s much less pain if it doesn’t hurt]

I am making the music for “pieces matter”, a performance by my fellow artist, dancer and choreographer Lieve de Pourcq. Very happy to work with her again, me is.
And since i am currently quite busy reworking the main theme shortly before the premiere i think i just share what Lieve says, couldn´t say it better anyway.

“Sticking holes in paper, shedding light in the dark, stars appear” Lieve De Pourcq

And here´s the invitation:

Lieve De Pourcq’s new performance Pieces Matter is a playful attempt to appropriate pictures, to break them down into their individual parts, and to place oneself into unexpected contexts in this process. The artist draws on a cornucopia of imagery and photographic material that either existed previously or was created especially for the performance. This material combines into a fictive, historical sequence during the 30-minute show. Equipped with an overhead projector, a video projector, and a slide projector, she transforms the material into poetic shapes or grotesque monsters confronting the audience. The projection methods reveal how much everyday perception of reality is formed by auxiliary devices. Lieve De Pourcq breaks with the unquestioned habit of completely trusting in the world’s pictorial representation in her performance. In doing so she instead formulates an expectation towards life and reality which is inconsistent and must continuously adapt to the conditions of its creation.

PS: Lieve De Pourcq adds with her work a new facet to the festival title imagetanz that has remained unfathomable thus far.

Concept: Lieve De Pourcq; Choreography and Performance: Lieve De Pourcq; Music: hons; Visual support: Klaas Verpoest; Production: Joachim Kapuy; Co-produced by: Imagetanz/brut Wien; Supported by: Cultural Department of the city of Vienna MA7; STUK kunstencentrum, Leuven; ’t ARSENAAL, Mechelen; and Figurentheater DE MAAN, Mechelen. Thanks to Paul Contryn, Domenico Giustino, Willem Verheyden, Markus Taxacher, Leslie Mannes.

Ticket reservation is already available at brut wien.
Tadaa. See you there.

Oh yes. Finally done, uploaded, online: The official music video for grump.
The reason it took me so long to publish the video is that i wanted to share some of the tools that i programmed (or refurbished) for the video along with it – which i did today:
A new “software” tab on the top of the page with hopefully useful stuff for, eh, jitter nerds.

Technically i am just reusing some of the material that Georg shot for the gloom video, passing it through a mesh generation patch that uses flowfield techniques and fooling around with videofeedbacks. So technically it was quite simple. Practically it was a lot of work, but hey, i still have a few years to go, so i need to fill up my time anyway.

Enjoy, share, and tell me what you think.

[back from india i am in the process of properly chewing, swallowing and digesting my amazement, so it will eventually come out as wisdom at the other end. and since i trust my subconscious mind to do this while i sleep, i had time to browse through my bucket-o-fragments, where i found this algorithmic text - actually on my birthday. fitting, funny, and if it does not make sense to you, i'll explain how it came to be below]

—————————————–—
me, sitting at the beach with with:
me fear
me wisdom
me love
me loony
and me sleeping youth
——————————————–

‘oh dear,’ said the fear , ‘youth had died away, ‘reshaped to nothingness by a string of accidents too long to be any lesson to me.’

‘surprise ?’, asked a little sharp bark just beside my head impatiently, ‘fear should know that knowledge can be ignorant.’

i hesitated for some time without interrupting.

‘though i must indeed confess that our circle became smaller.’ , the wisdom continued, not awaiting any answer. ‘but the ideals of consummate loveliness and wisdom are to come out to reconsider the regulations of non – existence’

‘.. to reconsider the regulations of non – existence’, echoed the love, her eyes getting thin,
‘ you can love, love generates will, generate will, you exist’

‘remember the simple rules birth had taught you’, the loony interrupted in a moment that it thought to be wise, ‘grant me harmony, dream up futures, those weren’t fantasies, we do not understand what space means.’

‘in the hope of enlightening your ignorance’,  youth was awakening and throwing in the next wisdom, ‘it said: grant me futures, dream up harmony, and if we do not understand what space means, we still have fantasies’

splash ! he was such a dear little puppy it was always irritating hearing his grave voice. but his restrictions and regulations tend to form a beautiful harmonious something, and wandering among those i was always surprised to note vivacity and cheerfulness, so i nodded.

‘restrictions and regulations may be accepted as a compass in most states’, wisdom was reading my thoughts, ‘but who is the court, and who are the jurymen ?’

‘the most blind and benighted ones’, i abused the opportunity for letting my thoughts escape. there were some attempts at applause, but then a chilling cry drilled through my brain:

‘- – oh dear ! ‘ , the fear screaming blue murder, ‘ you carry your affected simplicity too far’

‘that is how i came here’, i let fall the forbidden terms.

———————————–

Most of my lyrics and attempts at poetry are in some way or the other drawn from input texts, either via cutup techniques or via algorithmic collages based on statistical analysis. In this case the basis was a simple markov chain of words that i built by analyzing and mixing two complete books: Lewis Carroll’s “Alice´s Adventures in Wonderland” and Edwin A. Abbot’s “Flatland:  A Romance of Many Dimensions”. The process is simple yet wonderful: First i build a dictionary of words that i find in those books, then i count the words (first level: how often does a specific word occur in those books), and then i look how high the chance is that a specific word occurs _after_ each other word. Continue as you like, but three levels are usually enough. Then i build a random text that reflects those statistical tables: Start with any word, choose the next word by looking in the table which words are actually possible (and by which chance), choose the next word by looking what words can come after those two, and so on. Let the algorithm run until it stops due to lack of further possibilities or until you have enough nonsense collected, sit and read, collect the pearls, sort and rearrange, and let your creation make you happy.

I truly hope i have managed to embed an earworm deep into your musical brain, if not, let me try again: “I´m leeeaving on a jetplane..”

You are welcome.

I´ll be in India the next couple of weeks, but don´t you worry: You can still head over to the hons-shop and buy buy buy, the CD delivery is being taken care of even while i am gone. (A big Thank You to Claudia).

In the meantime: Enjoy the music, have a nice xmas and newyear, spread happiness.

Yours truly, hons

After an exhausting 2 month period of doing-other-things-than-music, i finally had a good night sleep and enabled the shop at hons.bandcamp.com just minutes ago.
Immediately afterwards my head turned into a void and i cannot remember any of the clever things that i wanted to tell the world, but:

This is what i have been working on for the last year – this is a release!

Not only can you, my dearest fans and friendlings, buy the complete album in any digital format that you could possibly desire, or as a physical CD (though i only had a handful printed – you´d better be quick), you can also listen to the complete album here on my page, on bandcamp and on facebook. That´s 14 tracks, 50 minutes. That´s wonderful.

There are a few things that i have learned on the way. And since i like writing lists, here we go:

1) Your hopes will be tested.
My hopes are usually high (as are my fears), and the road i chose to get the album out was quite a ride. Every second step i took felt like a rock breaking away beneath me, the latest glitch being that i trusted the company that sold the CD envelopes to sell the right thing, only to find out that with this envelopes the mailing costs are enormous.

2) Everything will be ok in the end  - If it´s not ok, it´s not the end.
Ha! I knew it. Going to repackage the CD´s this afternoon.

3) Eat healthy food, thus two sheets of toilet paper will suffice.
This may sound a bit off topic, but it is my way of saying „Take care of yourself and less shit will happen“.

4)  If your head is a void and you cannot remember any of the clever things you wanted to say, you can always fall back to calender-motto style wisdoms, just as i did.

Thank you,
humbly,
hons

Most importantly: The CD´s are here – and as a release date i have finally set 20.11.2011, cause it is a beautiful number, and 11.11.11 has already passed.

To celebrate this major milestone, Georg uploaded his musicvideo for gloom, ta-dah:

I am as happy as a hons can be,
Yours truly,
The King of Gloom

The idea behind trying to publish an album was also to create a test bed for my slowly awakening social skills. Show the world what I do, and see if I can handle the feedback. This will require some changes on my side.

The thing with change is that it might hurt a bit, but avoiding change usually hurts much longer.

In short (To extract some wisdom from what I have recently smiled about on the ted forums):

Change is inevitable. Change brings pain. Pain can catalyze growth, and personal growth brings wisdom. Wisdom brings open-mindedness, open-mindedness brings empathy, and empathy connects us. Connection brings happiness.

Possible Conclusion: Todays Sunday afternoon misery might easily be connected to the fact that I am somewhat paralyzed by the amount of steps still required to finalize the publishing process (At least five more steps, oh my). And thus deferring change, and thus avoiding happiness.

Possible Solution: Choose the simplest task, make a step. It will hurt just a little bit.

Answer: Aye Aye Captain hons. Made the CD-Cover:

PS.: You may have seen the front cover already, it is the picture that Wiltrud Derschmidt has taken. The inside and back are fresh and new. Big thanks to Andreas Platzer who helped me with the final touches and color correctiones for the printing.

But necessities is still alive, quite so, and for relaxation purposes i devoted my sparetime to grump. i have decided that i could easily squeeze a second video out of the material that georg recorded for gloom, with a different visual approach. so i refurbished some of my jitter-patches, mostly line graphics and video feedbacks, going for a cloudy and drifting look that quite neatly fits the “make-elephants-tap-dance”-approach of grump.

I think i have again managed to land on the dark side, but it seems that my tiny pearls of happiness are shining brighter against a dark background.