Patchcord Sunday Report

By coincidence I stumbled into two inspiring performances yesterday. One was Blank Pages, an experimental audio jam around four simple rules: use PureData or Max/MSP, open a blank patch, jam for 60 minutes, no load – no save. The event took place at the NK, an art gallery / studio / open space run by an old friend of VisualBerlin: Julian Percy. The registered participants were experimental musician and Max/MSP veteran Stefan Tiedje, installation and plastic artist Renaud Rubiano, VisualBerlin’s hardware expert and PD geek Servando, João Pais from Brazil, and the musicians Duan Wasi and Dominik Tresowski. It was one hour of ambient noise and experimental resampling joy and we got back in touch with the NK for future collaboration. A visual focused blank pages event with Jitter, GEM, vvvv, Isadora etc. has been in the back of my head for a long time and now I’m even more keen to realize such an event some time in the near future.

from the NK we went to General Public in the evening to see the performances of Andre Castro and Pan Am Scan. Andre started off with a really interesting live sound piece, resampling, looping and processing short snippets of noisy radio signals while surfing the frequency bands.

The following audiovisual performance of Pan Am Scan totally blew me away! The stage setup was impressive already, with a beautiful large vibraphone, a quite odd drum set, huge contrabass and laptop galore. My senses tried to follow every milisecond of the 40 minute performance of noisy ambient live jazz with incredibly talented vibraphone improvisation and insane drum geekery. The vvvv-based visuals perfectly matched the music and overall ambience and were just incredible. Silhouettes and subliminal outlines of faces and people shone through a strangely organic full screen dot matrix, occasionally flashing up in bright lens flare like glitches and feedback or bloating up into the third dimension towards the audience. Stunningly analog looking television interference noise flickering in sync with the audio, zoomed in to beautiful wave patterns with mesmerizing jitter. The whole performance really gave me  shivers and I will definetly be there when Pan Am Scan will perform again in Berlin.

more impressions here