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winter solstice livecoding, DRAGX-FUNK masters

valleta panorama

The Backstairs Tone
⎋/~

So, it's Sunday again. And too many Sundays have passed without the update from The Backstairs to my studio. To tell the truth, it's been a bit of a wild ride (which is not an excuse for not writing you my weekly log). I've been to Malta again now in December (after participating at 'Figure It Out' symposium in September), and the little (partial) reveal here is that eveything has been signed in the past two months and confirmed that it's a bit more of a long term and regular direction of work and residence and (academic) artistic research.

I haven't managed to realise the plan to close down Patreon in timely manner by the end of the year. I hope to do that by the end of the January with lotsa proper communication - the most important is "why" (simple explanation in a paragraph and a link to a short essay), and then "how can you do to continue supporting my work". After that I'll close the Patreon account completely, and patrons will stay on this (The Backstairs Tone) list for another three months to allow time to decide and resubscribe via recurrent monthly donation. After that those left will be (to my sadness) unsubscribed.

This past week or so included receiving (proper) masters of the DRAGX-FUNK album from Samuel from OpenMastering. Yes, this is what went wrong with releasing this album: despite the fact that I was working on the album from most of the year - and it's from music that was already done to substantial degree, I was late with finishing it all. The end result was that we published the album with "a kind of DIY master" at the beginning of the month but I sent the pre-masters to Samuel anyway and now I replaced the tracks on Bandcamp release page. I am very happy with new masters, they are better sounding and the direction that Samuel took (more open, less dark, a bit of analogue-sounding processing) is great! It also means a lot to me to be able to have masters done in a studio that uses Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS).

Another consequence of me being late is also the fact that the liner notes for the USB-booklet were nowhere in sight. We (at Kamizdat) decided to do a collaboration between myself and Metod Zupan (aka Mr. Magdalenca) who was also in the Mad Jakale stage production and had some good insight into that process. I used some audio-to-text transciption to arrive at some text from the live-stream about the album that I did in August and than when I was waiting for the plane to Malta I recorded myself speaking into the phone about some other things, put it into transcription and sent it to Metod. They got a great moment of inspiration and finished the text before the deadline. I edited that text a bit, and sent it to proofreading. Long story short, the editorial (all texts that need to be on the physical USB booklet) has been at designer's for a week already. We plan to print the booklets and USB in early January.

I played a 15 minutes livecoding improv SuperCollider set at TOPLAP Winter Solstice 2024 from Gozo, Malta, last Friday. I really enjoy playing these, it's always organized as an open mic, where anyone (with ability to live-stream) can put their name down and reserve their 15 minutes slot. Live streams happen using self-hosted open-source Owncast software on an autonomous self-hosted server. It's (seemingly) being watched by 60+ people so the chat on the stream is also quite lively. Was happy to see some nice words there and some new followers on fediverse afterwards.

HighHarmonics wrote:

"I really enjoyed your set. Crazy how you started w folk music and slowly transformed it (looked like granular / long reverb tails). Then you stayed with it. Lush and haunting at the same time. A very nice contrast to the EDM and dense pulse driven things many people (myself included!) do."

You can watch/listen to the live session here: https://vid.pretok.tv/w/vDiGbfTmiVnXUQd9ggECXp (it's been also published on YouTube by the organizers - EulerRoom)

Today I'm quite tired, physically exhausted. For last two days (this Friday and Saturday) we played a "New Year's" edition of "Technoburlesque: Image Snatchers" stage show, each being almost two hours long. This includes technical setup and rehearsals before the first show and corrections before the second show. And I also played another two-hour DJ set after the last one. There's been a lot of collective action too, so, many helping hands around too, but also responsibilities on some individuals (mine being for music, and sound design technicals apart from one dance number I do as well - yes, I run from the tech booth onto the stage, dance it off, and run back to start the next track!)

However, this was two nights in a row to full house - sold out ~110 capacity! And as I wrote on fediverse (sonomu.club): "especially on second night there was so much beautiful response from the audience at all the right moments and places. We feel so grateful to have arrived to this point without compromise, staying true to our vision (which was also research and experiment) and having all these people 'getting it' even if they don't 'get' theatre or performance".

I'm leaving you with an exclusive track, still work in progress, I guess, for the number that we are doing in Image Snatches - you will probably recognize the original, but the lyrics are a skillful translation into Slovene by the singer on the track - Blaž Šef. The background instrumental is extracted from the version sung by Ivo Robič. I have a desire to create a completely new electronic arrangement for beautiful singing by Blaž. Read more about the history of the famous song.

(Please don't share the track around)

That's all for this week. I'll write again very soon!

As always, thank you for your generous support, patience, and being part of The Backstairs Tone journey. I hope next week treats you well! 💚

§backstairs
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