instruments
Confluence Instruments
Chromatic Wing (1983)
Bronze rods braised to wing-shaped steel sheet, balanced on a balloon. The rods are bowed and amplified to produce continuous tones, or struck for percussive effects. Bowed pitches are tuned to three octaves of standard 12-tones, arranged in 12 notes per circle. The instrument was built for the composition “Alternating Currents” (1983) for electroacoustic instruments, percussion and trombone.
The Ice Queen (1979)
another bowed rod instrument with rods braised to the pan of a 55-gallon drum resonator.
Hot Lunch (1980)
a knee fiddle with plastic lunch tray soundboard and permanently attached contact microphone, adorned with objects for making rubbing, scratching and plucking noises.
Gazamba I (1981)
An electric prepared piano made from a portion of an upright piano action and keyboard with bell and percussive tone generators with both contact and magnetic pickups. Also near my left hand, a home-brew filter sequencer.
Gazamba II (1983)
This Gazamba is made from an abandoned Wurlitzer keyboard, action and case. Its left half uses carefully tuned bell sounds based on electronic carillon principles. The right half uses metal objects for gong and drum like sounds tuneable with harpsichord tuning pins in an original pin-block. This instrument was also used for “Alternating Currents”.
From “Falling Edge” a performance in 1987 at The Lab in San Francisco, with L-R, the Wing, Hot Lunch, and Gazamba II in action with Mark Trayle on electric guitar- electronics on the left.
Electronics
Home-brew digitally controlled live signal processors since 1985
Home-brew digital synthesis and signal processing and controller software since 1998
Member of the legendary network music band The Hub since 1988 — the computer network as both ensemble and instrument
Experimental tuning as a foundation for new composition and performance practice
Homebrew digitally controlled analog signal processor with Serge modules . It includes 16 MIDI driven control voltages (43e jacks) and a 4×4 MIDI controlled analog matrix mixer. This unit was made for realizing the composition “Lava” as well as for solo pieces “Hall of Mirrors”, “Iceberg” and others.
This is a more recent digitally controlled analog instrument with 21st century Serge Dual PCO siewave oscillators, a Dual Slope generator, a 4 input stereo mixer and a Buchla Source of Uncertainty. Digital controls are implemented with a Pepper CV module (black panel) that is controlled by SuperCollider software. Two recent pieces “Nesting” (2024) and “Sub Way Beats” (2023) are implemented using it.