Tag Archives: looping

Per Boysen USA tour in October 2014

pboy_stick_losangelesBelow are the dates and venues of my October 2014 US west coast tour. This project would not be possible without the great help from Rick Walker, Gene Perry, the Free Hands Academy, Peterson Entertainment and the Swedish Arts Grants Committee. Thank you!

Oct 10, Seattle, WA: North West Loop Fest

The Royal Room,
5000 Rainier Ave.
6pm – 10pm.

Oct 11, Portland, OR: North West Loop Fest

The Analog Cafe & Theatre,
720 SE Hawthorne Blvd.

Oct 12, Ashland, OR: North West Loop Fest

Club 66,
1951 Ashland St.
+1 541-450-2656.

For more information on the above mentioned festivals, please go to
http://www.noahpeterson.com/nw_loopfest/

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Oct 15, San Jose, CA

BEST of Y2K14 International Live Looping Festival
ANNO DOMINI GALLERY, SAN JOSE
366 South1^st Street

Oct 15-20, Santa Cruz, San Jose, San Francisco:
YK2 International Live Looping Festival.

For day’s program, several venues in Santa Cruz.
Y2K14_header
Founder Rick Walker says:

Now in it’s 14th year, the Y2K14 International Live Looping Festivals have expanded to 21 cities in 11 countries worldwide. It is a very creative and eclectic festival that celebrates the musicians who love to create and manipulate loops, live, in front of an audience. There is no style or genre associated with the movement, just the love augmenting musical performance with digital and analogue looping techniques.The main festival is in Santa Cruz, California for 3 days in the 3rd weekend of October every year. This years’ festival will be from October 15th – 20th in San Jose, San Francisco and Santa Cruz/Watsonville

To read more about this festival, please go to
http://y2kloopfest.com/

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Oct 22, Los Angeles, Long Beach, CA: SoCal Loop Fest

diPiazza’s,
5202 E Pacific Coast Hwy.

For more information on SoCal Loop Fest please go to
http://www.noahpeterson.com/socal_loopfest/

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Oct 24, Los Angeles: Per Fest

Guitar Merchant
http://www.guitarmerchant.com/
7503 Topanga Canyon Boulevard
Canoga Park
California 91303
818-884-5905
7pm – 11pm
guitar_merchant
A bunch of Stick players will play solo pieces in a round-robin manner.Do not expect one single dull moment!!! :-) A Stick Night initiated by Gene Perry of the Free Hands Academy.

On stage:
Emmett Chapman, Kevin Keith, Don Schiff, Gary Jiblian, Michael Johnstone, String Planet (featuring Larry Tuttle and Novi Novog), Mike Kollowitz, Gene Perry, Per Boysen.
stickers

pb_guit_merch
Photo: Gene Perry

Photo: Gene Perry
Photo: Gene Perry

Art film soundtrack: Tenor Sax live looping

Pose in Ivana – Reinvention of pose from Heidi on Vimeo.

Here’s a nice film that uses music I created by playing my Tenor Sax and Mobius looper; i.e. my “meta instrument for live looping”. This approach to live looping is different than the typical “Boss looping pedal layering” technique in that it draws on the methods discovered in the fifties by the folks involved with Musique Concrete at IRCAM in Paris (as well as the San Fransisco Tape Music Centre). Everything Pierre Schaeffer could do in the fifties with tape and scissors can now be done instantly while also playing an instrument to provide the source audio to be processed. The video was shot in New York while the cut-up performing technique of this saxophone goes back to Paris; both cities often associated with the Tenor Sax.

Lovely Harp Guitar!

Just a quick video upload testing out my new Tim Donahue signature Electric Fretless Harp Guitar. I think it plays like a dream… in fact I have been dreaming for decades about certain aspects of what this instrument has to offer. Tim designed it and has been playing this and the fretted version since the eighties and just recently initiating manufacturing of his harp guitars. You’ll find more on that at www.timdonahue.com

Sub City 2064 – The Concert Trailer


Erdem Helvacıoğlu and Per Boysen performs Sub City 2064 live in eight channel surround audio. An underwater epos and instrumental opera. Most scenes for this concert trailer were numberswiki.com

filmed at the Borusan Music House in Istanbul on Jan 7 2012. The concert’s duration exceeds an hour and is here cut down to 20 minutes with the surround audio converted to stereo.

Guitar Player Magazine: Editor’s Top Three CDs


Sub City 2064 was among Editor’s Top Three CDs in Guitar Player magazine’s september issue of 2010. It’s a big honor to be mentioned together with icons like Stockhausen, Hassell, Eno, NIN and Pink Floyd!

I made this music because Erdem inspired me in our collaborative duet experiment and also because I’ve always wanted music like this; music that doesn’t restrict itself by a particular “style”, “instrument” or “scene”, music that exists for no other reason than that someone actually loved it enough to make a recording so that other people may enjoy the same experience.

Improvisation is not free!

The better you become at “improvising” the more you realize there is no such thing as “free improvisation”. Since music is a form of communication the best improvisations are those where the player succeeds in applying gestures that draw on rules known to the listener. Such gestures and rules can be timbre, direction in movement or plain music harmony theory.

I am especially excited by multi lateral improvisation, as I call it when a player improvises many musical parts at the same time – as opposed to simply improvising a melody over a given background. In this performance I use live looping, which means I record phrases I play and then keep changing those recordings while playing an additional part. So there is no “lead” and no “background” part of this improvisation. I do not play melodies and improvise chords to back melody up, nor do I play chords and improvise melodies that fit in. I invent all parts of the music at once. This is not “free improvisation” because in order to sound like some sort of music, although weird, everything has to relate to some common ground. The common ground in this particular performance is parallel transposition of minor chords. In this case using only the tonica, first, second fourth and sixth position transposition diminishes the palette further and creates a musical universe where almost anything can be played and still turn out harmonic.

The looping technique used here is to start out by playing an instrument and recording it as a very long loop. Careful to initially play only notes that will work harmonically even if transposed (thinking not only about actual sound here but also about what scales any given future transposition of the recorded loop may imply). So as lungs go empty of air I close the loop and it starts repeating. Now I use foot pedals to shift speed/pitch of this long loop into different intervals while I play along. Manipulating transposition of the recorded loop is one orchestral element and my live instrument is a second – both elements are parts of the same improvisation. This is a simple technical praxis of what I call multi lateral improvisation. If transposing a musical part in minor you get totally different harmonic scale options for your playing compared to transposing a musical part in major. It can easily become too complex to sound interesting so the challenge is, in my opinion, to find themes and refine them.

Composers use similar theoretical rules to create scores, but to me in this moment of time it is more fun to work out techniques that allow you to do it all at once in sound!

(edit)
Since publishing I have received some questions on what software were used in this performance, so here we go: Mainstage by Apple is the “effect rack”, “mixer” and “patchbay”. Inside Mainstage I am running the AU plugin version of the looper Mobius. As soon as the first loop is recorded Mobius calculates the musical tempo I am playing in and sends out MIDI Clock which Mainstage adapts its tempo to. This makes tempo dependent effects follow my playing/live looping. Maybe I should also mention that the video doesn’t cover the extensive foot work done to simultaneously play Mobius from a Behringer FCB1010 MIDI pedal board. There are almost as many looping commands happening as there are notes played in this performance.

The audio sensitive live graphics are simply the iTunes Visualizer

The Chapman Stick totally rocks!!!

playing the Chapman StickI’m learning a new music instrument here, The Chapman Stick. It’s so fun because on the stick you can play both bass, comping chords and melody lines at the same time. The instrument has twelve strings divided into two groups of six and each group has its own set of electro magnetic pickups and output.

The Stick was invented by musician Emmet Chapman in the late sixties to be used by himself as his “custom instrument”. However, many folks that heard him play also wanted sticks so Emmet started manufacturing in -74. I feel honored having an instrument actually built by the inventor. Thank you, Emmet!

Here’s where you can read more about The Chapman Stick.

Epilogue: Below is a quick video I recorded as a freshman on the Stick. I will soon upload something more exciting, as I’m slowly rewiring brain to improve its skills as the conductor of the “two independent hands” orchestra.

Video clip from my Rome concert

I just got this video from Milco who was filming my gig at Dimmidisi Club on june 6. It was a lovely evening with quite a big audience and many exciting performers. Isn’t it wonderful that today’s music gear in a laptop lets you create this massive music with just one flute! No pre recording – just you and your instrument, instantly composing as you go and arranging on-the-fly with livelooping techniques. I-just-love-it! :-)

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