AntiVJ sent me this awesome footage of some work done with projecting onto 3D surfaces. The results are really beautiful and makes you wonder what this technique would look like if it was applied to the side of a building or some other large scale outdoor construction. With technologies like LCD paper beginning to emerge you also have to wonder what ideas like this will mean when instead of projecting, we can just cover surfaces with image design like this.
This installation also reminds me of the design of Storey Hall: RMIT where we have done some of the Liquid Architecture concerts in the years gone by. Liquid Architecture 8 is just around the corner BTW. Check out this years line up!
Tracking drums at Audrey Studios today for All India Radio. Recording drums seems to be the holy grail for lots of audio types and it’s a fair call. Lots of mics in a small area equals trouble, and it takes some time to figure out how to make it work for you. One of the things that is hard to get around is a good sounding drum kit. You must have this or else all your labour will come to naught. You can make any kit sound OK if you know what you’re doing as far as tuning, re-skinning and general maintenance go. But if that’s not your bag, you got to hire yourself a fine sounding kit.
Enter Travis Demsey. Aside from being a renaissance man (…he’s a busy guy), Travis has racked up a mighty collection of drums in his time. I think he told me once that when he was on tour instead of partying on, he’d get an early night after playing a show so that the next day he and his drum tech could head out into whatever town they were in to track down another set of vintage drums. That’s how you end up with 80+ odd kits I guess…! Travis puts his large collection to good use by hiring them and himself out to recording sessions. Travis appears with whatever kit you need, a few snare options and hangs about to set them and tune them to taste for your session.
Anyhow, Travis has this a’67 blue sparkle Ludwig set that is similar to this, – it’s a great sounding set of drums. I’ve used it once before with All India Radio. You can hear the (low resolution) results here on a track called ‘Four Three’. It has a great big old bass drum that sounds larger than it looks and has this great bottom octave – by bottom octave, I’m talking about the low down sub frequencies that you feel as much as hear. When you’ve got all the mics in place and have messed about with the options, it’s always a good feeling when you sit down to start doing the first bunch of takes and the kit sounds great. It makes the drummer happy to play and the band happy that their music is going to have a good solid foundation.
I get to hear and work on lots of records where people will track their own drum-kits themselves at home (or wherever they can). Usually the reason for doing this is money. Hiring a big room in a decent studio is not cheap if you’re an independent musician/band, and the idea of hiring a drum-kit on top of this (when the drummer usually has one) seems outlandish. At the same time however most everybody wants their records to sound as good as they can. There is a false economy here, because when you hear a lot of these self recorded drums they don’t sound so great. Usually the money saved on the DIY approach goes to paying a guy to sit down in front of a computer and replace all the sounds to get a better, but still not great result.
I think that it is possible to get a good drum recording with the equipment and resources that most people at home have access to. One important factor is the amount of experience the person recording has at recording generally (experience is a subject that I like to bang on about at length, but won’t here), and the other is the sound of the kit and the room it’s being played in. Instead of paying a studio nerd save yourself some money, and either get a guy to make your kit sound good (new skins, a good tune and all that) or hire a top sounding kit in for your session. This will get you much closer to a good drum recording than any amount of expensive mics and fancy recorders will.
This is similar to the technique that my good friend and partner in art crime, Daniel Crooks uses to generate much of his work. Dan has taken this technique in a bunch of different directions – from shooting off moving vehicles with one camera to shooting with up to 7 cameras at the same time. All use a post-production technique similar to the one mentioned above, which Dan likes to call “time-slicing”. One of his multi-camera shoots was blown out to the same number of plasma screens (all set in profile orientation) to make a gorgeous shifting and morphing 360º panorama of downtown Sydney. Dan has just completed a major exhibition of a whole range of these works (which he also renders as landscape style photo prints) at Sherman Galleries in Sydney.
Dan pretending to be busy at Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
I’m lucky enough to get to work with Dan on sound for these pieces and it’s always interesting to sit and talk with him about the ways we can render this technique in sound in a way that is as aesthetically and conceptually interesting as the visuals. Over the years we’ve tried a bunch of techniques and a mixed bag of results. One of our earlier attempts was for a train piece which you can see here.
If you ever get the chance to go and see these works, I’d recommend it. Not as a self-serving recommendation due to my involvement, but because I think Dan’s work is truly interesting and involving. His ability to envision a different way to see the environment around us and then render his ideas with such interest and detail is rare in video art. Too much video art requires high concept – reading a bunch of supporting text (usually bullshit), or being up to speed with the post-modern justifications (usually bullshit with flashing lights). The great thing about Dan’s work, is that you can walk right up to it and appreciate entirely on it’s own terms – no art school education required. However, if you wanna go and box it in with a bunch of words, then there is plenty there for you to get verbal about.
