Field Recodings & Scores

A collection of collaborations and versions from all corners of the world. Thus far these have been created collaboratively across time and space with no "real world" or face-to-face time. Someday, we may form the most dangerous band in the world!

Collaborations & Versions

Synthesis & Compositions

About PLATO:

PLATO & the Western Tradition is a Postmodern Improvisation Ensemble that has been recording real-time improvisations using electronic and acoustic instruments since 1988. The founders and core members are David K. Barton of South Bend, Indiana, and Boyd Nutting of Niles, Michigan. As of November 23, 2013, we have recorded 2,865 improvisations, and would like to share our music.

PLATO & The Western Tradition invites others in the Electronic Music Community to participate in the creation of an on-line compilation called “Weaving Indra’s Net”. Here are the “rules”:
1. Download from @plato-3 any of the improvisations by PLATO & The Western Tradition that capture your attention.
2. Use some or all of what you download as a part of your own music making.
3. Post your piece to SoundCloud, and post the SoundCloud link on Plato’s FaceBook page: www.facebook.com/PLATOandTheWesternTradition
4. Please comply with our Creative Commons attribution requirement (see creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) by including in your description of your piece this language: “Includes material from PLATO & The Western Tradition, No. 2811, ‘Limitless Geometries’”. (You should substitute the number and title of the piece that you are using.)
5. PLATO will organize and maintain the compilation as a playlist titled ‘Weaving Indra’s Net’ on the PLATO SoundCloud site.

Please post any questions or comments on the FaceBook page listed above.

Improvising with PLATO & the Western Tradition

Field Recordings

An Autumnal field recording meant to capture the falling leaves on the large maple in our backyard ... caught my wife and dog having a conversation.

Visualizer Version

This Is A Good Day (Would It Get Some Wind For The Sailboat Edit)

Lonely baseline seeking companion for further explorations in the sound system. I've got the bass frequencies covered (in fact, you'll need a decent setup to hear me fully). Can you provide the midrange and/or high end? Let's make beautiful music together.

@MidiPunk version: 
https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-mwm-entry-midipunk-has-background-in-vaudeville-version

#random-coil version:
https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-name-constants-spark-it-up-rub-it-on-the-glass-version

#random-coil has established a repository for all the stems (beautiful additional contribution, thank you!) included in his version here:
soundcloud.com/bscstems/sets/bassline-seeking-companion-2

Bassline Seeking Companion (MWM Entry)

It is said that if one were to stand on the Equator at Noon during a Vernal Equinox it is possible that they would cast no shadow. Did you feel the Earth tilt on its axis? (To really hear the shift, headphones are encouraged.

Cast No Shadow (Tilting Axis Mix)

Real-Time Improvisation by David K. Barton, Boyd Nutting, Jeff Campbell, & 337is (Leslie Rollins). Recorded May 1, 2014, PLATO’s Studio, Michiana.

PLATO No. 2973 The Beltane Woodpecker

Real-Time Improvisation by David K. Barton, Boyd Nutting, Jeff Campbell, & 337is (Leslie Rollins). Recorded May 1, 2014, PLATO’s Studio, Michiana. Includes PLATO No. 2952, “Logic Fails” and No. 2953, “Reduced to Fundamentals” (both recorded April 3, 2014).

PLATO No. 2974 The Akashic MayPole

For this composition, I followed the instructions given to "create a short melodic phrase, between three and six seconds in length, and loop it for between one minute and two minutes.” Over the past two months, I have been collaborating with a "Postmodern Improvisation Ensemble" called "Plato and the Western Tradition" every Thursday night. The phrase you’ll hear in this piece is one that David Barton, a co-founder of Plato, often works into his collaborations. I find this scale both haunting and comforting for some reason and have often woken up with this note progression echoing in my head. The particular sample I use here (taken from between the 36:22 and 36:26 marks) is from David Barton’s piano piece "Incommensurate Manifestation,” which I hear as a sort of variations and themes exploring harmonic elements of his scale. I have mostly heard this scale played by David in the treble range, and I was profoundly moved by hearing this familiar pattern presented in the bass range of his piano. It startled me with its richness; somber and stately in tone. I set out to create an original composition by filtering this loop in various ways to explore this tonal range. I manipulated the sound in real time and did not introduce any additional external sounds sources. My goal was to produce a sense of tonal compositional development without actually altering the melody.

The patch I created using my eurorack modular is one of the more complex patches I have made with it. Everything started with the Make Noise Phonogene sampler, which I fed David’s sample into, streamed directly from the Soundcloud application on my iPhone. Once the sample was in the Phonogene, I manipulated it gently on a granular level, enveloping both the gene-size and gene-shift by using two separate sides of a Make Noise Maths. I multed the Phonogene output into a resonant bandpass Pittsburgh Modular filter and then into the X-side of a Pittsburgh Modular ring modulator. I also sent the unfiltered multed signal into the Erthenvar Patch Chord. I took the 7th positive harmonic out of the Patch Chord into the Y side of the ring modulator. I came out of the ring modulator into a Make Noise Echophon whose echo and tempo settings were also controlled by the two Maths envelopes. I ran a side chain filter loop out of there into an Intellijel Dr. Octature II filter which was FM’d on both FM inputs using another 2 separate looping envelopes of a second Maths. The loop was then sent from the 180 degree output back into the Echophon and out to the left channel of the final mix. Initially, this was going to be the sole sound in the mix, but I didn’t care for how lost and disjointed David’s melody became through that processing and I wanted to hear more of the original loop. So I ran a third multiple out of the Phonogene. This chain went through a STG Soundlabs Sea Devil resonant filter, into a Thonk/Music Thing spring reverb, into two channels of a Make Noise QMMG set to parallel high pass and resonant low pass filters, and out to the right channel of the mixer. The right channel is what opens and closes the piece, and  the left channel and its ring modded distortion enter around the one-minute mark of the piece. The time constraint of two minutes made this a challenge to get through all of the ideas and filtering I wanted to explore. My wife, Lisa, used a timer and tapped me on the shoulder every 30 seconds so I could focus on manipulation exclusively. I did not use software to fade out the track but manually ran the mixer’s faders down at the end. I feel with the use of all of the filters in this track, and by using several modules not designed as filters in a “fliterish” way, I could have happily tweaked this for an hour and discovered all sorts of juicy nooks and crannies. Thank you David for the inspiration.

Includes material from PLATO No. 3006 MIMF XXIII No. 4 "Incommensurate Manifestation” [Real-Time Improvisation by David K. Barton, recorded June 23, 2014, PLATO’s Studio, Michiana. Using Dr. T’s ATARI KCS, combines nine different (and incommensurate) MIDI sequences from 2011-2014, with some “live” intervention.] 

More on PLATO & the Western Tradition:

http://soundcloud.com/plato-3

More on this 130th Disquiet Junto project — “Create a composition by altering an ongoing loop” — at:

http://disquiet.com/2014/06/26/disquiet0130-filteredmelody/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/?p=16588

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:

http://disquiet.com/forums


First Meditation on a Theme of Barton : {“Weaving Indra’s Net”} [disquiet0130-filteredmelody]

I can't seem to leave well enough alone with this theme. I used the same sample as I did in my first meditation: https://soundcloud.com/337is/meditation-on-a-theme-of-barton-disquiet0130-filteredmelody but this time I processed the sound much more intensely. I was greatly aided by the Frames module which allowed me to set up various scenes which I could then scrub through during the performance. The piece begins with the Phonogene playing the theme at an atomized granular level with the frequency pushed to the highest end of the scale. I played with the harmonic content trying to tease out the theme through various intervals slowly falling in pitch. Eventually, after about the 6 minute mark, the pitch is low enough that the sample is no longer affected by audiorate modulation and the original piano is audible. Because I pushed this sample much more aggressively in this meditation, I became aware that fourth tone is nearly completely inaudible stemming from a combination of David's gentle dynamic playing and my rudimentary sampling skill. As such, the fourth tone in the theme is often only implied in the harmonic space of the reverb tails on the H9. I'm very pleased with some of the small embellishments and nearly baroque ornamentations (trills and such) that develop through the piece.

Includes material from PLATO No. 3006 MIMF XXIII No. 4 "Incommensurate Manifestation” [Real-Time Improvisation by David K. Barton, recorded June 23, 2014, PLATO’s Studio, Michiana. Using Dr. T’s ATARI KCS, combines nine different (and incommensurate) MIDI sequences from 2011-2014, with some “live” intervention.]

More on PLATO & the Western Tradition:

@plato-3

Second Meditation On A Theme Of Barton : {“Weaving Indra’s Net”}

A harmonic study for 10% pulse width square wave & 18dB resonant filter.

Video

Harmonic Study For 10% Square Wave & 18dB Resonant Filter

Paulstretched version of https://soundcloud.com/337is/crows-nest-coyotes using Audacity 2.0.6 with the following settings:
Stretch Factor: 10
Time Resolution (seconds): 0.25

Crows Nest Coyotes (Paulstretched Mix)

More on the 636th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Left (1 of 3) — The Assignment: Record the first third of a trio — at https://disquiet.com/0636/

Left (1 Of 3) disquiet0636

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRV1MhdkiYU&list=UUrP4rvYdVvBUDhnOkj2bo7w

Score for video above video. Images/sound captured, edited, and produced by Leslie Rollins on 11/20/14 by the hydroelectric dam on Lake Chapin and the Saint Joseph River, Berrien Springs Michigan, USA

I do not have sufficient tools to work easily with video, so the process was exceptionally time consuming with much robbing of Peter to pay Paul in terms of scrabbling together some web-based and freeware options. I captured the video by the dam in Berrien Springs today during my walk with my dog Blixa. It was originally shot as a time-lapse video. I then slowed the video multiple times using the built in editor in YouTube. I took a screen capture of the initial frame of the video which I then imported as a RAW audio file in Audacity for further audio processing of the score. I downloaded the slowed video from YouTube and combined it with the new score in iMovie, rendered it, and re-upped it to YouTube. No synthesizers were used.

Total time of the original video = 5.4 seconds
Total time from capture through processing to final work: 7 hours and 44 minutes.

First Contact (Videoless Version)

A brief snippet of a longer set performed at "¡Vámonos! / Let's Go!". I recorded a short portion of a lovely performance by a local Lansing MI singer songwriter Tania Hayward using my iPhone from the back of house. The resultant recording was quite low in volume, so I had to boost it significantly to get anything to work with. I ran the audio into my Phonogene while Tom Schouten collaborated while running the mixer, and Paul Vetne, wearing a Neurosky Mind Wave EEG device connected to the soundmachines BI1brainterface, generated the necessary control voltages to create this piece. You can hear the crowd in the background at times during this recording.



When Your Time's Up (Neurorack Sketch #5 Open Mic Edit)

My first attempt to manifest sound using multiples of the number 13. This work springs as a direct result of my improvisations with Plato & The Western Tradition and conversations with Boyd about his growing integration of Kabbalah, Sacred Geometry, Sound, Manifestation, and multiples of 13. 

ALM's Pamela's Workout in partnership Modcan's Quad LFO with  did the lion's share of the lifting in this with Pammy's eight outputs each dialed into a multiple of 13. The main clock was set at 26 BPM (our "Here" Between Above and Below) and each of the 7 remaining outputs either added or subtracted 13 pulses to that starting number. These eight pulse streams were then moved around the modular with the first four streams sent to the four gates of the Quad LFO. The same four streams were additionally multed and distributed to the CV in of the Quad LFO. I then selected a variety of rates on the LFO to create multiplications or divisions of thirteen with a range of one to thirteen. With these signals in play, I routed them primarily to the E350 Morphing Terrarium which served as the only oscillator in this piece. All morphing inputs available were fed multiples of thirteen. The output of the E350 was first fed into the Pittsburgh Modular high pass filter (with all of its CV inputs influenced by multed LFO clocks) and then on to the Ecophon which was also clock synced to a division of thirteen. The feedback loop of the Ecophon was fed into a STG Sea Devils low pass filter whose resonance and cutoff were modulated by multed clocks from the LFO which had been slewed by an SSF Positronic Transient Gate. The Sea Devils filter was then fed into the Thonk Spring Reverb (in a proper homage to the Putney) and out. This created much of the upper frequencies in this work.  The same signal path from the E350 was also sent to a Toppobrillo Sport-Modulator for a bit of sample and hold. The XY output of the E350 went to the top channel, while the Z output went to the bottom channel. The two CV inputs of the sport modulator took clock from multed LFO signals and the comparator output of the unit was used to feed the E440 low pass filter. The CV inputs of the the E440 were thrummed by multed LFO clock slewed through the other side of the PTG. This chain outputted the fairly steady bassline in the track.

Thirteenth Manifestation for Boyd Nutting (13:26:26:52 Kabbalistic Clock Winding on 12/13/14)

void MacroOscillator::RenderTripleSineTriangle(const uint8_t* sync,
    int16_t* buffer,
    uint8_t size) {
  ConfigureTriple(shape_ == MACRO_OSC_SHAPE_TRIPLE_TRIANGLE ?
      OSC_SHAPE_TRIANGLE : OSC_SHAPE_SINE, 0);
  std::fill(&buffer[0], &buffer[size], 0);
  for (uint8_t i = 0; i < 3; ++i) {
    analog_oscillator_[i].Render(sync, temp_buffer_, NULL, size);
    for (uint8_t j = 0; j < size; ++j) {
      buffer[j] += temp_buffer_[j] * 21 >> 6;
    }
  }
}

Your Bones (Tri-Sinus Bolero)

Lisa and Blixa at Rosehill Cemetery 02/01/15

Fetch

Here is a recording, warts and all, of a walk my dog Blixa and I took an hour ago. It was sunny and one degree fahrenheit while we walked. I experimented mounting my microphones to the side of my glasses using small binder clips. This is my first attempt trying to fake a binaural technique. There are several times you can hear me cough, adjust zippers and velcro, and breathe heavily as I walk and adjust. Blixa is noticeable too. You can hear our wind chimes on the front porch as we exit the house. Then our neighbor's dog Jade barks hello as we walk by. Soon you can hear the thrum of the generators by the dam. Eventually you can hear the flowing St. Joseph river and a variety of birds. This recording features zero gain from the recorder and the only processing afterwards is the fade out.

Check out the beautiful composition that the collective (PLATO & the Western Tradition) made with this, and several other recent field recordings: https://soundcloud.com/plato-3/plato-no-3220-walking-on-water

Take Me to the River (From the House Mix)

Real-Time Improvisation by David K. Barton, recorded February 27, 2015, PLATO’s PilotHouse, Michiana.  Field recordings by 337is (Leslie Rollins): two copies of “Take Me to the River (From the House Mix)”; one copy each of “Roll Me in the Water (Dabbling Ducks Mix)”, “Immersion”, and “On Ice”; And one sample from a file labeled “insects”.  

PLATO No. 3220 Walking On Water

Update: 05/13/17 replaced MP3 with full WAV file: A walk from my hotel La Casona to the Rio Marañón in Iquitos Peru. I don't normally share in MP3 format, but the upload speeds here in Peru make it a necessity.

Walk to Rio Marañón

Tohil Threnody For Adelita Navas Videyra (Audio Only)

A walk from my hotel in Tarapoto to the Easter Sunday Parade around the Plaza de Armas. Local youth groups, schools, business associations, and military branches join to march each Sunday. You can read more about this tradition here:

http://www.iquitosnews.com/page18a.html

I've left this recording unaltered with warts and all ... you can occasionally hear me asking people if I can have their permission to photograph them. In the last ten or so minutes of the recording I stood next to a military brass band playing patriotic numbers to an enthusiastic crowd of locals.

Día De Pascua (Easter Sunday Plaza de Armas Parade, Tarapoto Peru, 04/05/15)

On a windy, rainy day, the regional fútbol enthusiasts came to San Roque for a tournament. There were speeches, game balls and jerseys awarded, and more motor vehicles in town than I'd ever seen before. This regional band from Tarapoto kept the crowds in high spirits with their propulsive drumming and catchy melodies. During this recording you can hear enthusiasts whistling their approval from the park across the street. You can also hear the local government official trying to work out how to use the PA system with their voice drenched in reverb and the omnipresent Cumbia y Reggaeton blasting underneath it all. The overall effect is like some mad psychedelic sampling and voice modification a la PLATO & the Western Tradition in full improv mode.

Conjunto Tipico Sensacion (Tarapoto Bande)

For a video work featuring a processed version of this recording please visit: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uyPFlBOxoA

Recorded at dusk on Sunday April 12th in the first bend of the river back towards town just to the West of downtown San Roque: http://goo.gl/elJlHU

The right hydrophone was in about 2 feet of water where the water was really flowing from heavy rains on Saturday and Sunday. The left hydrophone was a few feet away from the right, closer to the shore, in a little pool about 8 inches deep.

Rio Cumbaza

Sprott

Working with Martin Howse's TOAD circuit for this as the description of "resonant, clanging and metallic sounds" made me think of bells. By virtue of patching it with other ERD modules to allow chaos a more firm grip on the proceedings, I imagined the resultant sputtering to be in some sort of alignment for the deconstruction of a peel o' bell.

"TOAD can also model a mass-spring-damper system, or series of damped oscillations, which also can be used as a state variable filter.

Here the equation is: x’’=1/m(-(Dx’ + sx) with m as mass, D as damping coefficient and s as springiness. This is a simple equation to begin with, and can produce resonant, clanging and metallic sounds.

x represents the vertical displacement of the spring, x’ is the first derivative of x (which would be speed) and x’’ is the second derivative (which would be acceleration). We patch the equation by feeding the lower derivatives (x’ and x) produced by the first two integrators into the collector. Paying attention to norms, this can be seen in the next diagram. We can use the first multiplier pair as VCA for our input"

Disquiet Junto Project 0682: Unring a Bell
The Assignment: What if you could?

There is just one step to this project. The idea that one cannot “unring a bell” is a fairly common saying, at least in English. But what if you could? What might it sound like? And what use might the unrung bell serve in the making of music. Please record a track in which you try to unring a bell.

More on the 682nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Unring a Bell — The Assignment: What if you could? — at https://disquiet.com/0682/


Unring a Bell disquiet0682

Ipsative Factorum

Leucothoe

Corvus

Resonant/reverberant space is something I've thought about a lot since high school, but I never have dragged mics and equipment into a concrete stairwell or washroom before today.

I work at Alfred University in New York and our division of Expanded Media in the School of Art & Design has a four story stairwell which feeds the back of house to two of our galleries and the sonic/video arts studios. I set out four Tascam DR-100 field recorders and captured the sound of my wallet being dropped from the highest point to the lowest. In the accompanying artwork you can see two pictures of this stairwell (one from the bottom looking up [the bottom left picture], and one from the top looking down [the top right picture]). My calves always tighten up a bit at the top.

For the less reverberant space, I chose an old storage closet we're in the midst of transforming into a vocal/studio booth. It has rubberized floors, and a much lower drop-ceiling. I placed the quartet of recorders in the corners of the room, and then dropped my wallet from a much shorter height to the floor. You can see two images from this room set up in the other half of the cover art.

All of this for less than five seconds of audio total. In the first two seconds you'll hear the initial hit of the wallet, followed by a second quieter hit after it bounced in the concrete stairwell. At four seconds you hear the other room with a much more muted single drop (which to my ears sounds a bit like a champagne cork popping, but I've had champagne maybe twice in my life so I probably don't really know what that sounds like.)

More on the 683rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Space Shot — The Assignment: Combine reverberant and non-reverberant — at https://disquiet.com/0683/

Space Shot disquiet0683

MeAndOr

Pentserdrone

Minimopped

And it Dropped

Darkening

Droisened

Afore Sound

Crosstalked

Eh, Deal

Known-un

Gurgle

Smollone

Introductory Ritual

No/C-90*Min II

A recording of wind moving the tall, brittle grasses which occupy the dividing line between the sandy shore and the beginning of dune elevation in Warren Dunes State Park. It was a blustery day with constant wind rustling the stalks. I was able to wedge the two contact microphones at the base of two clumps and they held them, almost like a clothes pin, while the wind whipped the tops. I was surprised how sharp and pointy the drier stems were as they jabbed me while I got the microphones in place.

Marram Grass

Tangerine Dreaming

11/14/2020: Checkout Wilfried Hanrath's elegant reworking of this performance:

https://soundcloud.com/flyingtonefish/wilfried-hanrath-feat-udo-zoels-nachts-wenn-alles-schlaft337is-three-three-seven-is-rework

Nachts, Wenn Alles Schläft

Regina Angelorum

Anyone up to using this for some Cumbia, Polka, or something? Have at it!

MidiPunk has had a go with this bassline! Listen to it here: 

https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-2-midipunk-smashdown-mix

Bassline Seeking Companion 2

Here's a rockin' version of this original track: https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-2

The live drumming and percussion programming courtesy of the imitable @MidiPunk

Now, who is going to flow or vocalise over this?! 

Bassline Seeking Companion 2 (MidiPunk Smashdown Mix)

A brilliant thickening of the soup courtesy of @ellowalamandr4 aka YS4 ... you should check out the rest of his work!

Now who is going to transform this yet again?!

Check out the original barebones bassline: https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-2

Listen to the @MidiPunk drumstravaganza smash-down mix: https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-2-midipunk-smashdown-mix

337is/MidiPunk/YS4 - Bassline Seeking Companion (Yellow Salamand'r Tunes In Version)

@pythagora has joined the party and added a delightful  synth/guitar lead to:
https://soundcloud.com/random-coil/337ismidipunknc-bassline-seeking-companion-synths-topping

After name constant had added something to:
https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-2-midipunk-smashdown-mix

Which had the perfect drums that @MidiPunk had added to this:
https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-2

Bassline Seeking Companion (Pythagora's Theoremerizing Version)

I'm bummed that I won't be in town for this year's MIMF (Michiana Improvisational Music Festival) so I decided to create some sounds that might be useful to them in my absence. Have fun!

I recently aquired a Verbos Dual Four Pole Filter (which traces its design to the Buchla 291) and was eager to explore the new tonalities it will open in my case. All sounds from the DPO and filtered by the heavily modulated Four Pole.

llDiorll.Hban (A Filter Essay for MIMF 2015)

A drone for five square waves and resonant 24 dB filter.

How Going Over Niagara Works

@goiks suggested:

"I'd love to hear plucked string or other mutable rings sounds. I'd like the trigger for those sounds to also trigger an envelope that goes to the effect instead of the onboard lfo (both abrupt and medium attack), about 75% towards the lofi and wet settings."

Turing providing sequence, transposed by Pressure Points. Clock from one side of Maths, routed into other side of Maths to utilize AD envelope into ILFJ instead of its own internal LFO. Settings on ILFJ were usually 75 % for wet/dry and comp/lofi, occasionally full dry to reveal raw sound from Elements. Played with the rise and fall times of the AD envelope feeding the ILFJ. That, in combination to adding more and more Space in the Element's model created a lot of interesting textures. Any clicking you hear is a result of too hot of an envelope from Maths, but even that produces interesting artifacts. What can I say? Even when I try to do strings, they come out weird. Well, prepared piano is sort of a string right?!

For a video featuring ILFJ doing its thing to a drum loop, look here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2YiNFa7rx4

Here's a link to my modulargrid layout. Let me know the specific patch you'd like to hear and I'll give it a go if  I can figure out your patch notes. :-)

https://www.modulargrid.net/e/racks/view/192609

ZVex Instant Lo - Fi Junky Eurorack Module

During the Peace Walk on Sunday, June 7, 2020, all who gathered took a knee in front of the Berrien Springs High School while the walk’s student organizers read out a list of names of black lives taken through brutality and murder by police and vigilantes . After each name was read, the crowd of over 1,000 people responded with cries of "I can't breathe!" When the students reached George Floyd's name on the list and read it out, again the gathered people cried out "I can't breathe" and then fell silent for eight minutes and forty-six seconds—the length of time that Derek Chauvin kept his knee pressed to the neck of George Floyd while murdering him. During this silence, the sound of an arial drone could be heard buzzing overhead, along with the distant hum of vehicles on the village’s streets. 

Two days ago, PLATO & the Western Tradition (who have been creating as a Postmodern Improvisation Ensemble for more than 30 years), raised their creative voices in search of justice and equality by posting this original track:

https://soundcloud.com/plato-3/plato-no-7336-against-brutality

In this contribution to “Weaving Indra’s Net” I have explored a new node through the addition of a field recording I gathered during the Peace Walk. In listening to this new strand you can hear the calling out of each name, but miss the real-time immediate response of “I can’t breathe”. The first time you hear the full call and response of a name and “I can’t breathe” comes after the reading of George Floyd’s name. This is immediately followed by the 8:46 section of amplified ambient silence, where in the first moments you can just make out a voice commenting that “someone has a drone.” Gradually PLATO’s meditation rejoins this amplified silence. After the 8:46 portion, an electronically re-coded version of the crowd’s responses are heard one after another in trio form to conclude the piece. The left channel is sped up by 13 percent and the right channel is slowed by 13 percent, while the middle channel plays out in real time at exactly the pace of the unified crowd responding.

————————————
Please seek out organizations committed to demanding justice for All and support them with your action and donations. There are many possibilities for this including:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/georgefloyd

https://www.communityjusticeexchange.org/nbfn-directory

https://www.naacpldf.org
————————————
 
This recording includes material from PLATO & The Western Tradition, No. 7336, ‘Against Brutality.’

If you would like to participate in the “Weaving Indra’s Net” project, please see below:

PLATO & The Western Tradition invites others in the Electronic Music Community to participate in the creation of an on-line compilation called “Weaving Indra’s Net.” Here are the “rules”:

1. Download from @plato-3 any of the improvisations by PLATO & The Western Tradition that capture your attention.
2. Use some or all of what you download as a part of your own music making.
3. Post your piece to SoundCloud, and post the SoundCloud link on Plato’s FaceBook page: www.facebook.com/PLATOandTheWesternTradition
4. Please comply with our Creative Commons attribution requirement (see creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) by including in your description of your piece this language: “Includes material from PLATO & The Western Tradition, No. 2811, ‘Limitless Geometries’”. (You should substitute the number and title of the piece that you are using.)
5. PLATO will organize and maintain the compilation as a playlist titled “Weaving Indra’s Net” on the PLATO SoundCloud site.

Please post any questions or comments on the FaceBook page listed above.

PLATO No. 7336 Against Brutality (I Can't Breathe Version)

heart-open & earth-honoring 
synthesist & field-recordist 
journalist & dreamtime walker
visualist & connector
​
The seemingly limitless manifestations that are observed during improvisational performance of electronic audiovisual materials drive me to seek collaborative interactions between compositional systems, machines, and myself. In holding space to facilitate an emergence of indeterminate phenomenon through analog synthesis, feedback systems, and field recordings, I share elements from multiple sources to celebrate shapes, patterns, and spaces.
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I hold BAs in Art and English from Andrews University, and am currently enrolled in the Electronic Integrated Arts MFA at Alfred University. I was an artist in residency in 2017 at Signal Culture in Owego New York and in 2015 at Sachaqa Centro De ARTE, San Roque Peru. My visual works, and live electronic improvisational performances, have been featured across Peru, at The MuseumsQuartier in Vienna, and throughout the Midwest of America.
 
Note: Much of the work here is subtle in nature and I encourage you to listen via headphones or using a decent system whenever possible. Most computer speakers will not reveal the tracks fully.  Unless otherwise noted in the track description, everything is recorded direct to stereo track live and on the fly with no overdubs. Thanks for stopping by and listening!

337is (three three seven is)

Pinned to spotlight

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