After Mac's (The Dark at the End of the Tunnel)

"Nine to five to Paradise" gets its name from the Turin Metro station Paradiso; the 30 second recording upon which this piece is based was recorded as the metro arrived at the station of Paradiso. This 14 minute piece uses only sounds from that recording, including fragments of the bells and female voice announcing the station. All the sounds were treated using a digital audio workstation. Since I had worked on Musique Concrète in the seventies using magnetic tape, splicing and mixing and processing with the then new and innovative EMS VS1 synth, I was able to emulate these techniques with the computer software.

Nine To Five to Paradise

This is draft* of  a new work based on a short passage from "The Book of Tea" by Okakura Kakuzō (1906). This passage reads: 

The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboo
The fountains are bubbling with delight
The soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle
Let us dream of evanescence and linger in 
The beautiful foolishness of things

This is not a strict sonic representation of the text, it is what the narrative suggested to me and how I chose to interpret it.  Once the composition process begins, it assumes a life of its own

My favourite moment is at 9’ : 44” 

Though not done consciously, moments remind me of the composers that I have learned about in the past.  Eliane Radigue has been an inspiration throughout and a spur to finding new ways of expressing the drones in the work.  Other notable composers I found in the piece are: Benjamin Britten who gave me high violin harmonics, Béla Bartók who gave me a rhythm, John Cage who gave me space  and silence; Claude Debussy who gave me a scale; Henryk Górecki who gave me gravity.

Bamboo: the foolishness of things

This was the second take on day one of my "Duets" recording project with the Singing Ringing Tree (SRT), a wind activated musical panopticon in Northern England. The sculpture was designed by architects Tonkin Liu and completed in December 2006. I played accompaniment for the SRT binaural recording simultaneously using a Novation Bass Station II connected to a USB battery. I also ran the BSII through a Moog Minifooger Delay.

NOTE: This is a binaural recording combined with a monophonic synthesizer track. Although it sounds great through speakers, circumaural headphones must be used to experience the binaural effect.

Duet No. 2 With The Singing Ringing Tree

Paradise - A kubat

Sun World

Hera. Poor Hera. If only she knew, could understand what she could have if she left. If only she could understand what galaxies she could rule over, away from the watchful eye of her accursed brother. She would be supreme, unmatched and feared, but still she stays loyal to the one who would see her ruined before surrendering the cosmos to her. Poor Hera.


Performed on a Roland Juno-60; recorded onto Tascam PortaOne 4-track cassette; bounced to Logic where further editing occurred.

Hera

Lazy weekend jamming fun, playing my Akai MPC Live, Elektron Analog Four and Analog Heat.

Marsupial

This track is the first movement in a series of pieces that are impressions of Kandinsky paintings. The painting that inspired this piece is called "Colorful Ensemble," painted in 1938 by Wassily Kandinsky; the detail of which is what I am currently using as my profile picture on soundcloud and bandcamp. 

The defining feature of the painting "Colorful Ensemble" is the juxtaposition of small and large musical events. In the painting, Kandinsky juxtaposes small, energetic, colorful events with larger, timbrally-rich events of different shapes, contours, colors, and intensities. 

This is the defining characteristic of my impression of this piece: it utilizes microsounds on several different time scales superimposed on one another to create a unique energetic weave of multiple moving strata. Kandinsky's shapes all have different characteristics, whether they are colors or patterns, and I've attempted to give my microsounds different shapes, colors, and patterns as well.

Impression of "Colorful Ensemble"

Pizza Coupon covers this Allen Toussaint classic

Everything I Do Got To Be Funky

Submit booking, licensing, and label correspondence to keston@audiocookbook.org

John C.S. Keston is an award winning composer of electronic, experimental, and instrumental music. His work embraces the chaotic ambiguities of environmental and sensorial influences providing context within unpredictable or everyday events. His unconventional compositions convey a spirit of discovery and exploration through the use of graphic scores, chance and generative techniques, analog and digital synthesis, experimental sound design, signal processing, and acoustic piano. His compositions parallel indeterminate improvisation activating what remains immutable within traditional forms of notation driven music. Performers are empowered to use their phonomnesis, or sonic imaginations, to contribute to the work.

His music appears in The Jeffrey Dahmer Files (2012) and he composed the music for the short Familiar Pavement (2015) presented at the MNKINO Film Score Fest. He has appeared on more than a dozen albums including two solo albums on Unearthed Music. His latest release, Isosceles (2016) has drawn comparisons to the Stranger Things soundtrack. In 2011 he won the Minnesota Emerging Composers Award for electronic musicians. In 2013 he won the Jerome Fund for New Music for his project documenting binaural duets with the Singing Ringing Tree in the UK. 

John has performed and exhibited original work at Northern Spark, an all night arts festival with over 200,000 attendees (MN); the Weisman Art Museum (MN); the Montreal Jazz Festival; the Walker Art Center; the Burnet Gallery (MN); the In/Out Festival of Digital Performance (NYC); the Eyeo Festival (MN); INST-INT (MN); Echofluxx (Prague); WMC (Miami); and Moogfest (NC). In addition, Keston has worked with Atmosphere, Jon Davis, Martin Dosh, Peter Hennig, Joshua Herbst, Cody McKinney, Graham O'Brien, Adam Svec, and Nils Westdal to name a few. John resides in Minneapolis where he is a professor of creative multimedia at the University of St. Thomas and founded the widely read sound design resource  <a href="http://audiocookbook.org" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">AudioCoobook.org</a> where he shares sounds and writes about his unique approach to composition, production, and performance.

Duet No. 2 With The Singing Ringing Tree

John C.S. Keston

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