I have a new site. This is now officially the old site. For now I don’t plan on removing it so that any external links to pages on the old site will remain unbroken.

Thank you for your attention.

Technical Drawings, my post-percussion duo with Melissa St. Pierre has a string of super-awesome upcoming shows spread across the rust belt of the United States. Here is the skinny:

• Nov 4th - Brillo Box. Pittsburgh, PA. With Helen Money, Mike Tamburo, and Ho Ag. 9:30PM/$6.
• Nov 5th - Front Room Gallery. Cleveland, OH. With Helen Money, and Like Bells. 9Pm/$5.
• Nov 6th - Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit - Detroit, MI. With the Sugercoats and Lac La Belle. 8PM/$5.
• Nov 8th - Experimental Sound Studio. Chicago, IL. Performance and workshop by Melissa St. Pierre. 2pm - 6pm/more info.
• Nov 9th - Links Hall. Chicago, IL. Technical Drawings performs with mind/body-boggling dancers Darrell Jones & Kirstie Simson. Not to be missed! 7:30PM/$12 non-students/$10 students. More info.

Hope to see you and yours at one or more of these fine events!

Artist - Track - Album - Label- Notes

1 Jesse Stiles - Studio Outtake
2 Ananda Shankar - Dancing Drums - A Life In Music - Best Of The EMI Years - Saregama Plc
3 Sukru Tunar - Huzzam Taksim - Istanbul 1925 - Trad. Crossroads - snippet
4 Diana Deutsche - “High-Low” - Musical Illusions and Paradoxes - Philomel Records
5 Venetian Snares - Második Galamb - Rossz Csillag Allat Szuletett - Planet Mu
6 Jesse Stiles - Internet field recording - Reversed guided meditation
7 Valet - We went there - Naked Acid - kranky / Iris
8 Sukru Tunar - Huzzam Taksim - Istanbul 1925 - Trad. Crossroads
9 Raymond Scott - Backward beeps - Manhattan Research, Inc. - Spunky Monkey Music / IODA
10 David Last vs Zulu - Necessary Evil - Musically Massive - Staubgold Germany
11 Perry Cook Precedence Effect - Music, Cognition, and Computerized Sound - MIT Press (publisher of book with included CD)
12 Jaylib - Champion Sound - Champion Sound - Stones Throw
13 Raymond Scott - Backwards Overload - Manhattan Research, Inc. - Spunky Monkey Music / IODA
14 Nirvana - Ain’t it a shame - With the Lights Out - Geffen Records
15 The Source Family - Live At Beverly Hills 1973 - The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13, and The Source Family - Process (publisher of book with included CD)
16 Colleen - Everyone Alive Wants Answers - Everyone Alive Wants Answers - The Leaf Label / state51
17 Croiners - Untitled Track No. 12 - Music To Listen To Other Tapes By - ? - More info: http://tinyurl.com/lo9xef
18 Boudewijn de Groot - Prikkebeen Picknick - ? - More info: http://tinyurl.com/ms4kx9
19 Tamrat Ferendji & Sensation Band - Antchin Yagegnulet Africa 100 - ? - More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa_100 + http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/6007-the-indestructible-beat/
20 Wechsel Garland - Falter - Wechsel Garland - Morr Music / M.M.
21 Microstoria - “16:9” - Init Ding - Thrill Jockey
22 Gas - Gas I - Nah Und Fern [Disc 1] - Kompakt Germany

Download site

RedhouseArtRadio

In 2006, Face Removal Services created the Beatmap, a GPS-based music instrument that transforms the face of the planet into an enormous DJ booth.

Looping musical phrases are represented on a map as overlapping circular territories. As the vehicle approaches the center of a circle, the volume increases. In areas of the map where territories overlap the vehicle generates dynamic mixes of the overlapping musical phrases. By exploring a very large map of many overlapping territories the Beatmap creates complex, dynamic mash-ups.

The map can be explored on foot, by plane, boat, train, or automobile. In this footage the map is explored by car on the Bonneville Salt Flats, allowing the user to freely accelerate, swerve, and slam to a stop for optimum musical control of the instrument.

The Beatmap can be positioned anywhere on Earth and expanded or contracted to any size by manipulating a continuous stream of GPS data. The Beatmap can thus be used to create drive-through mash-ups on any surface of any size, from a tennis court to the Atlantic Ocean.

Exploring the Beatmap is like investigating a new city while navigating a DJ’s crate of records. Obscure landmarks begin to gain new significance by their association with unique musical juxtapositions. For instance, a treacherous pothole may invite multiple drive-bys simply because of its proximity to a particularly satisfying polyrhythm. The Beatmap is currently be readied for deployment in locations near and far.

Documentation from my multimedia performance “Deja Rendez Vous” - produced by the Center for Land Use Interpretation in March 2009. I’d recommend watching this in HD on Vimeo (here).

From The Lay of the Land, Spring 2009:

The Center For Land Use Interpretation staged an event on the waterways of Houston in late March, 2009, a public spectacle that made connections between the founding of Houston, its emergence as a global city, and the celebration of the sesquicentennial of the oil industry. This commemorative event commemorated commemoration, a spectacle celebrating celebration and spectacle.

The event was driven by a multimedia performance that re-examined a 1986 concert commemorating the sesquicentennial of the city’s founding in 1836. The 1986 event, titled Rendez-vous Houston, centered around a synthesizer-oriented performance by French musician Jean Michel Jarre which was one of the largest concert spectacles ever produced at the time.

In the Center’s “respectacle” event in March, Jean Michel Jarre’s performance was deconstructed by multimedia artist/musician Jesse Stiles, and staged on a floating plastic platform designed by the group Simparch. Titled Déjà Rendez-vous, the CLUI spectacle fused the founding of Houston and the Republic of Texas (1836), and the current sesquicentennial (1859 - 2009) of the oil industry, through the laser guided lens of Jarre’s concert event.

Jarre was known for his global son et lumière spectacles, as well as his soaring synth music, found on successfully selling albums such as Oxygen (1976), and Zoolook (1984). His performances included use of the laser harp, musical laser beams that fan out over the audience and are plucked like the strings of a harp. He performed cascading glissandos on custom-made circular keyboards, lit from within, while lasers and lights danced in monumental amounts of wind driven smoke. His Houston performance took place outdoors, on a stage near the Buffalo Bayou, and engaged the skyscrapers of downtown as a backdrop. Texaco’s headquarters was covered with a screen onto which images of Texas were projected. Several other corporate oil building’s tops spewed fireworks, like crude gushing out of a wild well. Jarre’s show was witnessed by over a million people, listening over speakers and on the radio. Many watched from freeway overpasses, which were closed to traffic for the event.

For the CLUI event, no freeways were closed. Though the city’s downtown was also visible, it was distant, as the event took place on the other side of town, on the industrial end of the Bayou. The performance platform, created by the build/design team Simparch, was assembled over the weeks prior to the event. It was a fully self-contained eventspace, with a large screen for rear screen projection for an audience on shore. As the time for the performance approached, the platform was propelled up the Bayou by an outboard engine, and positioned in place, facing the audience that had amassed in Tony Marron Park. As darkness fell, the respectacle began.

Using a five-channel array of video projections, monitors, and loudspeakers, Jesse Stiles’ performance kaleidoscopically dissected, re-assembled, and spatialized grains of footage from the 1986 event, investigating the augmentation and removal of original time, and creating new patterns of movement and rhythm by re-arranging those moments across the multiple channels of the performance space.

It operated in a sense like a reactor, converting the ecstatic synthetic gloss of Jean Michel’s original show into a new, refined product of pure pixel notion and light. It distilled the essence of pure commemoration, fusing the layers of 1836, 1986, and 2009, in the plasma of spectacle. Historical carbon catalytically cracked into an event that apogeed with a burst of fireworks, then dissipated, wafting away like smoke, remaining only as memory.

In 2006, Face Removal Services created the Beatmap, a GPS-based music instrument that transforms the face of the planet into an enormous DJ booth.

Looping musical phrases are represented on a map as overlapping circular territories. As the vehicle approaches the center of a circle, the volume increases. In areas of the map where territories overlap the vehicle generates dynamic mixes of the overlapping musical phrases. By exploring a very large map of many overlapping territories the Beatmap creates complex, dynamic mash-ups.

The map can be explored on foot, by plane, boat, train, or automobile. In this footage the map is explored by car on the Bonneville Salt Flats, allowing the user to freely accelerate, swerve, and slam to a stop for optimum musical control of the instrument.

The Beatmap can be positioned anywhere on Earth and expanded or contracted to any size by manipulating a continuous stream of GPS data. The Beatmap can thus be used to create drive-through mash-ups on any surface of any size, from a tennis court to the Atlantic Ocean.

Exploring the Beatmap is like investigating a new city while navigating a DJ’s crate of records. Obscure landmarks begin to gain new significance by their association with unique musical juxtapositions. For instance, a treacherous pothole may invite multiple drive-bys simply because of its proximity to a particularly satisfying polyrhythm. The Beatmap is currently be readied for deployment in locations near and far.

Documentation from my multimedia performance “Deja Rendez Vous” - produced by the Center for Land Use Interpretation in March 2009. I’d recommend watching this in HD on Vimeo (here).

From The Lay of the Land, Spring 2009:

The Center For Land Use Interpretation staged an event on the waterways of Houston in late March, 2009, a public spectacle that made connections between the founding of Houston, its emergence as a global city, and the celebration of the sesquicentennial of the oil industry. This commemorative event commemorated commemoration, a spectacle celebrating celebration and spectacle.

The event was driven by a multimedia performance that re-examined a 1986 concert commemorating the sesquicentennial of the city’s founding in 1836. The 1986 event, titled Rendez-vous Houston, centered around a synthesizer-oriented performance by French musician Jean Michel Jarre which was one of the largest concert spectacles ever produced at the time.

In the Center’s “respectacle” event in March, Jean Michel Jarre’s performance was deconstructed by multimedia artist/musician Jesse Stiles, and staged on a floating plastic platform designed by the group Simparch. Titled Déjà Rendez-vous, the CLUI spectacle fused the founding of Houston and the Republic of Texas (1836), and the current sesquicentennial (1859 - 2009) of the oil industry, through the laser guided lens of Jarre’s concert event.

Jarre was known for his global son et lumière spectacles, as well as his soaring synth music, found on successfully selling albums such as Oxygen (1976), and Zoolook (1984). His performances included use of the laser harp, musical laser beams that fan out over the audience and are plucked like the strings of a harp. He performed cascading glissandos on custom-made circular keyboards, lit from within, while lasers and lights danced in monumental amounts of wind driven smoke. His Houston performance took place outdoors, on a stage near the Buffalo Bayou, and engaged the skyscrapers of downtown as a backdrop. Texaco’s headquarters was covered with a screen onto which images of Texas were projected. Several other corporate oil building’s tops spewed fireworks, like crude gushing out of a wild well. Jarre’s show was witnessed by over a million people, listening over speakers and on the radio. Many watched from freeway overpasses, which were closed to traffic for the event.

For the CLUI event, no freeways were closed. Though the city’s downtown was also visible, it was distant, as the event took place on the other side of town, on the industrial end of the Bayou. The performance platform, created by the build/design team Simparch, was assembled over the weeks prior to the event. It was a fully self-contained eventspace, with a large screen for rear screen projection for an audience on shore. As the time for the performance approached, the platform was propelled up the Bayou by an outboard engine, and positioned in place, facing the audience that had amassed in Tony Marron Park. As darkness fell, the respectacle began.

Using a five-channel array of video projections, monitors, and loudspeakers, Jesse Stiles’ performance kaleidoscopically dissected, re-assembled, and spatialized grains of footage from the 1986 event, investigating the augmentation and removal of original time, and creating new patterns of movement and rhythm by re-arranging those moments across the multiple channels of the performance space.

It operated in a sense like a reactor, converting the ecstatic synthetic gloss of Jean Michel’s original show into a new, refined product of pure pixel notion and light. It distilled the essence of pure commemoration, fusing the layers of 1836, 1986, and 2009, in the plasma of spectacle. Historical carbon catalytically cracked into an event that apogeed with a burst of fireworks, then dissipated, wafting away like smoke, remaining only as memory.

I am producing a quasi-monthly show for Redhouse Art Radio streaming out of Syracuse, NY. Episode 1 is up and streaming and downloadable. Here’s the dirty details:

Artist – Track – Album – Label – Notes

1. Oneida – Sheets of Easter – Each One Teach One – Jagjaguwar Records – (Excerpt)
2. Chris Watson – Hippopotami Emerging from River – Outside the Circle of Fire – Touch Records
3. Pascal Schafer – Drrrunk – Dawn – Karaoke Kalk
4. Helvetica Is The Perfume Of The City – Bone of Bone – Self-Titled EP – Label: Foxglove
5. Jesse Stiles - Field Recording
6. Lame Bane Xoc – Jah Wobble & The Invaders of the Heart – Molam Dub – Label: 30 Hertz Records
7. Jim Becker and Colleen Burke – Interkosmos Theme – Interkosmos Soundtrack – Shrug Records
8. Mellisa St. Pierre – Fig. VIII – Specimens – Table of the Elements
9. Chris Watson – Adult cheetah resting by beobab tree – Outside the Circle of Fire – Touch Records
10. Entrance – Prayer of Death (title track) – Label: Tee Pee Records
11. Fenesz- Endless Summer – Endless Summer – Label: Mego Austria
12. DOOM – That’s that – Born Like This – Label: Lex Records
13. Casiotone for the Painfully Alone – New Years Kiss – Etiquette – Label: Tomlab
14. Belong – Late Night – Colorless Record – Label: St. Ives Records – (Syd Barret cover)
15. Anonymous Field Recording
16. Holy Fuck – Super Inuit – Holy Fuck – Label: Young Turks
17. Blipco Incorporated – Country Hodown – Blipco Episode 3
18. Marlui Miranda – Naumu – Ihu Todos Os Sons – Label: Blue Jackel
19. Aix Em Klemm – The Luxury of Dirt – Aix Em Klemm – Kranky Records
20. Jesse Stiles – Music from The Spectres of Liberty

Download site

RedhouseArtRadio

Saturday, May 9th*
6:00pm-10:00pm
Harmony Park - Lowell, MA
Corner of Cross St. and Cork St. (across from St. Patrick’s Church)
On google maps at:
http://tinyurl.com/harmonyparklowellma

~~

On Saturday, May 9, Lowell’s Harmony Park will come to life with music, food, and a large scale interactive art installation, “The Harmonic Center Of The Universe” by artists Chris Harvey, Olivia Robinson, and Jesse Stiles, with support from The Revolving Museum.

In “The Harmonic Center Of The Universe”, a giant luminous orb hovers on a tall bamboo tripod, swathed in a canopy of glittering LED lights. Suspended below it, “The Full Moon Seat” welcomes visitors to sit and activate the flow of animated light, which cascades through the surrounding garlands and strands. Once set in motion, the animated patterns of light flow up into the Orb and down a central cord, surrounding the guest in the enveloping glow and musical sounds of the Park. “The Harmonic Center Of The Universe” is built using a combination of ancient and cutting-edge materials, marrying bamboo construction with computer controlled LEDs.

Featuring performances by the United Native American Cultural Council, Cornell W. Coley, the Angkor Dance Troupe, Eric Anthony, and the Poi Fire Dancers, “The Full Moon Celebration at the Harmonic Center of the Universe” is an all-ages, family-friendly neighborhood event designed to celebrate community space and creative culture. The large interactive sculpture represents our connection to our surroundings, our responses to creative expression within our range and beyond, and our ability to feel centered in our perspective and sense of place.

The event opens with performances commencing at 6PM. At sunset (approximately 8PM), “The Harmonic Center of the Universe” will be fully activated, illuminating the park with patterns of light and sound beneath the auspicious May full moon. Further constellations of firefly-like points of light will be provided throughout the Park by small LED sculptures created by local youth for the celebration.

“The Full Moon Celebration at the Harmonic Center of the Universe” is presented by The Revolving Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts. It is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, Lowell Five, Kraft Foods, Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism and the Cultural Organization of Lowell, with additional support from City of Lowell Parks and Recreation Department, Lowell Housing Authority, Community Teamwork Inc., Coalition for a Better Acre, Lowell Community Health Center, St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, Lowell’s Community Greenhouse, Marktech Optoelectronics, and many volunteers and friends.

* In the event of inclement weather, a rain date of May 16 has been set.