Electroniums Live. the ‘science-fair table’ format

‘Serious Warping 2018’, an electronium-rich performance

‘Serious Warping’ is the name of a multimedia performance that was produced by the Hearding Cats Artists Collective. There have been two performances to-date, one in November of 2017, and one in February of 2018. The event is the brainchild of Rich O’Donnell and features a cast of a dozen improvising Videographers,  Models, Musicians, Fashion-Designers, and Dancers.  It was my privilege to be asked to perform a piece in a lightless basement of the venue  (once a 19th century bathhouse) with two veteran dancers performing under black-lights.

The rig I chose was predominantly electroniums,  and this post will expose the electroniums in the context of this performance.  Most of the devices I touch-on here are discussed in more detail on other pages on this site. My aim in this post is to describe my approach to live performance with a menagerie of these gadgets.

I was inspired to post this by the quality of the images photographed by Olivia Mabuse. 

The overall rig consisted of the following electroniums:

-The Dome , using the Bell Jar as a audio signal source.

-The Aurora and its external processor

-The NoiseRing Deluxe Martian Space Party Edition, driven by it’s DIY sidecar that generates 6 complex interdependent control voltages

=My Dual-Ribbon Controller and Wiard Joystick-JAG combination were the primary controllers.

and the whole rig was augmented by three boxes of  modules:

– the ‘utility belt’,  containing the Jackelope, the handyman mixer, a Twinkler,  and a small coterie of eurorack items.

-a ‘beauty case’ of mostly Makenoise audio sources. The Makenoise DPO, Mysteron, & Erbeverb are all much beloved!

-the ‘digital box’ which contains  ‘Mrs. Sputterworks’ which was recently redesigned as software on an Arduino Uno based on the original analog version, a twin-peaks filter, and a eurorack-sized Oscillosope to help diagnose the inevitable SNAFUs that bedevil the deployment of a big complex performance rig like this.

(please click on the image to expand and view notes if desired)

In a very visual performance like this, the dome tends to get a lot of attention so I’ll start with it.

The Dome is well suited to playing in darkened environments because the two primary sensor arrays use infrared reflection for control. i chose infrared because of it’s immunity to interference from visible light but there is always some infrared component in visible light so, in a dark environment, the sensors work at maximum sensitivity and project further, providing a physically longer scale of control. The right-hand dual sensor array can be seen in the photo above,  just-above,  and to the right of the 4th unused jack in the line of 4,  1/8″ jacks at the rim.

The Dome is very heavy on audio processing , and complex & manual control voltage generation. (there is only one dedicated on-board oscillator).  I use dedicated external devices to supply 5 separate audio signals. The original external audio source is ‘Pandora’s Box’, I created another called the ‘Bell Jar’ in 2016. For this performance I used the Bell Jar as the Dome’s sound source . The character of the Bell Jar’s signals is ‘busier’ and more flickering than the denser-sounding Pandora’s Box . Knowing that I would be working with dancers, I wanted to provide more rhythmic figures in the music.

The Dome’s infrared manual controllers were patched mostly to vary the overall tempos of the output signals, so I used a volume pedal to bring the Dome’s voice in and out of the final mix.

The Other manual controllers were more direct controls. The voices they controlled would only sound when I touched the controller.

I used the complex dual ribbon to affect signal chain of the Makenoise DPO & Erbeverb.

I used the long, zoned side for pitch control and the shorter single-zone side to modulate the DPO’s FM amount, and alternately,  the depth and decay time of the Erbeverb.

‘See What You Hear’ 2022

Jan 28th at the St. Louis Central Library Theater.

This performance was the largest array synthesizers that I’ve ever risked transporting. I over-hung 11-feet of table space on the right wing of Central Library’s stage. This massive rig was used to live-soundtrack a improvised analog video by Kevin Harris. (special thanks to Bret Schneider whose expert assistance made it possible for me , load, deploy, and test a rig this size in the 4 hours available for set-up)

There is a full-length video recording here.

National Electronics Museum Electronicafest 2023