The last Overlap Salon, hosted by the Berkeley Center for New Media, was a resounding success. We had a fantastic turnout during this East Bay edition of the Overlap Salon, and plan to hold more bold, cutting-edge, innovative synergies of new media social networking 3.0 there in the future.

Both beginning and experienced Max users attended (actually the largest concentration of experienced Maxers I’ve seen in the Bay since Expo ‘74), and our presentations did a good job of catering to all experience levels. Salon co-organizer Vlad Spears presented his new patch Wyvern, which uses the Monome and number patterns to sequence complex melodies. We discussed a lot of different data input and sequencing possibilities, including Numbers Stations.

Your humble author followed up with a run though of the poly~ object in Max. We started out with a very brief Max explanation for new users, which is the type of beginners educational content that we plan to be making a formal part of every Salon as we continue. After pulling everyone out of the wood of worldliness, I went through several patches showing both traditional uses of poly~ (to manage synthesizer polyphony) and less common ones such as filling arrays of audio and video buffers and changing out modular patches during runtime.

Poly~ Example Patches are the patches I showed at the event, consisting of some cleaned standard Max examples and a dynamic buffer patch.

After, we had an update on some new externals using Bonjour networking that are being developed by veteran Salon presenter Matt Ridenour. One of our ongoing projects at the Salon is to create a kind of performance framework where data and audio can easily be shared among several performers to create an ad-hoc Overlap Orchestra. In upcoming meetings we will be exploring this concept more, and encourage anyone interested to come share their ideas.

We look forward to our Salon next month, which we are planning to be an off the hook Max/Live explosion. Stay tuned to Overlap.org to get details on the event.

See more pictures from the last Salon on our Flickr page.

Image by Osterwalder with very little relation to this blog post

We had a meeting yesterday and decided that a few of us would each take a day to post content and generally look after the Overlap website. My day is Thursday! Today!

I wanted to quickly highlight a post I saw looking at the latest Overlap.org release on disquiet:

It’s always refreshing and rewarding to hear a musician forcefully push his or her limits, especially limits as to what listeners have come to expect. Flossin provides laptop-enabled guitarist Christopher Willits an opportunity to do just that. The duo features Willits and drummer Zach Hill doing up what they call “cosmic rock/noise/jazz/free improv,” which is a fitting description. A new EP, Serpents, has recently been released (more info at overlap.org). Also on the album are Matmos, Nate Boyce, and Carson McWhirterm, and remixes by Wobbly, Brad Laner (Willits’s partner in North Valley Subconscious Orchestra, and a former Savage Republic member), and Strategy.

The post continues onward and has a link to play the track with some more analysis.

If you have a post or review, please contact us, or post it directly to the site. We love reviews and we love sending other people traffic that send us traffic!

Wednesday night Feb 4th, 2009 from 7-9 pm @ Sound Arts Recording Studio 520 Hampshire street, suite #206 SF, CA 94110

We are revitalizing the Overlap Salon series with a new event on Feb 4. I’m taking over the reigns, and we are planning what promises to be a a very worthwhile series for users of Cycling 74’s powerful New Media creation software Max/MSP/Jitter to share their projects, help overcome problems, and learn new patching techniques. Everyone is welcome regardless of previous experience, and we will try to cater to all skill levels.

Our salons will be a mix of presentations and ad-hoc discussion, dependent upon what kinds of patches and issues are brought to the table. I will be discussing preset storage using the pattr system; one of the most powerful and perhaps least understood of Max’s object sets. We’ll cover some tips and tricks for integrating preset communication into your patches as unobtrusively as possible.

At this first event we will try to set some itinerary for what people are interested in discussing at future salons, so try to show up and lend your ideas.

Max/MSP/Jitter patches covered in the Salon will also be shared on Overlap.org following the event. All participants are encouraged to bring your their own laptop, and libations. WIFI provided in case I’m boring.

About Overlap.org:

Blending the lines between a record label, event production company and social network, Overlap.org brings together a diverse network of independent artists and media connoisseurs. Overlap promotes and distributes music, video and art via its website and live events. Monthly releases at Overlap.org feature brand new material and live event recordings which push the boundaries of genre classification. On the community front, anyone can sign up and join Overlap.org and share their work for free.

* Contact email: info@overlap.org

* Sponsoring Organizations: Overlap and Sound Arts

* Website: www.overlap.org

* Event post : More info: http://overlap.org or email info@overlap.org

OVERLAP LONDON
22 OCT 2008 @ 8 PM
18-22 Ashwin St | Dalston
London | E8 3DL | info@cafeoto.co.uk
£6/5

SEBASTIEN ROUX (room40 / optical sound / 12k)
DOUGLAS BENFORD (12×50 / Bip_hop / si-cut.db)
BEDDOES (overlap)

OVERLAP Presents

Guitars
WE ARE LIVING
@ Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk St
San Francisco, CA 94109
13 September 2008
w/ Lonely H & Dora Flood

Guitars is a two-person Brooklyn-based band.
We perform minimal psychedelic country, blues and soul.

Guitars FASTER EP

I have been thinking about doing this for a while, but finally spent the time to add it to Lester Chan’s wp-postrating wordpress plugin, and finally did it! So, if you post up something here, and it gets rated, then you will here about it (assuming your email address is valid!).

I will be adding some other features to this like the ability to turn off notifications if there is interest.

Here is the patch for now:


679a680,714
> add_action('ratings_post', 'ratings_notify_poster');
> function ratings_notify_poster($post) {
> global $user_login;
> // get_currentuserinfo();
> $tmp_login = $user_login;
> if ( empty($tmp_login) )
> $tmp_login = "Guest (anonymous user)";
>
> $poster = get_userdata($post->post_author);
> if ( empty($poster->user_email) )
> return;
> $post_message = "Your post got rated by $tmp_login! Help spread the " .
> "news of this post " .
> "to increase its rating! Follow the url to comment.\n\n" .
> get_permalink($post->ID) . "\n\n";
> if ( ! empty($user_login) )
> $post_message .=
> "View profile of the person whom rated your post:\n\n" .
> get_option('siteurl') . "/author/$tmp_login\n\n";
>
> $post_message .=
> "Sincerely,\n" .
> "Overlap.org Crew\n\n";
>
> $post_title = "Your post, " . $post->post_title .
> ", got rated.";
>
> $debug_msg = $post_message .
> "post\n\n" . print_r($post,true) .
> "\n\n\"poster\n\n" . print_r($poster,true) . "\n\n" .
> "currentuser\n\n" . print_r($tmp_login,true);
> wp_mail($poster->user_email, $post_title, $post_message);
> wp_mail('jon@rejon.org', $post_title, $debug_msg );
>
> }
726a762,763
> // fire action so that can do action around
> do_action('ratings_post', $post);
977c1014
< ?>
\ No newline at end of file
---
> ?>


Note to the cool is that Lester lives in Singapore where I will be traveling this Thursday from SFO -> Singapore on way to iSummit in Sapporo Japan, and then onward to China for all of August. Maybe we can meet up and talk shop

Heyla folks! Hope some of you can make it to this week’s LISTEN/VISION 01 event in San Francisco! Here’s our press release for the deets of the show:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

OVERLAP.ORG AND VOLUME PROJECTS ANNOUNCE LISTEN/VISION 01

San Francisco, CA, February 14, 2008 — Overlap.org and Volume Projects announce LISTEN/VISION 01, an evening of immersive sound and video art at SF Camerawork on Thursday, February 21, 2008. Featuring exclusive sound and visual recordings by Nate Boyce, Carl Stone, Frank Bretschneider, and Richard Chartier, LISTEN/VISION 01 is part of a unique series focused on unreleased audiovisual works specifically commissioned from an international pool of contemporary artists.

LISTEN/VISION 01 – Featured Artists

RICHARD CHARTIER Chartier_pre_1_01 (2005), 17:29 min.

Richard Chartier is a sound/installation artist and graphic designer who has created critically acclaimed recordings for labels such as 12k/LINE, Raster-Noton, Die Stadt, Spekk, NonVisualObjects, Mutek_rec, DSP, ERS, and Trente Oiseaux. His work explores the inter-relationships between the spatial nature of sound, silence, focus, and the act of listening.

Chartier_pre_1_01 was originally developed during the process of creating the work Incidence released on Raster-Noton in 2007. Beginning with a low volume sparkle of static, the piece gradually morphs into low frequency territory. The monolithic drone of Incidence ebbs and flows over a bed of gentle crackle and fizz, only to end much as it began, with a wafer-thin line of static and hiss.

FRANK BRETSCHNEIDER RHYTHM EXP (2007), 8:09 min.

Frank Bretschneider works as a musician, composer and video artist in Berlin. After the fall of the wall, he co-founded the record label Rastermusic which merged with Carsten Nicolai’s Noton to form Raster-Noton in 1999.

RHYTHM EXP is an attempt to assimilate the qualities found in music – including movement, rhythm, tempo, mood, intensity and compositional structure – within visual phenomena. The music for the project is composed of waveforms, feedback, impulses, clicks, the sound of mechanics, electricity, magnetism, light and radiation. As the animation is driven by sound frequency and intensity, the images attain an unexpected beauty, from simple geometrical patterns to extraordinarily complex forms.

CARL STONE Shin Chon (2006), 34:48 min.

Carl Stone is one of the pioneers of live computer music, and has been hailed by the Village Voice as “the king of sampling” and “one of the best composers living in (the USA) today.” He studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and has composed electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972; Stone has also used computers in live performance since 1986. In addition to his schedule of performance, composition and touring, he is on the

faculty of the Media Department at Chukyo University in Japan.

NATE BOYCE Plasma Wielder (2008), 10:00 min.

Nate Boyce is an artist and musician who creates perceptually disorienting and kinetically charged audiovisual works that take the shape of musical compositions. Influenced by the techniques early video art and the 1960’s structural film movement, Boyce employs a customized analog/digital hybrid processing and synthesis system based on modified consumer video gear.

Using control voltages from an analog synth to sequence analog video feedback, Plasma Wielder produces trance-inducing audiovisual polyrhythms which interpret the phenomenological reduction of the video signal as a temporally malleable material.

Previous events: http://overlap.org/tag/event

• Event Name: LISTEN/VISION 01
• Featured Artists: Nate Boyce, Carl Stone, Frank Bretschneider, and Richard Chartier
• Event Date: Thursday, February 21, 2008
• Event Time: 7 pm – 9 pm
• Location: Camerawork
• Address: 657 Mission Street, Second Floor San Francisco, CA 94105-4104
• Cover: $5 Public, $2 Students/Seniors, Free for Camerawork Members

More info: http://overlap.org or email press@overlap.org.

###