Opnemer.org

Opnemer.org

more hydra still

More Hydra experiments. I'm particularly fond of the "notomata" one.

more hydra

So, as a stop gap measure, I'll include a couple of videos of the Hydra experiments.

hydra

I've been playing around with Hydra . Hydra is a great livecoding environment for generative graphics.

It's entirely web based and has a low(ish) learning curve. I'm trying to embed it in my postings but with no success. Watch this space! (If all else fails I'll post screen shots.)

things I've been doing part 1

Some of the things I've been doing in the mean time.

There's a couple of shorts, too, on my youtube channel but I don't know how to embed them.

static

You may have noticed, the site looks slightly different. The server Opnemer.org is running on is ancient, and there was no way to keep the Wordpress installation up to date.

The solution wat to revert to a static site. No more PHP or MySQL dependencies, no more unpatched vulnerabilities, and --hopefully-- a much faster site.

A blog like structure is impossible to maintain in pure html. Fortunately, there's something called a Static Site Generator: the general structure of the site still resembles something you'd see on a typical Wordpress installation but the entire thing is generated locally, using Markdown or RestructuredText files as source code.

There's a bunch of them, and I suppose the most popular ones are

I picked Pelican. There's still much to learn but I'm getting there.

Next on the TODO-list: Make this prehistoric layout responsive to smaller screens. Guess I'll be learning about CSS Grid now, too.

things I've been doing part 2

I've been learning Hydra.

it's been a while

It's been nearly ten years since I last posted something. Lots of things happened since then.

I've done lots of things, too. I'll post about all of this in due time.

Love, Erik

rast rack

For years now, there's been a couple of 19" modules drifting through my house. For the greater part of that time I've been thinking about building my own rack. Printed scematics, trolling the interwebs for instructions, and so on.

About four years ago I ran into an article about the Lack Rack, a DIY solution where a low cost Ikea coffee table is transformed into a 19" rack using no more than a drill. I picked up a discarded Lack from the street, hoping to have a no cost 19" rack. This is when I found out that the Lack has gone through several iterations, and recent ones are pretty useless. I picked up a recent one.

I then found out about a slightly costlier —but still no-budget— solution: The same company has a nightstand called the Rast, which has exactly the right size, is made of actual wood, about the cost of a Lack and is only missing a mounting option. I picked one up —from the store, not the street— ordered some 6U rails, nuts and bolts, and got to work. In half an hour I got me a functional rack. Wooo!

Rast Rack

From top to bottom:

On top of the whole affair sits a Boss spring reverb.

mixing with ardour

The past weeks I've been mixing a friends' tracks. Two drone/sludge/doom metal inspired tracks, nice and heavy. He asked me if I knew anyone who could do this, and I said yes. Great fun!

I used Ardour to mix the stems. He recorded in Protools and exported stems with some effects and panning, and importing went without a hitch. Some downsampling happened ---there was no need to run at 96kHz--- but conversion was completely inaudible. In the end, I was running 28 stereo tracks. I had to adjust latency in Jack to get rid of dropouts, but I was using an old and beat up laptop so this was to be expected.

Reopening the projects was another story. There's a bug in Ardour2 in combination with Jack2 which prevents saved projects from being opened. That's a big bug if you ask me. The solution was to replace Jack2 with Jack1, which unfortunately caused problems for Mplayer, Avidemux and Qtracktor, all of which expect Jack2. The project was too important, though, and other programs I use (Pure Data, Moc) still worked, so I went ahead. And Hey Presto, I could reopen the projects again.

I searched around for a way to use some of my old VSTs, but I settled for the CALF LV2 plugins. I didn't have to use them in any radical ways, and the parametric EQ and compressor plugind worked fine. I noticed the compressor starts to distort horribly when pushed, so I was glad only medium compression was all I needed. Next time, I'll see if I can use my beloved Blockfish, old school but excellent. Non-free, which is a pity, but right now I don't know any good compressor LV2 or DSSI plugins.

Mixdown was easy: put all layers in busses, put compression and/or equalisation (if any) on the bus, adjust volume and render. After 3 versions, my friend was happy and so was I.

Conclusion:

Vatican Analog Optimus Prime sampler

The fine folks of Vatican Analog have compiled most of the sessions of the Optimus Prime Noisefest and put the result up on Bandcamp. Check it out, stream it or purchase it for a mere €4,-. Or all of the above, of course.

Optimus Prime live set

On sunday, january 13th I attended the Optimus Prime Noisefest. It was awesome.

I did a short set, just over ten minutes, which was very... crunchy. It's as close to a noise set as I've ever come. Hardware only, too: The Vatican Analog crew stated that it was okay to bring a laptop but only if it was sawed in half at the end of the show.

So, only hardware it was: an MD-player, an old walkman, my Electribe EA1, a delay pedal and a mixer. The MD-player and walkman provided a drone and a field recording respectively, which got processed with the Electribe and stomp box. The mixer has no headroom to speak of so things started to get distorted pretty quickly.

I enjoyed the other performances immensely. Looking forward to the next edition!

link

Optimus Prime

Januari 12th, MedMud will be performing a 12 minute set at the Optimus Prime Noise Fest in Tilburg.

Optimus Prime Noise Fest

This promises to be an awesome event, with a huge line up:

14:45 DOORS OPEN

22:00 - Curfew

Admission is €5,- which is very little for lots of noise.

Broken Video

I like broken videos. This one was broken by me and was eventually used during the Salon Brut event at Willemeen

10 iteraties

Last december, just before holiday madness, Epix opened again. The exhibition, themed "The End", opened on december 21 and dealt with the apocalypse.

My work, called 10 Iteraties (10 Iterations), shows 10 iterations of a short clip of Robert Oppenheimer saying "I am now become Death, the destroyer of Worlds", more severely distorted with every iteration. I used several databending techniques to generate the video.

The full title, kālo'smi lokakṣayakṛtpravṛddho lokānsamāhartumiha pravṛttaḥ, is the phrase from the Bhagavat Gita in original Sanskrit.

more EPIX

During a dreary weekend in the summer, there was another Epix exhibition, this time on another location. The theme was Transitional Invasion.

Unfortunately, the work I had planned, an interactive surround sound installation, was DOA. As a stop gap work, I presented a computer/video work instead, the one I had already shown during Nachtkerk #8 (see some posts below).

EPIX: Anything With Paint

[gallery ids="152,151"]

Anything But Paint was immediately followed by another exhibition called Anything With Paint. The idea was to present paintings with unusual media and unusual surfaces.

My work, Procedural 1, was again a procedural work:
I made a sound recording in the gallery;
I opened the sound file in a graphics editor;< br />
Reduced the resulting image to its graphical essence;
I used the image as the basis for a painting. The medium I chose was mud.

I used mud because it's the most base medium for a painting. The mud I used came from the banks of the Rhine, because at this point (Arnhem) it's matter collected from all countries along its course.

The work progressed during the week of the exhibition. Afterwards, I wiped the wall clean and returned the mud, now mostly dry, to the river.

[gallery ids="154,155,157,153"]

EPIX: Anything But Paint

[gallery]

As promised (in april) some footage from the Anything But Paint exhibition. My installation, called Sigil 1.0, was an interactive computer piece.

Sigil is a procedural piece: For every word in a sentence, which will remain secret, an image was found on Google; Every image was then treated to reduce it to its graphical essence; These images were then placed in a 3D space which responded to the viewer's presence and activity.

Here's what the screen looked like:

art, exhibitions and stuff

Last month I participated in two exhibitions curated by Gallery Epix.

The first was titled Anything But Paint. My contribution was a computer installation made with Pd, databended images, a webcam and aging hardware. Images to follow.

My contribution to the second expo, called Anything With Paint, was a painting made with mud. Long story, and details-with images- will follow soon.

It was great fun exhibiting these works. Epix is a cool spot. More about them, later, too. I'm gathering all images and videos and will post them as soon as I got them.

live(ish) video

I set up a video installation for the last proper Nachtkerk event, april 4th 2011. Never got around to post the video until now.

The installation is based on some of the videos I made for crib.sheet except they respond to the music the DJs played. It ran for 6 hours straight in a noisy and damp environment and was stable as a rock.

more mixes: Knorrr

Recorded for the Knorr preview at the Dagschotel party, feb 11 2012. Very rough mix because of a beat up soundsystem and no monitors. The crowd certainly didn't mind.

Recorded with my Zoom H2, gear was a pair of Pioneer CDJ-1000 mk3s and a Pioneer Mixer.

This mix represents the other side of what I tend to spin.

Maw Maw Mixes

Finally recorded some mixes. These were recorded at Extrapool during Maw Maw. Maw Maw is a fun monthly event with coctail specials, budget bagels, cool workshops and nice music.

These mixes represent one end of the music I play when DJing.

Part one:

Part two:

back (again)

Hi there.

It's been nearly a year since my last message. Stuff got in the way and I kind of got fed up with the site as it was.

So, I decided to write a theme from scratch. It's mostly the first version of my site with bits updated. It's HTML5 now, too. There are some bugs to be fixed (probably in the hackiest of ways) but I'm mostly happy.

I've been busy, too. Booked some great acts in the first half of 2011, did some video art (clip TBA) and I've mostly been DJing (mixes TBA). And I'm learning how to write wordpress themes from scratch. Great fun.

live with pure data

On friday 11 february I played a set at Bosch Acousmatic. Apart from the usual tape stuff, I ran my set through a pd patch on my netbook. This went very well.

live patch

The evening was opened by The Acoustic Electric Chamber Orchestra. TAECO are Steven Vinkenoog and Frank Baijer who play guitars, balalaikas and toy microphones. The room and silence play a large part in their music. The set they played last friday was truly mesmerizing.

My set included more synthetic tones. I started with a drone which returned later in my set. I also used unprocessed field recordings to contrast the processed noisiness.

My usual rollercoaster of feedback loops was completed with a Pure Data patch. Pure Data, Pd for short, is Max/MSP's half sibling and is an impressive piece of Free software. My patch isn't very impressive but worked very well and the bits and pieces it was built from are available for download here.

Unfortunately, I forgot to switch on my Zoom H2, so no recordings. NOOOOOOO

live MedMudisms added

On december 2nd I played live in Etalage De Derde Wal in Nijmegen during the Radiophonic Workshop evening. Bertin's Korg MS20 spiced things up a bit.

Other attendees were Frans de Waard (Beequeen, Kapotte Muziek, Zebra, Ezdanitoff, among many, many others) and Cotopaxi (Fyoelk, Moemlien).

Radiophonic Workshop flyer

USB soundcards on Debian and Ubuntu

To my frustration, I noticed that my trusty Edirol UA-25 refused to work properly on Ubuntu 10.04. I spend quite some time tracking this problem down; eventually I found out that USB soundcards are moved down in priority.

The result of this are, among other things:

In other words, no end of grief.

On Ubuntu, this started from 9.10 on (and because of this, also affects Pure:Dyne), on Debian this affects Squeeze.

Fortunately, there's a simple solution!

On Debian's bug-tracker, I found the following simple fix:

In /etc/modprobe.d/ create a file called local.conf. In this file, add the lines

alias snd-card-0 snd-usb-audio options snd-usb-audio index=0

Reboot, or do sudo alsa reload and you're done.

new videos; now with added youtubes

I decided to temporarily use youtube as a host for my videos. Saves server space and is easier to link and embed. Also, the HTML5-style links don't seem to work too well from a remote server.

Oh well. I don't really like it but it works.

Videos here. <> (link is currently broken. See the Video page. ) The direct download links to the .ogvs are still there for the flash impaired.

MedMud live @ Tape

I did a short gig at Tape, in Arnhem, sept 24 2010. Tapes, 2 delays, short wave radios.

(camera: Mark Kuijpers)

i edit video, too

Short impression of the Zirkus 8Bahn dance-festival, sept 4, 2010, Arnhem

Music by:

Camera: Pako Tan

videoglitch

MedMud - Cartilage

MedMud - Cartilage (direct download)

microaccoustic

bal-impuls

sounds from space, visualized

Started as a project for the .microsound mailing list.

akrstereo34 earchor jovbow ewhist

back, and stuff

Looks like opnemer.org is back up. Hopefully, it's back to stay.