2012 Kansas City Regional Electro-music festival

TapedRugsProductions · Posted: Sun Jul 22, 2012 10:20 am Post subject:

This year's KCEM has showcased some excellent talent and pleasantly reinforced some bonds of camaraderie, much thanks to Kevin K and Mike M for their hard work to make it all happen.

My own presentation about 1980's/1990's experimental cassette culture was not really "stream-friendly," so I'd like to offer to anyone who was not in attendance some online resources to get a similar experience. The entire GRINDSTONE REDUX documentary on 1980's avant cassette culture (which I showed half of) can be viewed free online here:

Grindstone Redux

I also handed out a resource sheet to audience members last night. I've converted this into a PDF (includes several links to historic cassette culture) and posted it online here:

Historic Cassette Culture Resources

I also shot a lot of video Friday and Saturday. I will prepare some documentation of the event and make it available online in the coming month.

Hope you dig, thanks, CIII

mrspiral

Hi, everyone! We are back online with the final day of KCEM 2012 music.

Tune in here to hear the stream:

http://dj.sparrowindustries.net:15988

From 1230 to 130 PM Central Time will be Tensor Sessellation (Damon Mar and David Herpich, aka adamon and dk_adrift), followed by three hours of open collaborative jamming between Damon, David, Kevin Kissinger, Barbara Vesey Johnson, Kevin Haller, and Mike Metlay. The current plan is to wrap at about 430 PM. We have some nice stuff planned and we hope you'll stay with us.

Note: the plan is to leave the stream up continuously without cutting back to music unless there is an emergency. That may mean we will have short sections of dead air, while people are getting set up to play or whatever. If this happens, don't panic, we'll be right back. Smile

mike

State Machine · Posted: Sun Jul 22, 2012 10:58 am Post subject:

Really been enjoying the stream of fine electronic music ! Hi to all at the KCEM and thanks for sharing your talents with all of us here in Cyberspace !!!

The stream has been high quality and continuous. Great job !

Bill "State Machine" Manganaro

remst8 · Posted: Sun Jul 22, 2012 2:33 pm Post subject:

Great job, everyone! Another fantastic event!

Already looking forward to next year. Wink

MusicMan11712 · Posted: Mon Jul 23, 2012 7:11 am Post subject:

Excellent music!!!! Thanks to the organizers, the performers, and to Mike for streaming it. If any of the performances are made available, please post a message to that effect.
Steve

adamon · Posted: Mon Jul 23, 2012 12:39 pm Post subject:

A big thanks to Kevin K for holding another successful event! I had a great time and enjoyed everyone's company and music. Can't wait for next year!

kkissinger · Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2012 10:50 am Post subject:

A big thank you to everyone who participated in the 2012 Kansas City Regional electro-music festival.

Also, thanks to the efforts of Mike Metlay, we were able to stream the event.

One of the factors that enabled a better streaming experience is that we were able to connect to the clubhouse's router via a cable (rather than wireless). Also, the clubhouse switched to another ISP that gives us better bandwidth than in previous years.

Half of the North section of the clubhouse (in the past, the "stage area") is a wooden dance floor. In the past, we have been able to use that space however the dance floor was sanded and refinished recently and they didn't allow any furniture or equipment on the floor. We ended up re-arranging the furniture and using the center of the clubhouse as the "stage" area. I hope that next year we will be able to work out a way to utilize the dance floor space -- most likely with a heavy-duty protective cover for the dance floor. I will keep you posted on the developments.

I personally had a lot of fun. This is the first electro-music festival where I did not utilize the theremin and, instead, joined on many of the collaboration/jam sessions on my DIY modular synthesizer. As a result, I now have plans to reorganize the instrument so that a single cabinet can function as a free-standing instrument such that I can take a single cabinet and keyboard with me to out-of-town events. Additionally, I plan to control the synthesizer from a theremin, too.

As a group, we played together a lot and many of the sessions produced remarkable and musically-pleasing results.

I continually appreciate the dedication of the core of local electro-musicians and the effort of out-of-town participants who make arduous cross-country journeys to participate.

Thanks to everyone for a fun and rewarding festival. Look forward to next year!

kkissinger · Last edited by kkissinger on Mon Aug 06, 2012 7:15 am; edited 3 times in total

Here are some of the jam sessions from the Kansas City electro-music festival.

We chose different "themes" for these collaborations to guide us as a group.

The Marsynth jam starts out with no effects and then after about 10 minutes effects such as reverb and delays are introduced. We did it this way in order to appreciate the sound of the Marsynths and as a "nod" to Howard who once mentioned that he is partial to Lunetta sounds without effects. Since the Marsynths are lunetta-based, this seemed like an appropriate idea.

I will update this post with the names of the participants as soon as I can -- I can't remember who participated in which jam although I think that just about everyone participated in many of the jams.

Enjoy!

edit 1:

Added Clock Sync Jam track.

Drone Jam.mp3

Description:

Performed at the Kansas City Regional Electro-Music festival

Filesize:

51.15 MB

Duration:

44:42

Viewed:

2055 Time(s)

Marsynth Jam.mp3

Description:

Performed at the Kansas City Regional Electro-Music festival with Damon Mar, David Herpich, Mike Metlay and Kevin Haller.

Filesize:

36.21 MB

Duration:

31:38

Viewed:

2134 Time(s)

Darkness Jam.mp3

Description:

Performed at the Kansas City Regional Electro-Music festival

Filesize:

35.56 MB

Duration:

31:04

Viewed:

1977 Time(s)

Floating In Space Jam.mp3

Description:

Performed at the Kansas City Regional Electro-Music festival with Mike Metlay, Damon Mar, DK Herpich, Kevin Kissinger, Barbara Vessey, and Kevin Haller.

Filesize:

62.16 MB

Duration:

33:23

Viewed:

2166 Time(s)

Clock Sync Jam.mp3

Description:

Performed at the Kansas City Regional Electro-Music festival

Filesize:

17.33 MB

Duration:

15:09

Viewed:

1996 Time(s)

remst8 · Posted: Fri Aug 03, 2012 4:57 pm Post subject:

Thank you for posting these, Kevin! Now I can re-live the fantastic jam sessions over and over again. Smile

kkissinger

To the group of tracks in the post above I just added our Clock Sync Jam.

For many years at the KCEM we've wanted to attempt a clock sync jam however we've either ran short of time, energy, or patch cords. This year, we were successful -- I'm not sure how many people were actually sync'd up.

Mike Metlay had a drum machine that output MIDI Clock and a concurrent click on a separate channel. This audio channel enabled me to sync my analog synth to his 16th note click (The Aries pitch-to-voltage converter includes an envelope follower with a trigger output).