I had the good fortune of being invited to do a live remix at the Punkt festival. The live remix concerts have much in common with live processing, except the live remix is done immediately after the acoustic performance. It was a fun challenge to record and edit for immediate playback in this manner. In many ways it was harder than processsing live on the spot, since there is no musical dialogue with the acoustic performers. Rather, it is my dialogue with the recorded material from the acoustic performers.

The beautiful performances by Sophye Soliveau (harp, vocals), and the duo Cycles (Sol Léna-Schroll on sax and Clément Merienne on prepared piano) gave me a rich and varied material. I am very grateful to these performers for trusting me to restructure and process their performances, and for their kind permission to present the recording here.

The live remix at Punkt

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Brandtsegg in action at Punkt. Photo by Alf Solbakken

I used a setup consisting of Reaper with my own custom plugins written in Csound. This was combined with audio feedback using shotgun microphones to pick resonances available in the room. One of the effects applied to the live material would trace the strongest partials from the harp recording, and since this gives a very “sinusoidal” sound, it was possible to create a smooth transition between feedback microphones and harp partials. I also used the regular arsenal of live processing effects, some of them repurposed from the Organotopia project, and some recent developments.

Tags: music

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