Gadzooks! This particular blog post has been nothing but a title, saved in “draft” mode for more than 7 months.
We (Anton, Pat, Dan and I) had a good time playing at the Chicago Bass Festival. Attendance was lighter than it had been at the inaugural festival two years age, and the audience for our performance was pretty spare. But–not to say having an audience isn’t important, but–we had other things on our mind:
The part of our contribution that I was most excited about was our performance of Mike Wittgraf’s Autogenous Mining, a piece composed for us. For double bass quartet and interactive electronics, each bass is mic’d and the sound from the basses triggers samples and effects on KYMA X software and a Pacarana sound synthesizer. The computer operator affects the sound and processing using a Wii remote and nunchuk. The title refers to the process of “self-mining” the strings of the bass for different sounds.
A recording of Autogenous Mining from the Bass Festival is now available on SoundCloud. I wrote about the piece in other blog posts as well.
Our program for the performance was as described in my post announcing it.