A virtual jam with drummer Anthony Taddeo
Early in the COVID lockdown, drummer Anthony Taddeo was asked to put together a solo show for Art is Live. He invited me to play Imager on a couple of pieces. Each piece was recorded in a single take (though sequentially with the music recorded first). The was shared as an episode of Art is Live on May 27, 2020. I played on the pieces JawHarp (4:30), which starts at 12:00, and Bowls (9:45), which begins around 27:30. Here’s JawHarp.
Unauthorized Duets
Between 1997 and 1999 Fred used a version of Imager built in Max/MSP and running on a Macintosh to produce a series of pieces that he called Unauthorized Duets. Each was an interpretation of recorded music. These interpretations, in the form of computer code along with a player, could be downloaded from the Internet.
Viewers placed their own copy of the artist’s CD in their computer’s CD drive to experience the sonic and visual “duet”. Because the musical portion was not included in the downloaded files and the experience was a personal one, performance releases were not required (hence the title). In 2000, he and his son Peter produced a CD-ROM of some of the pieces that was produced with (licensed) music by contemporary recording artists Brian Eno, David Bowie and Eileen Ivers.
Blue Glass (5:25)
This wonderful studio jam, Blue Groove, is from Eileen Ivers’ 1996 album, Wild Blue. Lisa Lehman designed the interpretation that we produced together.
Music by Eileen Ivers (Green Linnet Records)
Films for Music (3:09)
I had long wanted to do abstract visual interpretations of some of the pieces on Brian Eno’s 1978 album Music for Films. This is one of several that I did while at IBM’s Watson Research Lab in 1998-99. This piece started as a study of color values and clipping rectangles. Only when I was preparing notes for the finished piece did I notice the cut’s title—Slow Water.
Music by Brian Eno (EGMusic, Inc.)
weDDDing (5:04)
weDDDing is an interpretation of the David Bowie instrumental The Wedding from his 1993 Black Tie White Noise album. While I was working on this piece, Cliff Pickover of IBM Research dropped a pair of Chromatek 3D glasses on my desk and wondered out loud what I might do with them. The glasses work by shifting warm colors forward and cool colors back and moving less saturated colors toward the center plane. Both of these effects are used, particularly in the latter half of the piece.
Music by David Bowie (Savage Records)