SynthLab at soundpedro 2024: charivari—media dump by univac
soundpedro, the yearly experimental music festival in San Pedro, CA, was an amazing evening.
There were many audiovisual Installations and performances throughout the old military base, now art collective called Angel’s Gate, and SynthLab filled their usual location in one of the 2 large former gun-emplacements with audiovisual delights.
SynthLab Collective, a collective of solo artists, had an amazing lineup this year including a new member joining us, Álvaro Cáceres Muñoz live-coding his music.
7:10 Álvaro Cáceres Muñoz
7:30 univac
7:50 Putney Swope
8:10 Qrux
8:30 Dub Station Zero
8:50 Faraday Cage
9:10 OSC1Nation
9:30 Cannibalistic Caterpillar
Enjoy this media dump, videos handheld, raw and unedited for the most part, in chronological order.
For visuals I used seven 2012-2017 iMacs scattered throughout the space, each running custom Quartz Composer audiovisual-reactive patches.
They looked great along with 3 color-changing LED floodlights painting the space in a constantly changing slowly evolving colorscape.
Four of the 21.5” iMacsI were cleverly mounted into small alcoves in the wall, each using a bamboo stick, friction and physics.
However, as a result of a shortage of bamboo due to premature breakages and mis-cuttings, the kluged bamboo wedge of one of the 21.5” suffered catastrophic failure, shattering the iMac on the concrete below.
And, one of the two 27” iMacs just decided, after running for hours without a hitch, to just shut down every 5 minutes or so.
Fortunately, if anything, I suffer from redundancy and had 5 more still running great and securely mounted.
Audio-wise I played a broken 2015 15” MacBook Pro—when turned on the screen doesn’t light up, it doesn’t boot, the fans run continuously and there is logic board activity.
I extracted audio from the two fans and different areas of the logic board with RF coils I made into EMF pickups; the rotating fans, being electromagnets, caused the pickup coils to continuously repel and attract, creating repeating sequences. Somewhat difficult to get autonomous at times, but very satisfying when successful.
I mixed my set with a Behringer Xenix 16 mixer, using the onboard reverb, and played the EQ as a live filter, riding and guiding the harmonics of the beautiful droney waves created by the cooling fans, and staticky boops from the logic board.
You can find the playlist of all the SynthLab performers here shot and edited by Rychard Cooper, along with my broken laptop performance:
• Soundpedro 2024
And, below is my edit of my set, shot on a single iPhone 11 in 4K/30:
• univac — EMFbookPro15, SynthLab, soundpedr...