Here's a cool video art piece by Lucy Keany, with sound design by me:

"Is That a Cowboy Outfit" by Lucy Keany from The Amazing Rolo on Vimeo.

It was shown at the Edinburgh College of Art degree show 2008. Imagine it projected into a totally blackened room.

Doing the sound design was loads of fun - Lucy and I agreed very quickly on the sound aesthetic we were after, which makes everything easier! I found much of the source material on archive.org, which is a fantastic place to look for copyright-free sound and video.

This June, like last June and the June before that, my brother Cory and I met up in Paris to work on a play with our cousin Fabrice Macaux at the Abbaye de Maubuisson.

This year the play was called "Pour un monde meilleur", and it featured a 12 person choir! Cory and I composed all sorts of music and sound design that used the choir together with our trademark electro-acoustic hybrid style.

Cory was a character in the play, whilst I was a shadowy background character, controlling all of the sound from behind a fence behind the stage area. I think the crowd could just see my head. I was doing lots of live sound design, manipulating recordings and live sound in real time to go with the dream-like atmosphere of the play. During one day of rehearsals and performance I took a photo every 10 seconds with the built in camera of my laptop. I've made a medley of the sound design and music from the production to go with it, to give a vague idea of how it sounded:



If you would like to hear what the choir sounded like without my computer trickery, here are two rough recordings we made in the Abbey:
Artemisia
Le capital toujours fondamental

I'm now back in Edinburgh, working hard on the Loop Machine, and enjoying the long summer days!

It's been a long time since my last post, because I've been working on several projects at once. One of these has finished up, for the moment, and I'm now back in Edinburgh. I spent most of March in Paris working on a play called "Ces murs qui nous écoutent" ("The Walls Have Ears"), which was written and directed by Fabrice Macaux (loosely based on the novel by Spôjmaï Zariâb) and featured Delphine Zucker in the lead role.

I did a little bit of acting, wrote and recorded original music and performed the sound design live onstage. I also wrote some Wii software for some wireless motion-based sound control, which I will post soon on the Loop Machine site. We performed at the Lavoir Moderne Parisien and the Theatre Sylvie Monfort in Saint Brice.

The story revolves around a woman living and working in a totalitarian country, where books and culture are disallowed. I played the part of her colleague, who disappears after warning her to stop reading books. If you speak French you can read this rather positive review!

Here is one of the songs I wrote for the play...the set was a giant rotating steel cube with colored movable panels. At several key points I would turn the cube while this music played, symbolizing the passage of time. This song is built from many of the sound elements that were used in the rest of the play, such as flipping through pages in a book, the sound of the work bell, and her heartbeat.

The Amazing Rolo - Les jours passent avec lenteur

We did a lot of filming, as well, so I hope to post some video here in the near future.

Today I am happy to announce the release of my Loop Machine 2.0 software! As regular readers of this blog will know, this is the result of five months of very hard work, so this is very exciting for me. Go to the Loop Machine Website at theamazingrolo.net/wii/ to check it out. You can also see the press release here. Thanks to everyone for your continued support!

As I've mentioned many times on this blog before, I am currently working on version 2.0 of my Wii Loop Machine. I'm happy to announce that I've just launched a brand new website dedicated entirely to my Wii music software. It has all of my previous Wii blog entries, videos, and information, as well as a brand-new forum for questions, comments, and WLM discussion. I will be posted all of my Wii news on there for the most part from now on.

The software is nearly finished, I've started Beta testing and I hope to release it in a few weeks! In the mean time I will be making weekly videos showing off the new and exciting features available in version 2.0. Here is the first video, enjoy!






Wii Loop Machine 2.0 :: an intro on Vimeo or YouTube. Here is a direct link to the video.

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