Cerebri Machina

Boulder

Boulder is great! I never got to taste so many kinds of beer as in this town. I have the feeling that every person in this town owns a microbrewery. And each of these microbreweries produce at least 10 different varieties of beer: The Belgian style beer, the Kölsch, the ale, the IPA, which I have to recommend very strongly, the Weizen, the Stout, and so on…

I was told by the friendly barmaid at the Gravity Brewery in Louisville that there are even hopheads in this area - people that are so much into IPA with its ridiculous amount of hop, that they cannot drink any other beer because of the habituation for the hop. I know this only from chili.

By the way, the mexican food here is great! If you order spicy stuff, you’ll get spicy stuff. Unlike in Germany, where your food stands maybe half a meter from a pepper grinder and most people start to scream of its spiciness. One can get a decent chili-shock here. That’s what I like. I hope to get some American style barbecue one of the next days, since I’m curious. As a Thuringian, I have to be sceptical of other peoples ways to grill but nonetheless I’m convincible. When Tim Walters was talking about the ways of preparing the bbq and fancied the sauce, he got my mouth watering. Maybe I’ll check it out today with Bernardo Barros.

Two days ago we were hiking in the Chautauqua Park and it was really awesome. The Countryside around Boulder is so astonishing that it’s even ok to speed up a hill of a height of maybe 400m for enjoying the view. The geological form in this area is really strange: There is this huge plain to the east (the Great Plains) and at the west starts a ridge with phenomenal rocks, indicating the ultimate beginning of the Rocky Mountains. The next days I’ll be exploring more on the countryside, as I heard of beautiful national parks and german restaurants in this area.

http://thegravitybrewing.com/
http://bernardobarros.com/
http://www.doubtfulpalace.com/artists/TimWalters/

Borders

After 28 hours of travelling by trains, busses and planes, I finally arrived in Boulder, CO. The first insight is, that americans are extreme when it comes to controlling who or what enters their country. In China, for example, were a lot of military officers with machine guns controlling the immigration, but in the end they were quite uninterested and not overly eager to scare anyone off. In the EU the guards were more serious about what might happen to you if you don’t follow the rules but in the end they were pretty calm. Even in Iceland, when I became suspect of smuggling drugs or whatever into the country (at the end the problem was some dried fish I accidentally brought from Farøya), the lady in the office was very cool and we had a little chat on travelling Iceland by bike or motorbike. But the US were scary: I have never seen so many people in uniforms creating an apparatus or machinery dedicated to control the border of a country. It seemed very efficient and everyone had her job and exactly the right set of sentences to control the massive flow of peolpe hoping to enter the country. There was even one who smalltalked to the people in the queue waiting for their body-scan. A real Kafka-esque situation - One wouldn’t dare to make jokes about carrying anything not allowed. I was really frightened, when the customs duty officer inquired on me, after several scans of my fingerprints and a face scan, why I didn’t declare my Granulator (what I accidentally forgot). Somehow her face made me think about all the negative things that coud happen to me if I were to try to mess with her. And they destroyed my carefully prepared sandwiches and the two red apples I brought to soothe my hunger on the second flight. Bummer… But, so i had the chance to try out some fast food at the Denver International Airport.

The whole process set me back to the time when I was a child travelling from the GDR to Chechoslovakia and Hungary with my parents or grandparents. On the border, we were always frightened not to fall under suspicion of the officers, because nasty things could happen to you, and maybe the complete check of your car for smugglers ware, which means disassembling everything would not be the worst to happen.

After the whole process, on the inland flight to Boulder, there was heavy weather and stratocumuli all around. A great view from my window seat.

Nonetheless the people here are very friendly and caring when it comes to everyday situations. Where we germans react quite grumpy at times Americans tend to be very positive and open minded, nice and welcoming.

Granulator

Tonight at 2 o’clock I’m starting off the SuperCollider Symposium 2013. There I’ll give a talk on the Granulator. I hope to meet a lot of interesting people and to have a good time in Boulder, Colorado. I heard a lot about the country side and its beauty Robin Minard told me to also check out Arizona and Utah, so I’ll see how my precious time can be spent most useful…

http://supercollider2013.com/

Kokoro 心

After the “zeit - ende” film from last years KinoDynamique Jena, I had a lot of time to think about the aesthetics I used in this composition. Then, a few days ago inspiration hit me and I am now planning the concept of the next piece in this line. 心 - mind. When I was playing around with some old recordings today I got an inspiration which will lead the way to the mind. The experiment can be heared here:

 

Hoerfenster

A project I am planning to do for a while is “Hörfenster”. A LoFi wave field synthesis project. I’m thinking about building an eight channel box with small loudspeakers that will be driven by WFSCollider. Today, I built the loudspeaker array and tested it with a small amp based upon the LM386 IC. A single speaker works quite well with this setup. Loads of amplification and I was really surprised by the quality of the sound.

The next step is to build an eight-channel amplifier and hook all the loudspeakers to it. We will see how the speakers react when they are mounted into one single board. I hope it won’t be too bad. Since WFS is critical when frequencies and phases get messy, I’m really curious what comes out at the end. But in my phantasy it is going to be really great :-)

Check out WFSCollider: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wfscollider/

The LM386: http://www.ti.com/product/lm386

Dandy Mix

Tristan Héau has put together a track he performed with the portable dandy and put it on his souncloud page. Good work! I hope it will inspire a lot of people to do the same. Don’t forget: you may use iTunes to change the samples on the portable dandy if the original sample set “kraut” is not weired enough for you. The barefoot coders hope for a lot of experiments done with this piece of software!

Portable Dandy

News from the Dandy Desmond Doping Tour: Our iPhone app “Portable Dandy” is now available for free. It is a sample based sound generation tool with some sound forming capabilities. You may even put your own samples on it.

The iOS programming stuff was done by Stephan Hepper with artwork by Steven Hopp and audio coding by me.

We would appreciate any comments and/or feature requests on the program. Check it out at:

https://itunes.apple.com/app/portable-dandy/id615416196?ls=1&mt=8

Also have a look at www.barefoot-coders.com

http://www.stephanhepper.com

http://ravenfrag.wordpress.com

Barefoot Coders

Today it’s all about coding. Some friends of mine and me have this loose cooperation to build software that has that certain dandy-ness to it. There are iPhone apps, a website that lets you put words into the mouth of the Bundeskanzlerin and other freaky stuff that is not ready yet. Be sure to check out the site. and come back often to see what goes on.

http://barefoot-coders.com/

http://wir-sind-merkel.de/

www.dandydesmond.com

Ernst/Groeschl

Yesterday evening, Sebastian Ernst and Patrick Gröschl had a screening at the Schillerhof in Jena, showing their two new films “Der Brunch” and “Der Widerling”.

It was very interesting, because both films were finally completed after 2 years during which both of the authors graduated, did other projects and built the foundations of their start-up “ernst/gröschl”. Both authors started the films independant of each other but the long time and work have finally paid off. Each of the filmes had a black/white appearance and studies psychological parts of human interaction. But both films also differ in the speed of narration and humor/sensual intensity.

“Der Widerling” shows the situation of a young pair living together and being visitet by her brother. This guy is not the kind of person you would generally welcome in your own domicile and thus, the conflict is bound to occur. At one moment the sister/girlfriend leaves the flat and, of course, the conflict escalates.

“Der Brunch” takes us into the psyche of a emotionally disturbed woman in a desolate relationship. Most of the film shows the acting of her personal aspects incorporated in three different persons that dwell in a small dark room. Eventually she gets visited by her lover with whom she has an orgiastic feast on a Black Forrest cake. But his inability to love, his sole focus on the “feast” and his violence leaves her alone again, hurt and in despair.

http://ernstgroeschl.de/