Fading Into Existence
As mentioned in Gypsy’s recent post, I performed at the Asheville Electro-Music Festival last month, and gave two pieces their live premiere: “Fade To Blue”, a live improvisation for solo iPhone, and “Fade To Red”, a live performance on solo iPad.
These two tracks join “Fade To White (Glimpse)”, which appears on the CD sampler for the 2015 festival (available for purchase at Greg Waltzer’s Kunaki store), “Fade To Green” (on the beautiful charity compilation This Music Plants Trees, downloadable at The Sound4Good Bandcamp site), and “Fade To Silver”, yet to be released. All of this music was performed on iOS devices, with different apps and controllers and workflow (except for “White” and “Red”, both in Gadget).
So what, you ask? Well, I have to be honest with you… this whole “creating music on an iOS device” thing was an early interest of mine, but it’s only been recently that the tools have gotten to where I am comfortable with them and the iOS devices themselves have gotten powerful enough so that I can use them the way I want to. I’ve been making music on iOS since the first iPad was released, but iOS music didn’t really start to take off until the A5 chip was released, and didn’t really get seamless until the A7… and the A8 and A8X in my current devices are amazing in that respect. Sure, iOS 9 will come out and screw everything up this fall, but until then, I’m making music at a pace unheard of in my recent history. (So much so that I haven’t had much time to blog, alas.)
The current plan goes something like this: “Fade To White” needs to be expanded to full length (there were time strictures on the sampler CD that limited its length); “Fade To Green” needs to be revisited and possibly polished and expanded; I need to capture a good rendition of “Fade To Blue” without clams — it’s done live and recorded in stereo, one mistake means I have to start over; “Fade To Red” is very rough and messy and needs a proper arrangement and mix; and “Fade To Silver” needs to be recorded (and possibly released elsewhere)… once that’s done, I have enough for an entirely unexpected and unforeseen metlay! album, which I will probably release on Bandcamp/Kunaki (in addition to reuploading CD versions of my free albums on the Earth Mantra netlabel). Between that and getting the second Labrathisattva album out the door, I’ll be plenty busy for a while…
…but not too busy for Internet Radio and Second Life. My show has moved to 8 PM EDT/7 PM Stillstream time/6 PM MDT/5 PM Second Life Time every Sunday evening, and I may have a big announcement about a Second Life performance coming soon. Thanks for sticking with me.
MrSpiral
