This collaboration by Szymon Kaliski (electronics) and Stefan Wesolowski (violin) – released as a limited (50 only) edition on Few Quiet People – was commissioned especially to promote the new spatial audiovisual controller called the Dodecaudion.
A gesture-based controller which, by the looks of it, can best be described as some sort of nowadays Theremin.
A fascinating device, which was presented at the Culture 2.0 in Warsaw on October 28, 2011.
Introducing a new musical device may lead to a lot of theoretical background discussions about technical details. As Kaliski explains the setup for this event:
“For this project I ve created custom application in MAX/MSP, that used OSC messages sent from Dodecaudion to control volumes and panning of prerecorded samples (drones and field recordings), as well as different effects. Sound was fed into long looper that helped me easily create layered composition. Stefan was also using this application, as his violin was recording on second, shorter looper.”
This is very interesting, but the question is: does the music of this experimental setup also work when presented on a regular audio(-only) CD?
The answer is: Yes, it does. Quite good, in fact. It’s inspiring and innovative!
The beautiful sounds of Wesolowski’s violin work very well together with Kaliski’s electronic background, which is quite delicate on most tracks (the exception being 281011#3 which includes quite some feedback distortion).
Judging by the titles, these tracks were recorded in two sessions on october 27 and 28, 2011 (apart from 271011#2, which is a remix that Kaliski created afterwards).
It’s my guess that creating the Dodecaudion and the custom built MAX/MSP application used here probably took a lot more time!
Szymon Kaliski + Stefan Wesolowski – 271011#2