000000swan's Blog

HEXCODE is an experimentation in process and interaction, as well as our new record. I’m going to be working with Margaret Schedel (Stonybrook Professor of Music and cellist in 000000Swan) and Rebecca Fiebrink (machine learning expert, Princeton). Together we form a team of programer, artist, and musician to create a new form of musical interaction involving gesture, visual design and machine learning. Rebecca built the Wekinator and we are hooking it up to this little device called a Kbow Meg’s been beta testing for a bit now. It’s now available publicly, which is great. We are then taking a whole group of sample of different gestures, letting Wekinator learn them and then we are interpolating number sets between different groups of gestures. We then map those gestures to processing and values such as object size, scale and opacity.

So – here it is – some info on what is the project I’ve worked on for the last 4 years called 000000swan in near secrecy. Our record, Hexcode, comes out on Halloween. We’ve been playing in NYC for 2 years now, mostly unannounced or unpromoted to rooms where people stare enchanted or clear the room or both. There’s nothing like having dancers in swan costumes while you sing songs about death and transcendence surrounded by candles to make people think you’ve gone completely off your rocker. Well, it’s either that or covering my bandmate in blood…

We are threading a profound awareness. HEXCODE is a journey mutating through love to rage transmuted with fire into compassion ending broken in submission and release. It’s the story of Wands. It’s a record of love songs. It’s a record of love lost songs. It’s a record of liberation. It’s a record reaching through a void into stillness.
The optic experience evokes mystic awareness and entrains the viewer into an altered consciousness. We create and then destroy a palatable place within the music 000000Swan. It’s the architecture of the unbuilt…

http://player.vimeo.com/video/15517893