2018 in a Nutshell

I know that the year 2018 has already gone long ago… Still, better writing about some memorable musical activities from the year rather than not! And eventually it will make me to go further. It has been indeed quite a busy and productive year. I worked hard, and made lots of new music and performances, so here I’d like to share some of them.

1. ‘Identifying’ in sonADA, Aberdeen/UK //Feb

It’s not the first time to visit in Aberdeen. 4 years ago, Mei Yi (Percussionist) and I went there, performed several pieces of mine, invited by sonADA festival, which my dear friend and admired composer Suk-Jun Kim is organizing. This time I went alone, performed ‘Strings,’ ‘Singing Bowl,’ and ‘Two Bamboos,’ the most recent live sets. Although it was quite demanding to perform several sets at once, but I had a pleasant time! When you are performing at one festival second time, then you become a friend with it.

2. Rewire Festival 2018 //Apr

photo by Peter Balkema for 3voor12

It’s always great when performing at the local music festival. Since I’ve been in Den Haag, I have never had a chance to perform at Rewire, one of the most popular music festivals in Europe, and this time I got the honer and was very thankful about it. I performed a newly developed set with Bamboo and Gong at Koorenhouse hall, the very heart of the center. It was great, especially you know that most of your local friends are in front of you!

3. ‘CHI’ vol.2 //Jun

Finally after so many years, the CHI volume 2 happened at Studio Loos, the dearest place. CHI Vol.1 happened in 2013, performing with Mei Yi and Sonolab, with a guest performer (Henry Vega at Vol1). This time, I composed two new pieces, ‘Rolling stones’ and ‘Drinking alone under the moon’ and performed a piece from Vol.1 ‘BamBoos,’ and another premiere of a piece for a Bass Drum, performed by Sonolab Duo. The guest performer was Yota Morimoto, another dear friend from my first year in NL. After very nervous stressing time passed, it was very relieving to perform all the pieces. I hope this series could continue.

4. TodaysArt Festival – Azimuth-x //Sep

photo by Mike Rijnierse

Normally Azimuth invites composers/performers to perform with their specific multichannel system, but this time was MONO! It was special as the concert was part of the TodaysArt Festival in Den Haag! I performed a newly developed set ‘Cross Wired’ :the main idea was to modulate a CV voltage with an analog amplifier with feedback signal. This chaotic signal was enough to manipulate with the signal processing. But still I needed some more materials to fill 30 minutes of performance. So I added some voice and processing at the intro, explaining what I am actually doing physically, but the audience can’t understand what I am talking about in time, as the sound is turning into a very noisy sound. It was really fun.

5. UTOPA Organ – Conlon & Orgelpark //Nov

UTOPA Baroque organ is a special organ that one can control its keys/stops/registers via MIDI or OSC. This gigantic machine(?) was quite challenging as it can do a number of different things that normal Baroque organ can’t do, such as air control, making continuous pulses/staccato, controlling each register individually, etc. I thought it’d be a good idea to make the concept and the piece simple, so that I focused on the characteristics of the organ as a ‘Machine.’ Accordingly the title of the piece is ‘Machine Breathing .’
The project is commissioned by Orgelpark. We, the Conlon foundation, were participacing the project as a composer and also as an assistant for other composers.

6. Pentacle 15.3 – NEXT Festival, Bratislava //Nov

photo by Nina Mik

It was an exciting opportunity to perform in Bratislava, as it was the first time in Slovakia, and I could meet some old Sonology friends who are very active there. Above all, the commission is to perform a live electronic muisic for 15.3 channel Pentacle system! Commissioned by NEXT Festival and SonicActs Amsterdam, I could perform with it. Pentacle is developed in STEIM by Fedde ten Berge and Jesse Meijer. The spatialization works with audio signal using FFT bins. All the composers did a few days of residency in STEIM and the NEXT festival was the premiere. I renewed the live set with two Bamboos and a gong. I had a wonderful time there.

7. PRISM#1 – Live music for Live film projection by Lichun Tseng //Dec

decomposed landscapes @ sound//vision IFFR with Ji Youn Kang (excerpt) from lichun tseng on Vimeo.

Ever since I worked with Filmwerkplaats Rotterdam, I missed working with them. And dear Lichun Tseng, one of the filmmakers there offered me this chance to make a live sound for her live film projections with 16mm projectors. This time at Nantes, France, we performed 40 minutes of live set. We practiced only 2 days, due to the complexity of booking the location and her heavy loaded setup, so it made us nervous, but we made it well. We drove 9 hours to Nantes, was quite an adventure, but all were memorable.

I am again looking forward to this year’s activities! Hopefully another productive year!

SD WAN Network Protection

SD WAN gives you immediate visibility and control of network traffic and can provide a different cost alternative to traditional networking, and you can find some resources to install an SD WAN in sites such as https://www.fortinet.com/resources/cyberglossary/sd-wan-explained.

It can also help you to reduce your costs for maintenance and for the provision of new hardware as well as for network storage. For a high level overview on the capabilities of the SONET WAN please visit our web page.

Please refer to this video for more information about SONET WAN technology:

SONET WAN hardware specifications

SONET WAN hardware architecture

SONET WAN design concept

How do we choose the storage vendors and how does that affect our project? We have an internal vendor database with vendors that we have a good level of confidence in. There is a mix of legacy, software and new vendors. We do not have a system for selecting vendor based on price because we do not know that for sure. When we need to change the hardware we have to buy a new box, so there is some risk involved. There are no off the shelf solutions to make this process easier. We have some vendor that offer software that will help us do this, but this is very time consuming for us to do this and we cannot guarantee that the vendor will be able to make it in time for our next event.

I know this is just a simple question but please, can you tell me how much you spent on your event last year? If the answer is less than $2000.00, then I will be happy to purchase your services.

Thanks,

Nils

The cost of a small wedding can be anywhere between $6,000.00-$10,000.00. Please call our events department at 855-847-8228 if you need more details. Please remember that these prices are only the cost of the event. A lot of expenses that are not reflected here are the things that go on prior to the wedding. We offer a variety of wedding planning packages for you and your guests. You will be offered an opportunity to review the prices prior

Recording of ‘Jing’ for Jing and Computer

Here I would like to share one of my pieces called ‘Jing.’

This was composed in 2010, quite challenged piece, and I worked together with the percussionist ‘Mei-Yi Lee.’

Everything was written on score (sample below) and the live electronics was done with SuperCollider.

The recording was made with two microphones, (Thanks to Kassen and Rob) and it was very challenging due to the characteristics of the instruments and how the composition itself was aimed. More specifically, the range of the dynamic goes from Zero to .. I don’t know.. easily up to 120 db. I was having a hard time when I was right beside the instrument in order not to change my facial expression because it was just really really loud.

We needed to record several times because of this, avoiding clipping, and very small editing was involved because of the soft parts.

Of course live music should be heard in live for sure. But it was a happy moment when we finally managed to finish this recording, and now I can share with many more people.

Oh, by the way, Jing is a Korean percussion that is used in many other occasions especially in rituals. It has both a very gentle warm, embracing base sound to very hard crazy complex noise. So that I wanted to show all the character, and the percussionist is shown as he/she is communicating and triggering it. So in the piece, Jing is answering, expressing, angry, and so on. It has its own personality. Electronics is used for this conversation and also help to create what moods it is going to be.

I hope anyone who reads this can enjoy the piece. Thanks!