For some backstory that no one asked for but I'll write out before my memory gets too fuzzy:
It's March of 2018. Onyx may or may not have just gotten back to the US from a chapter of life in Europe going from Sainte-Etienne to Berlin. I may or may not have just migrated back from the East Coast with the geese.
I had joined the audience just in time for the performance without really getting an ideal seat in the auditorium for close-up filming in a way that wouldn't be obnoxious. I freehand recorded it on my phone with my elbow propped up against my one of instrument cases at one of the side wing seats of the audience as an unofficial cameraman for the performance and shared the video with Onyx after so you're technically seeing a bootleg recording that turned into the "official music* video" :-)
If I were to think about lighting with a better command over the phone camera (or any camera available) I would have probably tried zooming a bit more so that we could see the LED colors that correspond with his positional accelerometer sensors and filters*(? I don't think he had filters activated for this performance or even the entire iteration of the sonocybin exohands) plus adjust the white balance, ISO etc. and maybe avoid or block out the exit sign with his body position. But I kept the frame set at this distance as Onyx sometimes gets very physical with his range of hand and body movement in performance so I wanted to be able to ensure relatively smooth tracking within the frame just in case he did move more.
Choosing Your Own Patterns: Polyrhythms and Parrellels
On a sonic/aesthetic and musical level--while Onyx was still constantly seeking new standing wave experiences that could be created with the streams of sound in each hand throughout these 2017-2019-ish years, what I really enjoyed about this iteration was how he centered the possibility for listeners to discern or conceive of pattern/polyrhythms in a way that hearkens to the roots of Traditional Afrikan drum polyrhythms.
There's a less wordy and complicated way to say that, let's try:
I like that his way of building the instrument and playing it lets people "choose their own groove" based on how they're able to hear patterns as the "drums" of each hand played rhythms against the other regardless of their actual cadence.
This is important to note because it says a lot about the skills or care that may be beneficial for other concepts that involve self-organization and working together while respecting independence.
As a metaphor for healthy social relationships:
Think of a co-dependent relationship but with rhythms--It's like two people doing things in their own time without forcing one to fully conform and rely on the other. Whereas the "Interdependent" notion of a healthy relationship lets people do their own thing at their own pace.
But it's the attention given to how the two patterns of rhythms find their groove together is what makes the relationship.
Or how groups of people in organizations and cultures might be able to operate. In sentiment, I think of the quasi-autonomous sort of anarchistic (for lack of words in English) governance dynamics of the Anishinaabe Confederacy as nations and the cohesiveness still afforded by their inter-clan governance systems.
There are better descriptions to be heard or read from Anishinaabek folks, or elsewhere on the interent but for a shallow hint of what comes to mind in real historic context, read how the Anishinaabe factioned to be neutral, allied with the British, and the U.S. -- sometimes all at the same time:
In contrast to systems that meet catastrophic results if something goes another direction.
e.g. "US Congress failed to pass a budget? Panik! Kaos! Shut down everything run by the Federal Governement." [insert meme here]
Again these aren't the most precise examples, but if you look enough you'll probably get what I'm touching on.
So we have a contrast: autonomy between two different agents and structure normally don't work harmoniously without a lot of active work and preparation. But if you know how to sit back, watch or *listen* to the rhythms for long enough, the beats turn into a pattern.
Here, the left hand kind of "knows" what the right is doing because Onyx is listening. But we as the audience are listening too and we get to let the wonderfully fundamental part of evolutionary wiring in our brains to pick out when we hear a groove, or texture, or other interesting moment come together.
As Onyx had said in a conversation to me on a cold Autumn or Winter night in 2018 "Chaos exists at the threshold of one's capacity to discern pattern." At that point, patterns establish coherency from what would otherwise be a mess of dots .
*A technical development note for technology documentation purposes:
As someone who got to watch his projects develop and basically lived as his housemate (but like kind of on his front yard and porch, a story for another time), plus as a fellow bandmate I got to see and hear a lot being made along the way at a level of depth that most people don't get to see. I think it's important to document that where we can as the thought process and little mundane developments sometimes become a lot more significant than we think when no one is around to pay attention until later. So here's what I can recall short of reaching out to Onyx again and fact checking (which eventually I probably will try--Onyx if you're reading this let me know!):
I don't remember if he had knuckle sensor filters working at this point in the development of his exohands in that particular Infinity Drum software development iteration or if he was just activating golden ratio "notes" with each finger but I think that would come up later before he would put the entire infinity drum phase to rest and redirect his attention on being able to type and manipulate digital cursors on his network of Raspberry Pi computers without a keyboard.
I think at this time Onyx was using one or at most maybe two Raspberry Pi B+ish generation computers that either ran ethernet cables to the hands or maybe even used tiny shortwave radio. The main Raspberry Pi B+(or something older and bigger) was still mounted on his bicep with a touchscreen monitor interface on the other and maybe started positioning the battery packs on the back of his 3d printed body harness around this time or embedded them along with the bicep computers. Soon after this performance Raspberry Pi zeros would come onto the market at the local microcenter just a few months later and he'd rip it all apart and rebuild a new version in his ongoing quest for eliminating latency down by milliseconds haha (I forget exactly which numbers but it was a shift by orders of magnitude like from 200 to 24 or 24 to 4 milliseconds of latency when compared to what he performed with in 2017 while we toured in Sainte-Etienne to Paris).
No comments:
Post a Comment