AMBER STATIC EXPERIMENTS & STUDIO WORK

Following my discovery about amber and static electricity, (see previous blog post), further inspired by conversations about the magnet sense of birds, (see previous blog post), I decided to experiment with amber, static and some items I found at the flea market in Kaliningrad.

Below is a short video showing my experiments with Amber. I created some wire sensors that responded to static generated from rubbing amber onto woollen socks. I used an arduino to sense the movements of the wires as they made connections. I then routed that trigger to activate small vibrating motors to resonate the flea market items. Here is a short demo.

On Jan 30th, I gave a presentation of my work and demonstrated my Amber Experiment at Vorota Gallery. This time I added some reverb and pitch shifting to vary and build on the sounds of the objects.  Following my presentation, local electronic musicians Danil Akimov, Evgeny Milovanov (MLLFNN) and Igor Kachurin (RUTZ) improvised with synths. I joined in with the occasional metallic rattle and some field recordings. Here is an article about the event. The evening was really well attended, and I met many interesting people there. This really helped me connect with other artists and musicians, with whom I continued to meet up with during the rest of my residency, and I am continuing to devise some new collaborative projects. The evening was brilliantly promoted by Anastasia, who is a prolific music event organiser and musician.

During my residency, I also spent a lot of time with a selection of vintage soviet analogue synthesisers lent to me by Danil Akimov and recorded many hours of improvisations which I will work on later and hopefully release on cassette at some point. At the end of my residency, Alexei wrote a lovely article about my visit. Have a read here. He is such a talented writer and now, a great friend too. If you don’t understand Russian, then google translate works pretty well…