Projects

Mary Everest Boole

A narrative of stochastic musical cybernetics. An audience-driven performance with a mean diagonal slant. Listen to your own actions transform into music. Bacterial biology inspired the instrument designs. Learn about the life and work of the titular character. Combing algorithmic music, lyrical narrative, hand-made instrumentation, and the human voice, Mary Everest Boole is a reverent celebration of one of the first great women of mathematics.

This Score Is Butt Ugly

Score for the short film This Film Is Butt Ugly. It's a comedy, so I'll be making some funny music.

Conformal Creativity

Score for the feature film Mapping Creativity.

Ganglion.ca

Of course, this very website is one of my projects. If you've spent any amount of time fucking around here, you'll surely have noticed a lack of polish and quality content. Well, maybe you haven't noticed, but let me tell you.. there's a whole lot of lacking! I'll be working on this site regularly over the next few months. If you're not keen on seeing the evolution, come back in a few months for the extra happy!

Water March

Water March is an epic poem set to music in the form of a contemporarily-styled opera. The project was started in the winter of 2008/2009, and will hopefully be completed some time in 2011. You can read more about it here: watermarch.tumblr.com

GANGLION8

Not unlike a concept album, GANGLION8 is an eight-album concept series. Each album features a mock-genre with prescribed instrumentation and style, exactly ten songs, and specifically chosen experimental domains. The albums are being recorded and released individually, to be compiled with specific packaging and extra materials upon the completion of the series. The eight albums:

Go!

Folk-inspired music with orchestral arrangements, emphasis placed on the transition of moods from one track to the next, lending the album as a whole a particularly seamless, continuous quality while maintaining the standing of individual songs. Recording began in Spring 2007; completed and released in Fall 2007.

Away

Hip hop-inspired with an emphasis on manipulation. The "rapped" verses are obfuscated commentaries on hip-hop culture, mixed with religio-political absurdities and patent nonsense. The "beats" are bricolages of voices, instruments, and found-sounds. Recording began in Winter 2006; completed and released in Spring 2010.

Point

Metal-inspired, recorded with functionally-derived, constantly-changing tape speeds. Special forms of composition and recording were created specifically for this album, to address a certain nonlinearity of "time" present in the music. Recording for this album has not yet begun, though several iterated demo versions of many of the songs have been made.

Laugh

Noise-inspired, emphasis on varieties of texture. Recording doesn't really apply to this album, nor synthesis, and while work has begun on this album it is not yet completed.

Look

Jazz-inspired, compositions derived from birdsong. In writing, an emphasis has been placed on arranging instrumental parts to "pull" against each other, with swells and tension and selective distortion of the metrical regularity. Recording began in Spring 2007, and the album is (hopefully) to be completed in 2010.

Listen

Blues-inspired, emphasis on traditional songwriting and arrangement for a live band. Recording began in Spring 2007; completed and released in Spring 2009. Many of the songs form this album were rehearsed and performed in 2009 by the 8-member Ganglion band.

Lost

Classical-inspired compositions with emphasized negative-space and long-form free-composition, horizontal-composition, and vertical-composition. There is a substantial risk that the album will not fit onto a single compact disc as one of the songs is over thirty three minutes long, with many others in excess of ten minutes in length. Recording began in Spring 2007, principal recording completed in Fall 2007. The album is not yet released, as some additional composition and recording is required.

Found

Country-inspired, using Les Paul's method of single-track sound-on-sound layering with tape recorders. Writing and recording for this album has not yet commenced. It is intended that this album be written and recorded in an extremely condensed period of time, all at once, without the use of any digital technologies.

The Unlimited Dream Company

The Unlimited Dream Company was a psychoacoustic tour de force staged as a clinical trial for an exciting new brand of elevator music. The audience was introduced to the performance as if it was a scientific experiment and they were the test subjects.

We induced three types of brainwave states in the audience by producing specifically calibrated rhythms. Basing our work on research done by psychoacousticians, we used entrainment techniques to pleasantly invoke heightened states of alpha, gamma and theta brain wave production in the audience. This was done with controlled exposure to semi-periodic sounds generated or modulated at approximately 144hz, 12hz and 3hz, to create subtle mood-altering effects.

The performance had three overlapping sections. In each, a different method of sound generation was featured: electronic, mechanical, and biological. The electronic stage involved synthesizing devices emitting gently modulating tones in the gamma range. The mechanical stage was the pièce de résistance, creating an alpha rhythm with musical Rube Goldberg machines constructed out of uncanny objects. The last stage was bio-organically driven, involving voices and voicing instruments pitched apart microtonally so as to create a theta rhythm by their harmonic difference.

The Unlimited Dream Company was performed by Ivan Reese and Owen Thelwall in January 2010, at the Epcor Center for the Performing Arts in Calgary Alberta, as part of the High Performance Rodeo's Soundasaurus sub-festival.

Here's some video of the mechanical "dream" phase of the performance:

Shortly after the end of this video, all hell breaks loose. I kill some things with a power drill, Owen nearly electrocutes a bunch of stagehands, and then we move on to the third phase of the performance. The whole video will be online whenever they bloody send it to us.

Societal Records

SR was originally an artist-run collective covering every creative outlet, and everything that purported to be a creative outlet. Musicians, artists, and other creative-types organized and engaged in a number of activities including this-and-that, stuff, and circumstances. Collective activity has since ceased. The precepts of the society are being revised, and Ivan hopes to revive the organization at some unspecified future point. The website www.societalrecords.com continues to exist, and some of the links aren't totally broken.