This Saturday Seth Warren-Crow and I are performing at the Borg Ward Collective. It will be a night of electronic music, live video, tabla improvisation, and more. Seth and I will be joined by Trees Fall, the Milwaukee electronic music and video gurus. It should be a fantastic evening! The show starts at 8:00.

On Saturday April 21st the Milwaukee Laptop Orchestra (MiLO) will performed during the Kenilworth Open Studios, a collection of exhibitions from all areas of the Peck School of the Arts. MiLO played a live realization of Ligeti’s Artikulation, my structured improvisation Collision, and electro-acoustic improvisations.

MiLO is: Chris Burns, David Collins, Nolan Dargiewicz, Adam Murphy, Elliot Patros, Kevin Schlei, Steve Schlei, Amanda Schoofs, Sebastian Valenzuela.

For more information about MiLO, check out the new MiLO tumblr. You can also listen to the full performance on MiLO’s SoundCloud page.

Here are a few shots from the event:

If your in the Milwaukee area, come join the new TC-11 ensemble and users group TORCH: the TC-11 Orchestra. The group is an outlet for compositions and performances that use TC-11, where players can bring patches for the group to perform together. It is a great opportunity to get out and play with other like-minded users.

Meetings will be on Sundays, starting April 29th at 2:00. The meeting location is the UWM PSOA Arts Building on Kenilworth and Prospect Ave. Email me at kevinschlei@gmail.com beforehand so we know you are coming, and we look forward to seeing you there!

A paper of mine detailing the design of TC-11 has been accepted into the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference (NIME 2012). The conference will be held in Ann Arbor, MI, and I’ll be going to present and demo the instrument. Once the proceedings are online, I will link to the paper here (along with other neat research from the conference).

From the conference site:

The NIME conference brings together researchers and practitioners from a range of academic fields including computer science, electrical engineering, human-computer interaction, musicology, electro-acoustic music, dance and composition, and has routinely attracted interest from electronic music industry as well.

This year NIME will be held at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Ann Arbor has a long tradition on electro-acoustic music having been the location of pioneering early work by Gordon Mumma, Robert Ashley, David Tudor, Alvin Lucier, and David Behrman. It has just celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Performance Art Technology program, is the location of numerous electronic music groups such as Steve Rush’s Digital Music Ensemble and more recently Georg Essl’s Michigan Mobile Phone Ensemble. University of Michigan hosted the International Computer Music Conference in 1998.

This weekend is the Spring Unruly Music Festival, and features both performances and new piece premieres of mine. Friday night I’ll be performing in Cage’s Song Books. Saturday night an acoustic piece of mine, Pixelism, will be premiered by the Dal Niente ensemble. I’ll also be joining the group on stage for a piece involving live electronics. Should be a fun weekend!

All concerts are at 7:30 in Vogel Hall.

Thursday, March 8:
Minneapolis percussionist Patti Cudd (of Zeitgeist) integrates electronics into performance with atypical solo percussion instruments, including bass drum and cajon, in a concert of music by Daniel Almada, Jeff Herriott, Cort Lippe, Eric Lyon, Chris Mercer, and Barry Moon.

Friday, March 9:
A celebration of John Cage (1912-1992) for his 100th birthday, featuring performances of music from across his career.

Saturday, March 10:
Dal Niente presents the US premiere of “The Brightest Form of Absence,” an exploration of the Mojave Desert and Death Valley by Siemens Prize-winning composer Hans Thomalla, featuring soprano, 13 instrumentalists, and live electronics. The ensemble will also premiere new works written for them by UWM faculty and student composers.

Chris Huelsbeck and Amy Lee, part of the San Francisco Electronic Music Meetup, have started a video podcast to discuss news, tools, and techniques for electronic musicians. The show is aimed at those who use new tools for electronic music production, including iOS apps and interfaces. Episode 1 features an in-depth interview about TC-11, its origins and future.

You can check out the San Francisco Electronic Music Meetup page for more information.

‘Collision’ is a piece that revolves around a machine conductor that directs the players and their improvisations. The conductor decides when and how to ‘collide’ the players together, forcing them to play at the same moment in the same way. This is the driving force of the piece: players can improvise in and out of the collisions, but they are never allowed to stray too far from one another.

The instrument used is Napsynth, my early research into multi-touch control that eventually became TC-11. The trackpads gather the multi-touch data using a program called Tongseng. Then Processing and Pd are used to analyze and distribute the control data for synthesis. The visuals also feed from that data, and are drawn using OpenFrameworks.

David Collins joined me for this performance at the Unruly Music Festival at Vogel Hall in 2011. Collins is a Milwaukee native, composer, and performer.

Collision (2011) at the Unruly Music Festival from Kevin Schlei on Vimeo.

Seth Warren-Crow and I pair together the tabla and TC-11 to see just how similar the two musical interfaces are, in performance and sonority. These pieces were taken from an evening of exploring short-form improvisations.

Three Short Improvisations (For Hands) Part I from Kevin Schlei on Vimeo.

Three Short Improvisations (For Hands) Part II from Kevin Schlei on Vimeo.

On December 14th, my long-term project TC-11 was finally unleashed into the wild. Now it is live (alive?), and in the hands of users who will make it their own. But I wanted to take a moment to thank a few people for their support.

My colleagues in the electronic music department at UWM, Chris Burns and Jon Welstead, deserve so much credit for guiding me in synthesis and programming. Jon has always been a huge support for me. And before I met Chris, I hadn’t written a drop of audio code. You can definitely hear their voices in this app.

Jack Miller was kind enough to let me dump TC-11 builds on his iPad, and David Collins has been a great tester and pre-release performer. Many features would not be there if it weren’t for seeing them destroying my early, rickety builds.

But the most thanks goes to my wife, María Valentina, who supported me even as I disappeared into my studio for weeks at a time. She has been an incredible partner throughout the whole process. And she is a brutal beta tester!

Thanks to all my colleagues, friends, and family for your support. Now go check out TC-11 over at the Bit Shape side of this site!

On December 18th I’ll be joining a new group of Milwaukee musicians in the debut performance of the Great Lakes Improvising Orchestra. The performance will include exciting improvisation, electronics, and acoustic performance. The show is at Woodland Patter, and starts at 2:00.

The debut performance—an afternoon of open form collective improvisation—will include a cross-neighborhood gathering of composers-who-improvise and improvisers-who-compose featuring:

Linda Binder: violin
Thomas Gaudynski: guitar
Jeff Klatt: cello
Jon Mueller: percussion
Steve Nelson-Raney: reeds
Rick Ollman: guitar, reeds
Hal Rammel: musical saw
Chris Rosenau: guitar
Kevin Schlei: electronics
Jim Schoenecker: electronics
Amanda Schoofs: voice
Seth Warren-Crow: percussion

Check this post over at the Woodland Pattern website for more information.