Gregory Taylor

Live sound and video performance by Tom Hall

Tom Hall - Live Performance Fluere

September 30th, 2009

http://tomhall.com.au

Tom Hall @ Horse Bazaar - Melbourne, Australia 09.30.2009

Tom Hall @ Superdeluxe, Tokyo, Japan 4.5.2010

Debut NYC performance

http://tomhall.com.au

http://www.instagram.com/tomhallsonics/

Tom Hall @ Monkey Town HQ, Brooklyn 11.19.2009

Live shows in order:

NeueHouse, Hollywood, Los Angeles
Outpost/Confetti Machine Festival, NYC
Zebulon (Spectra album launch) Los Angeles
Human Resources, Los Angeles

Tom Hall - live 2017/18 Highlights

I've known and enjoyed Tom Hall's music for several years, but never been in the right place or time to see him perform in the flesh. Over that time, though, I've heard plenty of mentions of his interest in and work on the visual aspect of his performances. I expect that there are any number of us out there who've wondered what the trajectory of that kind of practice looks like, even if we're not necessarily engaged in it ourselves. How does one start to integrate visuals with live performance? Where do the ideas come from? What parts of programming Max for audio might map easily to creating live visuals? How does that process change over time? 

Tom was kind enough to take some time out from the Cycling '74 roles that many of you are more likely to be aware of and take a step or two sideways to talk about his life as an audiovisual artist....


Prior to creating your own visuals, did you work with other people in a live performance context?

Actually, in the early days - the 2000’s - I didn’t play live with visuals, and then projectors started being available at shows. So I guess that the newfound availability of equipment is why I started doing my own visuals. Using ‘found video’ helped me to create the environment I was seeking to portray.

There were two live shows I recall where I thought, "I need to have live visuals to add to the experience." One was the launch of my first album Fluere in 2007. The second was my first fully fledged A/V performance for Lawrence English's long running Open Frame series, opening up for Tim Hecker in 2008. So yeah — I'd been playing live for almost 4 years by the time I did those shows.

It stayed that way for many years. My very first visual collaboration with a group of other visual artists is very recent, in fact... Mexico City in 2018. 

Hall's first show with visuals - Brisbane, Australia, 2007

When it became possible to work with visuals, what sorts of visual work that you’d already seen influenced the direction you wanted to pursue?

My own entry and initial forays into the art world started with photography rather than audio. Initially, my live visuals involved “found video” - both in its natural form, and in manipulated forms. 

It wasn't easy at first. I was one those people in the early years of the new millennium doing battle with hard disk drive read speeds, Codecs, and image resolution. It was a tricky combo that always left me feeling like I was walking a tight rope... especially when you consider that I was using my laptop do do the audio and the visuals. There were plenty of disasters and mid-set crashes. Funnily enough, they now make up some of my best stories :-)

Prior to developing your own visuals, what previous work had you done (in Max or in some other way) with visual materials?

In terms of my live work, there wasn't much. In fact, it was a few years after getting into Max before I even looked at Jitter at all. Consequently, it’s one of my weaker sides in terms of programming, but I've been working quite a lot in recent years on bringing my visual programming up to speed.

In terms of other work, as a photographer I was very much inspired by artists like Wolfgang Tillmans and Doug Aikten and that interests carried over into my early photography, video, and live visual experiments.

When you started, were you working with Jitter as matrices, or did you go straight to using the GPU?

I actually found Joshua Kit Clayton's  jit.gl.slab and optimization thread pretty soon after I got started (thankfully). There’s no way I would have gotten very far back then without it.

I really way just shooting a bunch of abstract videos, and then playing them back, cross fading between them and applying different effect shaders - some audio reactive, and some not.

Were there any Max patches out there from other people that really inspired you or gave you a place to start? 

None that I recall. It was more that I had a vision of what I wanted to do and then set about designing Jitter patches to be able to do it, some that ran somewhat autonomously (because I had to play the sound live too) but with the ability to interject if I wanted to.

Were there any Jitter objects that you just felt an immediate connection to?  

I was one of those people that really actually started at Tutorial 1, but at the same time while doing them it was more the case that I was pulling out the pieces as I went along that I knew I'd need to build my vision.

The power of getting stuff on the GPU was even more obvious back then, so it was a matter of needing to get into those later tutorials to work out how to do it (there was no Vizzie back then). If you wanted it run at a frame rate higher than 5fps, you needed to do the leg work. 

What kinds of patches did you start from?

Finding Joshua’s UYVY Matrix to Texture write-up and using jit.gl.slab objects meant that I could really keep everything together. I certainly wasn’t worried about hijacking code from Cycling’s help patchers and tutorials ;-) No concerns at all — I was in Australia then, so it wasn't like they'd send people after me (hahaha!)

As you started moving into the live visuals world, what was your live performance rig like in terms of software or hardware?  Did your performances tend toward a long single set, or was it divided into something like individual pieces (or “scenes”)? Did that particular way or organized what your audience heard guide how you developed videos, or did things happen the other way around so that your audio changed based on how you did visuals?

My live setup back when I got started was pretty much a Titanium Powerbook, G4 laptop and an audio interface. That changed over time - I went to MacBook Pros, added a few MIDI controllers, then a Nord Lead 2, and a couple of analog Moogerfoogers, and since the turn of this decade, hardware modular.

It was pretty much always long-form pieces with plenty of dynamics, but no “song” stops for diversions. No matter how my work has been over the years musically, I’ve always wanted to present it as an environment -  something to enter into, to absorb, to be challenged by, to question etc.

You’ve been working with live visuals for a while now. Is there anything about your approach or the Max objects you work with in your patching that has changed radically over the time you’ve been working?

If anything, it's that, "Less is more." Like all visual art, it's easy to keep piling it on in live visuals using Jitter —more effects, more color, more layers, and so on. 

But what's harder is self-control and asking yourself "What is it really saying?" I find these days that my patches are more succinct. As my programming knowledge has grown, I've found ways to express more with less — and, for me, that's important in delivering the message. I think this is particularly important, given our current climate of diminished attention spans and addiction to bling taking precedent over quality or any kind of meaning beyond 5 seconds of throwaway swipe-up entertainment. I sound like a social media hater! Let's try this: Jitter is a great tool, but you need to realize you're playing with fire and excess these days.

How “tightly” did you conceive of integrating what your audience heard and what they saw?

These days, it’s pretty tight, Max/Jitter has a lot ways to integrate event control, but I really try to be pretty careful not to implement it in a way such that the integration becomes predictable or stagnant. I also seem to  enjoy keeping the possibility of failure around - sometimes, to my detriment. There’s noting like sitting on the edge to make you feel alive.

Is some portion of the live visuals you do generated directly from the audio? If so, what tools or procedures do you tend to favor for control?

I’m not using any ‘found video’ in my work these days. Instead, I'm generating everything using OpenGL. A big part of moving in that direction was to make stuff that was more fluid in movement that could keep up with the audio in terms of frame rates. It also meant that I didn't need to relive my past battles with 7200rpm hard disk drives anymore. A return to found video is something I want to explore again in the future, given that improvements with solid state drives and newer codecs would make that a lot easier and that 4K projectors are now starting to pop up at venues.

A lot of my visuals don’t do anything at all without audio input, but they’re not moving in a way where that's explicitly obvious, like pulsing to the kick drum. It might be that I’m measuring activity within certain frequency bands, smoothing that output, and then using that signal to drive the overall movement, while other frequency ranges would be controlling growth & movement, dimensional control, and that kind of thing. Sometimes those processes are going on one at a time, and other times they'll overlap or be running concurrently.

Ultimately, I’m trying to create a synesthetic experience for the audience. I'm interested in creating something that sits in the middle and internally creates its own environment that references the ‘everyday’ by virtue of the algorithms, temporal exploitation or found sound and synthesis I’ve obliterated with distortion.

What kinds of controllers did you bring to the table already by virtue of doing audio? Did you use those controllers, or repurpose them to do visuals, or did you choose new controllers?   

Honestly, I never really ever had a controller for playing visuals. I still don't. For some reason I just found it too cumbersome. If I was just doing visuals, I would have a controller. But since I feel in control of the sound or I can at least predict what it's going to do these days, it turns out that the sound itself is the best controller for me.

Once you’d gotten through your first show or two, did you immediately start changing what you were up to, or did you maybe start thinking about making the equivalent of an “instrument” for producing visuals rather than creating specific patches for specific pieces?

Not really. What I do is set up an intricate network of event control which is following the time since the start of my set, but which also has the possibility of being interrupted and coerced into other types of manipulation by the audio. Simply put, the audio is the controller: I start the visuals and off it goes. If there’s no audio nothing happens. 

Have you ever done video for someone else? Is that something you’d find interesting? Do you think your practice would change in a situation where you were only “responsible” for what an audience saw?

I’ve done bits and pieces but they’ve never really included my own creative input apart from the programming choices. Artistically, I’m open to collaboration but it really needs to be the right fit.

My practice always changes through working with others though. To be honest, it’s hard not to. I’ve had both incredible creative breakthroughs when working with others, giving presentations or even presenting workshops. What other people bring to the table is always interesting. As I get older, I know that I have developed certain perspectives (despite fighting it), and what’s exciting is when someone you’re working with comes in and just shatters it, flips the box on its lid. I love it.

Experience more of Tom's work on his Website.


tom_hall.jpg

While I've known and enjoyed Tom Hall's music for several years, I've never been in the right place or time to see him perform in the flesh. Over that time, though, I've heard plenty of mentions of his interest in and work on the visual aspect of his performances. Tom was kind enough to take some time out from his Cycling '74 roles to talk about his life as an audiovisual performer.

an-interview-with-tom-hall

An Interview with Tom Hall

Marsha Vdovin

Excerpts of the new automated Op art based visuals for the US tour. 
 
Dates: 
Fri. Feb. 15 San Diego, CA @ The Soda Bar 
Sat. Feb. 16 Los Angeles, CA @ The El Rey Theater 
Sun. Feb. 17 San Francisco, CA @ The Independent 
Tue. Feb. 19 Portland, OR @ Doug Fir Lounge w/ Matmos 
Wed. Feb. 20 Seattle, WA @ Neumos w/ Matmos 
Fri. Feb. 22 Salt Lake City, UT @ The Urban Lounge 
Sat. Feb. 23 Denver, CO @ Summit Music Hall 
Mon. Feb. 25 Minneapolis, MN @ 7th Street Entry 
Tue. Feb. 26 Chicago, IL @ The Mayne Stage 
Wed. Feb. 27 Detroit, MI @ The Pike Room 
Fri. Mar. 1 Montreal, QC @ Il Motore 
Sat. Mar. 2 Boston, MA @ Great Scott 
Sun. Mar. 3 New York, NY @ Santos Party House 
Mon. Mar. 4 Philadelphia, PA@ Johnny Brenda’s 
Tue. Mar. 5 Washington, DC @ U Street Music Hall

Mouse On Mars - WOW - US Tour

A collaboration with Ignacio Nieto Carvajal, aka Bosques de mi Mente. We had two concerts at Rojo Nova in Sao Paulo so far, but would love to bring this to your hometown as well. If you are interested or have an idea where we can make a show, feel free to drop us a line. 
 
In realtime this is running smoothly with 60fps. Vimeo can just show 30fps videos plus artifacts. 
 
Check out Ignacios website and blog at www.bosquesdemimente.es

Bosques de mi Mente - Ahora son solo fantasmas, parte 2

For the tour supporting their latest album Parastrophics, Mouse on Mars' three live members designed an interactive performance system around three laptops running Ableton Live. Learn more about their set-up in a new video feature.

Mouse on Mars: Live for All

I jumped at the chance to interview Karl Kliem when I heard he was doing the visuals for the Mouse on Mars tour.  So much of the live music experience has become multimedia and I think the visualists are often overlooked.  I found Kliem is a wizard of interactivity and Max has been his weapon of choice for years.

The Mouse On Mars US Tour starts February 15th. The tour dates are listed at the end of this article.

I also think that visuals for a music concert should only support the music and should not take away the audiences attention by telling a story on its own. 

Can you give us a little background on yourself?

I grew up on a farm in a small town north of Frankfurt am Main in Germany. Being a farmer was quite unusual in this area, since my hometown is about ten miles away from the city center of Frankfurt. So in high school I was known as the farmer's son, while my relatives from the more rural areas of Germany kept calling me the urbanite.

In my secondary education, I switched from advanced courses in Math and Physics to Arts and English, where I got interested in design. At the time, I had built a CD-player, a receiver and loudspeakers made out of rusty I-beams.

Yes. The first of those objects was the receiver. I welded a rectangular frame from an I-beam, which I had from the scrap yard. Then I fit in a new ‘state-of-the-art’ amplifier. The cover was a basin with moss inside. You had to water it from time to time. But the kicker was an old rusty water valve, which served as the volume knob. You could magically turn it with the remote control as it was motorized.

So, with these, I applied to study product design at the Offenbach University of Art and Design and was accepted. I soon learned that the things that I had been doing so far, were really just a kind of status symbol for some rich people. As a product designer you were encouraged to build things using the least amount of material as possible in order to protect the environment.

My intermediate diploma then became a minimalist digital radio for the elderly. I still regret that I didn't use it back in 1994, to apply for a design job at Apple Computer, as it looked very similar to old Braun or later Apple products.

Nevertheless, my ecological crisis went so far, that I actually didn't want to build any more physical objects at all. Instead, I applied myself towards my interest in electronic music, computers and all things digital.

It was kind of an escape into the virtual.

In the end I made my diploma in 1998 with 'brk_b.t', a drum computer for playfully slicing, rearranging and manipulating breakbeats in real time, done with Max. My first attempt to just present the patch was rejected. I had to make a user interface for it to get a diploma on a university for design, of course.

Did you find that the skills you acquired in your Product Design studies could be applied to this new 'virtual' realm?

Partially, yes. First of all, I have learned to work on projects and in project groups. Furthermore, we were encouraged to think so fundamentally about problem solving, that we may not need to fabricate a product at all if we could tweak a determining factor instead. A central point of the studies was the theory of product language that has been developed and taught at this particular university. A brilliant tool for analyzing products and objects in general, but inappropriate to design them, if you ask me, because its focus on the symbolic aspects of the products regularly lead to shapes that were overdone. Parts of the curriculum, like theory of perception, are essential not only to product design but also to user interface design. Richard Fischer, a former designer at the iconic Braun company and one of our professors put it in a nutshell, what I think is the essential key for good design: "Design is: reducing complexity and assigning relevance to the remaining parts". But for my studies and work in the area of the visualization of sound most of the stuff that I learned at the design university lies idle, unfortunately.

So Max was a revelation as I could keep everything open.

That was about 1995 when I first saw the good old 'non-rounded-corner' Max version 2. Three of us built our first interactive audio installation as Involving Systems with Max. It consisted of three pressboard boxes with a synth, a sampler and a mixer inside and it had a nice user interface: Off-the-shelf nails that extended the buttons of the underlying keyboard. Visitors of the exhibition could switch between predefined drum and synth presets of attached midi gear and sample short parts of vinyl records. It was all synced and controlled with Max.

I've noticed that most of your work involves interactivity to experience the results - as opposed to more static installations that basically run on their own. Is interactivity an important aspect of your creative work?

It seems like, yes. This is probably because I have difficulties making decisions. By these means I can delegate the responsibility of the end result to the users!

Interactivity sort of forces a non-linear approach, which is a cornerstone of Max philosophy. Was this an important factor in your choice of Max as a platform to realize your ideas?

Before I discovered Max I tried to produce some tunes with traditional sequencers. I made some loops that would work quite well on their own. But as soon as I had to arrange it over time to make it a song it got difficult for me. I also found myself lost in tweaking sounds without being able to envision what it should sound like. There were just too many options. At the same time, I didn't want to accept that I had to make that decision. So Max was a revelation as I could keep everything open. It is kind of strange, as this is different with my visual perception. Producing imagery I am better with making decisions.

The last bigger project I was involved in were the visuals for the current Mouse on Mars tour. They will tour the US in February 2013 without the drummer, so I am tweaking the performance setup for them again.

I am also doing the visuals for Bosques de mi Mente, a composer and piano player from Madrid, with whom I plan to do more concerts. At the Karlsruhe University of Art and Design I just taught Max within the communication design faculty.

Bosques de mi Mente - Ahora son solo fantasmas, parte 2.

Upcoming projects are an art installation with fluorescent tubes in Frankfurt and showing the Minus 60° surround sound installation in Athens. There is more on the horizon, but nothing definite yet.

Can we discuss your work on the latest Mouse on Mars, Parastrophics tour. 

They asked me to build something that would run automatically but would be easy enough to setup without requiring me to be part of the tour, out of budget reasons. But at the same time it should be unique, sophisticated and standing out!

Andi [Toma] suggested the use of projection mapping, so the stage design ended up being six separate projection surfaces that are all covered with one projector. The new jit.cornerpin object came in handy for this.

I started preparing different visuals for each song, but soon it became clear that there was not enough time. The record sleeve design featured graphics from a north American religious group, so I chose to use just those elements for all of the visuals. I think it's a good branding and it connects to the album as well. I also think that visuals for a music concert should only support the music and should not take away the audiences attention by telling a story on its own.

Were there any particular challenges you can discuss?

Well, first off, performance tests with the latest MacBook Pro Model from the beginning of 2012, showed that the frame rate of my visuals patch dropped to 20 fps while my desktop computer rendered it smoothly with 60 fps. The compromise between luggage size, weight and graphics performance was a Hackintosh that I built. It has a Mini-ITX form factor and a decent graphics card.

The next challenge was the vast amount of different kinds of projectors that the venues have. Different signals like VGA, DVI, RGB, different resolutions and different aspect ratios. The patch needs to be able to adjust to all of these.

The projector sizes can be controlled with the jit.displays object, but as our graphics card only supports one VGA out, but two DVI out, sometimes the projector and the control screen have to be swapped. An Apple Script that puts all windows to the screen of the control monitor was the solution for this particular problem.

But later, it turned out that from time to time the attached control screen would not be recognized. Usually with DVI signals the screen tells the graphics card via the EDID protocol which resolutions it can display. Sometimes this doesn’t work and thus the control screen stays black, because the graphics card sends a signal that the screen can’t display. We used another Apple Script to change the resolutions, but it’s probably more reliable to use a hardware box that forces the resolution to a specific setting.

Are the visuals being controlled by the audio from stage?

They are. The visuals are being controlled by some audio analysis objects. For the first concerts the audio-out of the band was sent to the visuals computer, which did the analysis. One problem was that the volumes and therefore the results of the analysis changed during the concert. Another problem, especially at festivals, where there is not much time for setup, sound check and testing, there had to be two long cables, an audio cable and a network cable running from the stage to the visuals computer, which usually is located at ‘front of house’, next to the mixing desk.

To simplify this, I installed a Max4Live Instrument that eliminates the volume changes and analyses the sound right there on the computer running Ableton’s Live software on stage. Now we only have one network cable that sends track and song position data as well as the audio analysis data over the one Ethernet cable.

Simplicity is the key when doing live work!

Absolutely. This allowed for quicker set-up and sound/visuals check. It also gave us a more reliable result.

Do you have any particular 'favorite' objects that you use often, or in a special way? 

One thing that comes to my mind is that I tend to make sub-patches with just an inlet and an outlet, that are connected, so that I don't have to re-connect all the patch cords if I want to swap the connected object later. I know that you can copy-replace nowadays, but that's a habit from older versions.

I use bline a lot, to have smooth animations in sync with the frame rate in Jitter. I also dig jit.mgraphics, but still have to understand how to rotate a graphic!

With the latest Max Version 6, the ji.gl.node object makes rendering of an OpenGL scene to a matrix much easier than it used to be.

Unfortunately I didn’t find the time to get into the new Gen objects yet, but I’m very curious.

One weird thing I haven’t really figured out: even though I change the default font to 'Verdana' at the start of each project, every time I make a new sub-patch, for reasons that are beyond my comprehension, the font switches back to 'Arial'. I then have to regularly 'select all', 'CMD-T Verdana-Regular-10pt'. It's a meditation, or maybe a procrastination thing I guess, but it uses up quite some of my patching time! [Laughs]

Mouse On Mars will start their US Tour with an improved duo live setup in San Diego today. They will perform a mixture of material from “Parastrophics” and “WOW”, the new album they just released nine month after “Parastrophics”.

We updated and simplified the setup. Ableton Live as well as the visuals-patch will all run from one computer now. The Hackintosh is not necessary anymore, as the graphics cards of the new MacBook Pro got a huge performance boost. Each song has its own images folder and the corners of the projection mapping can be adjusted with an iPhone.

Watch Ableton's interview with Mouse On Mars including live performance footage, and read more about them at Ableton.com.

Fri. Feb. 15 San Diego, CA @ The Soda Bar

Sat. Feb. 16 Los Angeles, CA @ The El Rey Theater

Sun. Feb. 17 San Francisco, CA @ The Independent

Tue. Feb. 19 Portland, OR @ Doug Fir Lounge w/ Matmos

Wed. Feb. 20 Seattle, WA @ Neumos w/ Matmos

Fri. Feb. 22 Salt Lake City, UT @ The Urban Lounge

Sat. Feb. 23 Denver, CO @ Summit Music Hall

Mon. Feb. 25 Minneapolis, MN @ 7th Street Entry

Tue. Feb. 26 Chicago, IL @ The Mayne Stage

Sun. Mar. 3 New York, NY @ Santos Party House 

Mon. Mar. 4 Philadelphia, PA@ Johnny Brenda's

Tue. Mar. 5 Washington, DC @ U Street Music Hall

Text interview by Marsha Vdovin and Ron MacLeod for Cycling '74.


Mouse on Mars visualist and long-time Max user shares his story.

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